Matt Slick Live

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. It's Matt Slick live. Matt is the founder and president of the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry found online at CARM.org. When you have questions about Bible doctrines, turn to Matt Slick live.

Francis, taking your calls and responding to your questions at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Sorry, flying, sitting in for Matt Slick. I'm Matt Slick live. Matt Slick is currently enjoying some time in the Holy Land with a group of Christians, and we're hoping that he's enjoying himself there. He's sent some small videos and snapshots back for me to sample what he's doing, and I'm a bit envious that I can't be there with him, but I'm sure he's going to come back with some good reports.

So today is Friday, February 24th, as we head into the weekend, 2023, and it's good to have you with us. Matt, normally on Friday, will deal with some hate mail. He likes to make a lighthearted approach on some of the people that have written him in less than charitable terms. I'll leave that to stack up for him when he gets back after next week. I'll be here next week, too, Lord willing, and he can bring you some of those things. He has a kind of a tongue in cheek page on the CARM website, that's C-A-R-M dot org, for Christian research, or Christian apologetics and research ministry.

Forgive me for getting that wrong. He has a page on there called Pick Your Insult, and it's a way for people to, in a tongue-in-cheek way, to keep their criticism sharp and witty, and it's a little bit of a road map. I've asked him to update it, he wrote it quite a while ago, but the Pick Your Insult page is good for a laugh. Now, some people have asked me, how did CARM get going? How did it start? How does the Lord bring us together in the CARM family? And so, if you don't mind, we'll stand by for your calls, nevertheless, at toll-free 877-207-2276, and you're welcome to call in with questions or observations or objections. We can stomach all of that quite well, but we have a wonderful CARM family that's developed, and some followers and listeners that have always been very, how can I say, they're very spot-on with some of the questions they ask, because there are questions that are commonly asked, and a lot of people need to hear the question asked, who are otherwise timid and don't want to call into a radio show, but there's no need to be timid. We're all friends here, and the question you ask may provide an answer for someone just listening in their car and driving that don't have access to a telephone or to the internet, or while we're broadcasting over several social media platforms. The one we're transitioning to here in most recent days, in the coming days, we're transitioning over to Rumble, which seems to be one of the more friendly platforms for doing what we do, but ask the question, and I bet you not only will you benefit from a biblical answer, but so will other people that are interested in the same topic or topics similar.

Now, as for CARM getting started, in the early days there was no CARM. There was just a couple of us Christian brothers and sisters that had developed what the Lord put in us as a passion to deal with apologetics. Apologetics are simply put in the exercise of giving answers for the faith that you hold. It's in light with, or in line with, the admonition we see in 1 Peter 3.15 that tells us to be ready to give an answer for anyone who asks us for the reasons for the hope we hold in Christ.

And if you're ready to give an answer like that, as to why you have the faith you do and why you hold to it, this is edifying to the body of Christ, and it's also attractive to those who are considering trying to respond to the willing of the Holy Spirit in that when they hear answers for the faith that this is an encouraging and a blessing all around. Now, we at CARM also took very seriously admonitions from some of our pastors at the time. We were living in Southern California, and one of our pastors especially had a license plate that read Jude 3.

And of course, in the book of Jude, it tells us to contend earnestly for the faith once and for all delivered to the Saints. And so I remember that license plate on that yellow car that my pastor drove, and that was his forte. Some of you may have heard of Dr. Walter Martin, the original and authentic Bible answer man. Back then in the 80s, I had the pleasure to attend his Bible study, and he became our pastor, and he was quite knowledgeable, as some of you know.

He had a very quick mind and a very sharp ability to remember and recall scriptures as well as documentation. We didn't have the internet back then to document things for people. Some people would say, well, you know, I think you made that up, or you're not putting it correctly when you criticize my particular position. And of course, we had to have books and photocopies for original documentation purposes. And of course, we couldn't photocopy page after page after page from a book, but we could get a reference and a quote and give it to them with the source, and they could check out the material themselves to make sure we were not quoting something out of context or in an illegitimate way. And we tried to assure people that even that we're hostile to the faith, that no, we're not making this up. This is something that's been published by your particular church or your particular organization that seems to be wildly contrary to what the scripture says, and some of them would follow up with our invitation to check out our documentation and come back and say, you know, it was interesting for me to go check this out and find out that you were you're pretty right on, and I need to adjust my ways. Now that kind of person was very humble and very not stubborn or prideful enough to stick to what they were believing, even though they saw sound documentation and sound biblical answers to answer in a way that would correct their position. Other people were rigid, obviously, and stubborn and bullheaded and like me, and I needed something more of a push from the Holy Spirit in order to acknowledge that I needed to adjust my position. But that's what the Word of God is for.

