John MacArthur: on criticism, Russian churches and possible persecution – Straight Talk 010

john mcarthur jr an american pastor and author known for his internationally syndicated christian radio and television program grace to you macarthur has written and edited more than 150 books most notably the macarthur study bible which has sold more than one million copies and received the golden medallion book award he is a pastor teacher of grace community church in sun valley california and a chancellor emeritus of the masters university and the masters seminary first of all dr mccallum thank you very much for your time i know you are very busy man especially nowadays a lot of things going on and i treasure it very much the opportunity to talk to you and to get some of your perspective your experience you had been around quite a long time for sure yeah and you had experienced a lot of things in christian world so i would like to start uh from 1969. you were a young pastor what did you expect when you started your ministry now when you're looking back 50 years did you expect something like that no i had no idea what the outcome would be uh from the beginning lexi of my ministry i was always concerned with the effort and not the result because i didn't believe that i could create results i can't do spiritual work only the holy spirit can do spiritual work so the work of salvation the work of sanctification even the work of illumination to understand the word of god is all the work of the holy spirit so i was always the messenger and god had to do the work to change the heart so i i never planned a certain growth or a certain outcome never all i ever did was decide one thing that i would teach the word of god expositorily sequentially through books of the bible because all all of it is god's divine revelation i didn't want to pick and choose the books of the bible were books so they they had a story line they had progression so i just wanted to teach the bible i believed that the word as it says in hebrews is alive and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword so i wanted to see what would happen if i just let the word of god do its work so my job was to give the meaning of scripture so that the divine revelation could work in the hearts of people that was it i never planned a certain number i didn't even plan sermons beyond next sunday um as if i could some guys would plan a year sermons i i couldn't do that because i didn't know what would come out of every text until i got into it each week so no it never ever entered my mind that the lord would do what he did in fact when i came out of seminary i was reading ephesians 3 now unto him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or think and i wondered well what could that be because i could think of a lot of things and ask well my life is god fulfilling that promise that he would do things beyond what i could think or ask i am not the explanation of my ministry god is the explanation god is the reason it's the work of the word what kind of challenges a church had back those days i mean church in general evangelical world and have you thought about facing those challenges and doing something or you were just focusing on your local congregation and preaching week by week how much uh awareness of the general problems of the christian world you had at that time well as you know alexi you are aware of the world's problems at any given time yeah you know when the apostle paul says to timothy preach the word in season and out of season what do you mean in season and out of season and i believe what he means there is you preach the word but you preach it with a sense of the season remember jesus said to the pharisees you can tell the weather but you can't tell the signs of the times ministry always has to be related to the season i mean right now we're going through very strange season in our culture in our society with covet and with all the racial issues and the breakdown of everything that we've known in america many of the things that um eastern european slavic people russian people tried to escape are showing up in america and so things are changing so there's a seasonableness to preaching so i i was aware of the world i was living in i was also aware of the church and what i saw in the church was shallowness a kind of a traditional approach to church in those days there weren't there wasn't a big charismatic movement there wasn't a big mega church movement there there wasn't a sort of the pragmatic seeker friendly movement most churches sort of felt the same and there was a tradition but that tradition had been accepted as if it was that all you needed and i i said look the church lacks biblical definition and it lacks an understanding of biblical doctrine so that that was my concern so expository preaching at that time was pretty new thing yeah it was definitely new there were very few my father the latter part of his ministry was an expositor and he had he had read a guy named g campbell morgan you may have seen some of his books the british preacher he would go through books but that was pretty rare and he was more devotional and then w.a criswell at the first baptist church of dallas was also an expositor he went through the bible big big pieces of books but he went through books when my dad saw that in in morgan and criswell it it drew him so i watched my dad in the last part of his ministry go through romans and go through matthew and go through acts and so i saw that that was such a great way to handle the word of god and leave nothing out but it was very unusual in fact when i first started doing that here there was a fear that was going to bore people that just going through the bible was too uh too programmed and you wouldn't be able to respond to all that's going on they they soon began to see the power of scripture when it's exposited so was it just your choice or you believe that it's necessity i believe that it's necessity i believe it's absolutely right early on at that time you already had that by the time look by the time i came to grace i had one goal and that was to go verse by verse through the new testament because i'm a minister of the new covenant yeah i understand the old testament uh happened as examples unto us and you draw the richness out of the old testament but we're ministers of the new covenant that's the new testament so no before i ever came to grace i told them i want to go through the new testament verse by verse by verse and no one had ever heard of anyone doing it not not as slowly as i did it but it took 35 years to get through the whole new testament but no from the time i arrived i said i have nothing to say god has everything to say i can't decide which of god's word is important and which is not have to teach at all now let's uh get a little bit of the other side of you you did not plan to become famous and influential but you did become one what comes with it burdens responsibilities one thing one thing brother i think is that it came slowly no one knew much about me for 10 15 years and what changed that because people didn't even record their sermons when i first started at grace church there were no cassettes there were no cds there was no internet so if you wanted to hear a recording you had a big reel of tape that went around and around so nobody recorded sermons then when the cassettes came in then people could take a cassette it was simple to put it in a little machine you remember those and then people began to hear you outside your own church and then it went to cds and that was easier to transport the message so the fame you could say grew with the technology and obviously when you get to the internet and you can download anybody and the same with you i mean for the years before the internet your preaching was heard by the people who sat there and heard it yeah so it it came at a slow pace for me and i i