Early Church History Shows Why Truth Still Matters Today w/ Paul Pavao

We explore what the first Christians actually believed and practiced, and why their unity, holiness, and courage still confront modern Christianity. Paul connects early church history to the living work of Jesus today, arguing that rooted faith becomes real when it turns into love, community, and restored lives. 
• Paul’s path from lapsed Catholic to being “distracted by Jesus” in the Gospels 
• how denomination conflict sparked a search for the undivided early church 
• early Christian community as true family that shares support and resources 
• the legalism misconception and why early believers used the Old Testament deeply 
• persecution and martyr stories that test modern assumptions about comfort and courage 
• what “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” looks like in daily life 
• holiness, conscience, and final judgment as a central early church motivator 
• why miracles feel rare in a culture shaped by low expectation and unbelief 
• seeking the Holy Spirit as an ongoing command and practice 
• modern healing accounts and how to stay open to Jesus’ intervention 
• bringing theology down to love by restoring those who fall away 
If this conversation stretched your thinking a little bit, share it with someone else that might need it.

Transcript

Welcome And Big Questions

SPEAKER_02 0:24

It's good to have you back. I'm your host, Nate Shear, and this is Mind Force, the podcast sponsored by the three L's Love, Life, and Learning. Today's conversation sits at the intersection of history, belief, and shared experience. We're exploring early Christian history and what the first followers of Jesus actually believed they practiced. We're talking about the faith once for all delivered to the saints and why preserving truth still matters today. And we'll be diving into the miraculous, ongoing, unpredictable, and transforming ways Jesus continues to intervene in our current and human lives. Before we jump in, I want to give you a moment to say hello, Paul. Yeah, hello. For those of us meeting you for the first time, who are you?

Denominations Spark A Search For Unity

SPEAKER_00 1:15

I'm just a guy. I in 65, we get to reach that mark this summer. Excited about it, start my senior life. I have I'm a grandfather of five children, father of six children. Still married for 38 years. And yeah, my whole uh purpose and I guess really until like it's what my life's been about for most of my Christian life, about forty years. I got saved in a vr in a town that was very active. I and I was I was raised Catholic. So I gave up on it in my teens. Then a series of circumstances led me back to the Gospels around, you know, actually when I was getting in the military. I was twenty one years old and I started reading the gospels and was I was reading them in order to show contradictions in the gospels to my boss who was trying to evangelize me. And I just got distracted by Jesus. I was I was looking for the sweet Jesus that I heard people talking about when they tried to witness to me, and I found this amazing, often not sweet man who had answers for everything, who lived with twelve guys for three years, and at the end of three years they were willing to die to that and say that he was the son of God. I thought, you know, if you lived with me for three hours or maybe even three minutes, you would be certain that I am not the son of God. So I was so impressed by that. And when I finally was willing to go, you know what, Jesus is the son of God, he's just changing. I mean, instantaneously on the spot, the grass was greener, light was lighter around me, all of that. And I got real excited about joining a branch of Christianity that actually cared about the Bible. So I dove right into it and found Christians fighting with one another over what it says, really being quite unreasonable about the whole thing, throwing verses at one another as though the Bible contradicted itself, and whoever had the most verses on one side, then the contradictory verses were wrong, and these correct verses were right. And I was like, this is crazy. And then of all things, nine months later, the military sends me on a remote assignment in Alaska. So there's only like 300 people up here, well, military people. So I grab all the young, excited Christians like myself, I get them together, let's do Bible studies, let's go in the Eskimo village, let's hand out tracts, let's do all of this. And six weeks later, because they were all from differing backgrounds, they had just broke up. Some of them wouldn't talk to each other. And I just went, This is this is insane. Sat down and went, surely there was a time when Christians, when there wasn't a thousand denominations, when Christians were together. And that started a search for me. I I was like, I gotta know what Christians believed when they when they weren't fighting with each other. And I just sat down in a pursuit of that.