That's why we study it. That's why we study to show ourselves approved, so that we're not ashamed in the fashion that we handle the Word of God. We need to prove all things, as Scripture says, and hold fast that which is good, and of course to prove or to test the accuracy and the legitimacy of something that comes our way of a spiritual nature. We use our scriptures, as did the Bereans in the book of Acts, who actually checked daily into their scriptures, according to the Apostle Paul, to see that even the Apostle Paul was giving them accurate information. He had just been from a place called Thessalonica when he went to Berea, and he told the Bereans that you know, the Thessalonica, they listened to me preach the gospel, and they accepted it readily enough, and of course we praise the Lord for that. But he says, you Bereans, you've taken the scriptures and daily checked what I'm saying against what the scripture says, and he said of them, you Bereans are of a more noble character, more noble-minded in that you do that. So it's a good thing to check everything that comes your way, and look at it under the magnifying glass of God's Word, and watch it open up to you. Some people have unfortunately turned the affair around, and they have a magnifying glass pointing at God, and they're examining him, when it's he who is examining us, and we're to try to see as much as we can, or accept as much as we can his insight into us, and showing us our need for him, and he's gracious enough to do that.

So anyhow, in the beginning of our ministry, we got together with other Christians, just loosely at Bible studies and so forth, and at one Bible study I met Matt Slick, and he seemed like just a normal guy, but it seems he was committed to learning as much as I was committed to learning. We had this hunger for the Word of God, we had this hunger to be able to represent ourselves as faithful Christians, and the topic came around about the cults, and we were mentioning that several of the more active cults that will come to your door, one of them being the Mormons, or the LDS Church, he said, well they're Christians, and I, you know, this is a common thing, because they present themselves as Christian with using our Christian terminology, but usually with the LDS definitions behind those Christian terms, so that if you're not aware of the definition of Christian terms, you might think they are talking to you on this equal level. When they're talking of Jesus Christ, they're talking of, in the LDS sense, the spirit brother of Lucifer in the pre-existence, Jesus being his brother, and God the Father being a literal glorified man from another planet that exists near a star named Kolob, somewhere in perhaps this universe or another, and that there's a progression of gods beyond him, that God the Father, he had a God the Father that was glorified similarly to him, and became a God of his own universe. This is something that's completely contrary to Christianity, so when they say Jesus, they have a different view, a different meaning behind that word than we do, just as the Christian scientists will say Jesus is a state of consciousness, the Christ consciousness is what Jesus was in contact with, and that's what made him Jesus the Christ.

He was somewhat of an avatar on a higher plane than we are. Well, that's not the Jesus we worship, whereas the Jehovah's Witnesses will say that Jesus is the first and greatest creation of the supreme God, Jehovah, whereas, no, he's not a preacher, he's not a creation, Jesus is God in flesh, second person of the Trinity, which most of these affluent and cultic groups will deny the Trinity as well. So we look at this, and we say, okay, well, how do we answer these people?

Some of them have this very refined theology, refined in the fact that it's off-base, but sounds good. Well, we'll come back after this break, and I'll tell you more of how we approach the people, and how we began. So this is Matt Slick Live, and we'll be back after this break. Matt Slick Live.

This is Charlie Spine sitting in for Matt Slick. I expect to sit in for him again next week, if the Lord is willing, and hopefully I can sharpen my technical skills to make it a smooth transition into the next week. I've had wonderful help from a couple of brothers at the station that are guiding me in a remote sense from the headquarters there, and they're very gracious in putting up with my lack of expertise in the broadcast arts.

They're wonderful. I was telling you how CARM got started, and it was before CARM was even thought of that, speaking of the cults and the alcohol and different things, Matt Slick mentioned to me at this Bible study that, and is regarding the Mormons in particular, that he thought they were Christian. Well, I had with me a photocopy that I used of a page when I would talk to some of the different members of the LDS Church that was a photocopy of the history of the Church, which is published by their church, volume 6.

