Father Josiah Opens Up About the Mysteries of the Orthodox Church

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So if you come into the church, you're going to see hundreds of
thousands of dollars of marble. You're going to see several
$1,000,000 worth of he says, do you renounce Satan?
And then he says then face West and spit on him.
There are some sins that you canrepent of.
And then the very next day they're biting at your ankles
again. And you have to learn children

(00:20):
are their mothers, wombs and oldpeople are have their lives
terminated by physicians that's said that.
When Paul is writing about the thorn in his flesh, do you think
that that was a chronic illness he was dealing with?
Do you think that that was a chronic sin he was dealing with?
Bruce LON. Hey, before we get into this
video, do me a huge favor, make sure to subscribe, make sure you

(00:41):
hit that like button. Huge percentage of you guys that
watch don't subscribe or like and we're now on podcast
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That helps out a son. Trying to make sure that we
spread out the content for you. All right, let's jump into this
video. All right, ladies and gentlemen,

(01:02):
we have an amazing, highly anticipated guests and you guys
been requesting them. Father Josiah Trenham all the
way down from Riverside. Amazing, amazing man.
We had a beautiful dinner last night, took a little walk on the
pier, solved all the world's ecumenical issues, and now we're
here today having a conversation.

(01:24):
Father, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Ruslan. I'm happy to be with you.
I'm pumped. So we met in person for the
first time at Jordan Peterson's ARC conference in London.
I don't know if you remember, and I was very excited to to
finally get to connect with you.We have a ton of mutual friends
and we're finally able to make this happen.
You have some really cool stuff in the works with regards to a

(01:45):
conference you have coming up onmarriage.
Obviously you have a thriving YouTube channel and ministry
that's that's exploding. But for those who don't know
anything about Father Josiah, give us a little bit about your
your back story. I got to know a little bit about
who you are last night. And very like the world's most
interesting priest. Oh, stop, Stop.

(02:07):
I don't think that at all. What can I tell you?
I'm a fourth generation SouthernCalifornian, raised in Pasadena.
I went to to school in Santa Barbara, met my wife there,
who's been my beloved for this is our 38th year of marriage.

(02:31):
Congratulations. She's a very patient woman.
Wow, very long-suffering, as washer mother.
God rest her soul. And we have a beautiful family.
I'm very thankful. We have 10 kids from 35 to 12
and seven grandchildren. I told my I told my kids, look,

(02:54):
you all don't have to have 10 kids each.
I would like that. 100 grandkids.
I can live with 100 grandkids. That would be two birthdays a
week, every week and to name it,4 celebrations a week every
week. I like that.
I've been a priest for, I guess,since 1993, so 32 years.

(03:15):
Yeah. And I served as an assistant
priest in Santa Barbara for almost five years.
And then I was sent to Riverside.
We had a small mission starting there.
We were in a in a warehouse and thanks to God the people have
put up with me and I've put up with them together and it's a

(03:37):
beautiful parish. Saint Andrew is the name of the
parish in Riverside. I'm seeking the Kingdom of
Heaven, thirsting to see my Saviour's face and trying to not
embarrass him in this life, but somehow make a small
contribution to the advancement of his Kingdom on the earth.
Now until my last breath. So that's me.

(04:00):
Amen. So you started the the parachute
currently at and it started as a.
Mission I was yeah, I did not the the I was the second priest
for 4 1/2 years. There was another priest, Father
Paul is his name, a beautiful soul who did, I would say the
hardest part of the work, which is creating something from

(04:23):
nothing. We were supported by our mother
church in Garden Grove, St. Luke.
What's the name of that parish? I interestingly, the the priest
who had started the church in inGarden Grove went to high school
with my dad and when I first gotassigned to my parish, and this

(04:45):
was May 1st, 1998, the Bishop assigned me there.
I went and I got to know some ofthe priests in the local area.
But the first time I met this priest, it was a huge gathering,
maybe 300 priests or so. We were in a large room, and I
saw an older priest on the otherside of the room looking at me
and staring at me. I'm like, oh, why is he staring
at me? So I just walked right up to

(05:05):
him. And the closer I got to him, the
more pale he became. And I got to like this close to
him. And he looked at me and he said,
my God, noble, I've aged and youhaven't.
My dad knows. Your dad, that's great.
He thought I was. You look a lot like your dad
then. I guess, yeah, I guess so.

(05:28):
I guess so. I do.
I do look like my dad, although my my dad was always clean,
clean shaven, except for the three years when he went around
the world that didn't shave. But other than that, it was
always clean shaven. But he saw my dad and me and I
found that extremely ironic and encouraging.
Anyway, he became of a great encouragement to me, supported

(05:48):
me. That priest God rest his soul.
So you said something really interesting to me.
You said when that church was started, you guys met in a
warehouse. Yeah, because it's very common
for Protestant church plants to start in warehouses and then
slowly be built up. But I've never I, I'd never

(06:10):
really thought about what it would be like to start a new
parish if you're coming from theEastern Orthodox tradition.
So how does that, how does that like logistically work in terms
of you guys find a building and then how do you add your art and
how do you make it feel like a Eastern Orthodox Church?
How does that the whole process work?
Because I've never never really thought about new churches
starting up and what it looks like.
If someone saw my my church in today and you could, you could

(06:33):
actually, I, I did a Sacred architecture video with Jonathan
Pejot and then kind of highlights the church.
If someone wanted to see it, they could just go to our
YouTube channel and see it there.
It's Saint Andrews, right? Saint Andrew, Yeah, the parish
is magnificent. The the church that we actually
built with the grace of God. Is this is?
This. Yeah, that's it right there.

(06:55):
That's the parish. OK, I'll.
I. Didn't mean to interrupt.
You it's a marvelous. So this is it, right?
Here 7 don't church. It's based upon an architectural
plan from the 13th century, a beautiful church called Saint
Catherine's in the northern partof Thessaloniki, Greece.
That's a World Heritage Site from 1280.
I fell in love with that church in the 90s when I was visiting

(07:15):
and I hadn't actually been sent yet to to Riverside.
I was an assistant priest in Santa Barbara, and I just put
some of the photos I had when I saw the church in Greece.
I loved it so much. I asked if I had a photographer
take a bunch of photos of it, and he sent them to me.
And I just kept them in a folderthinking, you know, who knows,

(07:36):
maybe one day I'll be able to build the church.
And if I do, I'm going to take these photos out and I'm going
to use these as a help for the design.
Well, that actually came to passabout the way that, you know,
when you have no money and you're starting out with very
few people, you do what you can.So we, we rented an industrial
site. It had no windows, it was a

(07:56):
machine shop before us. And we, we rented 2 next to each
other, one for, you know, Sundayschool and fellowship and
etcetera, teaching the other forworship because we, we, we have
services all the time. And it was right next to a, a
train track. We used to, in the middle of the
service every Sunday morning, wewould hear this.
No, no, no, no, no, no. The train would come, the entire

(08:17):
building would shake. We did the best we could.
You know, we, we built an altar with our own hands.
We built a Econistasa little wall where we put the icons.
We, we did what we could. It was, it was rough though.
While it was rough and we had really no air conditioning that
worked. And Riverside in the summers can
be brutal. And we were there for a number

(08:38):
of years. We were there for a number of
years. The the fire captain of the
city, We we were way above fire code.
And he was very kind. He came to see me once.
He said, father, tell me what's really going on in here?
And I said, I'll tell you the whole skinny come in here.
And I told him he goes, are you like going to build some church?
And I said, we just got into contract on land and we're in.

(09:02):
He goes, good. He goes, I'm closing your file
and I'm not going to open it again as long as you do what
you're saying because I don't want to have to come back here
because you're, you're totally illegal.
So we did. We were able to buy some
incredible land. The land was, it's right next to
the University of California Riverside.
You come out on our lawn, you can look right and you see the
entrance to UCR. It had been originally owned by

(09:23):
a 101 year old retired professorof botany from UCR named Homer
Chapman. I like to mention him, God rest
his soul because without Homer, our church would not exist.
He owned the first two acre parcel that we bought.
We bought another, we bought additional parcel since then,
but without him we never could have gone on there because we
couldn't afford it. We went to see him, he found out

(09:45):
who we were, he liked us and he dropped his price 40% and we
were able to get the land. We built our first building
there and that was our first service and our first building
was August 25th, 2002. And in 2004 we bought another 3
acres next door. That's where the church ended up
being built and then we bought another acre parcel just to the

(10:06):
just above the church, which is where our offices are.
We built a a grand hall. We built a school.
We actually have a Parish Schoolthere, K through 12.
It's a beautiful community, beautiful people.
How long does something like this?
I'm trying to get it back on thescreen SEC.
How long does something like this take to build from the
point you guys get the land and get everything together to

(10:28):
building a church like this? You know, sacred architecture is
is it's a divine art. It's a sacred art and it has
norms because buildings express truth.
And it's something that Christians have taken very
seriously for a very long time. There are there's meaning in

(10:50):
every aspect of the design. And the idea is that you offer
to God the best. No Orthodox Christian would want
to live in a house more expensive than his church.
He would feel ashamed. The church is the House of the
living God, and it is common. It's it's actually a expression

(11:11):
of the Kingdom of God on the earth.
We actually believe that God sanctifies materials, the human
body chiefly, but also stone that's consecrated to him.
So if you come into the church, you're going to see hundreds of
thousands of dollars of marble. You're going to see several

(11:32):
$1,000,000 worth of iconographicpaintings.
Some people look and they said, why all the extravagance?
And the answer is simply for thelove of God.
That's why the extravagance. The church.
Christians have always built churches at the center of their
existence. They've always been at the
center of our towns, in the center of our cities, in the
center of our villages, because we think worship gathers the

(11:55):
whole community together to be with God, and nothing is more
important than worship. And that's the proclamation.
That's the message that you're making when you invest yourself
in this kind of project and the church alters you, like when
someone walks into the church. All churches, all traditional
churches are built facing the East.

(12:15):
That's huge, absolutely huge. The Orient, right?
You know, the language orientingyourself or reorienting
yourself, That means re easing yourself.
And to east yourself means to face God, right?
Jesus says to us that his returnwill be like lightning flashing
from the east to the West. When we stand in worship, we're

(12:39):
facing east, anticipating his return, hoping actually that his
return will be in the middle of the liturgy.
That's our hope. But we go there to meet him, to
experience him. And that is something that
Christians have always done. They've always oriented their
churches to the east and the West.
We turn our back on the West. The West is in Scripture, the

(13:02):
place of the devil. The the beast comes up out of
the sea in the Apocalypse from the West.
And so when a person first becomes a Christian in the
Orthodox tradition and traditional Christianity, you
face the West and you renounce. The priest makes you publicly
renounce Satan. He says, do you renounce Satan?

(13:25):
And then you have to do that three times.
And then he says then face West and spit on him.
And the culmination of your renunciation of Satan is that
you look West and you literally spit on him.
And then the priest turns you east and he says, do you join
yourself to Christ? Three times He says that.

