Doctrine Drives Discernment

Doctrine Drives Discernment

Oct. 29, 2026

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: Bodie Hodge

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 10/29/26 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 Thursday edition of Stand in the Gap Today, and it’s also our monthly emphasis on creation, apologetics, and the development of a truly biblical worldview. And today I’m going to be joined again by a recurring guest and friend of Stand in the Gap Today and APN, and that’s Bodie Hodge. Bodie is president and CEO of Biblical Authority Ministries. And that website I’ll just give to you right off here is biblicalauthorityministries.org. Now, in that regard, for some people, and I’m looking here at what I want to say, we’re going to address a subject that many churches, I don’t know most, I don’t know, but many, rarely discuss, of which most believers, Christians in general, and it’s partly as a result of that, are ignorant. And yet that’s one that scripture repeatedly emphasizes. And you say, “Well, what is that?” Well, it’s that subject of doctrine.

Now, for some people, doctrine sounds, well, academic or theological, it certainly is that, or perhaps even divisive, but it should not be that. Yet the word itself simply refers to biblical teaching, truth. In fact, the early church committed itself to doctrine. The Apostle Paul instructed pastors to preach and defend sound doctrine. And throughout scripture, believers are warned against false doctrine, false prophets, false teachers, and spiritual deception. Why? Well, because truth matters. And what we believe determines how we think and how we discern, and ultimately how we live. Now, for years on this program, we’ve highlighted research from Dr. George Barna showing that while a large majority of Americans may identify as Christians, that number’s actually about 70% right now, only a very small percentage, about 6%, consistently demonstrate a biblical worldview. And that’s an alarming reality because as George often reminds us, people do what they believe.

And if that’s true or say since that’s true, then perhaps the larger question is this, what are people actually believing and where did those beliefs come from? Jesus himself warned in Matthew seven that many will stand before him one day convinced that they belong to him only to hear the sobering words depart from me. I never knew you. That’s not a warning to atheists. That’s a warning to religious people who are deceived. So today we’re going to begin at the foundation. What is doctrine? Why does God place such importance upon it? What happens when sound doctrine is neglected? And what’s the connection between sound doctrine and discernment? Discernment and worldview and ultimately Christian living. So the title I’ve chosen to frame today’s conversation is this, doctrine drives discernment. And with that, Bodie Hodge, Bodie, thanks for being back with me today. It’s always a privilege to have you on the program.

Bodie Hodge:

Yeah, it’s always an honor to be on it.

Sam Rohrer:

So Bodie, let’s begin here because you have been led of the Lord to do a whole series of presentations on doctrine and its importance. And people can find that on Biblical Ministries, the website that I gave your biblicalauthorityministries.org. But here’s the question here. Let’s define the terms. What exactly is doctrine and why is it so central to both the life of the church and the individual believer as well?

Bodie Hodge:

All right. Well, first off, when we think of big picture, there’s a lot of types of doctrine out. There’s legal doctrine, military doctrine, political doctrine. What we’re talking about here is religious doctrine. And what I mean by religious doctrine is it’s a principle or a set of principles, like the body of teaching that a group or an institution such as a church holds to base on their absolute truth. And of course, the Bible is the absolute truth by which we derive our doctrine. So doctrine really comes from the Bible. It’s read out of the pages of scripture for a host of different topics, whether we’re looking at the nature of God, whether we’re looking at morality, whether we’re looking at any type of individual subject, prophecy, baptism, war, you name it, all these things are predicated on the Bible and its absolute truth.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. Now that being the case, and if you said doctrine or truth extends beyond the church into the legal and all of that, but we’re talking here biblical doctrine. Okay, now let’s go now. The Bible repeatedly contrasts sound doctrine with false doctrine and it warns about deception. So here’s the question follow up to that. Why does God place such emphasis on doctrinal truth and what are the consequences when churches, or individuals too, but particularly right now when churches stop teaching it clearly?

Bodie Hodge:

Yeah. When churches are not teaching the doctrinal truth in the Bible, it opens the door to error. And both the church itself, so the life of the church gets affected that way as well as the individual believer. Because if churches aren’t standing on the Bible, number one, or they’re not teaching the doctrines from the Bible to the layman and the congregation, well then the church can now err, the people can now err and they don’t even realize it. The Bible teaches that God is the absolute authority. He’s the one that gives good doctrine. For example, you go back to Proverbs four verse two. God says that he gives good doctrine and do not forsake his laws. As soon as you defy what God is saying, then all of a sudden you’re going from good doctrine to errant doctrine or false doctrine. And it affects the individual, it affects the life of the church.

