Hero Worship

Welcome back to another episode of the Be a Berean podcast. I have a special guest on today. Of course, we always call our guests special, I guess. He's special to me. This is Austin Hetzler, and Austin is the pastor at Christ the Rock Church. Is that in Lorraine?

Lerida. I am excited to talk to Austin because we talked on Sunday night with Tim Hurd on the Bible Thumping Wingnut Guy show. And then we had a phone call yesterday because I wanted to follow up on a few things that we talked about. And the phone call yesterday started going, and I thought, like, I need to just record this. This is really good stuff. And one of the things that impresses me about you, brother, is I know that you're a studious Bible person because when we talk about things, you, from the top of your head, are quoting Bible passages and just talking about biblical principles.

And of course, that's what every pastor ought to be able to do. but there's some people who you know they just they just aren't in the word enough to take every thought captive to Christ like real time like that and so I commend you for that and I hope that anybody that maybe hasn't heard of you would would hear that coming through our conversation and so what's your your podcast on the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network that's it's just like Christ the Rock sermons yeah so first of all thank you for those kind words and And yeah, I don't actually podcast per se for Bible Thumping Wingnut. I preach. And so those are just my sermons on there and they put them on every week.

Yeah. And it's just under Christ the Rock Sermons Bible Thumping Wingnut Network, right? Mm-hmm. So, okay, good. And what are you going through right now? Are you going through a book or?

I am. I'm going through John and wishing that I didn't have to preach it from my basement. But what are you going to do? where are you at in John right now? I am in John 12 just finished up the triumphal entry getting ready to go into verses 20 through 36 which is probably actually more ambitious than I'm going to get through but we'll see for one shot for one week and you started John 1 1? yep that's awesome you know I always think about people that preach through books and it's like well you know you get Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians some of them are you know those are still big with a lot of doctrine but they're they seem doable and when people do things like Matthew and John like I'm blown away like that that takes that takes a lot of commitment John is mammoth it really is because you have you know if you had Matthew I think is a good comparison but if you have some of the synoptics maybe maybe Luke and Mark they're more narrative and everything is doctrinal but less densely so So when you're talking about those books, then John, you have all the nuances of the different narratives and things and all that to explain and the historicity.

But then you have just incredibly dense sections of doctrine, which makes it wonderful. I mean, it's a joy to study. Matthew is my favorite gospel. If I had been selfish, I would have done that. But John gives you that deep foundation in the deity of Jesus. It's just it's such a high Christology.

So it's been a joy to me to preach. So do you leave most weeks and you move on to the next section and you think to yourself, I wish I could tell them all the things, but you just can't do it all in an hour or 45 minutes or whatever? Yeah, somewhat. I think we – you have different kind of expositors who go verse by verse through a book of the Bible. You have some even popular and very good ones that will do a whole chapter.

I'm not that kind. So it's not uncommon for me to do three verses. Here lately, I've been going a little bit faster. But if it's something that's deeply doctrinal, I don't leave a whole lot of rocks unturned. So I don't often think, oh, there's something I really wish I should have done. Or I can do the same big swath, and I can sort of come at it three or four times and highlight a different aspect of what's there.

Okay, so you stay very thorough with it instead of moving on. So good. That sounds great. So Christ the Rock Sermons on the Bible Thumping Wingnet Network. And if you're ever near Elyria, I'm sure people are welcome to visit. Well, right now you're not meeting in person for some reasons, but contact Austin Hetzler about that.

So let's get into what I wanted to talk about today. So the first thing was, is we were talking about the COVID-19 crisis with Tim on Sunday night. And you introduced in our phone call yesterday, you said, you said, there's a few things that we just have to say are sin. Yeah. Yeah. So regardless of of the details of wearing masks and all the different things going on, what what were the things that just highlight?

What were the things, hey, we have to call this either sin or righteousness? What were those things? Well, I'll try to go quickly here. I remember off the top of my head, one of the big ones is it is it is evil to take away a man's living when he is healthy and able bodied. The same way with a woman, the Bible commends and commands men to work, to provide for their families.

