A Short(ish) History of the Restoration Movement: Part 7

All right, well, we'll get started.

Last class Yay, I'll miss you.

Yeah, I found last week, as I was walking to my car, I found a bodiless head.

Who is that?

Do you have any idea?

It's a kid's toy.

I don't know who this?

First I thought it was Marie Antoinette, you know.

I mean, it would fit the bill, I don't know.

Is that a Disney character or something?

Okay, yeah, so if you have a kid who's walking around with a doll with no head, I've got it in my pocket, okay.

So send them up to I don't know who this is.

I mean, I don't know, I have no idea.

So, anyways, there's that, All right, last lesson, adios, farewell, goodbye, good luck.

So long.

That was a song.

That's Buck Owen's son Looks like Buck, don't it?

Buddy Allen, you guys remember Buddy Allen?

Yeah, he was on.

Yeah, imagine that he ended up on Hee Haw.

I wonder how that happened.

Right, he was okay, I mean, he had some talent, he wasn't terrible anyway.

And then later, I mean, his career never really took off, you know.

So he started calling himself Buddy Alan Owens, trying to, you know, capitalize on the old man's name.

So anyways, in that vein, we have one last trivia contest.

Let's see how well you guys know your old time country music here.

Okay, we were in Nashville a few years ago and I wanted to go to the Country Music Hall of Fame until I saw the prices of the tickets and then suddenly my interest in it waned very quickly.

I was no longer interested in going to the.

I did go to Ernest Tubbs' record shop, but I didn't go there.

Who are these two fine folks?

Look at those clothes.

Isn't that 70s?

Doesn't that just say 70s all over it?

The brown suit with the mustard yellow shirt?

You know?

Yeah, look at his sideburns.

Yeah, right, right, yes, that's George and Tammy, of course, the possum and the.

I don't know what she would be called.

I don't know something.

First lady of country.

I was thinking animal wise, you know?

Okay, all right, now this is a tough one.

Who's that?

Keith Whitley and Lori Morgan Very good, yes, very good, very good.

The late Keith Whitley and Lori Morgan yes, excellent.

How many of you knew that one?

Okay, a couple of you did.

He's your cousin.

Was your cousin Like Tim Richmond was my cousin?

Right, right, in the past tense.

How about these two?

Very, you guys are excellent.

Ernest Tubb and Low Redalyn yes, very good.

If you ever want to see Coal Miner's Daughter, that's really Ernest Tubb.

He played himself and he was very instrumental in getting her started in Nashville.

He was a big help.

How about them two, kenny Rogers and Dottie West?

Yes, very good, very good.

Yeah, and her daughter, shelly West, did a bunch of duets, did one with David Frizzell.

You're the reason God made Oklahoma right.

Okay, very good, all right.

So I want to pick up where we left off last week.

I was tempted not to do this.

I thought I'm just going to skip it, but I want to run through this just real quick.

We did talk about some challenges that we have currently and some challenges that I see as coming up, including.

We talked about caring for those in need and challenges we may see there.

We talked about technology challenging our Christian unity, but this is one thing I didn't get to last week.

How many of you guys have the Bible on either your phone or on a tablet or something like that Down in front, please?

I can't see.

Okay, and I do.

You know what I do too.

Where's my phone?

There it is.

Of course I got the old man.

You know case that it goes in.

You know I don't people make fun of me, I don't care, you know whatever.

Yeah, I mean you can literally carry it with you anywhere.

I have both.

I've got it on my phone, but I've got a bunch of different translations in print also, and a lot of people do rely on electronic Bibles, and it's a very easy way to bring up different translations together.

You know, put them side by side.

Lots of different stuff, which is good.

It makes it portable and accessible.

Anytime you think of it, you can pull it out and read it, which is something you can't always do otherwise, which I think is a great thing.

But the problem is, if you rely on always do otherwise, which I think is a great thing.

But the problem is, if you rely on electronics for everything, then you're relying on the people who maintain and produce the electronics as well.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, okay, I'm as far from that as you can imagine, but I'm also.

I live in Realville, okay, and a lot of the people who maintain these websites and a lot of the people who are involved in the technological world are not believers and many of them, in fact, are anti-believer.

So we open ourselves up to the danger of the text being corrupted, and I saw this.

I think it was last year, when they were talking about AI and artificial intelligence and what it can do.

Somebody asked Siri to generate a Bible verse about some topic that was immoral, and the Bible verse was generated as they wanted it to be.

If you don't have a print copy, how do you know that what you're reading electronically is, in fact, correct?

