Did you know that there are different species of the fear of man, which has a paralysing effect on us? The Bible says that the fear of man is a snare. And you may know personal deliverance from the fear of man on the streets, maybe proclaiming the gospel and knowing a spirit-primed ability to be able to proclaim the gospel with boldness, as Paul said, and in other places, that he should do with boldness. Ephesians 6 and verse 20, I think it is. But there are also species of the fear of man that affect us, I think, not on the streets, not on the godless, lawless streets of Great Britain, but within the church, with brothers and sisters in the church. And might I say, particularly those who we admire and love and respect the most. That's where I think the fear of man can be most potent. And I want to confess something today as I do this video now as quickly as I can, which is to say that I have recognized something of that in myself, something of the fear of man in and amongst the men in the land who I love, respect, and admire the most. I'm not talking about the flakes who are preaching heresy. I'm not talking about those who are um grossly immature in ways that we might have caricatures in our minds about. I'm talking about the men in the church who whose doctrine is sound, whose doctrine is largely sound at least. And I want to share a little story, I want to share a little word of testimony, which is to say that a couple of years ago, less than two years ago, I had an invitation, a personal invitation from Ian Murray, one of the one of the finest men in the country, in his 90s, written many world-class biographies, including JC Riles, a fine biographer, fine writer, pastor, and so on. Now I'm not claiming for a moment to know Ian Murray in any particular intimacy as friends, but I did have a phone call from him about 18 months ago, having been in email correspondence with him, and during that phone call, Ian Murray brought to me a prophetic word. Now, it wasn't a prophetic word in his mind, and he didn't describe it as that, but during the course of our conversation, there was what I have no doubt was an example of the word of knowledge by the gift of the Holy Spirit in and amongst our conversation. And I'd had a dream the night before his phone call. So it's not an everyday occurrence to have a phone call from Ian Murray, the one of the kind of founders of the Banner of Truth Trust in Edinburgh and America. It's not an everyday occurrence to have a phone call. And during that phone call, of course, he didn't know anything about the dream I'd had the night before, but the night that the night before I'd had a dream, and it was one of the dreams that I'll never forget, a dream that was very clearly of the Lord. And within the dream, I don't need to go into all the detail now, but the dream, around the dream, there was a central motive of a candle being lit and that caught fire onto a curtain inside a house, and the candle that was lit essentially then caught fire onto the curtain, and of course the whole house was then brought down. And during the phone call with Ian, he said to my wife actually, Mary, who he was speaking to at the time I'd passed the phone over to her, that he didn't believe that the Lord had lit the candle of my ministry for no reason. That's quote for quote word for word what Ian said. And of course, I then relayed back to him what I believe, I had absolutely believed at the time and have no doubt, still believe was what the Lord was saying at the time, what his kind of unwitting, unknowing sense of interpretation of that was. Now the reason I mentioned that is because shortly after that, Ian invited me. I was invited to the pastors, Banner of Truth Pastors Conference of 2025, and I didn't want to go. I didn't want to go because I know, I knew and know even more now by personal experience, that if I'm in and amongst 300 pastors, mainly from the UK, some overseas, and in the kind of rubbing of shoulders, the camaraderie that should be at least, and I share my heart, as we do, men talk and share what's on their heart. I knew that if I shared on my heart what was on my heart, I would be treated in a certain way. And so I very nearly didn't go to the I did I very nearly turned the invitation down and didn't go. Just as a guest. And I think the encouragement was to come along and see what what's happening and the positive things that the Lord is doing, and so on and forth and so forth. And to be as gracious as I can be, and certainly without mentioning any of the individual guys in question, my time at the conference was painful in the extreme. For two reasons. One, because of what I'm about to tell you in a minute, in terms of the lack of personal corporate lament and repentance and so on, but also because of the patronizing, uh blinkered, obtuse, hard-hearted response from individual men to the sharing of my heart in and amongst the ebb and flow of conversation. And for any of you anyone who knows me and Mary and the conviction of our heart and the position and the stance that we've taken over years, is that the churches were closed in 2020 as a judgment of the Lord because of the profound unfaithfulness of the churches across the board. I've written about it extensively, I've worked all of it out in a very clear, kind of biblically scripturally sound way for you to read and listen to should you want to. So my point is that I knew intuitively that I was going to be that the response to my presence at the conference was going to be personally painful, and to be honest, I didn't see it being particularly helpful, constructive because of that. As I anticipated, exactly what happened was exactly what I thought was going to happen, and um anyway, enough said about that. The response was as I thought. I I was treated as an immature, kind of unteachable, slightly off the rails, misguided fellow who really