PHIL: Well, John, obviously there have been significant changes in the culture. Just in the course of your lifetime, the year you started at Grace Church, 1969, is when America put a man on the moon, which would have been unthinkable back when you were born even. And so all the changes that have taken place have, really, literally, changed the way we live, and some of them for the better—many more conveniences and technological advancements. But if you look at just the moral quality of life in the West, you’d have to say it’s degenerating, and it’s begun to generate quickly. Does it seem to you like the pace of our culture’s moral decline has accelerated dramatically just in the past half decade?

JOHN: Well, yeah, I think if you just take sort of a broad view of history. You talk about something like the Reformation; prior to that, there’s a thousand years of the Roman Catholic Church dominating. The Reformation comes, and it’s epic; and it goes for, I think, well, even until today. But it wasn’t long after that until humanism comes in. But those were always years—I mean, it could be many years, decades. Now you can have trends in weeks or months because of the massive, massive exposure to everything in the world through media.

PHIL: That’s right. You were born into the modernist world, and now we live in a postmodern world. What’s changed there?

JOHN: Well, I think what’s changed is the modern world could be defined as the effort to find the truth. The modernists believed there was truth. It really came out of the Enlightenment, it came out of the Reformation, because the Dark Ages were basically the Roman Catholic Church and the Western world had locked everything down. You couldn’t read the Bible—it was in Latin—and there was just a lot of ignorance; and they wanted it that way. When the Enlightenment and the Reformation came, there was a new individuality. And it wasn’t all pure, obviously; no reaction is. But the idea was we’re going to find the truth, and we’re not going to wait until some monolithic organization tells us what is true and what is not.

So, I think what defined modernism was there is truth, and we need to find it. What defines postmodernism is there’s no absolute truth, and you can create your own.

PHIL: Right. Modernism was bad for the church, actually, because it wasn’t just the idea that there’s truth and we need to find it. But by the late 1800s, most of our culture had accepted the idea that science is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and that it’s more authoritative even than Scripture. And so the effect of that modernist few decades was the destruction of most of the major denominations and lots of churches.

JOHN: Well, I think if you understand the big picture of the church being basically the disseminator of truth. And the church, the false Roman Catholic Church, can’t bring real salvation. It can’t bring peace and fulfillment in people’s lives, so—it’s all external. And eventually it so dominated people’s lives that they wanted to get out from under it. I mean, just imagine being told to conform to certain moral standards without any transformation of your heart. So you’re fighting against this system. Eventually you’re going to burst out of that.

And so, when I say that modernism was the search for truth, it was the search for truth apart from the church. It was as if they buried theology and they had to find—I mean, we used to talk about theology as the queen of the sciences. But they dumped theology for science because, well, science was—it was godless, it was amoral. So I think what characterized modernism was a search for the truth apart from God.

PHIL: And of course, that’s what Scripture teaches is the fatal flaw in humanity. As fallen creatures, we suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

JOHN: Romans 1. And the Old Testament says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” But yeah, we know the cycle of human history is to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. And what that means is this suppression comes because they demand to live in an unrighteous way.

PHIL: Would you agree, though, that this has accelerated exponentially in the past five years?

JOHN: Well of course, it’s accelerated because it’s been exposed in such massive, massive ways through media. I mean, you go a hundred years, and you wouldn’t have an epidemic of pornography because where would that come from? Certainly the culture wouldn’t have done that; there was no medium to do it. And now you have it on cell phones in the hands of eight-year-old kids. Yeah, sure, the blast of sin that comes through media at the high-tech level, with not only the seductive element of sin itself but the very seductive formats that create habits and habits that can’t be broken, just fuels this explosion of immorality.

PHIL: So you’re hinting, really, that underlying this rapid acceleration of moral decline, the Internet would be probably the prime cause.

JOHN: Yeah, of course. I mean, because that’s the power to get into everybody’s personal life in a secret, almost private, clandestine way. Sure.

PHIL: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that of all the sins Scripture points out, so many of the changes that we’ve seen in our culture over the past—over our lifetimes has to do with the acceptance of things that used to be regarded as sexual perversions. You have radical feminism, I think, at the root of it. But then the LGBTQRSTU ideology and transgenderism with an infinite array of new pronouns—things like drag queen story time for children. And next up is pedophilia. We’re being told that pedophilia is—that word is a slur, and so we should refer to people as “minor-attracted persons.” And so it’s on the same course for social acceptance that we saw with all the other LGBTQ stuff. And pedophilia and bestiality are both lobbying now to be accepted as congenital dispositions, like orientations. So you were born that way, there’s nothing you can do, and we’re supposed to accept that.

