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 KARM.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. All right. Welcome back to the show. Hey, if you've been listening for a while, thank you. And if you're a new listener, thank you. Hope you all want to listen. Have a good time today.

Now, today's date is 11-7, that's November 7th, 2024 for the podcasters. I hope you want to give me a call. The number is 877-207-2276. You can also email me info at KARM.org.

Info at KARM.org, C-A-R-M dot O-R-G. And you can put the subject line, radio comment, or radio question, and we can get to it. We get to it usually on Fridays, but sometimes when it's slow, then we get to them during the week. And we have nobody waiting right now, so we may get to a caller or two.

So, and my apologies. I'm still finding a bad chest cold. In fact, I talked to one of the board of directors who went on the trip to Israel, the footsteps of Paul, and he has the exact same issue, the exact same thing. And he's taking antibiotics, it's not doing anything to it. So, I think we're just going to have to just deal with it and cough. I have coughed so much that my ribs were hurting, my muscles were hurting, they no longer are.

They're just used to it. So, they've all got strengthened up, and sometimes I'll cough a lot for 10 minutes. And then not for a while, hey, you know, that's just what it is. So, if you're on the air, or if you're listening, and I go quiet for a minute, that's why I'm just trying to, you know, cough.

It's just, you know, but anyway, it's what it is. And my voice is starting to get back to normal, so that's good. So, Joanna says, her ribs are sore, she coughed all night. I once, just rambling right now, I once cracked my ribs coughing once, I cracked them.

Oh, man, I was, I had something going on, and I don't know what I did, turned right or wrong or something, and then cracked them. Oh, man, for another two weeks, I had to keep coughing. Oh, talk about horrible. Whew, has that ever happened to you?

Man, it was bad. All right, all right, all right, let's get to some topics of some sort here. You know, I go into the virtual world, the oculus, and I have an old one, and I want to get the newest one sometime, but because it's blurry and stuff, but, you know, I go in there, I go into these rooms, and I went into a Muslim room and just listen. I didn't say anything this time, but when I go into these rooms, you know, I've told you guys this before, I'm getting down to the point where I just start off with one question to anybody I'm talking to, whether it's people who are in Oneness Pentecostal, Church of Christ, which reminds me of a debate coming up next month, the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, Mormons, I'll ask questions. I'll say, what do you do to get your sins forgiven? That's the question I've been asking because I think that's the heart of the issue, and, in fact, yesterday, I went shopping, and on the way out, two more missionaries were coming in, and I talked to them for about 10 minutes. They were not used to someone having information and being able to quote stuff and do stuff, and after about 10 minutes, you know, they were polite, and I just said to them, look, you need the real God and the real Gospel because your sins aren't forgiven.

Even in Mormonism, you know, you're saved by grace through faith after all you can do, 2 Nephi 25, 23, and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it says in paragraph 2068 that you attain salvation through faith, baptism, and the observers of the commandments, and I was talking to, I think it was a Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox guy a couple nights ago, and I was getting to the same issue. That's what I do. That's what I do. Man, I got this cough. Sorry about that.

I should take a, I'll get a cough drop on the break, and so it was really bad, you know. I talked to these guys, and I actually asked this question, it was last night or night before, it was last night, I was talking to some guys last night, and I said, if you were to pray and ask Jesus, sort of Catholics, that's right, this is a Catholic guy, if you were to pray and ask Jesus to forgive you of all of your sins, you know, he has all authority, he's God in flesh, he says come to me, he forgives sins, if you were to ask him, would he? And the guy actually said no, and I'm like, wow, and he said no because you have to go to the church, and of course, this kind of segues into something else. I've been, someone said I need to write a book on this, but I'm not going to write a whole book, but I'm thinking about writing a pamphlet or some articles on the cult mind, and I found myself last night having a discussion with this guy, some other guys who were saying the same thing. I said, well, this is part of the cult mind, and they hadn't heard that phrase before. I said, the cult mind is that your church is the true church, and your church has the authority, and the cult mind just submits to whatever that church says. Whatever it says, that's just it, and so you have to believe whatever your church tells you, and I'm going into a really short version, but we had this interesting discussion, but I was just dumbfounded that if you ask Jesus to forgive you, you mean it. He won't do it.