Why A Book Can Clarify A Message

SPEAKER_02 4:47

That's awesome. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of Forrest Frank, his, I think it's grandpa, Neil Frank. He has the clip where he was on doing evangelizing and whatnot, and he was taking the kids to church, and someone stopped him and said, Why do you drop your kids off at church? Like, well, we we believe they should grow up that way. He's like, Well, why don't you come? And so he went home and he dove into the Bible, and he says that he dove into the Bible to make it so that he could prove God was not real so that he could go to the golf course and not have his conscience bother him. And then later on developed, he's like, Oh yeah. And, you know, the word opened up, the Holy Spirit fell on him, and then he was able to read things. He says, the someone messed with his book, is what he says. The book was different and it it connected with him and things like that. And another thing it reminds me of is Forrest Frank himself. He was talking on social media on how he gets attacked more by Christians. Oh, your music, I don't like this, I don't like that. He's like, I don't get really attacked by the world, surprisingly. I get attacked a lot more by our own people. So that was kind of interesting. I never really thought of it that way, but he gets a lot, I guess, bad messages and a lot of hate from people that were supposed to be in the family of Christ. That's kind of interesting. Well, Paul, what are you focused on right now?

SPEAKER_00 6:08

She played this game at Christmas time with my family, you know, three things you would like to do this next year, you know, bundle them up on a piece of paper, and we're gonna just randomly throw two in the fire, and the other one is uh so mine was uh write a book this year. So yeah, and I was I thought, you know, yeah, I I can do that. I actually have uh a very young friend nagging me to write a fiction book, but I really want to write just a more careful book on the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

That's awesome. Yeah, I've always wanted to write a book, and then I realize I talk more than I write, so kind of started the podcast, but we'll see. At some point, I thought it'd be really fun to do advice from the first 100 episodes. So I'm coming up on that now. This might actually be the 100th. I don't know. I'd have to look, but I think it'd be really cool to go through and pull all the common themes and threads through the 100 and see kind of there's been a lot on helping each other and meditation and breathing and devotions. And there's been quite a few where it's interesting, completely different walks of life from different people, and you still see probably five different trends. I mean, there's been a whole bunch of different stuff, but it's interesting that there are some that just show up time and time again. Like being quiet and connecting with the Lord is like comes up over and over. Even if they're not religious, they still will say, you know, being quiet and finding some connection to like a higher power. So they're always right there, even if they're particularly religious, which is really confirming and knows that there's something deep down inside of us that that's something that we need. Well, Paul, before we get too far, I'd like to flip the mic and have you ask me a question.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Okay, so I do have a quick question for you, but I want to make a comment on what you just said. One benefit for a podcast of writing a book is that it condenses the podcasts into what you want to get across. So I heard something about Michael Heiser, and then I went to see some of his podcasts, and he had so many podcasts, and so many that overlap on the same subject. I just didn't know what to look for. So I bought his book in order to condense this podcast. So I suspect you'll have people doing that too.

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Yeah, that'll be awesome. Yeah, it's interesting. You have, oh, fitness, and even though you have fitness multiple times, sometimes they're the same, and other times they have different spins. But yeah, it would be really interesting to see how how much it expands from there.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

So, my question that I and this is would be interesting to me. What unattainable person, a person you can't get on your podcast, would you most want on your podcast and what?

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Oh, who would be my number one guest? Oh. Yeah. I don't know. That's a good, good question. I think I'd have to go back, and it sounds kind of cheesy because I just mentioned it, but I did reach out to Forrest Frank speaking of him. He just seems like such a young guy that's just on fire for the Lord, and it'd be so interesting because I saw a couple different interviews, and like I said, people want to say bad stuff, but everyone I've ever seen, they talk about how genuine, how nice, and just how lovable. It's like hard to, even though people have been kind of throwing stuff his way, he's just a, I guess, an amazing human, and it'd be awesome to talk through like his experience and how he shifted music and how he's kind of rising in the space right now. So I think that would be awesome to go through. Or someone in like comedy, I think it'd be really fun. There's a couple different people that do comedy. I'm trying to think of the guy. He came through, he came on a virtual thing to our church. I can't think of what his name is, but he's hilarious. And he does really good, uh, clean Christian comedy. And uh he'd be hilarious just to sit and kind of talk through some stuff. But yeah, I think something like that would be would be really amazing.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yeah, that's great. I think comedians make uh good guests.

How The Early Church Lived As Family

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Yeah, they already know how to talk about it. Yeah, that would be fun. Well, Paul, your first pillar is early Christian history. So the first question is when you study the early church, what surprises people the most about how those first believers lived?