A Christian man that does not work is considered to be worse than an infidel. So when you take that away from a man, that's evil. And you not only take away his source of income, you also take away his source of self-worth, if you're talking about even unbelievers, which is why suicide goes up in the way that it does when you have a recession. Beyond that there an arbitrariness to the laws that are being made When you look at the law of God there is no arbitrary law that God makes They all connected to his character They all sensible They all matter So when you enact arbitrary laws it like the parent who enacts arbitrary rules on their children That's cruel.

It has no value save only to subjugate and humiliate. So for example, to declare a business non-essential and then effectively as governments or prohibit people from using that business, you are taking away someone's livelihood, which really is the moral equivalent of murder in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. but also when you've done it now in an arbitrary way so some businesses are still essential what you're saying is that's that's unequal weights and measures that's not justice that's not doing good right actually that was going to be the next thing that i was going to say the inequity that's inerrant in the application of the rules but also the arbitrariness in terms of not having more than 10 people in a particular home or you have to wear face masks, which was mandated in the state of Ohio, but you can wear face masks. And this all got repealed because he, he changed his mind, but you can wear a face mask that's made out of anything that's made out of any kind of cloth.

That's purely arbitrary. There's no, there's no basis for that in science. That It makes no sense. And there are a million little things like that. Parks, certain parts of them are closed and things. Those are public spaces.

People pay for those with their tax money. You can argue that we shouldn't be paying for that with our tax money, that government shouldn't be doing that. I don't necessarily agree with that. But anyhow, if they're public spaces and we're paying for them, they're closing off bits and pieces. So much of what is happening makes no sense. Okay, yeah.

And then you can see the effect on some people where, you know, if you sell soap or something like that and you're shut down, but Walmart's still selling soap like crazy. Right. And so it's not like people stopped buying some of these items or, you know, the one thing I thought of, too, is like a tattoo artist. I saw some posts by a tattoo artist. And, you know, there's whatever you think about tattoos right now, it's legal.

And there's guys supporting their families doing that. Right. And so, yeah, you've got kids that, you know, that are not going to have food on the table or, you know, whatever. People can get into details. But, yeah, I totally agree with you that I think we have to be able to start with some principles. and I think too often when we have these discussions we don't start with principles and even from a Christian perspective we start with biblical principles and we try to actually be able to defend them all from the Bible but even from a secular perspective secular people understand foundational principles and what they mean and when we just start dealing with the symptoms of a problem we often miss out on dealing with root causes, right?

Right. So nobody, you know, you don't cure your, you don't cure your broken bone with ibuprofen. But it sure takes away the pain temporarily, but we need to get to the root of problems. So something that's happened because of this, the situation though, now I don't want, I don't want to get too deep into the COVID thing because we all have opinions. but is is uh this is what came up yesterday was that you get some of these people who are who've now been frightened into thinking this is an extremely dangerous situation to even go outside is life-threatening either to an individual or to to their loved ones all right and there's people who really believe this i think some of them believe it you know genuinely and maybe they are really around people who would be very risky to get COVID-19.

And I think there's some people who have just been sort of frightened into thinking this is just a big dangerous thing. And so what we talked about was this idea that people who are going to Walmart to stock shelves are, are now called heroes. nurses and doctors who are going to their job to do the thing that you know in theory they signed up to do and we're always doing um they've now been changed from you know people as part of a larger economy doing their part to to heroes and so what why do you think that's happened uh because it feeds a vanity that's inherent in people and so everybody wants a world war two you hear that comparison made often you hear it made with climate change this is our world war two. This is being compared to wars.

For example, when we first started going through this and they were first calculating the numbers, the first comparison that I heard made to COVID deaths, between COVID deaths and a war type situation was 9-11. More deaths have occurred than 9-11. That is not a valid comparison because this is a disease. So why didn't they compare it to the regular flu and the deaths that happen every year?