It was two-sided, page 408 and 409, and I found this documentation especially useful because many of the LDS Church members I talked to had this collection of the history of the Church in their personal libraries at home, and so they could go home and check if what I was saying was true. So I handed it to Matt, and I read to him the part of what was said on page 408 and 409, and here's what Joseph Smith said in there, quoting Joseph Smith's statement. He says, God is in the still small voice in all these affidavits, indictments, it's all of the devil, all corruption. Come on, you prosecutors, you false swearers, all hell boil over, you burning mountains, roll down your lava, for I will come out on top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam, a large majority of the whole who have stood by me are here. He says, now neither Paul nor John, Peter nor Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. Well, when I read that to him, he snatched that paper out of my hand, and he said, what?

Who said that? I said, well, that's the founder of Mormonism, the so-called prophet and seer and revelator and president of their church. At the beginning, he goes, that's wack. And I said, well, I mean, that's kind of one way you could put it, yeah, but it's certainly not Christian.

And he goes, oh my goodness, had no idea. So, like lots of people, they're unaware of some of the origins of some of these cults and aberrant Christian movements, but when he found out at the beginning what the founder was claiming, it was enough to wind him up tight, and he eventually, as you see him now, is still wound up, so to speak, in his energetic actions to try to correct these things for people or try to keep them out of getting snared into something that they might otherwise think is a Christian organization because of the attractive lifestyles of the people that you might find there. You might find ethical people, moral people, wanting to do good for God, but they're wanting to do good for God becomes corrupted in that they think that they can work in and of themselves to merit the blessings of God by adhering to the laws and ordinances of the particular organization. And no, no, you put yourself right with God when you recognize, and he causes you to exchange your hard heart for a heart of flesh. You recognize your need for him, your utter need for him, and you understand that you lack anything that could possibly work or merit his grace. If it was something merited or owed to you, that would be something other than grace. Grace is a free gift from God, and we count on God to open the hearts and minds of people who preach to, because his word is, as he says, alive. It's sharper than a two-edged sword, and when you put forth his word and it goes out, it doesn't come back having not accomplished anything, but it does accomplish the purpose for which it is meant. Now the nuts and bolts of that, of how it actually works, is something that is difficult for us to discern or even to comprehend on this side of heaven, but God says that through the preaching of his word, it's part of how this is accomplished, how he accomplishes it, and so that's enough for me to know that I don't need to know the nuts and bolts and the intricacies of exactly how I makes it work.

I'll just do my part and respond to him in love and try to spread his word so that it will be the work it's meant to do. Now that quote from Joseph Smith energized Matt and some of us that were already interested in witnessing the cult, and we eventually formed a swap meet ministry. I inherited the swap meet ministry where we went to a local drive-in theater in Orange County, and the Orange drive-in, where, by the way, a larger ministry had established itself before us. They called it the drive-through church, but on the weekends they would have a flea market, so to speak.

It was a rather large drive-in. You'd rent from the drive-in owners a booth, we called it, a space between the two speakers where you would normally park cars. You'd rent that area, and people would present their flea market items or their special crafts and whatnot, or just stuff from the garage sales that they would otherwise put on, bring it out there, and give people a chance to appropriate it. Well, we had a booth with the little card tables that we got little fold-out legs on these little square tables, and we put out Christian tracts for people to pick up on different topics. We put some nice little smooth rivers down, holding dead papers down, and some people would walk by and we'd kind of crack up, because as they'd walk by they'd take a glance over and they'd say, oh look, they're selling rocks. No, no, we're not selling rocks, they're just holding down these tracts, you're free to take them. Sometimes they'd come over and take a look and we'd strike up a conversation, and it might be with a brother or sister in Christ, or it might be someone who is completely opposed to the Christian faith, and they would see a tract that pertained to a topic that they were interested in, and that we were off and running sometimes, that people would come back from week to week to seek us out as our booth location changed.

We didn't have the money to buy a single spot ahead of time and to return to that saved spot week to week, so people would have to look for us, and when they did and they'd find us, we'd praise God in our hearts that we had shown, we had given them an interest in what we were doing. So, at that slot meet, we developed into some interesting activities that eventually blossomed into what you now see on the internet as calm.org. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Well, welcome back to Matt Slick live.

This is Charlie Spartan sitting in for Matt Slick. While he's on a wonderful trip to the Holy Land, I was explaining to you some of the early origins of calm.org and the Matt Slick live program that has resulted in the end from that. We began our active ministry into the public with Matt and Slick and I. Matt Slick and I, in between going to the swap meet ministry and providing tracts for people there, we decided we would go out into neighborhoods and go to doorsteps and knock on doors. After all, other people were knocking on doors that had a message that was more like a spiritual spiderweb that we didn't want people to get caught in.