And so there are consequences that are far reaching when you start to deny the good doctrine from the Bible.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. It does. And we talk on this program a lot and I know you do as well because a true believer, understanding that the word of God is authoritative and the truth knows that, well then here’s a question. Does the Bible speak to all issues of life? And we say, yes it does. Or are those issues? Well, family and finances and government and business relationships and all that kind of thing. What happens when a person, and we’ll get into the false aspect of it, but in reality, should not every choice a believer makes be able to be grounded and founded and identified in a biblical truth or doctrine? And if it’s not there, it’s kind of like, well, can I do what I want to do?

Bodie Hodge:

Right. That’s exactly the situation here. And that’s the thing

Sam Rohrer:

That

Bodie Hodge:

Every believer needs to understand.

Sam Rohrer:

We

Bodie Hodge:

Need to get rid of the old though that we’ve had the old man. We need to get that off, go back to the Bible and get our doctrine from the word go. Now I understand that there are new believers. They don’t understand doctrine. They’re very new to Christianity. I don’t fault them if they don’t know all the doctrine and they don’t know how to get into it. But what frustrates me is when you have new believers in your church and you’re not training them in all this good doctrine, that’s where we failed in many instances. And that’s why we’ve got to get back

Sam Rohrer:

So that

Bodie Hodge:

These people do not fall into error.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re just joining us, our theme today is this, doctrine drives discernment. Do we not all pray for discernment? Are we not all wanting to cut through the clutter of the confusion of the day and have clarity? Where’s that come from? Well, the word of God. And so the theme today and my special guest, Bodie Hodge is with me. We’re going to walk through that next segment. We’re going to go from what is sound doctrine to that which is truth and then error and spiritual deception. They all fit together. Well, welcome back to Stand in the Gap today. And if you’re just tuning in, I think this theme that my guest Bodie Hodge, who is the president and the CEO of Biblical Authority Ministries and I have chosen to engage because it’s one that he has seen in his ministry. It’s one that I have seen in my years of involvement on this program and beyond.

And that is a matter of doctrine. Now in the last segment, we established that doctrine by definition simply refers to instruction or teaching. And you can find it in the legal area, you can find it any area, but we’re talking about Bible doctrine. So when the Bible says sound doctrine, it means teaching that is consistent with the entirety of God’s word. And that sound doctrine is essential to knowing God, to holy living and Christ-like living and as will come out, the salvation itself. But scripture doesn’t just speak about sound doctrine. It repeatedly warns so many places about false doctrine, false teachers of false doctrines and false prophets who promote false doctrine. And perhaps the most significantly tied into all of those false things is spiritual deception. From the Garden of Eden when Satan’s first attack was essentially doctrinal, think about that, where he said, half God said, well, to Christ’s warnings and the gospels and the warnings of Paul, the apostle Paul and Peter and John and Jude, the Bible presents life as a continual battle between truth and error, essentially sound doctrine or false doctrine.

And what makes this especially sobering is that deception by definition is not recognized by the person being deceived. And that was Jesus’ warning in Matthew seven that many will one day stand before him, confident of their spiritual standing and are going to point to their religious activity, their works and their profession of faith. And yet Christ will say, Depart from me. I never knew you. And to me, those are among the most alarming words in all of scripture because they describe people who were sincerely religious, yet tragically deceived. Today, George Barnes research, and as he shared in this program, even not recently, that while most Americans still profess some form of Christianity, a vast majority, 94% of all adult Christians as surveyed have embraced the religion of syncretism, which is simply the blending of biblical beliefs with competing worldviews and belief systems. And that reality raises an important question.

How does spiritual deception happen and how can believers avoid it? And that then connects into this whole matter of doctrine, truth, discernment and deception as we walk through it. So Bodie, the Lord Jesus himself and the apostle Paul and Peter and Jude and others repeatedly warned about deception and false teachers. Why is spiritual deception and understanding what it is such a prominent concern throughout scripture?

