Truth Network. Welcome to Truth Talk Live. All right, let's talk. A daily program powered by the Truth Network.
This is kind of a great thing and I'll tell you why. Where pop culture, current events, and theology all come together. Speak your mind. And now, here's today's Truth Talk Live host. Welcome to Truth Talk Live. This is Peter Roseburger, guest hosting today, and I'm so glad to be with you all. Thank you all for joining us for this hour. We're going to delve into some tough issues, difficult things that are facing us as individuals, as families, as churches, as communities, and as a nation.
Right now, you know that the DNC is having their convention right now. We're going to talk a little bit about that, weigh in and see what you have to think about it. And if you want to tell me what you want to think about it and share that with others, 866-348-7884, 866-348-7884, 866-34-Truth.
All right, we'll open the phone lines up a little bit later, but please feel free to call in. I want to start off with something that is kind of the underpinning before we jump into what we're seeing unfold in the news. I mean, for example, there's a mobile abortion vehicle at the DNC where they're doing abortions there, and they've set it up. It's rather alarming. You know, who would have thought that in America this would be what they said, which should be rare, and then, you know, extreme cases so forth. Now they're just parading around, and it's become every bit of a sacrament for some of these folks. And make no mistake about it, that's how they look at it. The way believers would look at communion, the sacrament of communion, this is how so many on the left are looking at abortion. It is a blood sacrament. That's exactly what it is.
Make no mistake, you can see it. So how do we deal with this? And what is our role in this as Christians? We can just simply say it's wrong, but we've got to go deeper. We've got to be wiser than this. What's going on? How did we get here? Churchill said, the farther back you look, the further forward you can see.
How did we get here? What happened? And I want to bring out a passage of scripture I've been going through myself in the book of Romans that I want to just throw it out and see what you think about this. In Romans 9, verses 30-33, what shall we say then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith, but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law.
Why? Paul said, because they did not pursue it by faith, but as it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone as it is written, Behold, I am laying a stone in Zion, a stone of stumbling, a rock of offense, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. What Paul has opened up the conversation to say is, the Jews were pursuing righteousness through the law. Look how good we're behaving.
Look how we're keeping the law. And Jesus appears right in front of them as a stumbling block. They didn't want a suffering Messiah. They wanted a ruler that would reward them for their adherence to the law, for being good people. And Christ comes along and says, none of you are good.
And you're doing what's on the outside, but it's what the inside that God is looking at. And these things inflamed these people. Now what does that have to do with what's going on in our culture? Well, I've been seeing a lot of things trending on social media so far that follow other things on X, and I see people discussing these kinds of things and saying, Christ is King, Christ is King, we're going to Christian nationalism and all these kinds of things. We are not functioning as a society anymore where the Christian community has a place of strength in this culture.
It's not there anymore. We used to be. We're kind of an anomaly that way. The world has not been this way, but America has been up until now. So if we go out there and try that whole Christian nationalism kind of thing, and this is probably going to get a lot of people upset, but we're not a Christian nation.
Make no mistake about it. We're not there. We have 60 million abortions on our hands as a nation. That is not indicative of a Christian nation. And if you go and look at John 7, Jesus had been feeding the 5,000, and then they wanted to go into the Feast of Tabernacles.
It was the Feast of Booths, and they wanted to go to festivals. Well, you did 5,000. Let's go feed five more, ten more. Let's do this right.
Let's do this big. And Jesus went the opposite way. So many of us want to sit out there and push Jesus out there to be the ruler, the king that will save us from this corrupt society. And just like his disciples, just like back then, and the same thing with all the Jews that looked at him and he came into his own and his own received him not, he takes the opposite direction.
He came to serve. And we're so busy trying to establish a little bit of his kingdom on earth. That's God's job. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. We're here to be obedient, to be salt and light, to go into these situations with confidence of the gospel no matter what happens to us. We're not here to change people's hearts. That's the Holy Spirit's job. We're here to bear witness to the truth. Period.
