Behind The Pulpit

Fight and Surrender

• Millington Baptist Church • Season 3 • Episode 40

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It’s VBS week at MBC, and the Behind the Pulpit crew is back, armed (literally), and ready for one final episode before the summer break. Pastor Dave, Pastor Bob, and special guest Oliver reflect on the fight of faith, share insights from the conclusion of our Divine Blueprint sermon series, and offer a tribute to faithful leader John MacArthur. Plus: an inside look at the new Wednesdays in the Word devotional series, a theological deep dive into 2 Thessalonians, and a candid conversation on standing firm in faith—whether you’re in the pulpit or the public school cafeteria.

With plenty of laughs, truth, and encouragement, this episode wraps up Season 3 with a call to flee sin, pursue virtue, and guard the gospel—together.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
2:36 In The News
9:51 PREVIEW | Wednesdays in the Word
14:12 Audience Question
20:54 Sermon Recap
45:37 Theology Sprint
48:10 Church Body Life





Music Credit:
ZDQKW7GSXHGKGFAU

Pastor Dave:

Hey, what's going on, everybody? We are here on the podcast today, Behind the Pulpit. You'll notice that it is full-on summer adventure VBS week. We are headed towards true north, and I am running for my life away from sharp objects that are being pointed at me. There's a Roman gladius nearby. I'm here with my colleague, Pastor Bob, who is armed and dangerous. What's up, man?

Pastor Bob:

What's up?

Pastor Dave:

How's it going today? Pretty good, man. You got...

Pastor Bob:

I insisted I brought the prop, so here it is.

Pastor Dave:

All

Pastor Bob:

I just want to say is, strength and honor.

Pastor Dave:

Look, look, look, look. I'm close and personal. That's got some ornate

Pastor Bob:

detail. I was telling Tim before that Amanda bought this, and I'm pretty sure it was $40 on Amazon. What? And feel this. Feel how heavy this thing is for $40. There's no way that... I look back. I think it was $40. Uh-uh.

Pastor Dave:

This thing is worth way more than $40. Feel that, Oliver. Oliver's here. Hello, hello. Oliver Aridi, everybody.

Oliver:

Full on. He's got some weight. to it it does it's hefty it's hefty well scared when you were swinging it during the sermon what's

Pastor Dave:

up oliver how

Oliver:

was your morning at vbs today it was tiring yeah fun Full of water. And that's why I'm sitting here on a towel, soaking wet. But I'm ready. I'm excited to be

Pastor Dave:

here. I was impressed with the water day out there. You guys were making aqueducts.

Oliver:

We were

Pastor Dave:

doing it all. Ancient plumbing or

Oliver:

something. We saw Pastor Bob's sermon and we were like, man, we've got to make these Roman... Little tunnels for our water. Oh my goodness. The aqueducts.

Pastor Dave:

There it is. Hey, we got a great show for you today. By the way, season finale. We're going to be taking a little behind the pulpit summer break. And so this is going to be our final show for a while. We'll let you know when we're back. Tim will probably tell us to get back in the studio. But it's been great. We've had a wonderful season together and we got a great show for you. We're talking about some news stories. We're talking about audience questions. Thank you, guys. We also got a wrap-up of our sermon series of the Divine Blueprint, the Healthy Church series, and a couple things to announce in the life of our church, as well as a Wednesdays in the Word podcast that we are starting this week, and Oliver's going to tell us about that as well. So, great show for you guys. Stay tuned. We are... We are happening here. Pastor Bob,

Pastor Bob:

what's up? You found the prices. Pastor Dave, it could be yours. Okay. I'm going to

Pastor Dave:

scroll. Is this like a Prime Day deal, man? That's really cheap. Okay. So without further ado, we're going to start where we usually start. Is that all right, Tim? Oh, yeah. In the... All right, so this is more of a ministry news story. I was looking at my feed yesterday and I saw an announcement that came out of Grace Church in California. There was one of the leaders saying, please pray for Dr. MacArthur and his family. It looks like he may be in the presence of Jesus soon. So that video was taken off of the live stream from their channel. church service yesterday, July 13th, 2025. John MacArthur has been preaching for 56 years, and that is something. I think they voted him in in 1969 at Grace Church. Pretty amazing legacy. I used to listen to Dr. MacArthur on 99.1 back in, I don't know, 25 years ago when you used to listen to the radio. Have you ever listened to the radio? No. When I was younger, my mom would put on 99.1 and jam out to the songs. You've heard of the radio. I have. There was this thing before podcasting. He was 30 years old. He's 86 right now. Yeah. So we pray for him. But we also, in a way, honor him. He's a fighter. Talk about fight, fight, fight, Bob. Bob's sermon yesterday was all about fighting the good fight. He's always been at the forefront of the fight. Like in the 80s, the big thing was the lordship salvation controversy. It was easy believism. Zane Hodges and some of the Dallas Seminary guys were on one side and MacArthur was on the other side, wrote a book called The Gospel According to Jesus. He's been really on the forefront of the critique of the modern day charismatic chaos that sometimes happens in those circles. The strange fire conference. He's been oppositional towards the ecumenical movement. He's been very critical of a lot of things in our day that he took stands on. So solid guy. Were you a John MacArthur fan

Pastor Bob:

when you were in your earlier days? Obviously, there's a lot to admire about him. He wasn't my favorite. Um, but he obviously had a lot to, uh, to contribute to the church and had a long, long legacy. Um,

Pastor Dave:

I remember when he, his, one of his goals was to preach through every new Testament book expositionally.

Pastor Bob:

And I just saw here, he had a 55 year long sermon series of the entire new Testament. He completed in 2011. Yeah.