Why? Because you've got to go through rituals in a true church. That's a perfect example of the cult mind. Let's get to Sean from Japan. Hey, Sean, did you call because I emailed you? Yes, that's part of it.

Okay. So I hope all that gets solved quickly, so please, we'll talk about that later, but I had an interesting experience with some Jehovah Witnesses that came to my door here in Japan, and I was very surprised because, you know, normally they don't come, but I wanted to share something with you and get your advice on this, too. I was actually late to church Sunday morning, and they come to my door, and they're like, you know, we want to tell you about the most popular book, the best-selling book ever of all time. You know, so I called them, man, Christian Science, and they're like, no, no, Jehovah's Witnesses, and as we were getting to the conversation, I said, you know what? Why did you come on this morning in particular? And then they said to me, oh, well, that's what our church tells us to do.

It says to always go on Sunday morning, and I replied to them right away. It's like, is that so you don't talk to Christians? And they were just absolutely dumbfounded. But I wanted to ask your advice on what is the best way to discuss with them.

Yeah. But I wanted to ask, is the best way to discuss with them in, because a lot of times I feel like I can get really heated, especially when people are saying, you know, when people deny the divinity of Christ, it really gets to the core of me. So how do we, what's the best way to speak with them in a loving, kind manner? But also they get to the point across that you're not actually worshiping Jesus, you're worshiping somebody else. That's hard, because what they're going to do is they're going to go to their New World Translation, which has been altered. And I was in Greece a couple of weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, and there are two Jehovah's Witnesses there.

And we got talking in English, broken English, enough to communicate. And I said, no, it doesn't say that in the Bible. And I said, let's show your Bible. And I forgot, I'm in Greece, and they open up their Greek Bible. I'm laughing, I go, I can read that, you know. And I looked at the verse, and it was even altered in their Greek.

The Greek version was altered. Oh, wow. So this is the problem with Jehovah's Witnesses. So what I resort to, as I was saying in the beginning of the show, one of the things I'll say is, are all of your sins forgiven right now? You know, and I say, I don't want anything bad to happen to you, but if you were to die right now, where would you go and why?

And that discussion I'm finding is getting right to the heart of things, and then I can try and weave certain conversations into it. And with the Jehovah's Witness, I would say, well, who's the one who forgives? Well, God, okay, and did he give authority to Jesus? Well, yes, he has all authority in heaven and earth right now. Then shouldn't you go to the one who has the authority and ask Jesus to forgive you? And this way, what you're doing is you're going against what they've been taught because they can't pray to Jesus, but you're showing in the Scripture it has the authority, and Jesus has, you know, in Matthew 28, 18, and then John 14, 14, ask me anything in my name and I will do it.

And so you can go to the Bible, their Bible, and you can use that and you can say, see, so can you go to him like he said? That's the thing I prepared for, and it's a pry bar on their foundation, you're cracking it, you know, you're lifting it up and moving it. So that's one of the things you could do because, you know, they're trained. I like that one. I'll give that a try next time.

Yeah, they're trained to, they're trained for basic common responses. I'm going to show you something. Watch this. I'm going to go to jw.org.

I hope you can stay on longer. And I'm going to go to John. This is something I do with the J-dubs sometimes. Go to John 10. I've got the New World Translation up on my computer, so I'm looking at it. And John 10.30, right? He says, I'm reading their Bible. I and the Father are one.

And you can ask him, can I look at something in the Bible, in your Bible, please? John 10.30, I and the Father are one. Once more the Jews lifted up stones to stone him. Jesus replied to them, I displayed to you many fine works from the Father.