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Well, if I had to choose something, because there were several things. I would choose just how family that that the church was. So we read about in Acts chapter two, they're sharing everything, and you know, and w we feel like it ended there, but it didn't. So there's a couple of quotes, I don't have them just up on my screen. I did call up once for a different subject, but around 150, Justin Martyr talks about what it means to be a Christian, and one of the things it says that we who formerly hated each other now share the same heart. And just the whole talk of it, they're you know, they're leaving Roman society, not in a sense of boxing Roman society out, but they're entering a family that's so together that they share everything. Curtin, who's 50 years later, so this is 200 AD, 150 years after Paul is writing to the Galatians, and he says he's writing an apology to the emperor, and he's saying this is what Christians are like. Yeah, he said that they we share everything except our wives. And so, you know, it's kind of a common theme as you read the second century writings that they're just so together that they share everything. And I feel like in the end, the the what we should get from that, there's a level of support for living the Christian life, for living a holy life that they had that we don't have.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

Yeah, I definitely agree. It's interesting going back to the themes of the podcast. I've been asked about that a couple of times, and there's one that I think that runs through all of them. It'd be hard, like you said, to narrow it down to one. But I think if I had to, it'd be one that's something about being social. There's something about helping others, being in community. There's certain things where you can't do things on on on your on your own. And so I think that's an important thing. And it's interesting that we're more connected, quote unquote, than we've ever been, but we're more disconnected. We have the internet and we can FaceTime and do all these things, but people feel more alone than they ever have. And I think back to your point, we used to eat dinner together, or you know, the neighborhood would all empty out, and we used to live in social environments where somebody would farm one thing and bring the animal from another house, and you kind of had to rely on each other. And the more independent we've got, which is good to a certain extent, but I guess there's always pros with cons. Being more independent, I think, has kind of driven us apart. It was kind of nice in a certain aspect to have to rely on one another.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Yeah, I've read some studies about, you know, what being social does for your immune system. Just down at the basic level, you're gonna get sick less if you spend time with people, despite the fact that they're probably communicating germs to you. So I'm no expert on that, but I did read those sources.

Legalism Accusations And Old Testament Use

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Yeah, that's interesting. You're coming in contact with people more often, and you still get sick less often. That's that's pretty powerful. I'm curious. So that's something that might surprise people, but I love like myths or misconceptions. What do you think is like maybe one of the big misconceptions on early Christians?

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Well, I know the one that gets said to me the most, you know, that they're legalists. And, you know, they that it's like the apostles who died in the church immediately fell away into legalism. And so that's the biggest myth, I think. And but it's based on something, and it's something that it to me is the biggest difference between what the United Church believed and what most of us believe today, which has to do with the final judgment.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

Do you think that's a old covenant versus new covenant type thing, kind of blurring the lines? I've seen a lot of things where people won't eat pork or do things where they're, you know, kind of pulling on the old testament versus the new. Do you see a lot of confusion there?

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Really, I'm the issue is the New Testament was really new to the early church. So the earliest right well, the earliest certainly dated writing that we have is a letter from Rome to Corinth. And it it just threw out. Is not the guy who wrote it was Clement, and there's lots of arguments over what his role was in the in the Roman church, of course, the Catholics versus the Protestants. But it it it is packed with Old Testament scripture. You I mean, just about every story in the Bible is thrown in there because Corinth had returned to division in their midst. You know, Rome was writing them a letter going, What what are you doing? You've removed a couple of people from being an elder, and it's just what you're doing isn't right. And what's worse is Paul already wrote you about this. You guys were famous for your repentance and your you know, kindness, hospitality, all of this for a long time, and now you've returned to this. And you know, that's the letter that's sent. But the point is, it's packed with Old Testament scripture and a few references to the gospels, especially. But yeah, their Bible was still largely, at least at the end of the first century, it was still largely the Old Testament was their Bible, but they had a much deeper understanding of it. So having read those early Christians, I feel like when you know I read about the first time I've ever read about Jesus walking on the road to Emmaus with those disciples and explaining the scriptures and how they refer to him, I was like, Oh my gosh, I would pay anything to have been on that journey. And uh like now I feel like I think in Mountings years, they use the Old Testament so much.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Yeah, that makes sense. We're going through at church a series of seven like difficult things throughout the Bible. And one thing I like that he said is the Bible is written for you, but not necessarily to you. And so it's written to, you know, people 2,000 years ago. And so I think that helps in a lot of cases where there's cultural things or things that like we can't really wrap our head around. And there will be some things that we'll never wrap our head around just because we won't be able to understand. But I think looking through that lens is always important. Like it's not current day. We have rules and laws and things that have progressed for 2,500 years, so it doesn't make sense right now. So for us, absolutely, but not necessarily to us.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Yeah, that's important.