JOHN: Well, yeah. But what else would you expect, because evil—humanity is evil. And the Bible says, “Evil men get worse and worse.” There’s an accumulated tolerance. One generation does certain things, and the next one pushes it further, and the next one pushes it further. And so subsequently, everything gets worse and worse and worse and worse. And then when you inject any form of media, any form of media, you literally expand exponentially the impact of all that is evil.

I mean, look, we understand that from the standpoint of our ministry. We want to spread the truth far and wide, the truth of the Word of God, which is what we do, using the same tools that the enemy uses to destroy people’s lives. But the fact that this particular time in human history has such massive overexposure should lead us to conclude that it’s going to be the worst time ever.

PHIL: Would you have predicted, say, fifty years ago that the biggest obstacle for the church in wanting to disseminate the truth, the biggest obstacle would be government?

JOHN: Well, I think—you know, if I had thought about it fifty years ago—I don’t know how much I would have thought about it. But government has always been the arch-persecutor of the church.

PHIL: Right. You just made a great documentary about that.

JOHN: Yeah, The Essential Church. But you have to understand that you might not like somebody who’s a Christian, but you can’t kill them—but the government can. You might not like a religion, but you can’t outlaw it—but the government can. So ultimately, it’s always the government that wields the most threatening power against the truth and against the church.

I mean, that’s true in all of history. You go back into the Middle Ages, and it was governments that were turning people into martyrs, and a lot of it was coming from religion united to government. I mean, there was no American experiment yet, where you separate the two. So religious governments were the persecutors. So it’s always going to be the government to do that, because they have the power to do that, the authority to do that.

PHIL: And now we’ve got anti-religious governments that are persecutors. This pressure to accept sexual perversions as normative is soon to become, I think, the law of the land. Already in Canada they’ve passed a law that makes it illegal to say that homosexuality is sinful.

JOHN: Yeah. And I mean, I don’t know what trajectory they’re on at what speed. But now they’ve passed laws on euthanasia—that if you want to die, you go to the doctor and he kills you. And that’s legal.

PHIL: That’s also legal in several European countries. That does seem to be coming this way. That’s another threat, I think.

JOHN: Well, yeah. The devil is the murderer from the beginning. And as society unravels, you can see people killing themselves at a rapid—more rapid rate than ever in my lifetime in the past; and if you don’t want to kill yourself, you can have somebody kill you. I mean, that’s where we are. But that shows the utter despair.

You might think that in a world with all the advancements that we have today, with all of the fulfillments, with all of the forms of entertainment and all the options you have to enrich your life every way you want, people would be more satisfied. But the truth of the matter is they’re less satisfied, and I think it’s because it’s the accumulated power of sin, and its dominating presence has overruled every other meaningful thing. People don’t know how to have a meaningful relationship. They don’t know how to love genuinely. They don’t know how to build a marriage, to build a family, even to build human relationships. I mean, look at—

I mean, here we are at this time in human history, and we’re all worried that somebody’s going to push a button and set off an atomic bomb in America or in Russia or wherever, Iran, and then all of a sudden the whole world blows up. We are seeing, I think, as much or more hate on a broader level than I can ever remember in my lifetime.

PHIL: Right. In fact, I made a comment online just a few days ago that it’s ironic that after so much rhetoric on social justice, the overall affect of that has been to increase ethnic strife and contention.

JOHN: Yeah. Well, I think that was the purpose of it. I mean, it was given a label that sounded somewhat benign. But what I’m saying is that it’s obvious that with all the history of life and humanity, and all the advancements, and all the opportunities, and life being so much more livable than it ever was in the past—and it gets more and more that way; you can have more of what you want—there’s no settling the human heart. I mean, we’re headed toward what looks like a global war. And that’s exactly what the Bible says will happen at Armageddon.

And it’s interesting to me that the focal point of this is Israel. Why is that? I mean, you wouldn’t—if you didn’t have the Bible, you’d say, “Why is everybody focused on this tiny little country with this few million people? Why is it the center of the globe?” But it is, increasingly. And there’s increasing hatred spreading globally against Israel, and we’re watching it foment everywhere. I mean, it’s all going down the path that the Bible talks about.

PHIL: Yeah. And that’s hard to miss, isn’t it? Everywhere I go, people ask—and I’m sure they ask you even more—“Do you think the current events with all the strife in the Middle East and everything else that’s going on signal that the return of Christ is near?” People ask me that all the time. What’s your answer to that?