I'm not saying you shouldn't have them.

I think they're a great tool, but I want to have the print version also.

There are errors in print versions also.

We've gone back and talked about how we got the Bible.

Remember, we did that class here a while ago and we talked about sometimes errors creep in Translation errors or printing errors or transcription errors it happens.

But in this hyper-political environment we live in, I'm very wary of that.

Okay, I've got to get off my soapbox there.

Okay, I'm getting ready to get back on it.

I'm fixing to get back on it again here in a second.

Okay, so and this affects our unity as well If we can't read the same words because you're reading words that are not in my Bible and you're reading, and I'm reading words that are not in your Bible, or whatever I mean that has an effect on our unity.

Obviously I'm going to talk about politics here very briefly, and I didn't get to this last week and I was tempted to just cut this out because I hate talking about politics, although in my personal life I love politics.

I read about it all the time, and I have since I was a kid.

It's just fascinated me.

But I don't like talking about it in church because it's a divisive subject.

But I do think I need to mention just a couple of things here.

Remember the moral majority, remember Jerry Falwell.

That was kind of the beginning of what I and again, this is my opinion, you can feel free to reject this if you want to it's the beginning, in my opinion, of some very bad things that happened, well-intentioned perhaps, but ended up being bad things.

Where we saw high-profile evangelicals, religious leaders, begin to align themselves with certain politicians and with the Republican Party.

Let's just be honest.

They did that, gained a lot of power for evangelicals.

A lot of power, massive amounts of political power.

But when you get political power, what do you also gain?

Political enemies.

You gain a lot of political enemies.

And so what started out as, hey, we want to use our religion to influence politics became politics influencing religion, and so Christians began to amass a lot of pushback from the other side of the political spectrum, and this is where I see things going off the rail.

Instead of making disciples for Jesus, we decided that we needed to vote your conscience.

Nothing wrong with voting your conscience, but I think what we started to do when I say we, this is the royal, we okay, this is everybody started to rely on the government to make people act like Christians, instead of going out and making Christians.

If you want people to act like Christians, make them Christians, Convert them, persuade them.

But it's easier to get the government to pass law to make them act like that.

So that's the shortcut, and it's very tempting very tempting to do that, and I think a lot of what you see today the polarization of politics in this country can be traced right back to that, because evangelicals have, for right or wrong, for better or for worse, have a reputation as being very dogmatic.

We're right and you're wrong, and not only are we right and you're wrong, we're righteous and you're evil.

If that's the way we view our politics, then the other side decides that they're going to view their politics that way too.

We're right and you're wrong, we're righteous and you're evil, which results in a lot of, I think, the political polarization that we see today.

That bothers me a lot.

I've changed my mind on it.

I didn't used to think that, but in the last several years I have gotten to that point where I just think it's.

I'm not saying Christians shouldn't be involved in politics, I'm not saying you shouldn't run for office, I'm not saying anything like that, but I do think it's wrong for us to rely on the government to carry our water.

We're supposed to be in the disciple-making business, not the law-passing business.

Does that make sense?

Okay, so Curly asks you what have you learned?

What have you learned?

This is your big chance.

What have you learned?

This is your big chance.

I've had four months of trying to pound into your head.

I've tried to beat God into you the last four weeks.

How much of it has taken.

What have you learned?

Let's go all the way back to the beginning, when we talked about the rise of the Reformation and how that happened.

All the way through we could talk about the founding of this country and religious freedom, and then the restoration movement and where we are today.

What have you learned?

I'll tell you some stuff I've learned here in a little bit, but I want to hear from you guys first.

What have you learned?

This is where you look at the floor right, shuffle in your pocket.

You know, yeah, that's the way we did it.

That's the way you always did it.

When I was in school, you never looked at the teacher, because if you look at the teacher you are dead meat right.

Never ever look at the teacher, except for the smart girls.

It was always the girls.

They would.

And I'm sitting there going.

What have you learned?

And I'm not going to.

There's no right answer.

I'm not going to push back against you, carol.

What a struggle it was.

In what sense?

Give me some details.

What stuck with you?

Okay, You're thinking about people like John Wycliffe?

Okay, great example.

William Tyndall Okay, the whole Right.

Yeah, I mean, this was the hotbed of the whole restoration movement.

You know this was the hotbed of the whole restoration movement.

You know Kentucky, northern Virginia at that time, far western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio this was the hotbed of that whole thing.

And then it spread into Tennessee.

Tennessee is now kind of considered like the Jerusalem of the Restoration Movement, but it didn't start that way.

That's not really where it started, south Jerusalem.

