Pragmatism & The Sinister Skewering of Biblical Truth

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: Dr. Renton Rathbun

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 1/12/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Monday edition of Stand in the Gap today. And it’s also our first recurring monthly program focus in 2026 here on apologetics, biblical worldview and education. I put those together because we do some things on apologetics, but a little differently in this focus. My guest, Dr. Renton Rathbun, he’s a speaker and he’s a consultant on biblical worldview instruction for BJU Press. Dr. Rathbun is also host of his own podcast called the Renton Rathbun Show, which he created to help parents and grandparents of all that as well to walk through the challenges to biblical worldview that are impacting their children educationally. And that website is rentonrathbun.com. Now, before I launch into today’s program, I do this often on Mondays is I need to reference a couple of things relative to very critical events that happen over the weekend that will cause this week to unfold in predictable and unpredictable ways.

Let’s put it that way. First, we’re witnessing the active stage, I’m going to say, of a global financial reset. We’ve talked about that, but things are in way. They’re happening now as fiat currencies, that’s money printed. The US dollar is one of them. It’s beginning to crumble due to high debt and the printing of money and deceptive lending practices. So with gold topping, historically today, $4,600, silver over 86 this morning. Expect major announcements from collapsing banks and global impacts as we move into this week. Things are happening. It’s not out there public yet, but keep your eyes open for it. Major secret banking decisions, for instance, were made in the US and in Europe over the weekend, and the fallout of that is being witnessed as I speak and this rise in gold and silver prices is an example of it. The markets are going to become more volatile by the day and people’s trust in money and government will be increasingly shaken.

Note it, it will unfold. Secondly, their threats of war in the Middle East are higher now than they even were last week, last Friday. Iran’s Islamic leadership cut the internet last week, as you may have known. And it appears that they’ve killed over 2000 Iranian protesting citizens, threatening to unleash their full power against Israel and the US. The leadership there, the Islamic leadership of Iran, which is not backing down because of the protests, are going actually full steam ahead. They believe, and they’ve stated, that according to the Quran, that they must make blood run in the streets so that their Madi, as they call them, their Messiah, we would refer to them as the Antichrist will return. Now that’s been a known fact. We’ve talked about it much in programs in the past. They’re citing it again. It’s factoring into what their actions may be now.

In Europe, NATO members like Denmark, France, and others are actively calling for preparation for war. To get this, not only against Russia that we’ve been hearing about, but now against the United States. What? NATO members against the United States? The answer is yes. Why? Due to Donald Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, whether Denmark or Europe likes it or not. So that’s another one. In the end, what do we make about all this? Well, the world is literally a powder keg. Change is hastening. In nearly every case, the justification for decisions coming out of Washington are no longer bounded by, not just Washington, but certainly there that’s closer to home, are not bounded by moral law or restrained by constitutional or even international law. Pragmatism is the rule of the day. Justification of actions based on the end justifies the means is mainstream. And as such, personal opinion rules unhinged from fixed truth.

Negotiation becomes mandate. Law becomes negotiable, might becomes right. And even those in our day who claim respect for God and truth are setting it aside and embracing pragmatism with so many literally telling me, as I’ve been trying to defend and question what’s going on, have said to me, “Sam, at times when nothing else makes sense, you just have to justify certain actions pragmatically and trust that what is being decided in DC is in our best interest.” And to that, I will tell you, I’ve said, “No, I don’t, and I willingly won’t.” Now, with that more lengthy setup and introduction, the title I’ve chosen to frame today’s conversation is this, pragmatism and the sinister skewering of biblical truth. Without Renton Rathman, Renton, thanks for being back with me.

Renton Rathbun:

Paul, thanks for having me on this important and very timely topic.

Sam Rohrer:

Renton, let me just get right into this. I’m going to shorten what I was going to say. You and I did discuss about a year and a half ago, July of 2024, a concept of pragmatism and the collapse of truth. This is really kind of a building up from that time because I’ve seen the deal making idea made popular in our day, further sanctions the pragmatic approach to decisions. And I’m saying that whenever pragmatism is embraced, fatal consequences happen. So to get us going, provide a brief definition of pragmatism, the accompanying process of consensus that goes with it, and to the extent you can, a brief compare contrast with truth. Set that up for us so then we’ll break it apart as we go into the program.

