one of the reasons why I have such concerns about the modern use of prophecy is because in our own lives we saw tremendous damage pyotism now merges with the first great awakening which was this new thing which we could call revivalism i really think that you know it's wild to me that you can be in a church for years and go I don't think I ever heard the gospel or it was in a passing or maybe at the end of a service oh by the way Jesus died for you if you need to meet him come up here it's like it's crazy it's absolutely nuts man guys welcome to another episode of the Wake Up and Win podcast i'm your host Bla1 Fere today and I'm excited to have a new friend of mine on the show you guys may recognize this gentleman from the Messed Up Church we've got Steven Kosar welcome to the show thanks Blaze i'm uh I'm looking forward to talking to you we've already talked a bunch and it's been really really good i I appreciate all that you're doing and I want to do everything I can to you know add to what you're already doing with your audience so I hope that we can accomplish that today for sure man for sure well um you know I think I think a lot of our audience has probably seen you or heard you if they haven't seen your face they've heard your voice behind the well-edited uh fun clips of you know Bethl Church and Todd White and all these but uh but just for just for the sake of the audience if you could just give a a short background of I know you were in the charismatic movement you kind of came it's pretty a long story but just give us the background of kind of what took you out of the charismatic movement to kind of where you are today and then we'll dive into what the kind of stuff you've been covering recently you know um there's a number of things that all came together about 12 15 years ago one of them was our kids and most of their friends who were now in their late teens early 20s were just abandoning the faith m and you know they went to all the super spiritual retreats and the concerts and the conventions and you know they went to the late night prayer meetings and they did all the super spiritual stuff my my oldest my son actually went to a YWAM um disciplehip training school my middle daughter also went to a disciplehip training school after that she actually went to IHOP for just a short time and they all just turned away from the charismatic well from Christianity altogether okay but it really made me start thinking all the stuff that I was promised you know this new generation these you know these young people are going to change the world you know we heard that 20 years ago and they all heard it and they didn't change the world and instead they they gave up on Christianity in many cases so that was one of the big things I saw a lot of moral failure in the church where we were supposed to be learning how to really do stuff the Holy Spirit was supposed to be giving us the power to do stuff that you know like the regular churches weren't doing and of course that wasn't happening i saw a really a church a big charismatic church pastor had a very substantial moral failing we went to another church one of the best things that happened during this time was well a couple of things one was I we were in a small church plant we knew some people who kind of broke off and started a church plant in a storefront kind of a setting and I said I would volunteer to teach the high school youth group which was a lot of kids that were my kids' age and I said I just want to read through the Bible i don't want to do any of those dumb workbooks and all that corny stuff and I was uh we did one of the gospels i think it was Matthew but whatever it was I remember just reading through it you know chapter by chapter and thinking why don't we do this in church more why do we always have to have these thematic sermons and and I was noticing how Jesus was not very uh seeker friendly in in many cases you know um very challenging and I also at that time started checking the pastor's sermon whenever he quoted the scripture I would just look it up and I was uh always on the worship team and I I was a lot of times at the service twice and I would be there just kind of hanging out waiting to come up to the end you know when the super spiritual time starts where the the music builds and all that yeah yeah and I just started noticing you know he's quoting this passage but the way he's quoting it and what it actually says in context doesn't seem to align in in some cases interesting so you know a lot of these little things were kind of creeping in and you know we're talking about a guy who'd been a Christian his whole adult life i was a committed kind of non-denominational evangelical became more charismatic for the last 20 years and uh went to a big charismatic church really really believed in what was being taught and and I just started questioning stuff and in that process um did a lot of research did a lot of listening I I am an artist for a living so I was able to listen to podcasts listen to sermons listen to lectures and I only discovered in the last five years that I actually have a personality disorder called obsessivecompulsive personality disorder which means that I have a intense desire to always get more information about a topic that I'm interested in which is a blessing and a curse and but I I I was really riled up by all the stuff that I wasn't understanding and I knew something was wrong and I started going on to uh the internet and I found people like Chris Roseboro I found uh Bezel T3 another YouTuber guy who was just making videos kind of speaking out against some of the bad practices and I thought you know I I think I think I want to just listen to people like this people who don't have a big following they don't run a mega church they don't have a big publishing deal they're just regular people who seem to be just kind of telling it like it is mhm so then I you know long story short I I thought I was going to use all the stuff I was learning to steer this big church in the right direction and that turned out to be a really dumb idea because it was run by a pastor who wanted to do what he wanted to do he was in charge he he even had elders who were they were all young people that he trained he was giving him the Rick Joiner book The Final Quest and he was saying "Now you don't have to believe this but this is what I believe is what's happening and this is what's going on in the end times church." So uh initially I was actually really doing most of my research about the emergent church the progressive movement yep like Rob Bell type of time frame yes because our kids our our kids listen to all that stuff yeah yeah yeah that's interesting cuz that was very popular like when I was at IHOP that was very popular 2008 to 2012 and me and my friends were kind of doing research on that and going "What are these guys believing oh look how far out these guys are." Um I would be interested to relook at some of it not in the sense of where it led a lot of people to which was Unitarian Universalism or New Age beliefs cuz I saw that happen a lot but I wonder how much of it um was a necessary look that was came from just deconstructing to try to go back to you know possibly uh high church thought process and more you know original i don't know i don't know what your thoughts are on that when you It's been years since I looked at those guys but the the emergent church thing first of all it crashed and burned like nothing it it it was such a big thing and actually Bill Hibles and Rick Warren and all these guys were promoting these people because they thought we need someone to talk to the young people you know right i just want to tell everybody who's a young person whatever that means you know if that means your 20s or 30s sure you're not going to be a young person forever before you know it you're not going to be a young person anymore so forget about being a young person just be a person you know and uh one of the things that they did in that movement was they wanted to kind of grab on to some of the trappings of high church stuff they wanted to have something that kind of looked lurgical oh let's light candles you know and let's Right yeah and it was like I love lurggical churches and I think it's a good practice for sure but only because when liturgy is done correctly it gives parameters to the worship service so that the gospel is always central and the Bible is always central so a good lurggical service is really just different ways of quoting the Bible or or quoting people talking about Christ and what he's done for us you know it's and it's beautiful you know the music can be very beautiful and I and I love the fact that it can be timeless so the emergent progressive guys were grabbing on to some of that but really what they were was kind of like the uh the Episcopal churches in America which they have a wonderful rich history but it's really sad they're very very liberal a lot of them have rejected biblical authority they've rejected all of the fundamentals of the faith but they're holding on to the lurggical practice because experiences yeah yeah and it feels good to be connected to history and to tradition i think that's a good thing i really do but not at the cost of abandoning what that tradition is supposed to be protecting you know right right so now now on the other side of that um you've got the charismatic church that will