Latest / The Salty Pastor / Why are the Essentials Important? [Ep. 122]
Transcript
- [00:00:00] I feel like a lot of Christianity is this way, this, these days where it's like, I only want to take what I like out of Christianity and the stuff that I don't like. I'm just going to kind of pass by. And there's some even churches that are kind of like take what you want kind of a vibe. And it's like, is that an effective way to connect with Jesus? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the salty pastor podcast, a podcast dedicated to helping you, learn to think for yourself and grow your own faith. We cannot do it for you. Nobody can do it for you except for you yourself. Learning to think critically for yourself and finalize and, and, and it's right there on the tip of your time. You want to really. I'm trying to think. What's, uh, when you, uh, temper metal, uh, what's the word I'm thinking when you're on the anvil, you gotta heat it. Heat it up and you want make it solid. You don't [00:01:00] want to flip-ity, flop-ity. You don't want any one of those like theatrical place swords. That's just call over the things you're facing needs to be solid. Needless to say, my name is Jesse Maher. I will be your host who sometimes has good words to say, and we can not do this podcast without the Salty Pastor Himself, Dr. Douglas Peake. Wow. What a strong opening we have today. Solid is 11:00 AM energy from Jesse. Or working door. We're improving. You can see. Yeah, The Salty Pastor is designed for you to first and foremost, kind of be able to dig into the Bible and know what the Bible is actually teaching the principles of it, because there's so much misinformation surrounding it. And we use the, uh, the, uh, historical context. We use the philosophical context and we go to the root words to understand this is exactly what. The Bible is teaching. And then on Thursdays, we tried to show you through real [00:02:00] life illustrations of how you apply these things to real-world situations. And so these principles have to be applied. And so we talk about what's going on. We also want to eliminate, I like to eliminate what's happening so that people know where ideas and thoughts and concepts that they're dealing with every single day are coming from. Right. Because when you know where they come from, I call that derivation. What happens is you're like, oh, okay. Now I can see why. This is an issue or I'm struggling with it. So that's what we're doing here at the salty pastor. And if you want to come up to speed, if you really want to get up to, to where we're at, since I make a lot of references and you don't want to listen to 121 old episodes to get there. Just listen to the specials. Specials, so our specials, we produced them and their episode numbers are all even numbers and they start at 102 and they go up till 110, so, 102, 104, 106, 108 and 110. They're also going to do search for episode [00:03:00] 102. Of the Salty Pastor Podcast. They are all start with the title, What In The Sam Hill Is, and then there is some sort of, um, topic that we covered that we referenced quite a bit in the podcast or. It's a key concept that is helpful in understanding some of the things that we're battling today, or trying to understand today in our modern world. Postmodernism, critical race theory, de-constructionism, stuff like that. So atheism, so those things are really important to understand. And it's just, they're, they're shorter too. Yeah. They're shorter. They're easy to catch up on. And if you're a new listener, this is your, you know, you're just getting started with us here on the salty pastor. Um, this is not my greatest episode started, but there are some really good ones in the past. And we do encourage you to listen to some of the older ones, but those specials will help you get up to speed quickly, quickly, and then you can work your way through the backlog as you find time. Um, we are actually in the S uh, start of a brand new series [00:04:00] titled Jesus Loves Me the essentials of the Christian faith. We're going to dig into non-negotiable things that if you take one of them, The whole thing falls apart, right? Yep. Christianity falls apart. And on Tuesday during the Bible study portion, we summed up these essentials by following the words of, you know, the, everybody knows it, the children's song, Jesus Loves Me. This I know for the Bible tells me. So, so today I would like to focus on why these essentials are so important. If we were to state that this is a question, like a question we would basically. What happens when people lose the essentials or no longer believe in the essential. So like I basically the premise of the question is why do the essentials matter, pastor? Yep. Well, the first of off, this is exactly where we're at, concerning the philosophical foundation of thinking in America today. And we just mentioned the specials and one of them's on postmodernism. [00:05:00] Another one is on deconstruction. And what's important to understand is that what happens when you lose the essentials? Well, you get what's happening today. And you get a more polarized society, a more divisive society, a more controlling, totalitarian, or fascist society. There's a lot more hatred. There's tribalism, meaning people are balkanizing, they're they're retreating. And they only spend time with the groups of people that they believe, look like them think like them act like them eat like them, dress like them talk like them. Right. And that of course is impossible to have a society that way. Uh, we have to figure out what common