Renton Rathbun:

Well, the last time we spoke, we defined it and I think we defined it okay, but I think it needs some adjustments for clarity. The last time we defined it, we called it a system, we called pragmatism, a system of thought designed to derive meaning from a concept by way of experience. And I think that’s okay. I think it might be hard to kind of think about what that means, but this is how I adjusted it. I think it’s a system of problem solving in which one’s current circumstances seem to be more crucial than one’s loyalty to principles of truth. And sometimes our current circumstances match our loyalty to our principles of truth, but the pragmatism we’re talking about is when the current circumstances, based on how you’re interpreting those circumstances, become so important and so crucial that you have to put your loyalty to your principles of truth aside.

And in times of crisis, we are faced with a problem that appears in a particular circumstance insurmountable if we hold to those principles of truth. So we turn to consensus and that brings great relief because it provides a way forward. But of course, this way has no faith in it because in a time of crisis, our instinct is to run to relief, not more tension with our loyalty to our principles of truth. And in that, that’s where the tension lies. We are always seeking relief from our problems and consensus gives us that relief, but we need to turn to the loyalty to our principles of truth, which will be harder, but it needs to be done.

Sam Rohrer:

That’s excellent. I didn’t write that down, but that is an excellent definition, Renton. Thanks for sharing that. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard the basis of it. With pragmatism, it’s an approach to problem solving and it is. It doesn’t rely on faith, which is a biblical concept. It doesn’t rely on principles or standards of objective truth. It’s what I can figure out and put together and that makes us feel better. That’s a problem with that. We’re going to break this out, come back, we’re going to talk about pragmatism, describe it a little bit more in the next segment. Well, if you’re just joining us our program today, this is the theme, pragmatism and the sinister skewering of biblical truth. Now, I come up with titles to try and frame the subject matter, the theme that we’re dealing with in our program. And I’ve said many, many, many times, difficult in an hour to actually take an issue, a matter of something that’s happening in the headline, we’ll try to pull that together and bring it back into connecting the biblical truth, a biblical world view.

And to do that sufficiently, that we don’t raise questions that we cannot answer, and we don’t walk away at the end of the program with questions in your minds that we’ve raised that we have not attempted to solve. And so the title talks where we’re going, pragmatism. And I tried to talk about that a little bit in the first segment and Dr. Renton Rathbun with a website at Rentonrathbun.com who joins us once a month on this emphasis of some type, tying in education, culture, biblical worldview, putting it together, this one happening to be pragmatism today. In order to do that, we’re talking about that now. He defined it and Renton, I obliquely referenced it, not going to all the detail of it, but that when you embrace pragmatism, as you referenced, and I said, “You have necessity, make truth secondary to this thing we called this pragmatic way of thinking things out.

” You would refer to it as a problem solving approach, but it does not start with God and biblical truth and unchanging moral law. It substitutes it with something else. We find that heavily within the political process we have for a long time. I sensed that firsthand when I was in office. I observe it when I look at anything, almost literally anything that comes out of Washington or state capitals and around the world. Policies and things that are put forth don’t start with what’s the law, what’s the Bible say? It starts with something else, i.e. There into we have pragmatism, but when that happens, there’s no real basis for human check and balance because nobody agrees on what is the standard. And then God’s got to step in and invoke justice because his law does not change. Now that being the case, let me go to you.

I can provide other examples of where I’m seeing things and you and I have talked about some things before we began the program, but from your perspective, as you consider the church, the culture, education where you primarily focus or other segments of society, I’m curious, where are you seeing pragmatism being embraced and perhaps the consequences that you are witnessing in regard to that? Let’s just start there.

Renton Rathbun:

Yeah, let’s start with the church. Again, with pragmatism, what you’re dealing with is you are interpreting your circumstances in such a way that you believe that you have to take action in a way that might violate your principles of truth. And when that happens, you don’t just violate your principles of truth, you have to redefine them or soften them or kind of have a nuanced view of them. Knowing that you are violating them deep down inside, you have to correct your conscience. And this happens all the time in churches all over. If we take a close focus on a … In your church particular, as a pastor myself, I understand the pressure of building up your church body and pragmatically it would be so much … I know I could build up my church body so fast if I just tweaked the worship service a little, shorten the sermon, make sure I don’t refer to sin as something that’s completely the fault of the individual.

