Somewhere along the way, the church swapped out one word, righteousness, and they put in the word nice. And those are not the same words. Jesus was righteous, but he wasn't nice. He flipped tables, he called men sons of vipers. He told the truth, and that truth got him killed. But the man being formed in the average church today isn't being shaped into that. He's being shaped into something agreeable, soft, and more or less useless. And he's being told that that's what holiness really looks like. It's the biggest bait and switch in the modern church. And today we expose it. So here's the swap that nobody named for you. At some point, the church quietly traded righteousness out for niceness.
SPEAKER_01Vodie Bachum, as he points out, we have the 11th commandment that guides us, thou shalt be nice. But we really don't care about the other ten. As long as people look at us and go, golly gee, Willikers, those Christians sure are nice. We must be doing well, right? My main question is why are he told me to proclaim the kings in the darkness that we must make America Christian again. We are so nice. Christians are so nice that when the pagans, the gay race, communists, and the god haters are quite literally destroying Western civilization in front of our very eyes, Christians will barely lift a finger to do anything to stop it. Because if we lift our finger to put a stop to it in any way, shape, or form, we will be called mean racist, bigot, homophobic, xenophobic. We will be called a myriad of names. And we can't have that, can we? We are too nice. We're so nice. We have the 11th commandment that guides us through thick and thin. Thou shalt be nice. Well, I think I speak for Christians all across America when I say we are done with that. And we are going to be reacting to a video today by this YouTube channel I've been following recently called The Heroes Forge. They've been putting out some incredible content. The theology of niceness is destroying modern Christian men. Yes, it is. So we're going to react to this together. I haven't watched this video. I've watched some of his other videos. I've been very impressed. And so I wanted to put this channel on your radar and react to this video with you guys because if it's anything like the rest of their content, it's going to be very good and we can enjoy it together. So let's jump in to this video.
SPEAKER_00Somewhere along the way, the church swapped out one word, righteousness, and they put in the word nice. And those are not the same word. Jesus was righteous, but he wasn't nice. He flipped tables, he called men sons of vipers, he told the truth, and that truth got him killed. But the man being formed in the average church today isn't being shaped into that. He's being shaped into something agreeable, soft, and more or less useless. And he's being told that that's what holiness really looks like. It's the biggest bait and switch in the modern church, and today we expose it. So here's the swap that nobody named for you. At some point, the church quietly traded righteousness out for niceness.
SPEAKER_01I like this dichotomy. I hadn't put it this way, but this is I'm I'm tracking with it. I'm tracking with it.
SPEAKER_00Almost no one noticed, because the two can look identical on a calm Sunday morning, but they are opposites under pressure. Righteousness will tell a hard truth and accept the cost. Niceness will tell a comfortable lie to avoid the conflict. Righteousness confronts. Niceness placates. Righteousness is willing to be hated for doing what's right. And niceness needs everyone to stay happy at all times and will sacrifice the truth to get it.
SPEAKER_01But here's That's right. I mean, uh if you're if you follow me, you've heard me quote, and I brought it up at the top of the episode. Vodie Bauckham, you know, he made it famous. The 11th commandment, thou shalt be nice. And it's not just the 11th commandment. As he points out, we have the 11th commandment that guides us, but we really don't care about the other ten. In fact, we don't take them, we don't talk about the Ten Commandments. We'll take them out of our classrooms, out of our courtrooms, and we won't even lift a finger to stop that. But as long as we are nice, as long as people look at us and go, golly, gee, Willikers, those Christians sure are nice. We must be doing well, right?
SPEAKER_00But here's what most men forget. The Bible never once commands you to be nice. Go look. It's not there. Pull out your concordance, look at all the pages, it doesn't exist. It commands you to be righteous, to be just, to be courageous, to be holy, to be truthful. Gentle, yes. But biblical gentleness is something completely different. It is strength under control. It is a sword within its sheath. It is not telling you to not have a sword. Even Jesus told his disciples to make sure that they had a cloak and a sword. The church took that word and gutted it. It told men that the highest value was to never offend, never confront, never to lead too hard, never to make anyone feel uncomfortable, and it dressed that cowardice up in spiritual language and called it Christ-likeness.
