Why Jimmy Carter's faith is lauded while the faith of others is loathed. That is a topic we'll discuss today right here on the Christian Real View 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. The Christian Real View is a listener-supported radio program. Our website is thechristianrealview.org, and the rest of our contact information will be given throughout today's program.
As always, thank you for your notes of encouragement, financial support, and lifting us up in prayer. Following the recent death of Jimmy Carter, who was the 39th President of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981, the headlines have been almost singing in unison. Baptist news headline, Jimmy Carter, a lifelong Baptist, left a legacy of faithfulness, compassion, and justice. Or religion news services said, a shining example, religious leaders praise the late former President Jimmy Carter. Or the US Conference of Catholic Bishops headline was, Pope praises Jimmy Carter's, quote, deep Christian faith. Now, setting aside the widespread perception that Carter's one-term presidency was feckless with a stagnant economy, fuel shortages, an unresolved hostage ordeal with Iran, the paradox with Carter is that he professed to be a born-again Christian, despite the fact that he was a proponent of abortion and homosexual so-called marriage.
How can a professed follower of God advocate for things so contrary to the Word of God? And why is Carter so lauded when other professing born-again Christians are loathed by society? Our guest this weekend is Josh Byss. He is the pastor of Praisemill Baptist Church in Georgia and the founder and president of G3 Ministries. Josh will talk about the dynamic with Jimmy Carter and some other various current issues going on in society and the church, such as why Christians should seek the abolition of abortion and not be satisfied with incremental gains like heartbeat laws. Also, how Christians should think about pastors in the local church in light of the disqualification of preacher Stephen Lawson.
And also, what Christians should discern about the person and policies of Donald Trump, our incoming president, as he takes the oath of office on Monday, January 20th. We hope you stay tuned for the program today, and let's get straight to the interview with Pastor Josh Byss. Josh, thank you for coming back on the Christian Review Radio program today.
I'm going to start our interview in a very similar way that I did the last time you were on the program, which is actually way back in July of 2022. I reread your bio and you said that my wife and I were members of Praisemill Baptist Church as kids. That's where you pastor today. Although I was very involved in the ministries of our local church, I was a lost church member. I had walked down the aisle when I was six years old at another church in our community.
I prayed a prayer with a preacher and later I was baptized as a member at Praisemill Church. However, it was not until I was 25 years old that God caused me to be born again through the gospel. Although I use the term, quote, lost church member, I was sincere, just sincerely wrong. I was not out to fool anyone.
I was the one being fooled. Again, that's from your testimony. Just explain more about your own story there and the difference between being a church, a tender or church member, and actually being born again. As a boy, I was influenced by my grandfather who was taking me to church really in the midst of a very difficult season of my own life.
The earliest memories that I had of life and that I currently have of life were basically just tumultuous moments. My parents were in the midst of a very difficult divorce. My grandfather and my grandmother, they would pick me up for church on Sunday mornings and they took me to a church that they were members of. That really in many ways was the first time that I remember or recall hearing the gospel. It was in that church setting, which was a very common thing for the pastor at the end of the sermon to call anyone to the front who wanted to profess faith in Christ. Then he would ask them to pray to receive Christ.
Then basically they were pronounced as Christians. So obviously going through a very difficult season of life, very confused about really everything about life, for the first time I heard the gospel and it really impacted me in a way, but I probably didn't truly understand the gospel. Looking back, I just knew that this pastor was calling people to the front. I had a really bad life. I wanted a change and so I just did what he said to do. Shortly thereafter, my dad would gain custody of me and my sister.
He brought us into Praisemeal Baptist Church where he had family connections historically. They asked me all the questions that they would typically ask of a seven-year-old. I told them that I had recently asked Jesus into my heart.
That was the language that I was taught. So they said, well, great. Well, the next step is you need to be baptized. That's what happened. They baptized me at seven. They gave me a little packet called a survival kit, which the SBC published. It was sort of the next steps after conversion sort of thing.
Then basically the rest was history. I grew up in the life of Praisemeal as a professing member of the church, professing believer, and a baptized follower of Christ. But it wasn't until I was 25 that the gospel actually penetrated my soul as I was sitting at work, listening to a sermon on the internet as I worked. I had been struggling honestly for a good season with doubts of my salvation.
