The Alex McFarland Show-39-The Implications of a Godless Culture with guest Dr. Erwin Lutzer

The spiritual condition of America, politics, culture, and current events, analyzed through the lens of scripture. Welcome to the Alex McFarland Show. Welcome to the program. I begin today's show with a quote from Martin Luther. Somebody one time said to the great reformer, you're such a leader, you've changed the world, and they were giving Martin Luther compliments, and Martin Luther said, I simply preached and taught the Word of God.

Luther, he said that he did nothing to ignite the Reformation, but the preached, the proclaimed Word of God did it all. Well welcome to the program, Alex McFarland here. Very special show today because I've got on the show today somebody that has shaped my life, and somebody that I have admired for years, Dr. Erwin Lutzer, and we're going to talk about his most recent book, which is titled No Reason to Hide. Now I've got to say this, as I travel and speak, very often people will ask me about preachers that I like to listen to, and who do you follow after, and I always tell people that the preacher that I would just as soon hear any day of the week, and I have followed this man's ministry for so many years, is Dr. Erwin Lutzer.

He was a long time pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, now Pastor Emeritus, prolific author, broadcaster, but Dr. Lutzer, in my opinion, you personify 2 Timothy 4, preaching the word instant in season and out of season. You've touched the world, my own life included. I thank you for that, and I thank you for being with us today. I'm so glad to be with you today, Alex, and your words are very kind. Of course, I like to remind myself and others that I have nothing that I have not received.

So as far as possible, I try to take no credit for the things that I've been able to do, opportunities that God has given me, because at the end of the day, we are all servants, oftentimes unworthy servants, and I want to thank God also for you. We've known each other for a number of years, and you have always consistently been gospel-focused. And the other thing about you, Alex, is that you have seen that the gospel has to unite us, and sometimes there are others who disagree with us, and we also have to work with them.

One of the things I've learned in the ministry is God sometimes blesses people who disagree with me. So we need to move forward as a church, and I appreciate your efforts toward that end. In John 17, which is often called the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus, the Lord was en route to the cross, and He's praying there. And the verse that I have always loved in John 17, 21, Jesus says, Father, I pray that they, meaning the disciples, the believers, may all be one, O-N-E, one, that the world may believe You have sent Me. What would John 17, 21 do to the church today if we actually really did link arms and work together, Dr. Lutzer?

Well, you know, in some sense, Alex, I do believe that that prayer has been answered because there is a transcendent unity that we all have as members of the body of Jesus Christ. And I'm going to use your question as a segue into one of the topics that I deal with in the book that we're talking about today, namely no reason to hide. When it comes to race relations, for example, critical race theory, as you know, keeps tearing apart everything that Jesus Christ died to bring together.

And now I'm answering your question quite directly. In Colossians chapter three, or it may be chapter four, I guess it is, verse 11, the apostle Paul says, in Christ, there's neither Jew nor Greek, bond or free, but Christ is all and in all. And then he goes on to say Scythian, barbarian, barbarians.

Now, here's the point that I want to emphasize. Paul is not saying that Greeks became Jews and Jews became Greeks and barbarians became Scythians, whom he also mentions. They kept their ethnicities. But there was a transcendent unity, the unity of the Holy Spirit, the fact that God had baptized them into Christ.

And I think that's the point that you are getting at. There has to be this unity, despite our differences. And we maintain our differences. This is not a surrendering of our differences. But there is that charitable aspect where we put them aside for the cause of the gospel.

Amen. Folks, if you're just tuning in, Alex McFarland here, we're speaking with Dr. Erwin Lutzer. His book is No Reason to Hide, a brand new book, which I would strongly encourage each of you to acquire and read. So Dr. Lutzer, in the book, you tackle a lot of very important topics like social justice, quote unquote, and racism and political divisions. What I think makes your book so timely is there are ideologies being really enforced on the culture now, like Marxism and socialism and the church that ostensibly would be the force for truth to hold back moral relativism and political encroachment.

The church, in my opinion, I love the church, but it seems pretty ill-equipped intellectually and culturally to deal with some of these things. But you give us a lot to think about and a lot of equipping to speak out intelligently. So let's talk about what led you to write the book. Let's drill down into some of these topics, but No Place to Hide.

What prompted you to write it? I looked around and I said, what are those issues that the church faces that we need to think through biblically? In the first chapter, I make the point that evil never recedes on its own.

It only recedes when it is confronted by a more powerful entity. And that entity is, of course, the gospel. And your question, which I discuss in the book, has to do possibly, especially, has a special relevance to pastors. I have never endorsed a political party or a political candidate, but I think that pastors have to preach, obviously, on issues of the culture which are deemed political today because we're living at a time when everything is political. For example, abortion is political. Transgenderism is political. Even the issue of socialism is political.