If I can just call sin something like, “Well, we’re broken people. ” And that way people feel like sin isn’t something that they do. They feel that sin is something that happens to them and they’re a victim. And then I can provide a way out, which is Jesus. And I know I could fill our views with people if I talk that way, if I made all my applications in my sermon positive and never in a negative way challenge the hearts of my congregation. On a wider note, you can see how the Southern Baptists are still fighting over whether women should be pastors or not, which is insane. I mean, one Timothy two is so absolutely clear, but they do know, or at least many churches in the Southern Baptist movement know that if you’re going to grow and build a community and grow your church, you’ve got to win over the women.

And the way to win over the women is give them leadership. And so these pragmatic systems can build something up and make you feel like you have succeeded, but the consequence is devastating.

With the first example I gave, you have a church filled with people that don’t feel like they’ve really done anything that bad, which makes God’s grace and mercy almost passively obsolete. If you look at the Southern Baptist problem with women in the pulpit, you have this issue where pragmatically it might be fine, but when feminism wins out over a church, it always leads to LGBTQ issues. If you want to know how the United Methodists ended up where they are, it started with feminism and it always ends with LGBTQ acceptance. And if you look at our education system, you see more pragmaticism being practiced. Both secular and Christian universities have dumbed down their prerequisites because we have a shortage of humans entering into college. We have the ages from, I believe it’s 15 to 18 right now. There’s a big dip in the population, so they need students.

So how do you get students in? Well, you tell them they don’t have to take a language. You tell them you don’t have to do a math or at least it doesn’t have to be hard math. And that way you get more students coming in because you’ve just made the path easier for them. But it even goes worse than that. You have the Christian schools that are more liberal just abandoning holiness altogether for the sake of submitting to our social pressures. And then you have more conservative Christian schools that might tighten up their life rules, but have no way of ensuring that their faculty are all on the same page theologically because if they did that, if they’re too rigid theologically, then maybe they won’t be able to recruit all the PhDs they need for their classes. It’s an absolute mess and we get ourselves into that mess when our faith runs thin and as we see our circumstances, we decide we need to act in a way that needs to reinterpret and reassociate our principles to something that they weren’t before.

Sam Rohrer:

I’m nodding my head and people can’t obviously hear me nodding my head because I had my mic turned off and they can’t see me, but I’m nodding my head as you’re going through and saying that because it does come down to a matter of faith. Leaders, when they find themselves in that kind of predicament, a pastors you talked about or somebody at university or school level or I’m going to say a politician, they’re confronted with problems and we got problems everywhere. When you say, “I’m going to go only do what the Bible says,” but then I have to put a lot of faith into it because I don’t know how this is going to work out. Now God says it’s going to work out, but I don’t know how it’s going to work out. So I move over here and I embrace pragmatism that makes me feel better, but it’s a fatal direction.

Now here, just do a couple minutes left, but answer this question. I have seen, and you’ve already kind of alluded to it, but it seems to me that the increase that the speed of people moving away from God said it, the Constitution said it if they’re in a political setting, I don’t know how it’s going to work out, but I know what was said and just a few years ago, they would have never embraced pragmatism. They say, “No, you can’t do that. That’s unconstitutional or that’s immoral.” But now they are because of the pressures of the day. How does that happen?

Renton Rathbun:

Proverbs gives us our outline for what wisdom is. And in the end, when we’re talking about problem solving and how we come to conclusions about difficult ideas, we want wisdom. And Proverbs one: three describes one part of how wisdom works. It’s when we receive instruction in wise dealing, and then it gives us some specifics in righteousness, justice, and equity. Now think of those three words and how the world has changed those words. You notice that society has made righteousness self-righteousness. It has made the justice of God into social justice. It has made equity of God’s unwavering standard into the equity of Marxism. Now, when we see this, we get enraged because we want to combat this. And so how do we combat it? We often combat it with our own justice, and that is where pragmatism comes in. It is based on what we think is right at the time that we’ll get back at these people that are attacking our faith and we want to fight fire not with water.

We want to fight fire with fire. We want to use their tactics because what we see is their tactics seem powerful to us. God’s word seems less powerful and seems weak. And so we feel we have to use hard, strong tactics at the time that calls for it at the time. So we see their tactics and we think, now that’s powerful. Let’s use their tactics. God’s word and God’s principles don’t seem as powerful to

Sam Rohrer:

Us. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, are you identifying with any of this? I hope that you are because it’s really a dominant philosophy. It’s a tendency within the human mind and heart to say that God’s word and truth, well, it’s not always enough. Well, is it? Is it not? We’re going to come back. We’re going to dissect this matter of pragmatism a little bit more fully so we better understand what it is and how it happens. Well, Renton, let’s go a little bit further on this. What you’ve shared so far has been very, very good. And then together we’ve talked about the necessity or the wisdom, let’s put it that way, of addressing this theme of pragmatism and which you defined in the first segment. And I would agree with it. There’s a number of different ways to do it, but it is a process that one employs relative to problem solving.