Pastor Dave:

So in 2011, he, um, finished the new Testament by wrapping up the gospel of Mark, um, And I watched that sermon. And of course, if you're in his church for like, I don't know, 40 years, you're going through the whole New Testament. It's like, wow, he just, he finished. So he's like said amen. And that was it. And he, and the audience just stood up and give him a standing ovation. It was, it was a moment. The guy preached every single verse of the New Testament. It took him like four decades. So we certainly pray for him. That's a big story in the news.

Pastor Bob:

But he wouldn't preach the Old Testament, right? No, he would.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah.

Pastor Bob:

Oh, so that was sprinkled in here too?

Pastor Dave:

Definitely. He just... thought the primary covenant for God's church today should be in the New Testament. So he made it his goal to finish that. So have you ever heard of John MacArthur? No. I think I'm a little too

Oliver:

young for that one. The name sounds familiar,

Pastor Bob:

maybe. There he is.

Pastor Dave:

He was a titan. I remember listening to his debate on baptism versus R.C. Sproul. That was back when they only had audio recordings that they could distribute. It was before the video became really popular. So pray for Dr. MacArthur.

Pastor Bob:

He's going. We had Stanley went. Tim Keller. R.C. Sproul. It's a generation that's just... Yeah. We have anybody left from that generation that's really well known? Who's still left? That's a good question. You know, it's... I guess maybe David Jeremiah. He's 86.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah.

Pastor Bob:

Oh, how old is David Jeremiah?

Pastor Dave:

Not sure. But certainly... One of the good ones. Yeah. Not without controversy. Don't agree with everything he said, but certainly worthy of honor. So that's what's happening in the news. We do want to talk about 84, David Jeremiah. Okay. He's pretty healthy for 84. We do want to do a little bit of a book recommendation, Tim, but it's not part of the war, right? The war is over? The war is over. Okay.

Unknown:

Okay.

Pastor Dave:

There it is. The war is over. Notice Pastor Dave is finally smiling in this picture. You made a new one. That was the same one as last week. Okay. Different expression to this one. Yeah, for sure. I look so mad.

Pastor Bob:

That's because he was like in it. He was game on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now he's like Thanos completing his task right there. Okay. All right.

Pastor Dave:

Here we go. So let's talk about books. Pastor Bob, I see you got something over there. What do you got for us today? What are you reading?

Pastor Bob:

Well, this book was given to me, and it's a book on Spurgeon the Pastor. Amy and Warren Huber gave this as a gift to me, and I was very thankful for that. Recovering a Biblical and Theological Vision for Ministry, and it's written by Jeffrey Chang, who is a church history professor and historical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. So I'm looking forward to digging into this and learning more and more about... Very good. So...

Pastor Dave:

I have an unusual recommendation today. This is not something you can get on Amazon, but we do have a bunch of copies and we'd be willing to give you one for free. So this is the Millington Baptist Church 150th anniversary story of our church. We actually put this together back in 2001 and it's a pretty good read. If you're actually curious, if you're part of our church and you want to know what's happened over the last 150 years, this would be worth your time you can sit down for a couple hours and read the whole story I enjoyed reading it when I first started here we have a couple of cases of these that are like just sitting around so if you don't have one but you're part of our church you should have this on your coffee table or on your bookshelf or something like that so come talk to me this is a wonderful story shall

Pastor Bob:

we be producing one for 175 do you think

Pastor Dave:

Bob's

Pastor Bob:

got an idea for you. We have the last 25 years that we need to put in

Pastor Dave:

there. If there's any takers, Bob's looking for a project to take

Pastor Bob:

on. Who would like to write? Historians out there. Maybe Oliver. Maybe Oliver could write it.

Pastor Dave:

All right.

Pastor Bob:

That's why he's here. We're giving him work already.

Pastor Dave:

So that's only up to 2001. You'd have to do a little bit of homework to get the last 25 years, but it's almost there. So that's my recommendation for today. Come see me if you want a book. Come talk to me. I think I'll see you right after this. Okay. I got one for you.

Pastor Bob:

I think we should make Darren do it. Darren's been here for the whole time. Yeah. He's

Pastor Dave:

still

Pastor Bob:

here.

Pastor Dave:

Files and files and archives. Darren. You hear that, Darren? It's all you, brother. You got to write it, man. All right. So we got Oliver here, and can we just spotlight what he's been doing? Oh, yeah. You went down to the... and down to the shore. You were dropping some scriptures. Where are you there? Is

Oliver:

that on the bay side? That's on the bay side. That's the dock. I forget which avenue. Fifth. Fifth

Pastor Bob:

avenue of where? What

Oliver:

beach? Seaside Park. Oh, you're in Seaside?

Pastor Bob:

I thought this was a picture from Harvey Cedars that Tim colored and then superimposed you on top of it, but you were really here. Oh, I was there.

Oliver:

I was in that stool. That's what, episode three? Hannah? Three.

Pastor Dave:

Four. The season... Four. Four. Episode four. Okay. When this stays in the word, the whole theme is surrender. Every video is the same theme. The whole theme is surrender. It's very

Pastor Bob:

special, man. Tim never takes us on location. He takes everybody else on location but us. What's going on here, Tim? We went to the tree in your backyard once, Pastor Bob. We want to at least take us somewhere. Okay.

Pastor Dave:

You know the bay at Seaside is gigantic, right? It's insane. It's like, wow. Sometimes the bay is really skinny. It's about that big. Yeah. So Oliver, like in 60 seconds, can you tell us what is this Wednesdays in the Word devotional going to be about?

Oliver:

yeah so just the overarching overarching theme is surrender and what that means we're going over questions like what that means uh we each episode is a certain thing that we need to surrender uh we got episodes like money time control future uh relationships so it's very good um it took my time but uh we just going around the bible picking out verses that really hit verses that really tell us that we need to surrender now because you know the lord's coming back soon and yeah so i Tune in every Wednesday this summer. And yeah.