think that was important because um we all don't we all want to avoid pride and a sense of importance that's above reality but uh but i think the the the mitigating reality two things mitigate against fame um sort of leading you into sinful pride one is you're an expositor so every week you're in the word of god so david says your word have i hid in my heart that i might not sin so what breaks your pride every single week as you're spending 10 15 hours in the depth of scripture secondly the the way pride is dealt with that's internally in the word the way it's dealt with externally is you're a pastor and you're living with all the failures of pastoral ministry right i mean we we could think if if we were traveling around and preaching everywhere we wouldn't have to account for what the church looks like but the reality is um you you have to live with your successes and failures and you're struggling in your church and people are struggling and people have marital problems and they have problems with their kids and so you're living in a lab that never quite succeeds you know what i mean it's never what we would want it to be and and so the the external humbling reality is the pastoral work that you're doing and it's not what it should be and you never seem to be able to get it there and the internal the prevention against pride is just the relentless work of the word in your own heart in which you recognize that you're preaching something better than you're able to live all the time do you uh have that thought on the back of your mind every time when you're behind the pulpit that every your word would be criticized when you are famous it's not just good people who are uploading you but those people who are criticizing you have you have you felt that weight i i do feel that weight but honestly i don't feel it when i'm preaching i think you understand what i mean when i'm preaching i feel the weight of the word right i'm i'm my heart is given to this passage so by the time you get into the pulpit i know what's in this this text right i just want you to know right so i'm lost in the the explanation of this text i'm not self-conscious i'm not worried about what somebody might think people ask me when you're preaching do you worry you might offend somebody never enters my mind but because when i'm in the pulpit all i'm thinking about is i've got to communicate this living transforming word from heaven to these people after i get out of the pulpit and i find out that somebody went on the internet and didn't like what i said then i have to face that reality you always have enemies you always have friends but the confidence the preacher has to have is that that's not what's going to determine what i do the content of scripture is going to determine what i do and the encouraging thing to me that may sound strange is that there was never a greater teacher than jesus everything he said was perfect and they killed him for it so if i think i'm going to escape without criticism i'm foolish yeah one more thing in 1980 i believe or somewhere around that you were part of the group which composed the chicago endurance statement uh why was it needed then it actually lasted from 1978 to 1989 it was really a 10-year little over 10-year period yeah the liberal churches in in america had been assaulting the bible you know directly confronting the issue of the bible's inspiration they were denying that it was inspired by god uh the the common idea was that the scripture is it contains the word of god but it's not the word of god necessarily it's men's spiritual experiences about how god communicated them so that there was an attack on on the scripture and of course if people lose confidence in the bible then everything is lost so that the leaders of the evangelical world recognize that they had to answer the attacks on the bible's inerrancy by inerrancy we mean that it is inspired by god in its original and every word of god is true the bible is true they felt that because it was being attacked they needed to amass a defense against that and that's what they did so there were a hundred men that were picked to make up this group called the chicago inerrancy council interestingly enough there were 98 professors from christian institutions and only two pastors which says that by the time you got to 1978 when people thought about serious doctrine they didn't think about pastors and that that is a shift that's a mega shift in american pastoral ministry that that wasn't good if you go back to the great awakening go back to jonathan edwards you go back into the early years of america the theologians were the pastors then when academia began to develop the theologians all went into the academic world lost touch with the people and pastors lost touch with academics but there were only two pastors myself and jim boyce dr james montgomery boyce an incredibly wonderful useful man of god so for 10 years we crafted the chicago statement on biblical inerrancy and for 10 years books were written articles were written papers were written all kinds of sermons were preached defending inerrancy so he had 10 years of work that settled in many people's minds the issues of inerrancy but it was because that is where the battle has to be won before you can defend any other doctrine right because what's the point in trying to defend the deity of jesus out of the bible if the bible might not be true did the three sheets go yeah it reached its goal in this sense that the chicago statement has been around now for 30 40 years by the way there were 100 men there i'm the last one living no really in the world since jim packer died and sprole died but it it did its goal it did its work and it reached its goal in this sense that it is still the best statement on biblical inerrancy so you go from 1988 to 19 to 2020 that's over 30 years that that statement has stood firm uh how the general attitude toward this statement chicago inherency statement of the evangelical world had changed during these 40 years is it still important for evangelicals very very interesting question alexi because this is what's happened in those days people were discussing theology there were guys denying inerrancy and making arguments and then there were the the men defending inerrancy and making intellectual arguments today don't people people don't make intellectual arguments you you couldn't probably find a guy in a mega church who would say oh i don't believe in the inerrancy of the bible they would say oh of course i believe in the energy of the bible if you ask them to defend it they couldn't i mean look 50 of evangelicals according to a recent survey 50 of evangelicals don't necessarily believe the bible is without error i mean this is this is crazy and that's evangelical so does it mean that pastors are not teaching that or yeah of course it does sure it's a direct reflection of leadership but here's the point it isn't that guys are getting in the pulpit and denying inerrancy they just aren't teaching it they're not denying the deity of christ you know when you read that 30-some percent of evangelicals don't believe jesus was god or 65 percent of evangelicals believe men are basically good their pastors aren't arguing that men are good and they're not arguing that jesus isn't god they're not arguing anything biblically they're not teaching doctrine they're not defending doctrine they're talking to people in sort of spiritual psychological terms about life situations and these people are doctrinally ignorant so there was a day when inerrancy and authority was attacked directly now it's sort of attacked indirectly by the superficial kind of preaching that goes on that doesn't teach people sound doctrine does that make sense yeah yeah i understand um speaking about that when we look at church history and especially recent history we see that trend the churches are always moving into the more liberal positions