things we have or what things we have in common, and then build on those things as opposed to focusing on what divides us and trying to tear us apart based on those things. So postmodernism and deconstructionism is deconstructionism is the result of losing our essentials. Well, and it's, I think [00:06:00] it's important to note, like there's kind of been this thing going around for the last couple of years. Um, it was big in the dance community as well as like find your tribe. And that's a very different mindset from what we're talking about, you know, tribalism of retreating into only having the people that do think, say, eat, it says, go find a small group of people that you can be part of. Those are very different, you know, calls to action, so. But then what happens is what, that's an excellent point because if there's an essential in, everybody knows what it is. That's an extremely healthy thing. Go find your tribe, go find where you belong and you fit. If there's no essentials and you say, go find your tribe. That's a recipe for disaster. Correct. And I think it's really important because. Help us understand what happens when we lose these essentials. When, when I feel like a lot of Christianity is this way, this, these days where it's like, I only want to take what I like out of Christianity and the stuff that I don't like, I'm just going to kind of pass by. [00:07:00] And there's some even churches that are kind of like take what you want kind of a vibe. And it's like, is that an effective way to. Connect with Jesus. Well, uh, obviously I would say that once you lose your essentials, you lose your capacity. Uh, to view yourself accurately, you know, and I think this is why, because there's no essentials. What has happened is depression, anxiety insecurity has become, uh, dramatically increased, particularly among millennials. Millennials are the first generation actually raised in a postmodern deconstructionist mindset, fully raised, fully raised 100%. And. What happens is now they're also the group that has the largest, you know, issues with depression and anxiety, lack of direction, lack of motivation. We gotta be number one at something, pastor. We're not meeting a lot of other, other generations back. And [00:08:00] I feel so bad because the thing is, everybody has essential. Whether they know it or not. And this is the mental matrix by which you interpret reality. It's, it's the way you bring in data and how you, uh, organize it in your brain. You're interpreting reality. And what's going on. It's your attitude, your mental state towards what's going on. And if you believe that the essentials that form this stuff up and how you view reality are fluid. If they're not absolute, if they're not there, they're just simply relative. They're constantly changing. Then you completely undermine any capacity to understand yourself. This is the ultimate in self deception. You are unable to have any firm sense. Of self of who you are because the ground on which you're trying to understand yourself is constantly shifting because there's no essential, there's no absolute, there's no guard rail. And so by embracing and centrals and understanding that there [00:09:00] are essentials and realizing that they must be absolute or unchanging, what you do is you create an opportunity to understand yourself. You can develop yourself, grow yourself, face the future with your head up, you know, and your, your chin up and your shoulders back. You can walk into this thing called life while back someone, uh, as probably about three or four months ago, someone asked me, why do I think the current generation. Particularly those universities and just out of universities in the twenties, uh, is so weak. And I wasn't quite ready to, uh, concede that premise that they all are. But what he did is he said, it seems a majority are snowflakes is what he called them. And my, my, uh, thoughts on that are, well, if you remove essential, Then you remove any foundation on which to build a life. Therefore, the world is extremely scary. It's extremely unknown. Anything that you don't [00:10:00] understand or anything. Uh, isn't exactly like you, or like what you want. It has to be canceled. It has to be eradicated because you've been told from day one that you're awesome. And you can be anything you want. And, uh, the reason you're not is because society is holding you back. You get a, you get a ribbon. Losing or showing up. And of course, all research points now how people who live that way as kids grow up with psychological issues. Cause they know they didn't earn it. They know they didn't deserve it, but they got it anyway. And then it devalues those who actually put in the effort. I mean the list goes on and on about how bad throwing essentials out the window is on our psyche as human beings. And so when, when our psyche isn't straight, it isn't solid. It isn't strong. By default, we become weak and fearful individual. I mean, I, [00:11:00] the way I see it for a lot of the people in my generation, friends, family, even, um, just people I've seen and observed, it's sort of like my generation, is, in the ocean, right? And if you are close enough to the shore where you can put your feet in the sand and hold your own, you can resist the waves. Like you're going to get buffered and shifted it a little bit. You're going to get moved around. But for the most part, Yeah, you can resist a lot of what the motions trying to do to you. But since we've removed that solid ground, we've removed the essentials. We're more like out in a rip current, and we have no