SPEAKER_01Yes. That just you can frame that. That quote. The church dressed cowardice up and called it Christ-likeness. It is cowardice. It is cowardice, and I'm I don't know if he's gonna get into this later in the episode, but it's fear of man. Those two things together, right? Fear of man that leads to cowardice in practice. So uh Christian ministers began to fear man, desire the approval of men. More specifically, they began to desire the approval of women. And not in even like a sexual or sensual sense. I mean that women and feministic effeminate tendencies began to rule in the church. And so men, as or I'm sorry, pastors, in order to keep their jobs, in order to have someone to preach to, as men are leaving the church's in droves and women are sticking around. Well, now the primary constituency that the pastor is preaching to is women, right? And eventually it gets to the point where like their paycheck is dependent on pleasing women. So we have longhoused the church, we have replaced the patriarchy with a gyneocracy. And then instead of facing that head on, we have a lot of Christian ministers who became cowards, right? And you see this with the complementarian movement. We talked about this in a few episodes ago when we were talking about complementarianism versus patriarchy. Complimentarianism is a halfway house. It obviously is. Patriarchy is the unvarnished, you know, untainted biblical truth on the matter. But whenever you put it in stark terms, it offends our feministic sensibilities. Right? So complementarianism is this way to take off all the sharp edges of patriarchy so that it's more palatable to our effeminate audience. You know? So anyway, so yes, it's uh it's fear of man, fear of woman more specifically, and then cowardice.
SPEAKER_00So today we do three things. We name the doctrine that did this, we show you what it actually produced, and then we go to the scripture and recover that man that the church buried because he's still I like this.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna learn together. I hate like I said, I haven't seen this, so let's see where this is.
SPEAKER_00And God is calling him out. This is God's design, and the modern church has spent a whole generation hiding it from you. All right, I'm here for it. Section one the theology of niceness and the three moves that built it. First, the church preached servant leadership, but quietly deleted the leadership and kept only the servant. Woo!
SPEAKER_01Preach it now, preach it. I don't know if you guys were uh in the evangelical, gospel-centered world during the servant leadership fad, but he hit the nail on the head. Let's see what he has to say about it.
SPEAKER_00Jesus washed feet. Yeah, he did that. And the church will remind you of that all over the place. But Jesus also led, he commanded, he rebuked, he drove men out of the temple with a whip that he made by himself by hand. The full picture is a king who serves. The church kept the towel and threw away the crown.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's very good. Kept the towel, threw away the crown. And uh he hasn't said this yet, he may say it here in a second. But this is really the servant leadership model was taught more than anything in the context of marriage. Husbands are to be servant leaders because, like I said, gyneocracy, longhouse. Women didn't want to hear that men are to rule their households. Women didn't want to hear that they are to obey their husbands, right? Even when I use that term obey, like even when I'll post that on X, I'll say, yes, women are to obey their husbands. And oh man, like the church ladies come out in force. No, no, no. The Bible says, actually, the Bible says to submit to. Well, actually, it does say to submit to in Ephesians 5, but then it also says, in giving an example of what submission looks like, it talks about Sarah obeying, obeying Abraham and calling him Lord, just as Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him Lord. Obey. And what does submit? Submit submit to obviously means to obey, right? Um, those are synonymous. Anyway, uh, so this is all in the context of husbands and wives and how they relate to one another. And the preacher would he would offer up his Sunday sermon on the topic and just talk, just rail, just go at the men. Men, if you want to lead your household, what that really looks like is getting down on your hands and knees and scrubbing that floor, is doing those dishes, is serving, serving, serving. And it's like, yeah, it's great to serve your wife. Yes, absolutely. We should do that. But the primary way that we serve is by leading. Like the servant leadership model implies within the leadership side of it, the crown, the rulership. Men are like patriarchy, quite literally just means father rule. Men are the heads of their households, and they are supposed to rule. That is the primary service that they offer is wise leadership for the good of their people, for the good of their wife, for the good of their children. That includes sacrifice, right? It's not everyone serves me and brings me all the goodies. It it is a the weight of the crown is in fact very heavy. It is. The weight of provision, the weight of protection. And uh anyway, and but with that comes responsibility, the responsibility to actually lead, and with that responsibility comes authority, real authority.