why is that happening i i think that the lord answers that uh in matthew 13 when he says the devil's going to come and sow tears among the wheat i mean the tough thing about the kingdom jesus said that whole 13th chapter of matthew is all about the kingdom you know you're going to he says like a dragnet you're going to throw the net in the sea and you're going to pull in stuff and it's going to be all kinds of things you have to sort it out it's going to be wheat it's going to be tears the devil's going to sow tares among the wheat and our lord even says don't try to root them up because you're not going to be able to discern you have to wait until the judgment when the lord separates so satan's strategy is always to go to church isn't it satan's strategy is always in religion he's disguised as an angel of light his ministers are disguised as angels of light and they don't there are attacks against the church but the subtle attacks that destroy the church are the inside assaults against the church so i i think that the answer to that question is that this is the strategy of satan to weaken the church on the inside to weaken it morally by having pastors who have a secret life of sin to weaken it doctrinally by preaching sentimental things but not sound doctrine to weaken it in terms of spiritual leadership and influence by by weak leadership all these things are strategically what satan tries to do to weaken the church disguised as an angel of light what can be done with it well you know there's only one cure for deception that's truth only one cure for a lie so second corinthians 10 3 through 5 is a really important passage paul says the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly what he means is okay we're engaged in a spiritual battle we get that uh we can't use human weapons fleshly web we can't use methodology strategies clever ideas and all those kinds of things the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly but powerful mighty unto god so we have to fight spiritual battle with divine weapons well we only have one weapon that's the sword of the spirit so then paul says we are destroying fortresses very interesting term he says spiritual warfare is not chasing demons like some people think it is spiritual warfare is fighting against fortresses you know massive the word in the greek means fort castle prison same word so what are these for these massive stone fortresses that we're fighting and in the next verse he explains that we're where we're fighting against fortresses and then he says which are ideologies la gizmos so the fortress is the logist mosque what's that in greek it's any idea any idea then in next line he says raised up against the knowledge of god so the the entire spiritual battle is a battle with the truth against ungodly ideas we have to attack all kinds of wrong thinking right sinners think wrong about sin they think wrong about righteousness they think wrongly about judgment they think wrongly about god christ the cross the resurrection it is the massive spiritual war in the world is the massive battle to bring the truth in order to to smash down the fortresses of ungodly ideas fortresses that become castles that become tombs and paul says at the end of those verses so that we can bring every thought captive to christ it's a battle for the mind it's always a battle for the mind and what you're trying to do is let is lead people so they abandon their deceptive protection they abandon their their ideologies raised up against god against the truth and you you want to bring them so that every thought is captive to the mind of christ this is work on the mind how people think now now what is the one weapon you have against lies the answer is the truth and this is where exposition becomes so critical because it is the word of god that smashes the truth we're begotten again by the word of truth first peter 1 we're sanctified by the word john 17 17 sanctify them by thy truth thy word is truth so it's always a battle for the mind and i say this in terms of preaching every sermon is an argument for the truth right you're trying to convince them out of this passage this is the truth to smash down their let their lies and their deception because you bring them to the knowledge of the truth that's where salvation is and that's where spiritual growth and sanctification can you tell uh a little bit more about this battle about this fight when we're talking about uh attacking the wrong ideas in people's minds this attack sometimes turns into inner fighting between between church leaders between congregations and actually some people say that macarthurites are known to be divisive what will you say about that first of all no one no one should ever be a macarthur right that's a terrible thought yeah um look i'm i'm just trying to be faithful to the lord verse by verse chapter by chapter book by book it's too easy for someone to say oh i don't agree with you show me you know r.c sproul my friend said to me and it's you can find it on some video he said to me in front of the whole conference one time he said let me tell you about my friend john if i can show him where he's wrong he will change that was the kindest thing that maybe any other teacher ever said to me yes if you can show me where i'm wrong please show me but show me don't just criticize show me look i'm i'm like any other pastor i'm like a pastor you know in the former soviet union somewhere who wants to get it right right and i've been there i don't know a dozen times and they want to get it right and and sometimes when i would go there i would they would say you showed me how to get it right i mean we're all trying to do this right i nothing is true because i say it's true it has to be true if i don't exist right i mean i i no truth is in me yeah no accurate interpretation is in me it's in the scripture outside of me so i don't mind somebody disagreeing with me because i expect that people won't like the truth but i also know that i may be wrong and if i'm wrong that's why i'm surrounded and you know this because you're part of my life i'm surrounded by men who would say to me you know pastor john we love you but that's that's not right can you need to re-examine that you need to look at that again so um i i you have to know my heart i don't want to misrepresent anything god ever said i don't want to say thus says the lord when he didn't say that so i want to be accurate and that's what drives me in the study and that's what the men around me are there to help me be able to come to the truth so where i'm wrong show me so that i can be right but if you're honest you've got to examine it from my side as well right so you come to the right conclusion not just because you've had an opinion the tough thing is holding on to opinions that you haven't really been able to defend sometimes you inherit an opinion about a text or a doctrine and it's what got passed down to you and you honor the people who passed it down but you've never tested it against the scripture and that's where it has to be tested i remember my last day in seminary dr mayhew had his class and he had given us a piece of paper with 15 mistakes that tms grants make the most often number one i don't know if you know that don't attempt to out macarthur mccarthy please don't attempt to do that so but speaking about that it is clear that spiritual spiritual reality uh requires to be faithful to the text to be confrontational in some way of course but how to do that without being a device being a person who always picks up the fight is looking for the fight how to combine it with the spirit of love with the understanding that the church has different people who are in different place of their development [Music] what was your experience in that area well first of all that is the experience as a pastor that i have in the church right i've got all these people some of them i've