(13:45):
Then he says, then bow down before him, and you make a
prostration to the east and pledge your loyalty to Christ.
That action which is the beginning of Christian life,
even for children, infants, their godparents, do this on
their behalf. They face W they renounce the
devil, they turn E they pledge their loyalty to Christ.
That action, the church, fatherssay, should be repeated every

(14:05):
day of your life. So when I start my day, I'd be,
I start my day with prayer. And in Orthodox Christian homes,
we, we make a little place, we turn, we try to turn our homes
into small churches so that the scent of the church, the, the
grace of the church when we're all gathered together as
believers spills into the, into the church.
So the idea is that the center of the Kingdom of God is the

(14:27):
church gathered together and that that should come into a
person's home. There's lots of ways you do
that. You bring the priest into your
home regularly. He brings holy water.
You bring things that are blessed at the church home,
flowers and bread and all sorts of things.
You also build a place in your home for prayer that your family
gathers together. And when I, when I leave my

(14:48):
home, I spit, I, when I leave myhome to go out into the world,
which lies in the in the hands of the evil 1 Saint John says,
he says the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
If the church isn't there, then it's satanic territory.
Our goal is to enlighten the world and to take it all and to
turn the whole world into church.
This is what we're trying to do.Bring the grace of God,

(15:09):
evangelize the nations until theknowledge of God permeates the
earth as the waters cover the sea.
This is what we're we're, we're laboring to do so that the
prophetic vision is fulfilled. So when I leave, I know I'm
going into, you know, hostile territory, demonic territory.
And so that Saint John Chrysostom encourages everybody

(15:29):
to do this. He says when you leave your
house, spit W remember who you are.
Remember what your relationship to Christ is, that you're his
servant in the world, and what your relationship to the devil
is, that you've renounced him and want nothing to do with him.
It's a beautiful practice. That's awesome, I didn't know
there was so much East Coast West Coast beef between the east
and the West. It's a 90s rap reference.

(15:51):
Oh, it is. It's OK.
Sorry my ignorance. My.
Ignorance, I didn't know that was there was so much in that
with regards to the East and theWest.
And so till this day, this when someone becomes a member.
Of your church universal. You guys still make them spit
towards the West? 100% interesting.
Yeah. Wow, it's universal practice.

(16:13):
OK. And so the altars and everything
is kind of built in the same wayto reflect this idea of the
world being the West and the church being the East.
I love what you said about. The Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God, I love what you said about when you go out
to the world, you're trying to usher in and illuminate the
world and and make church everywhere.
Yeah, That's what's coming. That's what's coming, Yeah.

(16:34):
Is that the, the, the, the splitwe have now what people call
secular society? It's totally unnatural.
When God fashioned the world, there was no sacred and secular
distinction. Everything was with the Lord for
the Lord in the Lord. That's that's how the world is
created to be. When we rebelled against them,
when our first parents rebelled against them, that created this

(16:58):
split. The split start in them and then
it went to the world, right? The split was in them.
Now they were disloyal, they fell into their sins, and now
they have this terrible conflictgoing on within themselves.
As Saint Paul describes it, right, you have the old man and
the new man in Christ. That split between the sacred

(17:20):
and secular torments Christians,torments me.
The idea that I could go for an hour or two hours and never
think about God, that pains me, makes me want to cry.
It's so grotesque. There should be no Saint.
Paul says whatever you do, Amen.Everything in the name of Jesus

(17:43):
Christ to the glory of God the Father.
Do everything with Thanksgiving.That's just normal human life.
That's what human beings made for.
So this sacred secular split which is the consequence of sin
in US, also exists in the world,and the Lord is 100% resolved to
solve that, to heal that. How much of that do you think is
also, though byproduct of Christians fleeing the world or

(18:06):
fleeing the institutions or fleeing the marketplace?
Meaning there's a lot of folks who are afraid of the world,
they're scared of the world. They don't maybe have the proper
framework that we are to go in ushering the Kingdom of God.
We talk about this a lot on the channel, right?
You asked me yesterday, what, what is it that we try to do?
And I said, I want to empower people to live a life that
blesses God to to go out and to be the hands and feet of Jesus,

(18:31):
right? And so, but, but in that, like
you see a lot of folks who we look at our modern university
system, right? And how much of that was
established by Christians, how much of that was established by
people of God to educate people,the, all, the, all the Ivy
League schools. And then slowly Christians just
kind of bounced and they left. And so even you go to Oxford and

(18:55):
CS Lewis being a teacher there, right?
And all these amazing contributions.
And now it seems that Christianshave fled the institutions.
They fled the marketplace, even popular media and popular art,
right? You talk about pop, pop music
all goes back to the, to the black church, for example, and
we've slowly pulled away and I don't know how helpful that's

(19:17):
been. So I, I, I'm totally with you in
that there's a, there's a war happening and that there's a
split it within Adam and Eve andall that.
But how much of that do you think has been Christians just
being afraid to go in and to occupy spaces that we're we're
we're called to transform and illuminate?
All of it. All of it but the the chief

(19:39):
space that we have abandoned is the human heart, our own hearts,
our love has grown cold and thatexpresses itself and not seeking
God, not living with God ourselves and then that spills
over into not having the fulfilling the responsibility of
loving our neighbors. So 100% I agree with you to take

(20:05):
take universities. I'd like also to address the.
The concept of hospitals too, 'cause I think these are very
parallel what's happened in bothcases, these have become centers
of Satan's Kingdom. Universities are secular
universities and our hospitals, sadly, which used to be places

(20:25):
of healing and now often are places of death, where we
actually kill people, babies, and now old people, which is
just tragic. The university is a Christian
creation. The very word university is a,
is a compound word that only Christians can articulate.
Only people who actually believein God can.

(20:46):
It's a, the, it's a unity and a diversity together.
What makes a university is a, a diversity of competencies,
right? You have professors of
economics, professors of history, professors of biology,
science, etcetera, all with their specialties.
And then you have a unity. The unity is 2.

(21:07):
You have the commitment that allthese subjects have a common
origin in God and you have that unity is expressed by a common
faculty. So traditional universities
which there is all all this 400 in Constantinople, in the West
it began really about 1100, Oxford, the Sorbonne in Paris,

(21:28):
etcetera. These are the oldest kind of
Western universities. Constantinople is even older.
But they the the concept was that the world is God's, every
subject is God's, obviously. And so theology was considered
in the West, the queen of the sciences that held everything
else together. The idea that you could
understand something earthly like biology without a reference

(21:50):
to God. Christians have never believed
that idea. That's nuts, absolutely nuts.
Today, universities have been Coopted by secularists through a
process of of gradual secularization in the West.
And now you have they they shouldn't be called
universities. There's no unity whatsoever in

(22:10):
universities. There's no reference to God in
each subject. And even the faculty doesn't
exist. So if you go to UCR, literally
200 yards from my campus, which there's much about it that I
love, many professors that I love, I mean nothing against
them, but the system itself is secular.
There's no cooperation between the faculty.

(22:31):
Each group is living with their own little world.
The economist and the business people talk to themselves.
The historians talk to themselves, the linguists talk
to themselves. Nobody talks to each other, and
there is no reference whatsoeverto ultimate things.
Rooting education, which is why education, which was
traditionally a study of unchanging realities that

(22:51):
informed our vision of the Earth, that's completely gone
now. It's essentially trade school.
That's basically what universe, the number one subject now is
business, and people go to universities for a business
degree so that they could make money.
What does that have to do with learning?
What does that have to do with knowing God and knowing His

(23:11):
world? Forgive me.
Very little, very little. And I think many Americans are
seriously reconsidering universities themselves.
Is this really worth it? Am I learning anything and am I
getting an education from the universities?
That's actually being very helpful.
All of my children have gone to university, but we, we prep them

(23:34):
all. We prep them all very seriously.
And they, I have a son just thisyear graduated from Berkeley,
another son who graduates graduating, he's actually
graduating in a week from UCIUC Irvine.
They went in with, you know, reasonable expectations, right?
They didn't go in thinking that they're going to get some sort
of great classical education. They had to actually, they went

(23:56):
in very with their eyes open, knowing how slanted the UC
system is in, in, in, in California.
And so they they knew what they were going to get and they knew
what they had to do to get through the classes so that they
could get a degree. That's very sad.
Yeah, it's very sad. What they major in?
I have actually two sons who graduated from Berkeley.
They both majored in classics, which is actually a very good

(24:17):
subject for a Christian person to major in because you get to
read significant literature and avoid a lot of the fake
education, which isn't even education.
My son, who just graduated from UCI, majored in economics and it
was very brutal. Very, very brutal.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ton of data to support that even

(24:39):
the the value of a college education isn't worth what it
was in the 90s You. Know Charlie Kirk's message is
really hitting people. OK, tell me about that.
I I don't know Charlie. I'm not friends with Charlie,
but my sons have got me watchinghim just like you.
Yeah, your. Your sons keep your ear to the
ground, huh? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, they do.
But CC, who's, you know, a very well known figure now in the

(25:02):
American landscape, didn't go tocollege.
And he goes to universities in order to interact with kids
about a lot of different subjects.
But one of the one of the commonthemes that he wants to discuss
is that it's not, it's not worthit to go to college anymore.
You can, you can be committed yourself to learning.
That commitment to learning is traditionally Christian, right?

(25:23):
If you love God, you love what he makes.
Come on, right? It flows from that.
If you love God and you love hisworld, you know that every
aspect of his world is permeatedwith meaning, and therefore to
study his creation is to know him better and to understand him
better. When you lose the grand vision,
you lose the enchantment of the world and you lose a great
interest in the world. Much of Western culture now is

(25:48):
all about pleasures. You want to get a job so you can
make money, so you can do the things you want.
What a banal way of life. It's just very sad.
So what are you? What are you advising your sons,
who are young men and what theirexpectations should be now that
they're out of college? My greatest hope is that they
will seek God and discern His will for their life.

(26:13):
God has given everyone a collection of talents that he
wants them to invest to promote worship, love, beauty,
significance. This is the goal of life is to
know God and to be known by God and to become his agent in your
piece of the world that he givesto you.