For which of those are you stoning me? The Jews answered him, we are stoning you not for a fine work, but for blasphemy, even because you, although being a man, make yourself a god. It doesn't say a god, but that's not a bad thing. Jesus answered them, is it not written in your law? I said, you are gods. And you can stop there and say, so the Jews thought that Jesus was claiming to be God? And they'll go, yeah.

And he wasn't, right? And the Jewish J-dubs will say, that's correct. So you agree with the Jews, right?

You agree with the Jews that he's not God, right? And that shakes them up. It shakes them up.

Yeah, it does. So there's that. And I can show you another couple of things that you can do in their Bible that, you know, could be effective if you know, if you have them memorized and you know where to go. But if you want, I can show you more, no big deal.

So it's up to you. Yeah, I can just start with that first one. That's fantastic. And then we'll give that one a shot.

Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff there. Yeah, you know, I'm looking at their New World translation. It is so bad what they've done to the word of God. These people are going to burn in hell for their alteration of the word of God in their deception, following demonic teaching. I'm looking at Psalm 116, 4, and it says in the end debut, but upon the name of Jehovah, I proceeded to call. And it's not how it's rendered properly. And then if you go over to 1st Corinthians 1, come on, get over there. Come on.

This is what I'll do. This actually brings up another question with the end of Revelation where it says not to change a jot or tittle. And what are we to make of that when we have people who are earnestly trying to translate the Bible into a new language and make mistakes? Well, that's different. Making a mistake is different.

You know Japanese, you speak Japanese. So what if I'm learning Japanese and I tried translating a verse in Japanese and it turned out to be a heresy? But you can see what I'm trying to do. You know, God's not going to judge me for that. He's going to make a mistake. He's going to make a mistake.

It's unintentional. He's going to quickly say, you've got to fix this. Okay. And you would come to me and go, Matt, you can't write it that way because of this. And, okay, thank you.

But to do it on purpose because you know that certain verses support the deity of Christ and you alter them, that's judgment of God upon their hearts and minds. They're going to get judged. They're going to break you. And if you want to hold or not, it's up to you, Sean, because you're in Japan. I'll put you on hold. If you hang up, you hang up, if you're not, we'll talk to you on the other side of the break. Hey, folks, be right back after these messages.

If you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276. We'll be right back. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. I guess Sean from Japan is gone.

That's okay. I've talked to him off and on over the past, I don't know, two or three years. He's a good Christian guy living in Japan, speaks Japanese, and his wife is Japanese. He goes to an American, or not American, but, you know, a Japanese church, a Christian church. And we had some talk about me going over there to do some little bit of preaching and teaching and things like that.

They'd have translators, of course. I don't speak any Japanese. In fact, I've never even been to Japan. I'd like to go. I'd like to go there.

I think it'd be great to see it. I've been to, I don't know, I don't even count how many countries I've been to now. So I just added two more this year, went to Greece and Italy. As I've been saying to people, I talked to some Catholics last night, as I was saying. I told them, I said, look, the Vatican is incredibly impressive.

It really is. If any of you are just curious to know what's in the Vatican, you just go in there and say pictures of the Vatican, museum, art, statues. And you just walk down hallway after hallway after hallway of incredible things. And I was talking to the Catholics about this, and I was telling them, I said, look, it's hard to just say how great the art was. Tapestries, the tapestries were there, the statues, just the statues were incredible. I mean, you just can't believe what you're seeing. People carved this out of stone.

What? And I don't mean one or two. I mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Just magnificent carvings and statues and lying down and standing up and just incredible stuff. So I was talking to these Catholics about this, and I said, yeah, I've got to tell you. I said, we were counting wows per minute. That's how incredible it was. When you're driving the bus down through Greece, you'd go wow once an hour, once twice an hour.

But here it was three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten per minute in the Vatican. So I tell them about this. They were very proud about that. And I said, but I got a question, I said, you guys claim that your church has the authority of the apostles, right?