Bodie Hodge:

Well, I think you nailed it earlier. It goes right back to the very first sin back in Genesis. It’s an attack on doctrine and it gets people to go in the other direction. For example, Adam and Eve, they sinned against God. They went against God’s direction. They went against God’s commandment. And that right there led the entire world into sin. Satan uses the same devices that he used on Adam and Eve. So here’s what’s happening. It’s affecting our entire culture. It affects the culture of our church as well. When we do not stand on the authority of the word of God to get our doctrine, we can go wrong in a host of different areas. Consider just something very simple like the doctrine of clothing, which also goes back to Genesis, by the way, when Adam and Eve sin, God clothed them and that’s why we have the doctrine of clothing.

Of course, the Bible talks further about the doctrine of clothing, being modest in our wear. But let’s just take, for example, a Christian who says, “Well, I don’t know anything about the doctrine of clothing from the Bible. Let’s just leave the Bible out of it when they look at clothing.” You never know what they’re going to wear or not wear in today’s culture. So it affects everything. It affects their witness. It affects what’s going on in the world. It actually produces lust and all sorts of things that are going on out there. So yeah, when you get rid of the Bible, you get rid of that authority by which we’re developing our doctrine or set it aside or throw it away or reinterpret it, you can run into a lot of error. And we see examples of that throughout the New Testament. We see examples of that today.

Sam Rohrer:

All right. So you’re breaking the application, which is interesting. A lot of people may not have considered that, the doctrine of clothes. Interesting. Modesty, scripture gives that. But there’s the doctrine of stewardship, right? There’s a doctrine of, for as that goes, consistency. There’s a doctrine that leads to holiness. Broaden that just a little bit to help people to understand the breadth of the concept of doctrine. It’s not just a theological understanding that describes the triune God. It goes beyond that, doesn’t it?

Bodie Hodge:

That’s right. Many times people think of the authority of scripture that is doctrinal or the inspiration or infallibility of scripture or even the interpretation of scripture, which is the doctrine of hermeneutics. But it also deals with our practical everyday life. The doctrine of prayer, for example, the doctrine that we have dominion over the earth, the doctrine of work and rest. We see that in a day, night cycle. We see it in a weekly cycle. So there’s that. Clothing, of course, is one of those, but it also extends to things like political things. We have doctrines that deal with things like war or how do nations relate to one another? There’s hosts of different doctrines. Many of them have to deal with the way we live our life. Some are doctrines for theology. Others are just very practical doctrines, the doctrine of a week. How many people think of a week?

A week is actually a measurement of time that goes back to God creating everything in six days and resting on the seventh. The concept of a week, the doctrine of a week actually comes from the Bible and yet people all over the world use a seven day week. They’re borrowing that from the Bible, you see. And I like to use that so that I can explain to different people, especially with people who’ve been deceived by false religions all over the world. We can go back and say, “Hey, you guys have a week in your system. It doesn’t

Sam Rohrer:

Make

Bodie Hodge:

Any sense.You’re actually borrowing that from the Bible.” You see, even under it all, you realize that the Bible is the absolute authority, whether you realize it or not. And so I try to direct them to the Bible in those ways.

Sam Rohrer:

And I think that’s so practical because the word of God is practical to those who submit themselves to the authority of God’s word. And of course that’s key in coming to salvation or anything else and why many people will not go to the word of God or prefer to pick and choose pieces of it, which we know happens all along. But you can build that out a little bit, but factor it into this. And that is back to my Matthew seven reference where Jesus describes many religious people who believe that they were right with God, but were tragically deceived. The idea that deception, the world that is a rejector of God is a rejector of God, not deceived. The deception, well, they may be deceived, but it’s really Jesus talking about those who think they are holders of truth but are not. So what does this passage teach us about the relationship between doctrine, truth, put those together, discernment and the deception that we’re talking about and the difference between genuine saving faith and a false and deceptive faith?

Ultimately, that’s the eternal question.

Bodie Hodge:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. The Bible is the absolute truth because it is predicated on God who is the absolute truth. So when God reveals his word, it is the absolute truth. God gives us good doctrine in his word, in the Bible, which is absolutely true. So when we develop our doctrine, we start to build that doctrine on all these different subjects, diet, life, the flood, the tower, baby, whatever it might be, then we get ourselves a proper worldview that’s based on good doctrine based on the word of God. What that does is that allows us to be discerning. When we hear things that are in contradiction with God in his word, boom, we can immediately spot it and we go, “Oh no, that’s not right. That’s a false doctrine. You’re going away from what the Bible says.” For example, let’s say somebody out there saying, “Oh, well, Mary wasn’t a virgin.