been here long enough to believe what i've taught you know their theologies lined up with mine most of them haven't been here that long so they're they're all along the line of what they believe and they're all in process so the key to to unity is to speak the truth in love and it's inside the church where that love is most manifest i can't what opportunity do i have if i preach a message on some doctrine and some somebody in another part of the world doesn't like it i have no connection to that person to demonstrate love i was introduced at a conference once with this introduction this is john mcarthur who is much nicer in person than he is in his sermons and the guy was serious but you know from a distance he's just saying i didn't like what you said but i don't have a relationship with him so that he might know my heart toward him but but in pastoral ministry you know i am more doctrinally focused and more dogmatic with my own church but all of that dogmatic attitude of teaching that but the bible is undergirded with the fact that they know that i'm the shepherd that loves them and so i i think you know paul says this is so important the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart that just happens really in a in a church relationship where love grows and flourishes so i understand that if i preach something and somebody far away who doesn't have any relationship to me doesn't like it that they they're going to attack me that i can't do much about but where the test of the balance in my life is is in the church so is the doctrine clear here and is love manifests that's and i know that's that's your church right your people have very strong convictions about the word but the goal of that instruction is love and that's what people experience in your church and that's why they're there that's why they feel about you the way they do so i can't create that balance outside but it should be the characteristic inside the life of the church how can we apply that to relations which we have with other christian leaders who are not part of our church but they are we have some relation with them like when we uh look i i had been around here at the shepherd's conference for a long time and i remember those day when i was translated jerry vines was here and i believe adrian rogers one time and then those uh presbyterian guys you started to cooperate more with them then um mark dever al muller were frequent speakers here and now we have we see changes in that what what regulates it how we can apply those principles which work within the church to the broader context of relationships yeah it's a it's a very good question and at first i knew that i had to accept all whom christ accepts i mean look when i receive another believer i receive christ right this is exactly what jesus said when when i receive another believer i receive christ so i can't i can't cut myself off i can't make an enemy out of one who belongs to christ and these men were gifted men who who who believed in the authority and inerrancy of scripture the purity of the gospel all the important doctrines and and there were some differences in in some of the methodology some of the church life some of the traditions and things i thought it was important for me to show the love of christ to those who were christ's and leaders in his church and i was happy to do that and the fact that they didn't believe in immersion or the fact that their eschatology that was not the same as i thought it should be i could i could still embrace them because they were christ's and they had a lot to bring to his people that's fine until some test some time some season comes where you find out that they deviate more than you thought they did it's very interesting to think about that you mentioned jerry vines in the current situation now um the men that i have worked with most closely over recent years in the stand that our church is taking now none of them have said a word to me about it but the one person who has called me and poured out his heart of gratitude is jerry vine oh really and thanked me um he was willing to stand with me on this when others weren't it's interesting the longer you live who will show up to support you depending on what the issue is yeah but when you're talking about people like that and situations like that are they still brothers oh they're still brothers and i love them as brothers and nothing has changed in terms of my affection can you say they still friends yes because they belong to christ they belong to him and i i don't want to i want to still influence them that they have much to teach me um i need to learn from them the things that god has taught them um i i wish them only success and blessing they may not agree with the ministry choices they make um but that only encourages me to pray all the more for them um no if if you're the child of the of christ you're my brother and i've got to love you and i want to love you and i want to see you flourish and my heart is broken when when i see you go a direction that i think is away from the truth and put you in a vulnerable position so i don't like to see that i might say well i i don't know if i could have them come and speak at an event at this time because i think the current issue is clarified in a certain way and they would make it unclear but that doesn't mean that they're not a friend not a person that i love one event i remember which impressed me very much was the debate that you had with rc sprawl about infant baptism yeah and that was very interesting experience for me experience how it is possible to disagree and still be friends uh that that is a very i personally attended that event were you there yes i worked there it was very interesting experience yeah so rrc you have to know his heart um he is a big hearted guy his love is not narrow and and he can embrace the people who don't agree with him on on issues but he said to me one day he said would you be willing to debate me on ba infant baptism and i said of course because you have no case you don't there's no argument for baptizing babies so he said well would you be willing i said i i will you sure you want to do this it's your conference oh no i think it'd be great let's do it let's do it so i said okay i just asked one thing i get to go first because i'm going to present a biblical argument and then see how you answer it i don't want you to present a non-biblical argument and then make me answer a non-biblical argument with the bible so i said fine great so you were there so i gave this i remember this argument for you know uh believers baptism no baptism except when you've come to faith in christ not not any infant baptism and i went through all and i you got to know too alexi i i studied because rc is a smart guy so i was prepared when i went in and so i laid the case out and then he gave i think the following case which was no case because there's no it's not in the bible and then there was some back and forth dialogue and i asked him i said who won the debate he said well you did and you know you know that is still on the ligonier website to this day how many years ago you can still go on linear website and hear the entire thing that that's the size of his heart um and i said to him okay i mean if i won the debate are you still going to baptize babies come on but i couldn't get him across the line but you know to the to the when he died his family asked me to speak at his funeral because there was just this love bond between the two of us and you know for a lot of people that was a picture of what um fellowship and love among leaders who disagree on a certain issue should look like uh he was the the thing that brought us together brought us together was the willingness to fight for the truth you remember he called me boris he borrowed a russian name and he always called me boris because one time boris yeltsin stood on a tank in moscow