speak of tradition in such a negative way that was always my experience growing up it's like oh you want to not let us lift our hands you're got tradition problems or you know you love tradition or you want to make sure the worship service doesn't go beyond 32 minutes uh it hits minute 33 now we got revival like but they always shut it off at 32 so you're just married to tradition and so speak to that if you would just the whole idea of how the charismatics pushed against tradition it's not just charismatics this is evangelicalism in a in a broad sense this episode is brought to you by Wake Up and Win Insurance we've been helping clients all over United States with term life whole life universal life and annuities for coming on 8 years now if you're looking for a way to protect your family life insurance is probably one of the best ways to do that and it's not hard to get in place work with over 25 insurance carriers and I can help almost anybody in any situation there are also ways to do infinite banking concepts which is basically life insurance with a savings account attached to it got a lot of clients that really like that option if you're interested hit me up link below schedule an appointment and I'd be happy to do a free consultation and see if I can help you out at a foundational level is reactionary it's about what it is against almost as much as what it's supposed to be in favor of m and and I'm speaking especially of popular modern evangelicalism not necessarily evangelicalism that you might you know like go back to the 1730s which is when most historians think we can start what we consider today as being modern evangelicalism but you mean like Great Awakening started yeah even even those guys Whitfield was he was like the mega pastor of his day he was a populist he he was an Anglican clergyman who basically walked out of school and turned around and said "I I I can abandon all the stuff that I was trained to do and then I can basically get a crowd around me by saying those fuddy duddy old-fashioned people won't allow me to speak in their church so I'm going to speak in the open and I'm going to give a speech out in public." and he was actually using dramatic um skills dramatic u trappings he actually had a background in it in his teenage years being very interested in theater and he then started railing against the theater while he was himself using all of the things that theater people use to get a crowd he would speak with voices and he was very dramatic and he would cry and he would act out and you know people weren't used to seeing that because that wasn't what clergymen did clergy men were pretty serious and they were used to using you know kind of a a very toned down method because whether you agree with it or not the basic idea was church is a holy place church is not a place for acting and for putting on a show church is a place where something holy takes place so he was reacting against that now you can argue about his intentions which is I don't know but honestly evangelicalism is very reactionary and I grew up in the modern evangelical world thinking all of the mainstream churches are are bad because they're liberal and that is largely true but it's not because they're mainstream it's because they turn liberal so the Episcopal Lutheran uh even Methodist and of course Presbyterian they all have a great background they all used to be very biblical and they all turn liberal and there's always a like my little Lutheran senate the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Senate is very conservative and it's completely different than the typical you know the the gay lesbian rainbow flag all the stuff that's kind of associated with modern Lutheranism sure but so so if you're always reacting against what you've been told is the bad thing you will just kind of naturally veer toward whatever they're telling you is the good thing but sometimes it's just not that clear-cut sometimes you're creating these false dichotoies between two choices when there's actually multiple choices that's interesting that's a that's a great way to put it so So you obviously you saw your kids falling away you saw um these things that just were not sinking up as you started to research which I think is you know just just actually spending time reading the word of God reading the Bible for yourself which we would I I would watch in the modern day kind of word of faith movement in a lot of charismatic churches it's like you said you kind of have a guy up there that's good at talking and there's nothing wrong with being good at talking it's nothing wrong with having a good person it doesn't disqualify you from being a minister but the reality is I think that so many times these guys are able to um kind of you you flow in some knowledge of scripture into a an exciting service and then people don't go away and check the context of what you just said um and so it sounds like you just started doing that and going "Okay wait a second." Uh so so what was kind of your first leap and I know I've seen some of you guys episodes with Pette and you guys work really well together so we'll have to have Christina and I interview you guys together sometime but um what was the first kind of mode or moment when you guys were like "Okay we're bouncing out of this and was she fully on board or what happened there with you guys making that move?" She took longer than me because I was the guy who was home all day and she's working a job doing her job and so she can't listen to podcasts all day like I can she can't do all of the stuff that I was doing so it took a little bit longer and I was very patient because I realized you know we have a lot of layers to to peel back and to reconsider some things and everybody has to do that at their own pace one of the sayings that we use a lot in our show is take responsibility for your own spiritual life m and um I needed her to process things at her own pace and you know just ask a lot of questions and say yeah but what does the Bible say i know we've been taught this but what does the Bible say and one of the things uh Pette did a an interview I think she's done a couple now with Darene Virtue where she gives some of her background because Pette was kind of the real um emotional uh she would be like a prophet she was a prophetic healing person in the charismatic church she was convinced that she was getting words for people and it it was very convincing for her and I really um I understand how hard it is for people who have had what they consider to be very real spiritual experiences to set those experiences aside and just look at what does the Bible say because I think experiences are so powerful that we filter what we think the Bible is teaching through our experiences and everybody agrees we shouldn't do that but I don't think very many people are honest enough to say "Yeah I guess I'm I'm really doing that i I I kind of want the Bible to go along with these experience I had because these experiences were so real." And one of the pieces of advice that we got and it was really more for her than it was for me and I I think it was really good advice was just set those things aside don't necessarily try to determine what it was that caused you to believe you were hearing God or you think you got a prophetic word for somebody or you you believe you you uh she actually had a really bizarre thing happened where we had Chris Gore come to our church he's a former Bethl guy out in the circuit and he's doing this healing service you know if you were the janitor at Bethl you can get a speaking gig i'm pretty sure you just say you know from Bethl and and it's a it's a big church there was a lot of people there and he was just so comfortable talking and talking and telling story after story and I'm looking around there's all these people here who were who were visiting to see this guy to get healed they weren't there to hear stories and he didn't do any healing at all and my wife Pette actually saw a teenage girl that she didn't know and she said "I I don't remember all the details but she basically said "You have a problem with a Oh I think Paul had actually felt like she was getting a headache." And she said to this girl "Do you have a headache?" And she said "Yes I've been having migraines they've been really bad." So she prayed for her and her migraines and they went away now what's crazy about that story is that you can hold on to that like this is really foundational to everything I believe which kind of would make sense right it seems like that was very real well couple years later we Paul talked to the girl's mom and she said "Oh yeah you know they came back and she's on medicine now or something." But it was there was nothing about oh she's never been the same ever since that time you prayed for her interesting the the thing about if God's going to really do something he'll do it and this idea that we have to try to figure out did God do something or not did God actually speak to me or not i I'm not sure but I think he may have told me something man I I don't know i just think that God he created the whole universe he if he wants to tell us something very specific he'll make it clear enough that we don't have to wonder if it was him or not another thing that I should bring up and I I I actually forget about this one of the reasons why I have such concerns about the modern use of prophecy is because in