(26:34):
Every every person has a portionof the world that's given to
them by Christ for them to make beautiful.
For some people it may be a cubicle, but that's the cubicle
where Jesus's name must be glorified, where love must
become normative. And if you do that, you can
change your world. If people know that when they go

(26:55):
by that cubicle, there's a person there who loves them, who
will stop what he's doing to listen to them, who will pray
for them, who's trying not to pretend that he's something when
he's nothing. No, he has some humility.
He knows he's a Sinner. He's or she.
We're trying to repent every day.
If they know that, wow, the the world around that cubicle can
become radically changed. So this is what I want my sons

(27:18):
to do. I want them to be human beings.
To be a human being. An authentic human being means
to live with God in everything. That's what humans were created
to do. Yeah, I love that you said live
with God in everything, right, Right behind me.
There's no God. Make him known, you know, so
it's interesting that that we'rewe're using very similar
language and I think that unfortunately people come to
faith and they think, OK, well, I got my health insurance Jesus

(27:43):
coming back next Thursday and I'm just going to punt it like
like the, the influence that Godhas given me, the talents that
God has given me. They start to hyper spiritualize
everything and they forget what you just described, which is
there is a occupying of space that we have, right?
My first devotional that I put out somewhere around here, it's

(28:04):
it's called Occupy till I Come, which is what Jesus said in Luke
19 in the KJV, Occupy till I come in a parable of the the 10
Minas. And so I think there's a command
to use our earthly resource to help impact eternal timelines,
right? And so I love how you describe

(28:26):
that. And I think unfortunately, so
few, so few people really grasp that, that it's about being
faithful to what's in front of us.
Can I pick up on that reference that you made to using your
meanness and from Saint Luke's Gospel?
It's an incredible text. You know, the the church says

(28:46):
that the goal of the Christian life is to acquire the Holy
Spirit in your life. This is the goal, to become
literally a temple of God. When a person devotes themselves
to Christ and and gets baptized,he's the baptism is immediately

(29:08):
followed by a a sublime act thatwe call in the Orthodox
tradition Chrismation, in which the priest anoints the person
with sacred chrism and praise that the Holy Spirit would fill
them and sanctify them and seal them, which is a Pauline

(29:28):
reference. Paul uses that concept of the
seal of the Spirit very much theout of own.
It's a it's a magnificent text that that action is establishing
them under the inspiration and leadership of the Spirit of God
who who takes up his residence is an incredible miracle.
I'm describing I I should say that absolutely we're just using

(29:51):
human words, but wow, the Lord isn't just interested in like
having some servants over there.He literally wills to be one
with us and to indwell to dwell within us, permeating us from
the deep the depart the church father say that the Holy
Spirit's so deep inside Christians that we don't even

(30:13):
understand how how deep he is. We, they call it taking up his
residence in the deep heart. And Saint Paul says from that
position, the Holy Spirit works as a pedagogue, as a teacher in
the life of Christians, teachingthem how to pray.
So in his epistle to the Galatians, St.
Paul says the Spirit literally cries out in US helping us to

(30:35):
pray to God and to call him ABBAFather, that's some that's a
miracle of the third person of the Holy Trinity inside of us,
teaching us how how to pray, howto be truly God's children and
to relate to God as a child, notas a servant, right?
We, we and we are God's servants, but God's offered us

(30:58):
something even more than just service.
He's after the intimacy of family relations with himself.
And that's taught by the Holy Spirit inside of us.
And the reason I'm mentioning this is because the idea of the
trading with the talents, right that that the Lord says to his
disciples, he says trade with these things that that have won

(31:22):
the five and the 10 talents. He wants us to trade with them.
One of our great Saints who fellasleep in the Lord in the 19th
century, his name St. Seraphim of Sarov.
He's taken the world. I I've met all sorts of
Protestants and Catholics who love St.
Seraphim. That's not the case with all the
Orthodox Saints. Many Orthodox Saints non
Orthodox Christians don't know but St.

(31:42):
Seraphim has like won the world like St.
Silawan also has in modern times.
He is so famous for his teachingon the whole the role of the
Holy Spirit in the Christian life.
And he says that the goal of life is to acquire the Holy
Spirit to increase in the presence of the Holy Spirit in
in your life. And in his commentary on the

(32:04):
menas, he says in Seraphim says that you should, you should use
the gifts that's God that God has given you and the
inspiration that God has given you by the Holy Spirit.
You should use them to trade in order to amass the grace of God
in your life. And he said, not everybody's
great at everything. And then St.
Seraphim lives like 5 or 6 things, OK, fasting, vigil,

(32:29):
unceasing prayer, the reading ofPsalms, you know, the spiritual
disciplines that Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount,
almsgiving. He says, look, not, not
everyone's a great faster, not everyone can stand up, can get
up in the middle of the night. Although, although it is a
traditional Christian practice to get up in the middle of
night, especially at midnight, and pray and crucify the desire

(32:50):
to want to lay down and sleep some more, not everybody can do
that. Not everybody is great at being
exceedingly generous and having a heart of sympathy for the poor
and making themselves less rich so that they can help poor
people have a little something. Not everybody can do that.
We should all strive to do thosethings.
But St. Seraph says trade well, The
things you're good at, focus on that.

(33:12):
If you're good at fasting, fast like crazy.
If you're good at that helps andserving other people, be
seriously devoted to that. If you're, if you're, if you're
great at prayer, pray. Set aside hours every day and
pray. That's the wisdom of the church.
And if you do that, if you tradewell with the talents that God

(33:32):
has given you, you're going to get incredible returns from the
Lord. The Lord's going to expand your
heart. And the goal is, you know, for
most of us, our hearts are very constricted, very small, right?
We know that God takes up his residence in the heart.
Christ comes to live in the heart.
But not all hearts are the same.Some hearts are kind of Stony.

(33:53):
Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians and he says
something absolutely radical. This church was caused him a lot
of headache. First of all, he spent tons of
you read the Acts of the apostles.
He spent so much time with Corinth, way more than with
other churches and they still cause him so much pain.
And then he writes to them. He says, my heart is open wide
to you. I have you all in my heart.

(34:15):
That has always blown me away. How did he get I've been trying
to do this as a as a pastor. You know, when you're, when you
become a pastor, they, they callyou father.
It's the, it's the greatest honor.
It's the most beautiful word to be called to be called father.
But are you a father? Do you actually look at your

(34:37):
parishioners as though you, they're your spiritual children?
Would you give to them? What would you give to your
biological children? This is a question I've had to
ask myself so many times. Is my heart open?
Is it big enough that when they're sad, I can be sad, and
when they're happy, I can be happy?
Wow, is that hard? Yeah.

(34:57):
Well, it's one thing to fake it.There's there's priests who do
that. And it's so gross.
It's so gross. It's one thing to fake.
It's something else to try to doit but not to be able to do it.
Well, at least then you can ask forgiveness of your parishioners
and say, I'm trying to love you.I'm trying to love you.
But what I've learned in 32 years of pastoring is that the
heart grows, especially if you, you, you're humble and you ask

(35:20):
God to help you and you repent of your inadequacies as, as a
true father. The heart gets bigger and then
it can get so big. The goal is that it gets bigger
and you can put your, not just your biological family, you want
your wife in there. You want your kids in there.
You want your grandkids in there.
You want your neighbors in there.
And if you're a pastor, you got to get your parishioners in
there. And it should grow.

(35:41):
Your heart should grow. I once asked a, a spiritual
father of mine, an incredible guide.
He's a monk who lives in England.
His father Zacharias, incredibleman.
It's almost 80 now a St. in our midst.
In my opinion, Sorry, I said that I hope he doesn't hear
this, but I asked him like what's the ultimate goal about

(36:01):
our hearts? He said, father, he has a very
high beautiful voices. Father, the goal is to become
all heart. I heard that I just went that's,
that's what I want to be is to have a heart that is capable of
putting in there everyone that God had puts in my life,

(36:23):
especially my enemies. Because Jesus says the mark, the
mark of being his is not just love, a particular kind of love,
right? He says everybody loves those
who love them. There's nothing special about
that. I mean, if you don't do that,
you're a real jerk, right? If you don't love those who love
you, but to love those who hate you, to do good to those who

(36:44):
abuse you, to love your enemies.St.
Cilla 1 says that is the distinctive mark of a Christian
and the most important love of all.
And that's why we need big hearts to be able to be able to
love like that. Yeah, yeah, that's good.
I think when you started talkingabout the heart and the the
transformation that happens to Spirit and dwelling as it made
me think of the passage in Ezekiel.
I don't know if you could see iton the screen.
Ezekiel 30 626 I will give you anew heart and put a new spirit

(37:11):
in you. I will remove from you your
heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my
decrees and be careful to keep my laws right, which which is a
Ezekiel's writing and it's a beautiful foreshadowing of
salvation. The interesting thing about
Ezekiel is that Ezekiel is, is acontemporary, you know this of

(37:34):
Jeremiah, the children of Israelare in exile in Babylon and
Jeremiah is there in Babylon. Ezekiel is not in Babylon and
they're and they're wrestling through a lot of the stuff that
they're having to deal with, with being exiled from their
land. And yet there's this
foreshadowing of this, I would, I would say ontological change
that happens in the heart of thebeliever or something is new.

(37:55):
The things that I used to love, my sin, my, my earthly carnival
flesh, I now hate. And the things I used to hate,
church, God's word, the Christians, right?
All the sudden I love and there's this light that goes off
and I'm ontologically different.I'm a different person and, and
it and it's beautiful because I think to your point that that

(38:17):
can increase, right, that grows and that expands and your
capacity to love, your capacity to serve, your capacity to be
faithful with what's in front ofyou.
I think it's from the overflow of there being a heart change of
something changing in the heart.And then we get to go and walk
that out in front of the world, in front of God, in front of our
family. And so I think it's a beautiful

(38:38):
picture of this in Ezekiel. And then Jeremiah, I think in
Jeremiah 31, he said something like, I'll write my law on your
heart, right? God's law, it is now written on
our heart. All will know me.
Yeah, yeah. And so it's a, it's a beautiful,
beautiful picture of, of what you're describing where there's
something that's that seems to change in the in the believer.
And it starts with the heart, right.
And we don't mean that the, the organ, the literal heart, the

(39:01):
heart in, in this context. I, I love the our little blue,
excuse me, a Logos Bible software.
I can go here in the original language.
And so it's like you got the inner man, the mind, the will.
That's what's describing as the word heart.
It's, it's the, it's the essenceof who somebody is.

(39:22):
So that that's one of those things that that when you when
we were talking about that, I said, Oh man, that's that sounds
like exactly the the this is. The God's will for the world.
Yeah. This is what he seeks for the
world. You know, we Easter was 54.
What's today, Say Wednesday? Yeah, 53 days ago was Easter,
right after the Lord raised fromthe dead, he spent 40 days with

(39:47):
his disciples, teaching them. I wish we, I think Christians
have always wished we had more insight into all the things that
the Lord was teaching during those 40 days, preparing his
disciples to live the Christian life and also preparing them to
live in his physical absence. And on the 40th day, he did what

(40:08):
has never been done before. He ascended in the flesh in
front of his disciples eyes fromthe Mount of Olives, and as he
was going up they were completely freaked out because
this was for them, horrible. They thought they had lost him

(40:29):
when he was crucified. He comes back in the
resurrection, which was a complete shock.
Just think of Thomas. St.
Thomas was kind of the symbol ofthat.
They get over it, they touch hisflesh, they come to believe in
him. And then he tells them, I'm
leaving you. What are you talking about?
You can't leave us. He's on the other side of death
now. The first human who's ever done
that, gone through death and is now on the other side.

(40:51):
And now he's going up and he's telling them, it's good that I
leave. I have to leave because if I
don't leave, the spirit won't come to you.
If I do leave, I'll send the spirit to you.
And so he ascends. He goes through the atmosphere
Kevin's, which was a huge blow to Satan, right?
Satan is called by Saint Paul, the Prince of the power of the
heir in his epistle to the Ephesians, right?