and stopped those people and ever since then he said to me you know you're boris you're going to stand on the tank you're going to stop the people who are bringing in the error so he you know all through our friendship he always called me boris so there were virtues that we saw in each other that transcended that particular disagreement even though that's an important issue [Music] recently i listened one of your sermons i think it was recorded in 1982 and you mentioned that you were speaking introduced in your sermon or or something in the course of that you mentioned that tonight we are going to listen from georgie vince and he happened to be a friend of my father uh he he actually visited our house back in soviet union what do you remember about him and what do you what did you learn from him about her persecuted church in russia the first time i ever learned about the persecuted church was from him um i mean that i didn't know him personally but he was associated with the persecuted church i think he was associated with the underground church yes and it was my first experience to actually talk to someone about what it was like to be a persecuted church and to meet in secret and of course it made him so unique in my life because in america you know we have all the freedom of religion and this was an introduction to a level of spiritual devotion and dedication and sacrifice that i hadn't personally i mean i heard about it but i hadn't had a first-hand conversation with somebody who lived it and i know your father went to prison for three years uh because of faithfulness to christ in in preaching the word of god in the church so yeah in those days that that was the strangest kind of thing because persecution of churches in the west was unheard of and and a lot of that we didn't know about in the east until people like georgie came out and began to tell us what was going on so um i i saw from my viewpoint for the first time from him in his testimony the positive effect of persecution on the church because if you're a fake christian you're not going to get persecuted right you're not going to go to the church so this is the true people of god and there was a i could see it i even said to him and i remember i said i wish our church would be persecuted because we need that kind of purging where you have people who are sort of faking to be christians but they wouldn't do it if there was a cost [Music] have you read russian classics uh i've read some russian classic i mean we've all been exposed to scholza nietzschen um i'm trying to think of any others specifically what was your general impression about russia russian people back then when when you were just getting to know or getting immersed into you know i studied history in university and um my understanding of russia was primarily the the classic understanding of the the typical european king the czar and you know then you come into 1916 and 1917 and you have the bolshevik revolution because the the tsar's power is perceived as abusive and so you have the the the re revolution of the masses and you know you know i looked at it all that way and the only experience that i had because i was born in 1939 was communism the soviet union communism and the communism that swept from there over eastern europe so um i i didn't really know anything about the people of russia in terms of their characteristics and their traits as such um from an american standpoint you know we saw communism as a threat yeah you know it was cold war the kind of thing and the in america they were trying to find every communist under every rock and put them in jail and went through those mccarthy era years so i didn't really have any any serious knowledge of the the church and that's where you know meeting georgie vince and another guy from romania uh who warburned yeah and yeah that's right warren brown and then there was a pastor later from him but now i didn't know a lot about the russian church and i don't know that too many people did because under communism the russian church was kind of hidden we knew one event that happened one the first that time i i think i i heard anything about the russian church overtly was when billy graham came to moscow and he went to the the baptist church in moscow and he preached there and the report was you know billy graham came back and said well there's not persecution in russia you remember that yeah which was ridiculous nobody believed that but that was the idea right the russians were going to have this showcase church to make it look to the world like they were religious freedom but i didn't believe it then but i i didn't have any real personal knowledge that i didn't develop personal knowledge of uh russia until connections with dr robert the slavic gospel association and until i met yakov du konchenko and then you know he was the leader and he began to inform me as we as we developed the friendship so when uh when the ir iron curtain fell and you had opportunity to visit russia and former soviet countries many times so what was your impression about the state of the church how was it how it differs different from what what you thought about it before honestly alexi i i'd never seen a church like it it wasn't like an american church because there was um there was a simple integrity there wasn't a lot of uh social social complexity to the russian life it was simple life right you work and family and life is hard but there was in the church an integrity and a spiritual honesty again people were christians even though it cost them greatly cost them jobs it cost them education they were persecuted all of that so i i saw what in my mind was a more pure church people were real christians uh there was openness i remember when the first time i was in a service and the end of the service the preacher said if you want to repent i had never heard that in my life in an american church calling people to repent people would say come to christ come to christ but repent and then people would come to the front and they would repent to the whole congregation and so i i was very moved at the integrity of the church and the spiritual quality of the church but i also recognized because i was told this that they had a hunger to know the word of god they had a hunger to know the truth and at first was with the conscience and gregory commandant who sat me down and said look we're going to get an influx of error now that the the wall is down press striker glasnost we're going to have people come in with false doctrine they were afraid dukanchiko said would you come and help us build a wall of protection because we are afraid so i felt my role what the lord wanted me to do was to help jacob build the wall of protection by bringing sound doctrine and that was the reason i was there i i would all i used to say all the time when i would come back to my church if i could speak russian you wouldn't see me again i wouldn't come back because the work is too great the need is too great and teaching sound doctrine to protect the church is so important that if the lord would would have allowed me to learn russian i'd be there so my goal was only to serve a spiritually pure church with a better understanding of doctrine so they would be able to protect themselves from the error that comes in when you get freedom okay let me switch gear another area of my interest is christian influence in america how much you think the church and the preaching and the bible how much was the role in making america what america is now how was it in the past where is it now and what do you think will be in the future in this matter um the bible and biblical morality was essential to the beginning of america because the founding fathers of america came here seeking religious freedom okay and christian religious freedom they weren't all christians some of them were deists but they came seeking religious freedom they they