Right? And they said, yeah, it does, has the authority of the apostles. So they stand in the place of the apostles, right? Yeah. Did the apostles gather to themselves such riches?

But that's my question. Did they? Well, they didn't have the opportunity to do that because of, I said, yes, they did. Absolutely they did. They had opportunity for several decades, at least three decades after the death of Christ as miracles are going forth, people would give them money, they would give them stuff and they would use this money to travel and to go to other places and give to the poor. I said, they had opportunity.

So why didn't they? There's no recollection, there's no recounting in the Bible of the apostles gaining fine tapestries, statues, humongous buildings with gold and silver woven in their clothing. I said, your church is the true church that's from the apostles.

How come your true church, which is supposed to be from the apostles, doesn't behave like the apostles? Because what I see is pomp and majesty. Now, I didn't mention this to him, but years ago, my wife and I went to, oh, I just had it in the tip of my tongue, the Notre Dame in Paris, and there was this extra room we could go into and he paid a couple extra francs and we'd go in this room and I'm glad we did. The Notre Dame was incredible, I know it's burned, I haven't been there since then, but I wouldn't mind going back, but it was inside the Notre Dame, it's just magnificent. Now we went into this other room and I remember being impressed at how incredibly beautiful the silver work was and some of the gold and the tapestries and the gowns, the clothing they would wear that was woven with gold threads, I guess, it was behind glass, you couldn't see, you couldn't tell.

It was incredible. It was just incredible how much money the Catholic Church has gathered to itself. It seems to me that they're trusting in money rather than the grace of God, and they certainly don't trust the grace of God because in Catholicism, in order to earn your forgiveness of sins, you've got to go to the church and you have to get baptized, you've got to do the sacraments, you've got to take the mass, you've got to do various penance, you've got to do all these things. An organization is in control of your soul, your salvation, that's corruption, and one corruption leads to another, and so you have millions and billions of dollars of assets. I wonder, I'm going to type this in, how much money is the Roman Catholic Church worth? By the way, Steven, thanks for the $10 rant there and rumble, really appreciate it. I do appreciate it, thanks a lot, brother, appreciate that.

I know we had one yesterday and I missed it, so whoever that was, I will check it out and comment too. Okay, the Catholic Church's wealth is estimated to be at least $73 billion. It's difficult to calculate it exactly, but that's the estimation. The Vatican Bank, which held $5.2 billion in assets at the end of 2022, wow, uses money for a variety of purposes, including charitable causes, maintaining church buildings and art, and reflecting values. The church's economy is volatile and dependent on tourism, gold prices, and other factors.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vatican lost an estimated $100 million due to a 75% drop in ticket sales. Yeah, when they talk about that, I, yeah, so I was with a tour group and because of that, we were able to skip some lines. So you've probably seen the Mission Impossible thing where they go to the Vatican and big walls, and those walls are there. And we walk down one street and this line of people, hundreds of feet long, and we were told by the tour company, the leader, to just keep walking. And this was the line to get in the Vatican. And so we just kept walking and walking and we got up to a different line because apparently you can get groups of people in and you can arrange this ahead of time, get reservations, and that's what was done. And so the line then was only 10 or 15 minutes to get in. And then once we got in, we had to go through detectors, metal detectors and things like that.

You walk into this big area, then you had to walk up some stairs and they did get a headset and stuff that only, it's from there. And we were told by the tour guide that when you walk into the Vatican, you're no longer in Italy. It's not Italian soil. It's Vatican soil.

It's the smallest country in the world. Now they used, not Leary because that was out of Greece, that was out of Turkey, Leary. It was euros, man, I'm telling you, I'm tired. And so line after line and you had to weave your way through people and they had a humongous escalator to get you up two or three stories and it was just packed. You make a lot of money through tourists, a lot. The Vatican, yeah, the Catholic Church, is it the true church?