It's interesting that all those and this blew my mind we talked about this a little bit too.

A lot of these guys are coming up with the same ideas or similar ideas and didn't even know that other people were having the same ideas.

They were independent of each other.

You know, barton Stone didn't know what Alexander Campbell was doing, or Walter Scott or any of these.

It's like nobody knew, but it was all happening at the same time, which tells me that there was maybe God's hand was in that.

I don't know what else have you learned Anybody?

Anybody?

Yes, gene, go ahead.

I think that was in the context.

What you're talking about was in the context of join our club, be on our team, right?

It's not?

It wasn't so much.

Why don't you come and join us so you can learn to love Jesus and praise the Father?

And it was join our team, right?

Get the Church of Christ jersey that you wear.

Yeah, there is that.

Wouldn't argue with it.

What else?

Anybody?

I won't call on Kevin.

He's got the pensive look on his face, but that means he's not sure he wants to say what he's thinking about.

Clark Shirley, you have a thought?

No't call me Shirley.

What have you learned?

No, it's okay, you don't have to.

Okay, clark, that was you were going to say, right, oh, he took my answer.

That was always my favorite answer.

He took my answer, which I couldn't do if I was first, but anyways, it didn't.

I tried that once and it didn't come.

It was last class.

He took my answer.

Yeah, I mean, there was always the idea that we've got it almost perfectly right, we are almost there, and if we can just get this right, then we've restored the church.

Except then, something else came up and you know the thing that has always bothered me to a degree, but I could never put my finger on it, really as to what it was.

When these things, whatever the things are, whenever these things come up, you were constantly taking the pie and slicing it thinner and thinner, and thinner and thinner, and the people who were in the salvation group, if you want to put it that way, kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, depending on whether they happened to agree with my idea of what doctrine is or not, and it got down, and I kind of made a joke of this before, but it got down to.

Almost this half of the church is probably okay and this half probably isn't, because it's some questionable thing.

I mean, that's how kind of the impression was that I got you know, and it bothered me in a lot of ways, probably most of all because of this.

I started thinking, you know, I always thought it was that way and now I'm not so sure it was that way.

So was I going to H-E double toothpicks if I had died thinking that it was that way?

And now I think it's this way.

But what if I'm wrong about that?

And you're never quite sure whether what you think today is actually the answer?

It puts a lot of doubt in your mind.

I don't know about you.

That makes me oh God, it's right Makes me not really want to associate with people like that.

I don't know.

That has always bothered me.

That has always bothered me.

It has always bothered me.

Where the focus is on the division, not the unity, where division becomes the focus of everything you do and say and teach about, does that make sense, okay?

What else have you learned?

Yes, tom, tradition, interpretation and opinion.

All right, now you're going to have to explain each one of those in detail, please, and we'll wait.

We have plenty of time.

Okay, you know what I've learned and I knew this, I guess, to a degree.

I'm sorry I keep walking, becky, and you keep having to turn around.

Send your chiropractor bill to me.

There is a lot of hidden tradition.

In plain sight you don't notice your own tradition.

That's what I've learned.

It's like you don't notice your own dust.

You know that my computer desk in our basement it probably has not been dusted in I don't know how long.

I could probably get an archaeologist to tell me they dug down far enough and that's my job.

I'm supposed to wipe that off every so, but I just don't do it and I don't even notice it.

You know, it's just kind of the way it is and it's my desk and I kind of like it that way, you know.

But the church can get that way sometimes, where we have our own traditions and we kind of like them that way, but we kind of just don't even recognize that that's what they are, until somebody else comes in and says, hey, what do you do with it?

How come you haven't dusted your desk?

Why?

Why would I dust my desk?

Well, look at all the dust on it.

Oh, yeah, well, you know I'm busy, lots of stuff going on.

I think it is good that we open our eyes and see where tradition has.

And I've said before there's nothing wrong with tradition.

It is the structure upon which we hang all of our lives.

But it's when we fail to recognize it and the tradition becomes doctrine that we run into issues, because we're no different than the Pharisees in that regard, if that's true, and Jesus reserved his harshest rebukes for the Pharisees and that scares me to death.

Yes, clark, did I take your answer again?

Yes, I'm repeating for the blog.

Man has an incredible ability to corrupt good things.

It's good to know the back story.

I think it's imperative to know the back story.

I learned from Buddy.

We will say sometimes he did that for no reason.

Well, that's not true.

Nobody does something for no reason, except for the Browns.

But I mean, I'm a Browns fan.

Okay, it's all right.