Pastor Dave:

Got to give Hannah a shout out. She will be editing those and putting those out

Pastor Bob:

on our YouTube channel. All right. So we have all the raw content, but now Hannah has to work her magic, huh? Yes. All right. Looking forward to that. Post-production. Yeah. Will there be reshoots? Too expensive. Maybe for season five. Well, thank you, Oliver. We're looking forward to the first

Pastor Dave:

video dropping this week. I

Pastor Bob:

have a question. So tell me the whole idea of surrendering and those things. If you had to pull out one key thing that you learned as you were prepping for this, what's the key to surrender

Oliver:

all these things? Give me a teaser trailer here. So a verse I kept going back to was in James. James 4, 10, I think. It's draw near to God and he'll draw near to you. So that's what we need to do. We're in this world, we live in it, but we don't belong to it. So there's a lot of temptation, there's a lot of, things that'll make us want to sin, make us fall back into sin. There's a lot of things consuming our time, a lot of idols taking up our lives, so we just need to just focus, fix our eyes on the Lord, and we need to draw near to Him, because He's waiting at that door knocking, and we just have to open it, we have to answer, let Him in our hearts fully surrender. And yeah, I think episode five, a little personal testimony of mine, so I won't give it away, so you gotta tune in. And yeah, that's just the main theme.

Pastor Bob:

I'm ready to watch. Hannah, you gotta get on this. Start releasing them. She's just waiting for us to finish the episode. Are you going to do this Netflix style or are you going to do it like one a week? One per week. Okay. We're not dropping all of them at once.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. First one will go out Wednesday. So as soon as midnight hits on Wednesday, that episode will drop. Oh, really? Midnight. Okay. Set my notifications. If you wake up for work at one o'clock in the morning on Wednesdays, you can start your day by watching the first episode. Okay. And then they'll drop every Wednesday for the next eight weeks until we're out of episodes to drop. Tim likes to do the late night drops, man. He does. It's like three in the morning. I'm sleeping, Tim. One of the things I like to do as a hobby is collect promises from the Bible. Like, It's kind of a fun thing. So that's one of the ones that's in my list. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Boom. There you go. That's something that we should take advantage of. It'd be kind of foolish not to take advantage of

Pastor Bob:

that promise. So easy. So simple. Yeah. Take it seriously.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. Take it seriously. And that's a good old New Testament, you know, right there in the book of James. Love it. All right. So cool. Thank you, Oliver, for that. Tune in on Wednesday. Very good. So let's talk, Bob. Well, wait, we have a question.

Pastor Bob:

I think there's an audience question. I thought you had slides, Pastor Dave.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah, there's a

Pastor Bob:

question. We have a question.

Pastor Dave:

What's your question? So my brother Ben has been studying. I know I brought up

Pastor Bob:

a second. My brother Ben. Sounds like a movie title, my brother Ben.

Pastor Dave:

I know I brought up out of nowhere second Thessalonians question. But he actually started, he went through both of the Thessalonians and he came up with a question. First Thess and second Thess. First and second Thess. So here's Ben's question. 2 Thessalonians 2.7 says, For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. Who could he who now restrains it be?

Pastor Bob:

Got our Gog and Magog. Was Ben listening to our behind the pulpit string of revelations here? I

Pastor Dave:

thought we were done with eschatology for a few years. Doug, you might want to take a break. If you're watching this, we're about to go to the future again. So... I can talk about this. Or the past. Maybe you guys have a different opinion. But in 2 Thessalonians 2, the he... Well, let me just pull up some slides, Tim. So I actually put this down on a slide with some highlights and stuff like that. So, all right, second slide. Here's the text that's kind of highlighted accordingly. So the he refers to some sort of specific future figure of evil, commonly called the man of lawlessness or the man of sin. That... person is oftentimes identified as the the antichrist so there's one person there that i those verses are in red

Pastor Bob:

specifically

Pastor Dave:

a future

Pastor Bob:

antichrist

Pastor Dave:

yeah it's at least future from paul's writing yeah and then the the highlighted verses there verses uh six and seven uh identify another he another pronoun that some people call it the restrainer who holds back the revealing of the man of lawlessness and this he is not named so there's a lot of debate over the identity of this he the first he pretty much everybody's agreed that that's the antichrist but the second he you've got a lot of different interpretive options and so um here's the issues the the first time it says what is restraining which is a neuter gender. And then the second time, it's he who's restraining, which is male gender.

Pastor Bob:

Let's talk about what the neuter gender means. In Greek, you have genders. Yesterday, I just got neutered on the air.

Pastor Dave:

In Greek, either it's masculine, feminine, but they also have a neuter gender that they can use. Like in between. Yeah. So some people translate the first one as what is restraining because it's not like he or she. But the second one is masculine. It says he who restrains. And so here's some views. I was primarily taught the view that this is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is present in the church and really only God can restrain evil at the cosmic level so the spirit is sometimes described in scripture as someone who restrains sin the critique of this is that people say how could the spirit be removed from the world and then some people say well it's a temporary absence from the spirit on the earth second view human government this is like The law and order is removed. So Paul is talking about civil government being removed and the institution of the government. Like Romans 13, it's the job of the government to bring about justice. Third view is actually the specific Roman Empire view. And a lot of church fathers held this view, Tertullian as well as Chrysostom. And the Roman Empire was restraining the rise of the Antichrist. And so... Perhaps it was ambiguous because the early church writers were hesitant to critique and talk pejoratively about Rome, so oftentimes they would use cryptic language to do so. The problem is Rome fell a long time ago, and we haven't seen the Antichrist, and so that view is problematic. The fourth view is Michael the Archangel. He restrains evil. In Daniel 10, he's like fighting against the forces of evil. He shows up again in Revelation 12. That could fit the masculine gender. The critique of is it's kind of speculative. Paul doesn't name Michael at all. The fifth view is really minor. This is that it's the gospel or the church mission is the thing that's restraining the Antichrist. And the church is salt and light, so it has a restraining influence, if you will. The problem is the gospel is not a he. And it doesn't really match Paul's emphasis on a force or a person being removed. And the last one, Satan, some fringe views suggest that Satan actually restrains the man of lawlessness until the time is right. This is almost the most, the fewest people hold this view. I think this is unlikely. Satan doesn't restrain evil. Well, for the most part, he's, he's propagating, he's promoting evil, right? So those are some views. There's ambiguity here. So Ben, what do you think? Do you guys have any thoughts on this 2 Thessalonians 2 passage? I've heard that, I've heard it as an argument for, if it is the Holy Spirit, as an argument for the post-tribulational because I've heard people say that the If the Holy Spirit is the one that's holding back the Antichrist from coming, they wouldn't be able to come until the Holy Spirit leaves the earth. So if the Holy Spirit dwells in believers, they would have to be off the earth in order for the Antichrist to come. I've heard that before. But I don't know if I necessarily have an opinion on this. Yeah. And the opposite is true too, Tim. So some people say it's the pre-tribulational rapture because the Holy Spirit is indwelling in the church and then the church gets removed. But then... The Holy Spirit's still clearly at work. Oh, I think I meant pre-trib. My bad. I meant pre-trib. Well, it could be either. I mean, the Holy Spirit's still clearly at work during the Tribulation, if you take a futurist perspective. You know, I'd like to chase down the preterist interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2. I wonder if, like, Doug Wilson or maybe Gary DeMar has talked about that. I'd be curious. Bob, got any thoughts?

Pastor Bob:

I mean, I've heard the first few, but to be honest, I haven't. All right, Ben. All right,

Pastor Dave:

so... Let's talk about some scriptures that Bob's a little bit more up to speed on because he's been digging into it more recently. So we finished the series. First Timothy is over. Chapter six is in the books. You did the benediction. Grace be to you. We are actually moving on. So Bob. Tell us in 60 seconds, what was the final chunk of Scripture

Pastor Bob:

in 1 Timothy about? I am going to do that, and then I also think we should do some highlights from the series. All right. We'll see what the big takeaways were. 1 Timothy 6, the second half, which is connected and in contrast to the first half of 1 Timothy. Paul ends with an exhortation, fight the good fight of the faith, kind of the way he ends the Ephesian letter where he tells the Ephesians there to stand firm and stand strong. So given everything he says, he says to hold fast to the virtues and then to fight the good fight of the faith, to hold on to the gospel. And then he also talks a little bit about what obedience looks like. And then he ends with the last hymn. I think when you had done the outline, there's three major hymns in the book. This was the last one. Paul ends with that, and then he gives a final charge to guard the deposit that was given to them. So the way that I voiced this in the outline was, what should the church fight for positively? And we talked about public virtue. that was the six characteristics, pure obedience. And then, uh, finally passionate praise. So I think Paul does a nice job of wrapping up the themes that are in the book and, and kind of taking us out on a rocket ship as we end. Okay. And why do you have a

Pastor Dave:

Gladius with you today?

Pastor Bob:

Uh, well, uh, For the fight the good fight section, I thought that was a nice image for people to think about. What does it look like for us to fight? And we did talk at the beginning about cutting off the head of the snake who's always coming to consume us. That was some kind of image you had there, man. That was, man. Yeah. I know. Well, you, you're famous for cutting. You were stomping the head of the snake a few months ago. We saw pictures of that.

Speaker 03:

Yeah.

Pastor Bob:

Maybe you can insert that picture later on. Not by choice. But Pastor Dave was taking the coat hanger of the spirit and crushing the head of the serpent.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. Whatever was handy. Okay. So let's chat about this. This is kind of a countercultural passage. A lot of commands in here that are difficult to apply. I think so. You want us to flee materialism. You want us to pursue godliness. That seems like it involves some surrender. You want us to be radically generous. Yeah. I think God wants us to be doing those things. Okay. Yeah. We're talking about it. Channel the spirit.

Pastor Bob:

Man

Pastor Dave:

of God. Right. Right. So there's a spiritual struggle here, which I think many people would prefer to avoid. Right. That's true. Yeah. Who wants to fight? Right? Let's just kind of

Pastor Bob:

take it easy. Let's just get along to get along and not have any issues. Right. Although Oliver said he was getting fired up when I was swinging the sword on stage. Oh, boy. Ready for battle.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. So, yeah, I guess I would just kick us off with the question, how do we understand how to live life? in that first section you talked about fighting for, um, the word was virtue, right? How do we, how do we practically pursue virtue? There was six words that you brought us through. How do we do that practically as Christians? How do we fight that good fight and fight for virtue?