Full stop. And if we don't do that, if we're trying to manipulate something, well, we need to be this, then we're no better than what was happening back when Jesus was walking on this earth. We're trying to force his hand. Well, go big or go home, Lord.
Let's go big here. Judas was trying to force his hand. That's one of the reasons he betrayed him. To force his hand, then Jesus is going to have to do something. You don't force God to do anything. And if you'll notice, God throughout all of scripture is never on defense.
Never. There's not one place in scripture where he's on defense. God is always moving and doing what he's going to do.
The question is, are we going to do it? And if you look in that same passage in the message—sometimes I go to the message just to kind of give me a little bit more clarity—and it says this from Romans. And Israel, who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing, they missed it. Well, how could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in God's projects that they didn't notice God right in front of them. Like a huge rock in the middle of the road.
And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah, again, gives us the metaphor for pulling this together. Careful, I put a huge stone on the way to Mount Zion, but the stone is me. If you're looking for me, you'll find me on the way, not in the way. We're going to talk about that when we come back.
There's more to go, because how we approach this culture is going to be rooted in these types of principles laid out in Scripture. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Truth Talk Live! 866-34-TRUTH. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Truth Talk Live!
This is Peter Rosenberger, glad to have you with us. The number to be on the program. If you want to call in, what do you think about what's going on? 866-34-TRUTH. 866-348-7884.
You're also welcome to go out to my website. Hopeforthecaregiver.com. Hope for the caregiver.
F-O-R-E. F-O-R-T-H-E, sorry. Hope for the caregiver. And you'll see on there a thing called Caregiver 911. And if you are struggling as a family caregiver right now, that's for you. And I host a radio program for family caregivers on this network, and I have been a caregiver for four decades, and I've learned quite a bit through the suffering of what my wife has endured and what we've gone through together, caring for someone who hurts, who has had a brutal journey. And in that I've seen God's provision, and I've also seen a little bit more of what Christ modeled for us, and what He said when He said, Husband, love your wives as Christ loved the church. He laid down His life.
Well, that's what caregivers do. We are putting ourselves down for the benefit of someone with a chronic impairment. And as we do that, we see a picture of Christ. We see the suffering servant as Isaiah betrayed Him out. This is why the stumbling block was there for the Jews, as Paul said in Romans 9. They didn't want a suffering Messiah. They wanted a ruling Messiah.
And I sense that a lot of people are like that right now in this country. We want Jesus to come back and take control of the situation and God's not manipulated like this. And God has His own plan, His own decree, and our job is to be obedient to what He has told us to do in His Word, which is to do justice and mercy, which is the sick, the naked, the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoner, the stranger.
These are things that He laid out very clearly. And we cannot go into this quagmire of dysfunction that we're seeing paraded out on the news every day with this idea that we've got to shake these people into accepting Jesus as their Savior. They are openly hostile to Christ. And it's our job to make sure we continue to stay steadfast to the Word of God, regardless of their hostility, because that's what He did. See, He's called us to take up our cross, not take up our palace. Take up our cross, just as He did.
Now that's not a very popular message for a lot of people. Because we want health and wealth and abundant life and this and this, but we have abundant life. We have abundant life in Christ. We have all the riches in Christ.
But it's not about having big houses, big cars, and the kind of government that we want. In fact, when we start demanding the government function like this, we're trying to supersede what God is doing. And Isaiah, again, what does he say about the government shall be upon His shoulders. And the government shall be upon His shoulders. He's in charge of that.
Our job is to be obedient to what is right in front of us. We've got to see individuals. We've got to see the pain. We've got to see the heartache.
We've got to see the dysfunction. We've got to be willing to call it out. We've got to be willing to minister to it.
But we do not have to have this rush to somehow establish some type of heaven on earth, because it's not going to happen. And hell is breaking wide open now, and you're seeing it. When you see a mobile abortion center, I mean, could you see anything more flagrant than what you're seeing right now in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention? And when you have the candidate who is the sitting vice president who is running for president of the United States, who openly visited an abortion clinic, what are your thoughts on that?