And everybody knows we’ve got problems all around. We have challenges that come from all around. We have challenges that are coming from around the world, from out of Washington, maybe from our doctor telling us certain things. I mean, we have challenges all around. So we’re always being faced with how do we deal with, how do we respond to problems or challenges or however that may be, and then craft a decision by which we can live. So let’s go a little further on that because as I mentioned, and you had mentioned earlier, it seems that those who have said they have known truth, believe truth, believe the Bible, even many of them of late, it seems like the pressures around us perhaps build, I have been finding, have been very quick to move away and say, “Well, in the circumstances that are confronting us now, then they embrace a pragmatic position because they think that solves the problem when what they said they believe didn’t before.” So that being case, let’s dissect it a little bit more.

What actually has to happen or does happen in a person’s mind or heart before pragmatism or the setting aside of truth can actually take root and grow. I mean, all of a sudden somebody just come to a point of saying, “Well, I’m going to put aside truth today because I can’t believe it, but I’m going to embrace pragmatism.” And they may not think they’re embracing pragmatism, but when you walk them through it, they say, “Well, I guess I am in doing that. ” So for instance, what aspects of God or truth or the opposite of pragmatism can be skewered so as diluted within today’s title and actually poke at and undermine biblical truth because they both can’t sit there simultaneously.

Renton Rathbun:

So in our church, I’m going through the book of Ephesians with our people and we hit Ephesians chapter four just recently. In Ephesians chapter four, what you see is Paul says this in verse 17, “Now this I say, and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. ” Now he’s commanding these people that he has already commended are in the Lord, they love the Lord, they love each other and now he is saying to them, “This I say and testify that you need to no longer walk as the Gentiles do. ” Now that command would not be necessary unless there was this danger of us walking as the Gentiles do. And how do they walk? They walk in the futility of their minds. Well, what’s the futility of one’s mind? Well, he describes it. He says, “It’s when your understanding is darkened and you’re alienated from the life of God, and this happens because of the ignorance that’s in them, and that ignorance is due to the hardness of their heart.” Now, what you see there is the futility of the mind is really when your understanding becomes darkened because there’s been a distancing from the life of God.

Actually, you could even say reality and how do we know the life of God and the reality we live in? Well, it’s God’s word. And this hardness of heart comes that leads to verse 19, callousness. And this is interesting about being callous. Callouses on your hands don’t happen the very first day. It’s a slow process of constant activity that slowly grows calluses on your hands. And this one day you feel, and there’s these hard, rigid pieces of skin on your palm of your hand, and you know that the callouses are there, but it’s something that’s gradual. And so you see this, how does it happen where people start leaning on their own understanding? They start problem solving based on what they think they need right now, even if it contradicts or they have to redefine their principles of truth from God’s word. It doesn’t happen just out of nowhere.

There has to be a growing callousness. Now, what’s the opposite of callousness? Well, the opposite of callousness is being sensitive, having a heart that’s tender so that your conscience is a very tender conscience so that when something slips on those principles, you are affected. The Holy Spirit pricks your heart and you have that constant need to keep that heart tender and sensitive to the Lord because the opposite of that is that callousness that leads to what we’re talking about today. When the pressure is on, when things become very difficult, when you think that you are up against a wall and you feel that what God’s word said is weak, but what your enemy is doing seems strong, should you mimic your enemy or should you mimic your God? And no one says, “Oh, I’m going to mimic my enemy. I’m going to forget about God.” What they do is they start imagining that God is more like their enemy and more like them so that they can use those tactics of their enemy and they actually start redefining Christ.

