Latest / The Salty Pastor / Removing Jesus from Christmas [Ep. 150]

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Removing Jesus from Christmas [Ep. 150] · The Salty Pastor

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Doug: Christianity at its core is this is what it means to be a human being.
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I want to describe who you are to yourself, so that you will,
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can understand why you do what you do and where you're at.
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And then I'm going to tell you about who I am.
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Jesus says, this is who I am, and this is why I came in order to fix that.
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That causes all of you.
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Individual problems and tainted,;/ your soul.
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Jesse: Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Salty Pastor Podcast, a
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podcast dedicated to helping you learn and grow in your spiritual walk
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and your critical thinking skills.
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We are here to be your guides.
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Ultimately you have to take that journey on your own, but we are here
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to be sages sounding boards and,
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sometimes comedians, to help you along your journey in life.
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My name Jesse Maher I will be your host and we can not do the Salty Pastor
0:57
Podcast without the Salty Pastor himself.
0:59
Dr.
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Douglas Peake.
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Doug: Well, welcome everybody.
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It's so good to be here again.
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With you today, right before Christmas season.
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And one of the things that I've really enjoyed doing over the last year and
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a half, I believe this is our hundred and 50th episode, 150 episodes.
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That's 75 hours of talking.
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That is so much talking.
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That's a lot of talking.
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But one of the things that, uh, is the hallmark of the Salty Pastor, the Hallmark
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of my ministry and the entire team here at Foothills, is that our goal is to help
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you grow in your face so that you know what you believe, why you believe it,
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because if you want strength, if you want courage, if you, if you want to have.
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Uh, character that allows you to not only survive, but thrive in the
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world in which we live the ultimate reality, then you're going to need
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to have more faith, not less faith.
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You need more convictions, not less convictions.
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You need to have more truth, not less truth.
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You need more moral clarity, not less moral clarity.
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It's the people who have these things who are the strongest, the most
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confident, the most courageous people.
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They know why they're here.
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They know the purpose of their life.
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They know the point of their life.
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They understand the ultimate reality in which live.
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They understand, oh, this is what a human being really is.
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Not under the silly stuff that the world keeps trying to convince us,
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but I know what a real human being is.
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And then as I'm created in the image of God, but I've been tainted by sin.
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And until I deal with that taint, like a cancer and get rid of it.
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Get myself in remission, which is righteousness.
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Then I'm never going to discover who I'm truly meant to be, how to truly live life.
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I'll never experience real love.
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I'll never experience authentic joy.
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And I'll never have the peace that surpasses all understanding and
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experience relationships, at a level of security that I never imagined.
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And so my trust goes up, my belif it goes up.
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And so the world is trying to convince us to have less of this, less of that
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be more malleable, being more, uh, have fewer convictions go with the
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flow, have fewer truths, have no trues.
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And then your life will be better.
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Is a bunch of absolute hogwash, toilet, water, urinal mint, thinking
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that we need to get rid of it.
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World right now.
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And so we're studying Christmas in order to show us how to have joy!
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Jesse: Urinal mint and Christmas in the same sentence, pastor.
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I think you're the only one that can pull that off.
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Doug: Urinal mint and Christmas in the same sentence.
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I love it!
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Jesse: Well, we are in our series title Jesus's Christmas.
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Um, basically the main point of this whole series is if you remove Jesus.
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Can we still have Christmas?
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That is the question we are debating this season and can
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humidity, humanity, not humidity.
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That's freezing today.
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Actually there no humidity.
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Can humanity become more joyful, discover more meaning and purpose.
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And on Tuesday we focused on the wise men, or the magi as they're called, who come
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from the east to worship the baby Jesus.
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And it was interesting to note that the Jewish leaders who spend all their time
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studying the scriptures, studying the prophecy about the Messiah, miss it.
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And these guys that don't really know anything about the prophecy are like,
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hey, we think something big is happening.
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You guys should really pay attention.
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Doug: Should pay
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attention.
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Jesse: So let's dive into that.
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What does that mean?
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Doug: Well, it's easy.
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I think that what this illustrated for us, what we kind of learned on
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Tuesday is that it's really easy for people to be driven more by a frame of
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reference or an ideology than what is
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actually truthful.
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In other words, we can have all these facts, but we don't
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interpret facts anymore.
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Just in light of the facts.
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Our ideology drives the interpretation of the facts and this is happening
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more and more, even in the science.
