Hello everybody and welcome to Into the Prey, Breaching the Chaos of the Church with Nick and Mary Franks. Welcome for those of you who've particularly just watched the video that we've just done today on I don't know how you would describe this location. We are on a location where there are several bridges, and we take that as a visual aid today for the multiple fronts that we've just discussed in the video. Now, if you've not listened or seen that video, then I'd encourage you to go and have a quick look at it because otherwise it might not make complete sense. So we won't rehash what we've just said, but we wanted to have a conversation about the video in a slightly more relaxed way where we're not restricted so much with the distractions of cameras and passers-by, that kind of thing. And so we're just we're just here with the Bible and with those thoughts fresh in our mind. Is anything that stood out to you, sweet?

I think I think whenever we talk about these things, I feel the sense of all the different things that God has led us through over the years, which will make more sense if you listen to the video. But I think it's just He leads us carefully step by step, which I think is always the thing I feel when we talk about this publicly. And it's hard to be concise about all the things that have happened. Um, but yeah, there's a lot, a lot that we've learned along the way.

Yeah, these multiple fronts. Um again, I'm I'm kind of using the language of Francis Schaefer from his book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, a blog article of which I have kind of put into the writing tab. It's one thing we didn't say is that we Mary and I have together have produced quite a significant now back catalogue of content. And now that word is hijacked today to be synonymous with YouTubers and influencers, and your content's great, you know, all that kind of it's it is just basically the proclamation of the testimony of our lives, and we've we've done that in video form, podcast form, several key books, all of which can be free. If you're in need, please contact us, we'll gladly post them to you, and and so on. Um yeah, but I think to be able to just talk about the chaos of the church, having seen, I suppose, in a way, more insight into the chaos of the church in this last couple of weeks than we have in the previous 13 years. A video that I I produced and made um a couple of weeks ago has had, I think, over 110,000 views, one and a half million impressions. It's a lot of people, it's a lot of eyes on something and a lot of ears on something that we're saying. Um, and so you can, as you imagine, there's a lot of there's a wide variety of responses to that. But I think we're more convinced than ever, particularly having seen that further insight into the chaos of the church, that the precise point at which he's called us to stand in, these front lines, these multiple fronts, these effectively coordinates, he wants us to stand and he wants us to stand in a very specific place. Like just like he did the reformers and the Puritans of centuries gone by, the place that these men stood in they weren't just generically costly. They were very specific in terms of doctrine. And those of you listening to me, if you agree with me, you'll know that the three things, the three doctrinal disputes that we have, that we are testifying to as being the very coordinates, the very location of where reformation, repentance, national repentance, and personal have to be, you'll know that it's impossible to find a church where there is a sense of agreement across the three issues that we've become utterly convinced and persuaded are non-negotiable, that the agree-to-disagree posture, reducing things from first order importance to second order importance. It's false. It's a false framework that is seen nowhere in the scripture. Now, that's not to say that some people can't have convictions about what kind of food they eat, and others have a different that we're not talking about that level. We're talking about matters of doctrine, biblical doctrine. Um, and particularly, I think, order, that's the word, in the church in terms of how churches should function, and that isn't big or singing or dancing churches with massive budgets and massive staff teams and whatever. I'm just talking about where two or three gather. The Lord wants us to be ordered in small numbers as much as he does in big orders. In fact, there's no difference, how how big in family and in the church. So, I don't know, sweet, do you want to maybe let's just talk about the wide variety and the the radically different attitudes and responses that there are in response to the chaos that we're seeing?

I think it's obvious to most people that there is a chaotic um problem within the church, and that's abundantly clear within the responses to the video that you see just a huge number of people just expressing their distress, their upset with the state of the church and the way that things are. Um, within that, you always have people who just want to disagree, and I think that in and of itself just displays a level of ignorance really towards what's going on and really diminishing the views and situations of a huge number of people. If you just kind of say, well, it doesn't matter, just go back into church. It's not engaging with people where they are. Um so we've seen we've seen just a huge, a huge variety, and of course, within that, as Nick's just mentioned, these three fault lines, there sadly is still this perpetuation of the egalitarian as you see that coming across. We just sort the problem out in our own way, and it doesn't matter who kind of who leads a little home church or whatever it is, and we just see the continuation of a problem that if we don't get to the root cause of it and then build upwards on what the scripture says, we will just continually be in the same position. What you do is you just move the problem from an institutional framework into a home framework or a smaller setting, and you end up in the same place all over again, and with people finding themselves in exactly the same situation again. So, as always, it comes back to scripture, it comes back to believing what the word says is true and then acting on it, letting go of things that we've held on to before that are maybe wrong, and just being really robust with how we do things, and if we're not sure, then taking the time to stop, as we've said, think and pray about it before we do anything. That's the most important thing.