Oh, nope. We know about the doctrine of the virgin birth. That’s dead wrong.” It teaches you to be discerning. And what that does is that prevents you from being deceived to go into some of these false routes and these false directions. It’s kind of like dealing with a counterfeit bill. If you know the $100 bill inside and out, the true one, then you can usually spot the fake ones. And it’s the same sort of thing here. When you go back to God’s word and you know what God’s word is saying, and you’re developing your doctrine from the Bible, from the pages of scripture, that absolute truth, boy, when you see that counterfeit, you can spot it. And that’s what I want to encourage people to do. Get back to the Bible, get back to good doctrine, and that will keep you in more of a discerning mindset and it will help fight against the deceptions that are floating all around us.

Sam Rohrer:

All right. So as a church in this whole concept of sound doctrine, and that’s where you started, you were telling me before the program that you’ve gone into so many otherwise good churches, but doctrine, if it’s at all taught, is very thin. And if Christians, those who are believers, don’t understand doctrine truth, that there are doctrine and standards of truth and standards for fathers and mothers and children and those in government and those in the pulpit as an example. Well, what happens?

Bodie Hodge:

Yeah. Well, that’s exactly what happens. People don’t know what to do. They’re stuck. And so if they don’t know what the Bible teaches, their minds are open to hearing and believing the things that aren’t from the Bible. And it’s interesting, you used that term syncretism earlier, and I think that’s absolutely apt. That is a perfect term for it. People take their Christianity then and they go over and they mix it with other religions. In fact, when I finished this doctrine series, the very last article that I wrote was syncretism, a false doctrine affects so many where people are mixing it.

Sam Rohrer:

And ladies and gentlemen, Bodie Hodge is my guest today. Our theme is doctrine drives discernment. And on his website of biblicalauthorityministries.org, you will find this entire breakout of all of his presentations on this matter of the importance of doctrine of which we’re dealing with the core portion today. Stay with us and we’re going to move from doctrine to worldview. In the last segment, we discuss the danger of deception and the reality that false doctrine inevitably produces false conclusions. Now we also talked about Christ’s warning that many, many, I don’t know how many many is, but when Jesus says many, it’s not just one or two, that many sincere and religious people will one day, when we all stand before the Lord, they will stand and discover that they were spiritually deceived because he’ll say, “Depart from me, you worker of iniquity. I never knew you.” Serious.

Now, that raises another important question. If doctrine shapes belief, or you could say since doctrine shapes belief and belief either reflects and is consistent with God’s truth or varies from it or departs from it, how does that ultimately affect the way we view the world, the events around us and the ability to think biblically in all spheres of life? You could put in that word culture. Now, for years on this program, again, we’ve regularly highlighted research from Dr. George Barna, and so I’m integrating some of his statistics into this program because one of his most important conclusions is that simple statement that people do what they believe. And I’m going to say people act in response to what they believe. Now, the observation takes us directly from doctrine to worldview. A worldview is simply the framework through which we interpret reality. It shapes how we think about God and truth and morality, government, family, education, culture, eternity, and frankly, every major decision of life.

And in that sense, a worldview doesn’t suddenly appear. It doesn’t grow out of nowhere. It comes out of what we actually believe to be true. And that’s why the spread of syncretism is so concerning and other Barnard research indicates that while 70% of adult Americans profess to be Christians, and I get this, profess to be Christians, only 6% have a biblical worldview, which with so many professing evangelicals in that more narrow category of Christians, that’s why so many of them, as we’ve talked about, support such issues as abortion or women in the pulpit and so much more. Yet when people blend biblical truth with other competing ideas, they inevitably develop a worldview that is inconsistent, unstable, in most all cases, unbiblical. So let’s connect the dots, Body, between doctrine, belief, worldview and behavior. Since George often says people do what they believe, how does doctrine actually shape belief and how do those beliefs eventually develop into the shaping of a person’s worldview?