JOHN: Well, first of all, the center of this focus in the world today, the conflict, the most dramatic conflict on the planet is building up toward Israel, not Bangladesh, not Peru or any other place. Why this tiny little country? And why this massive, massive antisemitism escalating and escalating and escalating in our supposed universities, where people are supposed to be learning to be civil? They’re defending Hamas and terrorists slaughtering people. Why all this violent energy of hatred driven against Israel? Why is that?

Well, if you look at the Bible, it’s clear that’s where human history goes, and it all ends up in Armageddon, and all the armies of the world convene to try to destroy Israel. And Christ returns and triumphs over all of them.

PHIL: And it is lining up for that. Is it also possible—so it’s obviously—your answer is yes, Christ could come at any moment. I know you’ve taught that.

JOHN: Right, because I believe in a rapture before the Tribulation, before all of the events of the book of Revelation unfold, and even the things Daniel and Ezekiel talked about. I think the church is taken out. So that’s the next event. That’s a signless event. But what we would expect to see in the Tribulation looks so possible and so near that I’m concluding the rapture’s got to be pretty soon.

PHIL: Now, it’s looked that way before, so this is my question, then: Is it also possible that the Lord could delay His return another thousand years?

JOHN: Well, anything is possible. And a thousand years is with a day—

PHIL: Right.

JOHN: A thousand years is as a day with the Lord. I’m not suggesting He’s coming anytime; I wouldn’t do that. I mean, people who have done that—

PHIL: They’ve all been wrong.

JOHN:—got it wrong every time. But I would say this: There’s nothing that is supposed to happen around the time of Christ’s return that I can’t now see as a very imminent possibility. I mean, you take something like the mark of the beast, a number in your forehead and in your hand. I mean—

PHIL: Yeah. And we used to wonder how that would be, how that would come about.

JOHN: Right. But they are talking about implanting chips. They’re already doing it in your hand or on your forehead. So you walk through some screening thing, and that’s how you pay your bills. And if you don’t have the mark, you can’t buy or sell. I mean, we’re pretty close to that now.

PHIL: Yeah, that’s actually what they’re doing in China.

JOHN: Yeah, you can shut down somebody’s entire life. So, yeah, I think—I don’t want to say everything is prophetic fulfillment; but in general, we’re looking at a world that is shaping up consistently with what the Bible says the time of the tribulation is going to bring to pass.

PHIL: Yeah. Don’t you think also though, from the New Testament the apostles lived with that expectation that Christ could and probably would return at anytime, and yet it’s been two thousand years. And Peter acknowledges that, that the time would come when people would say, “Where is the promise of His coming?” And he makes the point that the delay is because of the patience and kindness of God, who is just in the process of redeeming people before the great judgment comes.

JOHN: Yeah, and that’s not going to—that’s not going to come until He has completed the church—until, I guess you could say, the times of the Gentiles are complete, until the church is completely gathered; then it’ll be taken to glory in the rapture, and then all hell will break loose.

All I’m saying in looking into the realities of today is what I see happening today could readily happen in the Tribulation. I mean, if you, say, you go back fifty or one hundred years and, say, you’re reading the book of Revelation, you hear that a third of the human race is killed, or a fourth of the human race is killed, how would that happen? How would that be possible? But we now know how that is possible, with the nuclear power that we have now, which in previous history we didn’t have.

So I think there’s lots of things that line up. We also have Israel in the land. I mean, what a story that is. Nobody’s ever met a Hittite, a Hivite, an Amorite, a Moabite, or a Jebusite or anybody else like any other “ite.” But Israelites are on the face of the earth in their land, and that is a fulfillment of God’s purpose, that He would bring them back, and then He would redeem them, and then He would give them their kingdom.

PHIL: So, considering all of that and watching the decline of our society, we all say, “Even so, Lord, come quickly.” And the point I get out of all of this is that we shouldn’t be troubled. Scripture predicted that the world would go this way. And Jesus said, “Don’t be surprised if the world hates you. They hated Me.” All of that is told to us in Scripture.

I think one of the more disturbing things that’s happening today—and I think what maybe I’m more concerned about than anything—is the fact that within the visible church, within the evangelical movement, there is that same pressure, that same effort to try to mainstream some of these sexual perversions and embrace some of the same sins that the world is so obsessed with; you share that concern.

JOHN: Well, yeah. But that isn’t the surprise either. There’s no surprise there at all. In fact, I go back to Matthew 13 in my thinking, and have for decades, and realize that the Lord says to the disciples, “You need to understand the kingdom.” I’m sure they didn’t understand it the way they were about to hear it. He said, “It’s not all going to be righteous. There’s going to be wheat, and there’s going to be tares. And the wheat is the seed that God sows, and the tares are sown by the evil one.”