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Even in the scientist today in Western cultures.
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And the reason why is because of postmodernism and postmodernism
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denies any all objective truth.
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Now, the interesting outflow of this is that once you remove any
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potential for objective truth.
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Then it's just your ideology that drives you.
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And that ultimately ends up removing all the joy out of your life.
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Because what you've done basically is you've removed the capacity for
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joy to occur a case, uh, kind of a way to illustrate this is, uh,
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back in 2016 and went on sabbatical for about three or four months.
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And I have a cousin who has a house.
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In the mountains of Italy, right there, close to the, kind of the
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west coast, just north of PISA.
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We're up there in this house and I'm trying to figure out how to cook,
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you know, cause you got to cook food and you can't eat out every meal.
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It's just outrageously expensive for five people.
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So we go and I go, you know, I'd like to bake some bread because I'm not
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really a fan of the Italian breads.
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They tend to be hard and crusty breads.
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They don't salt, their breads.
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I used some good old American bread.
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Jesse: So white wonder bread is what you're looking for I believe.
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Doug: Soft and fluffy with some salt in it.
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I just think it, yeah, bread has meant to have butter on it and not use to
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lock up that Italian gravy stupid stuff.
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So anyway, I went there and I bought, I bought some, uh, Some flower, you know,
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Zac and I went to the store, we bought some flour and then we bring it home.
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And so I put it in there and I do all this stuff.
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And then I'm, you know, I put yeast in it and stuff and I'm waiting for
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it to rise and it will never rise.
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It never, I, and then I bake it.
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It was hard and thick.
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And I was like, man, this is crazy.
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So I, that was one of the big frustrations of my life in Italy
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is that I couldn't bake bread.
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So I get.
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And something popped up and I looked on, uh, this thing about baking bread or
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buying flour in Italy or something like that, uh, is right after we got back.
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And there was an article in there, says no, when you go to the store
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and buy flour, you know, the thing you have to realize is, uh, Italians
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make multiple kinds of flowers.
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And one very important flower to them is pizza, crust, flour.
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Okay.
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And pizza crust flour is designed to not rise.
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Even if you put yeast in it and guess what flour we bought, pizza,
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crust, pizza, crust, flour, bread.
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Jesse: Pizza bread.
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Doug: I had a pizza
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of bread, you know, I said, that's all I had.
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I go, that's it is, I got the wrong flower.
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So it never rose.
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If you don't have objective truth, you'll never have joy.
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It will never rise up in your life because you're using flour that cannot rise.
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It's designed not to rise.
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When you get rid of objective truth, people who do this have one goal in
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mind, and that is to create chaos.
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They say the opposite, but when you read what they write, you end
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up realizing it's about nihilism.
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It's all about meaninglessness and that's what they want.
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That's their goal.
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That's their frame of reference.
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So what does the Wiseman tell us is that even in religious communities,
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people can be driven more by ideology, then they can be driven by truth.
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And the objective truth is this Christmas story is about God, leaving heaven to
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come to people in order to redeem them.
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To help save them from the taint.
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Right.
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So that they can become who they were meant to be like Jesus was
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the most fully human being, right.
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That has ever walked the face of the earth.
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When you look at Jesus you go, ooo, that guy, man, he was a full human being.
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We all aspire to that.
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It's the highest ideals of what it means to be a human being.
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And in doing that, that basic truth right there, the objective truth of the
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Christmas story elevates the individual.
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It absolutely elevates the value of the individual.
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And elevates the value of Jesse, of Doug, of, uh, the people who
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work on your staff, you know, Finn or Jeremy or whoever it elevates,
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every single it elevates the value of the homeless person, dealing
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with a mental illness and drug addiction that sleeps under a bridge.
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It raises the value of the person who's a president of the United States.
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And everything, every person in between.
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And so it is that principle of the gospel that we celebrate on
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Christmas at its core and its purity.
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So, and what that does is that weaves its way out into the hearts and minds of
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people until you see massive movements, where do you think the principle of
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individual sovereignty comes from?
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You know, it doesn't come from.
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It doesn't come from a world.
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That is, uh, uh, post-modern what happens is, is that the principle of
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individual sovereignty comes from this elevation of individuals as valuable
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in the eyes of God, you matter to God.
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Right.
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You matter to God.
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And that's what individual sovereignty is based on that each human being has a soul.
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Okay.