SPEAKER_00And handed men a model of leadership with all of the leadership surgically removed. What's left isn't a servant leader, it's just a servant of everyone's comfort, and a man like that leads no one. Second, the church preached submission relentlessly, but only ever aimed it at the wife to get their husband under control.
SPEAKER_01To get their husbands under control. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And never taught a man what he was submitting to. It spent so much energy making sure that no man ever lorded it over anyone that it forgot to tell him that he was assigned to a post to hold. It warned him a hundred times about being too strong, and never once about being too weak.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's huge. That's huge. Don't be too strong, don't be too ever be overbearing. And what it's generated over the last generation is unfortunately, a generation of Christian evangelical men who are just weak, impotent, who have no leadership abilities whatsoever. They don't know how to lead at all. They defer to their wives. It's so bad. Oh my gosh, it's so bad. The feminism is is so entrenched, not just like in not just in the evangelical world. I'm talking about it's like in you and me. Okay? It's in you and me. And we have to do the hard work of ripping that out and and and locating it. Because it that that feminism that gets in deep and it hides in places you were not expecting. So men do the safe thing. They went. And on that note, it's there's there is a new generation of young men who are bucking against the system, and I'm so happy about that. If you're watching this, you're probably one of those men. Young men are strong. That's and it's quite literally their glory. The proverbs say that the glory of the young man is his strength, and the the glory of the old man is his gray hair, it's his wisdom. Okay. And so men are strong, young men are strong, and they they desire to utilize that strength to accomplish a mission. And if that mission is not channeled in a productive, godly, well-ordered mission, they will create chaos. That's what men do. Like they will use their strength for something. And well, or they will use their strength for nothing, and then society will decay all around them because while that young man is not using his strength for provision, for protection, for ordering society, other strong men who are not ordered biblically will use their strength for destruction. And so, godly men, we need you. We need you to order society. Um, but it's it one of the things that's really encouraging is it is actually much easier to uh to say woe instead of giddy up. Woe is easier than giddy up, right? So if you've got a young man who's just strong, rearing, ready to go, like, you know, let's defeat feminism, let's make America a Christian again. Let's actually apply our faith in the public square, let's grow a spine, let's do something. That's what we need, right? Now, he might be a little rough around the edges. I'm probably like that, right? Uh, and sometimes I need a little bit of whoa, whoa there, buddy. And my pastor is so gracious to provide that for me. I'm a man under authority. And so I ask my pastor to monitor my social media. And he has for the last three years. And I have taken some things down because I said, Hey, did I cross the line here? Is this wise? So I've taken things down. We need to be men under authority. But I bring this up to say um it it's much easier to get a guy to slow down a little bit than it is to get them to giddy up because that effeminacy, that complacency gets in so deep. And it's like, come on, we gotta get you to do something. Do something. 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SPEAKER_00It went passive because in the theology of niceness, the only sin a man can commit is being too much. Never being too little. Abdication became the respectable choice in that world. Third, the church swapped the gospel of repentance.
SPEAKER_01So submission one way, I agree with that. Uh therapy, not repentance.
SPEAKER_00It stopped again. The church swapped the gospel of repentance for a gospel of therapy. Okay. It stopped calling men to die to themselves and started helping them to feel okay about themselves. It traded the call to take up their cross for the promise that they're just enough, just the way they are. And a man raised on that gospel has no framework for struggle, for discipline, for the hard road, because he's been Okay, this is a good point.