(41:12):
This is Satan's realm. He's never let any human being
rise to the throne of God through the heavens.
And now Jesus blast through the demonic realm and brings the
human reality to the human beingup and plants it at the right
hand of God. And then ten days later, as a
love gift, as a as an enthronement gift, since he sits

(41:37):
on the throne of David at the right hand of God, until all his
enemies are made of footstool for his feet.
By the way, that Psalm, Psalm 110 is the most quoted Old
Testament text in the New Testament.
Yeah, it's in. It's in Ephesians.
God will make your enemies the footstool, right?
The Ephesians 1. It's in Corinthians, it's in
Corinthians, it's in Corinthians, it's in Hebrews.

(41:57):
It's an incredible text. And Jesus sends, and then he
sends the Holy Spirit. He says don't leave.
He goes, stay in Jerusalem untilthe promise of my Father comes.
And then the Holy Spirit comes upon the church and they're
enlightened, they're empowered, and everything's different.

(42:19):
100%. They go from being humble,
frightened fishermen to being the teachers of the world,
courageous in the face of death.And it wasn't just the apostles
who received the Holy Spirit. All the 120 received the Holy
Spirit. This becomes the new normal for
Christians is to live close to God.

(42:39):
The Holy Spirit brings the Kingdom of God and establishes
it within us. The Kingdom of God is literally
within us. He establishes the Kingdom of
God within us. So that for now, from, from this
point on, that's our primary reference, right?
We're, we're walking the earth, but we're walking the earth like
human beings should, which means, you know, God made us

(43:00):
bipeds. He didn't make us quadrupeds.
Most animals, they walk on forests.
They're always looking down humans because they are
literally the bond between the seen and the unseen world,
having an immortal soul and a body.
He made us bipeds. We walk on 2, but He put our
heads at the top of our bodies and he put our eyes here so that
while you're walking the church,Father say while you're walking

(43:20):
on the earth, you're referencingheaven, you're interacting with
God, You're on the earth, yes, and you have to be here, but
always with the heavenly orientation.
And this orientation has become normative for us by the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Whatever we do here, all of our
sorrows are cushioned. They're all lessened because of
our connection there. And our ambitions are heavenly.

(43:44):
We seek the things above where Christ is seated at the right
hand of God. And I always think of that, that
time when Jesus ascended, reallyit sets the norm for Christians.
When he was going up, do you remember what he was doing, what
the text says? In Acts chapter one, yeah, yeah.
It says in Acts chapter 1 he's talking about the restorer.
Verse 6. They gathered around him and

(44:05):
asked him, Lord, are you at thistime going to restore the
Kingdom of Israel? He said to them, it is not for
you to know. So they're asking about the
dates and the restoration. After he said this, he was taken
up before the very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
They were looking intently up into the skies.
He was going when suddenly two men dressed in white stood
beside him and told him, Why do you stand here looking in the
sky? This same Jesus who has been

(44:26):
taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you
have seen him go into heaven. It's a marvelous text.
Luke also adds material in the Gospels that's important for
this. But what what I wanted to point
out is that the disciples were gazing, right?
But Jesus was also gazing with them.
He's going up. If you see the icon, if the icon

(44:47):
of the ascension is marvelous, so it has the Lord going up in a
glory cloud, right? That cloud.
Think of the cloud hovering overthe Tabernacle in the Old
Testament, right? This is the sign of the divine
presence, right? Christ is going up in glory, and
He's looking at the disciples and He's blessing them.
If you see Him in the icon, He has His hand out like this, and
He's blessing the disciples, looking at them, communicating

(45:07):
them to them. Look, I'm leaving you, but
you're not leaving my attention.I'm leaving because I'm going to
manifest myself to you through the Holy Spirit in a way that I
can't physically be while I'm onthe earth.
I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father.
I'm going to send the Holy Spirit who's going to
democratize my presence in your life.
So they're looking up and he's looking down.

(45:29):
I call it the double gaze. It's in my mind, fundamental for
the the Christian way of life. We are setting our minds there
on things above, not on the things of the earth.
Saint Paul says, right, Colossians 3.
And he is looking at us with hishand out, blessing us and
inspiring us by his Spirit. That is how we walk through this
life. He's focused on us and we have

(45:51):
to be convinced that he his eyesare fixed upon us at all times,
because they are, and we have tokeep a heavenly mind.
If Abraham, our father, could dothis right, he was hemmed by
Saint Paul and his epistle to the Hebrews for being someone
who sought the heavenly city. Every place Abraham went, the
first thing that he did was create an altar for prayer.

(46:14):
That was his fundamental commitment.
And even though he was such a rich man, he didn't build any
fancy house. He lived in tents seeking
communion with God. Right when the three angels
came, which is a symbol of the Holy Trinity, his dream came
true and he got to go out and serve God, actually serve the
Lord, if he could do it before death was destroyed and the Holy

(46:37):
Spirit was given to him, to all the believers.
How much more Christians, how much more Christians should have
a heavenly mind and seek what Paul calls the heavenly city
whose builder and architect is God.
That's our home. The New Jerusalem is the home of
believers. And that's what we have to seek.
And we walk lightly here. Yeah, we walk lightly here.

(46:59):
We love this place because it's made by God.
And one day it's going to be redeemed.
Yeah. One day the heaven and earth are
going to be joined. And we're going to have the New
Jerusalem. We're going to have the new
heavens and the new earth, and there's not going to be this
terror and this misery. Satan will be dropped into the
lake of fire. The beast will be dropped into
the lake of fire. Sin will be over.
I know it's hard for us to imagine, but that's coming.
Mm Hmm. Amen.

(47:19):
Amen. Going back a little bit and and
I think what you were referencing here is in Luke, he
said this is where he says he lifted up his hands and blessed
them. This is the reference.
I think you were at the end of Luke, why he had was blessing
them. He lift them up and he lift that
left them and was taken up to heaven.
So the blessing, I think that's the image that you were pointing
to, which is exactly beautiful. I love what you said earlier.

(47:40):
You said when you said somethinglike when the spirit, when we're
indwelled with the spirit that even our ambitions are aimed
upward or heavenly, right. So it's funny because I said the
digital copy. That's what exactly what my
first book is about Godly ambition, which is what happens
with our desire and with our aspiration post being

(48:02):
transformed to having this encounter with God that even
those things are redirected and redeemed and pointing upwards,
right? That it's not just about our
selfish ambitions, which the Scripture is just two words for
ambition. Oddly enough, and I'm sure you
know this in the Greek one is the selfish kind and then one
that we see where Paul says I make it my aim, my ambition to
preach the gospel. There's another one that says I

(48:23):
make it my aim to my ambition toplease God.
And then first Thessalonians 411, which says make it your
ambition to lead a quiet life, working with your own hands so
that your daily life may win therespect of outsiders and so you
won't be dependent on anyone. And so there's this reshifting,
reorienting that also happens toour ambition and bring it full
circles. We were talking about earlier

(48:45):
people, Christians fleeing the universities, fleeing the
marketplace, being afraid to engage in the areas where I
think we're called to occupy. I think we're called to go out
into the world and to usher. Love and inspire and invest.
Amen. Amen.
Sometimes that word Occupy has alittle militant concept.
I like, see, I like the militantconcept.
I like the KJV occupy and so I come.

(49:06):
But yes, you could use other words there as well.
But not opposing the idea. I'm just expanding it.
Sure, sure, sure on what a what a Christian investment is.
You know, I said I was gonna saysomething about hospitals.
We talked about universities a little bit, but you know the the
concept of a hospital. Very few people know the history
of the hospital, the hospital system as we know it today,

(49:26):
where you have a collection of competent physicians and nurses
and a facility in which numerousdiseases are evaluated and
treated. This is right out of early 5th
century Byzantium, right? The eastern part of the of the
empire. This is Orthodox Catholic

(49:47):
tradition. We're the first ones who who did
it and we always built our hospitals around churches,
around chapels. The I The thought of course, is
that God is the healer of mankind, right?
And any ability that we have to heal is a gift from God, right?
God gives that's one of the spiritual gifts he gives is

(50:08):
healing and also the inspirationto use our competency to create
medicines. A great reference text for this
is Saint Basil the Great is one of the greatest church fathers
that there is why he's called the Great.
He wrote a treatise called the Long Rules which is a treatise
about how to live together monastically.

(50:32):
It's his monastic rule which is the most important and
influential monastic rule in thewhole church, east and West.
It became foundational for the Benedictine rule in the West.
Saint Benedict used St. Basil's Rule and made some
alterations for western peoples shortly after St.
Basil's life. But his question 55 is quite
it's it's done in a question andanswer format.

(50:53):
Question 55 is should Christiansuse doctors?
And then he makes a very long, gorgeous, intelligent answer in
which he describes what a Christian attitude towards
healing is, how much we should invest in our healing or not,
what the difference between healing the soul and healing the

(51:14):
body is, what the value of a physician is.
You know, there's not a lot in the Scriptures if you have the
longer Canon of the Old Testament, the 38th chapter of
SIRAC. I think a lot of Protestants
don't have this in their Bibles,but it's, it's, it's part of
what's called the longer Canon of the Old Testament.
It's a very, very important textcalled SIRAC is all about the
honor that God expects us to give to physicians.
What is the proper role of a physician?

(51:36):
St. Basil quotes that and describes
a a, a Christian attitude towards it.
He says that in everything, in every quest for healing, it
should be an expression of seeking the Kingdom of God.
And you should only pursue physical healing in accord with
your soul. So you should never do something
in a medical quest that's going to actually hurt your soul.

(52:00):
It might help your body. Because we're fallen, we're
earthy. A lot of times we react to pain,
physical pain, way more sensitively than we do to
spiritual pain. We might have some hard
heartedness in towards somebody or maybe even some hatred, but
we'll let it sit there for a month.
We would never do that if we hada thorn stuck in our physical

(52:23):
side. We're like, wait, stop
everything. You leave work, you're going to
get that thorn out, right? Because this is an earthly
mindedness on our part. And he says that that you never
want to pursue any physical healing at the consequence of
hurting your soul in every way. So he said, look, all diseases
are given by God to teach you how to purify your soul.

(52:45):
He divides all diseases into twochronic diseases and acute
diseases, right? Acute diseases can be treated
and healed. They're done.
Chronic diseases are something that you have to treat for long
periods of time, certain things that you have to change your
diet for you have to do exercisefor you have to take medications
for over A and extended think ofdiabetes, something like that.

(53:07):
He says God gave us those two toteach you how to overcome sin in
your life. There are some sins that you
simply have to face repent of and you're done and everybody
knows this. Anybody who's been trying to
serve Christ for any period of time knows there are certain
things that they've discovered in their life.
They recognize they weren't pleasing to God, that they were
grotesque. They repented of them, and

(53:29):
that's that. There's also sins that are more
chronic, to use the medical image, there are some sins that
you can repent of, and then the very next day they're biting at
your ankles again. And you have to learn to to
oppose that and to fight againstit over a long period of time.
And you only get victory in little pieces.

(53:52):
You show your love for God, though, by being engaged in the
act, by by sticking it out, to be able to uproot that right, to
purify your heart and to kill the old man, even if he keeps
raising his head, right. So this is the, this is the
image. So when we think, when
Christians classically think of medicine, they should be
thinking also of the soul, right?
That the church is a spiritual hospital.