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So, so let's just say, for instance, you know, just recently in our society,
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people are saying, well, uh, these lives matter, you know, uh, gay lives matter
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or transgender guys matter, men or black lives mattered or Asian lives mattered.
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And, you know, and then there became a debate that, well, if
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you say all lives matter, then that gets rid of something else.
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And we talked about this early on in the podcasting, back in those early
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episodes when we started podcasting a year and a half ago, and that was.
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Simply this is that in the eyes of God, it doesn't matter what you think about
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yourself or how you identify yourself.
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So maybe you think yourself, well, I'm a gay person and
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that's how I want to identify.
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You may think of yourself.
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Well, this is my ethnicity, you know, I'm an Asian, um, you know, I'm an American
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Indian, um, I'm, uh, maybe, uh, an Asian person, maybe I'm a, person from Africa.
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So I'm, African-American maybe I'm black, so I'm black.
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I mean, maybe I'm Hispanic or Latino and you, if, if you, however you
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identify, you have to start from the premise that you matter to God.
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So everybody matters to God.
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So as a Christian, we can't, you know, say one group matters to
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God more than the other, then we've departed from the gospel.
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So we've departed.
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So when we talked about this early on, you can go back and listen to
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those episodes early on if you'd like.
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And so that's really critical to understand, but there is a
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movement in Western culture today that is seeking to eradicate the
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sovereignty of the individual.
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They call it progressivism, but it's not progressive at all.
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It's actually re- aggressive.
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It's going back to ideologies from 500 years ago, a thousand
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years ago, 2000 years ago that broke people down into groups.
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You know, hierarchies of groups, your only value is dependent upon
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what group they associate you with.
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And so they're doing this over and over again.
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And in order to do this, what they have to do is they have to eradicate
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this notion of individual sovereignty.
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Okay.
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And they have to go back to it.
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Now it may not be as difficult as you think because the whole notion of personal
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sovereignty protected in a constitution or a government document is very unique.
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It didn't exist until 250 years ago.
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So you look at seven to 8,000 years of recorded human history.
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And you don't have that ever until now we were the great experiment.
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We were the great experiment.
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And so what's interesting though, is that even Western civilization cultures
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now are trying to eradicate this notion of individual sought us sovereignty,
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particularly as it comes up in the notion of celebrating Christmas.
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You know, let's let's secularize and sterilize Christmas so that we
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can maintain all of the good stuff.
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Right.
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And that we think is good and get rid of all the stuff that we
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don't like or think is offensive.
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But the problem is if you get rid of what you think is offensive,
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you actually get rid of all the good stuff they go hand in hand.
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You can't have one without the other.
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I was just reading an article about a,
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uh, there was the European union and they commissioned the European commission
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and the European union rolled out a 32 page document in October titled
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Guidelines On Inclusive Communication.
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And it featured a kind of inclusion that aims to exclude an entirely
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erase the Christmas holiday and Christianity in general.
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They quote from the document, "not everyone celebrates the Christian holidays
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and not all Christians celebrate them on the same dates", said the document, which
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encouraged people to replace the word Christmas with holiday and Christmas time
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with holiday time, it councils speakers to avoid divisive phrases, such as ladies
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and gentlemen, which furthers the general ba, uh, the gender binary problem.
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The EU leadership said that the speech or stick restrictions will help create.
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A union of equality.
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So you see, this is the reasoning and that is, is that well,
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we're going to be more at peace.
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We're going to be more equal.
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We're going to be more on the same page.
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If we get rid of these objective truths from which all of these
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principles have come from, and the guidelines were published by
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an Italian paper called Aljilani,
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and it was on the first Monday of advent.
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So on the first Monday of the advent season, which is a celebration of
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Christmas, there was this massive backlash all across Europe.
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As a matter of fact, it was such a big deal that the Pope came out and the
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Pope said this stuff is like the attempt to erase Christianity and Christian
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holidays to the Nazis and communists totalitarian regimes of the recent past.
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Boy Pope Francis was not,
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Jesse: He got salty!
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Doug: He got Salty.
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Jesse: Must been listening to the podcast.
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Doug: He, this is what he says in history.
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Many, many, many dictatorships have high have tried to do this very thing.
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He said, think of Napoleon.
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And from there, think of the Nazi dictatorship, think of
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the communist dictatorship.
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And so I think it's really important to understand is that our celebration of
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Christmas is that we're celebrating Jesus.