way of grounding ourselves anymore. And we're just literally getting flung around and tossed and slowly dragged further and further away and unable to really plant ourselves. And we're at the mercy of the culture of the world, everything that's going on to us, we have no way to resist what's going on. And so that's kind of the way I I've, I've observed it in the, in the people that are my age. That's really good. I think that's a [00:12:00] really great, great analogy. Um, and so I guess my question is how do you. Get here. I mean, you talked about, you talked about my generation is the first one that's really been raised in postmodernism deconstructionism. I would assume that's a portion of it. What else has gotten us to this point? I think if we just did a brief, uh, analysis of the last 150 years with Dr. Douglas, big, a little history, you're going to see pretty significant changes in American society based upon technological advance. Okay. For instance, uh, the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, 4 years after the end of the civil war and that transformed it basically United the country for the very first time you could get on a train in San Francisco and then four days, five days later. You could be in New York city. So that was pretty remarkable. I mean, it took four days, whereas before it was on horseback and it took a month, you know, or long [00:13:00] longer. And so that really changed things, uh, in that regard. But then shortly thereafter, uh, Ford in 1908 introduced the model T and that totally transformed the country, that technology along with everything else that was happening. Uh, here's another big one penicillin. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it was first used in 1942 to treat strep. And, uh, it's really a funny story when you hear about it. But, uh, uh, ever since then, that was a radical shift in the health of human beings. You know, particularly kids that were dying from all these things, vaccines are a big deal, but also antibiotics to treat things, uh, were critically important. And one of the things that they started to treat and have a huge impact on was none other than sexually transmitted diseases. And so the birth control pill was introduced in the fifties, but it became wildly available in the sixties. So you [00:14:00] could get your hands on it as a, is a young female, uh, in the sixties without a lot of problem. And then with the antibiotics treating sexually transmitted diseases. There was what is called the sexual revolution. And so basically you could participate in sex, uh, and it be divorced from the two biggest things that were a problem with being sexually promiscuous, getting pregnant or getting a disease, right. And so this launched what they called free love. And, uh, this was a huge movement, you know, for 15 years among the hippies is just free, love, free love, free love. And then everybody found out that. The two biggest issues getting pregnant or getting an STD had really nothing to do with sexual activity as a hindrance, because there's no such thing as free love. Right. You know, there's no such thing as free sex. And so the, the philosophical though, and social movements that were [00:15:00] brewing and our universities at that time, these social theories, uh, these, uh, Marxists oriented ideology. Use the technology of the pill and antibiotics, uh, as it's a conduit, they latched onto it for the purpose of building their philosophical construct. It created for them the capacity to be can deconstructionists and that's where post-modernism really started to take off in the sixties. And then it was popularized in the seventies, but it was in the eighties and nineties when it really became ensconced, as a frame of reference a worldview in all the philosophical departments throughout the United States. And since then it has transferred all the way out across the globe. Basically, what they did is, you know, if you lose these essentials and these technological advances, particularly in antibiotics and with, uh, the [00:16:00] pill, uh, allowed this philosophical postmodernism and deconstructionism way of thinking to enter in, it became very popular. But now who you are is no longer rooted in any form of material reality. And you know, people like, well, what in the world does that mean, pastor? Well, Everything is relative out there. And if everything is relative, if morals are relative, then guess what you are relative. There's no, you, that is you. You see your soul is now a drift on a sea, as you were talking about, and you, there's no point where you can stand up and go. I I'm a person, you know, there's nothing to stand on. And what happens is then society can push you in any direction. So you're extremely mailable and meant to be manipulated according to societies, whatever they want out of you at the time. Well, and I think it's important to note, you're not saying that the invention of these, you know, disease treatments, [00:17:00] or even the pill were necessarily inherently evil or bad. It's just that they've. You repurposed and used for, things that have then caused the, where we're at now. And it's just like, that's an important note to have is you're not raging against technological advancement in any way. Or you gotta sell your cars oh, no, no, no. It was just in my series on faith in science, which, uh, uh, we had these discussions and that is. You know, Christianity was the birth of science and without Christianity, there would have been no scientific revolution. And that's really important to understand. But what has