Living Outloud: When Love Loses its Spine

We trace a straight line from 2 Peter to today’s confusion about love, truth, and false teaching, and we make a case for a growth track that begins with faith and ends with real love. We name modern trends, invite honest questions, and call for repentance rooted in Scripture.

• 2 Peter’s step-by-step growth from faith to love
• Eyewitness trust in Jesus and confidence in Scripture
• How false teachers twist truth with clever language
• The temptation of deconstruction without discipleship
• Why love must be rooted in knowledge of God
• The patience of God and the call to repent
• Practical ways to let Scripture convict and form us

Hear it. Love it. Live it.

Chapters

• 0:22 Why Misquoting Scripture Matters
• 1:23 2 Peter’s Growth Track
• 3:54 Eyewitness Trust And False Teachers
• 6:28 Clever Lies And Real Discernment
• 9:06 Start With Faith, Not Vague Love
• 11:04 Deconstruction And Feel-Good Theology
• 14:19 Let Scripture Make You Uncomfortable
• 16:29 Naming A Trend: Exclusive Jesus Debated
• 19:23 Love, Patience, And Required Repentance
• 21:13 Stand Firm: Know, Live, And Love Truth

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:11

Hey, welcome back to the Out Loud Bible Project Podcast. This is our segment of Living Out Loud, where we take a look at what we read earlier in the week, and now we just get practical with it. How do we actually live this out? How do we do this? I've got Kelsey here with me, and uh I was on a rant this morning, which You're not very ranty, usually. I'm not a ranty ravey person. I'm pretty level-headed. I probably should be more passionate about things, but in this case, especially when it comes to the Bible when it's being misquoted or mistreated and leading people into some misunderstanding, I do get very upset by that.

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Like false teaching will send you.

SPEAKER_01: 0:49

I'm very upset about that.

SPEAKER_00: 0:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 0:51

And so I was on a bit of a rant. We'll get more into it later. I might even name names. I don't know. I don't know what we're getting into.

SPEAKER_00: 0:58

Expose.

SPEAKER_01: 0:59

Who knows? This is uncharted territory for me. I don't do this. We'll get into that a little bit, but I realized that everything I was ranting about has its roots in, or kind of points to, 2 Peter, some of the things that we read about. And I thought, oh well, that's perfect. We've got to talk about 2 Peter today. I want to start here, well, which is where 1 Peter or 2 Peter starts here in chapter 1. In view of all this, verse 5, what is all this? He's talking about God's divine power, his glory, his excellence, and his promises that help us to share with him. In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God's promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence. Like, hey, let's just have this affect how we live and improve the way that we show up in the world. And then moral excellence with knowledge. Like, hey, we gotta know what the Bible says. We gotta know about God. That is important. Knowledge with self-control, right? It should now lead to, okay, now that we know, now we it's gotta affect how we control our impulses and and resist sin and temptation. Self-control with patient endurance, patient endurance with godliness, and ultimately godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with not just love for those who love you, but love for everyone. This is just I I I love this because this is a really good step-by-step growth track that I think we can we can focus on. Okay, this is what the Bible and our knowledge of God should do in our lives. We should be seeing this. We should be growing in these things and generally this order, you know, that this you can't put the cart before the horse too much in any of these things.

SPEAKER_00: 2:32

Aaron Powell Because they they build up one on another. Yeah. Right? Like each one of these builds on the previous thing, and the the previous thing is the foundation for the next level of spiritual growth.

SPEAKER_01: 2:45

And interestingly enough, the the moral excellence is like the the second thing after faith. Like I I think the world has it backwards where it's like, eh, if you can get all your ducks in a row, then you can be a moral person and you can show up as a moral person in the world. It's like, no, no, no. This is like the first thing. Your faith should just now just just have morals now. Just like your morals are are rooted in in your faith that God has established morality in the world outside of you, outside of what you want and what your truth is. Um so let's start there and show up with this. And then add to that, knowledge, more knowledge of God. Like build on that with knowledge. Okay, this is not exactly where we're going to be camping out all day today, but I do like to highlight the fact that Peter has given us this growth track of what to do. And it he goes right into, therefore, in verse 12, I remind you about these things, even though you already know them and you're standing firm in the truth that that you've been taught. He he then talks about the fact that we can trust him specifically, Peter, you know, the apostle, the disciple of Jesus. Because he says, like, we're not making up these clever stories about Jesus. We saw him ourselves. Like me and my friends, we saw him. We saw, we saw, we heard God's voice come from heaven and say, This is my son who brings me great joy. Like we s we heard his voice from heaven, we were with him on the mountain, and because of this, we have greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets, the the scriptures that we have had, like we have even more confidence in God's word because of uh what we saw Jesus do and say and live. And this enters into this discussion of okay, now that we are confident in that, we have to recognize there are false prophets. There were false prophets back in Israel, back in the day. There's gonna be false teachers among you. And then he just he talk about a rant. Peter is way more ranty and rabi than I am. Yeah, but he goes on this rant about these false teachers. They teach destructive heresies, they deny the master who bought them, they will bring destruction on themselves, they follow evil teaching and shameful immorality, they uh the way of truth will be slandered, they are greedy, they make up lies to get your money. God condemned them long ago. And these people like blaspheme against uh powerful spiritual beings, and they are like unthinking animals, creatures of instinct born to be caught and destroyed. They scoff at things they don't understand, they'll be destroyed like animals. Like, this is a rant. Like Peter is not okay, bec and it's so offensive because he knows Jesus. He was like, Yeah, I know Jesus. I I I cannot bel like and and you all can know Jesus too. You don't have to walked with him on the road to to know him. You can know him because you can trust the people who walked with him to to tell you about him. Like you can know these things. You can trust the scriptures that we all learned growing up as kids.

