Uncommon Courage in Unvirtuous Times

Nothing says Christmas like a water buffalo. For a poor family in Asia, getting a water buffalo is like getting a farm tractor to pull a plow, or getting a milk truck full of delicious milk, or getting a stand at the market to sell cheese. A water buffalo opens the door for work, food, and income. More importantly, it opens the door to talk about Jesus.

And nothing says Christmas better than that. This is Andy Thomas from the Masculine Journey Podcast where we discover what it means to be a wholehearted man. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Well, this guy is right in the middle of it, and he's a warrior for Christ. His name is Pastor Andy Woodard, and he's standing right next to me. We're in Lynchburg, Virginia at the Freedom Uncensored Conference. Uncommon courage in unvirtuous times, and they asked you to come speak.

Why would they ask you, man? There's some noise here because there's a lot of folks mulling around, but talk to us. Pastor, what's going on? I was invited to a Christian school in New York City to invite students to our church and printed up a flyer that said, Tired of Woke Churches?

You're invited to PBC. We gave out about 30 or 40 of those copies, and one of the students, I guess, didn't like it. He sent a picture of it to an activist friend who tweeted it out. Then the mob descended on Twitter and started dunking on us, calling us racists, KKK, white supremacists, all sorts of things like that. Our church is majority non-white, so it was really ironic because that's not true at all.

But we are filled with conservative Christians who believe the Bible is true and that God is the one who defines what sin is, not sociologists. That flyer really made it around the internet with a lot of liberals hating on us and then conservatives promoting it and sharing it. So I figure maybe a million people saw the flyer if you add up all the followers of the different accounts. I saw new followers on Twitter too.

Yeah, my Twitter account went from 17 followers to 1200 followers in three days. Just use the word woke, friends, and you will get a following, or you may get a lot of people mad at you too. You'll wake some woke.

Yeah, I got like 30 or 40 hate calls in that first day, but then since then there's just been a lot of support and a lot of encouragement. Now there's confusion around the word woke. What is woke?

What does that mean? In fact, I had coffee with my pastor and he looked at me and said, What does this word woke mean? And today the word woke means a person who's in agreement with the social justice ideology. It came from the idea of being awake or socially conscious or aware of issues affecting the black and brown community. All those terms sound really innocent at face value, but the reality is much darker behind that.

There's an underbelly of Marxism and postmodernism and Hegelianism and all sorts of these complicated... Well, plus the CRT, the critical race theory. But what I'm hearing about that is, isn't that actually racist itself, telling people that they're blemished because of whatever color they're born with? Yeah, that's the basis of the idea is that you're either oppressor or an oppressed, and it all depends on your skin color and has nothing to do with your actual thoughts or beliefs or any basis of reality.

It's just what you look like, what your skin color is, what your appearance is. So you're speaking the truth, the word, and you're attacking the evil of the culture through God's word, and yet people are mad at you for this and they're attacking you. Is that what you're finding yourself on the crosshairs of a lot of hate and animus? Well, that has happened and it did happen. But from that point, it's really encouraged a lot of people to take a stand and that it's sort of like the dogs that chase the garbage truck. Once they catch it, they don't know what to do. So that's what the woke mob did. They attacked and then they kind of ran out of steam.

And the cancel culture falls right behind. Now, one of the guys that's there's no one more and more woke than Ryan. More awake, more awake, more awake. But he's the guy that put this whole conference on and it's sold out in the campus of Liberty University, the standing for Freedom Center. And you've been a guest many times this show. Ryan, you look at a pastor like Andy Woodard, he's young. He loves the Lord and he's got a big beeping sound. Someone's trying to page him.

It's a tornado siren or something. Something's going on. But Ryan, you just interviewed Mike Pompeo. Yeah, I can't believe my life right now. I think I've hit peak. Unbelievable. So I'm catching him on a high. It's like catching a guy after he wins the national championship.

But Ryan, what do you say about this really subversive attack? I mean, like, literally, it's like we're not even talking about the gospel anymore. We're talking about all these social things. Of course, we want justice to happen in, you know, social ways and all that. Of course, no one hates someone for their skin color, but like that's taken over and Pastor Andy's dealing with it in New York City. Yeah, it's complete hijacking of biblical truth, replacing it with a humanistic understanding. And so whether you call it critical race theory or postmodernism, these philosophies have been imported in many ways into the church.

And what I see that's problematic is that the church is using not biblical language, biblical definitions in order to fight it, but instead is adopting wholesale in many ways the cultural definition, the cultural language, the kind of he, her, him, you know, whatever, where we're using their pronouns, we're using their definitions and saying, yeah, OK, you know, and so we'll start to communicate with that kind of language. Absolutely not. One of the things that Secretary of State just said is never give an inch. I think that's really, really important to this generation is that you cannot there are certain things that are non-negotiable.