We do things for reasons.

It's just we forget the reason.

I will give you an example, and I bet you I can get a dozen different answers from you people to this question.

When I grew up, we went to church Sunday morning and Sunday evening and Wednesday night.

Where did that come from?

Now I will start hearing all sorts well, it's because I got electricity, and people want to come out and see electricity.

No, no, that's not right.

That's not right at all.

It's because and then you get all these.

That was our tradition.

The tradition that I grew up with was Sunday morning, sunday night, wednesday evening, bible study.

That was not worship.

Worship was only on Sunday morning, although I didn't know if Sunday night was worship too.

I don't know.

I mean the sun's down, I don't know.

Why did we do that?

And I, you know, as a kid I'm like you know.

I didn't get to see a Super Bowl, never got to watch the Wizard of Oz.

I can tell you it ended up okay.

Okay, you know, yeah, you remember the.

Did you ever get to see the wizard?

Do you know who the wizard was?

Tell you the whole story.

And I would ask my mom and dad why do we have to do this?

How come we got to go Sunday night?

How come I got to go Wednesday?

And, in all sincerity, the answer I got was because that's the way it is.

I don't think they knew.

Trouble, it's okay, I'm already in trouble.

What are you going to do?

Fire me, duck my salary?

We set up the assembly and then set people up to fail at the assembly we're going to set up.

You better be here on Wednesday.

Well, I'm busy on Wednesdays.

Well, you're not a faithful Christian.

You're the one that set this up.

Tell me in the Bible where it says I have to go Wednesday night.

Tell me where it says I have to go Sunday morning.

We want to restore New Testament Christianity.

I'm all for that.

They went every day of the week.

They met every day in houses, not in this building.

Blow the building up.

We're going to meet in each other's houses.

Oh, no, no, you can't do that.

Why not?

That's not our tradition.

That's not the way that we've learned it.

Is there anything wrong with doing it that way?

No, it's perfectly fine.

What I'm trying to say is there's nothing wrong with doing it this way, but don't get it in your mind that this is the only way to do it and look at somebody else who does it different and say you are wrong.

One of the big things I've learned out of this study is the different way that they used to do it.

We don't do it that way now and we view it as wrong that they did it that way.

People who were doing the best they had with what they had, and we view it as wrong that they did it that way People who were doing the best they had with what they had, and this is what they knew.

This is the best they did.

And Jimmy Carter's book that's the one I had last week.

Oh, you're talking about yeah, you're talking about I'll find it here in a minute Robert Richardson.

Here's our here's.

I'm going to boil it down.

Here's what basic Christianity is, but that's too simple.

Can you imagine a church that was as simple as Robert Richardson talked about?

Here's the danger.

We think unity means we do everything alike.

That's not unity, that's uniformity.

Those are two different concepts but we equate them, partly because somebody's phone's going off but partly because Sorry, geiler, had to call you out.

That was for the blog, that was GeilerGU, just kidding.

We do.

We confuse uniformity and unity and they're just not the same thing.

And you doing something different than me makes me very uncomfortable because it makes me question whether I'm doing the right thing.

And you doing something different than me makes me very uncomfortable because it makes me question whether I'm doing the right thing and where I grew up.

You better do the right thing, because if you don't do it right, you are in danger of hellfire.

Yeah, joe, you had your hand up.

Did you have your hand up?

Did you have your hand up?

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, okay, go.

If I didn't do that to Joe, I guess Heather would give him hard time too.

Go ahead.

If we teach people to love Jesus, if that is our primary focus, the rest of this stuff takes care of itself.

Oh, but that takes a long time and it's too hard.

I don't care, it's a lifetime.

It'll take you a lifetime and you'll never get there, but that's where we're headed.

That's what we need to do.

One of the things that I learned that I really love about the restoration movement is the idea that we have and we talked about the weakness in this, because who's going to define these things?

We have unity in essentials and liberty in non-essentials.

There are certain things that we have to agree on that we will have unity, and the rest of them is up to your interpretation of the scriptures.

I may not agree with you, but you're, my brother, easy to say, hard to practice, very hard to practice, and it is amazing to me I'll get you into a second Cliff.

And it is amazing to me I'll get you in just a second, cliff it is amazing to me how quickly that can go off the rails.

I mean, it just takes one instance for that to go to turn left.

It's something you've got to keep on top of all of the time.

Yes, cliff, you started out by talking about the Bible and politics, but politics played a whole role from the very beginning.

It has King this and king that and Pope this and everything.

It's always been politics.

There has been.