they wanted freedom they wanted free enterprise they wanted democracy they wanted a republic but to give people freedom you have to have some control what's the control you can create a police state like the soviet union but then you just get more of what you've already had so how do they control people and the answer was this god not necessarily a christian definition of god but a biblical biblical god they had it purposefully sure they understood that this is they understood that unless there is a transcendent judge you can't make people keep the law so that's why i say whether they were actual christians some of them were or deists they knew you have to have some you have to have some set transcendent authority that people feel they have to answer to and that's why one nation under god one nation under god and that in god we trust on the coins and everywhere there was god and it wasn't god defined necessarily by other than judeo judeo-christian god of the bible and moral law and they would they agreed that that god had planted in the human heart what they called natural law that everybody knows you don't kill you don't steal you don't commit adultery i mean those are that's built into being a human being so they knew that without god they could never get free people to behave morally so they had to have god that held for a while doesn't hold anymore because america has abandoned god america has no existential fear americans don't have a fear of judgment and so they are more destructive than they've ever been and now instead of people trying to build a nation uh with moral character and hard work they're trying to destroy a nation and then they've turned morality on its head now uh all morality is upside down um immorality of every kind is acceptable it's normal homosexuality lesbian behavior transgender and if you criticize it you're the immoral person so because the fear of god is gone there's nothing to constrain people at all you can't constrain them by law you can't constrain them by force and and i'll give you a simple picture of it god built into human life restraint we're all fallen sinners colliding so how do we not kill each other how do we survive so god's first restraint is the human law of god natural law written in his heart and the conscience the conscience is accusing or excusing behavior so you have that so what's happened in america over the last 50 years 75 years that moral law has been obliterated and in its place is the absolute opposite of that now you're a shameful unacceptable person if you're against homosexuality so the the first restraint is gone and you sh and you shouldn't feel guilty you shouldn't feel guilty because why should you feel guilty you're a wonderful person you should be who you want to be oh if you're going to feel guilty feel guilty about something you can't change like being white which is a ridiculous kind of guilt so now the personal restraint is gone the next restraint is the family and the parents and the weapon there is the rod spare the rod spoil the child so god god writes his law in the heart and gives the conscience as a weapon god passes to the family the responsibility to send righteousness from generation to generation and you teach your children to obey and use the rod so what's the next thing you have breaking down in america the family it just completely disintegrated the family there was overt attacks for the last half a century against disciplining children so now you have kids running wild in the street and police have to hitting hit them because their father never did so that's gone so all right what's the next one the police the government romans 13 first peter god puts government into place to restrain those who do evil and protect those who do good and what is the weapon the sword so the first restraint the conscience and the law in the heart that's gone the second restraint the family that's gone and now they're screaming defund the police they've got to get them out of the way so we've because there is no fear of god there is no existential threat there is no final judge get out of my way i want to live the way i want to live the last restraint in this society is the righteous you know the righteous like the the restrainer of the holy spirit in his people restrains evil in the church and as the church begins to become corrupted by the world it loses its salt and light influence so when i look at our society today this is where we are when there is no god there is no sense of conscience and moral law in the heart there is no family influence and the police are now seen as the evil in los angeles we had riots a few months ago and we at the church at grace church allowed our parking lot to be the place where the police processed the people they arrested so they brought them and they processed them when it was all over they the only people indicted were policemen so when you when it's bad to be a policeman how do you get people to be policemen so when that breaks down then what are we going to have we're going to have what they had in seattle or this kind of anarchy and the church would be the last stand and so many churches are unwilling to be that bold and that courageous what do you think about the possibility of a real persecution of believers in america well i think it already exists i i think it already exists and it's it's going to become legal i mean there is hostility toward the church we know that we hear it even from the people in the democratic party for example the man running for president joe biden stated i do not believe in natural law no one believes in natural law anymore in other words there is no right or wrong built into being human [Music] he he is saying that there is no immutable innate sense of right and wrong in a human being that's universal that's terrifying that is terrifying what have we got a bunch of dogs a bunch of wild animals without any moral compass that's not what god created his laws in their heart but when you deny that and you state that as some kind of a positive fact you have let loose hell in the world so um this is where we are this is this new generation i and then you have a church for the last 25 or 30 years that's been trying to look like the world sound like the world entertain the world accommodate the world and they can't speak now at the world they can't change the message and all of a sudden indict the world so the weakening of the church is sort of the last straw aren't they doing that in an attempt to reach people for christ this is why they try to look at the world sure but look i can give the message i can't save the people right no method no weapon we can't do this with fleshly weapons second corinthians 10 3 again all you do when you try to look like the world entertain the world make the world like you is you just define what worldliness is you know i keep reminding people even in spiritual leadership do you understand this jesus came into the world to seek and save that which was lost and they killed him they killed him the whole nation killed him all the leaders killed him now are you going to say he had a bad method the message is offensive right it's the preaching of the cross is foolishness and it's an offensive message jesus said you hate me because i i tell you you're sinful so you can't expect the sinful world to like the message that they're sinful and they're under divine judgment they're headed to eternal hell there's no way to make that attractive except to a broken sinner what's the proper attitude between of the church toward the society should the church aim in to some kind of changes in society and in what ways how we bring that changing effect into the country well first of all understand this um the world is what it is and the simple definition of the world is the whole world lies in the lap of the evil one right that's the apostle john the whole world lies in the lap of the evil