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Not all the fun stuff.
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What we're celebrating is where it all comes from.
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And let's never forget that because Jesus Christmas, why don't you get
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rid of Jesus, all that other stuff you've got dough that will never
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rise.
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Jesse: So let's talk a little bit more about this idea that this
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quote, unquote progressivism, uh, furthering, or trying to remove
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Jesus from, uh, Christmas altogether.
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Why do they seek to secularize the society as a whole?
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Like why what's the, what's the reasoning behind it besides this idea of being more
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inclusive?
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Doug: Well, I think, you know, the secularism, the
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syllogism, the logic goes like.
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This things that are not overly specific, they're not ideologically
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driven have broader appeal.
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Case in point.
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Ben Crosby's, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas is more
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popular than Buddy Greens.
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Mary Did, You Know.
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You know, Mary, Did You Know where he sings about her,
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you know, Mary, did you know that your baby would save the world?
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Right?
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So everybody knows White Christmas.
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Jewish people and secularists and atheist will sing White Christmas.
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And so on the surface, you look at that, right?
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And you think to yourself, wow.
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That brought EV, it brings people from different ideologies
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and religions together.
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They have something in common.
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Well, that is true at taht level.
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But that's also like saying, well, we all eat food, right?
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So that's just have food that brings us.
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Let's just all have together.
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Yeah.
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So the Grinch who stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer are more popular
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movies than the movie, the Nativity Story.
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Which is a story of Joseph,
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taking Mary as his wife and then mo, taking her to Bethlehem to give birth.
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And how difficult, even though the gospels just basically kind of skim over that real
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quick, how difficult that was going to be for a young pregnant woman and a guy.
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Who had no means in how far they had to travel on foot.
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It's a long way.
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Right?
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And so the movie is about that, but very few people have seen that movie.
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It's an excellent movie.
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It's well done.
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It's well produced, but p, more people know about Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer.
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Then they know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
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It seems like.
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Right.
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So secularism kind of has that as a, is in a kind of an ideological framework.
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And so they make assumption.
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And this assumption is very dangerous, but it happens.
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And that is well, if a nondescript non-ideological, non-truth claiming,
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you know, nothing specific song like White Christmas is more popular
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than Mary, Did You Know, or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas is more
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popular than focusing on Jesus.
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Then let's get rid of all the absolutes let's get rid of all objective truth
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claims we'll have, it'll give us a broader appeal and this will create
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peace and unity, but it is a lie.
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It is a lie because it doesn't take into account.
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Number one is all these different people who like Bing Crosby's dreaming
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of white Christmas already have truth claims that they've adopted.
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And the reason why they adopt that one is because, because it's nondescript,
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it doesn't violate their truth claim.
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But they're never going to let go of their truth claim.
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This is why I'm a big critic of the coexist bumper sticker.
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You know, people like that, they go, oh, it's so nice.
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It's such a great thing.
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And you should really, why, why would you want to criticize that?
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And I said, because at its core, you don't understand the arrogance of your position.
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Okay.
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What you're doing is you are demanding.
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You're making an absolute truth claim.
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That in order for us to get along, all of these people have
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to drop their truth claims.
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So you don't understand when you put that bumper sticker on your car, what
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you're demanding of everybody else.
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Jesse: Well, and on the other side, you're also saying it doesn't
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matter if they're all the same.
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Right.
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It's like, that's, you're, you're either saying you got to fall in
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line or you're saying none of it matters anyways, so yeah, get over it.
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Doug: Which is a massive truth claim and it's offensive.
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Right?
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You see it's offensive.
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It's offensive to me, it's offensive to Muslims.
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It's offensive to Jewish people.
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And so you think that you're all high and mighty that you love peace.
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But I would say to you, if you put that bumper sticker on your car, there's
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three things that you don't understand.
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Number one, you don't understand history, you never, never remember
20:20
reading the history book because you have no idea where peace comes from.
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Number two is I'd say that you're making assumptions, that you've never
20:27
even thought through in your own life, and you can't even live your own life
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according to your own assumptions.
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You can't even do that.
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And number three is that you're probably one of the most self-centered
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narcissistic arrogant people that, that anybody else could meet.
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Because you believe
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that you're right above every body else, without ever even investigating
20:47
the veracity of the claims of these different belief systems.
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So be careful about slapping something on your car.