I think it's worth repeating as well that if you take any one of these three multiple fronts, these three key doctrinal disputes that we're talking about, um, there's no shortage of people that disagree with us about women in leadership or the gifts of the spirit or of the importance or even what of what constitutes unity. One of the things I try to then respond to when it's but you know, there are different characteristics, different natures of the argument and dispute, depending on which of those three camps, uh which of those three fault lines we're we're discussing. You think about it as a triangle, and that each of the three sides represents one of those false doctrines, and I think demonic strongholds in the church, that those fronts, like on a war, a battlefield, and you have enemies approaching on a on front on one front and another enemy on another front, there are different characteristics of the fight, there are different characteristics of the language, of the accusations, of the characteristics of the people. You know, some of you listening to me have grown up in Presbyterian, cessationist, you know, staunch kind of environments, legalistic environments like that, and it's all you've ever known. It's all you it's all your fathers have ever known, your forebears, and that's what you've received. And so, in one sense, you're just like the men in John chapter 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. 5, 6, 7, and 8, that those four chapters that I've referenced recently and that we'll come to in just a second, you know, there you that such is the chaos that there are different types and species of enemy. Uh, that was a pigeon that flew overhead. If you've got Dolby surround sound on, you've probably heard it. Um so one of the things that I say to people then is okay, you think I'm wrong because I don't believe that egalitarianism is faithful to the scripture, and yet you're not calling me to repentance. They don't think it's important enough. Now, cessationists probably do. They probably would call me to repentance because they think that I believe in the now they couldn't they couldn't conform me to the lazy trope of a disordered charismatic maniac who has no sense of biblical literacy, who has no sense of reverence for God, who's just a walking nightmare. This is what a lot of these charismatic churches are. The cessationists would struggle to hang us on that particular hook, but they would still probably say, okay, there's a need for the charismatic churches to just let it go, repent, it's over. And I've heard people say, like kind of well-known people say things like that in recent years. And I would say that is to some degree true of the nonsense of the charismatics. You know, we say that not as though we're not charismatic, we are charismatic, but we just don't conform or agree with the mess that the circus is, all these false, you know, extra-biblical practices and beliefs and so on. And of course, the extreme charismatic scene then meshes very neatly and nicely with egalitarianism and ecumenicalism. So it's it's this the three multiple fronts of a triangle, but also that kind of shows its own willingness to be less rigid when it wants to be. The point I'm trying to make is that we, Mary and I together are calling the whole church to repentance, ourselves included, whereas the people who want to disagree with us on any one of these three points don't see the need for that. They make themselves the exception. They're the arbiters of what's faithful and true. Whereas we're saying, such is the state of the church, such is the centuries-long process of apostasy forming like rock sediment, that we are all in the state of play together, and that therefore the solution requires the whole church forgetting denominations, forgetting the sense of um our own lineage and history and the and and coming to the ground zero of the level way of preparation for the Lord's return. Now, I've written about that, you can read about it if you want to.

I think the the comments are are very they can be really frustrating at times because people don't want to engage with with the actual problem. And I think what Nick's saying there is just the key thing that we're all part of the problem and we all need to repent about the state of things. And um we've spoken about this for several years now, about the need for this to happen, and there are a lot of people who would agree with the the chaos of it all, but there seems to be a lack of responsiveness when it comes to repentance about these things, and it's quite often just really sad to see like there's a kind of hardness about it all, and it's very ingrained in the way that people think about it all. But the saddest thing is just that nobody seems to believe that it's that important, that Jesus doesn't care if men or women are in charge, or if we hold to totally different beliefs, and yet we want to say that unity and our redefinition of unity is fine as well, but that whatever we believe is fine as long as we look unified, and because of our witness to the world, and of course, it's completely counterproductive because we're beginning to see the the fruit of this way of thinking. Um you see we've seen the outworking of it in people we know, and it's not good. This type of carelessness with the Bible and with doctrine never leads to a good place, and it never makes the world think that the church is worth considering. So, on both counts there's there's a problem within the church and without it, and and our determination to carry on with certain things only feeds this problem, it never makes it any better. So we feel just worried and distressed about the way that things are going because it it affects people, individuals, it affects their lives, it causes people to become hard or apathetic, and that has serious consequences. So yeah, we just feel the burden of it.

