Hi, this is Robert Jefferson. Welcome to this bonus episode of the Pathway to Victory podcast. I recently hosted a special Ask the Pastor question and answer session in which I had the opportunity to address questions from ministry friends and partners. Today I'm bringing you the recording of that exclusive event so that you can hear my answers to questions posed by the audience. My friend and the executive director of Pathway to Victory, Michael Clark, served as the moderator for this session. In the first of two episodes, I'll tackle a wide range of topics ranging from the role of the Holy Spirit to some personal stories including how Billy Graham's influence impacted my own family and ministry. If you find today's discussion helpful, I encourage you to share this episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it as well. The podcast is one of the easiest ways for you to share our ministry with others. So join me for this special edition of Ask the Pastor here on the Pathway to Victory podcast. In Matthew chapter 7 verses 7 and 8, we read, Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you for whoever asks receives. So welcome to Ask the Pastor.
If you would help me out with just one thing before we begin, has anyone here ever been to a live studio taping of a television show? Dr. Jeffress, you have your hand up. That's your first question.
Which ones? Dr. Jeffress That's another story. I was a banana on Let's Make a Deal with Monty Hall, a full-grown banana.
And I was the four-day champion on Card Sharks on CBS television back in the day. Dr. Darrell Bock Not one, but two game shows, our pastor. I'm going to count to three, and I want you all to say at the same time, like you hear in a game show audience, Ask the Pastor. Can we do that?
And then you can clap and make some noise, okay? Okay, on the count of three, Ask the Pastor. One, two, three. All right, all right. We're going to do it just one last time, and I'm going to take a bit of, I'm going to say it quickly so I can break into it. On the count of three, Ask the Pastor. One, two, three. All right. Dr. Jeffress, I think we're going to- Dr. Jeffress I'm all excited now.
That's going to be great. Dr. Darrell Bock Now, I have gone through these questions, and there's some really great ones, and they span some personal questions. They want to know about the church.
They want to know about the ministry. They've got a lot of Bible questions, so if you're ready, I'm going to get right into it. Dr. Jeffress Go for it.
Dr. Darrell Bock Thought the first one would be nice and easy for you. Let's ease into this. Dr. Jeffress, can you please give a brief synopsis of the book of Revelation? I'm not kidding. Dr. Jeffress And when is supper? We might make it by six o'clock. Honestly, I can give you a brief synopsis.
I can do it in 30 seconds. And the reason I can do it is Jesus gave it in Revelation 1. He appeared to John on the Isle of Patmos, and he said to John, basically, get a pen and a piece of papyrus and write this down.
I want you to write down, first of all, the things which you have seen. And that's what chapter 1 is. John saw the glorified Christ. Secondly, Jesus said in Revelation 1.19, I want you to write the things that are. That's the condition of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3. And finally, he said, write down the things which will come, the future. And that's Revelation 4 through 22. So that's the threefold summary, the things you have seen, the things which are, and things to come.
That's the book of Revelation. Dr. Darrell Bock I didn't think that could be done. Now, I can't imagine any other scenario, but the question is, Dr. Jeffress, if you had not become a pastor, what other profession might you have pursued? Dr. Jeffress From the time I was almost born until the time I was, and it's actually 15, I thought I knew what I was going to do. I was going to be an executive producer of television programs. Ever since I was a little boy, I was fascinated by television, not what happened in front, but behind the scenes, the business of it, the strategizing of it. In fact, when my parents would drop me off at the Dallas Public Library before church on Wednesday nights to do my homework, instead of doing my homework, I went to the periodical section and I read every broadcasting magazine I could and Forbes magazine for the business angle.
So I was all set to do that. And when I was 15, I was at a youth camp. I see some people from Cedar Hill, Texas who are here. It was in Cedar Hill, Texas. And it was at the noon hour. The preacher had finished preaching.
I can't even remember what he was talking about. But God was dealing with me and they dismissed everybody to go to lunch. And I was walking from the tabernacle to the cafeteria when God spoke to me and said, you're going to be a pastor. And people say, was it an audible voice? I tell them it was louder than that. I mean, it was unmistakably God's voice.
And so I went home. I remember I told my dad first and then my mom, and they both said the same thing. They said, Robert, we've known since you were born, this was God's plan for you.
But we never said anything about it because we wanted to make sure it was God calling you and not us. The third person I went to see to tell was my pastor, Dr. W. A. Criswell, who pastored our church for 50 years. And I told him what God had said to me. He said, Robert, I want you to spend the summer working in every area of the church, the missions area, the children's area.
He said, I want you to learn every square inch of this place because one day it's going to be yours. And he had me kneel down with him. And he prayed for me when I was 15 that God would prepare me to be the pastor of the church. So that was my call to ministry. Well, we're all thankful that you answered that call, pastor. Absolutely.
