Not Country Music...But God's Country

This is Rodney from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explored manhood within Jesus Christ. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Sit back, enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

This is the Truth Network. With all the chaos, the turbulence, the attacks on the faith, the basic attacks on human life, what do you do if you're a pastor? What do you do if you're Pastor Alan Jackson?

Only a Pastor Alan Jackson can pastor in the Nashville, Tennessee area. It just makes sense on a lot of levels, preacher. It's great to have you on Truth Talks.

It's great to be here, Stuart. I've made a deal with the other Alan Jackson. I won't sing and he won't preach. So far, it's worked really well. I'm glad we got that worked out.

We won't even use that as buffer music. We'll just plow right through. But Pastor, I've followed you for some time. I've really enjoyed your ministry. I guess maybe you could disciple us here in this segment on Truth Talk.

We're at the NRB, so there's a lot of noise, a lot of fanfare. Some of our truth team are here representing. There's a guy with a whole armor of God back there.

I bumped into him and fell right down. That shield of faith almost put me back into the CBN thing over here, and then there's TV, and then who knows who. John the Baptist will probably walk by in a little bit, right?

So we've got all kinds of things. It's exciting to see you, and thank you for being a part, by the way, of this, and thank you for preaching the Word unashamedly. It is interesting, Pastor. We keep thinking, well, things aren't going to get worse, but they get worse. A little girl's parents are threatened to go to jail because they don't want the state to mutilate their child, who they've been giving therapy to without the parents knowing in public school in California.

This is, multiply that times a big number, this is happening. If you're a pastor, and someone says, well, Pastor Alan Jackson, just preach the gospel. Stay with the ABCs of the faith here. Don't wander out and talk about pro-life or talk about marriage. Don't you dare speak of it against these trans people.

That's just not nice. How do you handle that from your pulpit with all this coming in, and what do you say to other pastors out there who are thinking, well, no one's going to come hear me preach anymore if I speak about this? That's a really good question, and I think it's a pressing issue that has to be addressed at this unique point in the unfolding story of the church. For me, it's really pretty simple.

My goal is to be political. I'm not advocating for candidates or parties, but I believe we have to understand the gospel in the context of the culture in which we live. Most of us that have professional theological training, we were taught we had to understand first century culture in order to understand the New Testament. We had to understand the culture of the 10th century BC in order to understand the culture of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Well, our faith doesn't make any sense unless it's lived out in the context of the 21st century. So we can't make a separation between the training and our faith. John the Baptist could have lived to have been an old man if he wouldn't have talked about current events.

Wow. You know, his perspective on what was happening in the political arena cost him his head. The Hebrew prophets, those books at the end of our Old Testament, are all God's people addressing the behavior of their political and social leaders in the context of their faith. So I think as church leaders, we have to decide whether we're going to be academics and go to the university where we can choose a course title and just talk about that, or whether we're going to take the gospel, which is the transformation of the human life from the inside out.

And to do that, we have to talk about what's happening in the culture because that's where we need the transformation. So God hasn't redefined marriage because the Supreme Court ruled. I don't believe he's gone back and edited Genesis 1 and 2.

I think he still created his male and female. Those are not easy topics to talk about. It takes courage and some boldness. But speaking the truth doesn't mean we are hateful.

It doesn't mean we're homophobic or transphobic or xenophobic or whatever phobic they're going to call us today. I don't believe that at all. If you go to the doctor and the doctor doesn't give you the truth about your physical condition because he doesn't want to give you any bad news, he's not a good doctor. He's a quack. It's malpractice. And if we go to the church and the church doesn't tell us the truth, we don't get the perspective of God's word, a biblical worldview, then it's not the truth. And it's certainly not the gospel.

It's malpractice. Pastor, this is so timely with everything going on. I'm Stu Everson. Pastor Alan Jackson is with us, a pastor in Tennessee. He's got an international radio program.

He's got books. He's just been a blessing to so many. Many of you are listening to my voice.

A lot of the Truth Network affiliates carry his radio program. Pastor, the people listening and for everyone out there struggling with this dynamic. I can go over there and convince my neighbor to be pro-life. I can show him an ultrasound. I can convince him to be pro-2 genders, just like God created him, male and female. And I can get him to step over to the conservative ballot over here. But if he has his soul, what is a prophet of man if he gets all the issues right but loses his own soul? That question is simply to ask you to help us go deeper on the foundation of the gospel.

Like, how do you start at the heart level with these tough issues, from the pulpit and even in conversation? Because people are getting so mad. Just say the name Donald Trump. Everyone just gets mad at you. People are like, I don't want to talk to you.

I wasn't going to compliment him. I was going to say, they don't care. They just hear the name.