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So you can't get rid of absolutes.
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You, you can't get rid of objective truth claims for a broader appeal,
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because this will never create peace and unity, because secularists and people
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who do this, they don't want freedom,
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of the individual, right?
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They want control of the individual.
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Why do you think they got rid?
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Or why do you think up until the constitution of the United States
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put it in a political document.
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The individual sovereignty was never acknowledged by the government.
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Why do you think governments in all history?
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Why is that?
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Why did the Romans enslave, you know, half of their population?
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Why, why is it that, uh, king Henry the eighth instituted
21:38
the divine right of Kings?
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What is it that, you know, a certain person, you know, their
21:43
bloodline made them rulership quality and somebody else not.
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This isn't biblical, this isn't gospel oriented at all.
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What happened?
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Has that by regressing back to this, by getting rid of the individual sovereignty,
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it allows you in the name of whatever you want to get rid of true justice.
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It allows you to do whatever you want in order to create unjust systems, just like
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this article or this commissioned report from the European union, you can dictate
22:16
what people can say and cannot say.
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Now this ideology that they're propagating is a denigration of the individual.
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It's dehumanizing of the individual.
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This is where socialism comes from.
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Communism comes from, this is where critical race theory comes from.
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This is where cancel culture comes from.
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This is where all of the divisive, violent problems that we have in our own society
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and across the world today come from is when people are denigrating the value
22:45
of human beings instead of enhancing it.
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Jesse: So with this thought process of, uh, wanting to
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secularize and take control.
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A vibrant Bible believing Jesus center church would probably be, be a thorn
22:59
in their side to this plan, right?
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Doug: Oh, absolutely.
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I mean, you always got to do is read history.
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You Lennon had to deemphasize the church and sideline.
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It what's interesting at the time the Russian Orthodox church, which
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is a subset of Eastern orthodoxy, made it really, really easy,
23:14
for them.
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You know, how they made it easy for Lennon to deemphasize the church is
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because they became very politically, political in their orientation.
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They align themselves with the ruling power at the time.
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So they, so they lost their credibility.
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Uh, this is why Adolf Hitler basically took over the Lutheran church.
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You know, um, there's early on these, a lot of these have
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been scrubbed through history.
23:37
They're very difficult to find, but there was a thing where they took
23:40
the Naxzi Swastika, and they super imposed over the Lutheran cross.
23:46
Now, if you've ever seen a Lutheran cross, uh, the Lutheran church has
23:49
crossed is basically it has a cross with a wreath in the center of it.
23:52
Like a circle.
23:53
And then if you look at that, you can super impose the swastika right over
23:57
the center of it without any problem.
23:59
And that's what Adolf Hitler did.
24:00
And they hate out Hitler met with the church and he's basically
24:03
said, I'll let you exist.
24:04
As long as you don't oppose us kind of in a nutshell.
24:08
And they all agreed.
24:09
There was only one famous guy that was a Lutheran pastor.
24:13
Who's opposed nazi-ism right and left.
24:15
And his name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
24:17
And he was executed.
24:19
Uh, in some of his literature that he wrote while he was in prison before he was
24:23
executed, he was hung two weeks before his camp was set free by the allied forces.
24:28
By the way, this is why Mao outlawed the church.
24:31
Mao Mao outlawed the church in the first thing that a Mao Zedong did in the
24:35
cultural revolution is he basically went and got rid of all the educated people.
24:38
You know, you don't want people who have truth claims.
24:40
You don't want people who have intelligence.
24:42
You don't want people thinking for yourself.
24:44
As a matter of fact today, there's a massive resurgence
24:47
under Xi Jinping in China today.
24:50
It's a massive crackdown on Christianity in China right now.
24:56
Uh, just recently I was over at my brother-in-law's house and he's adopted,
24:59
he and his wife had adopted two boys from China who are deaf because they, they were
25:04
going to be in orphanages the whole life.
25:06
Nobody would really want them.
25:07
And so, uh, there was a gal who went over there and she
25:12
kind of started an orphanage.
25:13
She would take these kids that nobody would want.
25:15
Because they were deaf or they're handicapped in some way.
25:18
And so what happened is just recently, she had to flee because they arrested her.
25:23
They interrogated her over and over again for 18 hours, 20 hours over
25:30
and over and over again and saying that, uh, she's not an American
25:34
citizen, she's a German citizen.