And there are good reasons, by the way, good biblical reasons to reject socialism because it becomes a paradise for parasites. But the point that I want to make is we look at all of these issues, and I'm sure that in the next segment, we'll be able to discuss more of them to which we need a biblical response. Amen. Well, speaking of the next segment, we're going to take a brief break right now. We're going to come back and drill down deeply into this.

You know, the book, you can find it at moodymedia.org, M-O-O-D-Y, moodymedia.org. No reason to hide the new book by Dr. Erwin Lutzer, our guest when we return. Stay with us. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert.

Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. In recent years, our nation has suffered greatly, and we seem to be on a rapid moral decline. We've rejected God, morality, and we've almost completely lost our sense of patriotism. It's no wonder that many are asking the question, Is this the end of America? Hi, Alex McFarland here, and I want to make you aware of my book, The Assault on America, How to Defend Our Nation Before It's Too Late. You know, our nation has seen politicians that are corrupted by greed, and they've got a vested interest in power, and many of our elected officials seem to care little about the country that they've been appointed to serve. Read my book, The Assault on America, We Can Stand Up for Our Great Nation and Defend America Before It's Too Late.

It's available everywhere. You can learn more on my own website, which is alexmcfarland.com. Read the book, The Assault on America, How to Defend Our Nation Before It's Too Late. He's been called trusted, truthful, and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show. Now we bring back to the mic our beloved friend and colleague, Dr. Erwin Lutzer. Dr. Lutzer, I want to resume talking about the book, No Reason to Hide, but I haven't asked you before we recorded, are you going to be at the Cove this year?

I know you go up there frequently to teach. Yes, as a matter of fact, in October, and I don't have the exact dates in my mind, but I think it's the second week of October, I'm going to be having a pastors conference. We invite all pastors to come and then immediately following that, the very same week, a regular seminar. So if you're a pastor, you can go to the Billy Graham Cove website and all of the info will be there.

The seminar will have also to do with contemporary issues. We certainly will emphasize the glory of God in all that we do. Hope to see you there. Amen.

Amen. And folks, if you've never been to the Cove, I mean, it is just such a blessing. You know, Dr. Lutzer, I'm told that Billy and Ruth Graham walked over those hillsides and prayed and you will truly feel the Spirit of the Lord there. And so when Dr. Lutzer is there, I would encourage you all to attend. And I'm sure as you teach, you'll be talking about the book, No Reason to Hide. Let's drill down deeply into this book, Dr. Lutzer. For instance, one of the topics you talk about are the definitions of sex and gender and just how the use of language has caused so much division and so much acrimony within our culture. What are the implications of this? If the church doesn't speak out on sexuality, gender, morals, what's going to be the impact in the culture if we stay silent? You know, actually, you've asked me two questions and I'm glad to respond to both.

First of all, I want to throw this in. One of the chapters has to do with the whole cultural idea today that if you apply for a job, no longer is it a matter of competency, but loud enthusiasm for the cultural agendas. You know, if you apply for a job to teach chemistry, you'll be asked, are you comfortable with multiple pronouns?

Are you in line with the LGBTQ agenda? So suddenly competency has given way to whether or not you support the leftist agenda. But now, Alex, you've raised two issues. One of the most important chapters in my book I think has to do with the whole business of propaganda. You might remember that I've written a book on Hitler entitled Hitler's Cross. So I've always had an interest in propaganda because Hitler said that with the right use of propaganda, you can make heaven appear like hell and hell appear like heaven. And I give six different ways that language is used in propaganda.

I'm going to just arbitrarily pick number two. I mentioned universities that have speech codes. I quote a university that says that you're not supposed to use the word policeman or fireman.

And it goes on to say, and if you have a barbershop in your area, don't say that he takes in walk-ins because you might offend those who can't walk. Now, Alex, what we have to do is to take a step back and ask, what in the world is going on here? Is this done intended to elevate the discussion? Of course not. It's intended to silence the discussion. Nobody knows what it is right to say.

Is it okay to still go to a restaurant and ask for a menu? Nobody knows. And so that's why most college kids, particularly Christian kids admit that they self-censor themselves. So here you have language being used and remember the purpose of propaganda, and then we'll get to transgenderism in a moment.

The purpose of propaganda is to so shape people's view of reality that no matter how much evidence against it there may be, they will not change their minds. And I show in that chapter how this is done. Now you also asked a question about the language that is used for the whole transgender phenomenon. One of the things I tried to do in this book is to help parents think through what do you say to a child who comes home from school and says, mom and dad, I think I'm trans. What you must do is to help the child to understand that self-perception is often not a very good gauge as to who you are. You can go into a psych ward and meet somebody who believes that he's Napoleon. And I use the illustration of a young woman who has anorexia.