Well, because it doesn't fit the narrative as well. But we want this big, great evil, this World War II-like clarity with evil. Like we had the Nazis, okay? It was very, very clear, and they were an enemy of humanity. and then we want to be able to play our role in that war as the heroes of that situation And so we will embellish the danger if need be in order to provide ourselves with that kind of heroic thing where we get to say you know I 20 years old and I work at Walmart, and statistically, the chances of me dying from this disease are like zero.

I'm basically in no danger whatsoever, and yet I'm going to call myself a hero. irrespective of the fact that everybody and their mother has to go to Walmart so we don't starve and we need basic toiletries. So if going to Walmart makes you a hero, then everybody's a hero. So it's exaggerating the danger so that we can exaggerate our role in protecting people and protecting society.

And let me say this about nurses and doctors. I think in general, they are heroes. So my point is that there are no more heroes now than they ever were before. They go and they risk contamination from infectious diseases all the time. But this situation, just for nurses and doctors, doesn't present a greater danger. One of the things that's happened with this is that the media has done a very, very good job of making people forget that they live in a country of 330 million people.

And so every time that a nurse or a doctor gets sick somewhere in the United States from COVID, it now becomes okay because they got sick. All nurses and all doctors are risking their lives. Nurses and doctors get sick from all kinds of things all the time. This is just not statistically that kind of a situation. So why do you think people, you brought up vanity, and that's a very biblical term.

It doesn't sound like a good term, right? So it sounds like what you're trying to say is that the desire, the inner desire people have to be seen as a hero is not necessarily a good thing. It may be good to want to do good things or do heroic things, but where does this desire ultimately really come from for us to want to be seen as heroes? well it's a strong sense of innate morality that we have being made in the image of god and one of the things that's interesting if you look at i don't know if you know this but top 10 blockbusters usually they're stories of clear good versus clear evil so that's that's an interesting insight into human beings they want that story they understand innately that there is a good and there is an evil, and they have an innate desire to, in some sense, see good done.

This is Romans 2. In some general sense, they reflect the character of God by doing those things. So I think it comes from being made in the image of God. But when we're made in the image of God, but that image is not redeemed in Christ, it gets expressed in perverse ways, which ultimately all lend themselves to puffing us up. So our pride then takes that, distorts it, and instead of God being venerated as the ultimate good, we end up being venerated as the ultimate good, and that's the kind of Pharisaism that we see in the New Testament.

Okay, so it's not necessarily bad that a person wants to see evil overcome. It's not bad that somebody thinks, I want to help people that have COVID. Right. I want to go somewhere. And even if I really believe there's a risk to myself, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe I think there's a risk to myself, and I'm willing to take that risk for my neighbor. Right.

There can be some good in there, but when our goal is not ultimately the glory of God, what you're saying is it's still sin. Right. And in this sense, it also makes those people look ridiculous. It's like if you watch a talent show and the only one that doesn't know they can't sing is the person singing. Their perspective is grossly distorted on themselves.

They get up, they make an absolute buffoon of themselves. That's what these people are doing. you know they're they're making a false equivalency of of them and you know a soldier who dragged five of his buddies out of a bunker and saved all their lives because they went to walmart so there's a self-aggrandizing thing going on here that twists people's perspectives and causes them to inflate the actual danger like i say that there are people who are very much at risk from this and need to be careful but if you're 20 years old and you work at walmart you are just not one of them you're not a hero you know uh and yeah the things that people are saying online are crazy if you work in a hospital pretty much that isn't in new york or new jersey you're actually likely furloughed as a result of this if you're not furloughed uh you're you know all the resources of the hospital have been allocated to one wing. We have a girl in our church that is like this, and you're doing a lot of testing, but there are a lot of negatives that you're not heroic.