How do you feel about that? It started back with Obama saying, God blessed Planned Parenthood. He spoke up on their convention that at the end of his speech, he said, God blessed Planned Parenthood.
I don't know which God he was praying to, but it was not the God of Scripture, because he will not bless that. And until we understand these things and are willing to stand up against a hostile world, not knowing that they may not change, they may come after us like they did our Savior. But that does not absolve us of proclaiming this to the world and ministering to people in spite of all this. And in order to do that, we're going to have to be grounded in our scriptures. We're going to have to understand how did we get here?
There's an old phrase, and I'll unpack this as the program proceeds here, but there's an old phrase, if it's hysterical, it's historical. One doesn't just wake up one day and start acting crazy. There's a process to get here.
How did we get here? And the only way we're going to know these things, if we have the anchoring of scripture to be able to walk into these things confidently, not on defense all the time, because I said in the last block, God doesn't go on defense. And if you look through scripture, you'll see this phrase called, at that time, at that time, Jesus did this, at that time, Elijah, or whatever, at that time. In other words, the Greek word for that is kairos, the appointed time.
Kronos is the chronology, the chronological time where we get that word, but kairos, at that time. God has already set these things in play here. He's already decreed these things. The question is, are we going to be obedient in this? Are we going to be studious and know scripture and be able to articulate the gospel?
Period. How many of us can do that? How many of us do it with confidence, without hemming and hawing? And I go back to a caller I got on this network many, many years ago, and I was playing a tune on the—I have a caregiver keyboard, I call it, right here at my studio—and I was playing this tune. And I said, what's this tune? Lady called in, and you know this tune.
I'll go over here to the caregiver keyboard. Something happened, and now I know. And something happened, and he touched me, and made me whole. That's an old Gaither tune. I threw in some high dollar chords there. But the lady that called in, she said, oh, I love that hymn because I used to be one way and I'm not that way anymore. Is that your story today? Because how can you go out to this messed up world if you do not know the risen Christ?
How can you do it? Whose authority are you doing it on? Who has commissioned you to go out there and speak peace to the craziness, to model Christ to this, if you don't know him? If you don't know him, then you're just reciting things that—you're just reciting things. But if you know him, you're bearing witness to what he has done in your life, the transformative work of the gospel, and that is truth talk. This is Peter Rosenberger, Truth Talk Live, 86634 Truth. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Truth Talk Live.
This is Peter Rosenberger, glad to have you with us. 86634 Truth, 866348, 7884, if you have some thoughts on what you're seeing playing out on the news. But make no mistake about it as we're unpacking this thought a little bit more of what's going on with our culture. We are at war. But it's not going to be a war that we're used to fighting.
What does Scripture say about this sort of thing? Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. Who are they warring against? They're not warring against me. They're warring against the one I serve. And we have to wrap our mind around these—they have these strong theological underpinnings. They have to have a little bit more theological muscle so that we can properly go into these places with that kind of confidence, knowing that we are not in any way required to fix people or to argue them down. And I go back to what I said in the last block.
If it's hysterical, it's historical. If we don't know how we got here, all we're doing is arguing with the symptoms. When's the last time you had an argument with somebody who was a drunk or an addict, and they were wasted? How well did that go? How well did that go for you?
They'll spend all night long talking with you until the booze runs out, and then they don't want to talk to you anymore. But you're not going to get anywhere. So you don't try to argue with the sickness. You don't try to argue with diabetes.
You don't try to argue with mental illness. What you do is you go in confidently and point people to safety, point people to direction, ask what you can do to minister and care for them in their sickness, and get them to the physician, whether it's the physician here on this planet or whether it's the great physician. But ultimately it is ministering to him. And Jesus said, sick, naked, thirsty, hungry, prison, stranger. And this is part of what it means. Your suffering servant, the model is for who Christ is, the suffering servant. He came to serve. He said, I left you a model.