You cannot concede. It is important now more than ever to say the truth, to say it boldly, to say it clearly with conviction. And so in defense of some of these churches and we know them and we love them.

We're friends. But some folks will attack you and say, oh, Pastor Andy, you're just being political. You're just putting the you're putting the flag before the cross. You're just being you're just being so patriotic. You love America more than you love God. And they'll paint evangelicals like you guys with that brush. How do you respond to that?

I would say, no, that's not true. It's because I love my neighbor that I must stand for truth. And it doesn't matter what country I'm a citizen of. My allegiance is to Jesus.

And I have a responsibility to be a good, faithful citizen of that country, regardless whether it's the U.S. or Canada or Mexico or England or wherever. Scripture calls us to be a more faithful citizen of whatever country we happen to be of while we remember that our ultimate citizenship is in heaven. So these issues that we're seeing with critical race theory, social justice invading the church. Can you explain to pastors, Ryan, as he articulated just then Pastor Andy did that the real agenda is to shut down this book, the Bible.

These all these other things, a little facades, little fronts. They are going to legalize mandate pastors to marry homosexuals or you will lose your license. You'll lose your church.

Maybe go to jail. That's the agenda that they're trying to take. But it starts with these softer little overtures, right?

That's I would absolutely 1000 percent agree with that. Their goal is not to shut every church down. What their goal is, is to get the church to go woke.

That's their goal. It's to supplant the gospel and undermine it. You know, you look back at Old Testament Israel, right?

When you get the prophets of Israel to all of a sudden become prophets of Baal, that's the goal, right? Elijah had that moment where he had to declare the truth to a generation that didn't want to hear it. And he was felt oftentimes alone. Now God reminded him at the end of 1 Kings. He goes, Elijah, you're not alone. I preserved a remnant. Seven thousand who have not bent the knee to Baal.

So we need to remind one another we are not alone. Hey, guys, there are people out there that are holding the line on biblical truth. But if you're in a church where your pastor is going woke, get out of that church. Do not delay. Do it today. In a summary definition, we started this segment with Pastor Andy.

I want to ask you how we can pray for you as we close the segment. But before we go there, help everyone understand what woke means. You're not trying to attack people. You're trying to do this politically kind of correct nonsense where we're becoming more like the world in worldly thinking. Is that it? Explain a little bit real quick.

I want to be really careful and I also want to be charitable. You know, in a more kind of educational kind of vernacular, the word woke means a kind of awareness to historic injustices along racial lines and segregated lines. So oftentimes what people are going to point to is things like slavery in this country, things like what they would call institutional racism. And there were moments where that was absolutely true in America's history, that we did not live up to the promises of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But these social reforms and changes came not as an expression of humanism, but largely the people of God inspired by the Word of God were recognizing biblical justice compels us not to own our neighbor, but to love our neighbor. And that they are endowed with inherent dignity because they were made in the image of God. So we need to recognize that.

Woke-ism is not based on that understanding though. I think a good book is Dr. Jeremiah's book too. Where do we go from here?

He talks about the whole Marxism-Socialism attack and that a lot of these terms and this racial is created by that to divide us instead of unite us and really put Jesus out there in the center of it. Pastor Andy, how can we pray for you? You've come from New York to speak in Lynchburg, Virginia. You're going to inspire a couple hundred more than that people. This place is sold out.

It's Standing for Freedom Center here in Lynchburg, Virginia, Liberty University. Real quick, how can we pray for you, New York pastor? You can pray for us the same way as you always pray for us. Pray for us to be faithful to the Word, to be filled with the Spirit, to be courageous and obedient to Him. But specifically pray for our congregation, for people who are losing their jobs, for people who are being forced out of the workplace. We have several families that are losing their jobs and moving away and that's tough for a church in New York where there's already a very high turnover rate, but that's being elevated because of all these mandates. Hey, give us the website for your church in New York real quick.

www.pbc.nyc Okay, and then give us the website for Stand for Freedom Center because if you have questions about all this stuff, vaccination mandates, all the challenge of the church, the wokeness, there's some really good content there. You guys are real resources. It's amazing.

There's books in the back. You've got the Benham brothers here. Metaxas is coming up tonight to speak. Mike Huckabee is going to be here, the governor himself. You just interviewed Pompeo. What's the website for the center?

standingforfreedom.com standingforfreedom.com I'm going to do a little snapshot with a bunch of us here with my six foot seven inch selfie stick. Okay, with Pastor Andy and my daughter Joy and little Lucy, who's a master student at Liberty University, who was on Joy. She was on Gracie's upward team.

She was just a little on our little basketball team. My nephew Wilson, Brad Jeremiah, who's also here helping me as one of our truth warriors. So, so grateful for you and for your bringing this together, man. People from all over the country are coming. God bless you. God bless you. Thank you for all you're doing to tell the truth to this nation. This generation needs it now more than ever.