SPEAKER_01I don't know if I would have said it like that exactly, but this is a really good point. In the gospel-centered movement, there was an overemphasis on grace. And yes, you can over-emphasize grace. I mean, the Apostle Paul addresses this. Shall we continue in sin so that grace may abound? Absolutely not. What he's saying is we balance grace and law. Grace and law. They come together, right? Um, the law reveals to us our sin, first and foremost, so we can get into the three uses of the law really quick. This is very important. I did a whole video on this um back in the day. You guys can go watch that if you want to deeper dive into this, but we have three uses of the law. First and foremost, the law of God is a mirror. It reveals to us our sin so that we understand that we need a savior. That's the first thing. That's the first use of the law. The second use of the law, the law being the uh corpus of God's commands, right? We have the Old Testament law, the Torah, but then we can include all of the commands of Christ in there. Um, the second use of the law is as a shield to protect the righteous from the unrighteous, from the wicked. So whenever a society adopts the law of God and implements it throughout society, that society will experience a degree of blessing because they are submitting to the way that God made the world. All right. So um so it protects the righteous from the wicked. Whenever a civil magistrate puts to death criminals and does so publicly, especially, that's very important. Public executions really are the way it ought to be done. Uh, that is a a shield for the righteous, right? So it's more of a temporal blessing. So it's a mirror, it's a shield, and lastly, the law of God is a compass. It directs the Christian where to go, specifically in his journey of sanctification. How do I please God? It tells the Christian what pleases God and how I can bring joy to God, right? So how I can please God. And so the Christian is actually not just so the gospel-centered movement toned in on that first thing, the uh the the law being a mirror that shows you that you're a sinner in need of salvation. Yes, and amen. That's true. But they then completely went on to either be remain completely silent or reject the last two uses of the law, namely that it's a shield that should be adopted by society to protect the righteous from the wicked, right, at a civil administrative level. Or uh, thirdly, and very importantly, the law of God is uh is a compass. It directs us. We actually can please God once we are filled with the spirit, once we repent and believe we can please God. And we do so by obeying his commands. And we are filled with his spirit such that we can obey his commands, not perfectly, of course, not the sight of heaven, but you can please God. You can stop looking at porn, by the way. Get ever accountable. Link is in the description, guys. You guys need to quit looking at porn. You guys need to quit uh getting angry and shouting at your wives. You guys need to learn self-control. We can actually obey God. We go to his law once we are filled with his spirit, and the law convicts us of our sin, but then it leads us. The Spirit of God leads us through the law into righteousness. So that's very, very important. And the gospel-centered movement, what he's discussing, what happened in the evangelical church, we abandoned those last two and we did a hyper focus on that first one. So it's all about how, oh, Jesus Christ accepts you, and the law shows you that you're a sinner. And now all you have to do is just accept his grace, and that's it. Just enjoy the grace of God. And all the sermons all pointed to the gospel of grace and never any practical application, lest we become Pharisees after all. Right? If we get some practical application, well, then you're just being Pharisaical. You know, you're just the Bible's just, it's not just, it's not a rule book. Well, it is a rule book, actually. It's not just a rule book, but it is a rule book. It contains rules and laws. And so that's very important. Um, yeah, I call that actually a damnable gospel philosophy, where it's a hyper focus on the gospel of grace and it completely ignores the law. In practical terms, it ignores the law. And ultimately what that will do is that will lead you to hell. Because you think that you have experienced the gospel of grace, but if your life is not transformed, if you don't like the psalmist, like David says, Oh, how I love the law of God, how I delight in it day and night. If that's not you, you don't enjoy God's law, then you probably don't know him. Right? You probably haven't truly been changed by him. So the practical application side, the the application of the law is so so.
SPEAKER_00You get a nice one, agreeable, harmless, and entirely unequipped for the war that he was born into. Section two look at what the doctrine actually produced. Because doctrine is Never just a theory. It walks out of the building on two legs every Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_01That's exactly right. And when we look around and see the cultural decay that Christians have permitted over the last several decades, the fruit is rotten. It speaks for itself.
SPEAKER_00It produced a generation of men who confuse cowardice with peace, who won't leave their homes because leading might cause friction and might cause a night on the couch. And they were trained to fear friction above almost anything. Men who won't correct their children because correction feels mean. And mean is the one thing they were taught a Christian can never be. Who watch their own people?
