Renewed Conference 2021 | Nothing Better than the Real Thing

this has been a little bit of a long time coming i'm amy mcreynolds i'm the director of women's ministry here at athy creek and we first started talking to elisa about this conference and coming here almost two years ago and she was supposed to come last summer and some of you have been really looking forward to this and you've been so patient yes so we're just really excited to finally see this happen elisa was so gracious with her schedule to allow us to reschedule and all of the things that happened last year for those of you guys who don't know elisa i want to give you just a little bit of bio information on her she is from the san fernando valley down in california her parents are karen and chuck gerard chuck gerard was actually like a pioneer in the christian in music industry way back in the day and this some of y'all know this if you guys a fan girl at all annalisa you know this but many of some of you may not know she was one of the three in a group called zoe girl back in the 90s yeah and um so lots of us were hearing zoey girl back then and so the the group was there for about seven years did awesome things and and now she is wife mama she is an apologist she has a podcast she authors a blog apologetics blog that is so great she is author the best selling book another gospel that's out there and it is just excellent and she has another one coming out next fall of 2021 so before i have her come up i just want to pray over her one more time and then we'll welcome her dear jesus i just asked that um as we have elisa come up lord i pray that your word would be clear i pray that we would have no distractions that we would just really be able to hear what your spirit would be saying to us tonight lord so we pray blessing over alisa we pray that you would just fill her up with your spirit in jesus name amen you guys welcome elisa childers thank you oh thank you so much man jesus bride is alive and well in portland right man i've gotten to travel so many different places since covid and there's something that god is doing all over the country in particularly in the darkest places of the country i've seen churches in unity like this in places like northern california and certain places in dallas and just as i've traveled around it's really it's neat to get to kind of travel around and see what god is doing and bringing his church together i visited one church in texas that a lady was doing a conference for young girls that are in high school and so her ministry is basically to disciple them as they walk through their public school experiences and she told me something that i really sense it's like what god is doing in the nation right now and she said when i started this discipleship program i thought that i was starting a movement but then i realized we're not starting a movement we're finding the remnant and i thought that was really profound right because i think that's what jesus is up to right now he's uniting the remnant the faithful the true that really love him and and want to know him and his ways and so it's such a joy to be with all of you tonight and over the next uh you know i guess tomorrow and few hours i get to have with you i wanted to start by just sharing a little bit about my story what actually brought me to this place because as amy mentioned i'm really more of a musician i spent most of the 2000 to about 2007 in zoe girl and so you know if you would ask me back then would would i be speaking on apologetics i probably wouldn't even have known what that was i mean i kind of heard of it but i didn't really know what it was but i want to go way back with my story here so this young group of gentlemen is my dad's band so this cute little hippie right here is my dad that's my cute little hippie dad and he came to jesus in the late 60s and he was just searching for god through eastern meditation mysticism lsd uh buddhism you name it he was searching for god and a lot of people were searching for god back then and he ended up finding jesus in a little country church in southern california called calvary chapel he kind of stumbled in there and heard the gospel for the first time and he said it was just he'd never heard the real gospel and it struck him how all of the other ways he was trying to find god were really works based you know in the eastern mysticism it was like only the gurus really get the enlightenment and in in lsd trips you have to do all the things and you know might go well might not go so well and he heard the gospel and he was just convicted of his sin and he repented and trusted in christ that night and so uh some other guys in his band they all ended up getting saved at calvary chapel they started singing jesus songs and they traveled all over the country and even all over the world as a band called love song just singing their jesus songs and so i grew up kind of in a unique way traveling around the world on tour buses and planes this is me on an airplane i don't know who the person is holding me because this is my mom so i don't know who that is but but uh i i just i grew up traveling this is uh oops sorry this is us somewhere in i think we're in sweden here now i just i just want to show this to you here's my cute hippie dad there's my sister there's me i mean how's that for plucky optimism like my life's gonna be awesome this is gonna be great i had a pretty good childhood i i had parents who really gave me the real gospel my mom and dad were wonderful christian examples to me i in fact i i've loved jesus as far back as i can remember i don't even remember a time when i wasn't aware of the presence of jesus i don't remember a time before i was just convinced in my bones that the bible was the word of god now for most of my life if you would have asked me why do you think the bible is the word of god i wouldn't have been able to answer you i would have just said something like well it just is or because the bible says so and so i didn't really have a good intellectual reason to tell you why i believe that but i did and i knew that i could live my life by this book i trusted in jesus at a very very early age now my parents had sort of this philosophy on life where they wanted to be really actively involved in ministering to people who didn't have all the things we had and they wanted us to be exposed to that too and so i grew up with my mom on staff at the fred jordan mission in los angeles and we'd go down to skid row on weekends and as a 10 year old i'd be working the soup lines on skid row just regularly watching my mom hug prostitutes and drug addicts and drug dealers at 10 years old i was perfectly comfortable around homeless people now i thought like all christians were like that i didn't realize that that was kind of like not the norm for christians but my dad would sing in the in the mission and i would watch these homeless guys praise jesus before their meal and so i i didn't have a reason to doubt what i believed was true because it was a basically a good experience for me you know i'm sure we've all had experiences especially if you've grown up in church where you have a few stinker pastors here and there but i mean it was generally pretty good the christians that i knew were people who loved jesus not just on sundays they read their bibles every day they studied his word they loved people they were very repentant very humble very quick to repent and seek forgiveness when they had done wrong so i i don't think i had a reason to want to doubt that it was true and i think because of that i never really experienced any significant doubt about what i believed until i was much older and so i ended up following in my dad's footsteps of course being a part of zoe girl and we kind of got to do what my dad and his band got to do we traveled all over the world we traveled uh mostly in the states but we definitely got to go to a few places overseas and then i'm kind of a walking cliche because this is our drummer and i married our drummer so you know walking cliche here and then together we made this and this is my daughter dylan she's actually here oh everybody looked that way and stare at her make her feel she's she's fine she's my little joy i wanted to be a mom more than anything in the world and i was so excited when she was born when she was born it was her and i