There were heavier seasons that would ebb and flow as a teenager. I would go seek counsel from the pastors of the church and they would tell me, well, I believe that it's probably just Satan making you doubt your salvation. So what happened at 25 as I'm sitting there listening to a man preach the gospel, it became very clear to me that I was an unconverted church member. So I just simply bowed and confessed to my sin and begged the Lord to save me, believing that he truly died for me. And it was at that moment that there was a settled assurance in my soul that I was indeed a true follower of Christ.
So, you know, obviously a lot of different things would happen after that. I would counsel with my pastors and eventually I would be baptized again. I would say I would be truly baptized at this point as a genuine follower of Christ. That's my conversion story. But if you back up way back to the beginning, my wife was also growing up in the life of this church, and I'm four years older than she is.
So we're crossing paths in the hallways of this church and we have similar testimonies, but it would be after the Lord saved me after my conversion that we would eventually get married. And then shortly thereafter I had an insatiable desire to teach and to preach the gospel and would basically just resign from my job and go north to Louisville, Kentucky, where I studied for gospel ministry. Would you say the difference is from the time you were young to when you really were born again when you were 25 was just a greater understanding of your own sin? Or was it a better understanding of what the gospel actually is? I think progressively from age six through my teen years I was being taught the true gospel. So the genuine understanding of the truth of what the Bible teaches about the gospel was, I think, being taught to me. But it was really early on, I think, that I just didn't understand the gospel. And I was making a sort of a profession based on cultural conditions that were set up in that church setting, which I think is common in a lot of church settings.
And so I basically was doing what I saw other people doing, other kids my age and that sort of thing. And it wasn't as if I simply rejected the truth of the gospel. It was more or less just growing up in a home where it was just expected that we would attend church and that we would be involved in church.
And so I was doing everything that my dad basically wanted me to do all the way until I was 25. And then it really hit me that I needed Christ. This whole thing of just going to church and doing what is expected of you from parents who are seeking to follow Christ is not good enough. And so I was genuinely the one that was being fooled, and I had a false conversion.
I think there are a lot of people today in a lot of evangelical circles that have false conversions. But by the grace of God, He gave me eyes to see and ears to hear and called me to Himself. And so praise be to the Lord for that.
Josh Byss is our guest today. He is the pastor of that church he grew up in now, Praisemill Baptist Church in Georgia. He's also the founder and president of G3 Ministries. Tell us about the impact of G3 Ministries over the years, what maybe impelled you to start it.
And then what you think, Josh, are the major battles that the church and G3 is trying to contend with within the church today? G3 started as a conference, so we had a theology conference in 2013 in January, and it was a massive success, far more successful than I thought it would be. Every seat in our auditorium was filled with a waiting list a month early, and I just expected a handful of people that would come that first year.
And it wasn't as if we had a massive marketing plan in place or anything like that. We were just spreading the word that we wanted to have a genuine theology conference that wouldn't be a pep rally for Jesus or anything like that, but something of substance. And so that would be sort of the pattern that it would follow for the first number of years until 2017 when we had the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. And we did a conference on that subject, and we went away from the church campus to a convention center, and then it just started to just snowball in many ways. So early on, it was just a conference, but after about 2020, we shifted from just being a conference that we hold every year to being a content-producing ministry where we have G3 Press, where we publish books and literature for churches and for believers around the world, as well as the development of the G3 Church Network, which is not a denomination, but it's a network of like-minded churches that partner together. Pastors meet together monthly on a Zoom call.
We talk about theology. We partner in gospel ministry projects or missions endeavors, as well as workshops and other things that we're doing for worship, as well as for expository preaching. G3 is not a parachurch ministry, which is sort of a common thing that you hear about today, but it's really a sub-church ministry. We have a high view of the local church, so I don't think any parachurch ministry should be calling the shots for local churches.
In many ways, that's like the tail wagging the dog, and it should be the other way around. So we as a ministry exist for the purpose of helping churches become healthy and strong and vibrant, and to encourage them, to equip them, to educate them in sound biblical theology. So we are beneath the church, serving the church, and yes, to your point, we do address some controversies, we address some deficiencies, but we are merely there existing to help the church, but not to direct the church, if that makes sense. What do you think are some of the most important threats right now that the church is facing, that you're trying to address with G3?