25:36
And they said to her over and over, if you were an American citizen, we
25:38
throw you in prison because you're talking about Jesus in our country.
25:41
And that's illegal.
25:43
Hmm.
25:43
You know, it didn't matter that she saving all these kids.
25:46
It doesn't matter all, all of the things.
25:47
And so she fled, and this is what she said.
25:49
I have lived in China for, you know, 20 years, 25 years.
25:54
And I never realized how evil the CCP was until this happened to me.
26:00
And there's a massive crackdown right now because Xi Jinping cannot
26:04
bring about his communist utopia unless he gets rid of the church.
26:08
He has to destroy it.
26:09
But as the Russians found out, The communist found out one communist
26:15
leader once said, they said, well, we found out about the churches.
26:17
It's like a nail, the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes, you know?
26:23
So the number one people group persecuted in the world today as
26:26
Christians, no one else comes even close.
26:29
The murder, the imprisonment, all of these things, no money, no other
26:33
people grew up in the world comes close to the persecution that the
26:36
world propagates on Christianity.
26:38
Why is that?
26:39
Is that a coincidence?
26:40
Or is it because there is an evil in this world, propagated by Satan that
26:45
seeks to de-humanize and destroy people.
26:48
And the thing that stands in the way of his agenda and modifying the hearts
26:52
and minds of governments and social movements across the globe is Jesus.
26:57
Get rid of Jesus and we can win.
27:00
Jesse: So we all have
27:01
two minutes left.
27:01
Um, what, I mean, we are blessed in America to have protection.
27:06
As a church, um, under the constitution, what does the
27:10
church need to be aware of though?
27:11
Doug: Well, I think, you know, I, I want to make this point over and over
27:16
again, and it's really important to understand, but it's a nuanced point,
27:19
but it's critical and it's like math.
27:22
If you don't do the first step properly, then the next step won't make any sense.
27:25
And that is, this Christianity is not a political system.
27:29
Christianity is not democracy.
27:31
Christianity is not monarchy.
27:33
It's not a parliamentary.
27:35
It's not totalitarian.
27:37
It's not a governmental political system.
27:39
Number one, it's not an economics system.
27:41
All right.
27:42
It's not a free market system.
27:45
It's not a command and control system.
27:49
It's not a feudal system.
27:51
It's none of those things.
27:52
Christianity is not a social system or a hierarchy set up.
27:57
What it is at its core is a truth claim about Jesus and human being.
28:03
Christianity at its core is this is what it means to be a human being.
28:08
I want to describe who you are to yourself, so that you will,
28:11
can understand why you do what you do and where you're at.
28:15
And then I'm going to tell you about who I am.
28:17
Jesus says, this is who I am, and this is why I came in order to fix that,
28:24
that causes all of your individual problems, and taints your soul.
28:28
That's the gospel message at its core.
28:31
That is the objective truth.
28:33
Jesus Christ came to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.
28:38
The apostle Paul wrote, the reality is this objective truth then leads
28:44
to all sorts of political theory.
28:47
It leads to all sorts of social theory, at least all sorts of economic theory.
28:52
In other words, this basic truth that you, as an individual matter
28:56
to God, it blows the whole notion that you can enslave another person
29:00
against their will out of the water.
29:02
You have an objective truth that says, yeah, you can't do that okay.
29:05
We're going to fight against that.
29:06
Well, human beings trying to do it.
29:07
Yep.
29:08
They always try.
29:08
They always try.
29:09
They always try the fact that slavery exists.
29:11
Isn't the issue.
29:12
The issue is who stopped it and why, you know, who stopped it?
29:17
Number two, it has political theory in that is, well, where did the
29:21
notion of democracy come from?
29:23
That people should have, because up until 250 years ago, the whole
29:26
notion that people should be able to govern themselves was a joke.
29:30
The people who ruled, believed well, they are genetically inferior.
29:36
They don't have the intelligence.
29:38
To be able to govern themselves well, where did all those ideas come from?
29:43
A lot of people are not worried about this.
29:45
Here's a little brief history lesson, but.
29:48
When we went back to Boston, I toured a replica of the Mayflower.
29:52
So I was kind of digging into the derivation or where did the pilgrims,
29:56
you know, I knew there were Puritans and I know what Puritans believe, but really
29:59
they were kind of a subset appeared tense.
30:01
And this is what I found out is that what people were not aware of is that
30:04
king Henry the or eight who right after the Protestant reformation started in
30:09
Germany, he wanted to divorce his wife.