The kingdom is going to be mixed. There are going to be false converts. There’s going to be, like in the parable of the soils, some seed produces fruit. Some appears to look like it has life, but it dies out. So there are going to be fake, faulty, short-lived, pseudo-Christians. We have all of that. There are going to be false teachers. Is there anything that the New Testament talks more about, in terms of warning, than false teachers? I mean, it’s everywhere throughout the New Testament. From the beginning to the end, false teachers, even false Christs are going to be coming.

So it all is exactly the way the Bible says. The church is—the true church is in the midst of this kingdom that is a mixture of the true and the false, the wheat and the tares. The parable of the dragnet in Matthew 13, where the Lord talks about a net that brings in everything—I mean, good fish, bad fish, and whatever trash is on the bottom of the lake. And the Lord says, “This is the way the kingdom is going to be.” In fact, it’s so difficult to tell the difference that in those parables the Lord said, “You can’t always tell the difference. You have to wait till the harvest”—and He says—“when the reaping will be done by the holy angels.”

And He is—God is reserving the final—I guess you could say the final revelation of what people are, for that final judgment. And I think that fits Matthew 7: “Some are going to say, ‘Wait a minute. We did this in Your name. We did the other thing in Your name.’ And He says, ‘Depart from Me, I never know you, you workers of iniquity.’”

So there is such a mixture, and it’s so often imperceptible that we can’t even distinguish it; which is challenging, right, for the church, because we know there are nonbelievers in the church. We know there are false teachers in the church. We know some of them. We know who some of them are and many of them are, but we don’t know all of them. But that just fits the picture perfectly.

PHIL: Yeah. Let’s talk about that admonition from Christ, not to try to clear out the tares, OK. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t acknowledge the fact that there are tares, there are false teachers, and sometimes they are identifiable and should be called out. Would you agree?

JOHN: Well, absolutely. I mean, you start with this: If there’s a believer—professing believer in the church who is sinning, you go to that believer and you confront that believer, and hopefully that believer repents. If not, you take two or three witnesses and go through the same process. If not, you tell the whole church. If not, you treat them like an unbeliever. So there is a process going on—we call it the discipline of the church—that will reveal people who are fraudulent.

PHIL: Right.

JOHN: And then John says, “Look, they went out from us because they were not of us.” So when the church holds the standard of holiness high, there’s no question that it will reveal some of the tares. I mean, that’s going to happen in that process. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to necessarily know all of them.

Also, we’re told that if anybody comes with a different doctrine, in Galatians 1, he’s to be damned. I mean, it’s condemnation on him.

PHIL: Right. In 2 John, you’re not even to let him in your house.

JOHN: No. And then you have the factious person who is to be put out.

PHIL: Titus 3:10.

JOHN: Right, Titus. So we’re doing the best we can to keep the church pure, and that’s part of that. But all our Lord is saying is, in the big sense of things, there’s going to be a mixture, and you won’t be able to make the church—you won’t be able to understand the pure church until the final judgment.

PHIL: Right. Now you said, “We’re doing the best we can.” And I know you have. I was an adult before I ever knew of a church that practiced church discipline according to Matthew 18, and you were the first teacher I ever heard teach on that passage and say, “We need to implement this.” Would you say that the big movement—evangelicalism’s failure to obey those commands to keep the church pure, to practice church disciple—that lies at the root of a lot of the problems we’re talking about?

JOHN: Oh, it’s absolutely true. I mean, if the church is unwilling to do that, then it is subject to all manner of evil. The Lord wanted that stopped at the point of an individual following a pattern of sin. The first instruction ever given to the church was if someone’s in sin, go to him and confront that sin. And obviously, if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to be sure that your own life is what it should be. “You don’t want to be taking a splinter out of somebody else’s eye,” Jesus said, “while you’ve got a big two-by-four in your own eye.” But the holiness of God’s people is His desire. I mean, Paul even says that he wants to present to Christ a pure virgin.

So yes, I’m convinced, and I was convinced when I came to Grace 54 years ago, that we needed to follow the patterns of Matthew 18 and confront sin in the church on a personal level. People told me, “You’ll empty the church. You can’t do that.” I never heard of a church doing it, never.

PHIL: Right.

JOHN: I didn’t know any. And I grew up in church world. But I said, “The Scripture’s clear about that.” So yeah, I think that if you don’t do that in the church, you disobey the Lord. I mean, you’re letting sin find a place there. This is where leaven leavens the whole lump, and you have to confront it. First Corinthians, Paul talks about that. You have to deal with that person and put them out of the church; otherwise, they’re going to have an evil influence.