Bodie Hodge:

Well, I’ll tell you, when people start going down a belief system, like a particular doctrine, let’s say that they are not getting from the Bible, they’re getting an unbiblical doctrine, they’re getting a false doctrine, and they start to believe that. They start to live their lives out that way. They start to go into this entire other route. Now, they may still profess to be a Christian. They may still show up at church every Sunday, but they’re going in a different direction doctrinally on one or many other issues. And when they’re doing that and they’re syncretizing these two religions, they’re taking their Christianity and they’re mixing it with another worldview. When they do that, what they’re doing is they’re trying to combine two religions that don’t mix, and so something has to give. And usually these guys start giving up the pages of scripture. An excellent example of where people tend to do that in today’s culture is Genesis 1-11.

I see that over and over again. People want to give up six-day creation. They want to give up a global flood. They want to give up the Tower Bible. All three of those doctrines essentially get thrown out or reinterpreted, and people hold onto things like Big Bang, evolution, millions of years, and they hold onto those types of doctrines from a false worldview. So they take those false doctrines, they try to mix it with their Christianity something gives, they start throwing out the pages of the Bible. Now that’s just one small area that people do this, but it runs them into a serious error. And I’ll tell you one of the areas that it really affects. If you’re a leader in the church, it affects your church. If you’re a parent, it affects your children. It affects those people that you have influence on the most.

And that’s where it really gets detrimental going from one generation to the next.

Sam Rohrer:

And I think that’s an excellent application because it does, that’s the history of Israel. And look in the Old Testament and another generation of Rose who knew not the God of their fathers. It doesn’t take long for that change to happen, does it, Bodie? You can answer that, but factor into this part of it. As George says, such a small percentage of Americans who profess Christianity consistently demonstrate a biblical worldview, that’s a staggering number when he first shaped. I said, George, really? Is that true? Absolutely, it is true. It’s what we have found for 40 years and increasingly in the last years. So the question is, what does that kind of finding and what you’re talking about, what does that reveal about the connection between sound doctrine and biblical thinking? So for instance, a person goes to church, a person may even preach, frankly, they may stand behind a pulpit.

And yet there is a break that occurs between sound doctrine, what the Bible says, and biblical thinking, which then obviously leads to action, which we’ll talk about in the next segment. How does that happen?

Bodie Hodge:

Right. There’s definitely a big connection in there. Now there is something that I think as soon as people hear it, they’re going to say, “Oh, okay. I get it.” How often do say adults or even children get teaching from the church in a given week? If they’re lucky, two hours, three hours if they go on a Wednesday night Bible study or something. So they’re not getting too much time to dive into those doctrines. And then you take that time, you split it up. And by the time you get to the sermon, it’s 20, 30 minutes if you’re lucky. And then we mentioned earlier, a lot of them are very shallow. They don’t dive into that depth. So where are most people learning what they believe? They’re not learning it at the church. I would say the vast majority of people are learning it from their education system.

I was one of those kids. I went through the state education system. I was taught evolution millions of years, big bang. Where do you think those ideas came from? It didn’t come from the church. It was actually coming from the world. And so the world is influencing people. Kids nowadays, you think kindergarten through 12th grade, they’re spending 35 to 40 hours at school and then they have extracurriculars where they’re around peers, they’re taught the same thing. They’re really being hit with a lot of these false doctrines from the world. And yet the church only has a couple hours with them. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the church has a powerful opportunity here. We’ve got the word of God. We’ve got the word of God in our own language, which some people back in the past didn’t even have. We can go back and check the Bible to see what doctrines we should be holding on to get back to the authority of the word of God.

And I think we need to take that opportunity to really hit it in our youth groups, in our Sunday schools and in our churches to really start explaining doctrine, to really teach those doctrines because we can counter what’s going on in the world. We just need to dive into it. Instead of doing it from a shallow perspective, we need to defend these doctrines biblically so that our congregation can understand them.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. A couple minutes left here. So really what you’re defining or identifying, Bodie, and I think most listening would say, yes, when you lay that out, yeah, you’re only in church, well, a short time per week, maybe 45 minutes on a sermon perhaps. All right, so then you got the entire rest of the week. To what extent, and I mean, I have my own firm opinion on this and all that, but when a person is linked to the media of the day, driven by social media, looking into the news headlines of the day from wherever they may come and all of those things, and that is pounding in on the other side. All right. How do those interrelate and to what extent can a believer who wants to act truly biblically, what should be their approach to help shape their thinking, to keep it biblical?

