Best of Broadcast: Dr. Hugh Ross Talks About the Creator and the Cosmos

The following is a pre-recorded program. You're listening to a special Best of broadcast today.

We've got a fascinating interview today with astronomer Hugh Ross about the Creator and the Cosmos. It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Michael Brown is the director of the Coalition of Conscience and president of Fire School of Ministry. Get into The Line of Fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH. That's 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome, welcome to The Line of Fire. It's always fascinating, friends, to step back and look at the universe that God has created, to step back and learn about the Creator because of the creation. Do you remember as a kid going to a planetarium, maybe you've done that, and you'd sit down and the ceiling would turn into the universe, you'd look out, you'd see the galaxies, and wow, amazing. There's always this fascination we have. Some years back, Nancy and I were watching as many videos as we could talking about the universe, the vastness of the subject, and trying to get a handle on the size of it.

Of course, the brain breaks down. It just doesn't work. It's too big.

It's too magnificent. It's too beyond us. So I love to have the opportunity to talk to my colleague, Dr. Hugh Ross, founder and president of Reasons to Believe. He is an astronomer and he is a committed follower of Jesus. So he brings together those two wonderful qualities of having scientific understanding of the universe as much as we can as finite human beings, and yet believing in and personally worshiping and following the God who made the universe. And he has a brand new book out, The Creator and the Cosmos, how one astronomer's investigations into both the cosmos and the Bible revealed to him a more wondrous personal God than he could have ever imagined. So without further ado, Dr. Ross, great to have you back with us on the line of fire.

Well, thank you for inviting me. Why did you write this book? Of the many books you've written so far, what is it that prompted you to write this book, which seems almost like a summary of your life journey up to now? Well, it's actually a fourth edition. I came up with a first edition 25 years ago, and the reason I keep bringing up new editions is to demonstrate the biblical principle you see in Job and Psalms, that the more you study the record of nature, the more evidence you'll find for the supernatural and handiwork of God. And this fourth edition, I've got 80 new pages of content, because in the last several years, there's been an explosion of new discoveries in astronomy and physics that more strongly established the Christian faith and the reliability of the Bible statements about the universe. Now, as one who works in this field regularly, you don't just do Christian ministry, you and your team, Reasons to Believe, stay up to date with what's happening in scientific literature. Would you say that it's become increasingly difficult to deny a creator of the universe with the more scientific evidence that we have? Yes, that's mainly one of the reasons I brought this edition out is to make the point that my peers, who are not believers, are now appealing to non-empirical arguments to defend their atheistic worldview. The reason is that the empirical evidence is now overwhelming that there must be God, the God of the Bible, that's behind creating and designing the universe for our benefit. So they're appealing to things we can't measure or test and say, maybe in the regions of ignorance, there might be something weird going on that allows us to overturn everything we know and understand about the universe. You know, it's interesting, we posted something on our Ask Dr. Brown Facebook page about God the creator, and someone who is a rocket scientist and an atheist, very friendly in Australia, responded with, imagine this, and went into a whole multiverse argument in multiple universes, et cetera, et cetera. And I sent the quote to a friend of mine, a medical doctor whose post I had put on the Facebook page that prompted this response.

And he immediately said, notice the opening word, imagine. And so that's what you're saying that to just look at scientific facts, which is what scientists are supposed to do because the facts point to a creator, they're now having to speculate beyond the facts. Well, this is the whole point. We know what's true, not because we've got absolute proof. We humans will never have absolute proof for anything. But we know something is securely true if we see that the more we learn about the subject, the stronger becomes the evidence that in fact it is true. And when that happens at a rate of a factor of a thousand times per month, then you can be assured that it is true.

And that's what's happening with the fine tuning design evidence. It's literally increasing for the universe, our galaxy, and our planet Earth to make possible our existence. It's increasing in a rate of about a factor of a thousand times per month, which is why I share with skeptics, if you're not persuaded today, wait one month and see which way the evidence goes. Now, is this the kind of thing that is trickling its way down its way down into universities, into college campuses, into textbooks that kids are using in school?

Or is there an absolute resistance to acknowledge these things? It is trickling down to the graduate physics and astronomy level, but it hasn't trickled down part of that. It's going to take a while before it gets down to undergraduate science and out to the lay public. I mean, that's one reason I brought the book out. As I said, more than physicists and astronomers need to know about this stuff.