They go the other way. If you go on, that's just a political candidate for those of you who have never heard anything. I've been hiding out for a few years. But if you go on social media and say, we need to, for instance, be careful about all the drugs and the sex trafficking coming in through the borders, well, they will take your account down if you do that. But that's true. And so, there's almost like this cultural issue, but then there's this individual. We want to win our, we want to win souls. We want to be winsome to win some. Talk about that dichotomy and how is it either or or both and.

That's kind of where I'm going. Well, that's a mixed bag of questions because what you just described is censorship. And theoretically, that's against our law. And I think that should fundamentally offend us because our freedoms and liberties are dependent upon that freedom of speech. Germany, leading into World War II, was striving for racial purity. And they built camps and exterminated people with the hope or the stated goal of maintaining racial purity. We wouldn't think of that today, but we're striving for ideological purity and we're intolerant of people who disagree with us. And Christians are aware enough to understand that's happening and it's caused us to retreat.

We've become timid. And so we use lines that don't really come from scripture and we say that Jesus was all about love. Well, Jesus certainly had a message of love, but it wasn't some squishy love like the tooth fairy or, you know, a heavenly Santa Claus. Jesus looked at people who were opposing him and were religious leaders and he said, you're a brood of snakes, you're whitewashed tombs, you're blind guides, leave them, don't follow them. The disciples would come to him and say, did you know that you offended them? Can you imagine the disciples coaching Jesus on his public presentations as if he was clueless? So Jesus wasn't, and if you read the book of Revelation, it's as dramatic and as drastic and as harsh as any scene from the Old Testament.

So it's not an either-or. God didn't finish the book of Malachi, take a Prozac and chill out and write the gospels. Jesus' death was brutal.

They tortured him to death because of the sin of the human heart, and the gospel begins with that, I'm a sinner and I need a savior. We're not a social construct, we're not a do-good society, we're not just a benevolence expression, otherwise we'd just be a civic club. You know, we have to begin with every life has to be changed, and then we yield to the lordship of Jesus of Nazareth. We offer ourselves, the Bible says in Romans, as a living sacrifice, which we mean we lay down our self-determination. It's not my calendar and my schedule and my money any longer, it's the Lord's.

I have yielded those things to him, I serve at his pleasure. And we have lost that notion in too much of the American evangelical church. We've said the sinner's prayer and got dipped in a tank, and then we thought we could live our life any way we wanted to and ask God for his blessing. And if we get a little too far into the weeds, we just come back and kind of flip it, oh I'm sorry, and the creator of heaven and earth will just wink at us and go, it's okay my child. And I think that's a false gospel.

I believe in conversion, salvation, the new birth, being born again, whatever label we prefer for that. But it's an invitation, it's the beginning point for which we lay down our lives. And the church has got to come back to that. It's not about where I sit on Sunday morning, it's about how I behave the six and a half days of the week when I'm not sitting in the building.

Okay, we got a wake-up call coming on the other side of this break. I'm with Pastor Alan Jackson. He's fired up. He loves this country. He loves his Savior. He preaches the gospel faithfully on the radio, in his pulpit, through his written ministry. And he's going to come back and give us a challenge to the church, so everyone stay tuned. More on Truth Talk with Stu Epperson after this quick break. We are sitting here at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando, Florida. Not in Nashville, but I think we'll be back in Nashville next time with Pastor Alan Jackson.

Stay tuned. You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. So there I was this morning with all kinds of leaders, all kinds of ministries from all over the world in a breakfast sponsored by Salem Media. And Eric Metaxas, who has written quite a bunch of books, who's a friend of my guest right here right now, said some pretty sobering words. He said, for one, he said, Jesus didn't just die for you, so you could be a little bit happy.

You could kind of be moved from point A to point B. He died to transform us, our whole lives, in every part of our lives. And Pastor Alan Jackson, that means as a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, rewind the tape a couple hundred years, if you're William Wilberforce, who was in politics, who we credit with ending slavery. And we have atrocities, atrocities like slavery and other things happening in our country under our nose. What's the church to do of the living God in this time?

Well, Stuart, that is the question of our day. And I think COVID was the beginning of a wake-up call. I would say, and I've spent decades in the church, so I'm at least entitled to an opinion. Prior to COVID, I think we tended to worship at the altars of comfort and convenience. We wanted parking places that were close to the door, and we wanted our favorite seat, and we wanted the worship to be the style we preferred.

And we had our own list of personal preferences, and if it wasn't comfortable and convenient, we were too busy to be bothered. And I believe for some of us, God began to awaken us that we have a mission that's higher than that. We've been a very carnal church. And so now we find ourselves where they are trafficking women and children across our southern border. I mean, it's happening on a daily basis.

By the 10th of thousands. And we're really too busy to notice. It's like we're arguing about the hors d'oeuvres on the deck of the Titanic, and said, did anybody hear that crashing noise? And the question for our generation is, are we going to wake up and be an expression of the grace and the mercy and the power of God, and stand up for a biblical worldview? Are we going to be too busy and too distracted to notice?