Some of the things that we've addressed in the last number of years has dealt with issues like the woke movement, social justice movement, some of those things that have been greatly complex, you might say, multi-layered in various different ways, because the social justice movement or the woke movement was not something that just focused on the church, it also affected the corporate structures of this world, it affected the entertainment outlets, it affected the university system, and so there's so many different layers to the woke movement. So we've addressed that, we have been a part of the statement on social justice, I was the one that organized that original meeting in 2018 with Christian leaders, and we eventually published the statement on social justice and the gospel. So I would say that's a major thing that has not gone away, but by God's grace, a lot of Christians have been made aware of these threats, and really, in many ways, how to address those things, but that's one thing. I would say, when you look at the evangelical culture, I think there's a massive threat upon the church's understanding of what it means to worship God.
How should we worship God? And so we're addressing some of those things as well. Obviously, through COVID, there were many challenges, and we saw a lot of deficiencies that were brought to the surface and were made very much apparent to everyone that was paying attention, people that were content staying at home and watching through just a lens of technology, but that's not what it means to be a member of a church. And so we have so many different things that threaten the strength and the health of local churches, and I think that we as a ministry are really, in many ways, raised up by God for the purpose of speaking into those deficiencies, but also being a means of exhortation and encouragement so that Christians can take a step in the right direction for the glory of God. Just one more follow-up question, just on G3, and sort of the more conservative theological wing of the church. Comparisons are being made between the seeker-driven church, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, geared toward what they call the seeker or the unbeliever. It's like a pragmatic approach to ministry within the church.
But comparisons are being made between the seeker-driven church and what's being called now the preacher-driven church. All right, we'll explain what that term means after this short break for some ministry announcements. The January 2025 issue of the Christian worldview journal, which is our monthly print publication, mailed this past week. Really good articles, including one by our managing editor Soren Kern on Syria, and how the overthrow of the Assad regime there has changed the power structure from Iran to Turkey. Now, if you're on our mailing list, you'll be receiving the journal soon.
If you're not, listen to the announcement in this break as to how you can get it. Stay tuned. Much more coming up with Josh Byss of G3 Ministries. He'll explain some lessons learned from the disqualification of Steve Lawson, and talk about Jimmy Carter's faith and the abolition of abortion. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian worldview radio program. We are excited to announce our new monthly print publication called the Christian worldview journal.
In Matthew 24, Jesus called for his disciples to be discerning, watchful, endure persecution, and be prepared and faithful in the lead up to his return. This is what the Christian worldview journal will aim to do each month in three articles on current events and issues of the faith, including by Christian geopolitical analyst Soren Kern, who is the managing editor of the journal. You'll also find featured resources, ministry news, and more in this 12-page full-color publication. Everyone on our mailing list will receive the Christian worldview journal through the February 2025 issue. Starting in March, all Christian worldview partners will receive it.
To sign up for the journal, go to thechristianrealview.org, or call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Being an overcomer is God's purpose for each person. John concluded all seven messages to the churches in Revelation the same way, to him who overcomes.
Jesus is the example. He said, in the world you have tribulation, but take courage, I have overcome the world. An overcomer is a true believer who prevails over the tests and trials of life through the supernatural resources God provides. And now you know why the overcomer course is so named. In eight interactive sessions over two days addressing foundational issues of life and the faith, the course is designed to inspire young adults to be overcomers.
The dates are June 20th and 21st at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota. The course is limited to 40 young adults, so be sure to encourage the young adults in your life and your church to come. To find out more and to register, go to thechristianworldview.org or call 1-888-646-2233. Welcome back to the Christian World View, I'm David Wheaton.
Be sure to visit thechristianworldview.org where you can sign up for our weekly email, the Christian World View Journal monthly print publication, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Josh Byas, pastor of Praisemill Baptist Church, that's spelled P-R-A-Y-S-M-I-L-L, and founder and president of G3 Ministries, which stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory, is our guest to discuss a range of issues within the church and broader society. Josh, comparisons are being made between the seeker-driven church and what's being called now the preacher-driven church, where there has been such a strong emphasis on the powerful preaching gift of really big-name pastors, over and above the call to shepherd the sheep, let's say. And so I'd like to ask you a question because I know that Steve Lawson was involved and spoke for G3, as he spoke for many, many ministries and the whole tragic fall of Steve Lawson that our audience and you know well about as well.