happened today is scientific materialists and atheists are using science as their bridge to push their religion mode of transport to you. And in the same way, the pill and penicillin and these things were, um, technological advances, which were awesome. And I encourage. The usage of these things. However, they were [00:18:00] used by these philosophical paradigms to be implemented, throughout our culture. And, and what happens is society. What they did is basically said, anybody who disagrees with free love right, or free sex, is a UN bigoted redneck, you know, or a religious person who is living in the last century, their puritanical prudes, they're trying to legislate their morality on us. That was the most popular appeals in the seventies and eighties. I remember them as a kid growing up is like, who can you do? And so, but the problem is, is that that shifted philosophically to you can be anything you want, whatever you want to make up now, whatever gender you want to be, whatever, anything, because everything's a social construct and society's job is to recognize and affirm what you believe, yourself to be. If the society doesn't slap you on the back and give you a [00:19:00] ribbon and a trophy for whatever thing you want to be, then those people are holding you back. Those people are bigots. Those people are racist. Those people are phobic and you can put whatever adjective you want in it. And this is this, isn't just a little thing. This isn't just some professors in the college somewhere railing against. You know, people of faith or people of, uh, that, that hold on to patriotic ideals and stuff like this, California passed a resolution. Now it's not a law, right. But it is a resolution it's called ACR 99. And in it, they accuse all of the high rates of suicide, mental illness, rejection, and isolation that the LGBTQ community experiences on churches and religious people. They specifically state that it is religious communities that have caused the high rates of suicide and attempted suicide. This is a hundred percent false. It's been [00:20:00] proven false. And the people who proved it false are gay activists. Okay. Who are concerned about their community. And they're saying you go to areas of the globe where same-sex marriage and LGBTQ issues have been embraced fully for an entire generation of over 30 years. And guess what you find the same high rates of suicide attempted suicide, chemical addiction, depression, anxiety, and isolation due to rejection. So it doesn't have anything to do with religious communities. What is happening is then You can read that article it's by Michael Hobbs. Yes. Michael Hobbs, Huffington post, I believe is who wrote that. Um, Which is a fascinating, you know, we've talked about that article before, but, but I just find this amazing that even when you have actual facts, right. It didn't matter to the California legislature. So they're bringing the entire authority and power of the [00:21:00] California government, against religious communities. You saw this over and over again during the pandemic and lockdowns. If, if you had a political persuasion that the California legislature agreed with, you could do anything. But if you were a church that wanted to get together, even outside with everybody wearing a mask, they were, they find you. And what's amazing is the surprise. It went to the Supreme court and the Supreme court said, you guys can't do this. It is wrong because you're obviously unequal in your application here. And what ended up happening is there's groups. There's one in Silicon Valley in Santa Clara that is ignoring a Supreme court, uh, decision. On this, and now some of these local governments are having to pay settlements to churches because of people because they were discriminatory. So my point is is that this [00:22:00] philosophical and social movement is not some benign little thing in some university with a bunch of professors who don't have any influence. And this is really powerful. And I think one of the things that's most frightening to me is where this is coming out is in sexual identity and, uh, uh, like young girls in transgenderism. It's, it's, it's a very huge issue right now. That is very difficult to understand Lisa Littman, uh, Brown University did a research study on transgenderism among teen girls titled "Rapid Onset, Gender Dysphoria", uh, transgenderism. When you think that you're a member of the, uh, uh, other sex, then how you were born is gender dysphoria and it's called rapid onset. And she found that the number of girls reporting that they were experiencing gender dysphoria doubled in one year. Oh my gosh. And so she's like, uh, that's not, that has nothing to do with biology or science. [00:23:00] That's completely societal. And she concludes friends and social networks spread certain beliefs. And so the diagnosis that these people were using is that they would go to girls in middle school and say, do you feel awkward? Do you feel like you don't fit? Do you feel socially rejected? Well, I don't know about you, but I've worked with middle school girls and middle school boys for a long time. I've raised three of them and guess what? They all feel that way feel that way every other day. I mean, or every day, every other minute, they always feel that way because why it's such a they're entering puberty, you have all of these changes in their bodies. And so what's interesting is what these groups of people were doing is on social media, as they were driving a narrative and these girls were buying into it that, oh, because you feel awkward or