No, not to fault the church. Hey, there's the music, bottom of the hour, if you want to call me, 877-207-2276, be right back. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276, here's Matt Slick. All right, everyone, welcome back to the show and I want to give thanks to Miles from Nowhere.

He did a rant yesterday on Rumble, I forgot. I didn't see it, so I couldn't say anything, but hey, thanks Miles from Nowhere. I believe he's an atheist too and he's really a nice atheist too, we have good conversations. You know, we got a call coming in from Dayton, Ohio here, but I was doing a little bit of research at the Mormon Church, it's worth $265 billion, that's what one of the estimates is, $265 billion. No wonder the Mormon Church is trying to make itself look good and make sure its followers pay money in tithes, so they get the temples, because you've got to pay money in the Mormon Church.

Pay a full 10% tithe of your income to the church so you can go to the temple, because otherwise you're not worthy to go to the temple until you pay the money. Yeah, that's bad news. Let's get to Charles from Dayton, Ohio, Charles, welcome, you're on the air. Hi. I had a question about myself and then I got one about my wife and I guess I should probably, I don't know, I'm really concerned about her, I know she makes a confession of faith and she really seems to believe and trust in the Lord, but she never reads the Bible on her own or she just doesn't seem to, she'll watch TV a lot, and she doesn't seem to want to watch any of the ministry programs or anything, and I don't know, it just bothers me and I think she's sweet and I believe that she's safe, but at the same time I get really concerned because she's been shut in from going to church since COVID and she's got COPD and that's not her fault, but I just, I don't know, it bothers me.

Okay. Well, I have a suggestion for you then, one of the things you don't want to do is to force anything on her, you don't want to do that. So let me ask you, do you pray with her regularly, do you do that? Yeah, now she will, she'll let me read the Bible to her and pray with her last thing at night, and there's been a few times that she's let me do that earlier in the evening even if there was, the time was right. Well, what I would do is if I were you, I would make the suggestion, try and get into the habit, hold on, what I would try and do with you, what I would try and get you to do with her is to on a nightly basis make it as regular as you can, just pray with her, pray for her body, her health at night and you know, put your hand on her shoulder or hold her hand, whatever it is, you know, and you pray, it's what I do for my wife every night, almost every night, some nights, we're too tired or she goes to bed before me, she's asleep but you know, we do this on a regular basis, we pray probably 95% of the time each day, each night. That's one thing you could do and I recommend you do that. Also here's something to think about is you might have a daily verse that you share with her where you just read something out of the scriptures and you just say, here's this verse, I think it's good for today and it means this and that, you don't go long, 30 seconds and that's it, you're done and just see how she reacts to that, if she has any inclination to that and you could even ask her after a while, you know, you want to pray and you have a verse that maybe you got one I could research and maybe you got to find something that you know, might be tough and let me know about it and just tell her, you say, you'll do research on something, provide opportunities and of course you pray for her, even when you're not with her but you pray for her that God would open her heart and her mind, okay? Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, thank you and the other one, if you got time.

Sure, go ahead. If you have a besetting sin that seems like you just can't beat it and you keep praying about it and asking people to pray for you and just keep asking the Lord to help and maybe one day you make a little bit of progress and then 80% of the time or more you don't and after, you know, after a few years, what do you do? What you do is you continually go to the cross. The validity of the sacrifice of Christ is not dependent on your ability to be successfully repentant in sins.

The validity of the cross is what Jesus did when he died 2,000 years ago. So you have to understand that Christ will not reject you. That there are sins that you have struggled with and you fall into.

We all have those, all of us, I do too. I've got sins, it's like I wish my attitude was better here, I wish this wasn't there, various things and what you do is you realize that you are a sinner, that you are struggling against sin and against the strength of your flesh and you always go back to the cross no matter what. Don't let yourself not go to the cross after you've failed and even in your hypocrisy, your intention of your heart, all of this which is evil, you lay it all before God.