What would you say are some of the major lessons that you have learned in the aftermath of the fall of Steve Lawson? And part two of that question is, how should Christians then be thinking about the local church and their pastor in light of the reality of the popularity of sort of the big-name conference circuit? Well, I think lesson number one is that anyone is capable of deceiving you. You can have all of your T's crossed and your I's dotted, theologically speaking, appear to be well-read or well-schooled in Pacific theological subject matter and still be living a double life. So if someone's truly committed to living a double life, then you will not be able to detect it for a season.
I think pretty much anyone that's somewhat influential is going to be able to live that way for a season without being detected. However, I do believe that one of the things that you can learn through all of this, and it's not just the Lawson fall, but it's so many different things that we see in our culture today that sort of point this direction, is the need for a high view of the church and a biblical ecclesiology. So if you don't have what's called a biblical ecclesiology, a biblical structure for the local church, then your church will inevitably be taken downstream by the pressures of the culture or the winds of the culture. And so a biblical ecclesiology is going to put a priority upon church membership, a regenerate church membership, not just a bloated church role.
There's a difference. Genuine shepherds who are there actively engaged in the care of the sheep, not just seeking to preach sermons, but to actually shepherd souls. A lot of guys have the gifts to communicate well or to have the skills of rightly handling the scriptures in terms of exegesis and then putting together a really good preaching outline from the exegesis and standing up and communicating well to an audience. That is not the same thing as shepherding souls. And so one of the great lessons that anyone could learn from this season would be that you need to be a member of a church. You need to be under authority and you need to make sure that that church is committed to a biblical ecclesiology, a biblical structure, as well as biblical church discipline. Like Jesus actually taught us the foundation and gave us the marching orders for his church and then commands us to engage in genuine accountability and discipline in Matthew 18. So I would never take my family to be a member of a church that refused to obey Jesus in the issue of church discipline. We need to strive to be holy and strive in sanctification.
And we need shepherds who take that sort of thing seriously. Josh Byce with us today on the Christian Royal View. Josh, I want to get quickly into some of the other current events going on.
We're going to get to one of the articles you've written recently that's going to be appearing in the January issue of the Christian Royal View Journal on the abolition of abortion. But before we get to that, former President Jimmy Carter recently died. And I'm sure you saw the reporting on his death and the glowing praise, headline after headline, about Jimmy Carter. And I'll just read a couple of quotes here. Raphael Warnock, your senator from Georgia, said, Jimmy Carter is a shining example of what it means to make your faith come alive through the noble work of public service.
Well done, good and faithful servant. Well done, President Joe Biden said, To all of the young people in this nation, for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning, the good life, study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility. And this was also echoed within much of the Christian world as well, within outlets like Christianity Today and many others just praised Jimmy Carter for his type of faith, actually. Well, one of your fellow alumnus from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Andrew Walker, wrote a column titled Jimmy Carter and America's Double Standard for Celebrating Christianity. And he writes, To be fair, Carter's faith motivated many good works, for which I will not criticize him, Walker writes. But Carter's Christianity ultimately allowed him to serve as a chaplain to progressive America.
It represents the convergence of religious sentimentality with progressive moral values. In effect, Carter's faith symbolizes the one form of church-state establishment that liberalism will tolerate, a Christianity stripped of its harder truths, its calls to repentance, and its moral clarity. Biblical orthodox Christianity, he writes, on the other hand, confronts the liberal order with truths it refuses to hear. And when those truths are voiced, orthodox faith is sidelined or castigated as intolerant. Last couple sentences, liberalism will not accept a Christianity that proclaims Jesus Christ as the only way to God, that defends unborn human beings discarded as medical waste, or that challenges the decadent sexual deviancy now treated as routine.
The lesson? Our culture tolerates a Christian faith that aligns with its values but resists a Christian faith that challenges it. This dynamic reveals something fundamental about true Christianity.
It is to do both, both comfort and confront. Again, that from Andrew T. Walker of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Coming from Georgia, the home state of Jimmy Carter, so you're probably well aware of him and his beliefs and what he did with his life. What are your thoughts on the media's and others' lauding of Jimmy Carter's faith?