Do this. And it's very clear. But if it's hysterical, it's historical. There's always a story behind it. I want you to think back from an encounter that you had with an adult who was overacting to a situation. I was watching on the news today and some guy was out there just doing interviews with people and this demonically looking individual came up and just started screaming at him.
This is just today. I mean, in Chicago, garishly made up, you know, drag queen, demonic looking. It was awful. It was just screaming. And the guy, you could tell, he was just a bit taken aback by it because it was so overt.
Well, how did that guy get there? How did that person who was so clearly unhinged, how did that happen? Did you ever have a conversation with somebody like that? Were you caught off guard?
Did you feel uncomfortable? A psychiatrist friend of mine told me a long time ago, he shared this with his staff, when you see a patient overreact or act out, always remember there's a story behind that behavior. Adults don't lose control in a vacuum. There's a buildup and a story behind their behavior. And in the world I live in with caregivers, we understand this. We find ourselves, I'm still one, in unpleasant predicament of engaging individuals with frenetic or hyper behavior.
It's going to happen, particularly when you're dealing with somebody with mental illness or an addiction or somebody who's in intense chronic pain all the time. And it's helpful to remember that the behavior is more significant than the moment. And there's always an overreaction to the moment because there's high drama going on and they don't have the tools, the ability or the awareness to be able to process things normally. And you're seeing this right now. You see it on cable news when you see people just lose their cookies over stuff that's just stupid.
But here we are. And if we remind ourselves that there's a story, it enables us to speak to the deeper issues driving the outburst, which often requires assurance rather than reason. You're not going to reason somebody out of mental illness. You're not going to reason someone out of addiction. You're not going to reason someone out of open hostility to Christ.
It's not going to happen. Arguing with a long-time wound is futile. Caring for that wound and its symptoms remains a more effective response.
I mean, you speak for us as caregivers. We encounter those panicking about pocket-sized problems. Outbursts at a temporary or minor problem are rooted in a long journey that could stretch back a lifetime.
When we detach from the immediate eruption, it allows us to understand better and address the volcanic turbulence behind the explosion. But it always starts with us remembering if it's hysterical, it's historical. As you watch the DNC convention this week, and some of you will watch it, some of you are saying, no, I can't handle it.
But I've got a friend of mine, I called him up and I said, look, thank you for doing this for me and taking one for the team, because I don't think I can watch all of this. But as we watch these events unfold, I want you to see these individuals and see what they're cheering on. I remember one time I was watching some kind of concert footage of something. It was at a rock and roll hall of fame or something inductee thing and ACDC got up to sing, the rock group ACDC, and their hit was Highway to Hell. And in the text of the song, lyrics of the song, the text of the song, the chorus is everybody singing I'm on a highway to hell. And the entire audience is caught up in this and with unison, screaming voices, the entire audience of thousands and thousands of people were all singing that phrase, I'm on a highway to hell with ACDC. And they're just yelling it out at the top of their lungs. How do we respond to this as believers? This is the culture we are in now.
And that was at the rock and roll hall of fame, I believe it was. How do we respond to this? How would you respond to this?
What can we do? If you get the feeling like I do, I think so many of us as Christians spend a lot of time doing a lot of infighting in our churches, not recognizing that people are bleeding out. People are literally on a highway to hell. And scripture talks about this. Are we a source of light and salt to this world? You'll hear ads throughout this program. They talk about that very thing.
Are we a source of light and salt? There's a mobile abortion unit at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago. Babylon Bee had a story that they're very satirical and they mock a lot of the goofiness that goes on out there and it should be mocked. There's a scriptural precedence for mocking this kind of stuff.
Elijah did it with Baal and the prophets of Baal. But they said that Chicago dies its river. You know how they do it at St. Patrick's Day, they always die at Green.
To honor the DNC convention, it dies the river red. And their point is not lost. This is where we are. And if we keep holding on to this misguided belief that we're a Christian nation or that we're going to somehow Christian nationalize our way back to something, that ship has sailed. Folks, we're at war.
