Kuyperian Civil Disobedience

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

There are only two ordinances as Protestants. We don’t add into the list of ordinances, all those that the Roman Catholic Church does. So in Protestant churches, we have two ordinances, two mandates, two external ceremonies that Christians are commanded by the Lord himself to obey. Obviously, as a local church, we practice communion every Lord’s day. So that’s something that people get to see and participate in on a regular basis. In the case of most Christians’ lives, baptism is something that happens at the beginning, and it’s just one time. And then it marks them for the rest of their lives. We have a couple of different ladies who are going to be baptized tonight, from younger to less younger, but even, I mean, younger than me, so still not old.

But different ages, different experiences of Christian life so far. One is younger. And we do believe in baptizing those who can make a profession of faith as soon as they’re able to do that and their parents are able to corroborate that. It turns out that also tonight, I will be doing my very first ever baby baptism. But that’s only because Sarah is 37 weeks pregnant. So I have never, never yet actually baptized a baby. So I guess you start somewhere. So tonight is it. But Lily, who is younger, who I’ll invite just down in a minute, she is younger. I’m going to ask her some questions. She’s going to have opportunity to profess her faith in Jesus in this public manner.

And this is the beginning. And one of the reasons that we encourage even our young people to get baptized sooner rather than later, there are some churches that won’t baptize people until they are 18 or older, until they’ve moved out of the house and can really, quote unquote, prove their salvation. And yet, the Bible says that when you believe, you should be baptized. And also in Romans chapter 6, it especially talks about how we who have died to sin should not live any longer in it, because don’t you know we have been baptized into Jesus. And so for sake of our life of discipleship, in terms of pursuing obedience, we’re actually supposed to look back at our baptism, and remember that we have been identified with Jesus in that baptism, and that is supposed to remind us to then not sin more.

So, especially with a lot of churches that even I think some of us have probably been a part of have seen before, when you withhold the ordinance of baptism, you’re actually withholding a weapon of sanctification in the life of a believer. And it’s sort of like saying, you prove that you can live like a Christian, you prove that you can obey, and then we’ll give you one of the weapons that God says you can have for sake of your fighting for obedience. And that’s backwards. So when someone can make a profession of faith, when someone is able to understand that they can commit to their life of following Christ and obeying Him, then we want them to be baptized.

We want all of you to know that they professed to be identified with Christ. And then we want them to be able to look back on that baptism and say, I have died. I’ve been buried with Christ. I’m raised to walk in newness of life. Sin is not my master anymore. So this ordinance is a reminder for us and even a weapon in our sanctification and something that pleases the Lord something that is important for each individual disciple Something that even for the other young people or others who are here tonight Who have not been baptized or who have not made a profession of faith? then I’ll listen to these testimonies these questions and answers and May the Lord work in your heart as well first young young lady named Lily I’m very excited that Lily is tall enough so that I don’t need to hold her tonight because holding people at the moment I’m not I’m not sure I could have done it so I Anticipated she was tall enough. She’s totally tall enough. That is fantastic. So Lily how old are you?

You are seven. Okay, you know, I was baptized when I was seven You didn’t know that because it didn’t tell you that earlier. So that was not part of the quiz So Lily, why do you want to be baptized? Because I love God you love God and That in fact is the greatest Commandment that we love the Lord our God with all of our heart soul mind and strength So you you love God you want to be baptized good. So God sent someone to do something for us so that we could be saved. Can you tell me about that? Who did God send so that we could be saved? He sent his son, right? What’s his son’s name? God. God, but Jesus. He sent Jesus, right? And what did Jesus do for us? He died for our sins. He died for our sins. That’s right. Can you tell me what a sin is? When you don’t listen to God. When you don’t listen to God, yeah.

Another word would be when you disobey him, right? And so have you ever sinned?

Yes. You have sinned. I’ve asked her that question multiple times and every time she does not lie, which ironically would be a sin, right? But so you have disobeyed you have sinned and what does God say sinners deserve they deserve death right which is why it’s so important that Jesus came and died for our sins so that we don’t have to die right yeah so is Jesus still dead no he is not dead what happened him he was a break down to third day he resurrected on the third day that’s right so that those who believe in him can be saved so like you’re here to be baptized does baptism save you no it doesn’t save you do you need to pay God a certain amount of money so that he can save you no no do you need to go like to a particular place on earth and find a treasure and give it to him so that you can be saved? No. So what do you need to do in order to be saved? Jesus died and rose again, you need to do what? Believe him. Believe in him. Yeah. Love him, you need to believe in him, believe that he died and rose again. So baptism doesn’t save

you. Baptism is a picture of your relationship with Jesus and tell us what baptism as a picture of? Laying down in the water. Laying down in the water but what is what is laying down in the water remind us of? When he died. God when he died right. So Jesus died and was buried so I’m going to bury you in picture in the water in just a moment and then do you stay buried? No. So you actually come up out of the water just like Jesus came up out of the grave and so you are raised to walk in newness of life so that’s a supernatural thing. Now I’ve asked you this a few times you want all of these people who are sitting out here tonight or maybe even those who are watching on the internet you want all of these people to know that you believe in Jesus is that right? Yes. You You want them all to know that you love God.