Persecution Stories That Reframe Faith

SPEAKER_02 17:58

Absolutely. Well, Paul, I love stories. I think that's the best way we uh, you know, understand all the way back to cave drawings and things like that. Can you share a historical moment that still challenges how we think about faith in this modern world?

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Um a story. The stories I most love from the early churches are their stories of persecution. And while it's not true that Rome was constantly always persecuting the Christians, if anything came up, then you know, some official got angry. You know, there just seemed to be a wave of persecution, and they were all prepared for it. And so some of my well, my favorite story probably comes from the Christians in Gaul. So that's modern France, and those are barbarians. They're, you know, basically foreigners to the empire, you know. I think even way back Julius Caesar Caesar conquered that area, but they were still they're the barbarians or the barbarian tribes out there. And there was a missionary who was out there, he came all the way from Smyrna in modern Turkey, all the way to France, and he has a five-volume book on Christianity written in the late second century. It is hard to get through, especially the first two books where he's talking about the beliefs of the Gnostics, because he goes so in depth into all of that because he was concerned that the Roman church was going to be influenced by the Gnostics. But anyway, he got over there, and there's one of the big biggest stories there was at one point the emperor or whoever was in charge there in Gaul did a massive persecution of the churches there. And the stories of the things that happened, some people were just killed, but other people were like miraculously preserved. They laid some guy on a hop plate the whole entire day, and you know, God just miraculously preserved him, and then others died, and yeah, the so it it led to some quotes that I really love. So there's one that says, you know, God loves it when a Christian triumphs over pain. I'm trying to remember enough of the wording to paraphrase it, Collecte. You're in a war with pain, and you stand up, you defend Christ, and you triumph over the very one who's trying to pronounce sentence on you, but you pronounce the sentence of God upon him, and over and over, and so one other famous story is the martyrdom of Polycarp. So Polycarp was a bishop of Smyrna. Smyrna is one of the churches that was written to by Jesus in Revelation chapter two, and he has only praise for the church in Smyrna. There's only two churches that got all praised. Smyrna was one of them, and he was the bishop of Smyrna, and he was like 86 years old when he was captured and brought to the arena and put to death. And the story talks about people, you know, they're expecting this gallant young leader, and they got this 86-year-old man who has to have help putting his sandals on. And the guy who took him in the park, whatever they brought him to the Roman for to the yeah, the Roman Forum with. He's going, Wait, we're not wanting to kill old men, you know, just you know, repent of this thing of yours, you know, give us a chance to just let you go. And he goes, repent of doing good? Why would I repent of doing good? We repent of doing evil. I don't know what you're talking about. And then he got in front of the museum. The judge is, you know, trying to be nice to him. His answers were so sharp. You know, you're the one on trial, not me. And it it got uh the judge so angry that he kind of was like, Just turn this guy off, we're gonna burn him. The word used there as uh they bought branches and stuff and threw it on the uh and they set up a pole and they lit them on fire and the fire blew out, and then it had to light it again and it wasn't burning him, and then they finally had a spear in the just the greatest stories, and then then you hear the quotes about you know, it's our battles against death and pain that most fully show that this can't be done without the power of God, that the power of God is with the Christians, because you know, you brag about your your great warriors who were injured in battle, but even our women and children go through your persecutions and martyrdoms without a cry at all. And he goes, Yeah, surely you know that can't be done except by the power of God. So those are the stories I've always loved the most.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

Yeah, those are some really powerful ones. Me and my wife runs children's church for the older kids or older of the younger. And this week we went over the three men in the fire and how God like uses difficult times to use it for good. So it's interesting. Nebuchadnezzar then all of a sudden is like, oh shoot, I need to, you know, worship God because there's no way three guys could be in there, and then obviously sees the fourth being the God in there. But yeah, just an interesting story where something's supposed to be painful and terrible, and the three guys sit in there just fine, and they walk out, and then the king's like, that's crazy. I guess you have the the more powerful God. So I'll jump on that. So kind of interesting how used uh difficult things to get on the right the right track. Well, Paul, your second pillar I can jump forward just real quick.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Oh, yeah. There's a story in in during the Reformation. Baptists and the Anabaptists were persecuted by both the Protestants and the Catholics. But there's a fellow named Dirk Williams who was being paced by a Catholic tariff up in the Netherlands, and he escaped across a frozen pond of water because the sheriff, that was well, maybe it wasn't the sheriff, but whoever was chasing, crashed through the ice. And he stopped, went back, saved the person who crashed through the ice, and they still the the person still brought him to town, and he was still put to death for being an Anabaptist. It's one of that Anabaptist's most famous stories. Yeah. Jeez.