PHIL: OK. So it’s clear that when Jesus said, “Don’t uproot the tares,” He didn’t mean ignore sin or ignore false teachers; we’re to deal with those that we see. What do you think He did mean? I mean, I’m concerned right now with an increase of some fairly extreme people pressing for what they call “Christian nationalism,” where the idea is they want to commandeer the mechanism of secular government, take over the—take the sword, basically, out of Caesar’s hand and give it to the church. And it seems to me that that’s exactly what Jesus was saying not to do when He said, “You don’t try to uproot the tares.” I don’t see any command in Scripture for the church to commandeer secular government—government, and try to use it to bring about righteousness. Paul said, “If righteousness comes by the law, Christ died in vain.” That’s not our task. Would you agree?

JOHN: Well yes, absolutely, 100 percent I agree. In fact, we are told as believers to obey the government, not run the government. We’re told to submit to the people in authority. We’re told that they have a right to wield the sword, to punish evildoers and reward those who do good. We’re to pray for the people who are over us, for kings and leaders. And the separation of the church and government is crystal clear in Scripture. There is no—there is no place in the Bible where you can find the church blended together with government until you get to the millennial kingdom of Christ.

PHIL: Yeah. In fact, on the contrary, Jesus says, Matthew 20:25, “You know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.” But He says, speaking to the believers, “It shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister.”

JOHN: Or, “Your servant.”

PHIL: I would say that text in and of itself sort of defeats the whole idea of Christian nationalism.

JOHN: Well, there is no such concept in the New Testament as Christian nationalism. At what point does Jesus and the disciples lead a coup in Jerusalem?

PHIL: Right. And they were under Nero at—for much of the New Testament.

JOHN: Well, yeah. If you wanted to make a case that Nero was bad, that wouldn’t be difficult to do. But those two entities are designed by God to have separate powers. But there’s just—I mean, you have to believe that Jesus would have given command to His disciples to take over the government. And He said that’s exactly what He would not do. “If I wanted to take over the government, My servants would fight,” He said.

PHIL: Right. Now I’m certain that in the minds of lots of our listeners right now there’s a looming question, because you said it’s our task as believers to obey the government. And yet, probably the best-known thing you’ve done that’s gotten you in the news over the past three or four years was to open Grace Church when the county government was saying, “Keep it closed.”

JOHN: Yeah, but—

PHIL: What’s the difference there?

JOHN: The difference is when the government tells you not to do what the Bible tells you you have to do, or when the Bible—when the government tells you to do something the Bible forbids, then you’re in an Acts 5 situation, where you say, “You judge whether I obey God or men.”

That was—there was not five seconds of equivocation in my mind. When the government said, “Shut the church,” I said, “That can’t happen.” They’re not the head of the church. I can’t say, “Shut the government.” I could make a case that the church is above the government, right, because the church belongs to God in an eternal way, and He wields His power through us. I could say, “Shut down the government.” But that would be folly. And the church would—how would the church pull that off? We’d have to go to war to do that.

So conversely, the government has its area of operation, and it has no right to step into the church and command the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. So that was the clear cut. That wasn’t even a difficult decision for me.

PHIL: All right. So we don’t go to war in the literal physical sense, but we are in a spiritual warfare. This is a battle. What would you say is the church’s duty as we confront this massive moral decline that’s affected not only secular culture but its seeping into the church?

JOHN: Well, look, the church advances, the kingdom advances one soul at a time, right? There’s nothing we can do beyond individual salvation, right? People don’t get saved in groups. Towns don’t get saved; cities don’t get saved—you hear people talk about trying to win a city to the Lord. Salvation is a very individual thing. So if there’s going to be a change in society, it’s going to be because people’s lives are changed by the gospel. And that’s the church’s mission.

And I think if you go back in history, Christianity has made the greatest impact on the things that have advanced human life in terms of medicine and education and science and all of that. Even those early scientists, people wouldn’t necessarily know that because they’re so ignorant about the past. But most of those early scientists were Christian men who were making those original early discoveries before evolution reared its ugly head.

So Christianity has made a massive contribution to the benefit of the world on many, many levels. But it cannot do any more than provide salvation. That is the supreme thing that the church is to do, is to provide the doctrine of salvation, the clarity of the gospel, so that God by His Holy Spirit, through the means of the preaching of the gospel, can redeem His people.

PHIL: Is it necessary for the church to try to adjust that message so that it’s more palatable or more—I mean, I know your answer to this because you’ve written several books on it—

JOHN: Well, yeah, no, it’s—

PHIL: —but I want you to say it.

JOHN: No, you don’t adjust the gospel. You don’t soft-sell the gospel. You don’t take the offensive part out of it. You don’t try to create a message that’s tolerable to everybody.

