Speaker Series highlights on current events and issues of the faith. That is a topic we'll discuss today on the Christian Worldview Radio program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host, and our website is thechristianworldview.org. It was a beautiful fall evening at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota for our recent speaker series event featuring Travis Allen, pastor of Grace Church in Greeley, Colorado, and former managing director of Grace to You and member of the U. S.
Navy SEAL teams. One hundred and thirty five attendees gathered at the farm for a time of fellowship and dinner on the lawn beside the stone farmhouse, followed by dessert and coffee. Then, as the sun made its downward arc over the rural landscape, we all gathered outside the North Barn for an interview with Travis about current events and issues of the faith. It was a blessed time. We weren't able to fit the entire interview with Travis into today's program, but you will hear most of it.
So let's get straight to the interview with Travis Allen at our recent Speaker Series event. Welcome to the Christian Worldview Radio Program. Thank you for being here tonight. We are coming to you from Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota, the site of the Overcomer Course for Young Adults, which is held right in this building. We've had wonderful times, and thank you all for coming.
Pastor Travis Allen, we are so grateful that you are with us here in Minnesota.
Someone was saying during dinner that was way back in 2016, 10 years ago already. Hard to believe. That you were the first inaugural featured speaker at the Christian Review Conference. For those of you who don't know, Travis, I thought the first thing I could ask you is a question I often ask first time guests in the program, is just tell us briefly about your background, how God brought you to saving faith, and who have been some of the key influences in your life. First of all, thank you everyone for coming out.
This is really a well-attended event and really grateful to meet some new friends. Thank you, David and Brody, for inviting us. It's a joy to have your friendship. This has been a real sweet benediction and gift from the Lord to know you and Brody and your family and to be invited into your family as well here on the Christian Worldview. I also really appreciate how you do ask, usually it's first-time guests, but sometimes if they haven't been on for a while, you'll ask them to share the gospel or to share about their own experience with the gospel.
I really appreciate that you do that because we don't want to make those assumptions that somebody knows the gospel just because they're being invited onto a program.
So it's really great that you do that. It gives a lot of people another way to share the gospel by hearing it over and over. I was raised in a Christian home and very faithful Christian parents, conservative, evangelical, Christian family, very dear parents, very faithful. But I was not a believer. I was not a Christian.
And I knew that when I was kind of a young guy in like fifth grade, that I didn't. Believe. But I went through, you know, went to all the church events and went to camps and went through all the scripture memorization, kind of like Hawana. We had a Boys Brigade and Christian Service Brigade. Went through all those things and learned a lot of Bible because I was kind of forced to, but just it was not in my heart.
I was not regenerate, wasn't converted. If you don't worship God, if you don't worship God in Christ, you're going to find something else to worship. And so the form of idolatry that appealed to me as a young guy was the military. And I set my sights on a special forces type of an avenue. I learned about the Navy SEALs that they worked in the environments of sea, air, and land, and they worked all over the world.
And I thought, that's for me. I heard it was the hardest training in the world, and that's where I wanted to go.
So I set a course toward that kind of an idolatry and that kind of a life. I wanted to live in the Special Forces environment and do all the things I could do in the SEAL teams, and then maybe go on to officer training and maybe do that for a career, maybe go into the CIA, disappear into some type of a black ops world or something like that. The Lord had other plans. After I went through what's called BUDS, it's an acronym basic underwater demolition/slash seal training. After I did that, I was in airborne school in Fort Benning, Georgia.
And that's where the Lord sent His Spirit to start convicting me of sin and righteousness and judgment. And so that happened in August of 1989. I was convicted of sin that I'd been committing, you know, all through my years growing up. But the Lord opened my eyes to my wretchedness before him. And I think the thing that was deeply affected me was just the sin of pride.
Something that I knew internally, how I thought about myself and how I portrayed myself, my own mental image, started to really appall me and make me feel ashamed before God. That was not the moment of my salvation. I went back to the scripture, affirmed the gospel that I was raised in, that I did believe the facts of the gospel. I went back to church, started going to church whenever we were in town, not training. But it took about eight or nine months of struggle.
With the issue of the lordship of Christ. This is right around the time of the lordship controversy that John MacArthur wrote the book, The Gospel According to Jesus. That came out a little bit later, I think. Or no, just a little bit earlier. But I didn't know anything about that.
I just knew instinctively that if Christ was going to save me from my sin, he also had a claim of lordship over my life and that I needed to obey him. And I was really concerned because I knew obedience could mean that he would take away what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so there was a wrestling there of the lordship of the idolatry that I'd set my heart on, which was in special forces, and then the lordship of Christ. And so it was in the spring of 1990 that I eventually repented and put my faith in Christ. And I was so grateful, saying, Lord, take away all of this.
I don't care. I want forgiven sin. I want a right relationship with you. I want to know you. I want to know God.