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh. And that drives me bananas. I remember in this world, the gospel-centered world, they uh I listened to a whole talk about how he dues this one guy was it was like an anti-spanking talk. You don't spank your kids because look, what does that teach them about their father, God the Father? It teaches him that God pours out his wrath on you, but he doesn't. God poured out his wrath on his son, and you're like, and then if you're unequipped and untrained, you're nodding along to that, going like, oh, that's right. Yeah, if I if I spank my kids, that will teach them a lie about God, that he pours out his wrath on his children, but he doesn't. He pours out grace on them. Damnable gospel philosophy. Because see, when I say damnable gospel philosophy, I mean you've got a philosophy where you take a passage of scripture and then you extrapolate out logical, what you believe to be logical conclusions from a particular passage or an idea that uh there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Let's take uh um Romans 8. And then you extrapolate your own logic out of that passage, it gets you to what I just described. No, we cannot. We should not spank our children because that teaches us a lie about God. What except for the fact that the scriptures very, very clearly tell us the man who spares the rod hates his child. Hates his child. So you've got your damnable gospel philosophy directly contradicting the clear teaching of scripture. Not only that, but obviously we have in Hebrews and elsewhere in the New Testament the very, very clear teaching that God chastens, he disciplines those whom he loves. If you're one of his children, he disciplines you. If he's not disciplining you, you're probably not even one of his kids. So, anyway, let's keep going here. Then, what have I told you that for less than the cost of a couple drive-thru coffees, you could have premium gourmet coffee delivered straight to your door every single month. And you could even win a free riverfront getaway in the process. Well, I have good news for you. That's exactly what I'm telling you. Montana Coffee Company is a Christian-owned, veteran-owned coffee company that is committed to producing exceptional coffee without compromising their values. They are base Christian brothers, they make excellent coffee, and they are fully in support of our mission to make America Christian again. 10 out of 10 highly recommend. Their new subscription program ensures that you will never run out of the fuel you need for those early mornings of prayer, Bible study, and mindlessly scrolling through social media brain rot. I'm just kidding, you guys would never do that. I know you would never do that. Right now, the first 50 subscribers are entered to win a free weekend stay in a beautiful riverfront cabin from Riverwalk Properties in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Plus a complete Montana Coffee Bundle. Head over to Montana Coffee Company today, sign up for their subscription, and use code Reformation for 15% off your order. Dominion provides this counsel entirely for free because their purpose is to fortify the church rather than to profit from its uncertainty. They are the only distinctly reformed, full-service financial services brokerage firm in the nation, serving real Christian households with real conviction. Listeners who want their financial lives aligned with their faith and future can visit www.reform.money and schedule a free consultation today. Once again, that's www.reform.money and tell them that Joshua Haynes from Reformation Red Phill Century.
SPEAKER_00Watch their families drift and call their passivity patients. Who watch the culture disciple their kids and call their silence about it grace. Men who've been so thoroughly trained to be agreeable that they've forgotten that they were assigned to be there as head of the household. And here's the part I want to be careful with because it matters. I'm not indicting these men. They aren't the villains here. They're the casualties of this war.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean that's true. That's true. Uh it's difficult, right? Because the ones who are truly accountable before God in a very real sense are the elders and pastors who failed to disciple their people, failed to equip the saints for the work of ministry. Ephesians 4. Right. Um, but at the same time, we are all accountable before God. We need to be going to the word. We should be able to discern. Um now we have been failed in many ways by by our teachers, um, but we may we must not, we may not use that as an excuse for our passivity. We must pursue righteousness, pursue holiness. And God is patient with us, he's kind. Um, even with those leaders, those pastors. I was one of them. Like I planted a church within this whole gospel-centered milieu, and uh, and by the grace of God, he kind of woke me up to what I believe to be some pretty stupendous errors within that movement. But uh he was patient with me. He's patient with you. So we you know, we got to be patient even with our leaders. I was a lead uh uh, you know, a low-level leader, but I was a leader. I was a pastor, a church planter in that movement, and he was gracious and he was kind and he was patient with me.
SPEAKER_00So they did exactly what they were told. They showed up, they sat under the teaching, they tried to be good, and the teaching itself disarmed them for the war that they were born into. You can't blame a soldier for losing a war that he was trained to lose from the start. The failure isn't in the pews, it's in the pulpit and in the doctrines that came out of it. But understand the cost because it's huge. When the church manufactures nice men instead of righteous ones, it doesn't just weaken those men, it leaves their wives without leadership, their children without a standard, and their communities without the one thing a society of strong, godly men provides a wall against the chaos.