just needed to get back into church and and find a church to become a member of. That was it. Now, the reason I started off by saying that I felt paralysed by the fear of man is because of because of instances like that where it's not actually a weighty thing to have men who you don't respect or admire or love to attack you for X, Y, and Z for accuse you of being a cessationist by people who are just part of the charismatic circus. That doesn't bother me, but what bothers me is when men who I respect and love and admire behave in a certain way that they think is themselves mature, they themselves think is the fruit of their own solid doctrine and right standing with the Lord. But in fact, it's actually just the exact opposite. I find that particularly, and it's taken me this time to actually put my money where my mouth is and tell the world what I think is happening and what I think needs to happen. So I am sorry, and before the Lord, I'm sorry that it's taken me this long to kind of I suppose pluck up the courage to actually do this and challenge the banner of truth men, the finest men as I as I consider in the country, to challenge them and to actually call them to repentance and to issue um well, I suppose it is a rebuke. I suppose it is a rebuke of the Banner of Truth Trust and the Banner of Truth Pastors Conferences, that there wasn't a call to repentance. And this is this is what I'm saying is that during the conference, I listened, I leaned in, I longed and prayed for there to be the kind of content from the pulpit that would be proportional to the day and hour that we're living in, would be appropriate, and again it is proportional, a proportional response, call to repentance for the church to be on their knees across all of the peaks and troughs and to respond to the hour in which we are by a radical abandonment of business as usual in order to facilitate that. All the while we think we're repentant or experiencing biblical lament and distress, whilst refusing to let go of business as usual, we're manifestly proving that we've not understood biblical repentance, we've not understood crisis moments and junctures in the life of the church where it's not possible to repent and respond to the Lord as He means whilst we continue to do everything that we've always ever done. And so my feedback very recently to the guys at Banner was to point that out and to say somebody had said, I was so glad that you had enjoyed the conference and so on. But I hadn't enjoyed the conference. I'd come away distressed and upset and in pain because not just of the absence of an appropriate word and call to action, a call to repentance and prayer at the time, but because of the oh-so-predictable response of men to the prophetic word, to the word that is harder to bring and harder to hear, which is that the church are in a far worse condition, more precipitous than we understand it to be. The declension, the moral slide, the kind of deferring to each and everyone's camps as being the arbiter and the umpire of that which is true, and to what extent are we in trouble, that kind of thing. That that's the problem, and that's why there wasn't a sense in my own heart of these men having heard the spirit of the living God. And so, in fact, I think there is a resisting of the Holy Spirit. When I sat opposite the a man who's in my age, almost exactly my age, as a principal of a theological college in Newcastle, a fine guy, a guy who I probably would to some extent get on with because of our similar age, that kind of thing, but he did not have a clue what I was talking about. When I sat opposite him for half an hour or an hour over coffee and expressed, tried to at least something of my observation and strong inclination to say that there's something missing from the pulpit. There's no call to repentance here, there's no lament, there's no distress. He wanted me to know that, well, there'd been some lyrics in some of the songs that had conveyed biblical repentance. There'd been some kind of passing reference in and amongst the notices and the many, many book plugs. You see, there are some things as part of our business as usual that are simply incompatible with the kind of repentance that the Lord has has for his people and that we refuse, we don't even recognise. And one of them would be a ponchon and a kind of, I think quite carnal often, obsession with books and writers and church history. So the guy that I was chatting to didn't understand what I was saying, and more than not understanding, he wanted me to know that I was wrong. A kind of immediate lurching to an alien position of alienation rather than any sense of a chord in him being struck. And so I gave feedback, I provided it to Banner, one of one of the guys that who I had a friendly connection with. And again, it was amicable, it's not, it's not, uh, this is not the same as calling out the circus, the charismatic circus, or guys who are completely off the wall and borderline, not even Christian. These this is harder. So here what I'm saying: this is I'm not naming people today, I'm simply trying to be faithful to what the Lord has given me. And so the feedback, and I want to give now a little bit of nuanced response to how that email exchange went. I gave my feedback about the 2025 conference, and I must say, I don't know how the 2026 conference went because I wasn't there. And I would love to and hope to hear the messages. It was a theme of revival. I noticed that Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones was quoted on the back of the brochure for the conference because, of course, Lloyd Jones is well connected or well thought of in direct connection to revival and so on. Now, this here is how the email went, and I want to simply give you the overview and then summarise as quickly as I can. I expressed my concern about the absence of what was said at the