And clearly, that was regeneration. That was me getting a New nature from God by His grace, and then by that new nature, now seeing Christ for who He really is and God for who He really is.
So that's what changed completely in me. It was spring of 1990, August of 1990 is when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and our platoon then was fast-tracked to be sent over to the Gulf in support of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
So we were sent over to the First Gulf War. That was probably the Lord's plan for me. I like to say he had Saddam invade Kuwait so that I could be sent out of the States and get into my Bible. But the Lord was discipling me in His Word, and He deeply embedded the Word in my life. I read through the Bible for the first time, studied the book of Romans and then Ephesians and then Acts, verse by verse.
That deployment lasted from August 1990 through May of 1991. I came back a very changed person. I realized that he had set a doctrinal foundation in me, that I really was God-centered in my thinking because of those books of the Bible that I'd studied, word-driven, Calvinistic in my thinking. I didn't even know what Calvinism, the Armenian debate was, but I was certainly Calvinistic. I had an institutional foundation, believing in the family, the church, the local church was the context of the life that I wanted to live and knew that I should live.
I wanted to live out my Christian faith in the workplace, in everything that I did. And also had what I would call like an experimental foundation. Or experiential foundation where I really wanted an abiding daily relationship with God. I realized that the gift of salvation is God Himself. I relished the fact that I could know the living God and I could be.
On the far ends of the earth, and still know him personally through his word, through prayer. And so I really relished in a deep, abiding, experimental relationship with the Lord. Thank you for sharing the story. Travis, because I think one of the really good and natural way to share the gospel with someone is through your own salvation story. And I just think it's interesting that that occurred when you were in the Navy SEALs.
This is a really rough and tumble environment. You could say there's probably not a lot of sanctified other guys in that force, although I know there was one. And maybe you could just briefly tell us why that was so important to have one other believer in one of your SEAL teams. It is very true. And it's not just special forces, but it's military in general.
There's just not a lot of Christian influence. And even when you do get a chaplain, these days, chaplain can mean a lot of different things. You can have a Wiccan chaplain or a Roman Catholic.
So there's not a lot of really good, strong, true Christian influences. The Lord was gracious in giving me a friend that we had been through buds together when we were stationed at SEAL Team 8. We lived in the same house together until we were kind of getting settled. He was not in my platoon to start with, but just before we deployed, we had a guy that we had to get rid of out of our platoon. And this guy named Roy Lopez was dropped right into our platoon.
He's a dear believer, and the two of us used to study the Word of God together.
So we read through the Bible, but then we studied Romans and Ephesians and Acts and just did study together. We really came back from that deployment, very different men. He's still walking with the Lord today. We're still in contact and dear, dear friend.
Okay, so before we jump into some current events and issues of the faith, I did want to ask you about John MacArthur. It's been one year since he went to heaven, and you went to the seminary, which he presided over, the master's seminary. You worked for him as the managing director of Grace to You. Just tell us in what ways that John MacArthur. influenced you let's say personally And then also as a pastor as well.
It would be impossible to overstate his influence in my life and in my family. Very dear to me, even from a distance. When I got back from that deployment of May in 91, I was driving back and forth into the SEAL team from where I lived and was listening to Christian Radio. There are a lot of very good and gifted preachers on the radio, and one voice stood out, cut through all the other voices, and it was John MacArthur's. I just remember being elated, almost intoxicated with the truth because I was learning what the Bible meant by what it said.
Many other eloquent preachers, like I said, and all of them gifted, and you get a lot from them. John MacArthur just was plain-spoken, straightforward. And I remember driving back and just overjoyed at getting the truth. I remember pulling up to a stoplight one time, and just a very quick thing: I looked at the radio and was just praying. I asked God, would you one day allow me to do that?
By that prayer, it was a very simple prayer and about that simple. I didn't mean to be a pastor, to be a preacher. I just wanted to understand God's word well enough. That I could explain it to other people to give them the experience that I was. Enjoying on my daily commute.
And so it's just the power of Christian radio to get the Word of God into people's hearts. And so here's a young Navy guy driving in and out. You just never know who's going to be affected.
So it's from that time that John MacArthur, his writings, and then other people that he would mention, you know, you cross-reference and you start to find R.C. Sproll and you start to find, I found like Founders Ministries through the Southern Baptist Convention and Tom Askell and some others. Very faithful voices just deepening my understanding of the truth, connecting the dots for me doctrinally. I found a lot of people could be good Bible people, but because they didn't understand theology, they didn't understand of a systematized approach to the scripture that kept them out of the ditches theologically. I just had a lot of help early on.
So that sent me into eventually going to seminary at the Master Seminary in 2000 after I'd been in the Border Patrol for a few years and then went to the Master Seminary working for Grace to You. But he's been very influential. In shaping my thinking about life, doctrine, how to preach the Bible, everything really goes back to a lot that I learned from him. One of the things I really appreciate about John MacArthur is the reason he preached the way he preached is because he truly believed the Word of God is the Word of God. And when he studied it to clarity and he understood the truth, He was compelled to speak.