And verse 20 of chapter four in Ephesians says this, “You have not learned Christ that way.” Assuming that you’ve heard him or were taught by him as the truth is in Jesus, and that’s where we get that famous verse in 22, “Put off your old self.” And that’s what belongs to your former manner of life that’s corrupted in deceitful desires. And if we start thinking that way, we start seeing the opposite of what callousness …

Sam Rohrer:

That’s a good illustration. Let’s bring it into a practical sense. You’ve referred to being in a church setting, you’re pastoring there now and you’ve made some references. I’ve been in the pulpit, but I have not pastored, but I’ve been in office. One of the things that people are seeing is that, well, for a long time, in the political sense, we have one side versus the other side. And then some years ago, there were some who say, “Wait a minute, government is being weaponized against its enemies.” And then another comes and then says, “What’s my chance? And so I’m going to weaponize what I can against my enemies,” which is exactly what you were talking about, just in that practical sense. That’s something that people can see because it’s kind of like, “Well, man, have you used this department of government against me? ” Well, now it’s my chance.

It worked against me, so I have got to use it against you, and all of a sudden there’s nothing about that that’s biblical. Now, in a church setting, you can comment on that, that’s a real live one, I think, but in a church setting, how’s that done in a church setting perhaps?

Renton Rathbun:

So like what you’re talking about, being in apologetics, I have a lot of young people that come to me with questions about their faith, young people that feel like they don’t believe anymore and they’re walking away from the faith. My first question to them when it comes to why they question the faith, because they think it’s all these important questions, why do evil things happen to good people and all that sort of stuff, but it’s really never that. What I ask them is, “What have you been filling your ears with? What is the catechism of the music you have been listening to? ” And usually what I find out is the music they listen to is from the secular world that’s pumping in them a catechism of how life should be, what love should look like, how you should respond to the world. And I say, “Well, what are you putting before your eyes?” And they get a steady stream of shows and YouTube videos and things that are from the secular world telling them how to live.

And so it’s no wonder on a steady diet of the world that their faith gets so weak that they can’t even see why it’s true. And I think that happens even in the church as people are turning to secular speakers about how they should view their political world. I mean, it’s incredible to me. All the talking heads, especially in the conservative world, are people that do not have any place as far as I view God’s word. They don’t think God’s word is true. I mean, you look at Ben Shapiro, he’s a nice guy. Some of the things he says are good things, but he doesn’t believe Jesus Christ is God. You have Glenn Beck, who’s a Mormon. He doesn’t believe what we believe, and you go through all these conservative talking heads. And yeah, there’s some that claim Christianity, and I understand that, but in the end, if we’re filling our minds with a constant steady flow of people that don’t even believe what we believe or people that aren’t educated in the way we need them to be so that they can give us good information, then we’re surprised that we turn to pragmatism when things get tough because the talking heads are telling us that pragmatism is the best way.

The talking heads are the ones that got us so angry and so upset about what was going on, that our sense of justice is so strong that we are just ready to turn to anything to get back at them because we have been offended. And in the end, I think that’s the biggest question. Are you being offended or have they offended God? If they’ve offended God, then there’s a completely different way we should be approaching this. If we feel personally offended, of course, we’re going to pick any way we can to get back. Even if it’s their tactics, they need to be punished. And that is at the heart, I think, of what’s going on, both in the church and the political world as well.

Sam Rohrer:

So ladies and gentlemen, all right, we’ve talked about pragmatism. We’ve heard some description and we could go so much further, but in the end, all right, if we are not going to be an embracer of pragmatism and a discarder of Truth. How do we discard pragmatism? How do we cast that off so that we embrace truth, the truth of God’s word, apply sufficient faith to know that it will work out and then live accordingly? Well, we’ll look at that in the next segment. Well, as we go into our final segment here today, Renton, let me go forward in this fashion because I want you to wrap it up as we look at this matter of pragmatism because if pragmatism as the dominant approach to decision making, be that personally or nationally, as we’ve been talking, and it is dominant, but if it is to be discarded and rejected and replaced with a biblical reset, a biblical mind in a way to think of things where truth is the hinge pin, I’m thinking in terms of this, what must be discarded or put away?

And then what is to be embraced or to be put on? And whenever we use those kind of words, it makes me think of the apostle Paul because he refers to that kind of an illustration many times in scripture. Let me just read one verse and it’s from Ephesians four and you referenced it earlier. I think you say you’re going through this book with your church, but in verse 22 to 24, he says this, he says these very words, “Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” To me, there’s a lot in there. Just take it from there.