(54:15):
The mysteries are God's saving medications, the pastoral care
is the doctor for the soul, and then you have the hospital which
builds around that same image and extends it to the body.
So that's why our hospitals always have churches in the
middle. If you go to Saint Joseph's, for

(54:37):
instance, in Orange, it's a Catholic hospital, beautiful
house right across from Orange County Children's Hospital.
I I know that hospital well because I have another of a
number of parishioners who are physicians there.
And I've also visited more pressures than I can count the
last 30 years there. Church is right smack in the
center, started by nuns. Yeah, right in the center.

(54:59):
Everything's built around it. This is the classic Christian
way. People don't know it much
anymore. There's a beautiful book by men
named Timothy Miller. I think his last name is Miller,
who who writes about the origin of the hospital in the church in
the east. And it's desperately needs to be
discerned again because our our ethics have disappeared and now
we have hospitals that even according to the Hippocratic

(55:21):
Oath, no doctor should have anything to do with the taking
of life. Now we have hospitals in which
the children are murdered in their mother's wombs and old
people are have their lives terminated by physicians.
That's Satanic. It is.
It is. You mentioned suffering.
You mentioned chronic pain. I, I want to parallel it to the,

(55:41):
the spiritual aspect, but I'm just curious from your vantage
point, when Paul is writing about the thorn in his flesh, do
you think that that was a chronic illness he was dealing
with? Do you think that that was sin,
that he was working out the chronic sin he was dealing with?
Do you think it was symbolic forjust some, some, some enemy that
was bothering him? What do you what do you make of
that passage and and what? Do you?

(56:02):
There is no definitive patristicconsensus on what exactly the
affliction is. If you ask me.
In my personal opinion, I wouldn't give it to you because
it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant.
I have ideas but nothing that maybe.
You could tell me off the record.
Yeah, nothing that's really worth talking about.
I love the image though, and I Ilove that text from 2nd

(56:23):
Corinthians 12, Paul, for several reasons.
One is he was dealing with it. It shows you what to do when you
suffer, He prayed. Lord please take this away from
me. But it also shows you how to
keep it contained. He prayed 3 times many times
over my life as a Christian I'veasked my spiritual father about

(56:46):
some suffering in my life and I asked him.
I said what should I do? And he many times he referenced
this text. He said pray three times but not
4-3 times and but not 4. Come on, pray three times and if
the Lord doesn't answer, say glory to you, O Lord, if this is
what you want, I'll be happy andcarry it if this is what you

(57:08):
want. I think that is as important as
the fact that Paul showed us that you do pray about
everything and you do appeal to God to help you.
But if he doesn't answer you don't take that wrongly and say
he's abandoned me. No, the reality is that the Lord
wills the suffering of men for their glorification.
And Paul says this to the Philippians, right?

(57:29):
He says to you, it has been granted not only to believe in
Christ's name, but to suffer forhis sake.
That text I think is Philippians129.
What a text. He's saying it's a gift.
Why would you want to pray away your gift?
Yeah, that's good. That's good.
Speaking of suffering. And in Romans 7, Paul is talking

(57:52):
about the old man and what a wretched man he is.
Do you think that this is a chapter?
It's been debated about Paul before he becomes a Christian or
this is about Paul and, and, andwrestling with the flesh after
he became a Christian. What what, what do you guys make
of that passage? Romans?
Because I think Romans 7 builds this release.
I mean, builds this tension and in Romans 8 gives us this

(58:14):
release. So from when you're looking at
Paul talking about wrestling with his flesh and the law and,
and all these things that he's and he ends up with what a
wretched man I am right? Is this becoming a Christian
about his past life or is his post become a Christian?
The greatest commentary ever written on the Epistle to the

(58:36):
Romans was written by Saint JohnChrysostom and he says this is
Paul is a Christian. This Paul is a Christian.
Yeah, yeah. Chapter 6 He's talking about
baptism. This is this is post baptism.
This is the Christian life, which is described by Paul as
war. Yeah.

(58:56):
This is our life. It the Christian life is bloody.
Yeah, period. And it's an interior conflict,
and it leads sometimes to cries of despair.
And Saint Paul's point is that there's no condemnation in the
struggle. The struggle is good.
What are you supposed to do? Not struggle.

(59:18):
Right. Right.
Supposed to give into it. Come on.
Yeah, I mean you, you pointed out right, Romans 8 one,
therefore there is not no condemnation for those who are
in Christ Jesus because through Christ Jesus, the law of the
Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and
death. So there's this tension, this
war that you're describing, and then it goes into this release.

(59:39):
I love this verse which you're kind of alluding to verse 13 for
if you live according to the flesh, you will die.
But if by the Spirit you put to to death the misdeeds of the
body, you will live for those who are led by the Spirit of God
are the children of God, right? So this idea of waging war on
our flesh on on killing our sin before it kills us is the

(01:00:03):
overflow of there's no there's no, there's no condemnation.
Therefore, live by the Spirit. Yeah, it's the struggle, the
spiritual struggle. The engagement in the warfare is
an evidence of authentic Christian experience.
You know the word sodzo, which is the Greek word for save used
all over the new. Testament charismatics really
love that word Sozo, because they do well, because Sozo, as

(01:00:26):
we discussed last night, used past tense, present tense,
future tense. And in the future tense is when
you get all the healing and the glorified body and all that.
And so some, I'd say hyper charismatics will use it for
here and now that God wants you fully healed, fully delivered,
fully wealthy, healthy, all those sorts of things.
So they'll use that word sozo inthat context, which I think is a

(01:00:46):
is a misuse of of it in in the future.
They were trying to pull the future into the present with
regards to health and prosperity.
Unfortunately, yeah. You're almost tempting me to get
off what I was going to. Raise and talk about.
The future and whether health, so-called health and prosperity
has any relevance in the future either.

(01:01:07):
We can maybe talk about that later.
But what my point I was going tomake was with regards to that
usage is that the concept of salvation as a process is front
and center in the New Testament.It has a definitive beginning,
right? You call on the name of the
Lord, you repent and you're baptized, right?
When people heard Saint Peter preaching, they said, what

(01:01:28):
should we do to this? Be saved?
He said, repent and be baptized,everyone of you.
There's a beginning. There is a middle which is
described by Saint Paul when he says, work out your salvation
with fear and trembling. Fear and trembling.
That sounds very much like Romans 7, fear and trembling.

(01:01:51):
And then there is the predominant use of sodzo, which
is the future glorification of the human race, when we will be
transformed into the image of Christ, because in Saint John's
language, we'll see him as he is.
That transformation is so radical.
St. John says we, what we are going
to be, we don't know, except we know that we're going to be like
him. Saint Paul describes it just

(01:02:12):
equally radical in First Corinthians 15, right?
The resurrection chapter in which he says there's he's
describing the continuity and the discontinuity between our
bodies now and our glorified bodies in the future when we're
raised from the dead and Saint Paul says there is continuity.
Some people think we're getting a new body.
That's actually heresy. The church has never believed
that that this very body is going to be raised and saved.

(01:02:33):
It's part of you. If it's not going to be raised
and saved, part of you is not going to be saved.
It does turn into dust for most people unless you're a St.
Many Saints don't turn into dust, but in Christ didn't
corrupt at all for three days since the grave.
Peter makes a big deal out of that in his preaching, quotes
Psalm 16, and says the Lord did not allow his Holy 1 to undergo

(01:02:53):
decay. This body.
It's also why we treat bodies sowell when we bury them.
We don't cremate strictly forbidden to Christians.
Christians have never done that because the Holy Spirit dwells
in the body, not just in the soul.
We kiss bodies in the Orthodox funeral rite.
The last thing you do in the funeral is everyone comes up and

(01:03:15):
kisses the person right on the head.
If it's a priest, you know, his face is covered and you kiss him
on his right hand. We're expecting that very body
to be raised from the dead and rejoined to the soul and stand
for judgement to then inherit the Kingdom of God.
That's that's what's coming. Saint Paul says though, that
that continuity between this body and the glorified body

(01:03:35):
exists, but it's the continuity between an acorn and a tree,
right? So you don't look at the acorn
and see the tree. It is the tree.
But that's how great the glorification is, what we're
going to actually look like and be like.
I mean, just think of how much of our body right now is purely
an expression of our fallenness.Like you're very handsome dude.

(01:03:57):
You have nice eyebrows, but you know why you have eyebrows?
Because you sweat. And God created eyebrows to
protect the eye, which is very sensitive organ from having the
sweat come right down into your eye gets collected here and you
can push it off and you don't damage your eyes.
Think about the interior, which is it's not so pretty a concept.
I mean, just think of your intestines, your small
intestines. Your large intestines exist

(01:04:18):
because you're eating food. There's a lot of crap in it that
needs to be withdrawn that your system not is not poisoned.
There was no poisonous food. Adam did not eat fallen food
that creates death. There was no death.
He ate for glory. The Church Father say he ate for
glory and for pleasure, but not for need.
He wasn't compelled by any humannecessity.
So much of our body right now is, is what we would call a

(01:04:41):
fallen body. Even though we're sanctified by
the sacraments and by the grace of God, what are we going to
look like in the future? You know, Saint Paul, he
contemplates it elsewhere in First Corinthians 8.
He says the food is for the stomach and the stomach is for
food. And God will do away with both
of them. We're not going to need, we're

(01:05:01):
going to be something else. It's going to be us.
It's going to be this body glorified and transfigured.
But we don't, we just don't knowwhat it's going to be.
That's how we we look at human beings.
We look at them as precious and fleshed souls, right, with holy
bodies and holy souls that belong to God, that have a
future, a beautiful future. And we're trying now to work out

(01:05:25):
that salvation. We're trying to truly repent
with our eyes fixed upon what's coming, which is the return of
Christ, the universal judgement,the resurrection, and the
inheritance of the Kingdom of God.
When we hear from the Lord, come, you who are blessed of my
Father, inherit the Kingdom which is prepared for you from
the foundation of the world. This is the Christian hope.

(01:05:49):
Amen, Amen. We're going to go in a second to
some of our questions on Patreon.
We have a few there, but I did want to ask you a couple more
questions. Right now you reference Constant
Constantinople. Today it's called Instanbul.
Istanbul, it's the same word actually, except in Turkish

(01:06:09):
police in Greek means city, bullis is the Turkish for city.
So Istanbul means to the city. So it's still referencing
Constantinople. We, we Orthodox, love to point
that out because we want Constantinople back that.
Was going to be my next questionwas when it comes to the history
of things like the Crusades, sometimes Christians will get a

(01:06:31):
pretty bad rap. But there was also a practical
aspect of trying to take back cities from a pretty massive
conquest of Islam all over the world, right?
Trying to take back the Holy Land.
You just said you want Constantinople back, right?
Do you think the Crusades in their proper framework, not all

(01:06:53):
of them, but generally speaking,what they were intending to do
is misrepresented. Misrepresented today by by
historians. There were three major groups
involved with the Crusades, the Muslims who no one invited to
come out of the Arabian Peninsula and put swords to
people's necks and demand their property.