And for the rest of us, it sounds like, wow, he is bold, fearless, courageous. And when I would say things like that to him, I said, thank you for being so courageous on this issue. He'd look at me as if I was saying something really strange to him. And he'd say, well, is that what the word teaches? I said, well, yeah.
He's like, well, then why wouldn't you say it any other way?
Sounds like him. I'm rebuked. Yeah, thank you. But he was so clear in believing the truth. He knew what his job description was.
He knew what he was there for. He didn't try to be everything to everybody in the church. He tried to be faithful with the word of God.
So there's a whole lot more I could say. I know we're limited on time, but those deep lessons of we believe, therefore we speak, 2 Corinthians 4, that was John MacArthur. Pastor Travis Allen from Grace Church in Greeley, Colorado, is our guest today here on the Christian Worldview. And now, Travis, let's transition into some things going on in the world and current events, and then we'll get into more issues within the church. I think over the last Last six to eight years, there have been Christians who have been shocked with COVID.
The Biden administration were just shocked at the extreme leftism, the radicalism of things, the whole transgender movement, things being pushed in companies, the woke movement, infiltrating into education, in institutions, in corporations, and so forth. Very radical. I think it's changed some, at least on the surface, with a different presidency now. But even with the rise of socialism taking place, the socialists are winning elections in America today. How would you describe the state of the country Right now, and where we are.
I think a lot of Christians may not like Trump personally, but are grateful that it's just not a complete anti-Christian politician. Policy is being pushed out all the time, at least. But how would you describe what the state of the country is right now? The state of the country, I would say, is a nation under divine judgment. I think that's how we have to look at this country.
I don't think we're experiencing the favor of God because of the leadership that God Continues to put in place. I think Victor Davis Hansen said it well about President Trump. And I have no disrespect toward President Trump. I really appreciate a lot that he does, people he's appointed and what he's put in place. But Victor Davis Hansen describes our country as having a deep, deeply embedded cancer, and Trump is like chemotherapy.
And so chemotherapy on its own is poison. But it's the poison that we need. Like I said, I do not intend to disrespect our president. I do respect him, and I do regard him, and I think he's in so many ways brilliant. But at the same time, he is not a Christian.
and he does need Christ. And there are a lot of people who are jumping on to a political bandwagon thinking that, that is the salvation of our country, and that is a surface level improvement. It is just a stay of execution until the next administration comes in. I am concerned about our nation under judgment, and I'm concerned that too many people take comfort in things that they shouldn't take comfort in because it's crying peace, peace, when there really is no peace. There's no real unity.
There is no salvation. There is no fear of God before our eyes. I am concerned about that. It's appalling, and I think we should all find it appalling and remarkable that Islamists and socialists and Marxists keep getting into positions of influence, power, having cultural sway and influence. But I think, again, we need to look at that as judgment.
I came across this the other day, and I thought, I'm definitely going to say this. This comes out of 2 Chronicles 25. If you just permit me to read a few verses. It happened that after Amaziah came down from striking down the Edomites, Okay, so he wins this great victory over E the Edomites who are threatening It says that after he had struck down the Edomites, he brought the gods of the sons of Seir, this is the Edomites, brought their gods. and set them up as his gods, and worshipped them, and burned incense to them.
What is he doing? The Edomites' gods did not save them from him. Why is he taking them out of the rubble? Dusting them off, putting them up on a perch, and then bowing down before what could not even save those people. The anger of Yahweh burned against Amaziah, and he sent him a prophet A nameless prophet.
We have no idea who this person is. but sent him a prophet who said to him, Why have you sought the gods of the people who have not delivered their own people from your hand? The Islamists Didn't stand before American power, wrath, might. The socialists, the Marxists, the Soviet Union has fallen. Why are we setting those gods up again in our nation?
Why is that happening? The answer here. As this prophet convicts him, why have you sought the gods of the people who have not delivered their own people from your hand? And it happened that as he was talking with Amaziah, the king said to him, Have we given you to be a royal counselor? Like, who do you think you are talking to me like that?
Stop. Why should you be struck down? His life was on the line. for speaking to the king that way. Then the prophet stopped, And he said, I know that God has counseled to destroy you because you've done this and you've not listened to my counsel.
So, the fact that the king will not listen to sound counsel, the fact that the king will take. Fallen gods set them up and worship them. is an evidence to him, and when he will not repent at the rebuke, the confrontation of the prophet. That is evidence to him that God has handed him over. I think when we see that in our country, and we see that when there are prophetic voices saying, Why are you worshiping the gods of the Soviet Union?
Why are you worshiping the gods of power like the Nazis worshipped? Why are you worshiping these different false gods? And they do not listen. It's evidence that our nation's under judgment. Our guest today is Travis Allen, pastor of Grace Church in Greeley, Colorado.