our own lives we saw tremendous damage in our own lives and in people around us sorry I got drymouthed no no no you're fine you're saying in your own family uh there was there was a what would be like abuse of prophecy that caused problems in your family there was a a number of things one of which was uh this guy who came to our church as a guest speaker which basically gave him the endorsement that he needed to invite people to see him whenever he came to town i'll say his name tom Stamman he's a prophet here in the Midwest he lives in Minnesota and if you go to his meetings and he hasn't seen you before he'll call you out and he'll come up front and he's like a psychic it's a Christian psychic and he always says "I'm not a psychic." And then he does exactly the same thing as a psychic would do and sometimes he's dead on with something very very personal about you that nobody knows how he got those bits of information mhm anyway we were told by him he said "I see a I see a big house in the country with land." Well years after that there was a couple at our charismatic church who said they had a house for sale and I thought we were we were looking to buy a house we had been renting for a long time and I had just done some things with my art career that allowed us to have more money not a lot of money at that moment but I could see if I just kept doing what I was doing which was basically going to these art fairs that I could make a lot more money i kind of figured out a system which is great and I was thinking maybe maybe because they've had this house for a long time we can get it at a good price because we live in the Madison Wisconsin area and prices are pretty expensive they're even more expensive now but well we go to this house and we meet with this family who we'd seen at church but we didn't really know on a personal level and they said "Well you know somebody in our prayer group said "God's telling me that you're going to sell this house to a family member." And of course nobody in their family showed any interest but they said "That must be referring to you guys because you came here and expressed interest in this house and you're part of our church family that must mean you know you're supposed to get this house." Well the fact was the house was way too expensive wow and I didn't want to buy it my first inclination my instinct from just practical wisdom was "Yeah this this is too much we shouldn't get this house." Yeah but then you know the prophetic words were "There's a house in the country." So you're remembering prophetic words and then they've got prophetic words on their side and it's and your natural practical wisdom would say this is a bad decision but you guys make a move based on the prophetic it sounds like yep so we decide we make a deal to rent this house we give them a pretty big down payment just to hold it for the next year while we rent mhm and then in 12 months we'd have a down payment because I was going to do the things that I'd learned with my art career going to these art fairs i would just do more of it the next year well what I found out the next year was some of the art fairs that I thought were really good weren't anywhere near as good as I thought they would be so I just miscalculated and I I didn't have the money yeah and so uh by God's grace I said "Sorry I can't believe it but none of this panned out like we all said it would." Yeah and we were written off by this family as you've disobeyed God somehow because the prophecy said you're supposed to buy this house oh my gosh now we we we lost that you lose the down payment likely yeah we did yeah and we had to move in a hurry and we did all this stuff and the crazy thing is I went to some art fairs right after that and I made more money in a month and a half than I ever made in my whole life and we were able to buy the house we're in now which was a much more practical house wow and it it's if I could assess it it's like what you thought was prophetic and they thought was prophetic literally it sounds like God stopped you from actually being able to do that and then blessed you on the other side of disobeying the prophetic word so that you could actually be in a place that's healthy financially for your family yeah yep everything you said that's a great summary so our experience with prophecy I I actually talked to Michael Roundree yesterday for the first time and I I really like those guys i talked to uh to Michael Miller last week and I was really impressed with the show they did where they basically said "You know what i watched that Kar and Rose and Justin Peters we agree with just about everything they said here they they they are right we probably need to be a lot more clear and and you know draw the line more clearly on some of these false teachers and we haven't done that and we're sorry and we repent of that." I was I was like "Wow this has never happened before." And I really feel like I I hope that what I'm seeing is there's been a a significant corner has been turned and I I really want to I don't want to be the next Mike Winger because number one I never will be because I'm not Mike Winger he's smarter than I am he's nicer than I am he's better that at everything he does than I am and I don't want to have a huge audience but I love being the guy who's making videos that are helping other people and I'm doing stuff behind the scenes trying to connect people and to try to build unity as much as possible so that we can prevent some really abusive leaders from continuing to abuse people and uh I I I'm at this point anyway I I I could be proven wrong and that would be terrible but I I'm convinced that those guys really do want to prevent abuses in churches as well so if you're going to be charismatic man you better you better actually follow the Bible like for instance this jabbering in tongues with no interpretation just not in the Bible there's no such thing as going on and on about you know the same words that you've been using for the last 30 years and there's nobody interpreting it and you're somehow claiming that this is what the Holy Spirit is wanting you to do i just No don't do that just stop let me ask you a question let me ask you a question actually on this point not necessarily on tongues but on um on the point of Okay so obviously Pette was the one that had most of those types of experiences and and this is going to be an interesting layout for our channel this this week because I've talked to Jesse Underwood um which was a a or sorry Jesse Westwood not Underwood Jesse Underwood or Westwood from uh Bethl and and reformed refframed theology shoot I I I get his channel wrong but and I've also talked to the guys from Minor Profits this week and I'm talking to you this week and so I'm really and as I'm talking with most of with pretty much every single interview I'm not giving push back on things I agree or disagree with i'm just going I want to hear the journey i want to hear the story because I think that's the healthy part for everybody i want to hear for from you what were the experiences that you had that you held on to maybe reframed them a little bit and what like obviously you could probably write off nine out of 10 of your maybe experiences but is there like a 10% hold on to that secretly in your heart you're like that was God or that dream wow that really pointed to something and I'm not going to make a theology around it but it I don't have a lot of scripture that knocks that one off the table does that make sense what I'm asking that's Yeah it's a good question and off the top of my head there really isn't anything super profound well I don't know how this fits exactly i one of the things about the modern church world is that it's very mystical and there are a lot of assumptions made about how do you hear God and I think there are there's always extremes and there's always a lot of nuance positions in between those extremes and one extreme which a lot of people hold to is God is not speaking individually to people today in the way that we think he speaks through the Bible and and that's Otherwise he speaks through the wisdom of people in your church and things like that and um the other more just just a it's a little bit more mystical would say "Yeah well I I feel like God is giving me inclinations or he's giving me leadings." Well you know what that's that's totally different than saying "God spoke to me and said "Thus sayaith the Lord." God said this yeah yeah yeah so does God lead us absolutely i have to believe that mhm you know so how does he lead us i think is more of the question and I think it's really easy to say I felt a certain thing and now I want to I want to believe that it was God who made me feel that certain thing when in fact maybe it wasn't sure that's the danger and so that's where we always can bring in the wisdom of older people in our church and family who can say "Yeah you know what i know you and I don't think you want to do this right now i don't think that's a good choice sure sure and we didn't have anybody like that in our life at the time when we were making the decision to get this house and honestly if somebody had said you know this probably isn't the best thing for you to do right now mhm i don't know what I would have said i may have said well uh prophecy you know we can't go against God that's that's that maybe wouldn't have been what I would have said but I