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The Motives in Deconstruction. Examining What You Believe. What Is Your Doubt About? - Highlight Episode 346 · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Deconstruction I found this online is a process by which a person critically dismantles the beliefs they once held as part of the Christian faith, often driven by personal experience, cultural influence or offense, typically leading to a rejection or redefinition of core biblical doctrines such as the authority of scripture, the exclusivity of Christ or the nature of sin and salvation, and I like this note here.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: This is distinct from healthy spiritual growth or theological refinement, because deconstruction often begins with the self as the authority rather than scripture.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: What do you think, oscar?
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Does that kind of sum it up?
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: I like that phrase theological refinement.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: I think there's something healthy and beautiful when someone begins to really dive into the scriptures and distinguish the difference from what I call Hobby Lobby Christianity and what the scriptures actually say Christianity is.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: And unfortunately, what happens a lot of the times is people end up throwing the baby out of the bathwater.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: And you're exactly right.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: I've seen it happen over and over again.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: It starts with frustration about a cultural issue and then it turns to the inerrancy of scripture and then it becomes quickly about frustrations with scripture's view on sexuality.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: And all of this.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: You hit it perfectly.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: All of this.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: If we approach it from I am the source of truth and authority.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: I will determine for myself what is true and what is false.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: Then, ultimately, what you've done is made yourself your God and you start from that premise.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: And anytime you start with yourself as God, of course you're going to reject the one true God, because you can only have one God, and if you're Him, then you're going to end up moving away from your creator.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: We've got this little story about two men on a plane.
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: If someone wants to deconstruct, the question to ask them is why did you put the parachute on?
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: There you go.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: It's as simple as that.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: If they say, for the jump I've got to take, I've got to jump out of this plane, nothing will get it off their back.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: But if they've put it on for better flight, when the flight gets bumpy they'll have some excuse.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: Someone's kicked the back of my seat and taken this off.
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: So it comes back to motive.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: If you came to Christ fleeing from the wrath to come, you'll continue to know there's wrath to come and you'll cling to him because he's your life.
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: Richest prophet, not on the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: So you hold the righteousness of Christ, which is your life.
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: There's nothing wrong with examining what you believe.
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: We should that, right, paul Little.
• 3:38
  Speaker 4: He wrote a book called Know what you Believe.
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: And then he wrote a book Know why you Believe what you Believe.
• 3:43
  Speaker 4: There's nothing wrong with saying is's what I believe true and accurate.
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: Remember when Jesus was talking to the apostles?
• 3:51
  Speaker 4: He said the disciples, why do you reason amongst yourselves?
• 3:54
  Speaker 4: And that's where they went wrong.
• 3:56
  Speaker 4: They're reasoning amongst themselves without a foundation of truth, right?
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: And Isaiah says come, let us reason together.
• 4:04
  Speaker 4: So if you're going to reason, reason with a foundation of truth.
• 4:08
  Speaker 4: That foundation of truth leads you to more truth.
• 4:14
  Speaker 4: And when you remove God from the equation, you're removing truth from the equation, right?
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: So deconstruction is not the same as honest doubt.
• 4:25
  Speaker 4: You can have doubt, but what is that doubt about?
• 4:30
  Speaker 4: You say I don't know about this.
• 4:32
  Speaker 4: So you open up the Word of God to find the answer.
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: That's what you do.
• 4:37
  Speaker 4: You don't go to the world's methods and the world's philosophies to try to understand something that is transcendent.
• 4:44
  Speaker 4: You still have the same questions that I have, but now you don't have a foundation for truth.
• 4:50
  Speaker 4: Somebody said you can't search for truth while you sit in darkness and you're comfortable to be there, right?
• 4:55
  Speaker 4: So what do we do?
• 4:56
  Speaker 4: James 1.6,.
• 4:58
  Speaker 4: Let him ask in faith, with no doubting.
• 5:01
  Speaker 4: For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea.
• 5:04
  Speaker 4: Right, you're tossed to and fro right.
• 5:07
  Speaker 4: Biblical doubt says help me believe I believe.
• 5:11
  Speaker 4: Help my unbelief right.