Faith Once Delivered In Daily Life

SPEAKER_02 25:03

Even when you do the right thing, you still lose sometimes. But luckily we're on the right side of the Lord. So well, Paul, your second pillar is the faith once delivered. So for a foundation, if you could help us, what does the faith once for all delivered to the saints actually mean in practical terms?

SPEAKER_00 25:22

I think for the early Christians, I like to send people to 2 Peter chapter 1, and there's a description of the faith. So the biggest place where it's different is they clearly held themselves to a higher standard than Americans hold themselves to. And I think, you know, I I actually heard from some missionaries that sometimes the the persecuted churches in China, that was specifically the country that I heard it from, uh were just stunned, shocked, even laughing at some of the things that you know American Christians considered appropriate to and I don't know what exactly it was with them, but I knew I know with the early Christians you know maybe a great example would be in 19 in the 1980s, the Christian History Institute made a series of videos called The Testimony of the Early Church. And in one of them, they covered the story of a debate. The debate may or may not have happened, or it may have just been a book written by one of the second century Christians. But in the debate, the Roman says, You guys think you're better than everybody else. And the video this was before I I read the debate myself before I even had read any of the early Christian writers. The Christian answers with, We're not better than you. We're just forgiven. Every Sunday morning we you know we crossed, the wine, it's a reminder to us that you know it's not us who gets ourselves into heaven, it's you know Jesus and his forgiveness who gets us into heaven. We don't claim to be better than you. But the real answer that was actually written in the second series. I was so shocked when I found it. Because who who can't tell that we're better than you? We're you guys you don't you commit adultery left and right. We're men only for our own lives. You you know, you the things that you do, you hope men don't cost you done. We're scared even of our own conscience. If you go to the jail, you're not gonna find any Christians there unless they're in the jail because they're a Christian or because they become a traitor to the faith. That was his answer. It's like yeah, we're yes, we're better than you. And that sounds terrible. I've always asked Monica, did Jesus change you enough that you can say you're better than who you used to be? Then why do you not just expect Christians to have better and more virtuous lives than those who are in the world? Why wouldn't we say the same thing? I live a much better and a much more virtuous life with a lot more love and a lot less temper than the life I lived before I was a Christian. Anyway, that's my defense of what he said.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

Yeah, that totally makes sense. That's interesting. It may remind me of one of my favorite poems, is by Maya Angelou. I'm a Christian is the name of it. But the last, it's long, I wouldn't read it all. But the last part says, when I say I'm a Christian, I'm not saying I'm holier than you. I'm just a simple sinner who received God's grace somehow. That was always super powerful to me because I think that is a common thing. I don't know where that sums from, where it's always like, You think you're better than us and things like that. To your point, I think we are better than we were before. But the simple part of it is love. I mean, we should be falling back onto the two most basic rules, love, love God and love your neighbor. And so sometimes I think we drive division and drive people apart when we really should be trying to get people closer together than drive people away. Like you said earlier, legalistic, it's not a set of rules or a checklist, it's a relationship with Jesus, and that's what we should be focused on. Well, I'm curious, Paul.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay, well, I was just gonna say, you know, the thing is in how you talk, you know. The answer to do you think you're holier than us is yes. It works in the second century. They were that's one of the things. Uh the way the ancient people tell us one another was appalling. To me, it's an American. But in America, I realize I'm an American. If you know, answering yes to that question, do you think I would not believe that it would say if I tell you that in general Christians don't live lives better than the world, I'm telling you that Jesus has no power. That's how I would answer. I would go, Jesus has the power to make you be what you're hoping you could be. I know you don't, you know, want to be, you know, for people that are alcoholics, they don't want to be alcoholics, they want to quit. They might even want to still drink, but you know, that's not gonna work. But in the end, I want people to know that Jesus is gonna change them into something they're going to become more and more a proud of. And while we're not supposed to be boasting about ourselves, Paul does talk in Romans 6, he goes, What did you have in your old way of life? You had shame. Jesus can get you out of that shame, make you a servant of God, and cause you to walk in a way that makes you go, Yes, I'm I'm happy for the life that I'm living because Jesus helps me to live life every day. This is what we're offering. We're not offering the powerless Jesus, we're offering the real Jesus who created everything. He's the best helper you could possibly have.