We wanted to give them the truth. So, we drove around and drove around in Southern California in Orange County. If any of you are acquainted with Buena Park in Orange County, we ended up at a probably an otherwise insignificant intersection of two streets called Suntisk and Omega.

We kind of reasoned in our mind instead of Suntisk with S-U-N, we would kind of look at it S-O-N, Suntisk, and of course Omega brought to mind the Alpha and the Omega. I mean, we were kind of knuckleheads in how we approached it, but we said this is as good a place to start as any. So, we turned in there and we ended up on a very small cul-de-sac.

It was about, I don't know, just a few homes on it. We decided we'd worked up, I mean, we had butterflies in our stomach, major butterflies, and we decided okay, we're gonna go to this door of the house we came to. As we worked up the nerve to go forward, we approached it slowly and we knocked on the door and it was, the door was ajar, just an inch or two, and we heard a lady from inside say, I'm back here, come back here, hurry, you know, and she had this panic sound in her voice and we kind of looked at each other and before we could really enter the house, rolling up behind us came an ambulance and a police car and a fire truck with the paramedics and they were rushing in and we got out of the way and they'd gone in.

She had called the paramedics. We had no idea of knowing that when we walked to the door, all we did before we did it, before we got out of the car, we asked the Lord, please Lord, you know, give us an opportunity to talk to people and give us a, you know, a receptive audience, you know, in our efforts and so the Lord did. He did it by way of having everyone in that neighborhood, as you will do when something of a nature of this happens. You see the emergency vehicles roll in, everybody came out of their house and the lady was saying, okay Harry, don't worry, you'll be fine, you'll be fine, and they rolled this gentleman out on a stretcher toward the ambulance and the attendants were saying, don't worry Mr. Wolfe, we'll take care of you, we're close to the hospital and you're doing fine, you'll be well, and we looked at each other and the lady called him Harry and the paramedics called him Mr. Wolfe. Is that the guy's name, Harry Wolfe?

I mean a very memorable name and we never forgot it to this day, but it was kind of just a curious thing for us to have it developed that way. Well, when they took him away and the emergency vehicle started to leave, of course, what was there was this crowd of people and here we are standing there with our Bibles in our hands and those two kids on their bicycles looked at us kind of with a jaundice eye and they said, hey, what are you guys doing here? And here the Lord had provided something we'd asked for and he provided it in a greater way than we could have ever imagined. We were kind of stunned and didn't know what to do really, so we asked Mr. Wolfe's neighbors, you know, is there someone here that can lock up his house for him and in fact one of the paramedics came back and did that and Mrs. Wolfe, that's who she was, said here, just give my keys to this lady, we're friends and she takes care of things for me. So we said, okay, well, we encourage you guys to pray for Mr. Wolfe and his recovery and beyond that we really didn't know what to say, so everybody kind of wandered back to their houses and we wandered off through the rest of the neighborhood without any idea or feeling for that we should knock on another door as we had been taken by such surprise and overtaken by the circumstances that the Lord had us in a state of shock, really, my goodness. But we did eventually make our way to a few more doors and Matt was a bit sheepish and insisted I knock on the door and try to initiate conversations and none of them went very well. I had two or three people that were kind and just, you know, said they were busy doing other things and so Matt and I, we thought in talking together that he would knock on the next door. So when we did, he knocked on the door and we looked and he said, other than I said, you know, people probably think we're Jehovah's Witnesses or something, they're the only ones out on the weekend doing this kind of thing, and so we knocked on the door. This lady, we could hear her high heels on her wooden floor and she came toward the door. She opened it and I kind of pushed Matt forward and he goes, oh hi, good morning.

She says, we're not Jehovah's Witnesses, and the lady just roared back at him, well I am, and she slammed the door very hard in his face and it's like, wow. He opened his mouth and inserted his foot and I've never let him forget of his first opportunity and his first effort at evangelism by reminding him of that story, and we get a giggle out of it now. But that was Matt Slick's first attempt at public evangelism off the top of our head, but from our heart. Now, you can tell, and we admit we were kind of knuckleheads, not knowing what we're doing really, not having a plan, but nevertheless, we were trying to lend ourselves to the Lord to be instruments in his hand. We said, use this whatever way you can, Lord, and we weren't so sure that he could or that he would, but he did, and he did so in ways that stunned us.