you don't feel accepted that's because you have gender dysphoria. In Sweden, they adopted an aggressive approach towards gender dysphoria. And the number of girls [00:24:00] diagnosed with gender dysphoria rose 1500% in 10 years. Oh my gosh. You can't say that has anything to do. With science, right? It has everything to do with societal pressure and abuse of authorities who are succumbing to some, uh, special interest lobbying group. That's bringing pressure on them. Abigail Shire, who is considered a liberal author, wrote a book. Uh, the pressure that, uh, our society is putting on girls for gender dysphoria. Uh, another author just wrote recently that back in the eighties and nineties, I don't know if you remember this, but anorexia was a huge problem for girls, you know? And, uh, so this author said that transgenderism is the new anorexia for girls. So, so what happens is the ramifications here are clear. If there are no essentials [00:25:00] in your life, there's no way to know or understand who you are as a person. Our society and people with an agenda want no essentials. They want postmodern thinking. They want deconstructionist, deconstructionism as a way of thinking in order to remove any and all essentials so that when kids be getting to junior high and high school, they can be easily manipulated into whatever these people with this agenda want. No essentials allows people to be deceived and manipulated because they have no way, no mental defense to work through the data and come up to their own conclusion. Because let me, let me ask you this. Why do you think critical race theory is embraced on college campuses so much so? Well, it's because universities are the high church of postmodernism, right? And so they're pushing the elements. So this is why. Getting rid of essentials is such a big deal because it has dramatic [00:26:00] every day on the street ramifications for you. If you're a parent, if you're a grandparent, if you're a teacher, you're a coach, or if you're any type of leader in your community. So I guess the, the it's, it goes back to basically what I was talking about, where it's like, I feel. In my generation, we're constantly struggling with not having our feet planted anywhere, which then allows us to not have any kind of idea of who we are, which then in turn, cause this is all cascading we've we've been talking a lot about upstream, downstream stuff. Right? Right. So our upstream influences of postmodernism, deconstructionism not having any essentials has then translated to the fact that. I no longer have feet to stand on as a member of that generation and looking for someone else who I want to spend my life with. I don't know who I am. She doesn't know who she is. How am I supposed to find a soulmate if neither of us have any idea of what we're [00:27:00] doing with our lives, where we're going or who we are. And so it's like finding soulmates and, you know, finding the wrong soulmate or a marriage that happens because you think somebody says one thing and then you decide, oh, well, they're not what I want. And some thing tells me, I, if I don't like one thing, I should just throw out the window and get rid of it as a whole. A perfect thing out there for me. Yeah. There's a unicorn. And we see this in, in relationships and love and lack of love across my generation and going into the next generation. Yeah. Your generation has the highest rate of divorce and most divorces, most people get married in their twenties and they're divorced within five years. Right. And so, and I have multiple friends who have experienced this. Like, it's not like a, oh, well, I see the numbers, but I don't see it in my life. Like I, you experienced experience, not personally, but I have friends who have all, you know, multiple friends that have gone [00:28:00] through this. So, uh, where else. Outside of what we've talked about with relationships, other stuff like that, does this, having essentials make an impact? Well, just to address your direct question is, you know, it's heartbreaking to me to see so many young people struggling with meaning and purpose in their lives. And what's interesting is the only time I ever really get to interact with people is like, if we take a stand on something, like, you know, you take a stand against something, you know, and then they want to come and argue with you. And, and the only time people in your generation really get fired up and passionate is when somebody makes an absolute truth claim. Right. And what I find fascinating with that is isn't that a trigger? It would, what doesn't that, tell you something right? That the only thing I get upset with is essentials, right. When any, when anybody says there's an essential, that's what I get. And what I don't realize, what I'm actually doing is I'm saying [00:29:00] I have essentials. I just don't know what they are. And so that, that to me is, uh, the inability cause deconstructionism is basically being a skeptic about everything, which I don't mind skepticism, but deconstructionism says you have to be, skeptic, skeptic, skeptical of everything, but don't ever be skeptical of yourself. But that's a huge problem. That's a huge problem. Because if you think that you are the arbiter of the universe, that you're perfect and you're morally pure and you never make mistakes, then how can you never be skeptical of yourself? It's like, Hmm. Maybe my radar is broken picking guys, or It's not my fault. It's just that all the other men in the world don't make men like they used. To well, and you know, there are some men that are not great. And so, but that's, but if you make no. If you're not looking internally, as well as externally at what could be an issue.