SPEAKER_01Amen. Let's see. What it what were those three things there? It leaves wives without leadership, children without a standard. Oh man, that's so huge. Yeah. Um my generation really, we were the children without a standard. In particular, standard of masculinity. We didn't, we didn't know what it even meant to be a man. We were told that my generation was told that if we asked the question, what does it mean to be a man? A man is nice, a man is gentle, a man is soft, a man listens, a man, you know, it's like, you just, well, first of all, you just just you definitely described a woman just now. Um, or they would say things like, you know, they would just list off the fruit of the spirit or something, you know, man knows how to love and be and and he's filled, you know, I love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. It's like you just described a Christian. That's just what a Christian is. We're asking, what does it mean to be a man and not a woman? And the leaders of my generation, or the leaders who taught my generation, either didn't know the answer, and if they did know the answer intuitively, because they inherited it from their forefathers, they didn't communicate it to us. So it has been, it has been a struggle for my generation. That's why we have all these books. That's why, you know, free shout-out for uh Chase Davis writing offensive Christianity. Um, we're we're desperate for uh Michael Foster's. It's good to be a man. These books sell so well because young men are desperate. What does it mean to be a man? Tell me. I want to know, I want to know what the word of God says. I want to know what the generations before me believed. I want to know what the church fathers have taught. What do I do? What does it mean to be a man? Yeah, and uh the church has failed, but we're picking up the pieces. I'm not black pilling. I'm excited about the next generation, right? I'm excited about the leaders that are being raised up right now. So, yeah, no black pills here.
SPEAKER_00One thing a society of strong, godly men provides a wall against the chaos. The feminized church didn't just fail men, it failed everyone that those men were supposed to cover. And that's the indictment. Not that the church was too loving, instead it was too cowardly to love men enough to call them to something hard and to something that requires effort and strength of character and a righteousness that'll cause them to dig deep and be willing to say the hard things when it matters. And if you are sitting there realizing that you might be one of those men, that you were handed this version of faith that left you disarmed, hear me clearly. This is not your fault, but it's now your responsibility. Because the man that God is calling you to be was never just the nice one. He's assigned offices that the church never told you about. I've got a full breakdown of the four offices that God gave to every man and how the modern church buried them, every single one of them. You can find that in the card right here. Go ahead and click it after you're done with this video. Stay with me though, because now we're gonna recover that the man scripture actually describes. Section three. Let's go to scripture and meet the man the church buried. Because once you actually read it, the nice guy theology falls apart in your hands. Start with Jesus, since he's the model that we're all told about. The church gave you half of him. The gentle shepherd, the one who blessed children and wept at tombs. All of that is true, but that's not the whole man. The same Jesus made a whip and drove men out of the temple. He called the religious leaders whitewashed tombs and a brood of vipers to their faces. Jesus told Peter, his own disciple, get behind me, Satan. He said he didn't come to bring peace, but a sword.
SPEAKER_01These are all the passages that honestly we need to spend many, many, many Lord's Day services dissecting and talking through. Right? Because for years, for decades at this point, we have been served up a hippie flower child Jesus that never harmed anything or anyone, that never offended, that was just nice. Nice. And we've been given the the lamb of God without the lion of Judah. But he's both. He's both.
SPEAKER_00That isn't a nice man. That's a righteous one. He's gentle with the broken, ferocious with the liars, and absolutely unwilling to trade the church for everyone's comfort. If your picture of Christ has no edge in it, you've been handed a forgery. Then look at the men that God actually used. Nehemiah didn't politely restore order among God's people. He confronted the nobles, grabbed men by their beards, and drove them to restoration. Paul withstood Peter to his face when Peter was wrong.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Nehemiah told them to rebuild the walls, right? And they were rebuilding with a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other. Right? Like men who are ready for war, men who understood that it's their job to build, but also to protect, but also to provide. We have just we've become so soft. And we haven't we've abandoned all of the hard hard edges in scripture, right? Which, you know, it makes sense when you've become a feminized, when feminism has, you know, gotten its grimy little tentacles all up into the church, it snuffs out all of the uh the hard passages, or at least in your own heart, you just kind of glaze whenever you go over them, but then whenever you're awake to it, you're alive to it, when you're red pilled on it, for lack of a better term. Then you start to see them everywhere. Then you start to realize wait a second, how did I ever even believe that Jesus was like that? Like I believed that Jesus was a weenie. Jesus, the Son of Man, calluses on his hands, whipping Pharisees out of the temple, not a weenie. Not a weenie.