And I think you feel, and this is to close, just to encourage you, if you've got your Bible um to open to John chapter 9, the spiritual stress and angst that that makes you feel a spiritual sickness, but also a physical response, a visceral response to uh the errors that we're seeing and the fruits related to the errors, again with them with the different characteristics depending on which false doctrine we're talking about. You feel that when you read these chapters in John that I've been talking about, Jesus encounter, and don't don't get Jesus wrong, Jesus isn't just kind of you know caught up in something that he Jesus instigates and he deliberately causes, he draws out from the Pharisees, from the Jews, the religious leaders, all that all that he knows is there, and all that he knows and knew that we need to see, we need to see in the word. So when you read John 5, 6, 7, and 8, you feel this the what's the word? It's horrible. These religious people who stood before Jesus and couldn't see him, blindness, and the murderous, you know, they wanted to stone him. At the end of chapter 8, that's what it says. It's the last thing it says at the end of chapter 8 that they picked up stones to throw, and Jesus just went on his way. So, this is what I want to share to conclude, and it's to help, I think, help us all with the with assurance, the difficulty that it is to recognise that such is the state of the chaos of the church, that there is no quick fix, of just having this time out and then finding another church, to bring assurance that this is what the Lord wants for his people at this point in world and church history to have a more radical stop. And this was the message without wanting to go over the 2020 juncture and the significance of the film, the draft, it's all there in film and in book form, is that he loves us so much. He he loves us as a bride, as a bridegroom that loves a bride, Psalm 19. As a bridegroom comes out of his chamber like the sun that goes round its circuit, this is the love and affection that he has for us is seen in John chapter 9. As Jesus leaves the temple after they wanted to kill him there and then, Jesus saw a blind man. Now forgive me because I'm paraphrasing, I'm not stood in a pulpit, I'm not in front of a church, I'm not carefully exegetically going through verse by verse, I'm just giving you an encouragement, and I mean giving you an exhortation. Jesus comes out of the temple and he sees a he sees a man who's blind. And his disciples, who themselves have been infected by this wrong, faulty spiritual thinking, ask him, Who's to blame for this man's blindness? Is it his sin or his parents' sin? And Jesus said to him, It's not either of those things, guys. This is so that the glory of God can be manifest in this man's life, in effect. Jesus spits on the floor, makes mud, anoints him, sends him off to the pool siloem, which means sent, and tells him to go and wash. We see Jesus doing that with other people and they go off, or in the Old Testament with Elisha and they go off on the huff because it wasn't spectacular enough. Jesus sends this man with mud on his eyes and his spit on his eyes and tells him to go and wash in the pool of siloem. Whereupon he sees for the first time. Imagine being in your late teens, maybe early twenties, and never having seen. Close your eyes now if you're listening to me. Close your eyes, and I'm sure we've all done it. Imagine going about life for any period of time without being able to see. You wouldn't get as far as the toilet. This man had never seen, and Jesus sent him away, and he saw for the first time. Imagine the joy, but the overwhelming nature of the joy that he was seeing for the first time. He literally would have seen the pool, the waters of the pool of Siloem as the first thing he ever saw. And then all manner of trouble comes his way in the form of these spiritual leaders who are indignant because this man Jesus is healed on the Sabbath. How dare, how dare this man perform a miracle on the Sabbath? This is how twisted false counterfeit religion and doctrine makes us. And the neighbors and the people who saw and witnessed this then facilitate him being brought, this man who's just been healed from blindness, to the to the Pharisees. And he's quizzed and questioned, and eventually his own parents are brought and saying, Can you confirm this is the son that you that you bore or born and that you raised? This is this he was blind. Is that right? The parents bless their hearts. Think about how tender that was seeing the baby blind from birth and those all those years, and then suddenly he's seeing. He's seeing his parents for the first time. His parents are seeing him see them for the first time, and it's and it's all ingrained in this horrific, horrible spiritual climate where the Pharisees all they want to do is pour condemnation on Jesus and condemnation on this on the son that's been healed, and condemnation on the parents, who are paralyzed with fear because of the fear of the Jews, because they've threatened to kick to kick kick them out, to exile them, to cast them out. Long story short, Jesus after the boy had testified, and notice when you read John chapter 9 how bold he was. How bold he was with these Pharisees. He didn't cow to them, he didn't, he didn't kind of develop this he he went for it. This is ridiculous. Notice the exclamation where the boy, where the man healed from blindness starts to argue and say, This this is absurd, this is an amazing thing. This man that you're basically wanting to kill, when has this ever happened before? He said, when has this ever happened where a man blind has been made to see? Long story short is that the boy, the man healed, was cast out. He was cast out of the temple, just like Jesus had been. But look at the tenderness though. Jesus having originally seen at the first verse of chapter. 