But it's not going to be a war like we're used to fighting, like I said at the beginning of this block. Not by might, not by power, but by my spirit. How are we going to know these things unless we are grounded in His Word? How are you going to know these things?
How are you going to be able to talk to somebody? Somebody who is so filled with rage and hate and they are screaming that they want to go on the highway to hell or that they want to have the right to abortion. Not just right, they want to flagrantly flout it in front of us. It's almost mind-numbing to think that we've come here. But how did we get here? If it's hysterical, it's historical and you've got to go back and look at what happened in the 60s and onward. If you have the time, and I would recommend this, there's a series, it was on Amazon Prime, I don't know if it's still there or not, but there was a video series of How Should We Then Live with Francis Schaeffer. Now it's very dated production-wise, so just be prepared for that because it was done I think in the late 70s. And Francis Schaeffer submitted an acquired taste, but the content of this thing is really worth your time. And I would recommend it.
It's a 10-part series to show you how we got here. And he was calling this kind of stuff back in the 70s. He didn't have the words that we have now.
There were different terms for the corporate media and so forth. And there's no such thing as social media back then. But it would be worth your time to go see How Should We Then Live. Listen, this is Truth Talk Live.
We've got more to go. 866-34-TRUTH, 866-348-7884. This is Peter Rosenberger, Hopeforthecaregiver.com.
Go check it out. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Truth Talk Live. This is Peter Rosenberger, your guest host today.
Thank you for joining us. We're covering a lot of ground here today, but setting the table for what we as believers can do and must do and are instructed to do through scripture. We're not going to know this if we don't study our scriptures.
Okay? We're not going to go in there and pound people into submission. Our Savior didn't do that. He went to the cross. And he went there. Everybody deserted him.
They left him. But he stayed on message. And he said, pick up your cross and follow me. He didn't say pick up your country. He didn't say pick up your Christian nationalism. He didn't say pick up your palace. He didn't say pick up your mansion. He didn't say pick up your car. He said pick up your cross and follow me.
That is not something that you're going to hear preached a lot. But I've taken care of somebody who has suffered for now four decades. And it's in that journey that this has become framed for me so that when I go into the heartache and the misery and the messes of others' lives, when I encounter people who are just filled with all kinds of ick, I can testify to what I know. Like I said in that hymn in the last block, something happened. Now I know he touched me and made me whole.
I used to be one way and I ain't that way no more, as the caller said to me that I'll never forget. These are things that are incredibly important to us as believers, that we wrap our minds and our hearts around. It gets into our DNA so that we're not pulled into these weeds and these arguments. Is the argument about this particular sin? Yes, they're abominable but they all are. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Paul gives a litany of sins that are going to be rampant. And it's going to be in the days of Noah.
We're going to see more of it. The task is daunting for us. And yet this is the task our Savior has said to do, go into all the world and preach the gospel and make disciples. And that means we're going to have to go into there with that confidence, knowing that they're going to revile us. And he said that. They're going to revile you because they reviled me.
Is the servant greater than the master? We need to be prepared for this. America is not going to be the same America for my grandchildren than it was for me. And we went along as a country with a certain sense of isolation from the rest of the world's craziness.
We have the privilege of two oceans on either side so a lot of the craziness couldn't come to us. And yet here we are now. And as I mentioned the last block, Francis Schaeffer really laid this out and how fast all this stuff is going to start coming at us. We have gone from, you know, in the last 50 years, look at what has happened to this nation. Look at what has happened to the Democrat party. Look at what has happened to our political leaders. Look at what's happened to the Republican party. I don't look to either one of them as saviors. What I do is I go back to what Franklin Graham said the other day and it's a chess move on what kind of country we're going to have.
But I get the feeling and I go back to what Keith Green sang back in 1980, I think it was, maybe 81. He said the world is dying in the dark and the church can't help because it's asleep in the light. Are we asleep in the light? Or are we ready to take this into the pits that are out there of people's lives and be willing to stand strong? Are we willing to be confident in this gospel and go in there to serve? You're not going to win people over by conquering them. Jesus didn't come and conquer us. He conquered death. You see the difference? He didn't come to conquer Rome.