Are we more concerned about coming to Orlando, to Disney World, and bringing our kids on a holiday? Or are we willing to reorient our family and say, we're going to stand up for these children that are being sacrificed on our border, for the 3,000 a day that we're losing to abortion? Can we stop quibbling about abortion resolutions? Let's just go save some babies today. The Christians can't agree on the process we want to follow, so we stand divided and our enemies laugh at us. What if we just said, well, this month, let's see if we can save 100 babies a day?

That's a worthwhile goal. And we've got to get over ourselves, understand the gravity of the circumstances and the situation, and we're going to give the circumstances and the situation we're in. We are losing our liberties and freedoms.

Our children and grandchildren will grow up under authoritarian regimes if we don't get it right in this near future. Okay, that's Pastor Alan Jackson. Now, Pastor, folks listening to you, some for the first time, maybe don't know you like I do and haven't heard your preaching, let me ask you this very fundamental question.

Who is Alan Jackson? Well, I'm a pastor from Tennessee, and I'm an example of the grace and mercy of God. My life fell apart when I was a young person, and I realized that I needed mercy, but I'd been a smug, self-righteous, condescending church attender. And when I realized that I needed mercy, I told the Lord I'd spend the rest of my life helping broken people. So I'm willing to hold up the high standard of the Word of God, but I recognize that the church is a triage unit.

It's not a hall of fame of faith. We don't go to church because we have it all right. We go to church because we know we need help. That's not an excuse for sloppy living. If you're living in sin, stop it.

It'll destroy you every time. But having said that, we have to help one another, and by the grace of God, He's restoring people today as never before. Amen. And when people hear you, you're often a little bit like Metaxas. People a lot of times don't hear him preach in a church Sunday morning, right? But he shows up on a big talk show, and this guy is just so mad at abortion providers.

He's so mad at the illegal fentanyl carrying, brandishing people coming in the border and this and that. But you're preaching God's Word. Talk about the exposition of God's Word, the famine in the land.

I mean, that symptomatic thing that is potentially a reason that we have such shallow or feeble moorings for our faith and how we engage in culture. Talk about that and how important that is. Well, I think we have to be reminded that the Gospel is enough, that the redemptive work of Jesus of Nazareth changed the course of human history for time and eternity. And we never should be ashamed of that.

It doesn't need to be added to. There's nothing that can be detracted from it. It's an accomplished fact of history.

Jesus exhausted the curse of my sin on that cross and yours so that we in turn could receive the full blessings of His perfect obedience. That's the nature of the exchange. That's the message we have for the world. And we've been embarrassed by it.

We've been reluctant to say about the uniqueness of Jesus, that there is one way to God. And we have stepped away from point after point, and the church has to come back to that. But it has to happen in our culture. It has to start at our kitchen table, to be honest. We have to have the courage at our kitchen table to bring a biblical worldview back and say, I'm not going to endorse ungodliness in this house.

That's awkward. And then if we have that courage, we go to our holiday table with our extended family and say, what if we just decided as a family this year to honor God and stop a winking at sin and wickedness and immorality? We can do that.

Maybe we can go to the ball fields where we watch our kids and grandkids play and have that conversation in the bleachers then. We'll change our nation. We're waiting for a politician to ride in on a white horse that meets our standards of righteousness and change it so we don't have to be inconvenienced by it.

It'll never happen. The gospel starts with one life, one family. And from that basis, I believe we can see God bless America again.

It's interesting you say that. You really struck a nerve with me just now because we talk so much about, well, we've got to inform the voters and Christians need to vote and Christians need to be this, this, this. There's this long checklist. And of course, that's a stewardship that God's given you. So that's a responsibility.

So by not voting, you're saying, okay, well, you're a citizen of a country that does that. This isn't ancient Rome and ancient Syria or whatever. But Pastor, if you are feeding your flock and you're preaching the gospel, not the watered down gospel, the true gospel, the A to Z gospel, right? The truth about, I love what you said about Christ's obedience. It's not just his death, his life, his resurrection, but his perfect life is applied to us. So it's by his power we live.

It's by his grace flowing through us. If you're preaching that to your people and you're discipling your people, what you do in your church, and those in your church are going out and discipling those in their family, then you almost don't have to tell them how to vote. I mean, there's almost a foundation laid there, you know, so that we get stuck and we don't attack the root of the issue a lot of times, it seems like. Well, I think, unfortunately, we've come to the place on a national basis where the parties we're choosing from have platforms. And on a national basis, it's not really so much about candidates at all anymore, because they have made a commitment to what they're going to do when they're elected by the platform they've embraced. At the local level, that's different.