She looks into the mirror and believes that she is overweight when in point of fact she is starving herself to death. Self-perception is not a reliable guide as to who you are. And I point out that in the trans movement, you do not have a body problem. You have a mind problem. And so this whole movement has been generated because sex is being taught in our schools. And because sexuality is being taught in our schools, kids become depressed. They are filled with shame. And then somebody comes along and says, oh, you know why you are going through this?

It's because you're trans. So all of these things I mentioned in the book that we're discussing today, no reason to hide. Yeah. And you know, Dr. Lutzer, our culture is so it's a case study in where we go when we eliminate God, truth, the gospel. And so, you know, are any of the people out there that you've interviewed and the research that you've done, are you finding any people outside of the church that they may or may not be believers, but they're saying, wait a minute, this thing's getting out of control. We've got to rein this in. We've got to find some moral solid ground to return ourselves to. Do you see any caution flags coming up in the minds of the left?

I do. You know, there are even those who don't believe in God. By the way, Alex, you and I, because we've studied philosophy, we know right well that there can be no moral basis whatever without God.

Rationally, it's impossible. And yet there are atheists who have some sense of decency, but that comes not through their atheism. It comes because they are creatures created in the image of God and they have a conscience. You know, I think, for example, of the parents there in Loudoun County, when they stood against the school board, many of them were probably not explicitly Christian in any way.

Probably most of them believed in God. But there was this parents movement that says we will not put up with this because they understood that critical race theory continues to tear people apart. We begin to see each other in oppositional terms. And of course, you know, what else shall I say? Drag queens are allowed. And if you say anything against it, you're a hater.

You're, you know, somebody who has drag queen phobia and so forth. We're living in an age of insanity. And people recognize that. And even the people of the world sometimes know that things have gone wrong. But the bottom line that you and I know about is ultimately we must be gospel driven because it's not just a change of mind. It has to be a change of heart. Amen.

And like you say in the book, that is our motivation, the gospel, because ultimately as much as we want to see our culture saved, we want to see people saved. We've got to take a brief break. Stay tuned. The Alex McFarland show with our very special guest, Dr. Erwin Lutzer is back after this.

Stay with us. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. Do you have a desire to deepen your faith, better understand Christian apologetics or to get a biblical perspective on current events? Well, I've tried to make it simple for you to do just that. On my website, alexmcfarland.com, there's a new section called Ask Alex Online. It's simple, it's clean and you can read my answers to common questions about God, faith and the Bible. So visit the website alexmcfarland.com and look for the section that says Ask Alex Online. Christian author and speaker Alex McFarland is an advocate for Christian apologetics. Teaching in more than 2,200 churches around the world, schools and college campuses, Alex is driven by a desire to help people grow in relationship with God. He arms his audiences with the tools they need to defend their faith while also empowering the unchurched to find out the truth for themselves. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex is a sound voice who speaks timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. With 18 published books to his name, it's no surprise that CNN, Fox, the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets have described Alex as a religion and culture expert. To learn more about Alex and to book him as a speaker at your next event, visit alexmcfarland.com or you can contact us directly by emailing booking at alexmcfarland.com. He's been called trusted, truthful and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show.

Welcome back to the program. Alex McFarland here speaking with Dr. Erwin Lutzer. He's author of the new book, No Reason to Hide. You can find it at moodymedia.org, christianbook.com. Let me encourage you, if you have a local Christian bookstore, please patronize your local Christian book seller, but I would encourage you to read the book and all of Dr. Lutzer's books. Very insightful, very prescient, prophetic writings by Dr. Erwin Lutzer. You know, Dr. Lutzer, before the break you and I were talking about just the way language is used and misused. Exactly a year ago at the beginning of the 117th Congress, a person prayed and informed the audience that he wasn't going to say, amen, he was going to say a woman, which the word amen has nothing to do with gender anyway, but it just shows the lunacy. I mean, we're losing our ability to even be rational, aren't we?

We really are. And you know, the Bible predicts this. You know, in the book of Romans chapter one, where the apostle Paul talks about the downslide of humanity, he ends up talking about people who have a reprobate mind.

What you must recognize is that when that happens, there is no rationality. You know, in my book, I mentioned that George Orwell in 1984, remember that experience where Winston is taken into a room and he is told that two plus two is sometimes equal to five, sometimes it's equal to three, and sometimes it's equal to both. Now, I've often thought about that. Did they actually think that they could convince Winston that two plus two was five?

Possibly. The other possibility is that they wanted him to learn to live with lies. So our culture is expected to live with known lies. Men can have babies, too.