It took our breath away to see some of the things he did, and it was undeniably not a result of our efforts. It was undeniably his hand at work, and so that energized us more to keep it up and to keep finding new ways to reach people with the gospel, and eventually that developed from that small outreach to a wonderful fellowship of people that got together, and Matt especially was serious and followed up his desires by going to seminary, getting a master's degree in theology, and working in the ministry, and putting together pretty much single-handedly the CARM materials that you see on the CARM website at CARM.org. He's done a monumental job in putting together materials that are helpful in doing the things that we tried to do initially without much technology, without much at our hands as far as resources. He's made a resource available through the technology of the internet, which we had when we started out. It would have made things a lot more easy to approach in evangelizing the lost, but he offers that information by way of very pointed and succinct articles. They're like rifle shots to the topics they cover.

It's not a scatter shotgun type of approach. He'll pick a topic and he'll give you relevant and attendant verses to examine that topic, and then of course you can follow up from there as you open your Bible and examine his materials. You can go on from there to study further, and he'll usually have sister articles that will allow you to expand your search on topics having to do with God and having to do with the Christian faith and how it was formed and how it has blossomed and how it has reached what it has reached today with all those who enrich it and all those who assail it and how to handle them. So not only can you repel and correct some of the aberrant and hostile people, you can also enrich the understanding of the Scriptures to the fellow believers in the body of Christ.

Now I'll give you a little bit more insight into what happened, and as we come back from these messages that are coming up, and hopefully if you want to call 207-227-5077. You'll find we have online schools that you can go to to learn how to defend the Christian faith and learn more about the Christian faith and enrich your understanding of to enrich your understanding of Scripture and your walk with God through the materials. It's all there, and Matt offers most every bit of it absolutely free, so don't think that because it's free it's not worthwhile or valuable the way Madison Avenue has conditioned us here in the West is that the more you pay for something the better quality it probably is. Well that's not so.

Don't fall for that kind of conditioning, and just because it's free doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's indeed valuable. One of the valuable things that's developed in our ministry and something we have come to appreciate more and more is our prayer team and our prayer warriors who battle by assailing the kingdom of darkness with prayers and invoking God into the situations that we know we can't handle, bringing him into it and trusting him the way we should trust him as his children, to use his guiding hand either personally to touch our needs or to use godly people in his hands as instruments to minister to our specific needs. One in particular need that our prayer team has been focusing on here lately is a wonderful little new life born to a follower.

Her first name is Noelle. She's given birth to a wonderful little child called Avery Grace, and Avery Grace is in need of the Lord's attention more so than other little newborns. She has some special problems facing her, but nothing that the Lord can't help her overcome.

We're confident of that. The Lord takes a special interest in children and actually even encourages us adults to approach him with a faith, the kind of faith that a little child will have. Some people say, well, can that kind of faith even be recognized for or on behalf of a baby? Well, in the Old Testament it says that you did give me trust even at my mother's breast.

So to put trust in the heart of a little child even while she's at her mother's breast is something that I don't understand how that works, but yes, God can even give the little babies a measure of faith and trust and grow that into the kind of trust and the kind of the kind of trust and faith that we should have, which is without reservation as looking to our Heavenly Father as we look to our godly mothers and fathers here on earth. Anyhow, so if you can remember in your prayer Avery Grace, I'm sure her mom, Noelle, and her family would be most appreciative as we join together with you in praying that the Lord will meet and attend to her every need directly and or through the hands of people that he uses as instruments to directly work to her advantage and comfort her family as they learn how to deal with with her challenges. We have another young youngster that we've prayed for for several years now who I'm hoping to get in touch with her mother.

We had a snow squall here and then the day I was going to go meet her mother at a Bible study, this little girl has had some real challenges and the Lord has seemed fit to bless and grace this little child. Her name is Graceland and I want to have her mom possibly call in and tell us of the testimony of the Lord working in little Graceland's life. And of course we appreciate our prayer team which you can contact and I encourage you to contact because we take a great deal of honor and pleasure in interceding with the Lord for you. Our prayer team is a wonderful team headed by a very godly lady who lives on the different end of the country than I do and I haven't met her in person but we've had so many talks together and stuff. She's a lovely Christian woman. Her name is Joanne and those prayers can be sent to prayer at calm dot org.