SPEAKER_00Elijah stood alone against 450 prophets and mocked them. John the Baptist called out a king's sin and lost his head for it. These are the heroes of your faith. Not one of them was nice, every one of them was righteous, and most of them were dangerous to the comfortable lies of their day. So here's the standard, and here's the part that keeps it from going wrong. The answer to the nice guy is not the harsh guy. We don't trade a soft idol for an angry one. The man that Scripture describes isn't ruled by his temper any more than he's ruled by his fear. Self-mastery comes first. The biblical man is strength under God's authority.
SPEAKER_01He's gentle because he's strong strength under God's authority. There's a lot of good little, if they're not one one-liners, little taglines that he's got in here. Very, very appreciate very much appreciate that. Take that to the bank. Some of those things you just need to incorporate into if you're a journaler, you're a note taker, or you just like put those in your brain, man. Those are good.
SPEAKER_00He's strong enough to be. He's fierce because the truth is worth defending. He confronts when righteousness demands it and serves when love requires it. And he answers for both. Not to the room, not to the people whose approval he used to chase, but to God. That's the whole key. The nice guy lives for the approval of people. The righteous man lives for the approval of God. And that one vertical shift is what sets him free to finally tell the truth, lead his home, and stop apologizing for being a man.
SPEAKER_01So in other words, fear God and not man. If you guys want some further reading on this, I highly recommend Um John Bunyan's Fear of God. Oh my goodness, that is an that is an excellent read. Every young man should read that book.
SPEAKER_00It wasn't. It was a doctrine of cowardice in a costume of virtue, and it failed you, and it failed everyone who's counting on you to be something more than agreeable. You don't owe that version of faith your loyalty. You owe it your exit. Because God never called you to be nice. He called you to be righteous. And those roads run in completely different directions the moment that things get hard. Righteousness will cost you the easy piece. It'll make you tell the truth that gets you disliked. It'll make you lead the home that's easier to neglect. It'll get you to confront the thing that's more comfortable to ignore. The nice guy avoids all of that and calls his avoidance grace. But the righteous man walks straight into it because he answers to God, not to the room. So stop asking whether you're being nice enough. Start asking if you're being righteous enough. Whether you're gentle where Christ was gentle and fierce where Christ was fierce, whether you're leading the people God put under your care, or just keeping them comfortable on the way to nowhere. Recover the man that the church buried. He's still in there. God's been calling him out the whole time. The pulpit told you to sit down and be agreeable. God is telling you to stand up and be dangerous to every lie that's been costing you, your family. Be gentle, be humble, but never again confuse those with being harmless. Be righteous, not nice.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, be righteous, not nice. That's good. I one of the charges that gets hurled at me quite often is that I'm mean. But what I like to throw back is, okay, am I unrighteous? Okay, you say that I'm mean. Well, I reject that phrase, mean. What does that even mean? If if you think I'm mean, then you also think Jesus was mean. You also think that Elijah was mean. You also think that Ezekiel was mean. You think that Paul was mean whenever he told the uh Judaizers to cut their things off, right? So if that's mean, then yeah, I need to be mean. I'm supposed to be mean. All of the biblical witness, all of the biblical authors were mean, according to most people's definition. I'm not called to be nice. We're not called to be nice. So I get I get that accusation hurled at me, but the go-to, my go-to response outside of what I just said, is to go to the story of the woman caught in adultery. That is an example of the kindness, the grace, the gentleness of our Lord, right? He's very gentle with her. He doesn't have to be, right? She was caught in adultery. Right. Now, uh side note, that was a that was a uh kangaroo court. The reason why she wasn't given the death penalty, as she should have been, according to the law. But the law of God, the law of Moses, also require requires certain procedures and due process. And if she was caught in the act of adultery, hmm, there's somebody missing from that scenario, isn't there? Right? You bring two people if they're caught in the act of adultery, right? So it was uh it was a kangaroo court. Jesus um wasn't going to fall into the Pharisees' trap, and he