against the world and she was just always so fun i loved being her mom and everything was going really great for her until this little guy came along her world was perfect i mean everything like play time was this time to that time we had workbook time and we had all the sticker time all that stuff then then he was born and dropped a bomb into all of that but still she accepted him she loved him and they're still precious and so what a lot of people wouldn't know from this picture is that around this time when my son aiden was born i was going through a really significant faith crisis i was going through a dark night of the soul that i never ever thought that i would go through and it was the result of my husband and i attending a local church in tennessee we had you know zoe girl had come off the road we all of the zoe girls had gotten married and we're starting to have kids and so my husband and i began attending this church just right in the heart of middle tennessee this was an evangelical marketed as a non-denominational church and we we loved it we just loved the sense of community we found among the people you know being on the road in a christian pop band people tend to put you on a pedestal and either they expect you to have all the answers or they think you're perfect and you're not and it can feel like a lot of pressure but in this church i didn't feel that way there were lots of other musicians there and the the community was just beautiful and the pastor it was very intriguing because he had this intellectual approach to to his sermons that my husband and i hadn't been exposed to before and we found it just really interesting the insights that he would bring to the scriptures week after weekend oh he used so much scripture too it's just i mean we were just like how could we ever find a better church than this and so we attended this church for about eight months and at that point the pastor invited me to be a part of what he described as a study and discussion group now this was a very small group it was very exclusive we were instructed that the things we would talk about in the group kind of stays in the group you know like what happens in vegas stays in vegas it was like what happens here stays here and it was in this class that the pastor revealed to this small group of chosen few that he was actually an agnostic now i kind of knew what that was it's somebody who maybe doesn't really know what they believe about god and that was very confusing to me but i just felt like oh come on don't be so judgmental maybe he's just being honest and you know if we're all honest maybe we're not as sure as we think we are it was just very confusing i had this inner monologue going on the whole time uh in fact in my book another gospel which i believe they've got a lot of copies available it's my journey that through this whole thing and the pa the pastor is kind of the lead character but the second lead character is my inner monologue so like all the conversations i was having with myself during this class but i just i didn't want to judge it and so i thought okay well i'll just i'll i'll just stick around and see what's going on here and so the class was was set up in a way where we would be studying different materials and then we would come together once a week and we would discuss the materials that we were reading and so we were reading a lot of those early emergent christian leaders like brian mclaren people like that and i was very uncomfortable with a lot of the stuff we were reading we would discuss topics like biblical reliability now when you're in a church and you're taking a class where you're going to be discussing biblical reliability your assumption is that they're going to give you reasons why you can trust your bible right but in this class it was really all from a skeptical the skeptical side of things and so if we were studying new testament reliability for example all of the data that was meant to show that you know you can't really trust your new testament because we don't even know in fact we're pretty sure that what you have sitting in your lap right now isn't even actually what they wrote and even if we got close there are so many mistakes between all the manuscripts we i mean we couldn't even possibly know what they originally wrote and even if we did you know they they probably embellished a lot of stuff a lot of stuff developed later you know the people we thought wrote all those books didn't actually really write them and these were the types of facts and data that were brought into the conversation actually shouldn't say facts because they're actually not facts but that's the type of material that was presented and so while i was in the class i remember just being so mind blown because this pastor had really spent eight months winning my trust i felt loyal to him i i believed that he and i were on the same page i was so naive in fact that i thought maybe he's just like trying to see if we can spot deception like is that what he's doing i i don't know and so i would go home and i would google and try to find answers to the things that he was saying but again i had never really investigated the intellectual side of my faith and so i couldn't articulate why he was wrong even though i knew that he was wrong and so i would try to debate him i did the best i could and then the the time came for us to leave the church my husband actually made that decision and i'm thankful we the spouses were invited to come to the class one week and of course he was used to me coming home every week just going you won't believe what he said this time uh but i think when my husband heard it for himself we we got in the car and i just remember he looked at me and he said we're done you're done we're not raising our daughter here and so i'm really thankful for my husband in that way because i think that it really saved my faith in a lot of ways god really used that to to save my faith so it was after we left the church that my own sort of deconstruction began now let me ask you how many of you have heard the term deconstruction yeah it's okay yeah quite a few so interesting regionally where i go where sometimes people haven't very few have heard of it and then you come here and you you all know what i'm talking about uh you're live you're living among it right oh yeah that's just tuesday for us so um if you're not you know i don't mean to make you feel silly if you don't know what that is i'm i'm glad you shouldn't have to know what it is but deconstruction is basically a process that a lot of christians are going through where they grow up in the church and it's really more than just doubt because i think doubt is really based on truth it's okay doubt is good actually i think doubt is is okay it's good it's good for you to say well wait why do i believe this or do i actually believe this because the bible says to test every spirit so we should be testing our beliefs against reality we should be testing them against scripture and when you have a doubt i think it's good not to push that down but investigate find some find some answers to answer that doubt but deconstruction is a little bit different in that it sort of piggybacks on the whole post-modernism that we have in our culture today and post-modernism can really be summed up with the phrase what's true for you is true for you and what's true for me is true for me right that's kind of encapsulates the postmodern mood that permeates our culture and so deconstruction is really more of a process built upon the idea that you know absolute truth can't really be known if it exists at all and so it's kind of like our job to deconstruct whatever construct of truth we were given by our parents or our churches so that we can live our truth right so that we can construct our own truth and live our own truth and so a lot of times in deconstruction stories you hear people discarding the christian beliefs they grew up with and then replacing those beliefs with a more self-styled type of spirituality or even people deconstruct all the way into atheism so so i didn't understand that that's what was happening to me at the time i didn't know that word i just knew i was losing my faith because here's the thing i had lived my entire life knowing that the bible was the word of god when i you know i mentioned that my parents had