really see how that's what's taking place in a lot of people's lives right and this practical down to earth kind of you know I want to be a restaurant owner okay that's nice why don't you be become a restaurant employee for a while first and talk to a bunch of other people don't just jump into stuff and think there's this there's this idea that because you're a Christian you now have this relationship with God that means that you have this special ability to bypass the normal human processes that everybody goes through to do something that you know God doesn't promise that he's going to make your dreams come true and give you whatever you want and right it's so easy to just start veering in that direction and to assume that our desires are what God wants for us that's that's very real man that's very real and and you're answering that question in a way that's it's honestly it's taken a different direction but it's it's very helpful just conceptually as I think of um like like I did a reaction video to a Justin Peters video year ago probably this was this was way back when and um and I remember I saw something about him saying God does not speak to us in dreams i mean he was very matterof fact very God does not and I just remember at that time I was just going I I don't agree with that statement because I don't think but I I understand where he's coming from because of all the abuses in the same way that if I if I were to define prophecy well what if what if you know I mean I think there's probably a lot more mystery to everything than we realize and when we stand before the Lord you know we're there and I'm like hey what's up Steve and then we're like "Hey Lord so did you ever talk to me when I was down there?" He's like "No never and I definitely never gave you a dream." You know what I mean but if I was like "Lord look at my dream journal." He's like "Yeah that's 200 dreams i gave you 199." And you thought all 200 were for me and you did things in your life that were based on what those dreams were and you watched some movies that gave you those dreams you had some conversations and you probably psychosmatically gave yourself some dreams throughout you see where I'm going with this it's like I think I think some of the def definitions within the charismatic church um deserve to be redefined maybe and so I don't know like if you want to speak to it on as far as there's cessationists right but then when I look at what these guys really believe it's actually um they actually believe that God can speak to you and but I don't know if they would ever say God spoke to me does that make sense uh yeah i think again it would be God led me mhm god God allowed or or created circumstances in my life that really put me in a certain direction and now that I'm a little bit further down that direction I realize oh God put me here you know and I could I could probably make that case for myself as far as I thought I was learning all this stuff just because I wanted to figure stuff out for myself and my own family and then for my own church and it actually didn't have an effect at all on that church i I left that church and I did try to leave as much as I could on good terms you know I didn't I didn't want to create division i realized that I didn't have a voice i was just a guy in the worship team so I left peacefully and a few families that we were close with left with us but it wasn't with this you know we're going to tell everybody how bad you are and I I I really didn't want to do that um where was I just going with that thought uh God led me you were like I I could have felt like maybe God was leading just for me but maybe it was bigger but you know and I've had people say this to me which is "Well you're doing all this stuff you're doing now with the Messed Up Church YouTube channel and your website and you've written all these articles and you made these videos and all the stuff that I've gone through is what allows me to think through these issues that I've gone through." And you know and we also were in the thought control organization of Amway in the late 1990s for four years we talked about this both of us did on Dorine Virtu's channel just about a half a year ago and I saw cult tactics being utilized and I had the willpower or the the thought processes to pull us out of it and I see those same exact thought processes being used by people like Bill Johnson and Todd White today same stuff so interesting so interesting now I I can't dive deep into this but I will say that you telling me that about your Amway experience um I never did Amway or anything like that but I was when I was building an insurance agency and I'm not doing that anymore i I just I mean I I sell insurance for a living that's what I do but I uh when I was in the the world of building an agency and doing a lot of that I actually knew a lot of people that were from that whole world of Amway back in the '90s and I saw similar ideals and similar thought patterns and and they they recommend all the same books and all this different stuff so it's interesting that um and you know insurance was set up much differently than like an Amway thing because you have to literally you know you're working with these large insurance carriers not just like some soap products or something like that that Amway is promoting so it was different but I saw the similar tactics so when you tell me all that I'm like oh yeah I could see that this there and there and there were things that whenever I kind of stepped away from you know being like okay I'm going to go build this thing with this company i had to like literally look and go "Oh yeah that's like that that's word of faith movement what do I um I don't want to say I sat around and renounced all day but I was just like what are the things that I'm going to like no longer think and no longer because I don't feel like it's helpful literally to my Christianity to my walk with Jesus?" and and um so it's interesting that you say all that because I I do think that there's a lot of patterns in the health wealth success world that that's how we got that's how we got in the charismatic church okay we we went to a charismatic church because of Amway interesting we were going we were going to a small evangelical free church and we started going to these Amway meetings and we started hearing the speakers who were word of faith m we we didn't um hear them come right out and say "By the way we're teaching word of faith doctrine." You know they just said that we're teaching the Bible we're Christians right but it was it was different and it was positive and one of the false dichotoies would be well we're the positive Christians everyone else are the negative Christians which of course is ridiculous nobody's totally negative and nobody's totally positive right but um the church that we wound up going to had a background of being uh kind of word of faith and definitely has a it was founded originally in the 1920s as an early Pentecostal church but it became very closely associated with Robert Schuler because the pastor who really built it up in the 70s and in the 80s he was a big fan of Robert Schuler so I was reading Robert Schuler not a lot of his books but a few a lot of that positive thinking stuff we were reading in Amway yeah and it's not all bad it's not like you should always not be positive yeah but but this idea that you can make stuff happen with your mind and you know if you just focus on something it has to happen and all this stuff there was a lot of overlap so when we went to this charismatic church and we heard stuff that sounded like what we were hearing in Amway we felt like oh yeah this is where God has placed us and of course none of it panned out we lost our shirts in Amway and of course uh after another gosh 12 years or so in that church is when we left so it was it was through really hard experiences that we we were this is this is a really good direction I want to go because a lot of people are thinking about this idea of deconstruction and and here's what I did and I don't want to sound like I'm great or anything i just as a Christian who's Come on Steve talk positively you're great say it say I'm great who's that guy that used to be um that character on Saturday Night Live a million years ago i'm smart i'm funny and people like me dog on it people like me stuart Smallley that's who it is no I I I get the idea of sort I sort of get the idea of deconstructing to the extent that if you've been in a a really kind of weird abusive possibly or just unbiblical charismatic kind of environment Yeah you you need to peel back the layers and figure out what were you being taught that's really biblical and what was just pseudobbiblical you know they said it was biblical but when you really look at it it's like h that's not biblical so I I think the term deconstruction in and of itself isn't a bad term but it can also refer to I'm just I'm giving up on Christianity which obviously I don't want to do and that's that's a big focal point of my church um of my of my messed up church i want people to maintain their faith i want people to keep going to church and that's um so for me I I was saying you know one of the common denominators that I've noticed because we went through a period for about five years after this uh big church thing happened with a moral failing of a pastor we went to a startup church and then in a very short time