Well, obviously, Jimmy Carter was sort of a famed president, especially within Christian circles, because he was the first president that professed to be a born-again Christian. And so when you think about that type of language, that means something. That's a phrase or words that Jesus himself coined and brought to the surface in a conversation in John chapter number three with Nicodemus. And so when you ask yourself a question, what does it mean to be born again? Obviously, it means to be a genuine follower of Christ. It means to be someone who is in the faith that is once delivered to the saints. And so when someone is truly born again, the Spirit of God will bear witness in their own life by bringing out of their life the fruit of the Spirit. And when you look at the life of Jimmy Carter, you see a lot of progressive politics and a commitment to progressive politics rather than a commitment to the true gospel of Jesus Christ. It is one thing to say that you're born again, but it's another thing to actually demonstrate that by how you submit yourself to Jesus. Jesus said it very simply. He said, if you love me, then keep my commandments.
Really, in many ways, if you were to evaluate the commitments of President Jimmy Carter, what you're going to see is you're going to see a lot of the same sort of characteristics that you see in men like Raphael Warnock. I would consider him to be a wolf. I would not consider him to be a genuine follower of Jesus. When you look at the earthly ministry of Jesus, as reported for us in the pages of the New Testament, you see Jesus is consistently clashing with those individuals, the religious establishment of the day. In Matthew chapter 5 through 7, Jesus is consistently saying things like this, you have heard that it was said unto you, and then fill in the blank because he said it many times. But then he would follow up and he would say, but I say unto you, and then he would give a corrective. Now, the honest question at that point is just to ask this, is Jesus giving a modern interpretation of the law of God, or is Jesus correcting false teaching of his day?
And it's quite obvious. There is no new updated version of the law of God. Jesus believed the scriptures, Jesus believed the law, and he embraced it, and he did not violate it.
He did not break it in one jot or tittle. So if you understand that to be true, what Jesus is actually doing is he's confronting the false teaching of the rabbis. The rabbinical teaching of the day wasn't exactly conservative. Even the Pharisees who were considered to be the guardians of the law in many ways were very liberal because they were creating additional laws that should be kept while at the same time breaking the very law of God. If you're going to be a genuine follower of Jesus, a genuine born-again Christian, then you need to actually obey and submit to Jesus Christ fully. And with regard to really clear biblical issues like the issue of abortion, the issue of sexuality, Jimmy Carter cited a proponent of abortion, and all those sort of liberal corruption of God's moral order.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's a man who stood for the butchering of little babies. He supported the woman's right to choose to murder her child. He supported quote-unquote homosexual marriage and so many different things that are in a clear violation to God's Word.
So I have a hard time embracing someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus, but then at the very same time consistently disobeys what Jesus commands in his Word. Again, Josh Byce with us today on the Christian Real View Radio program. This is a good segue, Josh, to your column in the January issue of the Christian Real View Journal, and you title that column, Why Christians Should Support the Abolition of Abortion. And you start out by writing, January this month is the sanctity of human life month, for many years referring to yourself, supported the incremental approach to opposing abortion. In recent years, however, I've become much more convinced that incrementalism, small gains, will never fully abolish abortion. And then you go down further in the column to say, the fight is often centered on two arguments, the definition of terms and the protection of women at the expense of babies. Explain why those two arguments are so central and important for Christians to understand what's at stake and why Christians should be actually proponents of the abolition of abortion rather than just incremental gains. It's a really important subject, one that I'm very passionate about, because for a very long time I just gave myself over to the idea that just incremental steps forward is like marching down a football field.
And if we can just march the ball just a little bit further, advance it just a little bit further down the field, then that's going to be a success story for us. But the problem with that sort of thing is that incrementalism supports things like, well, heartbeat bills and heartbeat laws. And we have one in Georgia, and it's greatly celebrated by the Christian church in the state of Georgia, and other states have similar legislation. But the problem with that legislation is that instead of it being a road to the very end goal of full-on abolition of baby murder, what you end up with is you end up with a road that leads to a cul-de-sac.