Judgment And The Call To Holiness

SPEAKER_02 31:19

Yeah, I think that's a good reminder too, because I think a lot of times people are like, well, how come you know you don't got it all together? How come you're not perfect? How come you cut me off in traffic? How come you know you were rude to me or whatever? And yeah, we're not perfect. We're human, we're fallen. That's the whole point. We need God to fill that void. But I think that is one common misconception between believers and non-believers or pre-believers, as I heard on I think a previous episode, they're just not believers. Yeah, we just got to get them there. And so, yeah, I think that's interesting. It's good to empower God because that's what he can do. And I think that's a perfect segue for your last pillar, which is the living miraculous Christ. Like we believe that everyone, you know, needs God and can do miraculous things. We read about the stories in the Bible. And another thing I've heard pretty commonly, and I'm sure you probably heard is as well, is how come we don't see miracles? How come we don't see the parting of the Red Sea or, you know, the flood or these different things? And so, first question in this section is you emphasize that Jesus is still actively interviewing, intervening in human lives. What does that look like today?

Why Miracles Feel Rare Today

SPEAKER_00 32:29

So, first I want to answer that question because I think the answer to that question of you know, why don't you see miracles is easy. We're a massive um of unbelief in America. We love science. I love science. I'm don't get that wrong. I'm I love science. I get really mad when people say scientists are you know all inspiring love science. But that said, we rely so much on we figured out this, that, the other thing. And R3, I think it's R3, Jesus goes to his hometown and he can't do marriage. Jesus can't do many miracles there because of their unbelief. He just healed a few sick people. That is a terrific description of what's going on in America, and I feel like it's a pretty accurate description of our mindsets. We don't have much belief, we don't expect, and when we do, then we try to turn all of Christianity. I I got into the charismatic movement quite early in my Christian life, and uh pretending to be crazy. I like said, you know, and like I I wrote to you, I love the seeing the power of God in our lives, but we've got to actively be seeking God. We gotta actively, you know, it doesn't say, you know, in Ephesians 5, Paul says, be filled with the Holy Spirit. That's a command. It's not, you know, you are filled with the Holy Spirit. No, be filled with the Spirit. You might have been filled with the Spirit yesterday, but be filled with the Spirit today, be filled with the Spirit tomorrow, and live a spiritual life, and you'll start seeing enough interaction in your life to feed the faith that results in seeing more and more power. Gather people who really believe around you, and then you'll really see some amazing power. And we have seen that over and over in the revivals that are talked about in the US. I think my favorite is you know, the there was a revival going on, but basically kinds of signs, wonders, and also weird stuff that you know I read books about people who tried to investigate what was going on in those camptown revivals. But I that Kentucky revival is just people falling on their face and repenting and crying to God, just you know, boom like that. And then the other one was the late 18 year old hundreds revivals with many other people. Those are the ones I know best for the worst. You know, people would get converted. I one guy wrote that he was riding in a town on his mule, and he ended up having to get off of it. He was so convicted, and then he fell on his knees, and there was no preaching, no anything else. It was just the the town converted to Christ, and there was just a spirit of conviction, even as you approach the town, and that's okay, but Jesus said about the Holy Spirit he will convict you of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Yeah, I that's really interesting. It reminded me of a previous episode, a couple episodes ago, I had Benjamin Long, I think was his name. He was looking at researching sleep per uh biblical practices. And one thing I never really thought of, which is always so cool when you like read the Bible and everyone kind of interprets or sees things in a different view that I never would have. But he was talking about Moses and the burning bush. And he was like saying in order for him to even acknowledge it, he had to stop and notice that the bush was not burning because he could have walked right by. And so it's kind of comical, maybe not funny in the normal sense. But I think right now, the way that we're connected to our smartphones and always so busy and whatnot, I would almost envision if there was a burning bush, we'd probably walk right by it. We're probably looking down into our phone and would probably walk right by it. So we say there isn't things happening when they're probably happening all the time. And it's like, but you don't notice, like you said, having that glee or that connection and it's just not quite there. We wanted either some giant thing that's too big, or we're just gonna miss the thing that's right beside us as we're walking around.