This interview was recorded at the recent Christian Worldview Speaker Series event at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota, where listeners gathered on a beautiful autumn evening. You can see photos at our website, thechristianworldview.org. We have much more coming up with Travis on a wide range of current events and issues of the faith. I'm David Wheaton. You are listening to the Christian Worldview Radio Program.
The September October issue of the Christian Worldview Journal features a column by Rod Martin explaining why Christianity commands capitalism. Missy Ropenack writes about Lindsay Clancy, who murdered her three young children, and the widespread sympathy she has received. And Pastor Matt Morrell turns to beloved Psalm 23 and shows how God's names compel deeper love and trust in Him. The Christian Worldview Journal is a print and digital publication designed to sharpen your biblical worldview on current events and issues of the faith. The journal is sent to Christian Worldview Partners as a thank you for their support of this radio ministry.
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Socialism is on the rise in America. the Democratic Socialists of America are winning elections all across the country. Often promoted in Christian terms equality, dignity, common good, rights for all, the reality of socialism ends in human misery and rebellion against God. Kel Beisner, founder and president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, has written two excellent booklets that refute socialism and its supposed merits. The first is social justice versus biblical justice.
And the second is, is capitalism bad for the environment? To order one or both, visit our website thechristianworldview.org or call 188-646-2233 or write to box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's 188-646-2233 or thechristianworldview.org. Welcome back to the Christian Worldview. I'm David Wheaton.
Be sure to visit thechristianworldview.org where you can sign up for our weekly email, the Christian Worldview Journal, monthly print publication, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Today's program is an interview with Pastor Travis Allen of Grace Church in Greeley, Colorado at our recent Speaker Series event in Minnesota. You mentioned Islam, and you see what's going on in Europe with Islam. This is the bastion of Christianity over in Europe, where it's not started, but where it flourished, let's say, in the 1500 and 1600s with the Reformation and so forth. And I see countries like the UK, number one baby name in the United Kingdom right now is Muhammad.
They have a Muslim mayor of London. It appears to me that the country is, as they say, you see sometimes on social media, the UK has fallen in some ways. It's just a matter of time. I watched a documentary on 9-11, I think it was just last night. It was an interesting documentary because it just showed news reports of what happened chronologically that day.
Here we had Islamic. Hijackers fly airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. Due to the bravery of some Americans on board, avoided maybe an attack on the Capitol or the White House. And yet, 25 years later, we remember this terrible act on our country. That New York City, the place where this attack happened, just recently elected not just a nominal Muslim, but a very religious Shiite Muslim in Zoram Mamdani as mayor.
I mean, he is just a radical Marxist socialist. And you hear this in Texas is going on. Of course, we know it well what's going on here in Minneapolis in this state with Islam. Is this an existential threat, you think, to our American way of life? And do you think the West, whether Western Europe or Western civilization in America, has the fortitude to be able to fend this off?
I do think it's an existential threat, and I do think that it does portend trouble on the horizon. I think when we look at what's going on in the UK, so much of what I benefit from spiritually in my study, the writings of John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, and so many of the Puritans that came out of 17th century, 18th century England to see the complete flip. To abandon Christianity and then turn their hearts over to whatever. If they want to just hold on to a comfortable way of living, God will judge that. If you want the benefit of your Creator, the benefit of your God, without wanting your God, He'll hand you over.
And I think that's what's happening over in the UK. And I think when we look at the lessons going on in Europe. and see how that's spreading. It's going to spread over here too if we do not repent. The way that we could stand and stand up as a country and not be afraid of Islam.
is if our nation repented, And if Christians really acted like Christians and spoke the truth in love, but had a humble boldness about them to pursue Muslims who come into our country and see them as the mission field and really bring the gospel to them, to not be afraid of going toe-to-toe with their idolatry and bring out the Word of God and take their presuppositions, examine them, examine them according to the scripture, and see how many God would save. That's one approach to this existential threat we face. I'm afraid that the other is either. The compromise we see in Europe, which is just basically to cave, and then the Muslims are fine to do that. They'll set up their mosques and they'll have their imams crying out doing the daily prayers.
That's one approach, is to compromise, and the other approach is to return to the strong gods. And so have a strong political force, which turns into a kind of totalitarianism and police state and getting invasive into your private life and everything. That could be the other approach.
Well, this is going to be something that Christians need to be very strong on. The church needs to be very clear about. And no, we don't hate Muslims, but we also have a country with a constitution. And we can't allow people in our country who won't assimilate to the values of our constitution, our constitutional law, and yet want to follow their own law instead. We can't have two systems within one system.
I think Christians can do both. They can evangelize and proclaim the gospel, but we can also stand for our own U.S. Constitution and our Christian founding. I want to move into the church now. And that one thing is you just drive around town, I'm sure where you live, you'll drive by churches who the main thing that they will publicize about their church is a rainbow flag.