didn't. Um so that's just a side note. He wasn't uh he wasn't uh eradicating the need for the death penalty, right? Death penalty is Old Testament and New Testament, Romans 13. Uh he but he was demonstrating as the the Son of God that he has the authority to pardon sins and to be gentle with sinners, even sinners caught in their sin. So whenever there's someone who is repentant, someone who is broken, you as a Christian should not be cruel or harsh. You should be like Jesus, be gentle with that person if they are repentant. But whenever you encounter people who are self-righteous, who are prophets of their demonic gay race, commie religion leading people astray, just like the Pharisees did, you should treat them like Jesus treated the Pharisees. You should be sharp, you should be harsh at times, not always, sometimes, like in the case of Nicodemus, Pharisee, comes to Jesus, Jesus reasons with them. He's not super harsh, but then there's other ones, whenever he discerns that their motives are sour, he just goes straight for them, doesn't he? You brood of vipers. Anyway. Um, yeah, so we need to have some range. The Bible has range in how Christian, the Christian man, the follower of Christ, ought to interact with sinners. Sometimes it's gentle, sometimes it's sharp and harsh, sometimes it's even mocking and biting, right? Elijah with the prophets of Baal. Jesus made fun of the Pharisees' phylacteries. He made fun of their clothes and the way that they pray. All right. So there's a place for that too.
SPEAKER_00Now make sure to take a look at this video right here. Fatherhood isn't about being a friend. And watch exactly what nice guy theology did to a generation of dads and what the Bible actually demands instead to reinforce these lessons and to build a better life for you and your family. The Forge is ready. Let's get to work.
SPEAKER_01Very good. Heroes Forge. Good stuff, guy. Good stuff. Um, well, you guys should go check out that channel, go sub to them. Go subscribe. It's good stuff. I've seen probably three or four videos. I've been impressed with uh the research, and uh one of them on feminism was really, really good. Um, that's that. Niceness is not what you're called to. We are called to be righteous. Reject niceness, embrace righteousness. We need young men who are ready to confront evil and to do it in the same terms that the scriptures do. Right? I mean, sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh, sometimes kind, sometimes biting. And it takes wisdom and discernment to know how to wield the truth, the sword of the spirit, in a given scenario. But it takes practice. You're not gonna get good unless you practice. So you gotta practice. You should be a man under authority. Like I said, I'm a man under authority. I ask for my pastor's advice and counsel and um oversight. I invite that. I invite you to do that as well. We are men under authority, Hebrews 12. We are to submit to the authority of our elders, and they are going to give an account to God for watching over our soul, our souls. So it's very important that you understand that you are a man under authority as you seek to understand how to stop being so nice, but also don't fall into the other ditch of being a jerk for no reason, right? So, ditches on both sides of the roads, guys. And with that, uh, I hope that this video is a blessing to you guys. And uh guys, we've got lots of cool stuff coming up. All right, you need to join my book club. This is the what we're going through. Sorry, I'm still sick. We're going through Reformed Christian politics, Stephen Wolfe's book, and Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan. It's been excellent, very good. Uh, we talk theology politics, we have lots of fun back there. Join the Discord, join the club. And guys, exciting news. I may be coming to a campus near you. I'm doing a campus tour with TPUSA. Really, really exciting stuff. I've been very impressed with their organization. Uh, Charlie Kirk was very clearly incorporating his Christian faith into his politics and into this organization that he built. And I'm honored to step into that and to help be a part of that, be a part of that, because I do believe that Christless conservatism is the enemy. And they are giving me a seat at the table, as it were, bringing me into the campus tour. And I've been very impressed with their leadership. I'm very excited to uh be partnering with them, guys. So you guys can pray for me, pray that God would use me and uh my voice and that I would honor him in all that I do. And so, and that includes obviously all the campus tour stuff. So, guys, that's that. Thanks for tuning in. If you're still listening, obviously, you're an OG. You're one of the real ones. All right, now that's all I got. Get out there and build, defend, and expand the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.