And to me, part of that is don’t be listening to social media and the controlled news of the day. But anywhere, answer that how you’ve thought that out.

Bodie Hodge:

Well, I tell you what, we are definitely hit from a lot of different directions. There’s social media, of course, news, education, secular museums. We’re hit by our peers and our friends. We’re hit by it all the time. Here’s what I want to encourage people to do. Just step back and realize God is God. All these people, all these ideas, all these things that are coming from the world in all these different directions, they are not the authority. God is. And so I want to encourage people, get into the Bible. Most people have a smartphone where they’re grabbing their social media. Guess what? They can have a Bible app there too. Make sure they’re getting into God’s word, they’re praying, and that they are learning about these doctrines, learning how to defend them, dive into the apologetics of it. I’ll tell you what, that helps change your mind.

It helps you stand on the authority of the word of God. Maybe you can help start teaching some of these things in the church to help the church out, maybe encourage your pastors and youth leaders to dive into some of these subjects in more detail because here’s what I found. I used to teach the kids in church, the kids, they want to learn. They want to know what the Bible says. And I’ll tell you what, when we challenge them, you’d be surprised how deep they can really go because kids are a lot smarter than people think, but you know what? So are the adults. I think a lot of the adults, they want to know what the kids are learning if you start training the kids. So yeah, I think we have a big opportunity. I think there’s a lot of power

Sam Rohrer:

In

Bodie Hodge:

It if we can get it back into the word of God.

Sam Rohrer:

Ladies and gentlemen, obviously what we’re identifying is a need when we have 70% professing Christians, 6% of a biblical worldview of them. These are indicators of a need. When 94% of all adult Americans have really embraced this matter of syncretism, a little bit of truth, a little bit of that. That’s an evidence of need. A confused citizenry who does not trust in God, but looks to other things, that is a problem. Well, what’s the solution? Well, it’s fear of God. Keep his commandment. Go to the word of God. And when we come back, we’re going to conclude with this sequence, doctrine drives discernment.

All right, welcome back. And we’re going to conclude this program now. Again, just a reminder, my guest today has been Bodie Hodge. He is the president and the CEO of Biblical Authority Ministries. They have a website at biblicalauthorityministries.org. And our theme has been doctrine drives discernment. And that’s how we’re going to end up on that theme. We’ve now traced a progression, and it’s important to understand that whether you consider choices have consequences or however it is, life is laid out in a series of many choices. We end up where we are, not by one choice, but by many. And we’ve traced this progression from doctrine, truth, to belief, and from belief to worldview. And we’ve discussed how sound doctrine not only leads to truth, but actually it is truth with a capital T, ultimately directing us to Jesus Christ who says he is true salvation as we know, since he is the way and the truth.

Now, we’ve shown also how false doctrine of which scripture warns so clearly. False doctrine opens the door to deception. And it’s by definition, it lies perpetrated as deception, masquerades as truth, and that’s how deception occurs. And that’s the warning that Jesus gives over and over and over again. Then how and what a person truly believes eventually shapes the way they view reality. And that is one’s worldview about which we focus and talk about every day on this program. But now let’s bring this discussion down to where you and I live. If in since doctrine shapes worldview, then worldview shapes conduct. That make sense? It shapes how we think about everything, government, family, education, economics, justice, morality, work, citizenship, and even how we respond to the headlines we read each day. In reality, it determines whether we steward biblically our finances, our choices across the spectrum of life, our level of cultural engagement.

We got an election coming up, even our voting, right? There’s no area that it does not reach. And this is where the challenge becomes very practical. Many Christians can’t explain what they believe doctrinally, yet they struggle to apply those truths consistently to the issues and the decisions they face. Part of that is to the synchronistic viewpoint that we’ve talked about. But in other words, there can be a gap between professing biblical truth and thinking biblically. And as we’ve tested many times with George Barnum, people do what they believe. Therefore, the evidence of sound doctrine is not merely theological knowledge, but transformed thinking and obedient living. That is the thrust of scripture. Ultimately, the goal of doctrine is not simply to fill our minds with information. The goal is to know God, think God’s thoughts after him, exercise biblical discernment and live in a manner that honors Christ.