And I get it because they're basically wearing hazmat suits, and so there's this idea that we're going to war and things, but the war is just not what we were told that it was. So our desire to not only be seen as virtuous and heroic, but to feel that way, even in our own hearts, actually fuels some people to potentially inflate the evil so that it looks better. I think we done the same thing even I seen street preachers do the same thing where they describe some encounter with a non It sounds like wow the forces of hell just attacked that guy And then you watch the video and it like one dude walked by and gave him the finger It's like, okay, that's not exactly persecution.

I mean, I understand that it is biblical to have people utter things about you and stuff like that. But I think we tend to want to inflate the evil around us because it makes us feel better about ourselves. And that's what you said earlier. You said it's like a Phariseeism where we can't achieve the standard that in our hearts we know we should achieve because it's too high.

So if basically we could call everyone else Hitler, we could feel better about ourselves, right? Yeah. And without question, that's a good illustration. illustration. I've seen street preachers obviously throw gasoline on the fire in a way that they didn't. And then when it blows up, they back up and go, oh, woe is me. I'm so persecuted.

So yeah, that's something that's endemic to human nature, unfortunately. Yeah, we seem to have this, it seems to be a very natural desire. And when I think about it, when I think about Jesus Christ coming and literally being a hero, and when I think that We are called to imitate Christ, and he is who we look up to. And like you said, even nonbelievers.

I mean, the biggest blockbuster movies are almost all a clear bad guy and then an imperfect good guy who overcomes all odds, ultimately to win the girl at the end. I mean, like every movie includes, like, known facts about human sexuality and good and evil and stuff like that, right? They pervert it a little, but, you know, people understand these things. and so when you think about that though there does seem to be I think we have to be careful we don't want to just label everybody who's trying to do good things as oh you have a hero complex that's not what we're saying either we think it's probably some people that get to that point and as a culture I think the culture feeds it because one of the things you notice is we're treating nurses and Walmart people as heroes.

You pointed out, that's no different than how we treated guys that could put a basketball in a ring, uh, eight weeks ago. And 20 weeks ago, if a guy could throw a football to another guy and he caught it, we called them heroes. And, uh, and, and literally like, it's true though, in some ways, like entire cities are revived by guys that can do that stuff.

I mean, when the Cavs won the world series, that was, or, when the Cavs won the NBA championship. And then the Indians almost won the World Series. That inspired a lot of people. And so there is some truth to the way that we've communed together, right? But we have to be careful with things like the word hero. Jesus Christ is the only hero.

Correct. And Jesus Christ didn't have to play. He didn't have to be the imperfect hero who, despite his foibles and mistakes and sin, was able to overcome the bad guy in the movie, which is part of what happens in all these movies. Jesus Christ just came and conquered. And he's the one who deserves all praise and honor and glory, not man. Amen.

As I say, what do you think of that? Not just saying heroes are bad, but yes, we do have a hero, and he should be proclaimed. For every idolatrous pursuit that man has, there is the genuine fulfillment of that in God. And this is one of the examples of that. And that's true of everything. Every longing, every desire, ultimately is intended to be fulfilled by God through the person and work of Jesus by receiving the life of God.

And so he is, as you said, the ultimate hero. He is the ultimate fulfillment of that innate desire to see good conquer evil. But in order to recognize that, you have to see yourself as the villain. So that's the problem, and that's what so often prevents people, because it was my sin. that necessitated the slaughter of God's own son. So in this story, I will not be the hero.

And really, in any story subsequent to that, I mean, I'll do the best that I can for my family, and I go and I provide, and I do things that genuinely please God in many ways, because I'm a servant of God, I'm a child of God. I do a spiritual work that pleases God. But I'll never be the hero of this story or any other story because my salvation was accomplished by Jesus.

My sanctification is accomplished by Jesus. And everything that I do that genuinely is good, if it is good, is done to the glory of God. So Christ becomes the great hero. And we then see ourselves as the villain. and even in heaven we remember you can see the scenes in revelation where they are praising the lamb that was slain there's a there's an eternal remembrance of the fact that christ was slain and if christ was slain who was he slain for he was slain for us and why was he slain for us he was slain for us because we were sinners so you know it's not the ongoing recollection of my shame that just causes me to be mired in it over and over and over again.

