Hi, my name is Rachel. I'm a wife and a mom of school-age kids from northern Indiana. I've been a Desiring God ministry partner for 14 years, and you are listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with Jon Typer. Rachel has an important story to share with us, and I want you to hear it.

It's about the importance of Bible faithfulness. That in a moment. But on this theme of carefulness with God's Word, we have a question today from a listener named David about how progressive can a progressive Christian get? Here's what he asks. Dear Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. I have a colleague who would define himself as a progressive Christian.

He believes homosexual practice is holy and people engaged in such acts are qualified to be leaders in the church. He also believes the Old Testament is completely metaphorical and cannot be trusted in any historical way. I believe both beliefs fly against what the Bible teaches and teaches about itself.

My question is this, can you contradict the Bible at these levels and still be considered a Christian? I know it's impossible to have an infallible understanding of the whole Bible and that we will err in many ways. I'm sure I do. But also, isn't there a line that cannot and must not be crossed, Pastor John?

How progressively Christian can a real Christian get? So let me think out loud with you for just a moment about a couple of the words used in this question, and then I'll get right to giving as clear and biblical an answer as I can. Let's take the word "progressive." The reason this word has come to refer to people and views that go beyond what has historically been considered true to the Bible is not because the idea of progress is bad in itself.

All of us want to see progress toward truth and goodness and beauty. The reason the word "progressive" has taken on the meaning it has is because it has come to imply a progress away from the truth and toward error, progress away from biblical holiness toward morality. And here's a really interesting and, I think, significant thing, namely, that the idea of progressiveness is in the Bible.

Even the word and the idea are in the Bible. I didn't know this until a few years ago when I was trying to do careful translation of 2 John. So here's 2 John 1 7-9. It goes like this, "Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.

Such a one is the deceiver and the Antichrist. Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what you have worked for, but may win a full reward." And here comes everyone who goes on ahead. Now the Greek there is "pro-ago," who progresses. So you could translate it "Everyone who progresses," or you could say, to bring it right up to date, "Everyone who is progressive and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God." So here is a use of the word "progress" or "going on ahead" in the sense of leaving true teaching behind.

In other words, a person can forsake the Christian faith, not just by swerving to the right or to the left, but by going ahead, straight ahead, and leaving behind the truth and grasping for things that are coming, things that do not fit with the faith once for all delivered to the saints, though they may fit the spirit of the age.

So we have a yellow flag waving—I suppose I should say red flag— waving in the Bible, "Beware! Beware of those who get frustrated with abiding, standing firm." You could stick in the word "conserving." You've got the political polls. Let's just stay with the Bible words. "Abiding, standing firm in the teaching of Christ, holding fast to old, sure truth, and who are restless." The alternative is that they get restless with the old and the firm and the true, and they want change and they want newness, especially change that fits the spirit of the times.

Now, of course, lots of non-essential things need change from age to age and culture to culture, and that's not an issue here. But lots of essential things do not need to change and must not change if we are to be faithful Christians. Now, the second word that I wanted to make a comment about is the word "considered" in his question.

David asks, "Can you contradict the Bible at these levels that he itemized and still be considered a Christian?" That's a good way to ask the question. He didn't say, "Can you contradict the Bible at these levels and be a Christian?" Now, the answer to that question is more complicated, because the person might be on the brink of repenting from a temporarily destructive, unbiblical, heretical view, and we can't see it.

He might have dipped into it, been gripped by it, be on the brink of repentance, come out of it, prove to be a long-term great Christian, and we can't see any of that. Only God can see things like that. Our job in the church is not to make final, decisive, infallible decisions about who is truly born again and who isn't.

Our job is to decide who should be considered a Christian—that is, who should belong to the visible church and who should be disciplined or excommunicated from the visible church. And we make these decisions not because we're God, but because we are called to form judgments on the basis of what we can see and what we can hear and what we know in the Bible.

God looks on the heart. We look on the fruit of the heart—namely, what a person believes and how a person acts. So with those two clarifications of progressive and considered, my answer to the question is this. Yes, there is a line which a person may cross which puts him in a position of rightly being considered a non-Christian, having once professed to be a Christian, because of some unrepentant behavior or some belief that the Bible itself shows to undermine salvation.

Let's just take one of David's examples. He says that his colleague believes homosexual practice is holy and people engaged in such acts are qualified to be leaders in the church. So there are two questions here. One is whether practicing homosexual acts without repentance puts one in a position where he should be considered a non-Christian, and the other is whether a person who celebrates that homosexual practice as good and pleasing to God, who may not themselves practice, should be considered a Christian.

Little anecdote. In June of 2002, the Synod of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster in Vancouver, Canada authorized its bishop to produce a service for blessing same-sex unions. J.I. Packer, who has gone to be with the Lord now, a longtime member of that church, that denomination, walked out. He walked out.

This is hard to imagine. This is "gentleman to the max," right? You spent a lot of time with Packer. Oh, totally. I don't know if it's easy for you. It's not easy for me to imagine J.I. Packer standing up and in rejection of something so serious that he would actually walk out.

So here's what he wrote in January of 2003, and the title of the article in CT, you can go find it, is "Why I Walked." Why did I walk out with the others? Because this decision, taken in its context, 1) falsifies the gospel of Christ, 2) abandons the authority of Scripture, 3) jeopardizes the salvation of fellow human beings, and 4) betrays the church in its God-appointed role as the bastion of the bulwark of divine truth.