It ends with basically just stopping short of the end goal. And then what you end up with is an opportunity for politicians to sort of play the fence-straddling game and to say, well, Christians, we have a heartbeat law. So now you can't actually abort your child after there's a heartbeat that's detected. And then to the progressives, they say, well, you can still murder the baby up to a certain number of weeks until that heartbeat is detectable. And so I don't like that sort of legislation because it creates two classes of babies, one baby that's protected by law and another baby that's actually handed over to murderers to be butchered, and it's lawful.
And so I think that full-on abolition is the way forward for the church. And so it may come as a shock to those who are listening to this very interview, but the actual greatest hurdle for the church to get to a full-on abolition of abortion is really not the progressive liberal woman that's standing there with pink hair and a shirt that says save the whales, holding a sign that says kill the babies. That's really not the greatest threat to the full-on abolition of abortion. The greatest threat is the pro-life movement, the pro-life establishment.
Just let me flesh this out and explain. Some years back, there was basically a bill that was put forward for consideration, and it was an opportunity for the state of Louisiana to basically completely abolish abortion in the state. They had all the votes that were necessary, and everything seemed to be going forward really well, and at the 11th hour, there was a letter that was sent by a pro-life group. In fact, it was the National Right to Life Organization, and the National Right to Life Organization postures itself as an organization that stands for the sanctity of human life.
But that very organization teamed up with a number of other organizations similar to that one and then wrote to the lawmakers to say, we don't think that you should sign off on this bill, and here's why. By the way, you can go to the National Right to Life website, you can go to their home page, and you can find a link to this very letter that they sent. Their biggest thing was this, it wasn't that they wanted to just save the babies, but they were greatly interested in protecting women from criminalization is the language that they would like to use. They did not want women who murdered their babies to actually be punished for it. And so as a result of that, the bill failed, and so now it's still legal to have an abortion in the state of Louisiana. And so again, I share that as an example, that sort of thing is happening across the United States from year to year with this fight to abolish abortion in different states. And it's the pro-life establishment that says we want to protect women from being punished, from being prosecuted according to the law, and we also want to support the sanctity of human life as well. Lots of people call themselves pro-life because they are against abortions that occur after some man-made arbitrary point, whether it be after a heartbeat or after the baby can feel pain. But God has created a precious human life made in His image at the moment of fertilization in a mother's womb. The taking of innocent human life is an egregious sin before God.
See the Ten Commandments. After this short break for some ministry announcements, I'll ask Pastor Josh Byss about how realistic the abolition of abortion is, considering the worldview of our culture today. Again, you can read Josh's article on the abolition of abortion in the January issue of the Christian Wheelview Journal.
You can find out how to get in the mailing list for the journal during this break. I will also ask Josh about how Christians should view the person and policies of our new president, Donald Trump. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian Wheelview Radio Program. David Wheaton here to announce that registration is now open for the Overcomer Course for Young Adults, June 20th and 21st, at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota.
In eight interactive sessions over two days addressing life's most important issues, the Overcomer Course is designed to help young adults gain clarity and conviction on God's plan and their purpose in it. Pastor Matt Morrell, Pastor Ace Davis, and I will be the speakers. To foster personal interaction, the course is limited to 40 young adults, with meals, activities, and free time between sessions. Stonehouse Farm is just 40 minutes from Minneapolis Airport.
Many lodging options are a short drive from the farm. Encourage the young adults in your life and your church to come. To find out more and to register, go to thechristianworldview.org or call 1-888-646-2233. We are excited to announce our new monthly print publication called the Christian Worldview Journal.
In Matthew 24, Jesus called for His disciples to be discerning, watchful, endure persecution, and be prepared and faithful in the lead up to His return. This is what the Christian Worldview Journal will aim to do each month in three articles on current events and issues of the faith, including by Christian geopolitical analyst Soren Kern, who is the managing editor of the journal. You'll also find featured resources, ministry news, and more in this 12-page full-color publication. Everyone on our mailing list will receive the Christian Worldview Journal through the February 2025 issue. Starting in March, all Christian Worldview partners will receive it. To sign up for the journal, go to thechristianworldview.org or call 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. 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. In this final segment, our guest Josh Byss, pastor of Praise Mill Baptist Church in Georgia and founder and president of G3 Ministries, talks a bit more about the abolition of abortion and then responds to the criticism from the political and theological left that Christians who voted for Donald Trump have lost their credibility. Josh, just considering the political climate in our country at this point, how do you go from a society where, I mean, look, they just put Donald Trump in office. He's much less extreme, of course, than the left on abortion, but he openly came out during his campaign saying he's for abortion up to a certain number of weeks. It seems like when Americans have mostly had the chance to vote on this as it's gone back to the states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that most states are voting in favor of abortion. So how realistic do you think it is in our culture now of going to not just this pro-life, sort of semi-pro-life stance, but actually going to abolish abortion where there's actually legal consequence for women and doctors who perform abortions?