SPEAKER_00: 5:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 5:45

And so the fact that there are teachers out there who are just absolutely making a mockery of Jesus' teachings, but it's clever. It doesn't look completely wrong right off the bat. It's clever, but it's it's from hell. Like, it's just appalling to him. And we still see it today. These people are useless as dried up springs. Like he I'm still scrolling. I got the Bible on my phone in this case. I'm still scrolling, and he's like all of chapter two, he's just going off on these uh false teachings. And I we have to be growing in our knowledge of the word. That is the only way that we can function as God's people today. And it seems even more important now, even than when Peter was walking around, because we're that much more removed from Jesus. We don't have eyewitnesses of Jesus, you know, walking around with their writing these letters to us today. It takes I mean, even Jesus admitted, like, hey, blessed are those who believe and haven't seen. Like granted, it honestly takes a bit more faith to believe in Jesus and believe in scripture nowadays than it did back then. Yeah. And so it's more difficult, but that's why it's all the more important to to make sure that we know scripture. If you're a Christian, you gotta know what the Bible says. Yeah. And there's a lot of people out there who wanna tell you what the Bible says or what they think or what they want you to think the Bible says. Right. Whether they're being malicious or whether they are generally trying to help people, but they're misguided. Or whether they've just been deceived by ultimately they've been deceived and they think that what they're teaching is right. I don't I don't think the majority of false teachers think that they're wrong. I think that they think they're right, but they've been deceived.

SPEAKER_00: 7:32

Yeah. And one of those false teachings, going right back to the first part of Second Peter, where you started, Michael, that list that builds upon itself today in our culture, people want to start with love everybody.

SPEAKER_01: 7:46

Uh that's that's the last one that's going to start there.

SPEAKER_00: 7:48

And that's the last one in the lineup. You have to Now we're not saying that you have to know everything before you can love people.

SPEAKER_01: 7:54

Well, I'm not ready to love people yet. I'm not on that growth track yet.

SPEAKER_00: 7:56

You until you've developed patient endurance and godliness, you don't have to love people yet. Like we're not saying that. But but loving people isn't the starting point.

SPEAKER_01: 8:06

No.

SPEAKER_00: 8:07

Faith is the starting point. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 8:09

And knowledge of God comes before that.

SPEAKER_00: 8:12

Yeah. And and and self-control and uh patience and godliness and godliness and brotherly affection, like those that is the foundation for how we love people. Our love for people should be flowing out of our knowledge of scripture, our knowledge of God, our lives of godliness, our our lives of righteousness overflow in love for people.

SPEAKER_01: 8:38

Yeah, that's a great point. And and that is the dangerous trend that I'm seeing today. So if we can shine some light on some of the false teaching that looks popular today, it is, like you said, it's rooted in this God is love. God loves everyone. Am I wrong? No, that's not wrong, but it it morphs into this, we should love everyone, which again is not wrong, but but it stops there and it doesn't have the knowledge of God and it doesn't have faith. It's just love. And so when love is not rooted in knowledge of who God is, and God is love, then you're defining this love by, I don't know, however you feel love should be defined, which is dangerous territory. And so it there's this universalism, I think is a good word for it, this sort of doctrine that that like God is love, God loves everybody. And so why would a God who is love and love everyone send anyone to hell? Or why would there be punishment? Or why would there be only one way to God? Like, and maybe some will even admit, yeah, Jesus is like a kind of a shortcut or a fast track to this sort of uh God conscious love consciousness, but it's not the only way. And this and that was a very slippery slope. Uh-huh. Because it's rooted in something that's true. God is love, and we are to love everyone. But if love is not rooted in knowledge of who God is, it's if you don't if you don't define love by how does God show up in all of Scripture, then you get to define love by how you think you should be loved and what you want love to look like in your life.