Very simple prayer at calm dot org and we'd be more than happy to join with you in prayer for your needs. Now back in that slick, what can I tell you that I can get away with that he won't be upset to hear when he comes back? Well, not very much. He's been a wonderful friend, a faithful friend. Even though we've known each other over 40 years, we still like each other and that's an accomplishment sometimes in the world we're in because we know each other's, what would you call them, cracks in our character. We know each other's weaknesses but we overlook them in the Lord and we adjust and we love each other just the same. So he has been an encouragement to me.

He claims I've been an encouragement to him so I don't doubt his claim even though I question how much help I've actually been to him but I like to support him and what he does because his attitude is one of the kinds of attitudes you don't run into normally and it seems to have attracted other people with similar attitudes that are just willing and interested in responding as much as they can in the places they are and then with the skills they have responding to the call of the Lord and we appreciate them for that. Now the, okay, the calls haven't come in today. That's okay. I enjoy the opportunity to, let me adjust something here just real quickly.

There. I enjoy the opportunity to tell you a little bit about calm, a little bit of the inside scoop as to how we began. I would encourage others, even if you've got the butterflies like we had, even if you have hesitation or reservation about putting yourself out there to be made available to the Lord, to be made available to people who need him, even with those butterflies, go ahead and I suggest you make an attempt and the Lord will clue you in rather quickly if that's the direction you want you to go in. Go ahead and do your part to witness to someone. Have something ready at the doorstep for when one of those individuals that come knocking at your door with another gospel, have something ready, a piece of material, a printout of an article from Carm, if you have a family member or someone close to you that you've discussed a topic with that they need some help with, you get them over for a cup of coffee or whatever, sit down with your Bibles open and say, hey, you know, we were talking about this particular thing having to do with faith, having to do with Christ and his ministry, you know, his ministry as our priest. I did rattle a few feathers in my family, my personal family, the other day when I mentioned something about the priesthood of Christ and how his priesthood was superior to all other priesthoods before him, and my Roman Catholic family and my Orthodox family, they kind of ruffled their feathers, but I told them, you know, look, when you look at it, you have people claiming to hold a priesthood. One in particular, we'll take the LDS for example, their missionaries claim to hold, to be part of the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood that has been bestowed on them by the blessings of laying on of hands in their church. Well, as the scripture showed us, and I went into it the other day in Hebrews, Jesus is our high priest after the order of Melchizedek. Hebrews explains that in times past, the priest who made intercession for the people would pass away and have to be replaced from time to time as the years went by, but now that Jesus holds the priesthood inviolate, or by virtue of an indestructible life, okay, and he doesn't, he won't be replaced, he doesn't need to be replaced, I said that priesthood is something he's taken over, and he intercedes now for us, he's our intercessor, just as it was pictured in the Old Testament times leading up to Christ, that the priest, the high priest, would represent the people when he and only he could go behind the veil and represent us before God. Well, interestingly enough, we went to a verse that called us believers in the body of Christ that we're a kingdom of priests. Well, what's that mean, a kingdom of priests? Priests are the people that had the one-on-one contact with God on our behalf, but now God invites us to come boldly before the throne as his children and have direct contact with him. So the priesthood was inherited, so to speak, by Christ in his incarnation, and he serves as that priest for us right now, and he invites us to come to him directly, and that means we can have personal one-on-one contact with God ourselves. And in that fashion, we become a kingdom of priests, okay?

We, ourselves, could represent ourselves in front of him. Of course, when we do, what's usually revealed to us is our inadequacies, but we reveal ourselves to him as children, trusting that he will attend to those inadequacies. He will empower us and make us sensitive by the leading of the Holy Spirit to adjust to a more faithful way of life. Sometimes we call that sanctification. We grow in our sanctification after we have come to the Lord, and he puts us on a path of righteousness where we should grow and mature in the faith and become a more attractive representation of people of faith to the world. So this personal contact we have with him, this invitation to come boldly before the throne, I try to explain to my relatives, it's not an insult to you people who hold to what you call a priesthood on this earth. Just understand that I know the real meaning of what it is to be the high priest at the order of Melchizedek who intercedes daily for the people of God, and you don't fit the bill, okay? You're nice enough, you're sincere enough, but niceness and sincerity only go so far. That doesn't put you over the finish line with God. You need him to pull you across the finish line, and that's what our high priest does when we come to him in faith. So I hope you can join us next week for Matt Slick Live. We appreciate your your attention, and God bless you as you open another program powered by the Truth Network.