Healing Stories From Cancer To Leukemia

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Yeah, yeah. So I had leukemia, I got leukemia on S50, and right at the start of it, I really felt like God told me, You're not gonna die, but I want you to go through this whole thing. I want you to do the the whole thing. And so when people said, I'm gonna, you know, can I I I'm gonna pray that God heals you, and I was well, you can pray all you want, but that's not his plan. But on the other hand, yeah, about years later, there was a good friend of my son's who actually lived in our hospital a while when he was 18 just because he wanted to. And when he reached 30, he got colon cancer. They were very concerned about the colon cancer because it was so close to the end of his intestines that they might not be able to just fix it, that they might have to give him a philosophy back. So we got the men's group at our church together to pray for him. We put him out in the middle, sat him on a chair, and uh people started to get up to go pray. It's like, no, no, no, okay, we're gonna do it different this time, okay? None of you get up to actually believe that God can heal this guy. Don't pray for him until you're praying for his healing, expecting him to be healed. And slowly, bit by bit, men came up, we prayed. Surgery was the next morning, he'd already been in that week to mark the spot. I don't know how they do that with c colon cancer. I do know how they do that with other cancers because I've had my body marked. But anyway, that's what his dad said, you know, earlier in the week. Yeah, they went in and marked at surgeries this day. And so we prayed that night and the surgeon went in the next morning. There's nothing. It just didn't do anything. It was just gone. So, you know, I've got to experience both of just I don't think God wants to heal leukemia. I think he wants me to go through it and get whatever I'm supposed to get out of it. And for a young man with a definite diagnosed MART cancer, and have the surgeon go and go, no, the cancer's not there anymore, after it was just looked at three days earlier. So, you know, God does do amazing things in our midst, and it might not look like the Pentecostals and charismatics describe, and it might. But in the end, you know, God is powerful. He made the universe. We all believe that. How could we possibly believe he's not still working in people's lives?

SPEAKER_02 39:53

Yeah, it's kind of wild to me. Like back to your point about science, it always confuses me where it's like, oh, if you believe God, then you don't believe in science, and it always just drives me nuts because you look at million data points and DNA, and then you're gonna tell me there's no intelligent being that went and created us and you know, weaved all that together. Or, you know, if you look at Frank Turok or some of the other people that talk about, you know, the access at which the earth sits on and the temperature of the earth and the amount of oxygen and all the things that had to come together made by God so that we could exist and not fly off the earth or burst into flames or choke because we have no oxygen or you know, all these different things. You're gonna tell me that not all that was put together by an intelligent being that's just crazy to me. Like they go hand in hand to me. I've been stationed in in Guam and Japan and different places and scuba diving or skydiving and seeing like the beauty of this earth just reaffirms it for me. But other people want to try to drive them apart, which is really bizarre to me. But I think if I had to adjust my answer from earlier, I would love to have Josh Howerton on, the guy from Lake Point, or even Wesley Huff reminded me of him because you were talking about that. Wes Huff is awesome from Canada, but he had a diagnosis where he's supposed to be paralyzed for the rest of his life. And it was cute onset, really fast. Forget how old he was. I think he was like in his teens and he wasn't supposed to walk again. And, you know, then it all cleared up and went away. And so, yeah, to your point, just bizarre. We say things aren't happening, it's not really miraculous. Like, no, it's it's right there. It's you have something completely disappear, and there's so many stories. I mean, you could go to any church, I'm sure, and just start logging a hundred different miracles, all you know, ranging across the spectrum, but they're happening all the time. Like things don't just magically disappear on their own. So it's a really good reminder of all those things that are going on. But Paul, I'd like to try to tie it all together. I love the three pillars, but I love to try to pull it all together. So you had your three pillars. Uh, let's see if we can pull it all together. How does grounding faith in history while staying open to the living work of Jesus create a Christianity that is both rooted and alive?