A question here from another passenger. When do we receive the Holy Spirit? The Bible is very clear about that. 1 Corinthians 12, 13.
Paul was writing to the Corinthians. He said, for with one spirit we were all baptized into one body. The baptism with the Holy Spirit isn't a spiritual upgrade that you get after you become a Christian for paying a little bit more, working a little harder.
He's part of the basic package. He is the one who connects us with the body of Christ. Is there any second baptism with the Spirit? No, we have all of the Holy Spirit the moment we are saved. The question is not, do we have all of the Spirit?
The question is, does the Spirit have all of us? And that's why there's no commandment in the Bible to be baptized with the Spirit. But there is a command to be filled with the Holy Spirit. That word fill means to control. It was a word in Greek that was used, plethora.
It was used to describe the sail of a ship that is filled with wind, and that wind guides the ship in the direction it should go. In the same way, we are to allow the Spirit to have control of every area of our life. And there are things, in fact, I think we have a series on Pathway to Victory right now on, or it's coming up soon, called Unleashed, about experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit. Just like one of those electric plants where the water flows down and moves the turbines, there are four channels that the Holy Spirit flows into our life through and produces power through being connected to the Word of God, that's the Bible, through prayer with God, talking to God, through church, the body of Christ, and finally through obedience, quench not the Holy Spirit of God. And when we allow God to have every area of our life, we experience the filling, the power of the Holy Spirit.
You're known not just for teaching the Bible, but helping us apply the Bible. Here's a tough one. These are from parents. Dr. Jeffress, how do we rescue our 31-year-old queer, trans, polyamorous, polyamorous daughter from the evil one? What should we be praying for, and how can we rescue her?
Well, that's a question you can feel the pain behind it. There is nothing more painful than seeing your children or grandchildren not walking with the Lord, especially if they have a history of faithfulness, but then turn away. Here's what I would say to any parent in that situation. Don't hesitate to, in love, speak the truth. Speak the truth in love. But whatever you do, keep the communications open with your child.
It is a horrible mistake to ever turn your back on your child. People think or fool themselves into thinking they're being spiritual. Well, we shouldn't associate with sinners. Well, these aren't just sinners. These are your own children that God gave you. I think it's important to keep that communication line open. Let your child know that although you don't agree with what they're doing, you still love them. Because I've seen it happen so many times. Something happens in that child's life to make them want to turn back to God.
And they need to know they can come to you. I think about the prodigal son. You know, the father every morning got up and scanned the horizon to see any sign of his son who was living in the far country. And one day he looked on the horizon, saw his son walking toward him.
The son was walking, but the father ran toward him and embraced him. And that's a picture of what God does with us. God is working. He's longing.
He's praying for our return home. And we ought to do that with our children. So pray for them.
Love them. Speak the truth in love. But always keep those communication lines open. Related, another difficult question really on gender dysphoria. Dr. Jeffress, if a person accepts Christ under their given name at birth, but later in life decides that God made them the wrong sex, so they change their name, they make some body alterations, what's God going to do?
Accept them with both names? Dr. Jeffress Well, let's be clear. When people say, well, the Bible has nothing to say about the transgender issue, how mistaken somebody is to say that. In Matthew 19, Jesus is very clear, it is God who makes them male and female. God is the one who determines our sex.
And to try to change that most basic thing about us is an act of defiance, a rebellion against God. I've got an older daughter, Julia, who's a licensed professional counselor. And she says, gender dysphoria needs to be treated compassionately, but it needs to be treated. Treated compassionately, it's a sickness. Up until recently, I mean, it was considered in the world of psychology and psychiatry an illness, dysphoria.
It was abnormal. You know, if your child came home and told you, Dad, I think I'm a kumquat, you wouldn't go out and put it in the field somewhere and plan it and said, honey, let me help you grow as a kumquat. You'd take your child to the psychiatrist. What's the same thing with gender dysphoria? It is a mental, emotional illness that needs to be treated with compassion. We don't need to hate people who are mentally disturbed. We need to treat them with compassion, but they do need to be treated.
You're not doing anybody, you're not doing that child a favor by compounding their confusion. You need to name it for what it is. A question really civically related. Dr. Jeffress, do you think our government will ever take away the tax exemption of churches? Well, that is an interesting question.
Let me check my time here. There's a history behind that question. Back, I think it was the year 2000, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because of their racial prejudice. Now, what Bob Jones did and believed was horrific. It was terrible. It was wrong.