He already knows your heart and he already saved you from 2,000 years ago, he bore your sin in his body in the cross and eternity ago, he chose you for salvation. So you've got to realize that in the here and now of our sins, in the failures that we have, that we have to have the confidence to know that Christ will ever reject us. And we need to ask God to convict us of our sin so that for his glory we can resist it and that we can have victory over it. And if we never have victory over it, we always need to go to the cross because we always need to rely on what Christ has done and in that you glorify God as well because you're admitting as Paul did in Romans 7, 18-25, the things I want to do I don't do, the things I shouldn't do I do. Who will deliver me from this body of death? He was frustrated at the things that he wanted to get rid of and he failed but he would always say praise be to God. He is the one, in Christ, he's the one who delivers and that's what your attitude has to be. You have to always go to the cross even beyond your ability to understand, even beyond your ability to figure out how is it that he could continue to forgive you so many times over the same issues. Because look, he says, wretched man that I am who will set me free from the body of this death and what that meant in that culture. But Paul was talking about one of the ways of being executed was a corpse, human corpse would be tied to you, chained to you in a jail cell and its decay would become yours. Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord so that on the one hand I, with my mind and serving the law of God with the other, my flesh, but he immediately says thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

That's where you have to look. So I know that you have a struggle. Continue to fight it because the fighting of that sin glorifies God. If and when you fail you go to the cross again and you ask him to convict you, you ask him to strengthen you and you go forward and you repeat the process as long as you're alive until he takes you home. Not that we want to sin, not that I'm saying it's okay to sin, but we have to understand the blood of Christ is greater than it and you have to rely on that, okay? Yeah, yeah. And what if you really have a fear of being chastened because you keep failing?

Well, welcome to the club. We deserve to be chastened. And the chastening sometimes is a natural to prayer. Sometimes what it takes inside of our hard hearts and sometimes it takes a discipline of the chastening for us to learn, but you think he would do that to harm you or to improve you. So welcome the chastening if it comes and give glory to him during it if it comes.

And in the meantime you break your heart open to him, confess your sin and confess your bondage to it that you don't want it. And you always must rely on what Jesus did on that cross. Always.

Never turn away from it. Okay, brother? Yeah.

Yeah, brother. Thank you very much. God bless you. God bless you, man.

God bless you. All right. Hey, folks.

We have wide open lines. If you want to give me a call in the last segment of the hour, 877-207-2276. We'll be right back. It's Matt Slick live taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. All right, everybody.

Welcome back to the show. If you want, you can give me a call. It's easy to do, 877-207-2276. You can also email me, and that's easy to do as well. Just direct your email to info at karm.org, info at karm.org.

And in subject line, radio comment, radio question, either one of those, and we can get to them. All right. All right.

All right. Let's get to Patrick from Charlotte, North Carolina. Patrick, welcome. What do you got on the air? Hello, Matt. Thanks for taking my call. You're welcome. Sure.

So what do you got? Mark 3.13. Okay. Is that Jesus choosing the 12 apostles? No, it's verse 14. I mean, I'm kind of saying it tongue in cheek here, but...

It's on the mountainside? Yeah. In the next verse is when he says he appointed the 12. In verse 13, he went up to the mountain and summoned those whom he himself wanted, and they came to him, and he appointed 12 so that they would be with him and that he could send them out to preach. Right. So when he said he summoned the ones he wanted and they came to him, he was choosing the 12 apostles. That's one logical possibility, or it could also be that out of the group that he summoned, out of them he chose 12. Okay.

Okay. My question is, is in John 6.37, all the Father gives me will come to me. That's in a similar wording as in Mark 3.13. I believe that in John 6.37, was he then choosing the 12 apostles also? No, it doesn't work.

I've heard this before. It doesn't work because it says, all that the Father gives me will come to me, and he who comes to me will certainly not cast out. Who's the all who come to him? Well, we know what he's talking about because he says the will of the Father is that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in him will be saved. That's just three verses later.