This is something the general public needs to be aware of so they can deal with a lot of these issues, challenges that are being bandied about out there. You know, and I appreciate there are other books of yours that you've brought up to date or supplemented. And I remember looking at one of them about Days of Creation. I thought, I have this book. And then I looked at the one I was sent.

I thought, this is a much fatter book. The same with Creator in Cosmos, that what you've written, you're now building on. It's not that you have to go back and correct things.

It's now you have far more evidence to support what you've written. So give us an example. Let's say you're talking to someone that's a serious skeptic.

They're not a mocker. They're seriously looking at evidence. They really question a personal God and how we can really know if there's a creator. So what are some of the most striking or perhaps the most striking single example you could give that you've added to your book, the Creator and the Cosmos? Well, what I documented in the book is we've now entered an era of precision cosmology.

We're now making measurements to 1% precision or better. And to give an example, the Bible talks about how the universe comes from a space-time beginning, how it continuously expands from that beginning under laws of physics that are held constant. For one of those laws is a pervasive law of decay. So any system that expands under that pervasive law of decay, aka the second law of thermodynamics, must get colder and colder as it gets bigger and bigger. And so using these biblical statements and knowing the age of the universe, we can come up with a biblically predicted cooling curve for the universe. And what's new in the past few years, astronomers have come up with precision measurements of the past temperature state of the universe.

They've done that at over 13 different epochs. And what I show you in the book is the biblically predicted cooling curve for the universe over its entire history and overlapping that actual measurement that we astronomers have made. And you see that it's a perfect fit between the measurements and what the Bible predicts. And when you say the Bible predicts, where would it be predicting this? Well, for example, you see eight places in Isaiah where it speaks about God expanding the universe, also in Jeremiah and Job. There's 11 places in the Bible where it talks about the space-time beginning of the universe. Jeremiah 33 declares that God doesn't change and it's proof that he doesn't change.

Look at the laws that govern the heavens and the earth as they don't change, he doesn't change. Ecclesiastes speaks about this pervasive law decay. Romans chapter 8 explicitly tells us the entire universe has been subject to this pervasive law decay. So that's where we can get the Big Bang cosmology. And I tell my friends in astronomy and physics, it's not Albert Einstein or George Lemaitre that came up with the Big Bang model of the universe. It actually find it in the pages of the Old Testament that were written more than 2,000 years ago. For thousands of years, the Bible said it's the only book of philosophy, theology, or science that said that we live in a continuously expanding universe. You know, there's the famous story of Robert Jastrow and his book, An Astronomer Finds God, and the picture that's painted is the astronomer climbs to the top of the mountain of knowledge and finds a theologian sitting up there with his Bible.

But that's pretty much what you're saying. And that even the idea of the universe operating on fixed principles that Einstein said it could be observable and that there was mathematical precision to it. Could it possibly be argued that just over the period of billions of years that these laws and principles evolved and that it was just kind of a necessity that things came together like this? Well, it's something we astronomers can directly observe because the farther away we look, the farther back in time we see. And what I document in the book is that we've made observations of quasars and galaxies as far away as 13 billion light years. And we've measured the laws of physics and the spectra that we see from these objects. And those laws of physics measure to be identical to the laws of physics we measure in the laboratory to 16 places of the decimal. So it demonstrates that that biblical statement, the laws of physics don't change, our measurements show that what the Bible said thousands of years ago is indeed correct.

Yeah, it's extraordinary, extraordinary. And Stephen Hawking's brilliant physicist, now deceased, hopefully in his last moments, turned to the Lord only God knows. But Stephen Hawking's had once made a statement for me as a totally non-scientific person, I was baffled by, and John Lennox, a great scientific thinker, took issue with it. And again, I knew there must be more to it because of Hawking's brilliance, but he basically said that the universe was created out of nothing, but that the law of gravity somehow existed.

I couldn't make head or tail of that. How could someone so brilliant make a statement like that? Well, I devote all of chapter 12 in the book to Stephen Hawking's research over his lifetime and the philosophical and theological implications about what he discovered. Matter of fact, we're now giving that chapter away for free.