If you know anything about the French Revolution I don't know if you guys have ever about the French Revolution, I don't know if you guys have ever studied the French Revolution a fascinating story.

One of the reasons that they beheaded poor Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI was the church and the state had become essentially one.

They took Notre Dame Cathedral and turned it into a temple of reason, got rid of the Catholic.

They killed as many priests.

Temple of reason got rid of the Catholic.

They killed as many priests as they could, got rid of the Catholic Church because they identified the church with the state and they hated the state.

That's one of the dangers of Christianity, of our brand of Christianity, being wrapped up with the government.

People hate the government.

They're going to hate you, not because you're following Jesus, but because you're promoting political ideas, and that, to me, is just abhorrent.

All right, let me just run through a couple of things.

We're running out of time here and that's okay.

A couple of things that I learned.

I think we owe a great debt to the people who assembled and preserved the Scriptures very early on.

These were people who loved God and loved His Word and did everything they could to preserve it, and that was extremely difficult.

And I think we owe a great debt to those who persisted in trying to translate the Bible into the native language of the people around them.

Remember, we talked about it being in Latin and nobody spoke Latin.

Sometimes not even the priests could read the Bible chained to the pulpit under lock and key.

Remember all that, and guys like Wycliffe and Tyndale and Martin Luther trying very hard to get that book into people's hands so they could read it for themselves.

Would we agree with everything they thought?

No, absolutely not.

We wouldn't, but that's what they knew and they were doing the best they could and they were very brave people.

Some of them suffered death because they wanted to get that book into people's hands.

I think we owe them a great.

The reason you have a Bible today is because of people like that.

I think the people who questioned the church, the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation we owe a great debt to People like Luther Took their life on their own hands to challenge the status quo and say this isn't right, something has to change.

Who of us would be willing to do that?

And I think we need to remember those who were trying to discard human tradition and restore however imperfectly, whatever spin they put on those terms primitive Christianity.

These are people who said we need to get back to the Bible as our authority and try to do Bible things in Bible ways.

Did they get it all right?

In my opinion, or in your opinion, probably not.

Everybody has different ways of looking at that stuff, but that was the goal.

Let's get back.

Let's get this human tradition out of things and try to get back to just doing the Bible.

Let's love Jesus and try to be his disciples.

That's a great message, and I think we owe a great debt to those who advocated liberty, love and grace among believers.

I think that's fantastic.

Those are concepts that we don't talk about much and we probably should talk about them more.

I also have learned I must constantly examine myself, not you, me.

It's easy to look at my brother or my sister and say, here's what you got wrong.

I easy to look at my brother or my sister and say, here's what you got wrong.

I need to look at myself For the same errors, the very same errors those who oppose the Reformation or the Restoration movements, right Pride, self-righteousness, equating tradition with doctrine.

I need to look at myself and say am I doing the same thing?

Am I making decisions based on the same erroneous assumptions that they made?

I also think I have to keep an open mind, when I'm talking to people about the Bible and discussing ideas or issues with them, that they may come to different conclusions than I do.

We do need to examine what we believe we need to examine.

I'm not saying we need to reinvent the wheel every time we see a wheel.

You'd never get anything done.

It would take forever.

But I do think we need to understand wow, that is a wheel, and where did that come from?

Oh, and this is why we use it that way.

And maybe somebody else uses that wheel in a different way than I do, and maybe his idea is better than mine.

Keep an open mind.

I grew up in a very closed-minded world, very closed-minded world.

It wasn't until much later that I found out there was a world beyond the four walls that I knew and I wasn't ready for it.

I had not prepared myself for it and it blew my mind and I spent some time wandering in the spiritual wilderness because I wasn't ready for that stuff.

I just thought everybody thought the way I did and if you didn't, you're an ignoramus, which is true.

But that's kind of the way I thought of the world and I've learned.

Now you know, I've learned some things from people that I needed to learn, sometimes the very hard way.

And then this I'll finish the class with this I have to always remember and put into practice Ephesians 5.21.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Put Christ first, put my relationship with Christ first and learn to submit to each other.

I may not agree with you on a matter of liberty or a matter of conscience, but I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and submit to you, as I certainly hope you will submit to me as well.

Does that make sense?

All right.

I hope you've enjoyed the class.

Fare thee well says the Grateful Dead.

Fare thee well says the grateful dead.

Next week we will have the first of a series of lessons and I'm not even sure who's up first that are going to be taught in here on favorite chapters of the Bible All through June and July.

I'm sure it's going to be a great class, so hope to see you next week.

Thank you all, hope you've enjoyed it.