us out on skid row and stuff my dad also did a lot of street evangelism and so we would go down on halloween to hollywood boulevard and witness to people so when you're a kid maybe when i was about 13 or 14 when you're a 14 year old on hollywood boulevard on halloween you're going to be exposed to some world views right i mean you're not really in your christian bubble anymore so i mean at 14 years old i had conversations with satanists with wiccan witches i had conversations with atheists and agnostics and buddhists and you name it that was nothing new but it was easy to put aside the beliefs of an atheist because i just oh they just don't know they don't know that the bible is god's word the holy spirit will show them one day and then you know it'll all be they'll become a christian and that's how they'll know so if an atheist would have told me hey you know you can't trust your bible it was easy to just blow that off but when it was a pastor who'd won my respect and trust i couldn't toss it aside so easily and so this this book that i had based my life on he had convinced me was corrupted and this knocked the legs out of all of my beliefs and i didn't know what to do with that i didn't know how to answer what he was saying i i was so naive i thought he came up with all the questions i didn't realize that we have this 2000 year history of just rich intellectual tradition in the christian church and scholars who specialize in these sorts of things and so it threw me into a dark night of the soul that i never expected i never thought i would be that person that would even doubt my faith let alone be sitting in a dark room rocking my baby to sleep wondering if god even exists at all and really feeling like he probably doesn't my proof the only proof i had as a as a young person was my feelings if i'm really honest every camp meeting every bible study all of the worship services where i would just feel you know you feel it like i was feeling it tonight man what a great worship team because i was feeling it and and i love that because now i know that my feelings are based out of truth and they stand upon a foundation and i'm like give me all the feels about that you know i love it and i love glorifying god in song i mean that's who i is that's what i do i'm a singer i'm a musician but i always thought that that was proof that god existed and then when this pastor was really successful in convincing me that hey you know you can go to a rock concert and kind of feel that same feeling you can have that transcendent experience at a at a dance club you can you can have it looking at a certain piece of art and when i was really honest it was like yeah i mean maybe this is just synapses in my brain like maybe because i had such a good experience with christianity as a kid maybe every time that's affirmed in some kind of a group setting with music maybe my emotions get a little manipulated maybe just synapses in my brain start firing because they're responding to that sociological sort of background that made me feel good and something that made me comfortable and i thought was beautiful and he had convinced me that that was the case and so i found myself rocking my little girl to sleep every night in the rocking chair singing into the darkness just it felt like i was singing into a not just like darkness in the room but this spiritual black abyss void and i just remember the feeling in my stomach of like i don't know if god if god is real i mean this was beyond does christianity is christianity true was jesus resurrected or whatever this was just like is there anything else and i remember because i found the gospel so beautiful and i knew that i was a sinner and i knew that if the gospel wasn't true i was doomed and it was a horrible feeling but i would just rock her and sing hymns into the darkness and one of the hymns that i would sing over and over was before the of god above i have a strong and perfect plea a great high priest whose name is love whoever lives and pleads for me my name is graven on his hands my name is written on his heart i know that while in heaven he stands no tongue can bid me then steep heart and i clung to those words by my fingernails because i knew that if that's not true then i don't have much to live for because that has to be true and i remember crying out to god in the darkness because it felt like i'd been plunged into this stormy ocean of doubt with these waves of doubt just crashing over my head waves of the bible isn't true waves of jesus wasn't who he said he was waves of you got it all wrong were just crashing over my head and i was dog paddling for dear life and i couldn't keep my head above water and i just said god if you exist you have this is your time like you have to show up right now this is the time and you can't show up with some kind of a transcendent experience i need facts and i was a little bossy but i said please god you have to send me somebody that can talk to me about these things because here's the benefit of being raised by a hippie dad is that hippies don't tend to go with the flow you know and so all my life i would drive home from church hearing my parents discuss the sermons what they agreed with what they didn't agree with what they thought lined up with scripture what they didn't think lined up with scripture and so i was taught just kind of in the air i caught that you know you don't just go with the flow question it a little bit and so i was questioning it and i said god i know that that guy is like maybe the smartest person i've ever met and he has all of this data and he's analyzed it and come to certain conclusions but i know that somewhere in the world there is somebody who has all of that same facts and that same data but they've come to a different conclusion and i need to find that person and figure out what it is that i believe is christianity true first of all i had to find out if god existed even before we get to the christianity stuff and then if god exists how did he reveal himself to the world and if it's christianity i need to know that jesus really was resurrected and the bible's reliable those were my questions and so through a pro divinely providential series of events i discovered apologetics now if you don't know what that word means it doesn't mean we're apologizing for our faith apologetics just means giving a reason for what you believe the christian the mandate for us comes from first peter 3 15 always be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you sometimes i think we think that means oh i'll tell my testimony no that's actually the word where paul says give a defense for what you believe that's the greek word apologia that's where we get our word apologetics it's actually a courtroom term it's not about your testimony it's not about your feelings about god it's a courtroom term where in the that first century context if you were accused of a crime you would have the chance to come give an apologia in court to defend yourself to give reasons why the charges are not true and so that word is what peter uses there to tell us as christians that we have to always be ready to do that and so i discovered apologetics i got connected with southern evangelical seminary i began auditing classes and you know what's really interesting is i thought that i would be i would have been happy for there to be one person who knew about this stuff and could answer it but the wide world of intellectual thought that was open to me was like so exciting in the book i write that it's like being a kid in a candy store who just found out candy exists like that's what it felt like to me and so i began to read and study i started with lay level books and then i i thought well i want to i don't want to read someone's analysis i want to read the scholars for myself and i began to read and read and for years i studied and then i came to the conclusion that not only god exists you know spoiler alert god exists and um christianity is true and the bible stands tall above all the rubble of accusation brought against it and we have every reason to confidently trust it and all of those facts that people twist to make you mistrust your bible um they're the analysis you can find the bias right there in the analysis and so i became confident that christianity was true and so that's how this whole journey began now we're