If you go to reasons.org slash cc, you can get that whole chapter for free. And you also see a tribute that I wrote to Stephen Hawking on my Facebook page, because I got to hear him lecture several times when I was at Caltech. Quite an interesting fellow, but yeah, he kept making references to things like gravity creating the universe, or you would say maybe the universe didn't have just one dimension at time, but the equivalent of two dimensions of time. And what I explain in the Crater in the cosmos of what he was doing is what you see in Romans chapter one, he was attributing characteristics of God and attaching them to the universe. So yeah, I'm gonna jump in here.

He was deifying the universe there, thereby worshiping the creation rather than the creator. All right, we'll be right back with Dr. Ross. We'll make sure you know how to get that chapter free. And then from there, get the rest of the book. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution here again is Dr. Michael Brown.

All right. I just tweeted this out. You want to take advantage of this, the updated edition of Dr. U. Ross's classic work, The Creator and the Cosmos, now has a chapter that is devoted entirely to the work of Dr. Stephen Hawking's just deceased. You can get that chapter for free. Go to reasons.org slash CC, reasons.org slash CC. I just tweeted that out.

Take advantage of that. And of course, get the whole book for yourself. So Dr. Ross, you were saying before the break that what Stephen Hawking's, with all of his brilliance did and his non-belief in a God who created the universe, thereby attributed qualities of deity to the universe itself.

Can you unpack that for us? Well, what he mentioned just before he passed was his work years ago with James Hartle, where he basically said, yes, the universe is constrained by time. But let's suppose that in addition to real time, there's imaginary time. And mathematically, that's the equivalent of two distinct dimensions of time.

And that's the property that the Creator possesses. And what he actually admitted in a brief history of time, all the measurements and observations tell us that the universe and everything in it is constrained to one dimension of time. But he says if there's two dimensions of time, there's no boundary to the universe.

And if there's no boundary, what need then do we have for God to create it? But the problem is, the universe really does have only one dimension of time. And hence, there really is a need for someone to create that dimension of time. And ironically, it was Stephen Hawking, along with Roger Penrose, that produced the first of the space-time theorem that proves that there must be a beginning to space and time, and therefore an agent beyond time that creates time. And as you mentioned that, speaking of the agent beyond time who had to create time, and therefore the fact that the universe exists indicates that there is a Creator.

I mean, there's ultimately no way around it when you have the facts and the science in front of you. If I'm talking to a non-believer and they have questions about these things, is your book, The Creator in the Cosmos, something I could give to that person? Would it help them in their journey? Exactly. Of all the books that I've written over the years and decades, The Creator in the Cosmos has brought more people to faith in Jesus Christ than any other, and has been through Christians giving the book away to their non-Christian friends.

Awesome. All right, friends, again, to get the chapter on Stephen Hawking, go to reasons.org slash CC. You can read that, find out more about the book there, and then explore the website, Reasons to Believe. You'll find different levels of entry. If you're a seeker, if you're a believer with questions, if you're an adult, if you're a child, there's all kinds of material.

There are new articles being added on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Dr. Ross, what would you say is the toughest naturalistic objection to God being the Creator of the Cosmos? What's the most challenging thing that you've had to face, and what's your answer to it? Well, typically it's where they say, well, all this fine-tuning design evidence you present presumes the laws of physics. What if we didn't have gravity? What if we didn't have thermodynamics?

What if we didn't have electromagnetism, or the strong and weak nuclear force? And what if the space-time dimensions are radically different? And whenever that happens, my response is, oh, you must be talking about the angelic realm. That's a realm of very different laws of physics, different dimensions.

But guess what? Their realm is fine-tuned, just like our realm is. Simply the complex nature of life demands fine-tuning. Yes, God could have done it differently with different laws of physics, but either way, it's still fine-tuned. And if any of your listeners want to actually see this brought out, there's a debate I did in front of the International Skeptic Society with the atheist particle physicist Victor Stenger, and that was the subject of our debate. They said, yes, if you're talking these laws of physics, then yes, there's no question.

It's fine-tuned to make our existence possible. At the very end of the debate, he said, as an atheist, he said, remember, you are all cold nothing. And I thought, wow, that was an honest statement coming from a leading atheist, that if there is no God, we humans have no purpose, we have no value, we have no destiny, we're all cold nothing.