30:12
But he was in a political fight with the Pope and the Pope
30:15
said, no, so he broke off.
30:17
So he used the reformation as an opportunity to break off.
30:20
And he created the Anglican church or the church of England where he was the
30:24
head and he could do whatever he wanted.
30:25
Right, right.
30:26
And so what happened is then he died and his daughter, Mary took over and Mary was
30:31
a committed Catholic and she became known as bloody Mary because what she did is she
30:35
went through and she started executing.
30:37
All of the church of England leadership and people, she cause she wanted England
30:42
to go back to being Roman Catholic.
30:44
Okay.
30:44
Well then she died, heard it rain wasn't very long.
30:47
And then her sister took over, uh, her, her half sister international
30:51
says, sister said, I'm going to take king Henry's, um, position and keep
30:57
the Anglican church as the church of England is where England should go.
31:01
Well, during bloody.
31:03
The church went underground.
31:05
Right.
31:05
And because the leadership was being killed, they started a
31:09
congregational form of leadership.
31:11
And that is that they would get in these little groups and then they would vote
31:14
on whether or not a person could become a part of the church because you don't want
31:17
to bring a treasonous person or someone's going to betray you right into the group.
31:21
And so they started, they would vote on everything.
31:23
So they had this congregational kind of modality.
31:27
And what happened is then when.
31:30
Mary died.
31:31
And her sister took over and went back.
31:33
She wanted to bring the church of England back.
31:35
So a lot of these underground churches came out, but she wanted
31:38
to control them politically.
31:39
She wanted to use them to political ends.
31:41
And so some of those peak groups said, yeah, we don't want to do that.
31:44
And there was a guy by the name of brown and they were called brown
31:46
separatists and they said, yeah, we're not going to be a part of the king.
31:50
Uh, the church of England, we're going to continue to be
31:52
congregationally led churches.
31:54
Right.
31:55
They were persecuted for that.
31:57
So they fled to the Netherlands and then that's, those were,
32:01
the pilgrims were Puritans, but they were brown, separate tests.
32:06
You see?
32:06
And so then they came over and now when you go back to, to new England
32:10
and you go back up there to where the Mayflower is a Massachusetts
32:13
Cape Cod and you drive through New Hampshire and Vermont, every corner,
32:16
there's a congregationalist church.
32:19
And what's really interesting though, is that it started out as a congregational
32:24
church is basically a pure democracy.
32:25
We vote on everything, you know, and what ended up happening is is that.
32:32
Because it was driven that way.
32:34
It lost its focus.
32:36
So it just became whatever the wind of the age is.
32:40
And so that's why so many of those congregational churches are dying because
32:43
they, whatever the wind of the ages, that's what they want to propagate.
32:47
They removed the objective truth of the gospel.
32:51
So, so in essence, what this teaches us is if you remove Christianity,
32:56
The that Jesus is what Christmas is.
32:59
You remove the basis or the foundation on which all of these other things are built.
33:04
Political theory, economic theory, social theory, and it makes it
33:07
possible to do anything you want.
33:09
And so that's why the church has such a threat, but not.
33:14
You see, not a congregational church, that's not a threat.
33:17
What is a threat is a Bible believing Jesus centered, vibrant faith community.
33:24
Those are the most dangerous in the direction of where progressivism
33:28
wants to take our society.
33:30
Those are the ones that are most at threat.
33:31
Those are the ones that are being, I think, attack the most.
33:34
And so what we need to do as a church is we need to always avoid the temptation.
33:42
To reflect all the values of the culture, where you must always be
33:46
committed to the values of the gospel.
33:49
And we should never change that.
33:50
And that's why this series is called Jesus Christmas, because
33:52
if you get rid of Jesus, you ain't gonna have no Christmas.
33:57
Jesse: Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us, Pastor.
33:59
Um, I know you're gonna be talking a little bit more about it on Sunday, uh,
34:02
during your sermon, but we just appreciate you guys joining us, learning more about
34:06
who you are and why you believe what you do, and getting a little bit of a history
34:10
lesson, how it's affecting us today.
34:12
I'm all here on the Salty Pastor Podcast.
34:14
Thank you so much for joining us.
34:15
We'll see you on Sunday here at
34:16
Foothills
34:16
Christian Church.
34:19
Doug: Merry Christmas.