going to be talking a little bit this weekend about progressive christianity this is uh a false version of christianity that's infiltrating the church it's really trying to take over christianity right now and i don't think it's an exaggeration to characterize it that way and by the way just as a side note a lot of people ask me people who are more against what i'm saying will say why are you picking on progressive christianity so much why are you why don't you just you know say what you believe and not try to to argue against what progressives believe and i'll tell you the reason i do that is because all of those songs we just sang would go away if progressive christianity took over christianity you wouldn't be able to sing those songs we just sang because they would hate every single one of those and i'll develop more of that as to why over the next couple of days but the reason that i'm so passionate about helping people to discern progressive christianity is because the church where i had that experience several years later went on to rebrand itself they took down the nice scene in apostles creeds from their website and they wrote their own uh belief statement they put up a new belief statement and they rebranded themselves as a progressive christian community now that was the first time i'd heard the phrase progressive christianity and although i didn't know intellectually what it meant instinctively i did because i had just been through it then i began to see blog posts written by progressive christians i began to see uh youtube channels pop up and books being written about this movement called progressive christianity and so that's why i've been so passionate to talk about it but a huge part of my journey in the study was to go back to what christianity is because think of it this way if we're going to oppose a false version of christianity we have to know what the real version is right and so that's what i went on a quest for after i was satisfied that christianity was true and that god existed it dawned on me that a lot of the people that i was in that class with were leaving what i call historic christianity not because they disagreed with it now they might say they do but they were actually leaving the version of it that they grew up in so in the class there was one guy who had a string of unanswered prayers he had a chronically sick wife and they had sent the prayers through the prayer chains i don't know if maybe this was more of a faith and prosperity type church where he believed that part of christ's atonement guaranteed healing for his wife but he believed that if they sent enough prayers through the church prayer chain and if enough people were praying god was going to heal her and after years of struggle with her chronic illness he was wheeling her into the hospital and she fell out of the wheelchair and broke her leg and that was that was the last straw for him he's like god doesn't answer prayers and that's what began his deconstruction another guy in class had grown up in a very hyper fundamentalist very very legalistic sect of christianity that had very strict rules that were extra biblical they taught that all the other people who think they're christians aren't really christians they're all going to hell we're the only real christians and that's what he was rejecting another guy had been to thailand observing the monks bowing in honor and he said i can never worship a god that won't accept that as worship because they're so sincere they're being so honest and that's what he was rejecting historic christianity for and so i thought well i had a pretty good experience but i want to make sure that you know if if at the end of this whole journey you know christianity is or isn't true or whatever sort of toward the end of that journey i want to make sure that if i rejected i'm rejecting the real thing and not just a false version that i grew up with even if it was a good experience and so i went on a journey to discover what historic christianity is because we have to know the real thing if we're going to diagnose the false thing and so uh in this class everything was questioned i went on a journey studying biblical history biblical reliability textual criticism uh science questions there were history questions and ultimately theology questions and that was sort of the last rung of the latter there and on my journey to define what christianity is right because it means something you can't just say the word and let it mean whatever you want it to mean right it means something it meant something to the first christians it means something even though the very first christians didn't use the word christian until later it meant something to follow jesus right it meant something to be his follower to be saved into his family and so on this journey i discovered that there are eight truths that christians must believe now i don't want to confuse us by thinking that you just have to check a bunch of boxes to become a christian that's not how it works these aren't just things we make intellectual assent to but if you're going to serve a god if you're going to follow jesus you have to know some things about him in order to do that and so we're going to go through some of those things tonight but first i want to go back to my kids here so we're going to tell you about dylan dylan is my firstborn and she's my creative girl she's always loved art she's always loved that's her little dancing leotard she's probably going to be the one to come home in full sleep tats at some point i might get i'm guessing but she's very nurturing she's a great little mama to her little brother she takes really good care of him she loves to scuba dive she loves disneyland or at least she did love disneyland until we actually went to disneyland and she went on a roller coaster for the first time now little brother he was okay with it he loved it but not so much so little brother aiden you know if he didn't get the hint from the first picture of him he loves to get dirty i mean really loves to get dirty now before you call child services that was an organic lipstick from whole foods it cost 14 i'm not bitter but he really enjoyed that and like i said he just really likes to get dirty and he loves to comb his curly hair out just like his hero bob ross and all his life he's always just fallen asleep in the in the weirdest places like i would put him down for nap and go back in and find him in his toy box in his bed or on his bed like that so they're very different kids they have different interests and different things they like but one thing they like together they both like jiu-jitsu they're very good and although aiden's like he's kind of waning on that now but they did for a while they really enjoyed jiu jitsu together and they love legos now how many of you love legos oh i love legos i i you know you buy them for the kids but then i'm always like okay just move over i'm gonna do it because i just love i love putting that first first peg just down on the on the block i love building really cool structures and following the instruction and getting the manual out and i love building spaceships and dragons and castles and all kinds of fun things but how many of you know when you take the time to build something like this and it falls and breaks like you have a choice to make right okay so am i gonna get the manual out and then go back as many steps as i have to to figure out like where the break happened and then start rebuilding which takes like it's almost like impossible to think about because it's so hard to do or do you just sort of break it apart and throw it in the lego bin of doom right this is a photograph of our actual lego bin of doom where all of the broken lego sets go to a weight being used for something else now thankfully my son loves to make spaceships out of random pieces of lego so i'm super happy about that but as you can see there are there's a bb-8 in there from star wars there's an old police station that's all broken up but for a lot of the the sets that didn't really mean that much to us it's like yeah you just break it up and use the pieces but one time my daughter dylan wanted to build a lego dragon from the elves sort of brand and so this isn't an actual picture of the dragon we built the one we built was a lot more complex than this but i couldn't find it