9, you see Jesus seeing, he notices the blind man, he notices this man, this beggar. Unlike Bartimaeus, who Jesus in a sense had walked past, Bartimaeus, have mercy upon me, son of David. Very different. Jesus had seen this man and had noted him, so that when he was at when he was cast out, Jesus then heard of that and went and found him. Jesus went and found him and said, Do you believe in the Son of Man? Who is he, sir, so that I might believe? And Jesus says, it is he who is speaking, who you have seen, and who is speaking to you. And the boy worshipped, I believe, Lord. Notice he went from Sir to Lord. I believe, and he worshipped. This chapter is a wonderful tonic after reading 5, 6, 7, and 8 of John, because you see the heart of Jesus towards those who call him Lord and who love and worship him. And the denunciation that the chapter finishes of those who claim that they can see and yet their guilt remains. This is what we're seeing today, I think, in response to the call of the Lord to national repentance, to public, to personal and corporate repentance. Those who say that they have no need, they that say that we are the exception, they whose testimony doesn't include, it would appear, any sense of personal lament, distress, the ease of Zion that's woeful, they are the ones whose blindness remains. That's the only way of reading and understanding Jesus. And with that theme running through the Gospel of John, the spiritual blindness that we saw something of with Nicodemus, if you remember, in chapter three, and then comes to this particularly pronounced condition in chapters five, six, seven, and eight, you then see the man being healed of his blindness, but he saw the Lord, didn't he? Before he saw the Lord, in a sense, with his heart, with with the eyes of his heart. And that's that's the message I think today is that those who are listening who see the chaos of the church and recognize that the solution to that can never just be a time out and then find another church. We have to be prepared to be gathered, and this is what we forgot to say at the end of the video is that there is an in-gathering. The daily prayer of our home and our hearts is Psalm 106, 47. Deliver us, O Lord our God, and gather us from the nations that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise. Excuse me, this gathering is not just right, we see the chaos, let's just start a church. We'll get together with our egalitarian girlfriends and we'll start a church. It's not that. And that there would be an enlightenment of the eyes of the heart, not the eyes of the skull, the eyes of the heart to perceive and discern spiritual truth, objective spiritual truth, not subjective your truth is fine. If your truth doesn't agree with somebody else's truth, just find somebody else who agrees with your truth and everything will be well. God doesn't work like that. He brings enlightenment to the heart that has been blind and recognises that they're blind. The church today doesn't recognise that they're blind, that they're calloused. You can't read John chapter 9 after reading the horrors of John chapter 8 and not feel relief at the way that Jesus sees the man that's blind, he goes and finds him after he's been cast out, and then he comforts him with the assurance that he has seen him, the Messiah, and he is hearing him as he's speaking to him. That's the encouragement for you today. And you can't read the end of John chapter 9 and not think of Ephesians 1:17, where Paul's prayer once again for the church is that the spirit of wisdom and revelation would be upon them and that the eyes of their heart would be enlightened. That's what the church needs. Cessationist, that's what you need. Egalitarian, that's what you need. Ecumenical, that's what you need. I pray in the name of Jesus, Father, that your people would be prepared radically for your return and that it would be at the root where there's great pain and sensitivity for a period, but that you would bring order to homes and churches throughout the nations that is appropriate and relative to the preparation that needs to happen for our wedding day. I pray, Lord, beholding you, the Lamb of God, slain and yet stands again. I pray that you would help your people to see these fault lines, these multiple fronts, and give confession, Lord. Let there would be statements of faith, letters of repentance, leavings, turnings from false false doctrine, false heritage and lineage, and that there would be increasingly the testimony of the redeemed saying so. Lord, it's too much for any one of us. It's too overwhelming. We are in historic days. And Lord, what can we pray apart from your mercy and your grace to be upon your people so that they would be radically prepared for your coming? And Lord, we do desire your coming more than anything in this world. For to me, to us, to live is Christ and to die is gain. And Lord, we pray from the bottom of our heart, Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus. The Spirit and the bride say, Come, Lord Jesus, help us to be fit, to honor you, to glorify you, to be jealous for you. Help us to stand in these dark days as they get darker still, knowing that you are truly the light of the world who is coming again. We pray in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.