You want them all to know that you want to obey Jesus. So when Miss Rothenberger, she’s your teacher, right? When Miss Rothenberger sees you in class and sees you not being nice and she says, look Lily, I saw you get baptized. I know you love Jesus. You have to obey him. You’re okay with that. You’re okay with Miss Rothenberger knowing that you love Jesus. Yeah, same with your mom and dad Your grandparents are here. You have family who’s yours your siblings are seeing you right now They’re seeing you say you love Jesus and you want to obey him. You’re good with that Okay Well Lily based on your public profession of faith. I Baptize you in the name of the father the son and the Holy Spirit. Oh, it feels nice to stand in water Apparently you guys don’t know me.

So good evening, my name is Sarah. And I’m standing up here tonight because I want to be baptized. This is a very emotional night for me, and I’m probably going to cry quite a bit. My testimony is simple. I wasn’t saved before, and I am now. What led to this was the beginning of this year. To take a few years back, I was diagnosed with Celiac’s Disease. disease. And for those of you who don’t know, it is basically something to do with the insides of my stomach and intestines. And gluten is the only cause of it. My body sees that as a foreign object, and basically decides to rip holes through the nigh insides. So because of that, there are other complications, one of that being fertility.

I was told I couldn’t have children. At the time, I accepted it, in a sense, until the beginning of this year when I found out I was pregnant. This was something that I was told couldn’t happen. This was something that I dreamed of, that I wanted, that I had issues with. That same day that I took that test, my husband and I went to Target and I think we grabbed one of every single test off the shelf. Pretty much sure the checkout lady thought we were crazy. And for the next couple of weeks, I took a couple of tests and every single time it was positive. Went to the midwife, had a blood test, it was positive. I’m 37 weeks long and our baby girl was due very soon.

Now, also the beginning of this year, we had what is called this COVID, which we all know is many, many things at the time, though, just like the rest of you, we were all scared. We didn’t know what to think. I took time away from work and and then my work actually shut down. Thankfully, this was all due around the time that my first trimester was. So I was extremely sick, scared, and I remember one day looking over at one of my bookshelves, and there was a Bible that was sitting there, a Bible that my parents gave me many, many years ago when I graduated high school in hopes that I would follow. And I burst into tears.

And I knew right then that I was trying to do everything alone. I was trying to continue my life the way it used to be, and I couldn’t anymore. God was showing me through another little life inside me that I needed Him. My fears were too big, and I needed to give them all to Him. I wrote it down because I’m not good with memorization. But the verse that stuck to me that very day was Joshua 1.9. And it says, have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous, do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

So then why am I afraid? Why do I fear if he is with me at every step of the way? If he has allowed this miracle of this baby to be brought, and He has allowed us to live through all of this today. Why should I be afraid? And that’s where I end my testimony. I am now standing before all of you, proudly proclaiming that I am a Christ follower, that I want to follow Him all the days of my life, that I wanna raise this girl to know who Jesus is, that I wanna do what is right in the Lord. So I mean, you’ve known about Jesus for all your life and you know what it’s like to live without Jesus. Much so. So turning to Him is not because there aren’t other things that you have tried and those have not brought the satisfaction and the comfort that you know that Jesus will.

Yeah. And in making the public profession, you are also excited for all of these people to get to know you more. And ideally, the more we’re allowed out of our COVID restrictions, that can happen even more so. So you want all these people to know you and to encourage you and help hold you accountable to the things even you just said about obedience and raising your daughter in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Correct.

All the time we ask those who are being baptized, Because you can become a member, a recognized member by transferring that or by following the Lord in baptism. And so Sarah desires to identify with us in that official and formal way as she identifies herself with the Lord. So Sarah, based on your profession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do pray for both Lily and for Sarah and for the different challenges they’ll have in their lives as disciples and pray that they will remember their baptisms and that in remembering those baptisms they will choose obedience. They will choose to present themselves as servants of righteousness and that the Lord would be pleased not only with their public proclamation of faith but with their life of obedience by faith.