online so it was something like this and so we spent three days building this lego set together we got the manual out we followed all the instructions it was this mother-daughter activity we did together and finally when it was built she wanted to display it on her dresser so she put it up on her dresser and she went off to school and when she came home from school we walked in her room and it had fallen off of the dresser and it really looked like it had been run over by a car or something and and to this day like we don't really know what happened it could have been the dog it could have been you know magical elves living in the house we're not going to speculate beyond that but we had a choice to make do we go back do we get out the manual and do we find out where we you know where we need to start and start to rebuild well because this set meant so much to us we opted to go back and start wherever we had to start and start rebuilding so we went back and what we discovered was that early on one of the inner pieces of the dragon had been put in wrong and even though we were able to build around it the inside that core sort of foundational pieces those pieces that have to be sound and strong were not correct and that's why when it fell it broke into so many pieces and was kind of a weak structure and i thought you know there's a spiritual application there it's kind of like christianity there are certain fundamental building blocks that have to be in the right place you know you can build your set and even maybe get some pieces on the outside a little wrong or even decorate it a little differently than someone else might decorate it but if those inner core fundamental pieces are not in the right place your christianity isn't going to be right it's not going to be the real thing it's not going to be strong it's not going to be able to withstand a serious bout with suffering or unanswered prayers or doubt and so what i was on a quest to discover is what are those core fundamental pieces and so of course because that we have to talk about peach cobbler i mean of course so those inner building blocks of christianity i like to go to the earliest creeds now i did not know this this is all you know just over the last six or seven years all of this stuff is new to me but did you know that your new testament that's sitting in your lap right now contains dozens of early creeds that early christians circulated orally verbally be long before those new testament books were written so some of the material in the new testament books predate the actual book itself by 20 years in some cases and the biblical writer records those creeds for us in the bible and so how that works is kind of like peach cobbler so i'll let you know i'll let you in on the peach cobbler secret now so when i was about 14 i got to spend the night at my grandma's house we call her nana and when you have three sisters and you get to go spend the night with grandma all by yourself it's kind of like a really cool exciting thing so when i got there my grandma said what do you want to do and i said i want to make your peach cobbler because i think it's the best in the world and i expected her to turn to the drawer she had that had posh crocheted potholders and recipe cards and you know this was before iphones for all you young people you still have to write stuff on paper with a pen and she didn't do that she just goes oh it's easy it's my cup of cuppa cuppa recipe and she said it's super easy all you do is you take a cup of flour a cup of sugar and a cup of canned peaches with the juice and then of course she would pat out a whole stick of butter and then bake it up at the end on top and so i thought wow that's so simple that's why she didn't have it written down notice that the recipe cup a cup of cuppa cup of flour cup of sugar cup of peaches with the juice you can all you're all going to remember this recipe tonight i don't even have to write it down for you that's because it's easy to memorize because it's short and it's concise and that's how creeds worked so creeds were a way for the earliest christians to be able to kind of stay on the same page about what they believed it was the way they would say okay this at the very least this is what we believe this is what defines our movement this is what defines what it means to be a jesus follower and you have to be on board with this this material and so arguably one of well i i actually when all the research i've done i truly believe this is the earliest creed in all of christianity we're going to talk about a creed that's found in first corinthians 15. now paul records this creed for us somewhere in the 50s so first corinthians written probably around 55 a.d but the creed that he records in it scholars think goes back to within three to seven years after jesus death now i'm not just quoting the super christian scholars there are atheist bible scholars there are far left fringe fringe fringe bible scholars and it's actually the hyper liberal ones who were the ones that first dated this even to within a few months of jesus death so i'm not just kind of picking out some scholar that i like virtually all scholars agree upon this and in my book i even quote an atheist a very liberal christian and a conservative christian on this and they all agree this creed probably is about anywhere from three to seven at the very most years after jesus death this is like as early as it gets this is long before the new testament was written now notice what paul says here he says for i delivered to you as of first importance what i also received now i want you to learn this language here when the new testament records older creeds there are all sorts of ways scholars can recognize those creeds there's there's the grammar there's linguistic cues there's things like that but one of the ways that's the easiest way to spot a creed is the language i delivered to you what i received that's kind of ancient jewish slang for hey pay attention i'm about to tell you a creed that was given to me from another teacher another person this is something that's going to keep us on the same page now notice how paul characterizes this creed as of first importance okay this right here tells us that not all christian beliefs are on the same level some are more important than others right so so these would be those core inner building blocks of the earliest christians are you so excited to know what it says now maybe it's just me i get so excited about this stuff but we're going to go through this creed because it's very very robust for just a few months to a few years after jesus death so here's what paul said for i delivered to you as of first importance what i also received that christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that he was buried that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to cephas then to the twelve and then paul goes on to list 500 eyewitnesses and then includes himself as an eyewitness to the resurrected jesus at the end so let's take a look at this the first belief that this creed says is that christ died for our sins even this refutes progressive christianity because in progressive christianity the idea that god the father would require the blood sacrifice of his only son implicates the moral character of god and so in progressive christianity this is often referred to as cosmic child abuse the idea that jesus would somehow take your place and take your punishment or the payment for your sin upon himself this is referred to as divine abuse this makes god someone who's advocating child sacrifice now by the way just as a side note that's easily answered when you really understand the trinity right you have a perfectly holy and just god because he's perfectly just knowing sin has to be paid for but you know what instead of just grabbing some random innocent person and punishing them in some kind of act of cosmic abuse i'll do it myself and then jesus the incarnation god steps into creation lives a perfect sinless life takes our sins upon himself and dies in our place so that for all who put their trust in him they can be with him forever i mean that's good news not cosmic child abuse but the first christians believed that jesus died there was a divine purpose for jesus death he wasn't just crucified for speaking truth to power he wasn't just crucified because he