Renton Rathbun:

Well, what I see is in our talk of pragmatism and how we’re dealing with it, there’s these two things going on. You have the people in DC who are making decisions on pragmatic bases that they want to get their agendas across. But how does all that work? How do those particular people get in? How does all this machine get moving? And in the conservative side, I have to say, I think it comes down to people are swayed most in their rage. And so you have a lot of these talking heads that are getting people angry and filled with rage. And surely there is a lot out there. I’m not diminishing the evil that is out there, but this rage machine that’s going on, I think is feeding this idea that we need revenge in our way. And so in short, what should we discard? We need to discard our own sense of revenge.

We must discard the idea that when political liberals or the media or society denigrates Christianity or makes us look like fools or sees us as a threat or calls us deplorables, we need to discard our personal offense. Typically, you can tell who someone loves based on what offends them. In other words, if I have a strong love for myself, I personally will find offense at a lot of things. But if I love the Lord, my being offended will be in connection to how they treat God and his name. And that means I will expect my God to have his vengeance. I will expect my response to be in compliance with his law and his commands without exception because I don’t feel obligated to be the means by which vindication comes along. I would see my obligation to my God to vindicate himself because vengeance is his, he will repay.

We have his word on that. Our obligation is to respond in every way we can that complies with his word.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. In that aspect of what the apostle Paul said here, righteousness and holiness, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, have we gotten ourselves into a position here, Renton, where we’ve redefined perhaps righteousness and holiness and factoring into what you talk about and then wrap it up into this question as well. Is it possible for a person to say, “Well, you know what? I’m going to employ both righteousness and holiness. And at the same time, I’m going to keep a little bit of pragmatism in a way I think because at times that may be necessary.” Is that possible?

Renton Rathbun:

You know, what’s interesting about that verse is there is the word there, true righteousness. Now that is not on accident. The statement true righteousness is telling us something within the context of chapter four where Paul is telling the Ephesians they cannot walk as the Gentiles walk. They cannot walk like the old self used to walk. So Paul is forbidding this revisiting of the old self, this pining after the old self. You are to despise the old self. You take it off and discard it. He is forbidding the idea that you can wear your dead corpse from your former life and still be in life with Christ. He is forbidding the idea that you can hold the dead body of your old self and still have your new self still attached somehow. In other words, he’s saying there’s no neutral territory where you get to use a little bit of Christ and then a little bit of this neutral world that we might call pragmatism.

And I think that’s really where Satan has most of his work done in this idea that there’s this neutral place where the Bible really doesn’t speak to X. The Bible really doesn’t say anything about whether we should do this or do that as a country. So we just really have to use our best judgment at the time for the situation and just do our best. The scriptures speak to every single thing, and this is why we push so hard. And this is why I think it’s so dangerous when any Christian school ceases to use biblical worldview as a term or a principle in their work, because biblical worldview reminds us that there is no place on this earth in any idea, anywhere where we can say the Bible really doesn’t speak to this. This is a neutral spot and we have to just do the best we can with it.

Rather, scripture speaks to all things because scripture is God’s speech and God is the one that created all things. And as Ecclesiastes reminds us, there’s nothing new under the Son. And therefore, we have confidence even though it may not make us feel smart, even though it may not make us look great, even though it might make us look like fools, even though it may not give us the satisfaction of justice that we want at the time in the moment, God’s word does speak to everything and you do not get to share. God does not share his glory with anyone or anything. So you don’t get to use a little bit of the world to help you. You can’t have both. You don’t get to have one foot in righteousness and one foot in the muck of the world so that we could do the things we have to do because we are called to true righteousness.

And if I can put it this way, we are called, and I think that true also applies with the conjunction there. It says, “True righteousness and holiness.” And I think the true applies to the holiness as well. So we could say we are called to be truly righteous and truly holy because the true is a vital part of that verse. God never allows us to have just a little bit of sin in his presence. So in closing, what I would say is this, remember the book of Ephesians begins with the whole goal of God’s plan, which is laid out in chapter one, verse four, which says that we might stand before our God holy and blameless. And if we forget that, we have forgotten Christianity.

Sam Rohrer:

Renton Rathbun, thank you so much for being with me today. Just a great, great piece of information. His website, ladies and gentlemen, rentonwrethbund.com. You can find all of his material there, Renton Rathbun show and more. And as we depart today, it’s why we say all along, pursue the truth, choose the truth, pursue it and embrace it. That truth is the written word of God. It’s either sufficient for all or it’s not sufficient for any. We believe it’s sufficient for all.