Pastor Bob:

Yeah. A good question. I think, um, for me anyway, I think, uh, I mentioned that this was one of my life verse that I chose when I was back at Oliver's age. I was about that age. This first came to me. And I've held on to it through memorization. So part of that is knowing the scriptures, memorizing them, getting them deep down in your heart. But then also, in order to do this, it's important to live in community because you can think you're living those things out. But when you actually sit down and talk with somebody else that knows you, they might say, eh, you know what? this one, this one, but probably not this one. It's really helpful to have somebody else who is speaking into your life and giving you a mirror to look at in terms of how you're actually living. So knowing the word, being in community, and then... At the end, the praise part, I think, is important because knowing all these things is good, but actually having your heart lit on fire to live them out is something that's crucially important. So when you want to worship God and you want to follow him, it's going to be evident in your actions. Well, Oliver, I want

Pastor Dave:

to know what you think, but while you're thinking about that, we were doing this Bible hour today at VBS, and Noah was the teacher, and the theme of today was Repent. And so he was doing this passage and trying to teach like kindergartners, first graders, second graders, the meaning of repent. And I thought his like drama word picture thing was good for adults. So he had the kids like stand up and face one direction. And then in order to demonstrate repentance, he had everybody turn 180 degrees the other direction and face toward Jesus. Right. So and he had him kind of visually act this out. I'm like, oh, wow, that's a really good way to. explain repentance to a first grader. And actually, for me too, it's a good reminder. Turn my attention away from... Should we turn around? Yeah, just turn around and face... the opposite way that you're facing. Yeah, that's repentance. So I thought that was pretty cool. Maybe ties in a little bit with pursuing

Pastor Bob:

virtue. Sure, yeah. Well, you need to flee certain things. Flee the things that were mentioned in verses 3, specifically verses 4 and 5. It's a counter list to what Paul had mentioned a couple weeks ago when we talked about that. So flee those things, pursue those things. So there is a sense of being a 180. Flee that, go that. Right, yeah.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. The expulsive power of a new affection. All right, Oliver, what do you think about this whole pursuing virtue, fighting for virtue? How do you understand that? I

Oliver:

think kind of going back to what Pastor Bob was saying, you need to have those people in your life that you can rely on to hold accountable. And that's something we've been very big on in youth group this year. I know on retreats, mission trips, I've had people where after the mission trip, they'll text me. They're like, how are you doing in this part of your life? How are you doing with this? Praying for me. And it's the same. We have this community, and we just have to take advantage of it. And it's also... It's like they help a lot, but it's also something you have to do for yourself. Like Jesus tells us to deny ourselves, deny our flesh. Like it's going to desire all these other things. And it's going to be hard at first, but we have to fight that good fight. We have to stand strong with our swords in the air, swinging it like Pastor Bob. And we just got to be ready for that fight. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be hard to surrender, honestly. But it's so worth it in the end. Can I ask you a question? personal question

Pastor Dave:

about that. So you're wearing a cross, right? So Oliver, you're what, going to be a senior?

Oliver:

Yeah, senior.

Pastor Dave:

Okay, senior in high school. That's challenging. I mean, to stand out as a Christian in a public high school, I mean, how do you get yourself motivated and how does this show up in your life whether it's in at school with your friends in classes maybe in the athletic context how do you feel like this might apply to somebody who's in the same phase of life like you are how do you find this to be a challenge and how do you help yourself overcome the challenge

Oliver:

yeah it's it's definitely a challenge I've been facing a lot of persecution and at least when I first got into my faith. Now I'm standing strong and I just have to learn how to be comfortable in the uncomfortable situations. So, A big thing with me is before I was saved, I was living in the world. I was friends with all these people. I was, I guess you could say, popular around school. And I had all these friends. And then I get saved and my life changed drastically. Jesus is just changing me. And I realized that I had to cut off some friendships. I had to leave some people behind to better myself. And a big thing for me is when I walk around school, I want to see my friends in heaven with me. So it's just my motivation to preach to them, to tell them about Jesus to help save them and I mean it's just it's powerful knowing that like there's a few people in my life right now that I've brought to Christ a few friends that I got bring here and then I tell them about Jesus I talk to them answer any questions they have pray for them and a few of my friends got baptized here one of them right now is thinking about it they're in the community they're going to youth group they're going to Bible studies we hold and that's just just seeing these things work out is just so so powerful and just keeps me motivated It keeps me motivated. It keeps me wanting to keep on doing that. And yeah, you just got to stand out. You just got to be bold. You got to be a Jesus freak around school.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. Do you wear the cross?

Oliver:

I do. I wear it. So people can see that. But I feel like the cross is just a lot of people wear it now. It's more like a fashion statement. But I remember my mom when I first got it, she said, you can't get it until you tell me the... the real reason why you wanted it. So it took me a while to get it until I actually realized that this isn't just like a piece of fashion. This is life. It represents life. It represents what Jesus did for us.

Pastor Dave:

Awesome. Thank you, Oliver. So Bob, the second part of your sermon, we're fighting for something else, right? What was the second fight? For pure obedience. Okay. Obedience. Okay. So tell us about that part of the sermon a little bit. What was the challenge there?

Pastor Bob:

So the challenge there is that following Christ is not just a one-time thing. So Oliver's talking now about, hey, this happened in my life. It changed. Something's different. And that's awesome. That just following Jesus requires a continual thing. And what Paul says in here is until he appears, until Jesus comes back, which means, you know, depending on when you got saved, it could be a very, very long time. It could be your entire life. So staying obedient to Christ requires just kind of day in, day out, pursuing him, even when times are tough, even when temptations come, even when you're facing challenges, even when it seems like that snake is going to get you, like we talked about. You need to stay true to him to continue to make the good confession that he talks about in verse 13, 12 and 13. Cool. So...

Pastor Dave:

At that point, I think it was at that point, you jumped down to the end of the letter, and there's this final couple verses where he talks about guarding the deposit or guarding what's been entrusted to you. And I thought that that was a really challenging section for preserving truth or preserving the gospel, preserving the scriptures, preserving sound doctrine. And you had mentioned that I had found some things last week in the archives

Pastor Bob:

of the church. You were rummaging around and I got four text messages.