No, it's my shame has become his greatest glory. And for that reason, I'm happy to tell people that I was the villain in this story because it reveals the glory of God in a far greater way. It shows the glory, the goodness, the love and the mercy of my savior and truly reveals the nature of his terrorism. That was perfect. Because when you think about what we talked about earlier, that we sometimes exaggerate the evil that we're seeing in the world in order that our heroicism can be magnified.

And with Jesus Christ, we don't even have to exaggerate. We can't exaggerate how wicked men are. and we can't exaggerate how great he is so you just look at it here's total darkness and unapproachable light and it's so we can just tell the story that way so if we've established though here Walmart workers aren't heroes necessarily like you know just going to Walmart doesn't make you heroic and certainly there's people all over that are doing really good things and some of those things may seem heroic to us because it's something very few people are doing, but even then, they still might not be heroic. But so let's talk about Christian heroes now for a second.

We have a thing we do in Christianity where, I'll just come out and say my opinion and you can comment on it, where I don't think we've pulled this from the Bible. I think Christians have created a celebrity status and a celebrity culture. And we'll just say a hero. I don't want to say hero worship because that might be a strong word, worship, but just a hero genre of Christians.

Yeah. Where we now look at some Christians as a little exceptional in the heroic way. And so what we, you know, there's some good guys. There's some people who've been burned at the stake, some people we really look to. So what would be the appropriate way for us to look at Christians who do do some great things? I mean, let's talk about some, you know, Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon.

There's people who've died for the faith and were clearly acting very faithfully. How should we look at those people if maybe the word hero isn't appropriate? Trophies of God's grace. I think that's how we should look at them. They are trophies of God's grace. When you remember that, you'll be okay.

When you forget that, you won't be okay, because then you'll start to think that there was something intrinsic in them that caused them to be the way that they are, and we naturally gravitate towards that. We are idolatrous by nature, and then when we're given a new nature that's still one of the pools of our flesh is that sort of idolatry. We serve a God that we cannot see, and that's difficult at times, so we will turn to the things that we can see and in turn worship them. one of the things that has always befuddled and perplexed me is the way that Christians will venerate Christian authors and Christian preachers.

You know, I think just logically working through this, if, you know, Hemingway were alive, you have a figure like that, that's an author that really creates something, so to speak. I could at least logically understand really building them up in my thinking. If you're talking about a popular Christian author, the people that I have on my shelves back there, that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Or a popular preacher. You think about Spurgeon, okay? What was Spurgeon really when it all boiled down to it? He reorganized somebody's material. That's what he did. That's what he was.

And the somebody's material that he reorganized was God's. That's all any of us do. So for me, I'm not going to say it's wrong for you to have a Christian author to sign a certain book. But just remember, this guy is not Hemingway. This guy reorganized God's material. That's all he did.

Okay. He systematized it. Maybe put it into a book. He expounded it. There isn't anything in that book, anything in that work, anything in that sermon that has not been said before many, many times for 2,000 years down the line. So it's just not that impressive.

Okay. We don't create things. we expound things that have already been expounded at a previous point So within like all the different disciplines that the world has to offer every different profession the one that least uh allows for that kind of veneration is this one because we just took what was in the book and then we put it into an outline and we delivered it to you and if we were creative it's because we're heretics. So just that's totally and completely inappropriate.

And then if you think, if you have a figure in your life who's not some national author, but just a figure that you really look up to, you have to remember that that person is far worse than you know. If you knew them better, you'd be impressed less. You don't know their thought life. That part's not revealed to you because then we wouldn't have human relationships.

That's why God didn't give us that kind of ESP because you'd be horrified, and then you would think a lot less of them. So you've got to just bear all those things in mind. We're all trophies of grace, man. There isn't any of us that is intrinsically good or that in substance was better, and therefore that accounts for the way that God has used us. And if somebody did have a good impact on you, we have to attribute that to the Holy Spirit's work through his word in the hearts of people.