[00:30:00] You're only getting one side. You're only going to get one side. And this is the other thing that, that breaks my heart is that look all the research, all the literature points to one thing. And that is, is that when Jesse gets to the end of his life, the thing that will bring him the most meaning and the most purpose in his life is not how many times he set up sound equipment or how much video he edited or, or how much content he pushed out. It's going to be, uh, the people that he loved. If he has children, children, it's going to be his friends, his family, all the research points to that. Right? All the research points to every woman who in college right now who thinks that the goal of her life she's been told over and over again, that the most important thing that you can do is get educated and make six figures and break the glass ceiling and do all of that. And guess what women get into their thirties and they realize it was all a lie. Mm, none of that is what I really, really care about. I am wired. They have kids and they [00:31:00] get to the end of their life. And the most important things in their life was being married. It was having children, it was having grandchildren, their friends, and their family, all the research points to this. And yet whenever the church or followers of Christ get up and talk about it. Society talks about how we're a bunch of, uh, backward thinking Neanderthals in, in young women and young men grow up and believe it it's so sad. Uh, the other place that throwing essentials out the window, it does, it not only hurts us as individuals and our dreams and the things that we want to come to, but it's going to tear our country apart. Uh, postmodernism will destroy America. Absolutely. There's no way around it. First of all, history teaches over and over again. There is never been a society that was formed, built, existed, and thrived on, relativistic morality. It's never [00:32:00] happened in the history of the world. You can debate the morality of whether they pick something good or not. It doesn't matter. There's no relativistic moral societies in existence that have survived and thrived. They all Balkanize. They all fall. Number two is that our entire country in America is built on the philosophy of John Locke's social contract. Okay. All of our founding documents are influenced by his philosophy of the social contract. And if we throw out all the essentials and say, there are no essentials, they're all relative. Guess what? We have nothing on which to build a social contract there isn't, there isn't anything. And what, what we're discovering right now in America, what everybody I think is living through right now is not so much a loss of, of, uh, faith in God, which I think that's a big problem because that's a super upstream thing, but what's happening is we're discovering that secularism, that employees postmodern deconstructionist thinking [00:33:00] has absolutely an unequivocally failed. And if we don't defeat it, if we don't defeat the small group that is propagating this and defeat this intellectually, rationally, uh, with really powerful arguments, if we can't defeat that, then, uh, ma I fear for the future of America, but I believe we can defeat it. And one of the things that we have to bring back is classical education of our children, because our public education system has become the primary conduit through which these philosophies are being, uh, uh, integrated into the way of thinking of our children. And your generation is the first generation that came up through the entire public educational system with these philosophies being drilled into them since preschool. And now you're seeing the effect of it. And what I see is people in your generation is heartbreaking for me. Because I don't want people to fall in love and be happy and have joy and just [00:34:00] man, Yolo, you only live once. You know, don't miss out on the greatness of life. And the problem is, is deconstructionism and postmodernism and all of these ideologies. It's not that they've told you what to think. Taught you how to think about things and how you think about things is why your life is so difficult and why you're so disappointed. And so unhappy and anxiety is such a big issue in the whole notion of coming to Christ and walking with him. Is he rewires how you think about your life, how you think about you and how you think about the world and when you get that rewired that's when your life really becomes joyful. Well, I am so excited to get started in this new series on Sunday. We're going to kick off the Jesus Loves Me series, and we're going to be in here for about five more weeks after this. So six weeks total. Um, and I'm really excited to be learning about these pillars that we cannot [00:35:00] remove. They're non-negotiable these essentials, um, Hopefully you guys will join us along this journey. These, this is probably one of the most important series you can listen to. Um, so don't miss out on your Sunday's, um, messages. If you, if you can't make it to church because you're traveling or doing something, you can always watch them on YouTube. Listen to the podcast version of it. Um, we offer it in a multitude of ways so that you can catch up and do it in the time that you have available. So we appreciate you guys joining us here on the Salty Pastor Podcast. And we'll see you here on Sunday in beautiful Boise, Idaho at Foothills Christian Church. Blessings on you.