So let me pray for them and then we’ll sing some songs. Father, thank you for the opportunity to allow these young ladies to be obedient to your son and glorify you through their testimonies. May their families be encouraged. May our whole church family likewise be encouraged. May we remember our baptisms and our confession of faith. May that be something that dominates our decision making, our prioritizing, our interactions with one another. I do ask for Lily, that you would help her in her school work, that you would help her in obedience to her parents, that you would help her in the primary responsibilities that you’ve given her as a young lady.

I ask for Sarah as well, that you would help her as a wife, that you would help her as a soon to be mother of an outside baby, to be faithful to you, to submit where she’s called to, and to then honor you in the choices that she makes. Help us the rest of tonight as we sing, as we hear from your word taught, may you be honored. And I ask this in Jesus’ name, amen. Father, we come to you tonight in a kind of an interesting situation to talk about civil disobedience in our time. And I would ask that you would give us wisdom as we think this through. And I would ask that you would give people good questions to ask, to interchange.

And that we would honor you and honor the gifts that you’ve given us in our country and in our situation as it stands today. So I thank you for these things and I thank you for your spirit that guides us and for the baptisms and the fellowship that we have as we see our little body growing and strengthening through discipleship and through that life on life living. So help us to apply these things to that and to our society. So we thank you for all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This is an interesting subject. I have never been in a church where it’s been taught from the pulpit. I have seen other churches and watched video tapes of churches that have talked about this subject. Most of them are heretical churches, I would say. Even though maybe some of the things they were protesting, I agreed with, but as far as being Christian, some of them are a long way off from that, even though they might claim to be. I think the first thing that we need to settle, the big rule is God’s in charge, not one thumbs width of our life is outside of his rule, of his rule and his ordaining it and helping us to understand that in all kinds of different ways I think is a constant thing in our lives.

A lot of us were brought up in conservative Baptist type churches where government work and everything is over in this category and churches over here and the two don’t really mix a lot. You know, be honest and don’t cheat people and don’t hurt people. But you know, I’m a Christian, but don’t ask me a lot about that on Tuesday afternoon, you know, I have to get the house built or the room framed or I’ve got to make this sale on this car. When in fact, all of those things interrelate. And that gets to who gets to run the show. And we live in a time that is quite different than the biblical times in that we have 2,000 years of Christendom influencing our society and causing civilizations to make new rules and give the citizenry more power in those rules.

And how to wisely use that is really the question of, you know, what makes a good government and who we should support and all those kind of things. And the issue of civil disobedience, the definition would be, civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws. Okay? So you’re saying, I am not going to obey that law. It demands orders or commands of a government. By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called civil, hence civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protest or nonviolent resistance. That’s the kind of disobedience I’m talking about.

I’m not talking about rebellion. We don’t take the gun out in the yard and say, I’m not doing this, rack it up and tell you’re not doing that. You do it fully expecting or knowing that the penalty will be you could come and be arrested for doing this because you understand you’re breaking the law.

We live in a society that sometimes laws and edicts are made that aren’t what our laws and edicts should be. Okay. There’s a long history of civil disobedience in our country. If you we hope that we’re teaching the generations in our school a lot about this and we’re learning about American history and world history starting with the rottitus and then the years go by and we read the Federalist Papers and all of those things and you realize As soon as the United States gets started, the guys don’t want to pay a whiskey tax, or they don’t want to do this, or they don’t want to do that. And so there are all these little things that happen.

And then we come along with the Civil War, which is probably the biggest thing that this country has faced. And out of that, we end up with the 14th Amendment. And that was in 1870 that allowed blacks the right to vote and protected it. And then from that 1870, it took to the 1960s before a lot of that actually got instituted nationwide. And there’s a lot of blood and tears and things sweated over that. Now, was that right? Was that wrong? How do you look at it in the Bible? One of the things I’ve already kind of given away is in the kids corner and the verse that I had Gail put on there is Acts, in Acts 21, where Paul is saying that he is a citizen.

Now Paul was obviously spreading the gospel and preaching and so forth, but he used the tool of his citizenship in order to get to Rome. The whole story is Acts 21 through, basically through the end of the book. But in those first chapters 21, 23, 22, 23, he’s really arguing in Jerusalem and they don’t know what to do with him because he’s throwing in the gospel, throwing in what his ministry was as they’re arguing with him. And then he throws down that I’m also a Roman citizen and citizen by birth and I want to see Caesar. So he trumps the Jewish leadership in that story. There is a lot of interesting little things you can look at there, but the reason why I cite this is it’s one of the few places in the Bible where the guy uses his citizenship in order to further his cause.