Now, why did he say that blessing homosexual unions falsifies the gospel? That's probably the most serious of the four. Because of 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10. He explained, but I'll just put my own words here. The text says, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God." That's 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10. Now, the gospel of Jesus, the death of Jesus for sinners, is meant to rescue people for the kingdom of God, not keep them out of the kingdom of God.

Therefore, when you celebrate the very behaviors which keep a person out of the kingdom of God, you are anti-gospel. You are pointing people into the very sin that Jesus died to rescue the people from. This is a falsification of the gospel. It is saying, "Jesus did not die for this." It doesn't need to be died for.

It's beautiful. It's not damning. So, my conclusion is that both the person who persistently and unrepentantly carries on with adultery, theft, greed, homosexual practice, etc., and the person who celebrates that person's self-destructive course, should not be considered Christians. That is, they should be disciplined as a church. They should be excluded from the visible church in the hope that the seriousness of that act would bring them to their senses and restore them to Christ and to fellowship.

So, one principle then I close with—one principle for decisions about which beliefs and which behaviors are in this category of seriousness—is whether there is biblical evidence that they actually undermine the gospel. The closer they get to jeopardizing souls in this way, the more fitting it is that their advocates should be considered non-Christian.

What we do with the Bible matters infinitely. Thank you, Pastor John. And speaking of the importance of our faithfulness to the text of Scripture and why that matters, I want you to hear Rachel's story. She lives with her husband and kids in northern Indiana. You heard her voice earlier, and she shares this conviction with us.

We don't play games with the Bible. We preach what it says, verse by verse, without shame. Rachel's on the phone with me now to share a little of her journey. Rachel, thanks for taking some time out of your schedule. I know your days are very full and busy with little ones.

Share with us how you first learned of John Piper the preacher. I first heard of John Piper in 1999. I was a teenager headed off to college in a few weeks, and my grandma kind of convinced me or strong-armed me maybe into helping at a missionary conference in the kitchen.

So it was August, and it was hot, and it was a kitchen. But there was a family at this missionary conference from the Twin Cities, and this guy was so excited to introduce his pastor to me. And so he popped in this cassette into his cassette player, and it was John Piper preaching somewhere in Romans.

That was actually a pretty unremarkable event for me at the time, because I grew up with expository preaching. So he was preaching through Romans. My pastor back home had been preaching through Romans for several years, and I thought that that was what churches did. Pastors got up, and they took the next five verses of Scripture and talked about it.

And then you came back, and you took the next five verses the next week. Well, then I went off to college, and I grew a lot in college. I learned that I heard John Piper's name again and picked up his book and read Desiring God, which was helpful in learning to frame a worldview, to think about what I believed and why I believed it and how it affected the way I actually lived.

I got married, and we went off, you know, started our own married life together, and we were just going to find a good, solid, expositional, gimmick-free church, and that was not easy. We discovered that that was actually quite hard to find. So for 20 years, we kind of experienced church extremes.

We experienced church where there was a great emphasis placed on fruit without tending the root of faith and love for Christ. We learned that you can actually be in a place where theology is loved more than Christ is, and that was difficult. And then we also experienced church which had great love for Christ and wonderful people, full of wonderful people who served our children and loved the Lord and had wonderful community, but we would struggle on Sunday mornings with sermons there, just because the sermons were kind of like a box of chocolates.

You didn't know any given Sunday what you were going to get. So DG for us for 20 years was a constant resource of solid, consistent, biblical teaching— a place where we could go if we had specific questions on a certain issue, but also mainly just for consistent food to feed our souls when we weren't getting that somewhere else.

Powerful. Thank you, Rachel. You're talking right now to several listeners of the podcast, some of who are struggling in the same way—hungry for a church that preaches the Bible expositionally and for a church that loves Christ with great affection. So speak to our listeners now who turn to Desiring God for Resources for faithful Bible teaching, but maybe have never thought it is important to also support the work that we do here.

What would you say to them? I would actually echo something that I heard Randy Alcorn say a few years ago. He said something to the effect that if you believe the Word of God is true, and it's clear, you need to seek out ministries who believe that and support them, because there are getting to be fewer and fewer of them.

And that struck a chord with me. That's why we began giving. It's why we're still giving. The fact that anybody all over the world can go to DG and get solid resources that are based on the Word of God for free, no registration. They don't even have to give an email.

Any poor college student living on ramen can go get it. It is a blessing. It's been a blessing to us. It's been a blessing to many. I would encourage anyone to support Desiring God who has benefited from it. Wow. Well, 14 years of supporting Desiring God is a huge and strategic investment in our work, Rachel.

Thank you. You're welcome. So many precious friends have come alongside us and said, "You know what? The Bible is true and the Bible is clear, and where the Bible is clear, we need to believe it and love it and proclaim it on Sunday mornings." And then we need to seek out ministries that believe it too and support them, because the pressure to compromise what the Bible makes clear, that pressure is all around us, as Pastor John talked about a moment ago.

If you believe Desiring God is standing firm on the truths of Scripture, would you consider joining Rachel to become a monthly ministry partner with us? Much of our financial support comes from folks who give on average $30 a month. To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org. That's give.desiringgod.org.

Always appreciated. I'm your host Tony Rehnke, Pastor John and I return on Monday. We'll see you then. You You