we went to a number of different churches including a house church with some people that we knew and trusted and none of these were terrible bad experiences with you know abuse or anything but I just realized that everybody claimed that they were biblical everybody mhm but they were teaching completely different things and and and all that made me do was to say well I need to figure out for myself what does it mean to be biblical and then I realized this is not easy this is actually something that takes time and there there is even a place to say you know I see where they're coming from let's say as an example the reformed Baptist world which is a little bit ambiguous because there's the reformed Baptist that would that would go along with the uh the 1689 London Baptist confessions and then there's like a John MacArthur which would also include more of a um dispensational viewpoint but anyway that category I love those guys and I have a lot of friends who are in that camp and I I like to use the phrase I'm not convinced of all of their positions i'm not convinced of those but man they focus on the Bible a lot and I really appreciate that they focus on Jesus dying on the cross they focus on the gospel a lot so that's where Yep that's where So that's where peace in in the charismatic movement and the more I hear you talk the more I'm just going I really think that you know it's wild to me that you can be in a church for years and go I don't think I ever heard the gospel or it was in a passing or maybe at the end of a service oh by the way Jesus died for you if you need to meet him come up here it's like it's crazy it's absolutely nuts man yeah and one of the things that I love I could I could talk for hours and I actually do sometimes and Pette has to go like they're falling asleep Steve they do not think you you've worn them out but I there's a there's a historical development through time through centuries actually that leads us to the place where the charismatic church does what it does today and it's not because they're all a bunch of nasty heretics who are filled with the devil and they have bad intentions there's just a lot of ideas that had some good and some bad and over time the bad part continues and maybe the good parts kind of fall away as they stack on some other you know good intention but bad ideas ultimately um and so we're at a place now with the charismatic movement where um I I could go through the whole history of how it got to where it is i I love reading i've got a library of hundreds of books in the last 10 years I've been buying i don't go to the library because I always forget to return books so I just buy them i I love going to abbes.com and I just buy them you can get a lot of good books for five $10 each so there's a there's a um an understanding that I have of the Reformation and one of the really really helpful resources was the White Horse in which originally was a radio show now it's actually um you know a podcast okay and Michael Horton was the host i mean he still does do stuff with it's not like he's dead or anything but there's other people involved and they would have usually four guys talking about the modern evangelical church world and one of them was a Presbyterian one of them was a reformed Baptist one of them was usually a Lutheran and they would talk from their theological positions and then they would contrast what was going on in the modern evangelical pop world you know Joel Olstein and all those sorts of things and after listening to those podcasts for a while I started to realize oh yeah there's some fundamental differences between early Protestant beliefs from the first couple of hundred years you know going like to the 1500s to the 1600s and then you compare that to really into the uh later 1700s and especially into the later 1800s things really changed a lot so everybody thinks a Protestant is just all the same and there's a huge amount of difference well that's something I've definitely thought been thinking through lately as far as Protestantism and evangelicalism they're not necessarily the same no yeah no and one of the things that's really interesting is that the the mainstream church bodies in early Protestantism were largely either Lutheran or they were more reformed or Calvinist those were the two big Protestant bodies and they developed a lot of times you know it wasn't um because people decided to believe those things it was because the church and the state were the same and so each country would either adopt one or the other so it was the the end result of that was in the 1600s you had literal wars of Catholics killing Lutheran and Lutheran killing Catholics and you know it just so they combined church and state and and nobody does that today doesn't work out well no it doesn't work out well but um a a a reaction against that was the pyotist movement and the pyotist movement is one of the two biggest components that leads us to modern evangelicalism today pyotism basically said you know all that doctrine and all that fighting why don't we just love each other why don't we just try to be Jesus and let's just meet together and have small groups and it's all about the heart it's not about the head this was happening in the 1600s and so those ideas actually fizzled in Germany because they actually came out of the Lutheran church and the Lutheran church said you know there's there's some problems with what you're saying here i I I get some of this but you're you're actually going against what our Lutheran confessions teach and confess and you you can't change those things so the the ideas went to other places and one of them was the Puritans they brought over these ideas through the various writers mhm who had been expressing these ideas for roughly hundred years so this idea of pyotism now merges with the first great awakening which was this new thing which we could call revivalism so most historical people that I've read all agree that pyotism and revivalism are what merged together to form evangelicalism m and that was in the early 1700s 1730s 1740s into the 1800s it gets a lot more diverse in America because we don't have any church or state kind of connection so anybody can believe anything everybody starts bunch of things everywhere yeah yes yeah that's when you get the Mormons the Jehovah's Witnesses and a million different denominations and it splinters like crazy because everybody's saying "Well solos scriptor just means it's you and your Bible you get to make up whatever you want right?" which I actually I actually feel like that's the same feelingism kind of of charismatic or the charismatic movement which is like well we I got this in prayer today I got this in the scripture today and then and if you're influential enough you can start a church off of it and and as long as it's in the Bible kind of then people will just go along with it but literally your whole movement will never preach the gospel and you're like wait a second what what what is going on and so almost in a sense we're the same as like a the Mormons that like yeah I had a burning in my bosom in prayer therefore I am you know like Did Jesse Westwood talk to you about that you know we didn't get into a lot of detail about it but we we talked he he talked about how he was watching uh Jeff Durban uh interview a Mormon and the and he was agreeing with the Mormon at the time and he was going "That's not good." And I'm like "Yeah dude i can hear that." Yeah yeah but I do I do want to ask you another question i I think because we're in the 1800s now and you're moving evangelicalism to the 1900s so on i do want to ask you a question i want to come back to regarding Catholicism so maybe keep going with the evangelical history up to today and then I want to I want to go back and ask you a question about mysticism keep keep going yeah well the the later half of the 1800s America was very entrepreneurial anybody could teach anything thing and if you were convincing enough you could you could get a crowd and you could sell books and you could create a following whether you were a Christian or you were a spiritualist yeah there's all sorts of weird things being taught one of the one of the misconceptions I think a lot of people have is we got to get back to the good old days when everybody just went to church and read their Bibles and had their little clippity-clap horse and buggy and they were all good and it actually was it did not exist yeah even even uh Jonathan Edwards in the Great Awakening the first one which really wasn't a great awakening that's just a term that people added to a bunch of separate events later when that was actually happening there was nobody saying "Wow there's a great awakening spreading over the entire country there it was a little thing happening here and there." But Jonathan Edwards who was a great theologian the last great theologian in America I I think you could say in terms of having a huge influence Yeah he was he was reacting against what he saw as this hardening of the hearts of the people who they were succeeding they were in uh the upper echelons of society they were members of the church and it meant nothing to them and so I think his intentions were largely good he was a good man you know and he was a Calvinist he he was a guy that you know today you're supposed to think is the bad guy you know one of those again overly simplistic false take armies um so