This is the gospel. But you’ll notice in the story, Paul is being beaten. He’s being jailed wrongly, but he goes ahead and lets that happen in order to get the bigger goal to get to Rome to spread the gospel, to be done. So it’s kind of an interesting situation. It’s not exactly like ours, but that’s where we need the wisdom that we live in a time and live under a government where we’re allowed a lot of things. And a lot of this stuff has been set aside by us because I think we live so blessed with material things. We’ve forgotten a lot of these freedoms and we’ve let it go by the wayside. And I think some of our churches have deserted it by going into kind of a Christian cocoon, talking about the things of Christ, and not applying those things, as they should be, to all the rest of the world also.

That’s why we like to call ourselves, Sean’s invented the term, and I think it’s a good one, in other words, we are not covenant in our theology. We believe in covenants. Okay. Obviously God promises to do something. If we do something, God makes unconditional covenants. He’s going to do something. He declares it, but we don’t base our whole theology on that. We just read what’s happening and then apply those principles to those things. things. The men are reading another interesting book that most churches wouldn’t use in a men’s study and that’s this when dikki i contra tironos was written in 1579 and it’s talking about when do you obey the government and when do you obey God and when God’s law contradicts the government, what do you do then? And that’s an interesting situation. We did the first section last Monday. It didn’t take long. I led the discussion. I think I said three sentences and the discussion went on for about an hour and 30 minutes before I talked again.

So people were obviously thinking about this and I think it’s a subject that really gets and needs to get ironed out and talked about. I think that it’s something that we really haven’t thought through as Christians. Maybe some of us that are interested in politics and things like that have been involved in it more. Some of us maybe that are older that went through the 60s in America, you know, have different opinions on these things. I’m going to bring some of those things up and how I thought about them as a person that said they were a believer, but I wasn’t. I didn’t get saved until I was 37 in 1984, but I went to Vietnam.

Also during that time, I was stationed on the East Coast and I went to meetings of the extreme left wing in New York City. I was in a parade with Dr. Spock in New York City against the war during the time while I was officially in the Navy, a Vietnam veteran at that point. So there’s all kinds of personal applications I have, and it’s really interesting to be able to look back on this now because once when I got saved I thought all of that was this and I needed to learn about what the Bible said and I was only interested in Jesus at that point because I had been so starved and I totally got involved in that I mean I got saved and then three months later I I was going to seminary and I gave running of my business to the guy that had brought me the gospel as a salesman I had hired.

So at that point, all I wanted to know is what God said and I thought all the rest of it was worthless. Now it’s taken me full circle now we’ve come to realize, well, wait a minute. If God is God, of course, he’s ruler over my business. ruler over the molecules that hold this paper together and all these things. And now I see that we should be applying that. And I think a lot of churches get that wrong and don’t talk about all of that thing. Other churches get so involved that they want to go and run the world and forget about the gospel and forget that the world is not saved.

get saved. So it’s an individual life-on-life thing, the gospel and discipleship, and the government is a product of a whole bunch of people getting together. You know, the idea that we are a Christian nation. Nations don’t become Christians, the people in the nation are Christian. Some of them are pagans, but they’re living under a Christian influence. There’s a lot of of Christian influence in our laws and our society and the way we try to run things. And there are some things that we see that have drifted away from that. And how do we change that? And how do we make the government pay attention to the law that they have?

For instance, in the Vietnam situation, I went there. I was a junior John Bircher, which is really conservative in Arizona. My dad was the advance man for Barry Goldwater when he ran for president, which meant that he went and organized all the rallies at Dodger Stadium and those kind of things where big speeches were had. I got to go with him during that summer, and I was, let’s see, I would have been 15 years old with him, and I got to hang out with my dad and ride in the cars and see in all the organizations and meeting all the police chiefs and all that stuff that was organized. And I got to be in the hotel room when Ronald Reagan was told that he needed to run for the governorship of California.

And Reagan looked at the guy that told him that, he was the owner of TV Guide, and he said, I don’t wanna do that. I love the GE theater, I like speaking about all these things, but I don’t wanna be the governor. And the guy just looked at him and said, you’re going to run for the governor. And sure enough, he did. But it was fascinating, because I was sitting in this, they had this couch, and all these guys were sitting in this room talking, and I got to sit right behind my dad on a chair behind him and hear that kind of stuff. And it was fascinating to see all these guys and how you saw that they were in it for what they could get.

And my dad was just there because he wanted to see him get elected and didn’t want any government job. And when you get high up in those political organizations, everybody’s in it for what they can get. And it kind of burns you out when you realize, well, wait a minute. We’re here to serve. We’re here to help you get elected, not to get in the train of getting on the government payroll and getting this job or getting that department to run and things like that. So it causes you to become pretty cynical after you see that. Right after that, I got old enough to go to college. I went to the University of Arizona for three months.