Pastor Dave:

Check this out. So I brought the original church clerk

Pastor Bob:

record book. This is how they rolled back in the day. It just says

Pastor Dave:

records. Yeah. This thing is amazing. It goes back to 1851. You open up the first page, and it has this thing I can't read, but then the second page, it just talks about how they were constituting as a church, and then for the next three pages, they hand wrote out the Articles of Faith, which were exactly the same thing as what's called the New Hampshire Confession. Back then, it was a little different. They practiced the Sabbath a lot more strictly. So on Sundays, it specifically says here you're not allowed to have secular labor or recreate on the Sabbath. They took the Sabbath a little bit differently than maybe we would have more Christian freedom today. Then they have the church covenant, and then there's a policy on church discipline and what would happen there. So I'm reading this thing. It's cool. It goes all the way up to like 1954. So this is like the minutes from the business meetings and the original documentation of Millington Baptist Church. It's just sitting there, and it's like treasure, guarding the treasure that they had. A commitment to sound doctrine back then, and we have not let go of that for 174 years. Still going strong. This is not a book I can give out, but it's a precious jewel there just sitting in the archive room.

Pastor Bob:

Do we need to turn that into a digital copy before it disintegrates? You know what? That's probably not a bad idea. It's literally 175 years old, right?

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. I mean, I... Even the oil on my fingers is probably not a good idea to be flipping those pages too much.

Pastor Bob:

But that was pretty– it's pretty amazing. They took the time to handwrite it out and it's still been preserved for us.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. There's some other cool stuff in there. There was a list of pastors and I was like counting which one I am. I think you're number 13 and I was number 15, which is pretty amazing. And then there was also like financial records. So, I mean– It was amazing to me, like in 1957, the whole church budget was like $22,000 for the year. We did everything for $22,000. And now it's like, not exactly that. So times have changed. But really cool to see the archives and how we've guarded the deposit. As a church. So I think that was sort of a corporate way to think about that. But how do we understand our personal individual call to guard what has been entrusted to us? And how is that a challenge? And how can we help people keep that challenge? What do you think? Either one of you guys.

Pastor Bob:

Yeah, I think... The whole idea of the deposit is, I think, the message that was put in our hearts in which we were taught, that Paul is passing on to the people at Ephesus. And the challenge, of course, is that there's new teachings, there's new fads, there's different arguments that come up, there's cultural pressures and waves. And we can easily be swayed by our flesh, right? And so it requires constantly coming back to the things that we believe, constantly coming back to the Word, and holding on to that. So I would say, again, I mean, that's part of the reason the Church throughout history has done this in community, so that if people kind of go astray, that they can be corrected. And, you know, your message last week about the whole congregational polity of the Church, the setup of the Church, the governance of the Church— baptist churches in a lot of ways have held on to the core doctrines because it's not so easy to change you can't just have one person at the top that says you know what i read this thing i've come to a different understanding and so we're going to change the whole doctrine so yeah that's that's part of guarding the deposit so that that right there that's them guarding the deposit at the beginning of the baptist church and then each subsequent generation uh being faithful to that

Pastor Dave:

yeah so i mean i think There's a couple things that come to my mind here. The first one is sort of the relational cost that Oliver talked about. Like if you wanna stay true to this, if you're gonna actually believe this and stand up for this, that's gonna put you in a conflict with other people who may not agree with you. And so to be faithful to the truth might mean resisting a popular trend or might mean challenging other persuasive voices that are out there or other worldviews that are out there right so that's like something to maybe fight against and that's a challenge to guard the gospel there i also think there's like internal pressure like it's tiring it's fatiguing uh there could be fear um timothy might have felt tempted to give up or just uh tired or you know maybe even isolated uh It's a tremendous temptation to just for the sake of peace, for the sake of ease, kind of let go of some of the harder truths of the faith. And I think we need to resist the drift as we talked about at the conference. There can be a drift that just takes us if we're not like intentionally going the right way. We resist the drift. Did you guys watch the video on the screen today with the salmon swimming upstream from Alaska? Remember you talking about jumping the cliff? We made it happen. It was awesome. With the bear. That was crazy. But we got to do that. Like the salmon have to like work to go up that

Pastor Bob:

waterfall. By the way, $22,000 in 1960 would be $250,000 today. Okay. So we've grown quite a bit since then. So that'd be like 10 times bigger. That's factoring in an inflation rate of 3.75%. Okay. So there

Pastor Dave:

you

Pastor Bob:

go. And our budget's

Pastor Dave:

like $2 million. So

Pastor Bob:

we're a lot bigger than we were back in 1960. We're a larger

Pastor Dave:

church. And we were small. These records show the church was small. For a long time, it was between 100 and 200. I think it was that way until like the late 80s. It was a smaller congregation. So only recently, like in the 90s and above, did we start to grow a little bit larger. All right. And then so tell us what else stuck out to you guys about 1 Timothy 6. Anything else you want to share or something that kind of hit you in a unique way that you want to talk about?

Pastor Bob:

Well, I guess the only other thing I would say is I tried to– capture this at the end when I was talking about the ways that we get attacked and the things that can take our eyes off Christ. There's three general categories of trials, temptations, and tragedy, but it struck me that for each of those, and I mentioned this at the end, there's a solution that Paul is giving here. So if you're struggling with temptation, you should focus on that virtue piece. If you're focused on trials, they can easily take your mind off of the long game, and so you have to focus on obedience. And then if you're going through tragedy, it's counterintuitive, but we should focus on praising the Lord, just as Job did. You know, when things went wrong in his life, he said, the Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. And so each of those categories is really difficult, and we face different temptations and different seasons of life, trials. It's If life is going well, there's going to be a point where you hit a trial. And I hope people don't experience tragedies, but those things do happen. And we talked a little bit about that tragedy that just happened in Texas. So yeah, I think Paul's offering solutions for each of those main categories that we all face with. And we should all figure out how we can fight even in the midst of that. Yeah.