PHIL: In a postmodern society like we live in, if you do that and proclaim the truth in an unvarnished way, you’re going to be accused of being hateful. They’ll say it’s hate speech; they do say it’s hate speech. You’ll be accused of being arrogant or whatever for saying, “I believe this is true.” In an era when you’re not supposed to be totally convinced about anything, what’s your advice to Christians who are intimidated by that pressure?

JOHN: Yeah. I think, first of all, it takes courage, but it takes courage based on conviction. Like, I don’t mind standing up and preaching the gospel. I don’t care where I am or to whom I’m speaking, the pure gospel which starts with, “You’re a sinner. You’re on your way to eternal judgment. You can’t do anything about it in your own strength, and you need a Savior.” But there are some reasons why I don’t hesitate to do that. Number one, I believe it. I believe it because I believe the Scripture.

So it starts for me—everything in faithfulness begins with my view of the Bible. If you’re like Andy Stanley, who’s always trying to discount the Bible—you know, “Don’t bother about the Old Testament. Yeah, yeah, I know those verses about homosexuality, I’ve heard all of those, but we’re going to open up our arms for the homosexuals and the gay people, and we’re going to have a conference for those people”—this is—that is a literally terminal error to make. That is the end of everything, because if you’re a higher authority than the Bible, if you can be dismissive of Scripture, you have literally acknowledged that you are above God. The hubris of that, the narcissism of that, the ego of that, it frightens me.

PHIL: Right. And that takes us back almost to where we started, because that was the error of modernism: to regard the authority of science as a higher authority than Scripture; and then postmodernism basically.

JOHN: But it’s more than just—it’s more than just not wanting God. First of all, you have to start with the Bible as absolutely true, OK. Then you have to understand the doctrines of Scripture, and they have to become convictions. And when I say a conviction, I mean something that you don’t change. This is the structure of your life. And where you have convictions based upon Scripture, you are more likely to have courage because you know you’re doing the right thing and that God is on your side.

So I think that’s the simple way that I think about it. The Bible is the absolute authority. It’s true in full. I want to know what its principles are, what its doctrines are, what its truths are. They become not only something I believe, but something that I hold to and something I would fight for. They’re the convictions of my heart. And what those convictions are then overpowers my fears and overpowers my weakness or my thought of being popular or being nice. No. I want to be kind, and I want to be gracious, but I’m conviction-driven; and conviction is always tied to courage. Where you have no convictions, you have no courage.

PHIL: Now, what you just said, to have a conviction that you’re right, and God is on your side based on what Scripture says, the Word of God, that’s the very thing our culture constantly, relentlessly tells us we’re not supposed to believe. We’re not supposed to be that certain. We’re not supposed to be settled in any conviction like that. You’re not going to win any popularity contests with your view.

JOHN: Well, no. But I’m not trying to do that. The other thing that comes into this is—and so vital—is I can’t advance the kingdom no matter what I do; only God can do that. So some of these guys who don’t have convictions and don’t have courage and alter the message and change it and make it palatable to anybody and everybody trying to win over people, they literally abandon the very purpose for their existence, which is to boldly confront the sinner with the saving truth of the gospel. If you don’t have the courage to do that, if you don’t have the strength to do that, then you should be silent, because you’re just heaping up judgment on yourself.

And I would say there’s one other thing you have to keep in mind. I never ever consider the outcome. I never think about, “Well, if I say that, what might this guy think?” Or, “If I say the Jews crucified Jesus, really, even though they used the Romans to execute it, is that going to offend some Jews in the congregation?” or whatever. “If I say something against homosexuality, is that going to offend somebody, or if I talk about wives being submissive to their husband, is that going to offend them?” Whatever it is, that thought never enters my mind because I understand that God does His work with the truth and the Holy Spirit. So I just want the truth out there; I’ll leave the consequences to the Lord.

PHIL: You mentioned Andy Stanley. He recently, in October of 2023, had a massive conference that was called The Unconditional Conference, where he was lobbying for the inclusion and acceptance of sexually deviant people in the church—not just inviting them to come and hear the Word of God, which we would do. But he was saying we need to embrace them as members of the church and brothers and sisters in Christ. And that does seem to be the way the drift is going.

John, your perspective on this puts you in a small remnant. And of course, I agree with your perspective on it. Do you think it’s time for a massive separation within the evangelical movement? For decades evangelicals have been trying to gain as much clout as they can by broadening the boundaries of their own movement. Is it time to go the other way? Is it time for those of us who are absolutely committed to the truth of Scripture to split off from these people who are trying to follow the world?