(01:07:16):
Sorry, that's called theft and we don't appreciate it.
That's fundamental religious commitment, part of Islam.
Jihad is not just a matter of spiritual work on the inside.

(01:07:38):
Muhammad did say that's called the great jihad, and the lesser
jihad is the political, militaryjihad.
But in practice, the jihad that Muslims have been most committed
to is the violent, physical, political jihad, which is very
much happening right now all over Western Europe, as anyone
who knows history knew it would.Are you expecting people who

(01:08:00):
come to the West completely abandoned their faith?
This is fundamental. You don't fight, you don't
inherit in Islam. I used to teach a class at the
university, local university next to me called the cross and
the Crescent, the history of Christian Muslim relations.
And I would always have the kidsread the Quran, and it's very
short. It's not something like the
Bible. I would have them read the

(01:08:22):
surahs, and I asked them to write down how many times
explicit political physical violence is commanded.
My calculation is 123 times in avery short book.
Maybe it's 119, maybe it's 130, depending on exactly how you
read it. If you had the Quran's much, not

(01:08:45):
much bigger than your Godly ambition book, if you had 123
references to physical violence,would you go around the world
saying that jihad is not about physical violence, right?
That's such a scam. It's such a ridiculous scam.
And the people who quote that and say that just show that they
have never actually read the Quran.
If you read the classic Muslim lives of Muhammad, Muhammad

(01:09:09):
himself LED minimum 25 raids in which he killed people.
Himself, himself at least 25. That's a minimum, at least 25
raids. And these are people who were
not in conflict with him, Jewishand Christian tribes.
He just wanted their land. He wanted their stuff, so he
took it. I'm sorry, that's ridiculous.

(01:09:32):
It's absolutely, completely ridiculous.
Islam is one of the three parties involved in the
Crusades, having stolen Christian lands all over the
most precious areas to us, all over what is today Lebanon,
Syria, Israel, Egypt. They took those lands from us
without asking. But not not nice, not nice.

(01:09:55):
And they give us options, right?You can die.
Or pay the Jezre. Pay the jezia absolutely.
And not just that, you have to also obey Sharia.
You have to follow the Sharia law, which means there's no
evangelization or we kill you. You can't have public
processions, you can't go. We always are.
You kidding? Christians have never been
contained within their churches.We worship in the churches, but

(01:10:16):
then we take the the gospel message out to the world.
We walk out singing Christ is risen and we carry crosses and
banners with Jesus glorified on them.
This is how we we do things. And to be told by the Muslims,
you can't do that. You can't ring bells, you can't
go on processions on Easter. This is this is our life.
I'm sorry. That is the the sorrow and no

(01:10:40):
Christians have suffered under Islam more than the Orthodox.
So whatever Westerners think they know, ask us, ask us.
We have long lists of martyrs. Long lists and not just 7th
century martyrs, century after century.
They try to take Constantinople in 717, if the Mother of God

(01:11:01):
hadn't defended the city and slaughtered them, which she did,
amazingly, they didn't. They were so destroyed in 7/17
that they didn't try again for 600 years.
They wanted Constantinople from the beginning.
They finally came back. 1453, May 29th, they took
Constantinople. So for us, that was like
yesterday. It was like yesterday to get
into the Orthodox mind. About time.

(01:11:24):
I'll give you an example. The late Pope John Paul the
Second before he died, you know,he's Polish.
He grew up with a bunch of Orthodox friends.
He had Orthodox in his family. He had Eastern bishops
consecrated when he became a Bishop.
The whole eastern part of Polandtoday is, is Orthodox.
We typically think of Poland as a Catholic country, which it is.

(01:11:47):
Before he died, he wanted to make a pilgrimage in the
footsteps of Saint Paul, and that would require him to go
into Greece. Well, since the SYSM, no Pope
had ever stepped foot in Greece,was never allowed.
So he wrote to the Archbishop ofAthens, who presides over the
Synod of Greek bishops, like 70 metropolitan archbishops who
govern that country. And he said, look, I'm going to

(01:12:09):
die and I want to go on a pilgrimage, Can I come?
No Pope has ever come since the SYSM.
I mean, that's 100 years. And they said, no, no, you
can't. And he said, well, what if I
apologize? And they said, well, tell us
more about that. And what he was referring to was

(01:12:31):
the 4th Crusade in 12104. The Crusaders got distracted
because as I was describing right, there's three parties in
the Crusades, the Muslims, the orthodox.
We were involved in the First Crusade and the First Crusade
only when our emperor, Alexis Comenes, an unbelievable
emperor, an incredible man, participated and welcomed the
the Westerners to help get the Muslims out.

(01:12:51):
It went very bad from that moment on.
We we don't want anything to do with these crusades.
The fourth was so bad that the Western soldiers on their way
supposedly to deliver us from Islam, got distracted and
literally attacked Constantinople, murdered our
bishops and priests, raped our nuns on our altars and took over
the city from 12 O 4 to 1261, put in Latin bishops, Latin
leaders. I mean, we've never forgotten

(01:13:13):
that. We've never forgotten that.
So when the Pope said, hey, I want to come before I die, and
he said I apologize, they said, well, tell us more about them.
So finally they trusted him. They said, OK, if you're going
to come and if you'll, if you'llagree not to enter a single
church, They don't let him go inone church not to enter a single
church. If when you get off the plane,

(01:13:36):
you come and sit next to the Archbishop of Athens on
television and apologize for what you did in 12 O 4, we'll
let you come. And he did.
Wow. He flew into Athens.
You know, he he would always getoff and kiss the ground wherever
he went, right? He kissed the ground
immediately, went and went to the podium and on national
television read a detailed apology for the slaughter of the

(01:13:59):
Orthodox at the 4th Crusade in 12104.
We forgave and he had his pilgrimage.
I mentioned that because what Westerner, what Western
Christian would have a kind of amemory like that where
everything's very short for us, right?
We think that we're having our 250th anniversary as an, as a

(01:14:22):
nation next year and what Wesnercould think in 800 year terms,
but in the Orthodox mind, that'slike yesterday, right?
I mean, the church is 2000 yearsold and we're constantly engaged
in our history. It's not like us.
It's just a thing of the past. So the Crusades is a very, very

(01:14:42):
sensitive subject for us, a verysensitive subject.
I'm not sure there's great edification and thinking too
much about it, but we certainly have a lot to contribute to our,
our and our friends in the West who are allowing Muslims to come
in great numbers. If you want to know how it's
going to go, you should ask us, because we actually have 14
centuries of lived experience with Muslims. 14 centuries.

(01:15:04):
And it's still horrible what's going on today in Syria.
It's just heartbreaking. Yeah.
Absolutely heartbreaking. Yeah.
Well, I, I told you some of my back story growing up in
Azerbaijan, which is just W excuse me, just east of Armenia,
right. And then Armenia is Turkey is on
the other side, right? West is Turkey.
A lot of historical Armenia is now modern day Turkey, the

(01:15:29):
Armenian genocide of 1915. And so when people are talking
about Islamic influence in the West, the downstream effects of
it, I've lived it, I've seen it,I've seen people get displaced.
Oddly enough, folks that grew upour ZS and Armenians grew up
together friends, you know, some, some, some, some of my mom

(01:15:51):
and dad still keep keep in touchwith their RZ friends.
But the mindset and the, the, the philosophy behind it's
driving the ethnic cleansing that happened to the Armenians.
And then it just happened again in 2023, September 2020, three
100,000 Armenians were cleansed from, I think they cleanse from
the eastern part of Azerbaijan in this Niboro Karabakh region,

(01:16:15):
which is like this neutral zone.And they were just displaced and
no one talked about it. Two weeks later, October 7th
happens. And so everybody forgot about
the 100,000 up to 120,000 Armenians were just displaced
from that region again, you know, And so, yeah, it's, it's,
it's the the fruit of it in terms of how it deals with
Christians in that part of the region is, is very, very dark.

(01:16:37):
So that's why I was curious yourperspective and, and you tying
it into what is happening all over.
You know, they said in, in London, the number one baby boy
name was Muhammad. Oh.
Yeah, that's not just London, that's throughout England, and
that's for years, not just for ayear or two, that's years of
this. Yeah, but there are very many
positives, of course, and I'm certainly not trying to judge

(01:16:59):
and be mean to Muslim people, but I we do have strong things
to say. You know, the earliest Christian
commentary on Islam comes from Saint John of Damascus, one of
the great fathers of the church.He's the first one to write
anything, theologically speaking, evaluating Islam.
And he was very clear about whathe said and called Muhammad

(01:17:22):
Antichrist and Islam a heresy. He actually lists it as a heresy
because of the the Christian influence on Muhammad and which
is very evident in the in the Quran.
Both an orthodox Christian influence and also a heretical
Christian influence both in in the Quran.
But we've had a consistent witness to Muslims for 14

(01:17:44):
centuries. We still feel the same way
today. There are many benefits that for
them in the West though. And now many, many Muslims are
becoming Christians all across the West, which is a great
blessing for them. If they did that in their
hometown, they'd be killed. If they were in Muslim lands,
it's forbidden to convert to Christianity.
And you will be. Could I spent, when I was young,
a young man, I spent a summer inPakistan mostly working with

(01:18:09):
Christians. Christians were tolerated in
Pakistan because if they threw the all of the Christians out,
they wouldn't have any doctors or nurses, the Christians around
all the hospitals. And I was part of a mission team
that was working with the Christians in the hospitals.
And I remember sitting and having tea with a young man
maybe a year or two older than me.
I was 19 at the time. I think he was 21.

(01:18:30):
He and his wife had converted toChristianity and thought it
would be a loving and irresponsible thing to do to
tell his father and his mom. So he sat down to dinner.
His dad stood up, went out into the shed and got a picks pickaxe
and came and tried to kill him. Wow.
My goodness. And it had been, it had been a
year or two since he saw his parents.

(01:18:50):
And he said up on the wheel to see my parents again.
That's awesome. My dad will kill me on the spot.
Wow. Yeah, that's crazy.
That's just. And that was just normal.
Back to standing family. That's terrible.
OK, We're going to go to some ofthese Patreon questions here in
a second. So these are folks that are a
couple of them watching live andthen some of them sent questions
ahead of time. So this is an interesting
question. This is from Bian Berean, He

(01:19:12):
says. I've been reading a lot about
the Filioque Way and for the life of me I cannot understand
why this is such a divisive issue.
Can you please explain why the filioque was is considered of
such importance to divide the church?
So filioque is the view that Jesus and the Father send the

(01:19:33):
Holy Spirit or the OR the Spiritcomes from Jesus and the Father,
the Son and the father. And in the Eastern Orthodox
tradition, you guys hold to the position that it the whole
filioque is false because the spirit comes just from the
Father. Is that is that I just
accurately communicate that? Kind of.
OK, I'm sure I didn't nail some of the technical language.