It's just remarkable to me that instead of a bigger cross on the side of a church, they'll have a rainbow flag, or there's a church over in Wazetta that has Black Lives Matter on it, and with a rainbow flag. And so this issue has become the homosexuality transgender issue has become almost the litmus issue. of orthodoxy. Within the mainline denominations nowadays. Once was, well, we have female pastors or ministers in our churches, but that's 30 years ago now.
Now, the main issue is the homosexual transgender issue: as we're good people, this is what we believe. You're a bigot if you don't, if you're not bored with this. Why do you think that particular issue has become so prominent and so pushed, not only in mainline churches, but in broader society as well? I mean, why is it that particular issue? And do you think the evangelical church is susceptible to caving on that issue?
This kind of I think does run hand in hand with what we see going on in nations as well and in politics with the caving like we were talking the other day you and I about your governor and just what's happened with the immigrant population here and the caving to the Islamists and the Islamist agenda. You see the same thing with the caving into the homosexual agenda as well that I think it's a misunderstanding of neighbor love. Instead of true biblical love, theologically defined, it's now neighbor nice. You described it as Minnesota nice. That's actually a thing.
So I think in Minnesota nice, there's an approach to immigrant populations coming in. You want to be really nice to them and be welcoming. But at the same time, you don't hold up standards and boundaries that's treated as if it's somehow harsh and unloving. I think that's the same thing for many nominal Christian, whether it's a mainline denomination or whether it's an independent evangelical church or some of these big box mega-church franchise type of things that we see all over the place. They want people coming into their churches.
They want to show what they say is the love of Jesus. But what they realize is the love of Jesus was characterized by confronting and pointing out sin and dealing with the real sin problem, the vertical problem people have with God, their need for salvation, their need for escape from the wrath of God because of their sin. That doesn't sound like a very nice message, and yet that's exactly what the Bible describes as truly loving. for people not to spend eternity in hell, we need to tell them the truth. And a lot of the communication you hear for the support of these kind of issues is religious in nature.
Love is love. God is love. Or love thy neighbor. It doesn't matter if they've come here illegally and broken our laws, we need to love your neighbor. There's a lot of usage of religious biblical language to get these things passed.
I don't know if you remember earlier this year we did this program on the misapplication of empathy, that you can take empathy and just go down the road and completely alter your country and biblical truth out of just your feeling for someone else. When they try to portray the confrontation with sin and a sinful lifestyle. And they try to portray that as hate. Like those little bumper stickers that used to say, hate is not a family value. Same thing, love is love.
They speak of that as if it's just. Common sense, of course we all know what love is. The Bible says differently. The Bible says love comes from God. And we do not know love until God shows his love to us.
We're converted. You know, we see for the very first time with born-again eyes what love cost. what it means to love, to confront us of our sin. To warn us of coming judgment for us to be able to, by God's grace, to repent of our sin and to escape his wrath. That's what love is, and we don't know that love until God reveals it to us by his spirit and by his word.
Without that revelation, without God doing something in our hearts to open our eyes to the truth, we don't know what love is. And so when people speak so glibly about love is love and use those slogans as if it's a common sense thing, it just demonstrates to you, oh yeah, they're saying that because this person is not a Christian. They do not understand what love is because it's not been revealed to them. All right, Travis Allen is our guest today here on this special edition of the Christian World View Radio Program here at a speaker series event here at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota. I want to ask you to go from the mainline church departure from the truth to some of the things that have happened within the evangelical church, even the more conservative wing of the evangelical church.
There have been some disheartening Significant sin and disqualification scandals that have taken place, whether it's been with Ravi Zacharias, Steve Lawson. And just more recently, we just did a program on what happened to G3 ministries, sending anonymous packets of plagiarism accusations to a faithful pastor in Texas trying to undermine his whole ministry. And it was found out in G3, which was a very major conservative evangelical ministry to the church, basically dissolved in a day. What do you make of these scandals and disqualifications taking place? Peter said, It's time for judgment to begin with the house of God.
And if it begins with us, what is to become of the unrighteous and the ungodly? I think that Christ. is these days is purifying his church. I think it's a good thing. Because all those sins that were going on were going on, even if we didn't know.
Robbie Zacharias carried on a full decades-long ministry. And traveling all over the place. One thing I'll just say with Robbie Zachariah, Steve Lawson. In particular, those are examples of men who lived outside and kind of transcended the authority of the local church. They didn't live under authority of eldership.
They didn't live in the context of a life-on-life, see and be seen, know and be known, love and be loved type of an environment in their church. Church life is central. It is the means of God's grace to us. It's how we grow. It's the context of our life and faith and love.
And it is so healthy and such a protection for us to live within the context of a local church. And not to think that any one of us. Because of who we are, because of how busy our life is, or how we're jet setters and flying all over, and we do business in China, Singapore, and Africa, or whatever, none of us. Has the right, and it's an unwise, a very foolish thing to do to think we can transcend and not attend our churches. But some of these Christian speakers, because of their giftedness, It's like we consider them to be maybe on another plane.