into the late 1800s there's so much splintering the holiness movement develops out of Methodism methodism is an is a phenomenal story in the early 1800s the Methodist movement was basically guys on their horseback saying "I'm going to go out and preach the gospel because I don't want people going to hell." I read about that yeah I read about the Wesley brothers and all the um wasn't Well the Wesleys were earlier that was that was in the 1700s by the time the American version of Methodism is much more primitive and much more anti- theology really okay because the east coast of America was established that's where they had the seminaries that's where the smart people would go with money and so the these are these are stereotypes but you know sure they're sometimes based on partial truth the interior of the country which would be like you know uh Ohio Kentucky this was incredibly primitive and the people were living like incredible pagans america as a frontier country was really really rough drinking and prostitutes and gambling and people with their guns literally killing each other i mean so there was this intense desire to go into the into those environments and preach this gospel yes and and it was a very primitive gospel that basically kind of met people where they were at but after a few generations it actually worked and amazingly Methodism turned these rough people into after just a couple of generations successful business owners they went to college they were making money and the reaction against that was the holiness movement saying "Well the Methodists aren't like they used to be they used to be fire and brimstone they used to be flopping around on the floor they used to do all that weird stuff now they're all dignified and they own businesses and they own homes." And so you you you're always dealing with it there's always a reaction basically yeah yeah and so out of the holiness movement one of the aspects was trying to figure out what does it mean to be uh either baptized in the Holy Spirit or baptized by the Holy Spirit and one of the things that came out of that was well I think that would mean you'd actually be speaking in tongues that wasn't what everybody taught but that was one of the ideas and Charles Parham was a crazy nut job charles Parham was insane i'm giving you the thumbnail sketch because I've been reading about all these guys and this is what I'm working Most of my most of my research is about Parham about uh John Alexander Dowi who was a unbelievable Zion uh he created Zion Illinois or something yeah Zion is where a lot of stuff spread out of and especially the word of faith movement out of Zion sprung forth most of the heresies that we have today not is that a Bible verse out of Zion sprung forth the heresies yes I know it sounds like it sounds like Isaiah but not um yeah uh Frank Sanford was another guy who was was living at the same time as uh this John Alexander Dowi and they both considered themselves to be Elijah they both said this is the end generation this is the last generation before the return of Christ and therefore you know God is raising up a new leader to spread the the new movement of God the fi finally we're doing it right we're the real church we're doing everything that Christians have never done before and I just happened to be the leader of it because God told me so frank Sanford actually was convicted of manslaughter he literally let women and children die under his care while he lived in luxury it's a crazy story jeez and and John Alexander Dowi wasn't much better and Parham was he also did he also have like he was he was actually greatly influenced by both of those gentlemen he actually learned about speaking at tongues at Frank Sanford's Shiloh cult six months before he came uh he went back to Kansas and started his own little they call it a a school or a college but it was basically a rented building with about 30 people mostly young women who were basically sitting around listening to him lecture all day and out of that is supposed to be where the modern Pentecostal movement started although it didn't really spread directly from that one moment in in 1901 it was actually you know uh William Seymour who took those ideas from Parham he sat outside the classroom and listened to Parham preaching for a couple of or teaching for a couple of weeks because he couldn't go in the room because Parham was an avowed racist um but it was Seymour who took the idea of speaking in tongues being that one final sign that now you really do have the Holy Spirit in a way that no one has ever had before and now that we finally have this thing we're gonna we're gonna do this uh end times uh victorious this would be Parham was the turn of the century he's he started really having some um influence in the early 1900s okay and and Isuza Street was 19 say William Seymour Isuza Street uh California is that right am I right in that okay yeah yeah so so let me ask you this um cuz obviously we could go down that that trail for a while and No it's fun honestly we need to have some off the record conversations on this um but cuz I've read a lot of the charismatic viewpoints of history i've read a lot of the books back in the day it's been years since I've read them but they're terrible they're so bad that's one of the passions I have is to correct it's called heography it's when you when you turn somebody who basically was promoting themselves during their own lifetime and they were writing about themselves making up stories about themselves and you just take that all as fact totally that's what he did that's what you've got what's his name uh uh Robert yeah and so and I know that he ended up being a homosexual and being outed as a homosexual roberts did and and pretty much all the the God's generals had you know major lots of moral failings in their life add on probably a lot of heresy involved in their life too i want to I want to ask you this question and and like okay so clearly there's a lot of these guys and a lot of these movements sprang off of stuff but if a if you handed a Bible to a person and they read they read Old Testament to New Testament let's just say New Testament they read all four gospels then they read the book of Acts then they read the epistles clearly once you get into the epistles you have a ton of things that are focused on like proper church governance like healthy doctrine paul is not sitting around in the epistles telling people to like how to heal people that's not like he mentions it he clearly mentions in Corinthians about spiritual gifts uh but he's not spending the majority of his time in these epistles talking about how to do this that and the other he's focusing on the mystery of the gospel that was handed down and he's also focusing on church governance and setting up proper church structure but if you read in the book of Acts the storyline like it seems that if if you don't take a I'm wondering if there's a way to divorce the storyline of the book of Acts for from the revivalism culture so when I ask you this question I'm saying like cuz clearly there's this these processes throughout the book of Acts it's not just Acts chapter 2 but over time conversations that this happened this person spoke in tongues or whatever and there wasn't somebody going "Oh that means this." That's an interpretation so does that make sense so I can be like I I can I'm looking as a person that is a charismatic and going "Okay I see the abuse and where people are getting up and speaking in tonesues from stage or saying "Everybody let's all speak in tonesues right now go go go go go." And that rahrrah world and I I mean I was in that for a long time and so I think on this side of it I'm going I can see the the things where and when people would ask me about that scripture back in the day I just be like or that experience of corporate tongues and then be like "Show me that in scripture." I'd be like "You just don't get it." You know that's kind of the answer for charismatics that love it well you just don't get it but now I'm going "Well no i I clearly see some abuses that actually put pressure on people to to speak in tongues when they just simply don't but I also see if you were just to hand the Bible to somebody that never read it and they go "Oh that's interesting." You know what I mean like like Acts 19 and so on and so forth so is from your perspective um is it the abuse of it or is it the reality that there probably is a private gift of tongues at all or is that something that you would recognize there is a private gift of tongues or it's only a public does that make sense the yeah that's a really good series of questions one of the the points that I think is really difficult to land on with complete certainty is this idea of the private prayer language Mhm um one of the things that Parham was adamant about was that tongues were people speaking in known languages there's no such thing as private prayer language according to the founder of Pentecostalism interesting see I haven't heard that that's why he didn't like what he saw at Isuza he said "These people are falling all over themselves." He also didn't like the fact that black people and white people were in the same room together so yeah that's problematic which is that was what that's probably the best thing that came out of the the Isuza street was this that the racial divide just disappeared but you know what it came