They were absolutely wrong. But what was interesting is the Supreme Court upheld, I think, an eight-nothing decision, the right of the government to take away their tax-exempt status for acting, and this is a paraphrase, in a way that is contrary to the purposes of government. Government has said there's to be no discrimination, the Civil Rights Act, and you can't discriminate on the basis of race. And tax exemption, they say, is the same thing as government giving money to an institution, just because they don't tax you. They say that's government supporting. But they said government can't support something like that. It doesn't take much imagination to see how the government could say the same thing to a church that discriminates not on the basis of race, but discriminates on the basis of sexual preferences. If you don't recognize same-sex marriages, which now the Supreme Court has recognized, you're acting in a way contrary to the purposes of the state.
So it is very easy to see how that's happening, and in fact, it is happening. We, as you know, we have not made a big deal about this at First Baptist Dallas, hadn't publicized it, but it's starting to get out. We were the subject of an Internal Revenue Service examination that went more than two years and cost our church hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, they're a pagan organization that tries to remove the Ten Commandments and everything from schools and says, we'll sue you and causes them to back down.
Freedom From Religion Foundation, they lodged a complaint with the IRS for two reasons. They said that we had invited Mike Pence, who at the time was the sitting vice president of the United States, to come and speak at our patriotic summit celebration. Mike had nothing to say political. We followed the book on what you do when you have a political figure there, never said a word about the election, and all he did was share his Christian testimony for the first time in public of how he came to faith in Christ. Well, they objected to that. And then secondly, they objected to my personal endorsement of President Trump. Our church has a policy of not endorsing candidates.
We never have. But my personal endorsement of President Trump on Lou Dobbs and other programs, well, the IRS got this complaint. They did nothing about it for 18 months until Trump was out of office. And as soon as Joe Biden came into office, the IRS moved into action and they decided they were going to make First Baptist Dallas a test case of the Johnson Amendment. Now, understand, three days before the 2020 election, on Sunday before that Tuesday, Joe Biden had gone to an African American church in Philadelphia, campaigned and asked people to vote for him with a campaign banner behind him in the church.
The pastor stood up and said, go vote for this man. Do you think the IRS cared about that? Didn't do one thing about it, but they were going to come after First Baptist Church Dallas.
So anyway, they were going to make us a test case. We, a senator, well-known, went to the commissioner of the IRS who was unaware of it. He looked into it, and they found that a rogue group of agents at the mid-level, all of whom were Biden-Harris supporters on social media, they had launched this effort on their own to see if they could bring down our church and make other conservative churches fearful of speaking out on issues.
It got shut down immediately, and that was the end of it, after two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, about six of us were at a table having dinner with President Trump, and somebody said, Robert, tell President Trump what happened to your church. So I told him the brief synopsis, and he listened intently. He said, I had no idea that was going on. Why didn't you tell me? He said, when I came to visit your church during that time, I said to my staff, something's wrong with Robert. He's burdened about something.
Why didn't you tell me? And several others spoke up about their experience, and he asked me to send all of the material and all of the documentation to him and his staff, and they were going to look at it and see what could be done to make sure this never happens to another church in America. So the good's going to come out of this. But people — and let me just close with this — people say, well, what's the big deal? Tax-exempt status? So what if you don't get to deduct a contribution?
What's the big deal? That's hardly persecution. What people don't realize is if you lose your tax-exempt status, you lose your tax exemption from property taxes. Every church in America will have to pay property taxes. You say, well, they ought to. Well, hospitals don't.
Colleges don't. It's all long been recognized that churches perform a unique aid to society. The government has absolutely no business controlling what happens in the pulpit of a church.
They have no business doing that. And we need to say no more. Dr. Jeffress, you mentioned a couple of names I'm going to ask you to go back to, because one of them in particular came up again and again and again and again and again, and that's President Trump. People want to know, what's he really like? What's it like to be in the Oval Office?
How would you describe his faith? Tell us about President Trump. I've known President Trump now for 10 years, and he's told the story off into different groups about how we got to know each other. He and Melania were in New York and were watching Fox News one night, and I was on a program. And he said to Melania that this is his version of the story. He said, I said to Melania, who the hell is that guy? He said, look at his mouth, how fast it moves.
It's like a machine gun. And I don't ever want that machine gun used against me, so I'm going to reach out to him. And so he liked what I said. I said at the time that he may not be the best Christian in the world, but he's the best leader who can turn us away from that downward trajectory our country's on.
And so through the years he has kind of enjoyed embellishing that. And then Robert said, Trump is a lousy Christian, but he's a – I said, I didn't ever say you were a lousy Christian. But we became fast friends. I went to Trump Tower, and we began a friendship that has spanned the last 10 years, and I'll tell you just two things about President Trump. He is one of the smartest, if not the smartest person I've ever met. You know, people have this idea, his enemies, that he's some type of moron.