They can transcend that, and they don't have those needs because they're so gifted and so close to God and so useful and so fruitful and so. Therefore, it doesn't really matter that they aren't in their local churches ever. And that's definitely what happened with Steve Lawson, Robbie Zacharias. And I would say, it's not just that. Mm-hmm.
All of us need to learn the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And we need to walk in the fear of the Lord and walk within his structure, underneath the God given authority that He placed in our local churches.
So, so important. Let's move off that last point you just made about the importance of every believer being part of a sound local church under the authority of a local church. They need to have qualified pastors, elders, and then members need to be under that.
So critical, and that's something that's not really to prioritize today, unfortunately. But you, with your church in Greeley, Colorado, which is just north of Denver, what are. a few of the fundamentals of being a faithful shepherd. Of your church that you kind of go back to all the time, remind yourself of all the time. Like, this is my calling, these are the important things for me to do as a pastor.
As a pastor, as elders in a church, we need to demonstrate to our people that we live underneath the authority of the Word of God just like they do. And we want to call all of us to live under the authority of the Word of God. We want to demonstrate the fear of the Lord in how we speak about Him, in how we order our churches. We're not there to be innovators, we're there to be followers, servants, slaves of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's His church, He builds it, He adds to it, and He subtracts from it.
And it's His will to do with His churches whatever He wants to.
So we shouldn't think that by our own pragmatic choices and our own charisma or our own programs and plans that somehow we can build the church faster if we'll do thus and such. We need to do his will in his way and submit to his authority and his plan, which is all laid out in scripture. We can see the great commission, obviously, in Matthew 28. We have one command: make disciples. We do that by evangelizing and discipling.
We do that by evangelizing, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And if we're going to baptize them in the Trinitarian formula, one name, three persons. That means that our converts have to have teaching. Even before we bring them to the waters of baptism.
So we don't just get them saved and get them dunked. We teach them, train them. We want to catechize them in a sense. I know that's a real Catholic word, but it's not just a Catholic concept. We want to train them before we bring them into the waters of baptism so they understand.
Basic doctrine, basic understanding, so that when they take on baptism and they take on a profession of faith, it's an informed profession of faith that they really are believers in the gospel. Once they're baptized, we're to teach them to observe everything Christ has commanded. That is a teaching that is not only an impartation of truth and doctrine, an understanding of the scripture, and understanding of how to read the scripture, but it's also a mentorship. It's a life-on-life discipleship, friendship, lifelong, targeted friendship to help us to grow from one level of maturity to another.
So, Colossians 1:28 says, Him we preach, admonishing every man, teaching every man, in all wisdom. It takes wisdom from older, more mature Christians and teachers, pastors. to train the younger, less mature, and raise them up in maturity so that they'll grow into maturity and everyone complete in Christ. And that's what we're after, is everyone complete, mature, sound in the faith. That's what we get to do in our local churches.
So those are commitments I have. I want to make sure that also I'm looking to the next generation. I'm not the last stop with regard to where our church is. I'm aging out already, and I want to look at the next generation and say, how do I find faithful men? teach them to train others also.
So I'm looking for the future leaders of our church, knowing that I'm trying to build something that I'm not going to fully enjoy. I want to build something that these new leaders are going to take the baton, the mantle of leadership, and take it into the future. That's why we plant trees. We plant trees because we believe that God builds tomorrow and our children are going to enjoy the shade and the fruit of those trees. It's the same reason we raise up leaders as well.
We don't know when Christ is going to return, so we work as if he's not returning for another thousand years. You are listening to an interview with Pastor Travis Allen from Grace Church in Greeley, Colorado at our recent Christian Worldview Speaker Series event at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota. It was a memorable and meaningful evening, and we hope you are being edified by hearing a pastor who understands Christ's mission for the church. Much more coming up in the final segment. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian Worldview Radio Program.
David Wheaton here. For a limited time, we are offering My Boy Ben for a donation of any amount to the Christian Worldview. The book is the true story of a yellow lab that I had back when I was competing on the professional tennis tour. It's about relationships with Ben, my parents, with the childhood friend I would eventually marry, but ultimately with God, who causes all things, even the hard things, to work together for good. You can order a signed and personalized copy for yourself or for your friend who enjoys a good story, loves dogs, sports or the outdoors, and most of all, needs to hear about God's grace and the gospel.
My Boy Ben is owned by the Christian Realview. It's 264 pages, hardcover, and retails for $24.95. To order, go to thechristianworldview.org or call 188-646-2233 or write to box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331.
Socialism is on the rise in America. the Democratic Socialists of America are winning elections all across the country. Often promoted in Christian terms equality, dignity, common good, rights for all, the reality of socialism ends in human misery and rebellion against God. Kel Beisner, founder and president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, has written two excellent booklets that refute socialism and its supposed merits. The first is social justice versus biblical justice.