(01:19:54):
The tricky part about this is I,I was just reading about this
recently is like when we look atJohn, it was 14 and 15.
It does seem like at one point it's the Holy Spirit's coming
from the Father. And then Jesus says, I'll send
the Holy Spirit. So I could see how people can
can be confused about this. And also seemingly it, it
different chapters say both right from the spirit, Spirit

(01:20:16):
from the from the Son and from the Father.
Jesus sends the Spirit, Father sends the Spirit.
But yeah, So what what is the the big divide?
We know, we know. The only begotten Son, right?
So Father begets the Son, not asin creates the Son, but begets,
right? Does the way a human begets
another human. So we know that.
But why is the issue issue of the Spirit and whether it's

(01:20:39):
coming from the Father and the Son versus just a Father so
important? It's a very important question.
I'm happy to entertain it. I don't think it's a question
asked much in the West, people is it's amazing that this is
being raised now through discussions between Protestants,
Catholics, and Orthodox because this has always been a great
concern of the Orthodox Church. I should just say issues about

(01:21:01):
the relationship of the OrthodoxChurch to the Catholic Church
and especially to Protestantism.I wrote a book actually about 10
years ago called Rock and Sand and Orthodox Appraisal of the
Protestant Reformers and their Teachings.
It's on Amazon. I did it really just as a love

(01:21:22):
offering to try to help people from my former background from
from Protestant background to beable to understand why I became
Orthodox, etcetera. There's material on this subject
in that book for this person or whoever else is interested in
this. There's a lot of reasons that
the Filioque Way heresy is totally unacceptable that the

(01:21:47):
Orthodox and has always been a very important matter for us.
It has to do with understanding the Holy Trinity.
And forgive me, no one understands the Holy Trinity and
focuses on the Holy Trinity morethan the Orthodox Church.
When I was a Protestant and I was visiting the Orthodox
services for the first time, what impressed me most was the
100% focus on the Holy Trinity everywhere.

(01:22:11):
Our worship is completely Trinitarian and Holy Trinity.
The Holy Trinity isn't just a a concept, it's reality.
It's the way that we relate to God and to his Son and to the
Holy Spirit. It's very, very important to
understand the Holy Trinity in adeep way because it's the number
one theological concern. The revelation of the knowledge
of God is the number one thing that God's taught, taught us.

(01:22:32):
The most important thing to understand is who is God, who is
our God? What we what we know, what the
Lord has revealed to us is that God himself has a Co eternal
Son, Jesus, who is in every way God with regards to whatever

(01:22:56):
godness is right. The quality of the divine
nature. Jesus is fully that What's
unique about Christ is that he'sthe Father's only begotten son.
We learned that incredible truthwhich no one could possibly
create except through experience, because the Co
eternal Son in time became a manand was born as a baby in

(01:23:20):
Bethlehem and then grew up as a Carpenter and began a public
ministry at the age of 30. And we touched him and we saw
him work his miracles. We saw him raise the dead.
We saw him crush Satan. You know, until Jesus began his
public ministry, the devils tyrannized the human race.

(01:23:41):
People would scream and run fromanybody who was possessed.
And it was exactly reversed as soon as Jesus began his public
ministry. The children that were screaming
were the devils. They saw Christ.
They were screaming in terror because of who He is.
It's one of the most obvious expressions of his divinity was

(01:24:03):
his relationship to the demonic world and their utter total fear
in his presence. So we learned that God has a son
by actually talking to him, right?
And believe me, it took us a long time to figure it out.
And he would say things over andover and over again,
progressively revealing who he is in his divinity.

(01:24:23):
And the disciples were very muchstruggling with this.
We learned that the God has a spirit who is Co eternal with
him and is equally God with regards to the divine nature
godness. Let's call it because he was
sent by Christ and the Father and literally came upon us and

(01:24:47):
indwelt us and we have been living in his inspiration and
his guidance. And we learned by practice that
the Holy Spirit is God. So the Holy Trinity is a very
practical. It's not something that the
theologians got in their room together.
Let's come up with an explanation of God.
No, no, no, this is about revelation, personal experience
and revelation of the one true God and of His Son Jesus Christ

(01:25:09):
and of His Holy Spirit. This is how Christians know the
Trinity is by experience. Now how do you exactly
understand the relationship of the Son and the Holy Spirit to
the Father? That the Church fathers are very
clear. The way that you understand the
uniqueness of the Son and the uniqueness of the Holy Spirit is
though they share everything in common with the Father with
regards to the divine nature. They have personal qualities,

(01:25:32):
personal characteristics. The personal quality of the
Father is that He is the Father and the origin of the other two
persons of the Holy Trinity. He's called by Saint Gregory the
Theologian the monarch. The personal quality of Jesus is
that he is God's only begotten and Co eternal Son who has
always rested in the bosom of the Father and in time became a

(01:25:53):
man. The personal quality of the Holy
Spirit is that He proceeds from the Father who is His origin.
The error of the Filioque which was inserted into the Nicene
Creed, which did not have the Filioque and could never have
had the Filioque because it was considered a heresy when when it
began to be talked about in the first Millennium.

(01:26:17):
The Trop. The problem with the Filioque is
that it destroys the theologicalprinciples that have been
revealed about how we know who God is and what are the
characteristics of the Persons of the Trinity by suggesting
that a quality which is not a matter of the divine nature

(01:26:40):
belongs to the Father and to theSon and not to the Holy Spirit.
The principle is whatever doesn't belong to the divine
nature, whatever I mean. That means Co, eternality,
omniscience, omnipotence, all ofthose things are qualities of
being God. What's unique to the Father is
that He's the origin and the Father.
What's unique to the Son is thatthe He's the only begotten Son.
And what's unique to the Holy Spirit is that He proceeds from

(01:27:01):
the Father. As soon as you take the
uniqueness and you make it belong to two and not to all.
If it belong to all, then it's aproperty of the nature.
Otherwise it only belongs to 1 because that is a personal
characteristic to suggest that the Father and the Son share
something in common. That is not a matter of the
nature that the Holy Spirit doesnot share in is a serious

(01:27:25):
violation of traditional theology.
That's saying that they share the Co origin of the Holy
Spirit, but it's not a matter ofdivine nature.
Therefore, there's something about the relationship to the
Father and the Son that the Spirit doesn't share in that is
outrageous. Forgive me.
That is outrageous and it leads necessarily to a demotion of the

(01:27:48):
role of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which in the Orthodox
mind is exactly what you have received as a result of putting
that in the creed. Besides the fact we're not even
addressing the issue of the impropriety of changing the
Creed, which was can only done be done by an ecumenical
council, not by a Pope. When did they?
When did they change the creed? 1009.
Oh, OK, so this is quite, quite a while later, yeah. 100 And

(01:28:10):
there was multiple attempts to change it that the the Pope
squashed 6th century, then againunder the Franks in 800, they
actually suggested that the filioque was originally in the
creed and that we took it. Yeah, nuts.
Anyway, so this is this is the violate the the the patristic
principle is whatever is not shared in common in the divine
is unique to the person. The filioque violates that and

(01:28:33):
says that something is shared. That's not a matter of the
divine nature is shared by the Father and the Son that the Holy
Spirit doesn't participate in. That is that they are both Co
origins of the Holy Spirit. Now when you refer to John 14
and 15. I got it pulled up here too.
When you refer to that text, we do believe that economically, so
to speak, the while the Father is the unique origin of the Holy

(01:28:55):
Spirit, the Holy Spirit proceedsfrom the Father through the Son.
So the Son has a role in sendingthe Holy Spirit, but he's not
the origin. He's not.
There's only one monarch in the Holy Trinity, and that's the
Father. You can't take what's unique to
the Father and apply to Christ one.
It's an insult to the father #2 it's a demotion of the Holy
Spirit. And you end up instead of

(01:29:17):
relying on the Spirit's inspiration, you end up creating
a system of authority, which, forgive us, forgive me for
saying this, I don't want to be insulting, But we think the
whole creation of the authority apparatus of the Western church
post SYSM, the creation of temporal, the assumption of
temporal authority having militaries creating the

(01:29:40):
so-called College of Cardinals, amalgamating power to 1 Bishop
in Rome saying that he has to appoint.
We think not just that that's gross, which it is not just that
it's gross, but it is something that follows this insult to the
Holy Spirit. Yeah.
Now you have to build up an authority structure, which by

(01:30:00):
the way, doesn't work. If you haven't noticed, almost
no Catholics believe the Pope. I know the leaders do.
And all the talking, the, the inspired people, I was going to
call them talking. It's not a nice thing to say
because they're very lovely people.
Very, very lovely people. So many lovely Catholic people,
for sure, and lovely leaders. But this exaltation of the
papacy and the authority of the Pope, I mean, do you, do you

(01:30:24):
talk to Catholics? I grew up talking to Catholics.
I'm still talking about who who actually believes the Pope?
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of Catholics talk with the Pope,
but we don't we don't have the maybe these.
Days they're trying, but we haveall sorts of statistics.
I mean, we're not just making this stuff up.
There have been tons of of data produced.

(01:30:44):
You can say the Pope is the mouthpiece of Christ on the
earth, that he is all the authority, he's infallible,
blah, blah, blah. Which, by the way, that's 1870.
It's a little late to be inventing new things. 1870, I'm
sorry. It's a little late.
I agree the verse, the verses. So I think I'm tracking with you
if I if I, if I may so John and I would get and I will ask the

(01:31:05):
Father and he will give you another advocate to help you and
be with you. The Spirit of truth, John 14,
and then right below that, John 1425.
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will
send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you
of everything I've said to you. And then again at the end of

(01:31:26):
John 15, Jesus says when the Advocate comes, whom I will send
to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out
from the Father, He will testifyabout me.
So if I'm tracking with you correctly, it sounds like what
you're saying is, yes, there's acertain degree where the Spirit
is from the Father set by the Son.

(01:31:47):
But when you say that it's both the Father and the Son where the
Spirit originates from, you're demoting the Holy Spirit as a
little less consulting the Father a little less is.
The unique origin of the Trinity.
Now you're making two monarchs. You have the Father who's the
origin, and now Jesus is also a monarch, right?
Sorry, he's the Co eternal Son. Yes, yeah, and the Spirit is Co

(01:32:08):
eternal as well. Absolutely, because that's a
quality of the nature. That's the quality of being God.
I think we solved the filioque really.
I hope everybody else agrees. Too, I know I, I, I, I guess I
solved it in the sense that likeI understand why this is so
important to you guys. You know, in, in our, in just to
throw a little sideline for those who are Protestants,
evangelicals, charismatics, etcetera.