Yeah, I don't see any way around that. To me, we're just neurons firing any sense of purpose or destiny is the figment of our own imagination if we are just walking carbon or whatever. Have you, in the aftermath of these debates, ever had interaction with some of these scientists, skeptics, atheists, where they've opened up and admitted that the evidence is against them or it's more philosophical thing for them where they just don't want to make the jump? Yes, I mean, that happened after that International Skeptic Society conference. I mean, the audience was composed of 700 atheists from around the world.

Wow. And I stayed for more than three hours talking to them individually and in groups afterwards. And one thing they told me, they said it was the first time in their life they'd ever heard a credible scientific defense of the Christian faith. They said, we atheists thought we owned science because you believers are so silent on the science, you talk about everything else except, but we thought we owned it. The second thing they said was, well, in fact, I made an observation to them. I said, you know, I've been here all weekend. I've just found a brand new evidence for my Christian faith.

And they said, well, what is that? I said, all of your speakers were focused on the God of the Bible. They let all the other gods to get a free skate. The other thing I noticed is how passionate they all were about the non-existence of the God of the Bible. I said, if you really were convinced that the God of the Bible didn't exist, you'd be treating that God like you do the Easter bunny or the great pumpkin or the tooth fairy.

Your passion tells me you really do believe that he exists, but you don't like him. The response I got from almost every one of them was, it's not that we hate the God of the Bible, but it's that we despise his follower. And then they began to tell me stories of how they had really unpleasant encounters with Christians in their life or people who thought who they thought were Christian. And so it just showed me that when you do give solid evidences for your Christian faith, you need to be ready with a compassionate response and listen to people's struggles and hard issues.

Yeah, and absolutely. What I found interacting with some atheists is that they're so passionate about justice and so believed in this God that was supposed to be just and fair and hearing their prayers that when they had a major spiritual disappointment, they just threw everything out. So it wasn't based initially on hostility towards God, but on a sense of disappointment. And that leads me back to where we started in reading the description of the book, but I want to end here. This for you has been over the years writing the book and now updating it with 80 more pages. This for you has been an ongoing discovery of the wonders of the God we serve.

So what have you learned for yourself about God over the years working on this book now updating it in the fourth edition? Yeah, what I've learned is that literally everything that we see in the universe, every component of the universe, every event in the universe of history plays a critical role in making possible the redemption of billions of us human beings. That also applies to our galaxy.

It applies to our planet. I look up to millions of species of life on planet earth and realize that in the context of God's goal of redeeming billions of human beings unto himself, each one plays a role. And so the evidence for fine-tuning design really becomes impressive and pervasive when we put it in a context not just of what God needs to do to make a home for us, but what he needs to do for billions of us to come into a loving redeemed relationship with him for the rest of eternity. So for you this is not just a matter of scientific evidence for the existence of God but a revelation into the character of God.

And this may be a question you can answer for three hours but we've got about two minutes left. How does this give you a revelation of God being our Heavenly Father? Well it shows me the degree to which he loves me. The fact that I couldn't be here unless he first created 50 billion trillion stars. I said wow he went to all that effort in order for my existence to be possible.

He must care for me a great deal. And realizing that the age of the universe, if the universe were even slightly older or younger, my existence wouldn't be possible. If the stars didn't have the varieties that they did. And just looking at the galaxies and realizing there's only one galaxy in which life is possible. Realizing that every one of the asteroid belts fulfills a role in making my existence possible. God must care for me a great deal which gives me the confidence that he's going to be with me and work with me literally every moment of my life which allows me to kind of step out and basically say okay when I walk into that auditorium filled with atheists who are angry, I'm not walking in alone. The creator of the universe is walking into that auditorium with me and so it gives me the faith and the confidence to be an instrument in those kinds of situations.

Incredible and just as you speak I'm sitting here drinking this in. It's ministering to me as well and to all of our listeners and viewers. Friends, if you've never visited the website reasons.org, reasons to believe, reasons.org, check it out today. You'll be enriched. Send your friends there that don't yet believe in the God that we know and love and then while you're there go over it's reasons.org slash cc forward slash cc.