That's what he's talking about, everybody, not just the 12. Well then, my question to you is, how did you come to Jesus? Jesus, how do you describe this? Not Jesus, you. How did you come to Jesus? Yeah, I went to a church just to check out a little bit about Jesus.

Some friends invited me. I wasn't all that interested, but I went and then got tricked to walk up forward to receive Christ. I wasn't really interested in that either, and I just started praying, give it a shot, see how Jesus was, and then all I can tell you is the Holy Spirit himself came over me with such power that I instantly threw my face to the ground and moaned and groaned and almost yelled out my agonizing tears of repentance.

Right, I've heard your testimony before. What I'm going to tell you is, in Mark 3.13, Jesus was on a mountainside. He summoned the ones he wanted and they came to him. That was back with Jesus on earth. The 12 apostles got up and walked over to him on the mountainside. Wouldn't that make sense?

You have to look at the context of each place. You can't do what you frequently do, which is misapply the word of God, because you believe, if I remember correctly, that you think baptism is crying tears, right? Isn't that correct? Right, and that's what happened to you at your born-again experience documented in your testimony on the internet. But the point is, is that when all the Father gives me will come to me in Mark 3.13, that's Jesus choosing the 12 apostles, they got up and walked over to him.

That's what happened back then. That's why all the Father gives you will come to me. In Mark 3.13, it's about choosing the disciples, and John 6.37, it's not, okay? Yeah, but like you said, in Mark 3.14, it mentions he chose the 12 apostles. He already had apostles before John 6. No, that's when he chose them, because this was before, this was the beginning of his ministry.

Mm-hmm. That's what that's all about. So, no, that's not the beginning of his ministry. John 2 is when he did his first miracles, okay? Yeah, his ministry started after John baptized him, but the point is, is when, you know.

So, hold on a sec, hold on a sec, hold on a sec, hold on a sec, hold on a sec, hold on a sec. In John 6.8, one of his disciples, Andrew Simon Peter's brother, said to him, so their disciples are already chosen by Jesus in John 6. Then later, John 7, all the Father give me will come to me. He's already chosen his disciples.

So you're just simply wrong. Well, again, I'm going to ask you, so you came to Jesus at a church when you walked up front, right? That's when you came to Jesus. It happened after I walked up front, but yeah.

Yeah, but, and here, okay, let's. He came to me. On your testimony, you did cry tears, right, the day you were saved. Yeah, but that's not baptism. You understand that living water, in John 4.10, when Jesus said, if you knew the gift of God, you would have asked me for a drink, and I would have given you living water. Do you understand that when you were crying that day, you were drinking the living water?

You are crazy. You don't have all your paws in a litter box. No, you lost your foundation. You don't have. You have lost your foundation. Hold on, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, put you on hold. I know who this guy is, ladies and gentlemen.

This guy couldn't argue his weight of a wet paper bag kind of a thing. He doesn't have all his paws in a litter box, his ratchet set doesn't have a socket. All that kind of stuff I love saying, he doesn't know what he's talking about, and when you refute him, which I've done many times, he ignores the reputation and goes on to pre-terracy.

He's entertaining, and maybe we'll do this for a little bit more if we can get him back on. I put him on hold, and notice what's happening. It's part of the cult mind. They don't listen.

They just start teaching and telling you. That's what it is, and they over talk. It's bad.

Let's get rid of them. So anyway, it's very unfortunate that this poor guy would say that crying is what baptism is. Obviously, it's not the case, and he would take my testimony and then misapply it, misuse it, and commit blasphemies, not only in that, but other areas.

He's an interesting person because he's crazy. Seriously, there's some real problems there, and his ability to understand scripture is just basically not there. As I just proved to him, this is typical of the cult mind. When he said that all the Father gives me will come to me is in reference to Mark 3.13, when Jesus went to the mountain to choose his disciples. Yet in John 6.37, when he says all the Father, right there, I went to John 6.8, and he's already talking about his disciples that he already has right there.