(01:32:30):
To us, it's a it's a sadness because at the time of the
Protestant Reformation, when so many questions were being raised
about the false authority of thepapacy, right, which from an
Orthodox perspective was legitimate.
You know, when Pope, when when Martin Luther was on the floor
of his first heresy trial, he stood there and said, I stand

(01:32:54):
with the Orthodox. That was what he said on it when
he was. Friendly, friendly communication
between Luther and the Orthodox.Not he didn't actually have any
his, his best buddy and better theologian actually.
And him, Mellington, Philip Mellington actually was
participating in what began, what he began and what continued
for 100 years of theological letters back between the

(01:33:14):
Ecumenical Patriarch and the Tubingen, Tubingen theologians,
the Lutheran theologians. You're right, that's a long
correspondence. Fascinating correspondence,
actually. But it's sad to us that if
you're going to oppose papal editions that aren't justified
scripturally or in tradition, the first thing they should have

(01:33:34):
opposed was the filioque. In terms of the the the
Reformation. At the time of the Reformation,
100%. But if you look at the
confessions that followed, you know, the 1600s and 1700s are
the years of the Protestant confessions, detailed detail.
And the Catholics did it, too with Trent, very detailed
confessions. This is unusual and this is
bizarre in Christian history when we just didn't do those
kinds of things. And what's sad about them is

(01:33:57):
when you do that, when you fall into the trap of making these
long confessions, you say too much and then you have to go
back and reject what you said intoo much detail, which is what
they've all done, including the Catholics.
Sorry to say that, Trent. Nobody really follows Trent.
I'm sorry you, you say you do, but you don't.
And the Protestants, certainly. I remember when I was a
Presbyterian and I was being licensed as a Presbyterian

(01:34:18):
minister, I had to acknowledge any changes to the, what was our
Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession of Faith,
Very, very long confession, pages and pages and pages and
pages I made when I was being examined by the presbytery.
I made 15 exceptions. I had them all written out.
I don't believe this. I don't believe like for
instance, that confession says that children shouldn't have

(01:34:40):
Holy Communion. I said no, no, no, I don't
believe that 100% children should I have if they're
baptized or should I have Holy Communion.
I made 15 exceptions and it was,I was, they said no, no problem.
You can take 15 exceptions and still be a licensed minister.
So that's what happened to me. That's what happens when you
fall into saying too much. But if you're going to reform of
the Catholic Church, it's what the Protestant reformers

(01:35:01):
initially wanted to do. You should have started.
They should have started with the issue of the.
Fair enough. OK, we got to get you out of
here soon because you got a heart out.
But you have a marriage conference coming up.
Indeed. And is it November?
I think October 10th and 11th. October 10th and 11th.
The Fox. Theater in Riverside, CA Can I
say a little bit about it? Please.
And I got a follow up question on that.
OK, Yeah. So Patristic Nectar has always

(01:35:26):
hosted for, for many, many years, conferences, usually 2
conferences a year, usually about the spiritual life, about
the writings of the first churchfathers, deep theology, that
kind of thing. We always bring in very high
level Orthodox priests, monks, scholars, Patristic scholars
mostly this year in the fall we're, we're, we're changing our

(01:35:47):
strategy a little bit for edification because of what's
going on in America. There's such an incredible
moment. My heart's just reading fast
when I look around at how many people are considering their
faith and are contemplating becoming Christ's servants.
I'm dancing, I'm dancing. I've never, I never thought I'd
see this. I thought we are in this
terrible decline and all of a sudden people are waking up.

(01:36:09):
I really think the Spirit of Godis stirring us and waking us up.
So we decided for the next 5 years we're going to try this
and see how it goes. For the next 5 years, we're
going to host a fall conference that is going to appeal and and
focus on large civilizational questions.
We're starting with marriage because it's my conviction that

(01:36:32):
the abandonment of marriage is one of the key markers, if not
the key marker, to the destruction of traditional
Christian culture in the West. The abandoned marriage, the
embrace of of the sexual revolution, of divorce, and all

(01:36:52):
of the sorrows that associate with the breaking down of the
family when marriage is not honored.
And for that reason, we're inviting champions, nationally
recognized champions from a broad Christian swath of
scholars who are going to speak about the value of marriage.
So it's not going to be narrowlyan Orthodox conference.

(01:37:13):
It's a larger Christian conference.
We're very happy to have the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San
Francisco, Salvatore Cordillion,who's going to come.
He is well known to Californiansbecause he was the champion
behind Prop 8 when we were defending traditional marriage
in this country. He also chaired the Defense of
Marriage Committee for the USCCBfor years.

(01:37:33):
The number one sociologist of marriage in America is a guy
named Doctor Brad Wilcox. He published an incredible book
in 2024 called On on the subjectof marriage.
He runs an institute of the the Institute of the Family out of
the University of Virginia. No one has data and a vision for

(01:37:54):
marriage better than Doctor BradWilcox.
He's going to come. Your viewers, I think, know who
Jonathan Pejo is. Jonathan Pejo is going to come
and talk to us about the symbology of marriage from
Genesis to Revelation as a themeof orientation between God and
his people as well as its earthly expression.
We're also going to have Doctor Gavin Ortland, who I think you

(01:38:15):
know pretty well, who is a Protestant YouTube, a very
wonderful person and a pastor, Protestant pastor who is very
competent, has a great competency in the subject of
marriage too. And so in this collage of
speakers from Orthodox, Catholicand Protestant backgrounds,
we're going to try to hold up a vision for honoring the natural

(01:38:38):
condition of the human race in marriage and family life.
I love it. I hope people will come and
enjoy themselves and leave inspired to have a high view of
marriage and to invest themselves in marriage.
This is an area I'm. I'm going to speak from my
vantage point. I did my doctoral work at the

(01:38:59):
University of Durham in England on Saint John Chrysostom's
teaching on marriage in virginity.
That book is available on Amazonalso.
And I also wrote a marriage manual, kind of a preparation
manual to help couples prepare and lay deep roots so that they
can have a marriage that bears beautiful fruit.
You know, if you put your roots down deep, you can grow your
tree large with beautiful fruits, and that's God's

(01:39:21):
intention for marriage. That book is called Enduring
Love, Laying Christian foundations for marriage.
So I'm going to from that background, I'm going to try to
make a contribution also October10 and 11 at the Fox Theater.
You can just go to themarriageconference.com and
find out more about it. That's beautiful.
I mean, I listen, we talked about this last night.
I love that you guys are bringing people together from

(01:39:43):
from the Catholic streams to theProtestant streams.
Like I think that's amazing. But there's been some backlash
from some folks in the Orthodox community about you having Gavin
Ortlin there. I had Gavin Ortlin in my event
and there was some Orthodox friends that I was also trying
to have and they said we can't do it, Gavin's.
Gavin's a heretic, we can't havehim at the event, so it's

(01:40:04):
refreshing for you to embrace him and have him at your event.
But in terms of some of the backlash, I don't know if you've
responded to it publicly. Is the idea that you can't
collaborate on important civilizational questions like
marriage, patriotism, technology, education,
motherhood unless the person's theology is perfect?
I don't know what the. Idea is that the presupposition?

(01:40:25):
I don't know what the idea is. I'm I'm with you in that like
that. Would have to be the
presupposition. My, my, our summit, which you
were at for one night. Bless got summit.
It was we we definitely talked about theology on the first day,
but it wasn't an explicitly theological event.
We talked about worldview, we talked about virtue, we talked
about impact, right. So we're doing another one.
So in the same way, when we had our event, there was some like,
hey, we don't know about Gavin Gavin's a heretic.

(01:40:47):
So I'm with you. I think it's a very
conscientious and pleasant Protestant theologian and
pastor. Amen.
So people who are criticizing him for being what he is or
criticizing us for hosting him, forgive me.
That's a very narrow perspective.
Because he's speaking doesn't mean that I as an Orthodox

(01:41:09):
priest, as in am endorsing Protestant doctrines.
You know, I've benefited for years by participating in larger
cultural exchanges where we met.ARK is a good example, right?
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship brought people to
talk about common cultural concerns from numerous
backgrounds. I mean, look at all the 4000

(01:41:31):
plus people there from all thesedifferent backgrounds.
Right before that, I I many on many occasions participated in
an incredible organization called the World Congress of
Families. In fact, I spoke at numerous
World Congress of Families gatherings in Utah, in the
country of Georgia, in the country of Hungary.
This is a fantastic organizationthat has as its goal of

(01:41:55):
nourishing a broad commitment tosupport societally the
institution of marriage and family life.
That's what we're trying to do on those paradigms.
I love that you pointed out thatjust because you're having
someone at your event, that doesn't mean you're endorsing
them fully. I think it is very narrow minded
because I get the same thing of like, hey Ruslan, you're sitting
with a Catholic priest, you're sitting with an Orthodox priest.

(01:42:16):
Therefore you're endorsing everything you believe.
And I'm like, no, no, no I'm not.
I'm not endorsing anyone that I have on.
I'm curious about their views and stories.
Some might say, well, we don't talk to people about sacraments
who aren't Orthodox. Forgive me, that's such total
nonsense. This is not a or, this is not a

(01:42:37):
conference about the mystery, the sacrament that's lived in
the Orthodox Church that we knowas marriage.
We're not going to be studying the marriage services and what
it means from a, from a interiorperspective of the Christian
mystery. This is talking about marriage
for the world, right? Marriage isn't just for

(01:42:57):
Christians. Marriage is an institution God
created for the human race. Amen.
This is very, very important. And we're focusing on that
aspect of marriage. What marriage What?
What is the reason that God has given marriage for society, and
what's the benefit of upholding it?
Amen, you. You said some very amazing
things about Gavin Orton. Are there any other ways where

(01:43:18):
you see God using Protestants, Protestant creators, Protestant
Youtubers, Protestant theologians, and the ways that
you think God's using them for good?
You know, the Lord himself uses everyone who will cooperate with
him, not just Protestants and Catholics.

(01:43:40):
He he uses everyone who has an openness.
I have so many people who have written to me from Muslim lands
who somehow have found YouTube and the Lord is literally
reaching out to people all all over the place.
So the idea that he doesn't use humble hearted believing

(01:44:02):
Christians if they aren't orthodox?
I'm sorry, I don't believe that at all.
I just don't believe that at all.
That I I spent many years as a conscientious Christian before I
became Orthodox. The Lord engaged me and woke me
up from the age of 15 until 25. I spent the 1st 10 years of an
actively seeking Christ in my life before I was Orthodox.

(01:44:25):
I'm not going to water down HolyOrthodoxy or suggest that, you
know, there's something called the invisible Church.
We think that's nonsense. I'm sorry.
I'm not going to suggest that. But I'm certainly not going to
go to the other extreme and suggest that the grace of God is
contained only in the Church andthat the Holy Spirit can't
illumine people and guide them. Are you kidding me?

(01:44:46):
I, I lived it for 10 years. I lived it for 10 years.
I was deeply altered by the Spirit of God in my life who
helped me to repent when I was 15 years old, taught me to love
the Scriptures. I think the Lord's Spirit is
roaming the whole earth seeking anyone who has an openness to

(01:45:09):
repentance. And he wants us all.
He thirsts for us all. He will have us all.
That's the heart of God for the world and no sin and no
stupidity and even heresy. He has to he's he's reaching out
to people to help them over comment.
Amen. Father decide we got to have you
back. This is this is not long enough.

(01:45:29):
You're. Going to give me another really
great dinner if I come back. I will take you out to another
great dinner and drinks and all the fun stuff we did last night.
So thank you so much. Appreciate you the marriage
conference dot. Com the marriageconference.com
are you going to come? I think I'm in North Carolina on
the 12th, so if I'm in town on the 11th, we.
Would love that the VIP will putyou up.

(01:45:51):
We'll take real good care of you.
All righty guys, we're out of here.
We'll have Father Josiah on again.
Sorry this with this didn't go as long as we wanted it to, but
hopefully you enjoyed it. We're out of here Peace brand
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