Go there, get the free chapter on Dr. Stephen Hawking and then with that I'm sure you'll want to get the whole book, the creator and the cosmos. Dr. Ross, as always it's a delight to speak to you. God's blessing on you and the whole team. Oh thank you very much. All right friends we come back. We're going to change gears and have a very interesting discussion with James Robison about working with people that are different than you without getting flaky and sloppy.

How do you do it? It's the Line of Fire with your host Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Hey friends, welcome to the Line of Fire. Michael Brown, your joyful voice of moral and cultural revolution.

Great to be with you today. Hey, go to the stream.org, stream.org. I've got a brand new article up there today.

Are people born transgender? Trust me, you'll want to know the information that's in there. Also an article I read with great fascination and interest by Rachel Alexander on stream.org right on the home page today about the Las Vegas massacre asking very carefully, is there evidence, real evidence that there is a cover-up, a conspiracy to cover up evidence as to what actually happened?

It's a pretty unnerving thing to read at stream.org. It's my joy to speak with founder and publisher of the stream, James Robison. James, it's been a couple weeks but great to have you back on with us today. Well, it's good to be with you Michael. Always enjoyed, always appreciate what you share and just thank you for representing God's truth and love.

I appreciate it. Well, from the heart man, we're in this together. All right, so here's a big question and it goes back to advice that Billy Graham gave you many years ago in your own ministry to spend time with the Christians that you were taught to avoid. Now on the one hand, we know scripture tells us to avoid false teachers and to mark heretics. At the same time, we know the scriptures urge us to preserve the unity of the body. So how do we spend time with believers that we've been taught to avoid and maybe get past some stereotypes and misconceptions without just getting sloppy and thinking anything goes?

Well, Paul, we started in Ephesians 4 that we were to preserve, seek to preserve the unity of the Spirit in a bond of peace and that's the unity of the Spirit into which we were born and to tarry like they did in the upper room until they were endued with this power so that they could have the unconditional love for one another but also an uncompromising spirit. You know what happens today when we disagree, Doc, it seems like we have a spirit of divorce prevailing even in the lives of believers and Christians. If we disagree on a point, we just can't seem to come to agreement. We just split.

We start another tribe, another group where we just get away from and I think this is anything but family. There's not a single marriage, there's not a single family member that doesn't have some very serious disagreements, not only tension, not only some foolish arguments sometimes or even seriousness but to cut and rock, to divorce is one of the most damaging practices I believe in the church and on earth and we've got to stop that. I don't know very many people that I can have a long lengthy serious discussion with that we may not find what we consider to be a pretty important serious point at which we don't see it exactly the same. Now rather than having a love and a patience that goes with love for one another, to see if we can grow together at least a continuation of that love without having to divorce to me is important.

I am not going to stop loving people just because I am convinced they're wrong or they're convinced I'm wrong. It's not like we necessarily sign a truce but we just agree to let peace abide. We keep the preserve the unity of the spirit in a bond peace. If you and I had a serious serious disagreement I don't know a thing you could do doc to stop me from having a very deep sincere real and redemptive love for you and I would also have this spirit where we disagree I would ask the Lord to show me if I'm wrong, correct me and help us reach a point of understanding.

Now that just to me sounds like a very effective way for couples to get along for family members brothers and sisters and people to get along. I read so many things that I think my goodness that's not the whole truth that's just part of the truth it looks like this person's taking a shot at these other believers but I don't automatically pick aside I don't start putting words names and labels on that individual to try to discredit them or minimize their effect. I immediately start praying for understanding praying for an opportunity you can't believe I've got two calls in right now to people and I questioned some of the things they said and I don't think they understand exactly what's going on totally that they're addressing in a way that sounds like it's unkind. You know one of you addressed Michael Gerson recently I've got I'm trying right now to call him just talk to him I just want to talk to him. I don't want to say the man is being unjustly critical he's saying a lot of things that are really really they they bear meditating on thinking about but we don't have to decide I'm a person and I'm of this one and we're apart I'm not going to do that I'm going to do my best to be a peacemaker and preserve the unity of the spirit into which we were born in a bond of holy spirit peace.