Pastor Dave:

It's interesting at the end of 2 Timothy, when Paul comes to the very end of his life, and he's in the maritime prison in the dungeon there, and he knows they're about to cut off his head, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. He's done. Right. And I was thinking about, wow, I wonder if I could ever get there and say, I did this. That would be a dream of mine, to get to the end and go, you know what? Thank you, Lord, for helping me make it to the end and never stop fighting. I was thinking about John MacArthur.

Pastor Bob:

Yeah.

Pastor Dave:

Okay.

Pastor Bob:

He might be in his last hours. Now that you're mentioning that, I should have used that as the closing passage for the sermon. Oh, well, maybe next time. We'll go through 2 Timothy another time. Next

Pastor Dave:

time. There we go. Anything stand out to you that you wanted to mention before we

Oliver:

move on? No, just what you guys said sums it all up. Yeah, we've got to endure to the end like Timothy did. We've got to endure, and that's how you're saved. You've just got to stand true on what you believe, stand true on the true scriptures. You've got to stay bold. Rooted in the word. What was your favorite

Pastor Bob:

messages of 1 Timothy, Pastor Dave? Oh, man. What was your highlight?

Pastor Dave:

Whatever I'm preaching this week is my favorite. I don't like to pick, man. It's all good. The scriptures are so rich. Yeah. There's some good stuff in here. I'm glad we did it. We wanted to kind of have an ecclesiological series and talk about why we do church the way we do church. And I think it was a good opportunity to explain some things that we don't normally take the time to explain. Yeah. We can now look back on those and say, yeah, we talked about this. Check this video out. Tim's going to collect.

Pastor Bob:

I was going to say, should we tease our Teaching

Pastor Dave:

Tuesdays series?

Pastor Bob:

Yeah, Tim, what's going on here,

Pastor Dave:

man? What are we going to do with this

Pastor Bob:

series? Talk to us, Tim.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah, so coming up, we're going to work on it during our little behind the pulp hiatus, I think. We're going to take little clips from this sermon series, maybe a few from a couple other where we need to cover a few things. And we're going to... send out some, sorry, I had a brain fart. We're going to send out some teaching Tuesdays on our YouTube. I think we got about to have a half of a year's worth of content of just little clips from these sermons for things that we think you should, Pastor Bob, Pastor Dave, think you should know. So we're looking forward to that. Awesome.

Pastor Bob:

Give us a preview. Let's talk about a preview for Season 4, which is going to be coming up in September. If we didn't mention before, this is the last episode for about two months.

Pastor Dave:

Season, yes. We're going to be taking a break from behind the pulpit, so enjoy your summer. But I have some ideas for Season 4. I'd like to bring some guests back. I have some ideas for types of guests we could bring back, but we'll see.

Pastor Bob:

In the fall, we're covering the Book of Isaiah. Have you heard a sermon series on the Book of Isaiah? Yeah. We are tackling it this fall, Pastor Dave. If

Pastor Dave:

you want to do a little summer reading, maybe crack open the book of Isaiah to kind of get ready because it's a lot. It's like wrapping your arms around an elephant. A large elephant. A woolly mammoth even. Yeah. Yeah, looking forward to it. But for now, Summer in the Scriptures. We've got a bunch of different standalone sermons coming up. I'm preaching. Bob's preaching. But we also have some great guests coming in. Sidney Bowie's going to be here this Sunday from City Relief talking about covetousness. Sits, baby. And we are looking forward to hearing from him. And Johnny's going to preach a week. We got Vince Stager coming in to preach a week. Ken Huber's going to be taking the pulpit.

Pastor Bob:

Clint Watkins is going to do a sermon on some of 2 Timothy. Do we want

Pastor Dave:

to take... wagers now about the how Johnny's going to preach his sermon. Oh, it's true. It's true. He's very unconventional in his approach. He brought the bench press out one year. He sang through the whole sermon like David did last year, and then he had Felicity out there with him for this year. I think he'll probably bring the volleyball net out and just bump, set, spike his way through. Do you think

Pastor Bob:

spike ball is going to make its way into this? He's going to

Pastor Dave:

put the volleyball net in the middle, down the aisle of the sanctuary. Yeah. I think left side versus right side, hey, it's going to be fun. While I'm preaching, I want you guys to get a game going and see if you can get this volley. I think that would be a fun way to spend the Sunday. He has used a volleyball illustration at youth group before. He actually put the whiteboard up and he drew out some strategies.

Oliver:

Oliver, do you remember that? His little game plan. Yeah, his little... plays and goes over in school. I noticed

Pastor Dave:

there's a permanent volleyball net up over there now.

Oliver:

That's the spot. That's where all the kids go. Before youth group, we're out there diving. Do you like volleyball? I'm a fan. I'm not the best at it. Basketball is more the

Pastor Dave:

jam. Do you have other sports?

Oliver:

I used to play baseball. I'm still pretty decent at it. Sorry to offend some people out there. Do

Pastor Dave:

you play baseball anymore or

Oliver:

are you retired? I retired. I switched back to basketball. I was a little more fun for me.

Pastor Dave:

Is it just like you play during the winter during school

Oliver:

or do you have other commitments? All year round. Travel.

Pastor Dave:

Like right now?

Oliver:

Yeah, right now. Oh my gosh. I got a game after this. You're playing in the summer? Got two games after this. Outdoors too. Are you talking about pickup? No, it's for my high school. We do like a summer league. Are you really in season right now? Yeah. In this heat? We're out in Jersey City, Hamilton Park. What? Beautiful court. Beautiful. Oh my gosh. All right. That's a lot of fun. You've got a busy day coming up. Is

Pastor Dave:

this podcast?

Pastor Bob:

Yes. How many

Pastor Dave:

views used does this podcast need to get? to get a one-on-one game that will release between Pastor Dave and Oliver. Oh, man.