Rooted Faith That Restores The Fallen

SPEAKER_00 42:09

I think the stories help keep it rooted. You know, the especially it's you know, I focus on early church history because I'm really trying to find out what the faith is that was once delivered to the saints, but in all of history, so one big historically important thing for me is George Whitfield and John Wesley. Okay, so I think Calvinism's bizarre. I completely disagree with it. I'm not gonna spend any time arguing that, uh obviously on your program, and you wouldn't want that. But the point is there's George Whitfield, as Calvinist as Calvinists could be, and John Wesley, as anti-Calvinist as Calvin as you can be. You know, as a matter of fact, they they were gotten a feud because they kind of agreed not to argue publicly because John Wesley made it public. But the fruit of their ministry of George Whitfield and John Wesley are are legendary. Just their effectiveness, the power of God that are coming in, both of them had to tell people not to climb up in trees to see because you're gonna pass, you're gonna, you know, the power of God's gonna come down, you're gonna fall out of the tree. Both of them had to tell people that. And you know, it's like God's God's not going, well, you know, I think he ought to. You're a Calvinist, so I can't do anything with you. He He doesn't do that. He goes, He goes, Do you love me? Are you gonna give up everything for me? Are you gonna put me first in your life? Because if you do, you're gonna see me do all the things that I want to do through you. And if you don't, that's the real problem. So I'm hearing I'm learning the early Christian faith, I get theology out of it. And I do want to draw the one big thing that I that I think is different than the modern day. Okay, we don't think Christians will face a judgment that might condemn us and send us to hell, even though like the judgment of the sheep and Goat suggests otherwise, and I could make a big case to defend the early Christians, but they live their lives in the view of the judgment. And actually, Peter tells us to do that. 1 Peter 1:17. If you address his father, the one who judges him partially according to each man's word, then conduct yourself throughout the time of your sojourning here in fear. The early Christians did that, they were always pressing each other forward because there's a judgment coming that we all have to face saved and unsaved aligned. And it will be by words, not just by whether you believed in Christ. And that's the bombshell. I at my website's Christian-history.org, and you can look up judgment quotes on there and just read the quotes yourself. They'll all have links. You can go read the writing yourself. So that's the big difference. But in talking about that, that's all theology. That's all theory. What's real is when you put human faces to your theology and it becomes practical. You know, what are you going to do with the guy who falls away? Are you going to argue about whether he was ever saved or not? Or are you going to listen to James and go restore that brother? Maybe the people who believe in eternal security and the people who don't just both follow that command because we all want to do it. Let's go restore that guy. Let's go help him. Let's pray for him. Let's get him back. That's the real answer to the whole once saved, always saved, versus, you know, can you lose your salvation? The real answer to all that is let's go help the people who fell away. And don't ask the question of can a Christian fall away? You've seen a thousand people fall away. I've seen a thousand people fall away. Let's go help them, not disgust them. That's yeah, that's my theology versus practice versus bringing it down. The center of Christianity is love. And God works through those who love. That doesn't mean that I don't want to know. It says pen earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. Although that's not just, it doesn't say theology that was once delivered to the saints. It says the faith. And that faith is an active, progressive, pursue God, make Jesus first. You don't really have to debate and just read Jesus' words. He's our Lord. Read his words and do what he says and love him deeply, and you'll experience the favor and the power and the Holy Spirit because you love him and you're following him. So anyway, that's my summation in bringing it together.

Where To Find Paul And Closing

SPEAKER_02 47:17

Awesome. That's a wonderful end note. Thank you for that, Paul. I think that's the core of it. I think we want to get hung up in rules and checklists and things like that. Love. Love's the most important. Like you can't figure out what to do. Love someone else, and it'll probably work out. Love God, love your neighbor, you know, bring people back. You know, you're never too far gone. Just keep bringing people back. Well, Paul, thank you for bringing both depth and clarity to this conversation. Before we wrap up, where can listeners learn a little bit more about you mentioned the website? Is there any other areas people can connect with you?

SPEAKER_00 47:52

There are, but within the next couple of days, everything will be just kind of focused at Christian-history.org because then AI told me I need to do that. I do have videos on YouTube and I write on Facebook quite a lot. Nice.

SPEAKER_02 48:07

Under my sounds good. Or hopefully people can watch you and continue connect. Everyone listening out there, thank you for being here. If this conversation stretched your thinking a little bit, share it with someone else that might need it. I love you all. See ya.