I never drew a sober breath, and I ended up that I was either going to get drafted into the Army, or I could decide for myself which way I wanted to go, and I decided going in the Navy would be a lot better than being in a ditch in Vietnam. I’d much rather be in a ship. And so that’s how I got to there. And as I did that, I went to Vietnam for a year. We were there for a year. We had the fleet commander of our destroyer squadron on our ship, so we got all the great ports, all that kind of stuff. But as we were helping different invasions and different up the rivers and shooting our five-inch guns at the Vietcong in different places, I realized that we were just messing around there because we would get up to the DMZ and then we would stop shooting.

And there were times when we actually helped get Da Nang that base built and then we went north of there and we would shoot to a certain line and the line was a certain parallel line and you couldn’t shoot any farther than that. So we would shoot at these villages And you’d see the guys through the range finder. You’d see them all running up the hill, and they’d get up the hill where they knew they were beyond that line. And they’d stand up there and watch us bombard their village. And then we would sail away. And as we were sailing away, you could see them all going right back down to rebuild their little grass shacks and do whatever they wanted to do.

And I realized this is crazy. We’re sending all these guys to take this land and to give it back, and to take this land to give it back. We’re not there to win the war. We’re just there to do this kind of police action or hold a fort against the communists. And it ended up that after we finally signed the peace treaty and left Vietnam, you guys have seen the pictures where the helicopters are taking the people off the roof and all of that kind of stuff. That next year, one million Vietnamese were murdered by the communists as they took over. So you get involved in some country’s civil war that had gone on for a long time and we should have known. The French told us at the end of the interview that this was not a good place to be, but we went anyway.

So out of that experience, I came back and from becoming totally for the war, I swung the pendulum totally against the war. Then I started realizing that the United States Constitution, the document we’re supposed to run our country on, said that the Congress has the power to make war. And you’ll notice that during World War II what happened. We got attacked at Pearl Harbor and the next day Roosevelt is in front of Congress declaring war against Japan and Germany. We never did that in Vietnam. We never did that in Korea.

We haven’t done it since World War II. All the people that have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq and all the rest of these actions that we’ve had, basically we go in, we make some kind of peace or some kind of, you know, standoff and then we quote sign a treaty and let the UN run it and we get out and leave and what happens in most of these countries they turn back to the mess that they were in. I mean Korea is an excellent example. You got two Koreas. One Korea is following the Western model, North Korea is following the model we were fighting. It doesn’t take you long to realize, oh I think I’d rather live in South Korea than there.

And yet we have people that want to follow that kind of government and end up and make America the next Nicaragua or whatever or the next Venezuela. It’s just crazy. But anyway when I recognize that that war was not actually legally done. It was done in a way where the president could go and ask for a police action and then the Congress gets to come along and every 60 days give the president a continuing resolution to do what the president is commanding. That is not the way it’s supposed to run. If our population actually knew what the Constitution said, we should vote the bums out and only have people that will actually vote to go to war, which would give wars a whole much quicker resolve.

If we’re going there to win and stop the deal, that’s a whole different kind of war you’re in. So anyway, that caused me to have a great suspicion of how things were done. The other great civil disobedience in the 60s was the freedom marchers. Now these people lived in the South that was not behaving according to what the Constitution had said. Remember in 1870 these people were given the right to vote, the right to be citizens, and they couldn’t even go in the Walgreens and have a Coke. So they started civilly disobeying those laws to show how silly that was. Some of the political activists in the North came down and helped that.

Most of these people were very left wing and very much in a kind of rebellious state against America. Now the thing is, when I was against the war, I never was against America. I was trying, thinking in my own head, to try to do it the right way. What happens is, a lot of the people that were also on that side of stopping that war, their thinking was not that they wanted America to stay the way they is. They wanted America a whole different thing. They wanted it to be much more totalitarian, much more socialistic, things like that. So you have this big struggle going on, and then you have the blacks, and you have Martin Luther King, who, and this is one of the reading examples that the students have at our school, that they read the letters from a Birmingham jail, and I have a dream speech.

And you see that King is talking about the rights for those individuals that they’ve been taken away from. that he felt that America had shortchanged them, which they had. And it’s interesting how when you read these things, like one of the first things he says in the letter from a Birmingham jail is that, conversely, one has a moral responsibility to obey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all. Now, that’s an interesting thing. This is part of the thing that we’ve been talking about and we will be talking about in this book, is because you have an unjust law, what do you do with it?