Oliver:

I don't know about that. We've got a big center over here. I heard that

Pastor Dave:

this guy can play. I don't know, man. That might be embarrassing for Pastor Dave. I'll try, though. If you guys share this and we get 750 combined views between audio platforms and YouTube, we'll get a one-on-one game to 11. All right. Where are we going to play, though? It's got a gym over here? We're going to the nearest park. Pleasant Valley Park. Pleasant Valley. Pleasant Valley. We could do the gym. There's double gyms over there, man. That's tough.

Unknown:

Ugh.

Oliver:

Yeah. No, it's tough for both of us. They have some

Pastor Dave:

stiff ribs, yeah. Yeah. I'll have to work on my shot to get ready

Oliver:

for this. 750. All I'm going to see over here is you practicing in the gym every day when I come in. We

Pastor Dave:

should play a lot this summer while you're here. So Oliver's doing an internship. We're excited to see what God will do through you here this summer at NBC. Thanks, man. All right. So, Tim, we're going to talk about sprinting. Are we doing that? We're going to sprint. Okay.

Pastor Bob:

The final sprint of the year. We've got an athlete here. So I figured... We should let Oliver sprint. Give him a question. Yeah, like basketball's a sprinting sport.

Pastor Dave:

All right, so we got a question to close out our season three here. Can someone actively living in unrepentant sin still be saved? Okay. Well, the answer to that question is it depends. So if you're talking about active ongoing unrepentant sin that never gets resolved i would be very fearful this for this person's status before god and i say that with a humility and a certain reverence there that's a that's a dangerous thing to feel god's conviction but not do anything about that i don't think the scripture in the new testament has a category for somebody who like perpetually hardens their heart and does not come to a spirit of repentance over their sin. Now, there are seasons for Christians who resist God and who are going the wrong way. I think there is examples of that in the New Testament. But eventually, I think the Holy Spirit is the hound of heaven who's going to track you down. And he will... Christ will have all that he has paid for and he will finish the good work that he started in you. And I think that the ones who are truly belonging to God are the very ones who persevere or who endure and who choose what's best, who fight the good fight. So is that fair? Do

Oliver:

you guys have any disagreements here? All right. And just like Proverbs said, you know, the righteous man falls, but he gets back up. So as long as we get back up, we may stumble. We may go through that season that's rough. But as long as we get back up, we keep fighting. We keep working for the Lord. It's really just like how much do you love the Lord? Do you love him so much that you see that he did all this stuff for you, he died for you, and you don't want to do anything for him? Like we got to repent. We got to get out of the sin that we're living in. We got to turn away from it and look to him.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah. Good word. Thank you, Tim. Tune in Wednesday for more of that. Surrender, man. Surrender. We fought the good fight, and we

Pastor Bob:

surrendered this episode. We fought the good fight.

Pastor Dave:

There it is. Whoops. Announcements. Fought the good fight.

Pastor Bob:

We got a few things coming up. What's coming up the rest of the summer? We're out.

Pastor Dave:

Yeah, so let's talk about some men's stuff here. First of all, who doesn't want to go out to the Somerset Patriots Park? We've got a game coming up on Saturday. Saturday, August 9th. You guys can buy the tickets by scanning that QR code or just go to our website. You'll see how to do it. We hope to enjoy a great game together. So check it out. Sponsored by Men's Ministries, but don't misunderstand. Women are allowed. You can go. It's okay. This is not like the tea. It's true. No, it's not like that. Speaking of men.

Pastor Bob:

Bob, what's this? So this is a men's activity night happening on July 31st, sponsored by the men's ministry. And I'm told there's going to be all kinds of games. I'm sure there will be pickleball. There will be volleyball, assuming the net is repaired. Wait, it's broken? Well, yesterday it was down. Half of it was down. Did you guys fix it overnight? I don't know. You need to go check that out. It looked like it was damaged. I'll go fix that right now. Johnny. Yeah, Johnny.

Oliver:

John.

Pastor Bob:

Come on. I assume there will be food there, so make sure you come out. And as Craig likes to say, you don't need to sign up. You just need to show up. Sounds good. It's kind of a dangerous precedent, but that's kind of what they've hung their hat on. All right. We'll see. We'll see. Show up. July 31st.

Pastor Dave:

Also, speaking of men, now's the time to submit your application for next fall's radical mentoring season. We're gathering the fourth group of men together. This is a challenging discipleship environment. Radical Mentoring It is on our website. Fill out your application today. We're going through it this summer.

Pastor Bob:

There it is. Is that it?

Pastor Dave:

Well, let me tell you what. For the last episode of season four, this is the first episode in a very long time. This is episode 40. This is the first episode since episode 30 that's going to be under an hour. All right.

Pastor Bob:

Hey, we sprinted through this episode, Pastor Dave. That's right.

Pastor Dave:

Take us home. I guess we're getting better at this. I don't know. Hey, thanks for watching, guys. Better or worse, depends on what you think. Like and subscribe. Hey, thank you for commenting on our videos. We always appreciate the opportunity to dialogue. If you have questions about anything we've said... You had quite the dialogue last week, Pastor Dave, didn't you? I'm 12 comments in with... You know who you are, brother. I don't know your name. Yeah, that's your handle. What is it? Cayman... Cayman171. Good to meet you, my friend. Cayman has a large collection of... Baptist Historical Archives. He's got like a couple thousand pages of minutes. And so

Pastor Bob:

looking forward to it. But you've got the record book of Billy Newton Baptist. I do. So,

Pastor Dave:

Kamen, do you have one of these, though? It is a book, a real book war right there. A record war. There we go. All right. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for watching, guys. We will see you for season five. Until then. Four. We're

Pastor Bob:

skipping over season four. Is this season three? It's going to be a writer's strike. What season are we on? We'll see you in season

Pastor Dave:

four. Next fall. Sorry. about that. Take care guys.