was threatening the state he wasn't just crucified at the hands of an angry mob who just wanted their blood uh just they wanted their pound of flesh all of those are true too but there was a divine purpose for jesus death and this gives us the seed bed for a doctrine that would develop later called substitutionary atonement and even further developed in the in the phrase penal substitutionary atonement now this is the ladies conference you can't say penal substitution to children and to like young people because they'll just give and they won't listen to anything else that you say my husband walked in and was like what are you studying i'm like penal substitution he's like tell me more so that i hope that was okay you can edit it out if it wasn't then i told him i was studying penal satisfaction after that and it was like we could it was like feel free to edit if you need to do that um that christ died for our sins there was a substitutionary act that happened he was our substitute he died for our sins now notice how they back up that belief in accordance with the scriptures so the next time somebody tells you hey the earliest christians didn't even have a bible as if to say like they were just winging it and believing whatever they wanted you could say oh no they had scripture they had the old testament scriptures true the new testament wasn't written for 20 years or so after jesus death but they had the old testament scriptures in fact their view of jesus death on the cross was in accordance with those old testament scriptures well what does the old testament have to say about something like that this is laid against the backdrop of the old testament sacrificial system god instituted this system with israel where to make atonement for their sin to be forgiven and cleansed from their sin to have the guilt from their sin removed they would have to bring an animal and they would actually lay their hand on the animal's head many scholars believe that symbolized that animal being the substitute for the sinner and then the animal would be slaughtered and the blood would be poured out on the side of the altar that's the context within which they understood jesus died for my sins just like that animal did there's a similarity some something similar happening here it's not cosmic child abuse it's actually biblical and then we have a very interesting statement it took me a while to figure out why this was in here and that's that he was buried well to me i was like why do we need that like obviously if he died what does it matter if he was buried it's evidence i was talking with a philosopher once who pointed that out to me he said that's actually the evidence to back up the belief so check this out in this very early creed we have right here we have a belief we have it backed up with scripture and then backed up with evidence how cool is that so then we move on to the next belief that he was raised on the third day the physical resurrection of jesus you know he was buried that tomb was empty the fact the belief that jesus was physically raised from the dead is of utmost important paul said this is more important in fact paul goes on to say that if christ wasn't raised the whole belief system of christianity is false he said if christ hasn't been raised your faith is in vain and you're still in your sins this was a core fundamental building block for those early christians and then again we have in accordance with the scriptures it's a scripture sandwich like the earliest christians had a very high view of scripture they viewed it as the word of god as we're going to learn more about tomorrow and then the final piece of evidence here is that he appeared to cephas and then to the 12. so you have like a a format going on here where you have a belief then you have scriptural backing then you have evidence like in the world then you have a belief and then you have scripture backing and then evidence of eyewitnesses that is incredibly robust so the next time someone tells you oh the earliest christians like they all believed a bunch of different things and it was very diverse all you have to say is well what's your earliest source on that they might be able to come up with something from the second century they might be able to show a diverse belief that comes in the third or fourth century but you take them back to within three years of jesus resurrection this is what christians believed i love that isn't that cool so there are other creeds though and this i need to fix this slide i have been corrected by some awesome bereans and i it's not romans 1 34 it's one romans one three through four so if you're making notes i thought i corrected this but i guess i didn't i love when i go to a church and someone will come to me afterwards like that's not in the bible and i was like thank you i love you you're like you're my people that you would do that so this is another early creed and what a lot of people don't realize you might hear skeptics say that the idea that the earliest christians thought that jesus was actually god that was a later development that was something that developed over time but the earliest christians didn't believe that jesus didn't believe that about himself but if we go to one of these really early creeds that's recorded in our new testament here's what it says sorry i hit the wrong thing here concerning his son who was descended from david according to the flesh and was declared to be the son of god in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead jesus christ our lord now if you read scholars on first century judaism to call someone the son of god was to make him equal with god it was to proclaim that that person was god now this was not entirely uncommon in the more polytheistic religions they would sometimes claim that their person was the same as a god so they would call them sons of god but it wasn't just like oh i'm a daughter of god i'm you know you're a son of god like we might say today this was a claim to deity that the earliest christians believed another verse early in our scriptures that talks about the deity of jesus you know john explains for us that the early christians did believe jesus was god in fact this was why the jews were seeking all the more to kill him because not only was he breaking the sabbath but he was even calling god his own father making himself equal to god to call god your father was to make yourself equal with god it was to equate yourself with god so jesus clearly claimed that about himself which is why the jews wanted to kill him because according to jewish tradition that's blasphemy and blasphemy was punishable by death now we can even go to outside sources we can go to non-christian even hostile sources around the time within about 150 years of jesus life and know that the early christians believed jesus was god there was a a magistrate named pliny the younger and he was writing a letter to the emperor trajan and he was kind of tattletailing on the christians he was like okay here's what they're doing and this is what they're doing and here's what he wrote to the emperor he said they the christians were in a habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light when they sing in alternate verses a hymn to christ as to a god now on your kindle you can download for three dollars the uh uh antonycine nicene and post nicene church fathers it's literally like millions of words for three dollars and it's all of the earliest uh church fathers and their writings all of this is in there and like you have some of the plenty of the younger stuff you have clement you have the early apologists such as justin martyr i would really encourage you guys to read that because when people would tell me well early christianity doesn't look like anything like you believe and then i read those guys i was like that's exactly i mean of course we're going to have some disagreements on some things but these guys believed that they were sinners that jesus died on the cross for their sins that he was coming again that he's that he is god i mean all of that was is in there and so i really encourage you to read that stuff for yourself but that's what plenty of the younger said about the christians of course he was trying to get him into trouble by doing that so what are these eight things that someone must believe uh you know maybe you've