Do you obey it? Do you not obey it? Do you get somebody else that doesn’t want it and elect that guy and put him in so that the law can get passed so that it’s just? Or you just don’t obey the unjust law? Now, I’ve talked a lot so far about kind of the big subject. Notice that you guys are attending the church and I don’t see anybody in here with a mask right now. I don’t see anybody in here social distancing. So basically, I don’t even need to teach you about this because you are already being civilly disobedient. Now, we have not called this congregation to come to worship without thinking this through. The elders realize that at some point somebody may walk in here and arrest us for leading the charge for this.

I think that it’s way out of line what they’re doing with this stuff. And I think that we live in a country where we have a choice. We have a freedom to choose to do this. And it’s not the government’s business to stop us from worshiping God. This one has the added benefit of the higher thing. We are here to worship God who is ruler over all. This isn’t just, I’m not getting the right to vote because I don’t have my COVID mask. I think that we have that right also because it’s in the law. But that’s not on the level of obeying God that we have to worshiping. on a level over here with civil law. So these things get complicated, but I think it’s really something that we are raising up a generation, I’m hopeful, that they will clearly understand this and it will be much more difficult for the powers to be, to get away with things that really isn’t their business.

And it creeps in on you, you know, well, we’ll just do this for two weeks till we flatten the curve, or we’re just doing this so we have enough emergency rooms, or emergency beds in the hospital. And of course, when that happens, then all the elective surgeries don’t go by, all the cancer treatments, all the people that are going in to get their heart examined, maybe they need a stent put in or whatever, or they miss their chemotherapy for their cancer. All of those things start happening when the regular procedure doesn’t come, but they don’t talk about that. They just talk about the great dreaded COVID and it has a low percentage of death unless you’re in the category that I’m in, where I’m 74 years old, I’ve had a stroke, I’ve had a brain bleed.

I am one of those people that probably shouldn’t be here, but that’s all right. I’ll be happy to be here. So, but we already have declared what we think about this. And I think it’s really good to be a member of a church like this. And I think a lot of us have thought this through and thought what we are arguing about. It’s done my heart a great good to see John MacArthur. That’s basically a lot of us our roots are there. I I got saved listening to John MacArthur tapes I was an elder down there for 10 years That’s where we met Shawn who then married Morgan. He came to the Seminary down there and John MacArthur in those days in the 90s late 80s 90s all the way up to to 2005 probably, maybe even longer, maybe 2010, would not even have thought about being political like he is now where he has declared we’re going to worship, we’re going to do this.

And it’s interesting that he was called by one of the White House lawyers and told that they would give him the legal support that the Grace community would need in fighting that battle to worship. And the reason was that way back in the 80s, or I think it was the late 70s, Grace Community Church was sued because one of the people they were counseling had killed themselves while they were being counseled by the church. And so the government sued them that they weren’t licensed to counsel, and they made the defense that they were counseling biblically, and they could. The lawyer that won that lawsuit was also an elder at Grace Community Church.

And in the 80s, he moved to Washington, D.C. and started a whole legal society of Christian lawyers to defend those kind of situations. So that was the birth of that, and yet MacArthur would stay away from those things, and now he’s right in the middle of it. They’re racking up a fine every Sunday when they go to church there. And I think it’s great. and we’ll see how that goes for them.

I really think it’s great that we are doing that and I think most people in our congregation recognize what we’re doing. So it’s the time we’re supposed to quit and what I wanna do is I could go on and tell you all these stories about this and that, but the main thing is to think about We have a law that governs us. God is above it. He’s our families. The husband is responsible to God. Then he’s responsible for his family, and in a way, even responsible for his wife’s sin. He’s that pillar. And then we pass that all down the same way here at the church. The elders are responsible. We’re ready to take the bullet on the front line.

And that’s the way it should be. But I want to have people ask questions about this stuff. The last little thing I want to introduce into this, and I think it’s really incredible how my journey in the Christian faith has led, as Shawn’s has also, that we have gotten to be friends with lots of Russians. And it started when Alexei Kolomitsov came to the master’s seminary. and he was sent there by his church in Russia, never asked for a penny, went clear around the world, came to Los Angeles and came to the seminary. And this was the time when Bob Provost had become friends with the future leaders of Albania. He was living in New York and then got to meet the rulers of the Baptist Union.

And so they wanted help in seminaries in Russia And we were sending people over there. And when Alexei came to the seminary, the guy that ran the Baptist Union was the guy that turned Alexei’s father in and threw him into the gulags. So we had helped the very Russian that had thrown Alexei’s father into the gulags.

And it was a fascinating time. It was like reading a Tom Clancy novel to sit in those meetings with those people talking. And that guy that led the Baptist Union at that time did ask for forgiveness of Alexei, at least in front of us. Now, Alexei has gone on to run a nice big church down in Vancouver, and Shawn has taught several things down there. But when I came up here, I met a lot of you. And I think that it’s fascinating, especially Philip and Max’s grandfather.