SPEAKER_00: 10:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 10:19

And then it is an open door to who knows what. We we see this as kind of the a driving force behind the the deconstruction mentality that seems to be popular with a lot of people under the age of 40.

SPEAKER_00: 10:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 10:34

Like our generation and a little bit younger, especially. I'm not I'm not including Gen Z at this time. Right. Like but somewhere between like 20 and 40, 25 and 45. Maybe a little bit older, maybe a little bit younger, but because it's our generation that for the most part went to Sunday school, went to church as kids, and there seems to be a lot of this this talk of like, oh, well, you're saying like you've you've heard from friends, former friends, former I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 11:09

People I still care about, but people I personally know who have deconstructed their faith, who would call themselves deconstruction. And some of their talking points, some of their reasoning is because they were taught the rapture and they were really scared when they went to bed, wondering that if they sinned that day and Jesus came back, would they make the rapture? And they were um really nervous about whether or not they could lose their salvation, or they were scared that every time they sinned, that that was gonna send them to hell.

SPEAKER_01: 11:38

Or you read the story of Jonah, and it's like, oh, if you sin, you're gonna get swallowed by a whale or something like that, right? And so now we there's a lot of people who have these, I think they'd call them traumas of of you know, past teaching of the Bible that made them feel scared, that made them feel not safe, and and made them doubt and question. It's like, okay.

SPEAKER_00: 12:00

But that has then led them to be like, okay, my Sunday school teacher taught me that. It made me feel scared, it made me feel unsafe. And so I'm just gonna push back against everything my Sunday school teacher said, and I'm gonna go develop a doctrine and a belief system based on what makes me feel good instead. Yes. And the the problem is the problem is not questioning your Sunday school teacher, question your Sunday school teacher, sure. But go to the scripture, go develop, increase in your knowledge of God, increase in your knowledge of scripture. That is what the Holy Spirit is here to help us do. That's why God gave us his word, so that we can know. We can know. And if things your Sunday school teacher said scared you or developed in you this fear or this anxiety, don't throw out the Bible, throw out that Sunday school teacher and that teaching, and go learn for yourself what the scriptures say. The problem is these people are not going and learning the scriptures for themselves. These people are developing an entire worldview based on what makes them feel good. And then they're listening to other quote unquote scholars who are emphasizing things that make them feel good. And they're like, oh, see, that's that makes me feel good. So I'm gonna go with that. That whole God is love thing. I'm not like repentance made me feel icky. Talking about sin make me made me feel icky. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 13:21

I feel guilty, I feel shameful.

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

Talking about hell makes me feel like that's a scary place that why would God send people to God. Why would a loving God send? So I'm gonna develop an entire worldview based on what I how I define love so that I feel good about God's love in my life. And that's so dangerous. Yeah, it's so bad.

SPEAKER_01: 13:41

Because here we've talked about this on a podcast before. We need to be willing to let the Bible make us feel uncomfortable. Yeah. Okay. Like your comfort and your happy, fuzzy feelings are not God's priority. And that comes from his love. Okay. Like he's not less loving because he lets you be uncomfortable. We have to let the Bible make us feel uncomfortable. When we come across something that makes us feel a little, ooh, ouch. Okay, that's something to lean into. Now, Satan wants to be right there next to you, making you feel shame, making you feel guilt. That's not the same thing as the Holy Spirit coming alongside you, often at the same time, convicting you of this sin and and God shining a light on something he says, like, hey, I see this. This doesn't actually line up with my heart. If you want a heart like mine, I'm gonna have to do some work on this area. Okay? Look, if you've been a Christian for any length of time, you've felt that at some point, right? And I think when we start listening, if we're not tuned to what God's voice sounds like, if we're not tuned to what God's heart is, then Satan's voice of shame and guilt is gonna sound more reasonable to you, and you're gonna make decisions based on that. And you're not gonna let the Bible be the mirror that it's supposed to be. You're going to let the Bible feel like this ouchy pokey thing, and maybe I just won't get into it because it makes me feel weird. I'll just go, I I know Jesus. I'll just and I'll go, and God is love. I'll just hang out with my my bro, Jesus, and my loving God Father, and live the rest of my life without the icky feelings. If we can put words to it, this is what's happening today. Just comes down to we need to know what the Bible says. I'm frustrated because, and I'll I'll name names. It was a couple years ago, I think, even, that I was following uh the Bible for normal people. And I was like, man, such a great name. Because it was about the time I had just recently started Outloud Bible Project Podcast, and I was like, oh, the Bible for normal people. That was actually, I was trying to, I think I actually came across it because I was Googling, like, can I name this podcast like the the Bible for normal people or like because I want it to sound natural and normal, like being read like a normal person, like you know, that sort of thing. You're you you've been listening to this podcast, you know what I'm trying to say. And so I think I came across it that way. It's like, oh, it already exists, the Bible for normal people. What's this? Oh, that's cool. And so I followed him for a bit. And at the time, I was like, yeah, that's pretty, pretty good stuff. They want people to go read the Bible for themselves and not just, you know, be scared of what their Sunday school teachers told them as kids, but get into it. Pretty good. Okay. But but as time went on, I was just more and more concerned watching some of their videos, watching some of their teachers teach. The one that really got me upset was talking about the verse that where Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through me. And this teacher at the time, she was very clearly well learned in Greek and exegetical studies and stuff like that. But she was making a case that Jesus in this verse was not talking about salvation, that he is the only way to be saved. He was talking about again, I don't know what her whatever thing she was talking about. And I'm like, okay, you know what? And so I I even engaged in the comments. I was like, I'll grant I I have not studied the Greek as much here. I don't and I I hear your point. But the danger here of what you're of this video in this discussion is that people may come across this, and if they're not discerning, if they're not if they're not well learned in the Bible, they might think that you're saying that Jesus isn't the only way to heaven. Can you clarify that that's not what you're saying, even if you're making another point? Nothing. No response. Right. And looking in the comments, there is a lot of people who were jumping on that train and the comment section was was as disastrous as I was afraid it was.