And so, you know, you can stand up and read sinners in the hands of an angry God to a group of people tomorrow, and they're not going to react the way, at least one of the groups described when Edwards preached it did. And so it's not intrinsic in what Edwards did or even those words. God has to choose to work in a situation. Jonah was a terrible guy.

God worked in Jonah's life in the Ninevites life at the time so one final thing then one final thought you can just tell me what you think of it when we think about Christian I don't want to use the word heroes but when we think about the people of the faith that we remember there's names, Athanasius Augustine, Jerome there's people whose names we remember from history and there's a reason we remember them. They did something significant. And when you read biographies of a lot of these people, what you don't see is the day they sat down and set a goal to become a Christian hero.

What you see is you see a guy who at some point was convicted, I want to be faithful to do what God has called me to do. And through that conviction, they took action that eventually was used to make a difference. You know, Martin Luther didn't intend for what we see now as the Reformation. He was just trying to do what he thought was the right thing to do the next day.

And so I think that is our, to me, that's the, and I'm not a pastor, you are, but that's the pastoral exhortation to anyone listening. Like, get out of your mind that you need to be the next John MacArthur or the next Charles Spurgeon or the next, you know, A.W. Pink or whoever you think you look up to who accomplished a lot. And get in your mind that you need to be faithful in what God has put in front of you.

And oftentimes that looks like things that are as insignificant as stocking the cereal at Walmart. Right. And you don't have to pretend that you're a hero because you woke up, you wiped your kids' snot, then you wiped their butt, and you cooked meals, and then you went to bed. You don't have to be a hero. You can just do what God called you to do. And maybe someday it'll be something that impacts or has an effect on more people.

It may be something people write about. There's people alive today who, you know, if the Lord tarries, they'll be in the history books 100, 200 years from now. That's okay. but nobody who seems to set out for that kind of glory actually ends up getting it in a Christian way. You know, it looked like a guy like Mark Driscoll. You know, all these people that set out for those things, they fall away and they just become their own little religion or whatever you want to call it.

So what your final word for people about just being faithful and what God called to them And do you even agree with what I just said It seems like you did Totally agree with it I would just say the important thing is to evaluate success in the Christian life in terms of glorifying God not in terms of the discernible result. So you raised a lot of people there. Luther, Luther thought he was going to get himself killed.

All right. When he, when he didn't, end up getting put to death as a result of what was considered heresy at the time. That was a surprise to him. So Luther didn't know that that was going to be a shotgun blast around the world. And the 95 Theses being nailed to the door, that was a common way to debate. He had no idea that that was going to be what it was.

So God takes common moments by common Christians, and according to his own good purposes in certain situations. He uses those to a greater extent. But that Christian is not rendered more faithful because of the result that's yielded from their work. They're not a better Christian as a result of that. Some of the best Christians in the world, the people you have never heard of, that were faithful Christian mothers who gave the gospel, little old ladies in churches who gave the gospel, faithful men who went to work every single day and trained their children the way they ought to go from scripture.

So the result, the tangible result is not what demonstrates faithfulness. You got to get away from that. You can use Mark Driscoll as a great example. Tangible result, Mark Driscoll was 10,000 people baptized. Fast forward a decade, all those people were gone in the Seattle area. They all defected.

And not all, that's speaking generally. I'm sure there were some that stayed, but the overwhelming majority, they followed up on later and they were gone. So the way that human beings account for results is very, very flawed. Don't think in those terms. Just be faithful. Put one foot in front of the other and if you think about results by the way often you're not going to get them and then you're going to you're going to fall apart self-fulfilling there yeah yeah that's the glory of god is the result that you are after and you glorify god by obeying what's in the book and however god chooses to use your uh work that's how he chooses to use so we use people when you think about heroes, you name some like Augustine.