He is a hero in the Baptist Union because in the Soviet Union, he was thrown into the gulags because of his faithfulness. And he is still alive. And as I understand it, the tapes are being transcribed, right Philip? That he made, right? Yeah. And it’s that history will be recorded. And that’s something that we here in America just, we don’t even begin to know about that. I mean, Martin Luther King was on the front lines and you know, you see the Selma Bridge and you see people getting beaten and you see the dogs biting people in those protest marches, but it is nowhere close to like the treatment of Christians in Russia, all right, during that time.

So, are there any kind of questions that you guys have thought about? What about this? Why, why would we do this? Why would we talk about it? Do you think it’s not biblical? Should we not be interested in politics? Any of those kinds of questions. Ron, you told me that you wanted to ask questions, so you have to ask at least one question or at least Abigail did.

Oh, Jen did. Okay. I have an opinion obviously I always have an opinion about stuff and by the way I changed my opinion too you know they’ve so uh but case where you should be possible mayor. Right, well you talked about civil disobedience, and you said civil disobedience against the law. Well, I’m sorry, it’s not a law. So, ta-da. Everybody get that? It is not the law, it’s a edict from the governor at the moment. Now, the problem is they try to force it into the law, and you’ll notice that across the country there are all these tug of wars going on about this kind of stuff. And the thing is, if enough policemen understand what is a law and what isn’t a law, you end up with where we are here in Snowmish County, where the sheriff just flat said, don’t worry about it, I’m not going to enforce what Inslee says.

Then they tried to recall him, okay, that sheriff, That didn’t work out so well. And that, to me, is exactly the kind of teeter-totter that you’re in. Now, do I think it’s idolatry? I wouldn’t say that it’s idolatry. I wear a mask to get into certain places that they tell me to. I got a whole glove compartment fill up. I can’t go to the doctor unless I go in the building with a mask. They take that mask from me and give me a new one because they want a clean one on me or whatever. So I put that one in the glove compartment. But I just don’t argue with them. I just look at them and smile and put the thing on. When I have a choice, I don’t do that.

Do I fight with everybody about it? No. If I have a chance to talk with them about it and maybe plant a seed of what are we doing here, I think that that’s all right. But I wouldn’t say it’s idolatry. But, and that depends. I mean, if you feel strongly that it is, then I definitely wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to fight Max to try to get him to wear one. I don’t think I’d win. And I don’t even know Kung Fu and Karate and all that. Yeah, that’s right. He’s got the ninja book. They told me what my ninja name would be. Yeah, Daniel. So Roman 13, I guess, is the gold standard for unconditional obedience to anything a government person says.

But as I’m looking at the past, it says, for rulers who are not apparent to good conduct, but to bad, would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval. For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is a servant of God, an inventor who carries out God’s wrath on the wrong doing. So I guess the application is we’re not doing wrong and yet we’re disobeying a man-made law. Are we then free to continue to not obey a man-made law that’s actually for evil instead of for death? Yes, I believe in that particular section of scripture it’s talking mainly about Caesar and kings and things like that.

We live under a different system of government where the rulers do, especially in our country, derive their power from the Constitution. So they don’t get that whole, you know, they say it, I got to salute and do it. If they’re out of step with how they got that decision. And that is, of course, the reason for all the lawsuits against these governors that are commanding these things. They’ve overstepped their bounds. I believe they have. And I think that that’s where we have to be wise and yet disobedient to it. Yeah. I would say, yeah, that’s where I’m at. Now, do I think that we all ought to run down to downtown Seattle and rip our masks off and act like a bunch of idiots downtown?

No. And definitely people that are down there protesting that Lighting businesses on fire gale, and I had to go down to California. We have a business do what? right well You we had to go down to our store in San Diego during the first start of the BLM kind of stuff this summer First thing we did was load a shotgun in the car so that when we got down here somebody wanted to come burn my stupid little business, they were going to get a lead for. And it’s not a problem. And I loved it in Snohomish when they heard that maybe BLM was going to go up there and protest. And a whole bunch of guys showed up and surrounded the town and said, not here.

Not going to happen. That is exactly how it should go down. And protesting is one thing. Us Psalms singing downtown Everett is a whole thing. We didn’t break any windows. We didn’t burn any buildings down. We’re not there to do that. We wanted to give honor to the Lord, sing. And that to me is exactly how it should go down.