And the second is, is capitalism bad for the environment? To order one or both, visit our website thechristianworldview.org or call 188-646-2233 or write to box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's 188-646-2233 or thechristianworldview.org. Welcome back to the Christian Worldview. I'm David Wheaton.
Be sure to visit thechristianworldview.org where you can sign up for our weekly email, the Christian Worldview Journal, monthly print publication, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Today's program is an interview with Pastor Travis Allen of Grace Church in Greeley, Colorado at our recent Speaker Series event in Minnesota. I heard someone say it actually at our program one time. Every single significant doctrine of Scripture has a paradox to it. There is a tension there that the human mind can't perfectly reconcile.
So for instance the Trinity Well, how is God? three persons in one God. Or What does it mean that Christ was fully man, but also fully God. Or Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, but it is God who is at work you both at will and to work for His good pleasure. And one of the big ones is the one about God's election.
My personal sense of this one is. There doesn't need to be such animosity on this particular issue. It's that God is, I'll read Romans 8: for those whom God foreknew, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son, so that he, Christ, would be the firstborn among many brethren. And those whom God predestined, he also called. And these whom he called, he also justified.
And these whom he justified, he also glorified. Ephesians 2: you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world. And it says, but God, not but you.
So there's God's sovereignty and God's election. And yet, at the same time, I can affirm 100% that whoever believes in the Lord will be saved, and God so loved the world that whoever believes on him shall not perish but have everlasting life. I'd like you just to explain that particular issue because it gets very heated between Christians, and I don't think it needs to be. I think we can rest with the tension of knowing, yeah, God is sovereign in salvation, and yet we must repent and believe in the gospel.
So, how would you like to tell people here tonight how to best think about that issue? God's sovereignty and salvation, and yet man's responsibility to repent and believe. It's the starting point, isn't it? Is the starting point man Or is the starting point God? Those who have a starting point with man at the center are going to struggle, and they're going to see the prominence of man, decisions we make, the free will that needs to be protected.
And I think all those issues are important. I think it's very important to understand the true use of the human will and that it is free. It's not coerced. I think that's very important to protect. But I think our starting point, it has to be God.
We have to have a theocentric, not an anthropocentric, but a theocentric worldview. When we start with God, we have to acknowledge that God is who He's revealed Himself to be on the page of Scripture. When we let God define Himself for us and teach us about His essence, that His essence is spiritual and eternal and infinite and limitless, we start with a very big view of God.
Sovereignty, by the way, is not an attribute of God.
Sovereignty is God functioning as God. He is in charge. He is sovereign. He is king. He does as he wills.
He does as he pleases. Even creation itself is a free choice of God.
So God acted according to his freedom, and only God has absolute freedom to do as he wills. None of us complains that We have been chosen to bear his image, and the dogs over there as beautiful as they are. They are not created in the image of God. And none of us cries. That's unfair.
We all just accept God made some creatures to be like this. And he created the angels, though they are great in power and glory. They're not created in his image. They're not image bearers. Angels have a spiritual essence only.
Animals have a material essence only. We have both a spiritual and a material. Essence. We're a composite creature. And we have a connection with the world He created and the God who He is.
We're partakers of the divine nature. He's made us very special to be bearers of his image. He chose that for us. He is the chooser of all things. He is the one who determines all things.
He predetermines, he set, he didn't create Adam. and then cross his fingers and hope that Adam would get it right. He knew, in fact, he planned. In his sovereign will, that Adam would fall, that sin would enter into the world, Because the point was not Adam and a perfect humanity. Apart from Christ.
He intended to bring his son, the only mediator between God and man, and that could only come in. With a fall, with redemption necessary. God planned that for the foundation of the world, as it says in Acts 2.23 and many other passages as well, that God determined from ages past, from before the foundation of the world, to bring about this great plan of redemption, to highlight his Son, that everything would culminate in his Son to the glory of God. When we start with God. It is the sovereignty of God that is primary, logically primary in salvation.
While I think it's important that we do not argue and fight, these are called the doctrines of grace. We look at the back of the Protestant Reformation and pulling us out of the Roman Catholic communion to clarify again biblical Christianity that had been subdued and darkened and oppressed by that system. It was a return to these doctrines of classical theism, doctrines of God's sovereign will. All these went back to Augustine and the early church and restored through the Protestant Reformation. And every revival really has been a return to a biblical theological doctrinal, clarifying understanding of what scripture teaches about God and His priority and His initiative and His will.
When we approach it like that, God gets real big, and our problems become. All planned by God to shape us, to conform us to His image, to make the Son more glorious to us, and God's glory to be great. That's what we're after. Yeah, and I think these kind of issues are really good to discuss. You know, I don't think churches and pastors and Christians need to avoid talking about these really deep theological issues that really expand our mind and give us a higher view of God.