conference. It was mainly an absence rather than something being present that was wrong. It was just the absence of there being a kind of radical postural uh recognition of the need to repent and a change of what we always do. There was just fine biblical doctrinal teaching, but there wasn't anything there that made me think these men are feeling disturbed in their own private closets. And so the email came back to me from a well-meaning guy, I think, a good guy, and he he basically wanted to kind of, I suppose, insinuate that I couldn't possibly know what was going on in each and all in each of the pastors who were present, often rural ministry, often difficult, often lonely. And that the conference, pastor's conference, was a time for fellowship and relationship, and the word he used was mirth. A time for eating and relaxing together in conversation, and none of those things are wrong, none of these things are bad. But my point is the way that that was then used to deflect from what I was saying, and I want to read this as a summary because it's much more succinct and won't take me as long if I do it this way. So there's three things. Firstly, the corporate climate versus individual morale, two, a misinterpretation of motive, my motive being misinterpreted, and thirdly, a conflict of paradigms. I'm just going to read these summaries. The corporate climate versus individual morale. Firstly, the critique I offered was focused entirely on the public direction and corporate climate of the 2025 conference. Specifically, the absence of a sober, root-level focused lament for the current state of the church and nation. The response I had pivoted to the individual weather of the attendees' private lives. By focusing on exhaustion and the need for mirth among rural pastors, the banner platform is effectively shielded from a necessary critique regarding its public responsibility. These two realms are not mutually exclusive, but using the personal weariness of pastors to deflect a challenge regarding corporate direction is a misstep. Secondly, a misinterpretation of motive. To suggest that a call for public corporate repentance somehow implies a lack of empathy for what individual men are facing privately is a categorical error. Biblical lament is not an attack on tired pastors, it is often the only honest pathway to true spiritual refreshment. True safety for a heavy heart does not come from an institutional buffer or a bit of levity, but from the safety of radical reality before God. Did you hear that? The safety of radical reality before God. This is what we refuse when we when we refuse to let go of our business as usual, including our church life through the seasons, but then in our conferences, we are resisting the radical reality of the spiritual reality before God, the state that we're truly in. And thirdly, a conflict of paradigms. Ultimately, this is a clash of fundamental outlooks. One side appears to be prioritizing institutional maintenance, individual morale, and safe fellowship. The other is looking soberly at the reality of the hour and calling for radical root-level postural change, one that is proportional to what we have and are witnessing across the church. When these two meet, the insistence on precision and truth will frequently be misconstrued as harshness, negativity, or strife. The tension felt is the loneliness of carrying a shared burden that the institution is simply not yet willing to share. My question is: what will it take for the institution to come to a place of being willing to share the burden that I'm expressing? And to make this final point, what was it that tipped me over into sharing this today and plucking up the courage to do this today? Well, it was an email from the banner of truth that I received about 30 minutes ago. A circular. And their call to prayer, it buoyed me. I thought, wow, maybe something has maybe something has happened. Maybe that they have been convicted. Maybe they've heard something. Maybe even something that I've said has resulted in something fruitful. And to my profound sadness and disappointment, I then saw underneath what I thought was going to be a kind of national's call to repentance and prayer was a building fund. An opportunity to give a number of eight a number of million pounds that's needed to build a new banner of truth. Now listen, I love the banner, I love the inception of the banner, I understand how it started, why it started, the lack of Puritan literature at the time under Martin Lloyd Jones' influence. For the last 50 plus years, I understand that, and reformed theological literature is gold, golden, but this is idolatry. This refusal to listen to the call to repentance that sacrifices on the altar before the Lord are preferences, our respectability, our comfort, our tradition. This man I told you about who sat opposite me and just couldn't understand, he's the same age as me, but he's been brought up in Scottish Presbyterianism. He can't hear anything else. When the call to repentance and prayer is treated with contempt as it was through my life when I went to this conference, but we're willing to call the nation to some kind of prayer in order to see a new building rise out of the ground at the sum of 18 whatever million pounds. We are proving that we are idolatrous whilst being unaware. And I don't need a response to this. As I said in my email back to my like somebody I consider to be a mate, a friend. I don't really know him, he doesn't really know me. So I don't need a reply from this, I don't need a reply from you, I don't need anybody to leave a comment, I don't need a reply from the banner. But what I do need to do is be faithful to that which God has put on my heart and to speak that which he has said, refusing, come what may, to not fear man. The fear of man is a snare, and that applies within the church, perhaps more so than outside of it.