never really thought about it this way where you're like well what are those core essentials and so when i talk about essentials what i mean is salvation issues so these are beliefs that are going to directly affect your salvation that's what makes it essential now there can be beliefs that aren't going to affect your getting saved that could still be wrong and they could actually be error and put you on a really bad trajectory and we can debate those things and and we can argue those things but they might not be essential to your salvation does that make sense so when i say secondary issues i don't mean unimportant i think there are some issues that are not in the heart of essential that are extremely important and i have opinions on those things can you imagine that i have an opinion on those things but i have an opinion so it's those are important but i'm not going to say that person's not my brother and sister so we're talking right now about those core fundamental building blocks that have to be in the right place okay so what someone must believe number one that you're a sinner right these are going to be a lot more simple than you think you have to at least know you're a sinner in order to know that you need a savior and this is something that theologians refer to as the depravity of man we're going to get a little bit more into that tomorrow because different christians define this different ways the depravity of man just means you're inclined towards sin it means that not that you're worthless you're not you're actually you have a lot of you're inherently worthy because you are made in the image of god you have worth i shouldn't say worthy i should say you have worth because you've been created in the image and likeness of god everyone in here has been made in the image and likeness of god that gives you worth and inherent dignity but because of the sin nature that's been passed down to us we've all sort of distorted that image in one way or another and so that's the depravity of man now if you need kind of proof of this just ask any mother who's ever birthed a child into the world you don't have to teach a kid to lie or cheat or steal they actually really do that naturally i mean have you ever wondered why kids sort of pop out of the womb ready to give a master class in manipulation like who taught you that it's depravity of man you actually have to teach them to be honest and tell the truth and you know do all the the good character traits that doesn't come naturally it's so i'd more our natural inclination to do the wrong things that's depravity of man number two you'd have to know that there's one god now what i want to clarify with all these beliefs is i'm not saying that you have to be able to write a doctoral dissertation on these things right you could even maybe know it but not even be able to articulate it or maybe even know it implicitly but you'd have to at least implicitly know that you're not being saved by a pantheon of gods like in ancient egypt and this is what theologians refer to as monotheism mono meaning one theism meaning god you'd have to know there's one god now it gets a little bit deeper you'd have to kind of know at least implicitly that christ is god you have to know that the person saving you is god right we're saved by jesus and this is what theologians refer to as the deity of jesus which goes hand in hand with the fourth belief is that christ is man so christ is fully human and fully man he's not half and half he's not 50 percent god and 50 man it's hard for us to understand but he's fully god truly god fully man truly man so that's the humanity of jesus and those things work together because jesus has a dual nature not we don't have that dual nature we have a sin nature jesus has a dual nature a human nature and a divine nature but he doesn't have the sin nature that we have number five you'd have to believe that he died for your sins right again you don't have to write a doctoral dissertation on penal substitutionary atonement unless your husband asks you to um but you'd have to kind of at least understand that he's dying for your sins and some kind of a meaningful substitution number six i'm saved by grace this is a big one guys we don't like this one all of the false gospels in the world are sort of like they start with this one like we want to earn it right like we want to work for it we want to be worthy enough we want to do enough we want to not sin enough we want to do all the things we can do to be worthy for this gift of salvation but we can't because anything that we do is filthy rags to god it's all by grace it's the necessity of grace grace just means unmerited favor this is a gift god gives you for free you cannot earn it it's not because he just thinks you're so adorable that he's going to give it to you and not this person this is a gift from god you cannot earn it and we have to understand that number seven that christ rose from the dead we talked about that christ bodily resurrection this would be in that core essential category now this one this last one is sort of a big one too that you you must put trust in this this would be the necessity of faith we are saved by grace through faith and remember i talked about these aren't just intellectual boxes that we check this is putting your trust in the person and work of jesus so i like to think of it like this you know when we we see the word faith in the bible it often refers to trust it's putting trust in and so i we had to get on an airplane to come here and i can believe all the right things about the airplane like i can believe it's going to get me where i need to go the pilot's going to be well trained uh the seat belts are going to work all of the machinery is going to be functioning properly all the hydraulic stuff that is in airplanes is going to be working properly but it's one thing to believe that the airplane will get me here but i haven't put active trust in that belief until i get on the plane i think this is why i think that a lot of churches are filled with unsaved people because they know they believe they checked the boxes but they haven't put trust in jesus because you know the bible says that the demons believe all of these eight things demons and satan believe are true but they're not saved so what's the difference it's putting your active trust in these things it's getting on the plane putting your body on the plane and i would just take a moment and say if if that's you if you've kind of been in church a lot you read your bible you believe that jesus is all these things but you haven't given him your life you haven't said i trust in you for my salvation i repent of my sins save me jesus then there's a really good chance that you've checked the boxes but you haven't done this eight number eight now notice that i haven't said anything about the trinity or the virgin birth or the bible so there's a scholar named norm geisler that spent quite a bit of time researching these ancient beliefs and kind of what are the things that christians have to believe and he studied through history he studied through all the creeds and then he went back to the early new testament sources and all that and and this is his list of eight things and i i like it so i use it but he also said you know there there are beliefs that are in that essential category that do affect your salvation that you could be unaware of but are logically necessary for all of those eight things to be possible so these would be beliefs that you could be unaware of but you wouldn't deny them if you're really a christian so things like the trinity the virgin birth i like to think of the thief on the cross so you have jesus being crucified with two thieves and one and they were both actually mocking him and then at some point this one thief puts trust in jesus and what does jesus say today you will be with me in paradise you know jesus didn't say well first explain the trinity to me and then we'll see how it goes right so now if the thief on the cross had survived he would have gone on to learn about things like the trinity and the virgin birth and and all of these things would come together as those core essentials for him but there are things you must believe in things that are kind of logically necessary so i would put that and so you know what about the bible um this is a tricky one