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: It's who we are asking to and we are expecting an answer.
• 5:17
  Speaker 4: You want knowledge Go to school.
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: You want wisdom you get on your knees.
• 5:21
  Speaker 4: So we want a greater understanding of God about the purpose of man.
• 5:27
  Speaker 4: Why am I here?
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: How did I get here?
• 5:29
  Speaker 4: What's going to happen to me after I die?
• 5:31
  Speaker 4: When you're left to yourself in a corner in the dark asking these questions without including God in the equation, well then, every man's going to do that which seems right in his own eyes.
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: Biblical doubt says help my belief.
• 5:45
  Speaker 4: Deconstruction says help me leave.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Who would really, in an objective or in a concrete way, say oh, I'm God.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: But that's the deception, right With Adam, or with Eve rather, and by extension, adam, satan's temptation was you will be like God, knowing good from evil.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: In other words, really you'll be the arbiter of what's good and evil.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: You'll be the one to make the call on what is good and what is evil, and in essence, that's what's happening.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: We're just removing God from the equation, we're removing the authority of Scripture and now we're becoming the authority, which means we're usurping God's throne and man.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: That's destructive.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Ray, I want to ask you this you often will pinpoint with atheists what their true motivation is, and that is you just want to look at pornography, sleep with your girlfriend, indulge in the pleasures of sin.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: What role do you think this plays in those who are deconstructing versus atheists, where people say I'm a Christian, but I don't hold to this anymore?
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: And that's why I love saying to someone who says I doubt this, I doubt that, say look, it's not God's existence we're talking about.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: You're having sex with your gorgeous girlfriend, aren't you?
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: And up goes the mouth, the corner mouth and the edges, and I've had so many people say you're right.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: Ray's become a body language expert, Seriously from witnessing.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's just wonderful.
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, if someone goes, hmm, pulls in their lips, they're going to get angry.
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: Any pulls in their lips, they're going to get angry any minute.
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: I saw a lady do it the other day.
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: I thought she's going to walk off and she did.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: Within two minutes she walked off and she was angry and those lips showed me where she was going.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: But yeah, men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil and that's usually the problem.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: How can anyone doubt the existence of God?
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: To think that all we look at happened because of an explosion of nothing caused by nothing?
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: It's just insane.
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: Just take one part of god's creation hummingbirds.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: Just say the word hummingbird to yourself and watch it flap its wing what?
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: 50 times a second, and look how far.
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: I mean, when I see a hummingbird I get real excited, but I can't watch them for more than two seconds because they're off, they go and they're gone and there's no helicopter that can do anything like what the hummingbird does flies backwards all over the place.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: So we see the genius of God's creative hand in his creation and so we can have doubts when we go through a Job experience that's legitimate.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: You know, where is God in this?
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: I can't see it.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: You've got a friend that just lost his wife and a horrific thing.
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: We pray for him and his family every day because he went through such a terrible experience and I can imagine doubts coming to him, not doubting God's existence or what Jesus did on the cross, but just why did this?
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: happen and that's understandable and people like we need to weep with them.
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like so often, what happens is we're walking around in our Christian faith and this moment of doubt comes up.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: We're like what about my friend who just died of cancer?
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: You know what?
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: I'm not even going to think about that right now.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: I'm just going to put that question away and come back to it later.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: Huh, I wonder what is up with the authority of scripture.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: You know what?
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: I'm going to put that one away.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Huh, I wonder what is up with the relationship between slavery and the Bible.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: You know what?
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: I'm going to put that one away and think about that one later.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: And what ends up happening?
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: What ends up happening is that we walk away from the faith not because we think too much, but because we think too little about it.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: So many of us have unanswered questions about the faith that we end up abandoning the faith to go find something new.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: We end up abandoning the faith to go find something new, but again, you're walking away, not because you thought too much, but because you were thinking too little about the faith.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah amen.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you for tuning in to this week's highlights from the Living Waters podcast.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Friends, we value your time, so we've created a bite-sized version of our podcast for listeners who want to get equipped.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Without the jokes and fellowship, be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday where we dive deeper into the topic.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Until then, you can watch the full podcast episode available now on livingwaterstv.