right back again it didn't last very long but you mean it was like a healing that that left and then didn't they didn't keep the healing um but the idea of a private prayer language where you're just kind of speaking privately to yourself and that's going to do something for you that developed after it became very clear that people weren't speaking in known languages so That's just a really I think kind of eye-opening point where a lot of times the way it's taught is well that's what it is there's this thing there's a tongues where you speak out publicly and there should be interpretation and then there's the private version which you do and it's just the Holy Spirit kind of building you up somehow well that that's an interesting interpretation it might be right but there's a lot of people who say actually you can't really prove that from the Bible very clearly at all in fact the people who came up with those doctrines were the ones who were saying "We got to come up with something because this whole idea that we've now got the ability to speak in known languages isn't happening it's just so the known languages uh doctrine or whatever that you're mentioning isn't necessarily from the Bible either." Like I mean it is from Acts chapter 2 that there was clearly known languages being spoken in that moment in time it seems very clear as day but it doesn't seem like when Paul's explaining that in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 that he's telling people oh yeah make sure you know we're proving that it's spoken in known languages i just don't think it's a main doctrine of the church frankly and you know what that's a super good point because uh going back to me talking about I was the worship leader and I was checking the Bible whenever I heard a sermon being preached i came up with the first rule for Steve Kosar which you dear listener may want to take for yourself which is just check everything with the Bible just check it and uh on top of that if it's something that we really should be focusing on then it really should be something that the Bible focuses on not just mentions a time or two but it should be something that's very central so your point right there I think was excellent simply that in in first Corinthians we got correction to people who are all off on these weird tangents we don't have any of the other instructive epistles where Paul is saying now make sure you do tongues this way and don't do it that way and make sure that it so one of the things that's um I think really healthy to say is is it possible that if we believe that God is sovereign and God can do whatever he wants is it possible that God could today speak through a person in a especially in an evangelistic encounter to say "I'm gonna speak in your language and I'm going to tell you that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and he's real and you better repent and I'm going to say it in a language that I don't know how to speak but I'm going to say it perfectly in your language for this very distinct moment in time because God knows that that person is never going to hear the gospel ever again." You know what i talked to David Loey the guy who was the the writer and the narrator of the Cessationist movie we were sitting down and talking about it he said "Oh yeah i absolutely believe that could happen." Yeah you know so this idea that a cessationist thinks the Holy Spirit is like done he's not doing anything at all anymore is is one of those I think it's a great it's a great point because it's a straw man argument and I I would say that that's helpful for charismatics to hear because I think that Yeah that like I think that probably the cessationist crowd or the the leaders of it would probably agree more so with a normal charismatic on like are people that consider themselves charismatic i think that they would probably agree more with cessationist leaders than they realize if everybody read their Bible and listen to each other talk about it cuz that's what I realized when I reacted to Justin Peters over time i went you know what I think I actually just agree i think that he we agree probably more than we disagree and the reality is that um I think it's a disagreement for and I'm not even saying for me cuz I don't even know where I stand on how I define so many of these things at this point regarding like like uh like cessationism does not believe that God is not doing anything ever besides like sitting inside of a Bible you know and sitting in heaven and sitting in the Bible like cessationism would not say that but I think charismatics overuse the the their definitions in how they're operating in spiritual gifts and and so many times they're like I think Paul would probably have a heyday with the American charismatic movement and and as far as writing a Corinthian style blog to us like dude you guys just don't you guys just need to sit down and just like actually I think so much charis charismatic so much of the charismatic movement the main issue is that there's not a gospel- centered focus it's literally on how to walk with God by utilizing spiritual gifts it's like no no no you don't even know you know the basic gospel you heard it one time a long time ago and you haven't heard it since and you're probably not rooted and grounded in that reality and I think we would all do really well and I'm just saying to my own crowd here I think we'd all do really well to go back to that central focus and I think spring forth from there and it's not to take away the the experience you had in speaking in tonesues i mean uh I speak in tonesues you know and I don't do it on our show cuz I don't want I don't know if Steve Kosar has the interpretation so I'm not going to do it but uh totally kidding but uh but yeah it's not to take away from people's experiences but I don't hang my hat on my experiences i look at the gospel and whatever is not leading me back to the gospel and springing out what I can impact the world with the gospel I don't find it helpful and um so anyway I don't I don't know i had to go on a little tangent there but what are your thoughts that's a really good tangent and let me finish a thought i always go on tangents and I want to get back to one of the main thoughts which remember I was talking about I was peeling back the layers and deciding what do I want to believe well first of all I'm just going to go to the Bible and I'm going to make sure that I keep going back to the Bible i'm not going to just believe that somebody is preaching something or teaching something biblical because they say they are mhm and and you know there's there's there's certain things that you know you need to understand what it means to try to pull the meaning from the text as opposed to insert your own meaning into the text you know exugesus versus isogesis there's um the idea that the Bible is to be interpreted with some kind of interpretive method everybody's doing it everybody if you don't believe you're using any kind of a theological grid well you're just creating your own theological grid while you are not admitting that you're doing that thing that's a great point unless you're using a pre-existing theological grid you're going to insert your own meaning into the text somehow mhm and so the original Protestant Reformation did this incredibly radical thing by saying "We don't think the authority of the church has the same authority of scripture." So then they had to say "Well what do we believe about the Bible?" The Lutheran confessions were basically saying "We told everybody we don't believe the Roman Catholic stuff." Well which stuff do we disagree with and and how do we you know how do we explain what we do believe and we'll have to use the Bible to do that they spent about 70 years doing that and the finished bundle of writings is called the Lutheran Confessions or the book of Concordia which was finalized in like 1575 or something that's an example of a confessional document which was established by many godly the theologians over a long period of time and one of the one of the benefits to that kind of interpretive method is it's just not some guy saying I think this might be true because I had a dream or you know I really feel strongly about such and such it was it was actually it started with Martin Luther but it was written long after he was dead and gone but his emphasis on the gospel and about the assurance of what Christ has done for us was always there because that's the foundation and this is so this is such something I wish I would say more often because I already know it and you know when we know things internally we kind of forget that other people maybe don't know those things but the gospel is about what Christ has done the gospel is not about what we will do preach obviously if we if we believe the gospel we will do some good things with that certainly we want to we want to we want to praise God we want to serve God we want to preach about God but it's really it's a really big misconception to say that the gospel is something we do or the gospel is really the gospel needs us the gospel is a pre-existing thing it's a belief in what Christ has come and done and that's primarily to die on the cross for our sins to give us assurance and everything should be built on that foundation that's an interpretive grid so when you were talking about people kind of coming up with their own interpretive grid um the