Is that realistic, and how would we ever get there as a society? First of all, it's the Church of Jesus Christ that should be preaching the truth about this very issue from the pulpits. And when that happens, then the church at large in America will be able to be educated properly on this very issue. And so I think we've been there before historically. Yeah, it might seem like a really, really big hurdle to overcome when you think about the way that people tend to vote today as they look at the issue of abortion, even from state to state.
But we've been there before, if you think about it. Years ago, you had farmers that said, it's my farm, it's my choice. And what they were talking about was basically the idea of I should be able to own human beings as property because of their skin color, and so it's my farm, it's my choice. Well, here we are in this day and age, obviously would certainly completely condemn slavery of human beings, but now we have women who are chanting that sort of mantra, and they're doing it in the public sphere, and they're saying it's my body, it's my choice. And what we need to do as a church is to educate and to say, no, it's not your choice to take the life of an unborn child, of a preborn baby.
So we need to stand up and we need to speak up and we need to apply the law of God to this very issue and say we need to have a full stop on baby murder. Josh, political conservatives right now are very enthusiastic and optimistic about the incoming Trump administration. And many Christians are as well. I'd like to hear how you are thinking about Donald Trump's presidency here. In light of the diverse group of people he has put around himself, including non-social conservatives like Elon Musk, even though he's for free speech, he has all kinds of not very conservative viewpoints.
RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or someone like Tulsi Gabbard. Now, these are accomplished, skilled people, not saying anything about that, but they're definitely not social conservatives that would hold to moral issues like, let's say, born-again Christians would. For me personally, I look at the Trump administration as an opportunity for the church to advance. I look for opportunities for the church to be able to have greater freedom rather than less freedom, greater opportunities in terms of free speech in the public sphere, as opposed to other progressive administrations, even like Kamala Harris and others, who if they had been elected as president would have further restricted the voice of the church and the reach of the church into the public sphere. So I just simply say that when we look at a Trump administration, although I would see many, many deficiencies in his choices or maybe even in his own positions publicly, I think even on the issue of abortion, he waffled some 13 or more times on his positions back and forth, and you can find those clips on YouTube.
And so on that issue, I'm very discouraged, but on other issues, I'm also very encouraged. And so I simply state that Trump is not a perfect man, but he is a man that I think will give a greater opportunity for the church of Jesus Christ to go forward, to preach the gospel. I think some of the challenges that the church will face under the Trump administration is just the blurred lines between what genuine real Christianity is versus sort of this strange understanding of Christianity under a conservative political umbrella, and there's a blurring of the lines there. And so I think that it's going to be really incumbent upon pastors to preach the true gospel and to make sure that we say this is true, but this is not true, and to sort of separate, make a line of distinction between what real genuine Christianity looks like versus some of the strange forms of quote-unquote conservative Christianity that flows out of a political sphere. Yes, because one of the main strong criticisms against evangelical Christians today is that, well, how can you support someone like Donald Trump and his movement? You used to back in the day have a big problem with someone like Bill Clinton for infidelity in the White House, but you don't have a problem with a man who's now in his third marriage and with his background and so forth.
How do you respond to the attack that Christians, you have lost credibility, you don't have any legs of stand anymore if you support someone like this in this administration? Well, it's really simple for me when I think about the categories that were set before us as a nation. If I go into the voting booth and I write in Mickey Mouse instead of voting for one of the two candidates that were put before us, then it's quite obvious that I'm just simply missing an opportunity to choose the very best candidate for this position that's set before us. And so we only had two options.
And so I chose the best of those two options and it was quite clear it was a landslide decision. And I think it was critically clear and vitally clear for the church if you were to just to be very honest. But at the end of the day, some of the critique might be, well, here's a man who's obviously led an immoral lifestyle. He has violated so many different things according to the Christian biblical ethic.