JOHN: Yeah. And I think basically we do. I mean, at Grace Community Church we don’t have any alliances with people who advocate homosexuality or tolerate sex before marriage or sex outside of marriage or pedophilia or drag queens. I mean, we have nothing to do with anybody like that. So we’re already—I mean, “Come out from among them and be separate, and touch not the unclean thing.” That’s what Paul told the Corinthians. “You can’t join Christ to Satan or Belial.”

So yeah, we’re doing that all the time. But it isn’t that we have to sort of reinvent ourselves all the time; we just keep doing what we’ve always done—preaching, teaching what the Word of God says—and it puts us in a position that is adversarial to all these aberrations.

PHIL: Right. So you’re still preaching the Word of God out of season, like Paul said.

JOHN: Right. It’s either in season or out of season. And either way, you preach the Word, and you preach it positively; and you confront sin, and you preach the truth. It’s the Word of God. One verse at a time, we unleash the Bible. Trends come and trends go, and I think this is something that’s defined our ministry. We’re aware of the trends. We’re aware of what’s going on; obviously, we can’t escape it. But it never changes the message for us. Obviously, the Bible speaks to all these issues. And I’ll take the Bible at a certain point, when I see a certain issue, and drive what the Bible says right at that issue. But again, it’s all the Word of God. When you get to the point where you have to hide what the Bible teaches or you have to downplay what the Bible teaches or you have to avoid what the Bible teaches or you have to discount the Bible as such, as the authoritative Word of God, then this is the foundation of all heresy.

PHIL: You have led the way in all of that. I know a lot of our listeners would love to thank you personally, because most of us sort of feed off your example and your courage to do these things. I know you hear, like I do, relentlessly from people who tell you, “You’re going to be on the wrong side of history. Your narrow perspective is relegating you to a position of insignificance.” You’re not deterred by any of that, are you?

JOHN: Well no, because that’s not where I find my authority. And it goes beyond that. It goes beyond people criticizing a position or a stance or a doctrine or conviction. I mean, they pick at me in all kinds of ways trying to say I lied about certain parts of my life, I lied about certain things that I did in my life or places I went or whatever it is, even back into my youth and my time of education. They say that I abuse women in the church. I mean, there’s no end to what people have accused me of. And there’s always a gang out there who feed on that. They get their satisfaction on imbibing and passing on lies about not just me but any faithful person. And what you have to do in a situation like that is you look at your own heart, and you say, “Is that true or is that not true?” If it’s not true, then you can say—and this is a privileged thing to be able to say if you examine your heart, “Look, they falsely accused Jesus, too, and they falsely accused the apostles to the point where they martyred them. They falsely accused the Reformers. They falsely accused—” I mean, terrible, terrible things have been said by the people who hated the truth, against the most faithful people through church history. So that goes with the territory because Satan is a slanderer, right, and that’s how he’s coming at you.

So again, I think you have to make sure that your life is consistent, and that what they say about you can never be validated by the truth. But it’s always going to be manifest to be a lie; and then you just boldly preach the truth, and let God do what He will do.

PHIL: This idea that really dominates big-movement evangelicalism: the idea that we must make the world like us, or we’re not going to have an impact. We have to be winsome, or we can’t win the world. We have to be—we have to go with the flow of history, or we’re not going to be relevant at all. This whole notion of relevancy and academic respectability has driven and obsessed evangelicals all my life, at least back to the 1950s. And it’s a poison these days; it’s just everywhere. And yet, I think it’s true—I think you’d agree that anti-Christian sentiment in the secular world has never been greater than it is today. They’re not winning the world by this strategy. In your judgment, does the visible church bear any responsibility, or how much responsibility, for the decline in the secular world all around us? Do you think if the church had been doing its job for the past half decade, the world would be any better than it is today?

JOHN: Well yeah, I think we have to say that; otherwise, we would not be responsible for anything. Of course, if we were more of what the church should be, it would have a greater impact on society, yeah.

Look, just take the seven letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3. Our Lord just blistered five of those churches. He didn’t say, “Well, it’s all going to work out anyway because I got it all planned; it doesn’t matter what you guys do.” No, He pronounced judgment on those churches, told them He was going to literally come and blow the candle out. And He did eliminate those churches.