one that's where it is that's where it lives and all that is in the world is the lust of the eyes the lust of the flesh and the pride of life and the world is passing away okay so that's what you're dealing with you're dealing with a world system not just no i'm not talking about the planet i'm talking about the world system it's all satan's he's the god of this world it's all driven by the lust of the flesh the lust of the eyes the pride of life and it's all passing away and you can't fix it you can't fix it so i can't fix the world the kingdom of god advances in the world against the world one soul at a time right yeah so we're not changing the society we're changing souls well you will eventually change this you either believe you can change the evil people and make them do good things or you have to see evil people transformed into righteous people who change their society it's pretty simple and from a biblical standpoint society only changes when people become right with god and become filled with the spirit and do righteous things speaking about that should church be involved in social work or politics it depends on what you mean by that so sure feeding the poor helping widows and orphans that's pure religion but when you talk about politics we all have opinions about that i think i think we have to be involved in what politics is today because you know when when we were a lot younger when i was a lot younger in america the democratic party was represented labor the working people republican party represented ownership the people who had the money and so there was always a tension of getting the people who owned everything and the people who worked together and find a compromise so everybody could get along and in that sense there was there was a working relationship now those social differences don't exist now what you have is people who want to kill babies who want to promote same-sex marriage who want to have all freedoms for transgender people that's how they define their party who as biden said believe in no natural law written in the heart and when you go to the other side you're not seeing necessarily christianity or except for the fact that the only possible place for a christian would be as a republican because you don't want to murder babies you don't believe in same-sex marriage you don't believe in transgenderism so the distinctions that i'm talking about now are moral they're not societal and no longer or economic they're moral so i have to be engaged with upholding whatever righteousness still exists i have to fall on the side of righteousness so does it mean that it's the position of every christian or should the church have some kind of active involvement well yeah i think the church has to instruct its people in your church nobody would have to tell your people what to do because they've been hearing the word of god they know what righteousness is and they're going to stand for it in our church i don't have to say go vote this way they know what is righteous and what is not they also know that righteousness exalts a people and sin is a reproach to a people so if you want to bring down the nation just promote sin so i think knowledgeable christians know they have to vote on the side of righteousness they have to work on the side of rights one of the things that maybe helps answer that question grace community church has a very very strong relationship with the los angeles police because they are ministers of god romans 13 says they are ministers of god who the powers that be ordained of god because they punish evil doers they protect those who do good and they carry a sword so they're ministers of god so they're built they're god's design built into human society to allow it to be civilized so we have always been the friend of of the police because we're on the side of what is good and what is right um we do police training at our church we we do lunches for the police we show them respect we show them honor we've done it for years and years so much so this is interesting that recently when the city and the county and the state attacked our church and tried to shut our church down the los angeles police department sent out a notice to the city of los angeles and it said this if you go against the grace community church the los angeles police department will not be involved which is amazing these men would not be the instrument of the politicians to attack our church because of the partnership and you have to understand at the same time they're going to ask the police to take action against us they're defunding the police by 150 million dollars they're making their work more difficult and they're going to attack us it's it's amazing to see there's still a sense that these men and they said to us i asked the chief he said we only react to violation of the law we don't follow the the whims of politicians so um that that's our role in the world is to support what is righteous and what is biblical and the police fits into god's pattern for the preservation of society so that the redemptive work can go on [Music] okay in conclusion i have several uh short questions short answers maybe it depends what do you pray about the most the most is lord please help me when i'm preaching you know every time i want to preach i my heart goes out that the lord would give me direction and find and fulfill his will and uh i i pray for i i pray for my children i pray for my grandchildren um i pray for the people in my family the people in my congregation people in my church the the men i work with the leaders i'm involved with um yeah i think it's my prayers are most intense at the closest point so it kind of starts with me lord keep me faithful use me and then it goes to my to patricia i pray for every day my wife and then my kids and my grandkids and it extends from there and and i'm like anybody too i i'm i'm praying that the lord would like habakkuk says when he's tobacco says lord how long you know how back the prophet how long are you going to allow this to go on and god says to him i'm going to send the chaldeans and destroy israel and he just is surprised then and then he says oh i see you've ordained them for judgment it's now judgment time and i see that in america but he says this in the second chapter he says in wrath remember mercy and i think that's the prayer you know we understand that this is wrath romans 1 wrath is unfolding and my prayers in in wrath remember mercy what is the biggest danger for churches in america today the biggest danger for the churches in america today can be summed up in one thing and that is a lack of discernment and the best illustration of that is um the human illustration of uh an immune system okay there are i mean we we know through all this covid stuff that our bodies are amazingly created by god to fight off all kinds of diseases there are i think i heard 250 different um mutations of the coronavirus so so your body has got to fight all of this stuff so you have a incredibly intricate immune system and if you have a compromised immune system you can die of a thousand diseases so when i look at the church i see the fact that the church has a compromised immune system and it can die of a thousand heresies and the compromising of its immune system is the fact that its doctrine is too weak to be self-protective you know what i mean it can't defend itself the issue is discernment it can't discern i'm always amazed when i say something or write something that points out an error that seems so obvious to me and everybody's shocked or silent about it i i just think a deficient immune system means you can't protect yourself against a thousand heresies are you sometimes getting tired of that kind of fight and misunderstanding that other people kind of not supporting you that you thought they should how you overcome that discouragement well i i don't think i get tired of the fight i think