Now that's where I'm going to live. Yeah and the fact that you pray for the person sometimes we forget to do that yeah and that we then pray for ourselves maybe we have the blind spot or maybe both of us have blind spots things that we tend to to not do. Many years ago there was a brother with a major media ministry who was attacking meetings I was part of the Brownsville revival and I was going to be having a debate with him and I called our student body to pray for him but in such a way that the prayers were positive prayers and I would pray the same thing for him that I prayed for myself that wherever I was doing God's will and speaking his will that he would give increase and where I was not doing his will speaking as well that he would bring pruning and after the debate we ended up having a great time of reconciliation together he then came and spoke to our student body when he walked in he was given a standing ovation which floored him but the students never heard a negative word about him in other words they prayed for him in a constructive way they knew he opposed what we were doing but there was never any hostility in the way we prayed or we're right he's wrong it was rather here's a brother we're brothers and sisters Lord bless your people together I think sometimes that we have this whole divorce thing perhaps because of insecurity and our own position could that be true I think what you just illustrated is the perfect illustration of exactly what he was talking about preserving the unity of the spirit upon the peaks you did it it worked I think we would all be amazed at how effective the gospel would be if we would just practice it not just preach it but put it in action if you realize micro that people would be impacted by the gospel of Jesus Christ the transforming power of his truth that his redemptive worked in our lives that we don't have a single issue a single challenge a single dilemma that we could not effectively and even successfully address and we could do it in short order the solution to the problems in the world are found in the transforming power of the gospel and the impact of that kingdom on every one of us you just gave an illustration of it I tried to give an illustration of it and I'm telling this is where I'm going to live people may want to take all the cheap shots in the world toward me I'll tell you what you'll notice something there are not many people sniping me right now they're not taking cheap shots at me you know something now they may start they may start in mass tomorrow it could all change and I'll still love them I'll forgive them I'll try to learn from my enemy that'd be one of the greatest things the president could do is start learning from his enemies start learning from the people that criticize him we all need to do that love your enemies they can teach you the truth not in the best way necessarily but learn from it I'm going to do that period and I'm not going to change it's interesting that this this spirit seems to disarm even the harshest critic yeah it is it is true you know on one occasion when I when I sat down with this this one brother who was very critical of us we said let's spend a few hours together and my perception had been that he had really been attacking me and coming against us in unfair ways but when we sat down to talk the first question I asked him was how have I failed you in our relationship and he just wanted me to know that he's a very sincere believer and that there are lots of false attacks against him and you know basically the wall between us went down in a matter of seconds then there was a lot to talk about and talk through but it's just like in a husband-wife relationship once we put down our defenses and once we don't just walk in such pride and now I'm concerned about the other person normally once you get there you've already opened up a massive door of communication so it comes down to do I love my neighbor including the neighbor that I differ with well if all marriages and couples treat each other the way church leaders and church members and preachers treat each other every marriage would end in divorce so there's something amiss and I want to be a part of correcting it and inspiring the correction of it and I'm determined to live that out I'm not I'm not going to go somewhere else to try to prove to everybody else that I'm right and they're wrong and look how wonderful what I believe is I'm going to try to show them the transforming power of how wonderful the gospel is so that we can all continue to be soft clay yielded in the hands of God the master potter to continue to shape Christ in us and let's keep in mind that even the pressure and attack that comes from the enemy can still shape Christ in us because it's built through the fingers in the hand of God so everything that happens in our life if we allow God to use it correctly it will shape Christ in us and that's the hope of his glory being revealed on this earth yeah I remember the first piece of hate mail I got in ministry decades ago someone gave it to me at our book table and this is decades and decades back and and I brought it home and I said to Nancy you're not gonna believe what this person said it's crazy and I started and I and I was ready to throw it out she goes no no maybe there's some truth in it I said what are you talking about the guy's off the deep end she's going I know I know but maybe there's some truth in it to learn from yeah you know you have to immediately then put the pride down and say okay maybe I can maybe there is something that I could learn from this and and James one thing you've done now is really seek to get God's heart and speak to the nation as as a father because it's such a fatherless nation and generation and you're doing that on your Facebook page rev James Robinson and then those are also posted on stream stream.org what's the last thing that you've talked to the nation about just this father's heart perspective well last