I mean, no, the church has the responsibility in the world. And again, the problem is that the church has gotten this notion that they have to be popular with the world. And it’s so simple. You go back to Jesus and ask yourself, sort of, before the Lord comes—let’s just say we’re living in Israel, and all of a sudden the Messiah shows up, and He feeds people, He creates food. He basically heals every disease day after day after day for the three years of His ministry. He is a manifestation of love, of the likes of which the world has never seen. Little children are drawn to Him. Outcasts are drawn to Him. Wretched people are drawn to Him. He even goes to their places and has meals with them—that’s what the Pharisees condemned Him for, being with tax collectors and sinners. And He banishes disease from the land of Israel for the duration of His ministry, and He promises the forgiveness of sins, and He promises heaven, and He promises a kingdom—and they kill Him.

What—if you wanted to develop a strategy for church growth—healing everybody, feeding everybody, demonstrating love and offering forgiveness to everyone—I mean, non-stop, all of that—you ask, “Well, why did they kill Him?” And He says it. In John 7 He says, “You hate Me because I tell you your deeds are evil.” Sooner or later, that is the message that He had to give.

PHIL: And yet that’s the starting point of the gospel, too, isn’t it?

JOHN: Well, that’s the whole point. The gospel starts with a recognition that you’re a sinner, can’t save yourself; you need a Savior. So if you don’t have the courage to say that, you’ve prostituted the ministry, because that’s the gospel; that’s good news. It’s good news to find out, right, that I’m—I have no capacity to be reconciled to God. It’s good news to find out I have no means by which God would accept me. It’s good news to find out that, because then I can say, “Well, what do I do?” and I can hear, “Put your trust in Christ, and by faith God will declare you righteous.” That’s all good news.

It’s all good news to know you’re a sinner. But you can be forgiven and given eternal life. That’s the good news. But the willingness to speak the truth is very rare. It’s far more rare than it needs to be. And it’s maybe because they don’t believe it. But I think more often than not it’s because they want to be popular.

PHIL: You’ve echoed a lot of things that I’ve heard you teach from the beginning of your ministry, and it’s interesting that lots of Christians, I think, think that it’s our task to sort of stand aside and tell the world what’s wrong with them, what they need to change. But your ministry has been more focused on an effort to call the church to faithfulness. And a lot of what you’ve said today, same thing—your focus is on telling Christians, “Look, we need to clean up our house first.”

Let me read a verse in closing and let you comment on it. this is from 1 Peter 4:17, where Peter writes, “It is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us . . . what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?” What was Peter saying there?

JOHN: Well, Peter is saying you have to understand that being part of the church does not exempt you from judgment. The truth of the matter is judgment’s going to begin at the house of God. And this is part of the principle of “to whom much is given, much is required.” You can’t play church. You can’t play fast and loose with the truth and think that because you’re in the church you’re OK. You can’t be a religious fraud or a hypocrite. You can’t trample underfoot the blood of the covenant and count it as an unholy thing, like the book of Hebrews says. If you deal with the gospel—even though you’re religious, you deal with the gospel in a trivial way, that is extremely serious. In fact, in Corinthians we read that there were certain believers who, literally the Lord killed them because of the way they approached His table.

So the most—well, look at—go back to Acts 5 for a minute, what happened in the church there. Ananias and Sapphira were killed in front of the church for lying to the Holy Spirit, and it says in that chapter of Acts that nobody dared join the church. “You don’t want to join that organization; people die there.”

PHIL: Not very seeker-sensitive.

JOHN: Not very seeker-sensitive is right. But the Lord added to the church constantly, built up the true church.

So judgment will come to the church. And we see that again in Revelation 2 and 3, where the Lord literally judges five of those seven churches in Asia Minor. So the church is not a safe place to be a hypocrite; judgment will come. And I think judgment could even encompass the fact that you wouldn’t want to spend your life as a leader in a church and come one day—because maybe you’re a true believer, but you’re just cowardly—come before the Lord and have the Lord say, “You brought shame on My name.” You want to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

But again, I think the picture of Christ and the apostles and Paul—they all lost their lives. I mean, even go in the Old Testament. Jesus said about Israel, “You kill the prophets. You stone those that are sent to you. I send My Son, you kill Him.” And it’s because the truth always attacks man at the point of his ego, his pride, and it crushes him under the weight of his guilt before God. And if you don’t—if that’s not your message, you’re not being faithful, because that is the message that leads the sinner to brokenness and penitence that brings about faith and salvation.

PHIL: Good insights. Thank you, John. Thanks for your time today. Thanks for your faithfulness over the years. Thanks for the example that you give to all of us. And I know I speak for countless numbers of listeners when I say thank you for being example.

JOHN: Well, Phil, thank you for your partnership and your friendship. And thanks to all the folks who support this ministry. I don’t deserve any special accolades; I just want to be faithful. I know what the Scripture requires of me, and it’s an incredible joy to be given the privilege of endeavoring to be faithful to that.