reason why that's a good grid is because we see the Apostle Paul using that same grid i preach Christ and him crucified yes yes he he never said "I preach about whatever you know whatever the new thing is in whatever town I go to." He didn't change the he might adopt the message a bit to fit with the crowd if they had a different background like he talks about but it was always focused on Christ and so man when I heard that I just went man that's so simple why didn't I hear this more often and and so um for people who are trying to find their way I would suggest that you obviously go to the Bible first and foremost and have that Christ centered foundation and then I would really recommend not going to a non-denominational startup church with a guy who's really persuasive no matter how good his intentions are that's just not my favorite sure now if you're going to be if you're going to be Pentecostal the Assemblies of God actually did a lot of work just after the first decade of the beginning of the Pentecostal movement it was started I believe in 1914 i visited their headquarters in Springfield Missouri about 5 years ago and there there were some really good well-meaning theologians who said you know this this whole Pentecostal thing is growing like crazy but man there's no structure there's no theology we got to we got to put some parameters on this otherwise it's just going to turn into some weird thing and it's already happening mhm the movement that reacted against that was the rain movement is what we're in now and and it's just an extension of the latter rain movement from the late late 40s they say "Yeah all that structure and the denomination again it's another reaction." Yeah and and the and actually the N the New Apostolic Reformation is a reaction in some ways to the shephering movement of the 1970s where it was very hierarchical and everybody was supposed to do whatever their leader told them which was incredibly abusive so now the N is you can join whatever network you want if you don't like it quit start your own network you know it's it's just it's it's very free flowing and very ambiguous and it also makes it incredibly hard for anybody to ever to ever be held accountable yes which is what which is part of the mess we're in right now yeah yes well man this has been so helpful and enlightening one of my favorite points you made and and uh just I love I love your historical knowledge you know just that you are a reader a voracious reader obviously and listener um I the interpretive grid uh idea um concept is huge and I think a lot of young people just don't realize that that they're all interpreting the Bible through a grid and if they're not if they say they're not they're just interpreting it on their own and I think it's actually very dangerous because they're like solo scriptura just me in the Bible it's like me the Bible and Holy Spirit it's like no you do need to be connected to a community and it might be helpful if that community is connected to a larger broader community which I think is in some ways why right now if you go online it's very popular to see the debates between Catholics and Orthodox Orthodox and Protestants Protestants and evangelicalism and I think it's actually healthy because I think we actually need to be connected to our history because um I'm not of the opinion that all Catholics are um non are not saved and I'm not of the opinion that all Orthodox are not saved and I'm not of the opinion that they're all correct and I'm not all all of that i think that we need to have the conversation in a way that connects us to our history and understand why there were splits why there were breaks and who we are because of what what our history comes from and it might tell us a lot about why we're seeing the mess that we're in and so um yep those are really good points you know and just to build on that before I go off on a really big tangent cut me off if you have to but I got about seven minutes to the podcast um only because the wife is telling me we got to roll out pretty soon so well that's important if you've been in an environment where you listen to a popular charismatic preacher you have been fed and you've been actually conditioned to just believe him whether he intended for that to happen or not he's been manipulating you because he was probably manipulated by somebody else that's exactly right this is how this is how we get our information as Christians a lot of times and what I've found is that one of the first things I did was I just stopped listening to television and I stopped listening to popular culture stuff i I I do a little bit of that more now because I need a break from all the heaviness of the weird dark things that we have to expose but um when I started going into theology and history I I kid you not I feel like my mind uh expanded like I had this brain that wasn't being used and I really feel like God has given each of us a brain that has all this capacity and we've heard this you know for decades you know your brain's only being used for a small portion of its potential or whatever whatever the case I don't want anybody to be intimidated by this idea that you know to learn theology is is so deep and and unfathomable that you just don't want to go there and you just want to latch on to whoever makes you feel comfortable we we as humans want to veer towards what we're used to and what we're comfortable with and that actually maybe is part of your problem that's why you wound up where you wound up so it's going to take some effort but it's kind of like you know exercise if you exercise after not having exercised for a while it hurts a little bit but then you start building up muscle and actually starts to feel good i think our brain is in a is a similar sort of a muscle that's a great point man and I it it just it reminds me back in uh you know my first kind of exit from uh IHOP was 2012 actually and and it was definitely reactionary i definitely went into another reactionary kind of mode but one of the things that was really helpful was Paul's epistles and I just I dove deeply into the gospel like I had never had before and I almost could have become a Calvinist but I but I didn't go that route because I just I didn't agree with some of those points and um but I did come to a conclusion that the gospel was totally a missed component in the charismatic movement which is mind-boggling like isn't this whole thing about the gospel you know and so so that definitely was a shift in my world years ago and I started just digging deeper and deeper into the gospel now what I found was that once you start diving in there um in especially in the charismatic movement there's a whole inclusion movement which is basically ultimate uh ultimate reconciliation regarding hell and I saw that over there and I started going down that road and then I realized that's not the road that I really think I'm I agree with either although I was there for about six months and and I guess I'm saying all this to say that it's okay to read and explore outside of your purview and debate and listen and as long as you stay open-minded to coming back to the scriptures and anytime I would veer a little far in this direction there was always scriptures that people would debate me with that pulled me back to the centrality and the focus of Christ him crucified and um and and our part in that in the sense that our part is belief our part is obedience to the gospel which is basic belief and uh yeah but I I I love what you're saying here and I think that um I think our audience is really really going to be helped by this and I'm definitely going to point them all to go watch the messed up church because we didn't really even get to this but frankly um Steve has been doing this for a long time and you know some of the the Bickle exposure stuff yeah he didn't know that Bickl was a sexual predator but man you know sometimes the theology can point to point to some of the problems but he's been talking about Bickl for a long time talking about a lot of these guys even Todd White who's going through his own situation right now of exposure i mean I think you've got videos of Todd from two three four years ago um five or six years ago actually five or six years ago so so anyway I want to point people over to your your uh website and messed up church and um also your painting you know he does uh you do commissioned paintings you're very very good at your paintings and so um maybe we'll put a That's what I'm working on right now i love it i love it it's it's much larger than normal but yeah stephvencar.com is my is my website for art that's actually my real job so to speak i'm in this dual career weird position right now as a as an older man and I I don't know what I'm doing but you know this is where God has led me apparently so I feel really good about it i feel you man i love it and you're doing a great job and I just want to say thanks for talking to me thanks for I I love these boundaries breaking you know watching you guys talk with uh with Remnant Radio you know it's just it's fun because I just believe that God has something in in all of us to gain from to take us back to the centrality of the gospel and um you know I think he's in all this so anyway I'm not going to prophesy that there's a unity or a movement coming but hey maybe maybe there is but uh thanks Steve i appreciate you brother thanks please