night I joined Sammy Rodriguez and my pastor Robert Morris gateway pastor and Sammy calls me dad and Robert looks at me as a father and we talked about mentoring and mantles but we focused on mentoring and by the way this is a one-hour program that will air on tbn on praise very soon you don't want to miss it and it'll air several times maybe many times because God showed up it was really really amazing and they were asking about the mentoring effect that I've had on their life and many others that they brought up you know you kindly said that I've had some kind of positive effects on your life now here's the deal I don't go out seeking to mentor people I go out and love people and when I love someone it's the father's love that's filling my heart to overflowing and out of the abundance of my heart the father speaks and he speaks as a father as the mentor as the one that speaks not only perhaps sometimes correction or exhortation but always encourage and that that's just it's just simply a way of life yeah it's not who I am it's who he is in me and you know it really it does shine through we we're out of time my dear brother but thank you again for joining us and for exemplifying the message you preach it's the line of fire with your host dr michael brown your voice of moral cultural and spiritual revolution here again is dr michael brown welcome welcome to the line of fire this is michael brown what a delight talking to you what a delight talking to my friend and colleague james robinson and he yeah he really does walk in very supernatural very deep love and and you know if he's if he's in your court he's a friend so I want to talk to you about this for a moment about walking in love about being redemptive in the midst of differences we have so so look we have differences with some people who are of another faith or not of any faith in other words an atheist or an agnostic or a buddhist or muslim or hindu these are people who are completely outside of our sphere of faith we don't look at them as fellow believers we don't expect them to share our same belief system we understand that and yet if that person was our next door neighbor we'd love that person as ourself yes that would be our calling and we'd reach out to them we'd be kind to them we'd do what we could to be good neighbors and thereby demonstrate the reality of our faith in god through our love for them and be genuinely good human beings so that they would be glad that we are their neighbors right that that would be the goal now ultimately they may be uncomfortable because we're believers and they're not but our heart is we love them we are not going to have fellowship with them in terms of a deep spiritual bond that's not going to happen right but we can certainly be co-workers friends neighbors and and we should exemplify the spirit of jesus in that what about people who claim to be followers of jesus but are heretical in their beliefs like mormons or jehovah's witnesses or other groups like that well again we treat them in a similar way we treat them as people outside of the faith we treat them as we would treat any other person who doesn't know the lord loving them as ourself seeking to be good neighbors friends co-workers but we couldn't have fellowship with them nor could we work together for the gospel now let's say there was a crisis in our neighborhood and something happened whereby everybody had a chip in together to try to help out a family that was destitute or some natural disaster hit you know there's an earthquake and people buried under rubble well we all go running down together atheist hindu buddhist jehovah's witness mormon born again christian side by side and try to pull the rubble off people right but if there was a prayer meeting that night praying for victims that are in the hospital i'm not going to be part of a joint prayer meeting where everyone's praying to their god or whatever i'm going to pray with other believers so my spiritual activities are going to be together with other believers and natural things we can work together on you know your food distribution okay how can we work together as a neighborhood to help out those that are in need great everybody working together but ultimately gospel solutions are only going to be found with fellow believers okay what about people of of whose faith we're not sure in other words they seem to be believers they seem to be genuine they seem to profess that they've come to faith in the god of the bible etc but some of their beliefs are very different than ours why not get to know them okay pretty radical extreme idea why not spend time together and find out what they really believe i i just got a copy yesterday of my book the grace controversy which came out after hyper grace at the request of the publisher it's shorter it's a popular version it breaks things down into certain questions does not take the place of hyper grace kind of just a different book on the same subject just got a copy of it translated into indonesian so hyper grace has been translated into many languages it's been translated into finnish and into italian and into german and into dutch and into indonesian etc and now grace controversy also in indonesian i'm not sure if it's in other languages well i have very very very strong differences with hyper grace teachers some of them call themselves hyper grace teachers some of them this is how i categorize them based on them holding to certain fundamental beliefs and because of that i spent over two hours with pastor joseph prince oh 15 months ago when i was in singapore pastor prince is the best known teacher worldwide that i would say teaches a message of hyper grace he wanted me to know areas that he emphasized that i would know were absolutely foundational to me in other words his his faith in the word of god his love for the word of god his love to win the loss to jesus his belief that submission to the lord jesus is important and essential his belief that holiness