Women can become fathers. All of this, obviously, foolishness, it is lies, and yet we are expected to believe it. And so the more we drift away from God, and certainly we can debate whether or not America was a Christian country, it's best, I think, to simply say it had a great deal of Judeo-Christian influence, but the more we drift away from that, the less sanity we have in the culture. And so I'm no longer surprised, I'm heartbroken, but I'm no longer surprised at insanity and stupidity, because as we drift, all of these things are going to increase.

And I point out this, this is very important for your listeners. We're living at an age, you remember it says in the book of Isaiah that darkness is proclaimed as light, but that's only part of the revolution. The revolution is not over when darkness is called light. It's over only when light is condemned as darkness, and that's where we are. Any light that we want to shed on the culture is spoken of as darkness. You are either a hater, you are someone who is a deplorable, bigoted, that's the word I'm looking for, a deplorable. And so what we need to do is to recognize this.

Now, I know we aren't going to have a lot of time here. I want to mention how this kind of reasoning comes to the issue of social justice. We must recognize that justice cut off from the Bible is up for grabs. So you have marriage justice, which of course is same sex marriage. You have, you know, reproductive justice, which is abortion. You have all of these justices, remember it says in the book of Judges, each one did what was just or right in their own eyes. And there's a verse in Isaiah 59, I believe it is, I think it's verse 14, where it says, justice is not allowed to enter and righteousness stands afar off because truth has stumbled in the public square.

So we don't get back to biblical truth, words such as justice and equality and equity can go in any direction, totally compatible with any Marxist idea anyone wants to have. What is your call to action from the book? And listeners, please read this book by Dr. Lutzer, No Reason to Hide. But can you give us a synopsis of what you'd like to see the outcome of this be? Yes. You know, at the end of every chapter, I have an example of someone who faced a difficulty and they did it successfully to the glory of God. But here's my call to action.

In answer to your question, Alex, everyone has to answer that question for themselves. The businessman has to ask whether or not he is willing to sign a document in which he apologizes for his racism and skin color. Is he willing to go there? Someone texted me the other day with a statement of inclusion. He was asked to sign.

Can you do that? Somebody who teaches in the public school system here in Chicago told me, he was told it is not enough for you to simply tolerate same sex marriage. If you don't celebrate it, you'll lose your job. Now that for him is a line in the sand. He cannot celebrate what God has condemned.

But here's the question I want to ask. Is the church going to come around him and say, you know, you do have a wife and family and therefore what you should do is we're going to be here to help you. We're living at a time when we're going to even have to rethink the role of the church as we hang together.

So everyone needs to ask themselves this question. Am I willing to violate my conscience to live by lies or am I willing to take a stand for truth wherever God has planted me and to be a witness for Christ and to recognize that truth and love are not enemies as people think, but rather what we have to do is to speak the truth in love. And by the way, herein is love that you keep my commandments. So we always have to be gospel driven, redemptive driven. But at the same time, we always have to ask ourselves the question, what does God want me to do?

And we can talk about the wider culture, but it comes down to the individual and his love for Jesus Christ. Well, regrettably, we're almost out of time. But Dr. Lutzer, I want to say how much I appreciate you. You've served the Lord faithfully. And, you know, one of the great things about what I've seen in our friendship now, which is like 20 years, I mean, you've got the mind of a scholar, but the heart of both a shepherd and an evangelist. And so I just want to say for your incredible ongoing legacy in ministry, thank you, because you're making a difference. And we're so blessed to have you. Thank you, Alex. God bless you. God bless your ministry.

And, you know, each of us has a different place in the vineyard, but everywhere we serve is an undeserved privilege. Indeed. Folks, we've been talking with Dr. Erwin Lutzer. He's the author of the new book, No Reason to Hide. I would encourage you to read this and all of his writings. You can find them, as we said, moodymedia.org, christianbook.com, and everywhere you get books.

God bless you. Let me encourage you folks, stand strong for truth. This is a time that we need Christians who know what courageous obedience is. You must be a Christian of conviction, and I encourage you to draw those convictions only from the Word of God, not from the tides of popular culture. Remember in John 10 35, Jesus said, the Scripture cannot be broken.

And that's a fact. So stand strong for truth. Thank you for listening. And know, 1 Corinthians 15 58 promises, your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Alex McFarland ministries are made possible through the prayers and financial support of partners like you. For over 20 years, this ministry has been bringing individuals into a personal relationship with Christ and has been equipping people to stand strong for truth. Learn more and donate securely online at Alex McFarland.com. You may also reach us at Alex McFarland P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404, or by calling 1-877-YES-GOD-1. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again on the next edition of the Alex McFarland Show.