But on the national level, that's very much the case. So it's really subterfuge when Christians say, oh, I can't vote for that person or that candidate. They're voting for a platform. And if you're voting for platforms that stand in opposition to a biblical worldview, I don't think you should imagine you're being an advocate for Jesus.

I don't know how you reconcile that. We've got to wonder what's at the foundation. Where did their thinking go south? Where they made this dichotomy that, you know, oh, I love Jesus with all my heart, but I'm voting for the most pro-death, evil candidate who's super nice on the outside. But it's just absolutely diabolical. I mean, this trans thing didn't come out of nowhere, you know, when President Obama was the first, you know, president in a speech to call, you know, to call out trans to award and celebrate trans, to turn the White House into the, you know, and of course, he's kind of running things now, we all know, it's no secret.

But you think, oh, you all know, wink nod. But the thing is that he is a nice man. But he has a full agenda to say, hey, this is anti-God and this is how, you know, but Christians, how can they get that wrong? How can entire churches say, well, just because of, you know, because this guy's got nice optics and the other guy's mean, it's almost like we've lost our discernment.

Not almost. I think there's abundant evidence that we have been living apart from a biblical worldview for a great long time in the church. You know, I've said many times and will continue to say, I don't think our problem is fundamentally political. It is not politicians or parties. We have deviated from the authority of scripture in our lives on Main Street in America.

And until we come back and say, we'll begin to live by those principles that we know, it's foolish to think we're going to have leaders at higher levels that do that. Politicians, one of my friends, he's in heaven now, who's Charlie Daniels. And Charlie wrote a song about a long-haired country boy. He said, a politician wants another vote.

A drunkard wants a drink of wine. And a politician wants a vote. And that's true. So politicians will follow what the polls say. And we have to have a heart change in America. Or we come back in our churches and say right and wrong is not about party affiliation. Right and wrong is determined by a biblical worldview.

God defines sexuality in a context. And if we'll come back to that, the politics will sort itself out. If we try to make it a political change first, we're going to lose our freedom.

You change the heart and then everything, every part of how you live your whole life, including going in the voting booth changes as well. And which brings our final question. It's been estimated by Barn and other groups that less than 5% of born-again Christians have led someone to Christ in the last year.

And so like, we can talk about not voting, but like less people are evangelizing than voting as believers. Now we have the cure to COVID cancer and everything. We have eternal life. We have the bread of life, the living water.

Pastor, what is wrong with that picture? Like, why aren't we, do we even possess something if we can't even give this away? Well, unfortunately we've been so blessed. We have such abundance, so much food, clothing, shelter opportunities, you know, that we have really haven't had to depend upon God as the source of our lives.

We've imagined that we could either secure our future or the government would secure it for us. Most of the world doesn't live that way. And if we don't wake up, we will lose those things because they have come from the hand of God. And we haven't had the humility to even recognize the blessing of God. If we would recognize the blessing of God, we would serve him with greater enthusiasm.

We're not the first generation to do this. God said this to the Israelites. When you get into the promised land, you're going to forget that you're living in cities you didn't build and harvesting from vineyards you didn't plant. And when that happens, you're going to say, I've made myself strong and wealthy and independent.

And we have done that. We think we have made ourselves free and that we have brought the blessings by our hard work, baloney. God's blessings have filled our lives. If we will come back to that as the people of God and begin to humbly acknowledge God and willingly serve him, he's not encroaching on your calendar when he asks you to attend the worship service and serve your fellow believers. He's not encroaching on your cash flow when he expects you to pay a tithe. It all belongs to the Lord.

Start with that first offering. If we will come back to the truth that we know, God will show us his mercy again. If we don't, we're going to walk through his judgment in a much greater depth than we've seen yet. Your final challenge to pastors about being faithful to God's word, but speaking directly to these evil issues of our culture right now as you get out of here. Well, I know it's not always cheered for, but we have to have the courage to tell the truth about the world we're living in. We can do it with love, but we have to do it with determination. In the same way a doctor lovingly gives you a bad diagnosis, we have to tell the truth to the people that we're serving. Okay, Pastor Alan Jackson giving us some tough love, but some much needed encouragement.

What a blessing. Your ministry website, Pastor, for folks to hear your preaching. Folks in the Tennessee area want to go to a good Bible teaching church. How can they find you?

Absolutely. It's alanjackson.com and that's a-l-l-e-n dot Jackson. Jackson dot com.

There's not a bunch of country western music now at that site. I hope not. If I'm singing, it will not be a blessing. Hey, thank you so much. You're a blessing. God bless you. Thank you to you and to all the pastors that you represent out there that are faithfully proclaiming God's word. We need every good church. They may never ever be on a national talk show if I don't find them before glory to interview them, but keep preaching the word to Timothy 4-2 and speak up to all these things in the word of God. Let's watch the word of God change lives for God and put that fire in them.

It affects everything. We need more men of God like you. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your faithfulness. This is the Truth Network.