because if you look at the chicago statement on inerrancy online they'll say on one of the points that you know you can be a christian and not believe the bible is inerrant but they say that's a very dangerous belief to hold so you know someone can hear the gospel respond to the gospel having never opened a bible but this is where we know all this stuff from and so i would put the bible very close to that core essential that you know just you know what just trust the bible and you'll be fine you know it'll be great just do that um and so it's kind of in that logically necessary category so i want to end by just bringing my daughter back around here to you now how many of you know that that's not my daughter that's my daughter so this okay we'll get to the ice cream in a second this is a random picture i found online of a little girl that looks like my daughter now notice they have the same dark curly hair the same brown eyes the same little ruby lips and snow white complexion um but you don't know that because you don't know her you don't know the real thing now if one of my sisters or my mom or my husband's mom was sitting in this audience and i would have put up this picture they would have been like why is there some random kid on the screen right now like they would not for a second they wouldn't have bought it for a second because they know her they know the real thing and so that's kind of the point i want to leave you with tonight is that the most important thing you can do to insulate yourself against a false version of christianity is to know the real thing study the bible study church history read some of these really early sources of church fathers what did jesus think christianity was what did his disciples and the apostles the people who walked with him and knew him in real life what did they think it was because if you know the real thing you won't be fooled by a counterfeit but if you don't it might be a little more tricky to discern you know you might be tempted to take a look at this girl and say okay well wait her cheeks are this and i can't remember what the real thing was no just know the real thing if you know the real thing you study the real thing you won't be tricked you won't be taken by because christianity is not like ice cream you don't just pick a flavor and say well i like this flavor of christianity the best i like this flavor certainly we have choices as far as the style of worship or maybe what we wear when we worship or uh you know because the more adornments we put on the outside of our lego structure but those inner pieces it's not like ice cream where you can just pick a flavor it means something it is something and that's why what we're encountering with things like progressive christianity uh is is such an affront to the gospel because paul said that if anyone comes to you preaching a different gospel let him be accursed you know it's so interesting to me that some of the pushback that i get from progressive christians is just how mean it is to call out what they're saying like jesus would never do that you know the christianity isn't like that and i'm just like have you read the new testament because there are literally entire books dedicated to telling you to stand against false teaching was clearly a ma one of the main themes of the new testament is be on guard hebrew says watch your doctrine closely lest you drift away there are massive amounts of instruction on what to do with a false teacher jesus called false teachers wolves i think that's really interesting he didn't just say well they're kind of confused no he said they're not sheep they're wolves they're here to devour the sheep and you've got to protect the sheep from the wolves this is something that we're called to do is to call out false doctrine because that's what jesus called us to do and so over the next few hours that we have together tomorrow we're going to talk a little bit more about progressive christianity about the the kind of inner workings how that's manifesting even in culture i think it's probably more like progressive christians are getting a lot from culture that they're trying to bring into the church but we're going to talk about some of these deceptions some of these lies they're like pretty little lies they sound good you know we you want to click like and share because it sounds positive and affirming and it sounds like you know i'm going to be a nice person if i share this but when we really get to the bottom of those things it's going to leave you with a false gospel and so i wanted to take tonight to sort of lay a good foundation i wanted to give us those inner core building blocks so that tomorrow when we come back we talk about these sparkly pretty little lies we'll have a really good foundation to stand on to understand where this is all coming from and why it's actually wrong even though it might sound good so let me pray for us and then i oh you know what though before i pray sorry um i do want to tell you a little bit about this book because uh they have this available back there so the story that i told in the beginning i tell in this book so this this is a book that is written for christians who are concerned maybe they have a family member who's caught up in progressive christianity or deconstructing and you know you want to learn more about why this is happening and what it looks like and why are they coming out with all these brand new beliefs about the bible why are they saying the bible you know isn't really god speaking but it's just what people were trying to understand god and the times and places they lived if you're wanting to understand that this book will help you understand that but i also as as a secondary audience what i had in mind was the hardened deconstructionist the hardened progressive christians probably not gonna gonna like it but i did write it in a tone that i hoped would be received by people who are confused by it maybe they're getting swept up in it a little bit and they're confused but they're seeking truth i try to write it in a disarming way that's not confrontive because it's essentially a story so it's very memoir-ish where you read through the book you're gonna walk through my journey with me and my goal was to to have you come out on the other side of reading this book feeling like you just read a really interesting story but you also just had like a massive theology class and like you learned a lot i i felt that way when i read nabil qureshi's book uh seeking allah finding jesus anybody read that book yeah it's like you feel like you're just reading a story and you're like oh my gosh i could get a phd in theology right now like that was so so hopefully i mean i will you won't have a phd after this one but hopefully this will help you kind of understand why i came to the conclusions that historic christianity is true and why progressive christianity is false so that's available i'm gonna be around all weekend like i'm not going to just hide in the back the whole time so i'll be out and about i'd love to talk with you i'd love to you know just hug you and you know or or social distance air hug you whatever you want and i'm really looking forward to tomorrow we're gonna have some good time together a great q a that's my jam can't wait for the q a um so let me let me pray for us father thank you so much for this group of ladies who so obviously love you and are committed to you and i pray for anyone in here who might be questioning or seeking or isn't sure what they believe holy spirit would you reveal yourself to them would you show them the real thing because it gets mischaracterized so often but we know that the real thing there's nothing better it's so beautiful the gospel is beautiful it's beautiful to be your child and your follower adopt it into your family where we can call you father and i pray that there would be no one that would leave this conference this weekend without that saving knowledge and i pray that you'd move on every heart here thank you for this place in jesus name amen you

Channel: Athey Women

Views: 1,942

Rating: 4.8297873 out of 5

Keywords: Athey Creek, Athey Creek Women, Devoted, Devoted Podcast, Through the Bible, Brett Meador, Amy McReynolds, Bible Study, Women's Ministry

Id: c2tAAAom5xE

Length: 69min 56sec (4196 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021