He came to conquer death. That's what he did. We need to pay attention to these sort of things. And remember what I said in the last block, if it's historical, if it's hysterical, it's historical. When you see all this kind of craziness being splashed all over the place, understand there's a story we got here. And unless you're able to go through with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit through scripture and see how we got here and speak with clarity to this, you're just arguing with the drunk.
You're just arguing with the drunk at that point. So anyway, let's go to the phone calls. Mike in Dayton. Mike wants to come in on this and I look forward to hearing what you got to say. Mike, how you feeling? Well, Mike, are you with us?
There you go. I'm feeling great. Thank you for taking my call. First of all, I want to say that there's people listening. The other day, I stopped real quickly to say hi to my neighbor and he's taking out the trash. And he says, you know, the other day I was listening to a guy who was talking about boundaries. And that was you, sir. And, and, and our conversation and we, we, he's a newer neighbor, and I haven't really talked to him much.
And my wife was behind me and she's honking her horn and she had to get out of the way. And he starts he before all that, he started talking about this, Mike guy, I like what he says. And, and he's telling me about this, the program and, and, and I had to get out of the way and I couldn't say, Hey, that's me.
That's, that's my favorite show. And, and, and, sir, you're making an impact and into the world, you know, I mean, you are. And thank you for for doing what you're doing. And what you say is, is, is unbelievably spiritual, unbelievably sound. And thank you for I hope my neighbors listening right now.
It's Mike across the street. Well, I hope so too. And I think right now. Yeah. Well, I thank you for that. Yeah.
Appreciate your comments. World is a crazy world, isn't it? God is good all the time. I want to one time once it wants you to play it as well with my soul. That was my dad's favorite song.
I love it. I don't know if I have time for the whole song, but you can hear that on my CD. You can listen, stream it on Spotify or Amazon music because I put it on there. It's called songs for the caregiver. Songs for the caregiver. It's called songs for the caregiver.
It's called songs for the caregiver. Peter, can you hear me? Oh, yeah. How's that? That's what we need. That's beautiful, sir.
That's what we need, isn't it? It is indeed, but we got to, our journey is to make sure we understand what it means for our soul to be at peace with this. I look at the journey I've had with my wife and I've watched her through surgery after surgery after surgery after surgery. I've had to say that to myself, watching her go down the hallway more times than I can count. There are very few places in this world as lonely as a hallway in a hospital when you're watching your spouse or your child go down to surgery.
It's a very empty feeling knowing they may not come back, particularly the kind of surgery she's had. But I go back to what David did at Ziklag. I don't know if you remember that story. It's one of my favorite stories in Scripture. It's in 1 Samuel. Saul was chasing David all over the kingdom and it was a mess and David and his men were out fighting and they came back and Malachites had taken all of their families, kids, women, donkeys, everything, I mean sheep, they took everything. And his own men were going to stone him. They picked up stones and David, it said, encouraged himself to the Lord while they were getting ready to stone him.
And I think this is the model for us as well. Can we encourage ourselves to the Lord even in the presence of our enemies? Even in the presence of all this craziness that we're seeing in Chicago right now.
And make no mistake, the Democrats do not have a monopoly on craziness and wickedness, okay? It is rampant everywhere and it's even in the church. And we have to understand for ourselves how important it is for us to stay in our Scriptures. If we do not know what God's Word says, how in the world, well there's no way we can go out into all this nuttiness.
We can't. So it is incumbent upon us to be obedient to study His Word. Man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. And when these things happen, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot.
And I'm saying that as a caregiver for four decades for a woman who's lost both legs and had 86 surgeries, okay? Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say. It is well.
It is well with my soul. And that is Truth Talk Life. Thank you.
That is Truth Talk Life. This is Peter Rosenberg and Mike. Thanks for the call. Thank you all. Go out to Hopeforthecaregiver.com. There's a little thing there called caregiver 911. If you need it, it's right there. Hopeforthecaregiver.com. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.