is progressive that you cannot get more righteous because you're declared righteous at salvation but you can get more holy you can become holier as you grow in the lord which many of those who hold to hyper grace do not believe that they say that holiness is instantaneous just as righteousness is in any case we work together i wrote an article and then i sent it to him and we went back and forth on the wording saying these are the areas where we agree we still have differences we still have areas of disagreement absolutely i'm glad that my hyper grace book continues to get out make an impact be translated i'm glad the grace controversy is out in hyper grace i quote joseph prince many times but you'll see in the book i quote him as a brother you say why because according to everything i understand he is genuinely born again he holds to gospel fundamentals he wants to see people truly saved and discipled and the differences that we have are different differences within the faith there is nothing of the fundamental gospel to my knowledge that he denies and there are areas within the gospel within salvation where we have strong differences but in the book i quote him as a brother and i also reference testimonies of people whom i've heard from regularly through the years now who have been positively transformed by the message of grace that he preaches i've met them regularly people that i've known for years said that they were really bogged down and struggling people that graduated from ministry school and served on the mission field one of them said yeah just they didn't agree with everything he said maybe 20 30 they differed with but the 70 or 80 percent was liberating and life-changing for them has really helped them in their walk with the lord somebody tweeted me one day i'm not sure if i should get your book hyper grace i got set free from alcoholism listening to joseph prince said i said well you'll be helped by the book we'll only build on the grace truths and remove some error along the way pastor prince sent me many many testimonies of people delivered from all kinds of sexual immorality as a result of hearing his message in other words he says that the message he preached leads to holiness and i said yeah there's error in it that's going to confuse people as well but here's the point we can emphasize where we agree now i've had people damning me to hell because i recognize him as a brother so be it that fine go go ahead i'm not his defender i'm not his apologist we differ i wrote the book hyper grace okay we differ that being said spending time together really helped me better understand what he believed helped me probe some issues with him help us focus specifically on areas where we still differ with each other my hope is that whenever he preaches and teaches that some of my differences with him would be in his his head because i said man if he could just preach repentance more clearly and lay these things out more clearly it would be helpful you know and whatever perspective he has what he does in his ministries between him and god but here's the point we spent time together here we might have spent all that time and concluded that our differences were even deeper well then good it's good we spent the time together then i shout out my warnings even more loudly than before and then he tells people to avoid my book you know whatever or we find there are areas of common concern that we have with exaggerations of grace he said to me why don't we agree to expose counterfeit grace and he laid out what he meant by counterfeit grace i said i agree with that definition of counterfeit grace yeah let's put our strengths together because by god's grace we both have influence in platforms let's put our strengths together he has a massive massive tv platform these days and let's come against counterfeit grace well at the same time people realize we have differences about other issues within the faith i want to encourage you if you're a pastor or leader have you gotten together with other pastors and leaders in your city i'm not talking about those who are in cults you're trying to reach out to them but those who are within the body now maybe it's a liberal lutheran presbyterian pastor when you get with this guy or gal you'll find out they don't even believe in the authority of scripture they don't believe jesus rose from the dead okay that's so now you're you deal with them like an unsafe person you're trying to reach all right but i'm talking about your baptist and you got an assembly of god pastor you're presbyterian there's a baptist pastor you're whatever the different groups are that claim to believe in the bible is god's word not exterior books as god's word like the mormons doing things like that that hold to the fundamentals of the apostles creed and i see you know the fundamentals whatever okay the basics they affirm those things have you ever spent time together have you ever done it or just brothers and sisters you got friends and other churches and rather than arguing all the time you're wrong on it have you ever spent time together and talk things through and find out maybe you have more in common than you realize or maybe you could each learn from each other because maybe you each have strengths could it be i encourage you to think about it all right friends that being said let me encourage you to visit our gofundme page we now have an updated video showing you progress you got to see it you got to see what i see in the studio we take you around the screens the whole setup but everything that's happened through your contributions and this is how we're doing live stream right now on youtube and facebook that is you're listening on radio others are watching me live on youtube and facebook so go to and excuse me gofundme.com forward slash ask dr brown studio gofundme.com forward slash askdrbrown studio together we're making a difference back with you tomorrow another program powered by the truth network