Look, you don't become a billionaire and president of the United States twice by being a moron. He is extremely intelligent, and he's also one of the funniest people I've ever been around. I mean, I know somebody had a question about Lou Dobbs, who's my dear friend, and sometime we were in the Oval Office, the president and I, he said, hey, let's call up Lou Dobbs. So it puts Lou on the speakerphone and said, Lou, this is your favorite president. Let me ask you, what do you think about Robert Jeffress? And Lou said, well, Mr. President, I like Robert. Well, good. He's seated right here by me.
He's got a great sense of humor. Cremation. People want to know about cremation. Yeah, look, it doesn't make any difference. I mean, we're all turning back to dust, these old bodies. Cremation just accelerates the process. That's all that happens. Doesn't confuse God at all. He knows where all the parts are. And if we're going to drag these bodies into heaven, we might be in trouble, but God's going to give us a brand new body.
So it doesn't make any difference. Pastor, as we wind down this first session, final question for that is really in and around the person of Billy Graham, his legacy, maybe beginning with your mom and dad, his history with First Baptist Dallas. Tell us your Billy Graham perspective. Well, Billy Graham and my parents are actually in First Baptist Dallas, all intertwined with one another. I was at the Billy Graham Library speaking last week, right before I came on to this trip. And, you know, there's never been a greater evangelist in history, except for the Apostle Paul than Billy Graham. It's just amazing how many millions of people had their lives transformed through the preaching of Billy Graham. My dad was saved at the end of World War II through the witness of an Assembly of God chaplain. And my dad said to the chaplain that he was going to move to Dallas to go to SMU and wondered where the best church in Dallas was to go to.
And the Assembly of God chaplain said, well, there's only one church to go to if you want to hear the Bible, and that's First Baptist Church of Dallas. So my dad started coming to First Dallas. He met my mom at SMU. They were both freshmen. He was 20. My mom was 15.
I think you get arrested for stuff like that now. But it was a different culture back then. And they started dating.
They got married. My mom was not a Christian. She had grown up in a mainline denomination that didn't preach the gospel. And she wasn't saved. And so my dad did everything he could to witness to her. And he tried to get her to come to First Baptist Dallas.
She would have no part of it. She didn't care for Dr. Criswell, didn't like a lot of things. But the real problem was she wasn't saved. Well, it was the summer of 1953, and Billy Graham came to Dallas to lead a crusade at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
This is 1953, June of 1953. And that week, the last week of the crusade, he announced that he would be at the First Baptist Church of Dallas the following Sunday to preach. And so my dad said, would you like to come to First Baptist Church? My mom became a Christian at the Cotton Bowl. And right after she became a Christian, they announced that Billy Graham would be at First Baptist Dallas.
So she said, okay, I'll go. And she sat up in the balcony with my dad of our old worship center. Billy Graham preached that Sunday morning, June 28, 1953. He preached. And then after he finished preaching, he moved out from behind the pulpit, came to the front, shook Dr. Criswell's hand and said he would like to join the First Baptist Church of Dallas. And Billy Graham joined our church that day. He wanted to be in a church, even though it was far away from North Carolina in his home, he wanted to be in a church that believed the Bible, that was built on the Bible. So he joined the church that day.
My mom watched that and said to my dad, well, if it's good enough for Billy Graham, it's good enough for me. And that day, my mother joined the First Baptist Church of Dallas. And in many ways, the reason I grew up in a Christian home is because of Billy Graham's witness. And oddly, the reason I became pastor of First Baptist Dallas is due to Billy Graham, because our family started its involvement with that church. I grew up there, was saved, worked there on the staff and so forth. So anyway, I was telling this story at the Billy Graham Center last week. They already knew the story.
And so they presented me with a special gift. And it was the handwritten sermon notes of Billy Graham from that date in 1953, June 28. And he went on to preach that night at the Cotton Bowl for 75,000 people. At that time, it was the largest group of Christians who had ever met together. And he was preaching on the final judgment.
And he titled it for his Texas audience, The Last Roundup. And that's what it says at the top of his sermon notes. So the interesting thing about that is Billy Graham remained a member of First Baptist Dallas for 54 years. But when I was pastor, he wrote me the nicest letter, recounted the history and said, I'm in my final chapter, and I probably ought to be a member of a church close to home.
And so I always tell people I have the distinction in history of being the only pastor in America who could say, I ran off Billy Graham from our church. He's been a great friend and a great witness. You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we're so glad you're here.
Be sure to listen to part two of this exclusive podcast tomorrow as Dr. Jeffress provides biblical answers to your questions. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. And right now your ministry gift will be matched and therefore doubled in impact, thanks to the salt and light matching challenge. Take advantage of this opportunity to double your impact before the deadline on July 6th. To give toward the matching challenge, go to ptv.org slash donate or follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.