And I would say I absolutely agree with that. But I didn't vote for Donald Trump to be my pastor in a local church. He is a leader in a civil sphere. Now, what I would say is I don't think that you get a free pass just because you're a leader and you're not a pastor in the political sense. I don't think that you should just be given a free pass in terms of your moral choices.
They do actually matter. And so there's an old principle that's called the law of the lid. And the law of the lid basically teaches that you can't really expect the people that are directly under your leadership to rise to new heights of whether it be knowledge or spirituality or sanctification. If you're talking about the church or even in your home, you need to be thinking the same way. So as the father goes, so goes the family, as the pastor goes or as the pulpit goes, so goes the church. And in many ways, in the political sphere, as the president goes or as politicians go, so goes the nation. So we should not, as a church, just say, well, in this new era of life and in the history of this nation, we can now have a lower standard for morality in terms of political office.
I don't think so. I think we should still strive to elect the very best person possible for those elected positions. And I think we should still speak the truth and say Hebrews 13 says that the marriage bed should be honorable and it should be protected and it should not be violated. And I think that there should be something to be said about the speech of a politician and it should be measured and not just a person who's running like a loose cannon with a loose tongue saying despicable things. And so I think those things matter. And I also think it matters how we view things like human sexuality and all of the things related to marriage and how marriage has been greatly marred in recent days.
So all of those things matter. So just because we see deficiencies in, say, Donald Trump or someone else that he appoints doesn't mean that we set a new standard. No, the standard is still set by God. And Romans 13 says that anyone who occupies an office, that that position has been granted to them by God and they are to use it for good and not for evil. And that their position and their authority should be something that is a terror to those who do evil, but not to those who do good.
I think that's very well balanced that, you know, we were given a choice and we choose the better choice. And that doesn't mean we overlook or make excuses for and we actually do what you just did and actually point out that the lives and the practices of those we may have elected need to be to a biblical standard. And we need to preach the truth of the Bible in a spirit of grace.
And I think you've done that very well today, Josh. We appreciate your coming on The Christian Rule Review and all you're doing at G3 and for your local church. Praise Beale Baptist Church in Georgia as well. All of God's best and grace to you. Bless you.
My privilege. Well, we appreciate Josh Bice taking the time to answer a wide variety of questions today. If you want to find out more about him, his church and G3 Ministries, we have links at our website, thouchristianrealview.org. And be sure to read his column on the abolition of abortion in the January 2025 issue of The Christian Real View Journal. That should be in your mailbox soon. If you don't get the journal, just go to our website or call us to sign up. All of our contact information will be given immediately following the program in just a few moments. And remember to tell the young adults in your life and your church about the Overcomer Course, June 20th and 21st at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota.
Registration is now open. We're looking for 40 young adults who want to gain clarity and conviction on the most important issues of life and the faith. Full details are in the journal or at thouchristianrealview.org. You know, as I think more about Jimmy Carter and the almost universal praise he is receiving for being a born again Christian, it's all centered around what a good person he was for volunteering for Habitat for Humanity and teaching Sunday school or being a nice, friendly person. Those are all admirable things. But Jesus did all kinds of good works and they crucified him.
Why? Because he not only did good, but he also spoke God's truth about salvation, that he is the way and the truth and the life and that no one comes to the Father except through him, about religious corruption and pride, that the self-righteous would not receive eternal life. He spoke clearly about the binaries, the hard truths of scripture that we in our fallenness don't like to hear.
He was the perfect one and yet the humans he created still crucified him. Jesus said in John 3, you must be born again. And you must be born again by repenting of your sin against him and believing in his sinless life, his substitutionary death and his supernatural resurrection as fully satisfying God's justice and wrath for your sin. So if you've never placed your faith in Christ for salvation, call us or go to thechristianworldview.org and click on the page, What Must I Do to Be Saved? Thank you for joining us today on The Christian Worldview and for your support of this nonprofit radio ministry. Let's remember that Jesus Christ and his word are the same yesterday and today and forever.
So 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 1-888-646-2233. The Christian Worldview is a listener-supported nonprofit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Worldview partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit thechristianworldview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Thanks for listening to The Christian Worldview.
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