Augustine was used in an enormous way at the Council of Orange and other situations, working against Pelagius. Luther was used in Reformation, obviously. How about Jeremiah, who just preached and was faithful? How about Noah? What a depressing ministry that is. That's why he started drinking.

These men were not less in substance than the other men. They weren't less in substance than Peter, who had the profound privilege of being there at Pentecost. In fact, you could argue that they were greater in substance than Peter because they never denied Christ in the way that Peter did. But yet God chose to use Peter. God chose to use Paul in the greatest way, who was the greatest villain.

So that's kind of a theme there. Often God does not use people that the world would have chosen. He uses people who the world would never have chosen so that they recognized that this was nothing but the hand of God. So very often one of the reasons why we're used, if we're used in great ways, is because we are inept, incompetent in certain ways, or considered so, or just we have a background that wouldn't lend itself at all to any kind of a revival or something like that.

Yeah, our weakness displays God's power when things do happen. Another thing I thought of as you were speaking is if our goal is to see the tangible results, then I'm not going to do the things no one sees. Correct. I'm not going to pray alone. I'm going to pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, right? Right.

I'm not going to study the word all by myself as much because I need to be out there where the people are and I need to be marketing and some of the other things we do to end up growing in the way we think we supposed to grow and we trying to build a ministry that way But if my goal is that I want to be faithful to God, I'm going to do the things that only God sees. And I'm going to be concerned about the state of my heart. I'm going to be despondent when I know in my heart I've sinned.

Whereas I think even when I was a newer Christian, it was very easy for me to have wicked thoughts and then be very comforted that I didn't act out on them. And that was a huge improvement for me. When I got saved, not acting out on wicked thoughts, that was huge. I needed to do that. And that was the first step. But now, you know, as I'm maturing, like I hate when I have a wicked thought. and I hate it because I know God sees it, and he deserves better.

And it's the same thing with building your ministry up, is you're going to talk to people who can't help you. You know, Jude says, he says, these are grumblers, malcontents. He's talking about these false teacher guys. He says, following their own sinful desires. And then he says, they are loudmouth boasters showing favoritism to gain advantage. And so the trait of these wicked false teachers who were condemned before the world began is that they basically use others for their own advantage.

They're not going to stop and talk to a guy like me at G3 because I can't help them. But if all of a sudden I was popular, they would talk to me. and that tells you a little bit about what their goals are and who they're trying to glorify I appreciate you coming on do you have a final comment? I just wanted to say last thing to your listeners if you struggle with anxiety it's probably a demonstration of the fact that you've become your own hero and the reason why I say that is people who deal with anxiety to a great extent often are engaged in some form or another of self-worship and the self that they've been worshipping eventually they discover is not worthy of worship.

And so they start to crumble because you can't control your circumstances. And so everything starts to fall apart. So if you deal with anxiety, you might want to evaluate whether or not Christ is really the hero in the story, or you are the hero in your own story, and you're just not able to bear the weight of that. And so you start to apart. Absolutely.

And if somebody just heard that and that struck a chord with you, there is a previous episode of this Be a Berean podcast about dealing with anxiety. And I'll spoil the surprise, the antidote was looking to Christ. So it gets into a little more detail, some scriptures that encourage people. So that is a good point. Ultimately, we didn't want to just blast a couple Walmart kids out there that were enjoying a little bit of glory.

That wasn't the goal. As far as I'm concerned, they deserve it as much as LeBron James. But in my case, I am glad we led into, hey, how do we help Christian brothers and sisters who genuinely want to please the Lord really investigate their own hearts in this matter? And I think we did a good job doing that, and I hope that it will help people out. And if anybody has any questions, you can always email me and Michael at thingsabove.us.

And I know that Austin's on Facebook, Austin Hetzler, and also he's got the podcast on the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network. And I'm sure he'd be happy to minister to people in various ways as well. For sure. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website, michaelcoghlan.net.

You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us. I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.