I think avoiding them leads to shallower Christians and think through. We may never be able to fully understand that tension between God's sovereignty, the starting point, and yet we do have meaningful choice. Christ said to repent and believe the gospel, but we can understand them better and have a greater view of God and His grace.
Now, I always like to think of salvation in terms of three tenses: that there is justification, what you just talked about there, that God justifies the repentant sinner. And then the second tense of salvation is sanctification. That's the rest of the Christian life. Once God brings you to saving faith, and then once you die as a believer, there's glorification where we're saved from the presence of sin. One more thing, though, that I'd add to your past tense that precedes justification is.
Election.
So we go back to Ephesians 1:4. Just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy. Holy and blameless in his sight. That takes care of justification, sanctification, glorification, all in that phrase right there. And I wonder how many Christians think, in terms of the mission of the Christian life, is to be holy, is to become more like Christ.
Holiness is constantly like, well, I'm not really sure I want to do that. But that is the mission of the Christian, once you're a Christian, is to become more like Jesus Christ, to increase in holiness. In John chapter 15, where Christ says, I am the vine, you are the branches, he who abides in me, and I in him, he bears much fruit. For a part from me, You can do nothing. And so I think for every true believer, you think in terms of, well, How do I grow and have a deeper walk with Christ?
How do I love him more? How do I want to have a greater desire to obey him more, to tell others about him, to disciple others? How do I live my life with a nearness to Christ? Because that's the point of life. God created us to know him and to walk closely with him.
And you see the Christians in Scripture that walk closely with God.
So what would be your pastoral counsel as to a couple things that can help us abide closely to Christ? I think it's to recognize what were we saved for. We understand what we were saved from. We're saved from the wrath of God. We're saved from a just judgment for our sins being cast into an eternal hell.
He takes away our sin. He forgives us.
So we know what we're saved from. And there's a lot of emphasis, for good reason, a lot of emphasis on that story. But what do we save for? We're saved for the glory of God. To bring glory and honor and praise to him.
And the praise doesn't come from an uninformed mind. True praise comes. From a heart that is filled with a delight in the God who saved us. Look around at the beauty of the state. I've been around your state just a little bit in the last couple of weeks just to look around and see what God has given you here.
It's absolutely beautiful. Yeah. But imagine I came here without any eyes in my eye sockets. I couldn't see and experience any of the beauty. But God gave me eyes to see, and then He opened my eyes to see the beauty.
But what if my eyes that I have are somehow diseased or malformed or something like that? That's the presence of sin that allows me to look around and see shapes and colors, but not really see them in great clarity.
So, the Christian life is a process of taking away all the sin, all the things that cause a misunderstanding of who God is and what the world's like, and brings further and further clarity to His great glory, the power of His gospel, the greatness of Christ, the glory of the cross. all those things are my sanctification. And if I realize what I'm saved for, to know and to love God, to worship Him, to tell others about Him, to bear fruit to His glory, to sing His praises from an informed mind and lips that really understand what they speak of, That's what I've been given. If I understand that God is the gift of my salvation, the gift of my salvation is not just escaping hell. That's just what's necessary in order to get me to the goal of knowing and enjoying my God.
And I'm going to know him and enjoy him forever. And part of the incomprehensibility of God, part of the glory in that, he is immutable, incomprehensible, he's eternal. Me being finite, not eternal. I'm not infinite. Me being mutable, he being immutable, unchanging.
And yet because I'm mutable, because I do change. Every single day of my eternity is going to be a greater and greater understanding and viewing and perceiving the glory and the greatness of God. That is our future as Christians. And we get to start enjoying that future right now. in our life.
Every single day. That's why sin is just an impediment. All the entertainments and distractions and pleasures of the world, they are an impediment. Let's sweep them aside. And dive into what is our birthright is to know and enjoy God and tell others about Him.
What a great way to close the program today, reminding believers of the call and privilege to know God closely and to make Him known. We have links to Pastor Travis Allen and his preaching ministry at our website, thechristianworldview.org, where you can hear a replay of today's program. A thank you to him and all who came to the Speaker Series event at the farm. Finally, the September-October issue of the Christian Worldview Journal is releasing soon, so if you're a Christian Worldview partner, be sure to look for that in your inbox or your mailbox. Thank you for joining us today on the Christian Worldview and for your support of this non-profit radio ministry.
Until next time, think biblically. Live accordingly and stand firm. The mission of the Christian worldview is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. We hope today's broadcast encouraged you toward that end. To hear a replay of today's program, order a transcript, or find out what must I do to be saved, go to thechristianworldview.org or call toll-free 188-646-2233.
The Christian Worldview is a listener-supported, non-profit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. to make a donation, order resources, become a Christian Worldview partner, sign up for our weekly email or the Christian Worldview Journal print publication, or to contact us, go to thechristianworldview.org, call 188-646-2233, or write to box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Thanks for listening to the Christian Worldview.