So Bodie, there’s a tight linkage between sound doctrine and acting according to sound doctrine, such as God’s requirement. Deuteronomy 28, for instance, that fearing God and keeping his commandments or God’s requirements for God’s blessing or judgment. Earlier in the scripture, God told the people of Israel about being thankful to God, gratitude as really being the antidote to idolatry. And you’re saying effectively today that the antidote to deception is really sound doctrine. And that’s what you effectively said a little bit ago. So here’s the question. What should pastors and parents and individual believers do to strengthen biblical discernment and intentionally cultivate a truly biblical worldview and communicate that to the next generation?

Bodie Hodge:

Well, first off, I think they need to actively understand the issue so that they can actively respond in their local churches. They have such an opportunity to be able to teach their congregants in youth programs and Bible studies, “Hey, let’s dive into this, but let’s talk about the doctrinal aspects and let’s defend why these doctrines are true.” I’ll tell you what, what an amazing opportunity that is to be able to get people to stand on the authority of the word of God on so many doctrines, whether it’s hermeneutics or the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture or just whatever subject it might be, some of those creation doctrines, for example. But we need to recognize that today’s culture is no different from the cultures going all the way back into the Old Testament. I think of something like two Kings 17:33, “They feared the Lord, but they served their own gods.” We do so much of the same thing even within our own local churches.

It may not be other gods that they want to insert in there, but they’ll take tenets from another religion, whether it’s the secular religion that’s dominating or just various other religions that pop up or even cult ideas that are floating around. What we need to do is get back to the Bible, have sound doctrine so that we can spot those things, spot why they’re wrong and be able to defend the authority of the word of God. Within our churches, within our families, I’ll tell you what, it’ll change our lives. It helps us repent and get back to the word of God in every area of life.

Sam Rohrer:

It certainly does, Bodie, because what you’ve just shared is sound doctrine. To put it that way, it’s sound doctrine. It’s what the Bible says. And I think in a practical sense, what the apostle Paul said in, for instance, Romans chapter 12: one and two, about not being conformed to this world and this world system, and that’s involved thinking, this world view system of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And that action, Bodie, speak to that. We don’t have too much time left, but that renewing aspect, it’s not something that’s just done one time and you’re done with it, is it?

Bodie Hodge:

No, it’s part of a sanctification process. We’re constantly growing and developing in that holiness and that’s going right back to that doctrine.

Sam Rohrer:

All right. And with that, I think we’re getting close here to the end. I didn’t ask you ahead of time, Bodie, but all of these things that we’re talking about here today, the applications are so broad, but it brings us back to this very thing. There’s doctrine, there’s sound doctrine, truth found in the word of God. And people have a choice of whether or not they go there and compare every choice and every circumstance that comes up to that grid or make determinations and choices based on something other than that truth. And that’s something we really need. So here we got about a minute left. Could I ask you in this last minute to close in prayer? You’ve talked about this subject a lot. I know it’s near and dear to your heart and it is to mine as well, but would you close in prayer and just ask the Lord to take this information and use it in the hearts of those who are listening?

Bodie Hodge:

Yeah. Dear Heavenly Father, we just thank you for being such a wonderful Lord. Thank you so much for revealing your word to us so that we can grow in your sanctification by the power of the Holy Spirit. Lord, help us humble ourselves. So many times we can buy into wrong views and Lord, we just ask for your wisdom to be able to just get rid of those false views, those false ideas that might have taken us captives in one area or another. Just Lord, help us be humble in that and realize that you’re the one that’s always right. Lord, help us be able to take this out when it comes to any aspect of doctrine, any aspect of our life, any aspect of the church or theology or government or whatever it might be. Lord, help us be honoring to you and stand on the authority of your word and elevate the glory of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ in all that we do.

We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sam Rohrer:

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Bodie, for closing this program in prayer. And ladies and gentlemen, there are a lot of things for us to pray about, isn’t it? Well, we have world events, we have national events, we have an election, we have elections occurring all over the world, but in every case, the word of God speaks to all of them. So I just pray that we take this to heart and apply it in every regard. Again, biblicalauthorityministries.org is Bodie Hodge website. Go there and you can find a lot more as he builds out this concept of doctoral application. And thank you for being with us today. God bless you all. I’ll see you later.