Interesting problem we live in, isn’t it? So what do I do? I have to work for a company and they tell me I can’t go to work unless I wear my mask and do my thing. Well, you are basically an indentured servant to that company, they’re paying your salary. And if that’s part of the gig, you have to wear this mask and obey the rules that that guy wants you to obey. Being a good employee, that’s what you do. Because you’re selling your time for that time to that guy. You are that indentured servant to that guy. That’s another thing that people all get screwed up in the Bible, you know, slavery is totally bad. Well, yeah, chattel slavery, when I own somebody, that’s bad, but indentured servitude is basically what we do all the time.

We make contracts with people, and I get paid a certain amount to give you a certain service or product or hours of my life to do something that you want me to do. That’s just business, you know? That is what we’re doing. And you are under that person’s rule when you do that. Now, if that guy asks you to go murder somebody or commit something that’s illegal, obviously you don’t do that. Don’t be woodenly literal. But do think those things through that we are all slaves to who? Christ, right. The word is doulos, it is slave. any way you translate it, it’s slave. It’s not servant, it’s not a nice maid or a butler.

No, you are Christ’s slave, God’s slave. You were a slave to sin, now you should be a slave to righteousness, which the baptism also represents. So this is a big subject. I’ve already gone way beyond what most preachers would say, But we, I think I’m speaking for the elders, we are willing to make this, you know, presentation and be arrested for this because we think it’s way overstepping the bounds of it. Now, the other thing to this is COVID is a bad thing to get if you have asthma, or you are old like I am, or just like Cuomo, if you study the issues of this thing and how many deaths there are, I think it’s 39,000 people were killed in New York because they were ordered back to the nursing homes, okay?

So out of the 217,000 people that died, 39,000 of them were ordered back just in New York alone to go into a nursing home where there were very weak people that couldn’t take another thing in their chart to be killed, you know, that would kill them. And the government is counting a lot of these deaths in bogus ways. Talk about, should be an illegal law. My brother-in-law died of Alzheimer’s just six months ago now. And I have a picture of his death certificate. They said in the state of Arizona, the facility he was in, that he died of COVID. He did not die of COVID. And the doctors told my sister that her husband did not die of COVID, but they put that on his death certificate because they got an extra $13,000 because they put that on his death certificate.

And she said, that’s not right. You shouldn’t do that. At this point, she was, you know, distraught because her husband had died and all of this and it was a bad scene and everything, she didn’t carry through with it. But that’s just one example. So it’s not 200,019, you know, whatever, it’s 200,018,999, because that guy didn’t die of COVID. And these stories are all over like that. But it is dangerous to people that have pre-existing conditions and all that kind of stuff. It’s not a kid disease. I mean, it is a kid disease, because kids get it and they just, you know, get over it. And a lot of people get it without symptoms.

They test positive and they don’t have any symptoms and on they go. Now, you know, but I’m telling you as a person that’s in the risk category, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to live my life. And if that’s what God wants to take me out at, maybe I’m stupid. So any other question? when now we’re 15 minutes over where I should be. Interesting. I think it’s wonderful that all you people are here. I think it’s really exciting to be part of a church that’s trying to work through these issues in a Christian way. I absolutely think that Martin Luther King did some good things for the society. And I absolutely think that Martin Luther King is a heretic, okay?

I mean, you can tell by the things that he taught and that sort of thing. The FBI caught him in all kinds of affairs, all of that kind of stuff. So he was not preaching the gospel. He was preaching the gospel of non-segregation and things like that, which I think are good things. And I’m in favor of that. But a lot of times, and this is where you have to be wise. A lot of times we are going to be against something that maybe the allies we’re with are not Christian people, but we do live in a society that all kinds of people can live in our society. Mormons probably are going to vote a lot like us, but Mormons are not Christians. So, you know, do we align with them for political things? Could I vote for a Mormon? I did when Mitt Romney ran for president.

So let’s pray and then we can get on with it, huh? Father, I hope that we have honored you in the things that we’ve said. And if we haven’t, convict us and we will stop doing that. I just thank you that we live in a country where we can be free to worship you as we are. And people can have churches that are heretical and that our society allows that because we understand you are the one that opens our eyes through your spirit and that we don’t. And we can’t make a law to make Christians, but we can just be those people and be those people to be that light to the world. Help us to do that and help us to make a better society. And we thank you for all these things in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

So let’s pray and then we can get on with it, huh? Father, I hope that we have honored you in the things that we’ve said. And if we haven’t, convict us and we will stop doing that. I just thank you that we live in a country where we can be free to worship you as we are. And people can have churches that are heretical and that our society allows that because we understand you are the one that opens our eyes through your spirit and that we don’t. And we can’t make a law to make Christians, but we can just be those people and be those people to be that light to the world. Help us to do that and help us to make a better society.