i'm sort of made for this i i wish it would get over but it oh it just seems to change you know you're fighting at one level on one issue i mean the issues are generally the same but they take different forms i think i think i'm sort of made for the fight because of all these years of studying the word of god and i want to do it in love but but this is in one sense i mean to be my age at 81 first of all to be 81 and know you're 81 or to be 81 and know you're anything and then to be able to be active and be preaching and seeing the lord you know bless so no this is a great privilege for me do do i yeah i have a heart for the church i love the church not just my church but the church of the lord jesus christ and it grieves me deeply that it isn't everything it should be it grieves me when its leaders are sinful when its people are irresponsible when they lack discernment when they don't when i don't see the courage of standing up to fight for the things that are true but i don't i don't get tired i i get you know maybe this goes back to the days in which i played football i my response to difficulty is the opposite of getting weary it's okay give me the ball we gotta we gotta do something here and the lord has put around me some men who can help me move forward so my response is action rather than a sort of depression going backwards because i think the only answer to this is we've got to ramp up the proclamation of the truth um yeah i think we've all been disappointed by people you know people you invest in it's not it the disappointments don't come from people who are far distant from me yeah even though they're well known they come from the people that are really close to me and you would know this that you invest so much in and they're unfaithful to the lord or they're disloyal to his church so we all have to live with that i mean jesus had judas and and he had peter and there wasn't a whole lot of difference between the way the two acted even though the outcomes were completely different so i think the hardest thing to bear in ministry is not people outside that are unfaithful to you but people inside how do you protect your heart from getting bitter toward those people i i just think i'm surrounded by so many people that love the lord and are responding to his word that um maybe the lord has protected me in some ways because there always seems to be more encouraging people than discouraging people so there are always people coming around to encourage and say thank you while there are the disappointing people they seem to be in the minority and i think that's not because of me but because of the word of god doing its work that's one of the great things alexi about teaching the bible is people's the bible has the power to capture their entire soul and then what happens is i get the blessing even though i'm not the cause the word does the transforming but but the the love and gratitude spills onto me so if if you didn't expose it the word of god for any other reason then you get the overflow of the work of the word in the hearts of the people coming back to you i mean it is now what paul said from isaiah how blessed are the feet of those who preach the good news so you know you get the love of the people for the truth you bring to them there always seem to be many more of those than there are the people who are you know enemies what's the greatest achievement of your life i i don't know that anything is an achievement or even a great achievement uh i don't look at my life as any any achievement it's it's a it's every day it's every sunday preach the word preach the word preach the word um i i think the most satisfying thing was the lord let me stay in one church they didn't throw me out so i could finish the new testament the verse by verse to the whole new testament but there's nothing great about that you could hear a sermons and you could say that's mediocre sermon that's not a very good sermon and then you say well this is a better one this is a good one i mean it's just it's just a life of days and a life of sermons and they are what they are in the moment in the time and however god uses them there's nothing about human achievement that comes in my mind at all i i seem rather to feel like rather than me accomplishing anything in particular the lord just keeps piling on responsibilities that you know i wish there was i could say well that's what it should be but that never happens i wish all these responsibilities were everything they should be but you never feel like they are so it seems like the lord just keeps adding more and more responsibility but at the same time he brings people around and if you knew the people that's around me and you do and you're one you would know that i'm not the reason they're just so many many people i'm i may be the public voice but um i don't think in ministry you ever really achieve anything um there's not some great glorious moment in your life it's do you have something that you really believe that you need to do before you die no because i never have thought there was anything i needed to do i i i'm i don't i don't plan my life i don't know what i just do what i do and i don't know plans for retirement no well what i've said is i don't want to retire when i can still serve so i told the elders i said when i don't make any sense get me out but understand when i don't make any sense i might not know why i should be removed so you might have a fight on your hands but no as long as i can do what i'm doing and that then they want me to do it um i i can't i can't live life unless i mean you how do you step down from this right i mean what you what do you just say okay i'm done teaching the word of god i'm done serving the lord as long as i have life and breath you know when it's over it's over take me to heaven there's a story about a guy named george slavin who was a pastor preached for 45 years in a church and announced on sunday that he was going to retire and he bought a motor home and his wife and him were going to drive around america um very famous church in michigan and he announced that on sunday on monday he died and went to heaven the rv was sitting in the driveway so that's a perfect scenario for me well except i'm not going to buy the rv preach the last sermon and go to heaven okay last question our channel is lessened by many hundreds of thousands or millions russian-speaking people around the world what what would you say to them ah what would i say just one thing keep listening to my dear brother alexis besides that i'd say it again you've been listening to my brother alexi and love the word of god and um in in everything you do in your life the the greatest riches you'll ever know are coming to you from the word so um ask god to develop your appetite for for his truth and and then i would say secondly you will you will retain what you give away right that learning for the sake of learning is not the issue learning for the sake of teaching so everything you're learning when you pass it on it becomes your own so listen to great preaching great bible teaching and pass that on because that's how you solidify it in your own mind thank you very much thank you for your faithfulness thank you for your example thank you for many many sermons i know that those sermons will continue to bring fruit in many people for years to come and the same is true of you my brother and i'm so glad that the lord raised you up because this was my burden how do we get a preacher to do exposition in the russian language that the whole world of russians will listen to and god raised you up praise god you

Channel: Word of Grace Bible Church

Views: 65,478

Rating: 4.8905358 out of 5

Keywords: Word of Grace Bible Church, Word of Grace International Ministries, Word of Grace, Battle Ground WA, WGBC, WGIM

Id: nWwickbcgN4

Length: 81min 55sec (4915 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020