SPEAKER_00: 17:26

And because this false teacher came out claiming to prove from the Greek that Jesus is not the only way to heaven, and everybody who's ever been offended by the exclusivity of the gospel has now found someone claiming that the Bible affirms that point of view.

SPEAKER_01: 17:46

Even if she didn't say that outright, opening the door to doubt and opening the door to questioning is is really dangerous in that, and letting people draw their own conclusions. And I realized from that point on, they were not teaching people how to study the Bible and understand it for themselves. They were telling them that, hey, it's okay, you can question the Bible. And you need to you need to question the Bible and draw your own conclusions. And like that's a very different thing.

SPEAKER_00: 18:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:09

Like, please study the Bible and learn from it. Do not just have questions. Have questions, ask your questions.

SPEAKER_00: 18:14

Please like wrestle with it.

SPEAKER_01: 18:16

But don't just accept the answers that make you feel better. Don't just settle for, okay, oh well, now that doesn't make me feel icky anymore. Wrestling with God ended up with Jacob with a bad hip for the rest of his life. This yielding to the discomfort that inevitably comes with when we wrestle with God, I think, is part of this faith journey that is important, that we don't want to deal with, but is is necessary to get to know him more. This idea of God is love and he loves everybody, and we should all just go to heaven because God loves us gets put to bed in 2 Peter chapter 3. He's talking about dis talking about like punishment of and the world kind of coming to an end, and he's talking about in verse 9 of chapter 3, the Lord isn't really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he's being patient for your sake. And here is a glimpse. Peter's making a kind of a specific point in the context of punishment and you know the world, but he's rooting it in a truth about God and God's heart. So he kind of zooms out and he says, He doesn't want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent. That's God's heart. You read in the Old Testament prophets, you see the same thing. You see Exodus, where like God is compassionate, God is slow to anger, but he will punish people to multiple generations for their sin. And that is the truth, that's the tension we have to know about God. When we just stop with, well, God is love and God loves everyone. I mean, that's not untrue, but when we stop there, we disregard this entire second half of this truth of who God is. Like Peter says, he doesn't want anyone to be destroyed. Why? Because he loves you. You're all his kids. We're all his kids and he loves you. He doesn't want anyone to be destroyed for eternity. No, he he loves people too much for that. And that love drives him to wait. And this patience comes from his love. But what is he waiting for? Repentance. His love is unconditional. Amen. His salvation is not unconditional. His salvation is conditional. But you know what? Not on him. He's already opened the door. His the condition is you. The condition is, are you going to repent? And because he loves you and he loves everyone, he is waiting as long as possible for the final judgment. That's unconditional because he's waiting on the condition of you repenting. And if you just want to just bask in, oh, God is love and he loves us all as an excuse to not change, as an excuse to not give up your sin, as an excuse to just continue living the way you want, well, he loves you, but his patience is gonna run out eventually. His love is everlasting. His patience is not everlasting. It will come to an end. And we have to be okay with that tension. That's just rooted in who God is. If you don't like it, well, you be God, I guess, and make your own rules. I don't know. Alright, I got a little ranty there.

SPEAKER_00: 21:11

I like it.

SPEAKER_01: 21:12

We have to root ourselves in truth. We have to know what the Bible says. We have to know who God is based on what he has revealed about himself in Scripture. It may make you feel uncomfortable. It may lose you some friends. But let's let the truth do what it does in our hearts and in our lives. And let's stand up for it when we see other people being led astray by it. That's not how we end these. Go out and stand up for truth, right? Just go live it. Go love it. Go do it. We'll see you next time.