So he's already chosen them before John 6.37, so that's the proof that his understanding of John 6.37 is wrong. And if you will remember the conversation, he dismissed it and went on to just teach more heresy, more error. So this is an example of the cult mind. The cult mind is not only in religion, but it can be in secular realms as well. Picture an evolutionist who was absolutely convinced that evolution, macroevolution, evolved from lower primates, hominid ancestors, et cetera, et cetera. And you present counter information to them, like the problems with eohippus, the ancestor of the horse, the problem with hominid ancestors, the problem with genetics, things like this.

They don't care. In the cult mind, it doesn't matter. They have a worldview that is absolutely true, and no matter what you say, if the fact contradicts the worldview, the fact is wrong.

If an interpretation contradicts the worldview, the interpretation is wrong. This is part of the cult mind. Breaking out of that is really difficult. It takes often years for someone to come out of that. And what has to happen is a long series of small things that cause such a person to doubt their worldview, and it's really difficult for people like that. Another thing that can happen, and sometimes happen, is a trauma, a severe trauma, causes them to doubt their worldview and what they're putting all their faith or hope in.

And so with that, they can sometimes come out. But it's really difficult, and I'm really intrigued by it. I always have been. The cult mind. People might say, well, Matt, you have a cult mind.

Maybe I do. But if I do, explain to me how I do, and would you agree with me that the scriptures are the place we need to go to in order to expose the cult mind because it comes from God, the scriptures do? Yes.

Okay, great. Then let's go to the word of God and let's look. And what I find is that in the cult mind, sometimes they will go to the word of God, but they interpret it in light of their worldview again. So for example, when people say to me, baptism is necessary for salvation, and I ask them, I say, okay, it's necessary? Yes. Okay, I'll ask them, are we justified by faith?

Yes. Are we justified by faith when we have faith? Well, that's a tough question for them. Because if you have a cult mind, you can't agree that justification is by faith when you have faith. It has to be by faith when you get baptized. So to go on with this example, and they'll say that, no, you're justified by faith when you get baptized.

And it's a clever kind of a trick. And so I say, okay, so we're justified by faith when we get baptized. So we're not justified by faith when we have faith.

Is that what you're saying? And then what they're doing is always trying to add works to faith and have both be the way they work things out, because it's part of the cult mind. And you've got to be thinking about this, because are you guilty of this too? And myself, are we guilty of this kind of thing where our attitudes are unassailable and our worldview is simply correct?

I see this on the side of the left, particularly the whiners who, well, Trump won the election and people are crying, they can't believe it, they're attacking the people who voted. It's sad and it's kind of scary to see this cult mind. And sometimes in a cult mind what will happen is the more you get entrenched in a cult mind, the more dangerous you can become. That's not an understatement, because people who are given over to cult thinking, particularly if the leaders, whoever that might be, like a liberal media that says that the others are unworthy of respect, the people who don't agree with you are unworthy of respect and that their words to you are violence. So if you say something like, I disagree with you, I don't think your opinion is correct, that's violence. And then you're allowed to respond with real violence, because this is the cult mind.

This is the kind of thing that goes on, and I've seen it on the left, sometimes on the right as well, but not as much. The cult mind is something that is a worldview that filters all facts, all reality, all truths through that perspective. And you can't assail it, you're not allowed to, because if you do, then you're evil.

That's brainwashing, and it does take a lot for someone to come out of that kind of cult mindset. And it's there, it's there. So anyway, there you go. Hey, we're out of time. The music is going to be starting, and by His grace, we're back on the air tomorrow. You can call me then.

We have nobody waiting right now, of course. And hopefully, if you have a comment or a question, save it for tomorrow, and we can blab them. May the Lord bless you. Have a great evening, everyone. Talk to you later. God bless. We'll see you next time.