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So You Wanna Walk in Truth?
Why We're Still in the Fight
Forty-one years of marriage. Four kids. A career arc that went from sports broadcasting to general manager of radio stations to a little radio station in the village of Knacknack, western Alaska, then Phoenix, then Grand Rapids, then syndication, then seminary, then Christian films, then the pulpit. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Emily became the voice you heard selling garage door openers and new cars on local radio. Then AI took her work.
And now this.
Fresh Road Media is not a hobby show. That word got thrown around for a while, and it took one of those rare, stop-everything, look-me-in-the-eye conversations (the kind that happens maybe five or six times in forty-one years) to settle it. This is my calling. And someday I might have an income from it, but if I never do, it's because I want to be faithful. So let the record show: it is not a hobby show.
It is a volunteer broadcast with real expenses, running on donor support and a lot of hours nobody's getting paid for. It carries this show, a teaching platform called Salvaged by God, and it's in conversations with up to a half-dozen or more other shows. All with one purpose: to make his name great while we still can.
Why the urgency? Because we are in a time of profound biblical illiteracy, and that includes those of us who've been in ministry for decades. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. But the illiteracy isn't the worst part. The worst part is what rushes in to fill the vacuum.
Gramster Rant: Heresy. You're Soaking in It.
You remember Madge the manicurist from the old Palmolive ads. She'd have women soaking their hands in the dish soap and then reveal, calmly: you're soaking in it. That's the picture. That's where we are. Heresy is the dish soap. You are the hands. And you've been soaking in it so long, a lot of people can't even feel it anymore.
Heresy is everywhere. It is rising. It is infiltrating the average Christian's daily life through YouTube, through social media algorithms that nobody asked for, through slick production values and voices that sound deeply, convincingly kind. A new believer who just gave their life to Christ at a coffee shop goes home and searches for spiritual food online. What does he find? Heretics. Lots of them. And some of them are going to sound sweeter than the real thing.
Let's be precise about what we mean by heretic, because the word gets treated like an insult when it's actually just accurate. If you blaspheme, you're a blasphemer. If you steal, you're a thief. If you put forth heresy, you are practicing heresy. The label follows the action. Calling it something softer doesn't make it less dangerous.
A lot of what passes for Christian content today isn't flat-out heresy. It's weak Christianity. Crowd-friendly. Built around what appeals to the fallen sinner rather than what's actually true. And there is a direct line between that kind of ministry and the marketing decisions that drive it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with creativity in how you invite people to come and hear the gospel. The question is always: what is the intent of your heart? If the intent is to make his name great and see the kingdom advance, the approach won't be contrived and it won't be manipulative. But if you're trying to fill seats and meet a budget, if you're doing Easter car giveaways so people will be in the building on Easter Sunday, you've made a wrong turn. You will try to appeal to the fallen sinner. You will try to meet people where their flesh is comfortable. And when you do that, you get a bunch of carnal people. And then what's the point?
Here's the hard truth people have trouble grasping: God doesn't need you. He doesn't need any of us. In fact, there are times it seems like he might not even want us. But because of his great mercy and love, because he's going to give a bride to his Son at the great wedding feast in the New Jerusalem, he offered us a redemption we could never have earned. And the joy that comes when the Spirit is genuinely infused in a life supersedes everything.
That's why we preach the word. Not a car raffle. Not a marketing campaign. Preach the word. Be faithful to it, and God will bring the people who need to hear it.
This is also why Matthew Henry's warning lands so hard:
The church of God is in more danger from her heretics than from her persecutors. And heresies are certainly from the devil as open force and violence.
What makes that quote striking is the life it came from. Henry lived in 1600s England. He went through the upheaval after the Reformation, a period when sound doctrine was not tolerated. He got kicked out of his church. In those days, that wasn't just you can't come back to that building. It meant being pushed out of the town, into poverty. He had a lot of kids. He had to keep his family alive. And him and his wife never stopped their dedication to studying and teaching God's word. Even in that struggle, even in the poverty, the work continued.
What makes the quote about heresy being more dangerous than persecution so striking is that Henry was the one being persecuted. He wasn't theorizing from a comfortable study. He was living it. And still, after all of that, his greater concern was the twisting of God's word from within the church. Not the enemies outside the gates, but the distortion happening inside them.
He eventually saw a reversal of that trend. Praise be to God. But the warning stands.
This is also why we tend to trust the dead ones. Matthew Henry, Spurgeon, the guys who gave everything to the text and whose theology is now fixed and scrutinizable. They can't change their position anymore. They can't hide anything. Their whole life's work is on the table. For the living, look at Vodie Baucham, Paul Washer, John MacArthur, Alistair Begg, Todd Friel. And if the old English feels like a barrier, get the updated versions. We read a Spurgeon devotional in common English just this morning and it was outstanding. Stick with it and you'll get into the rhythm. The depth in those men is worth every page.
Salvaged by God Deep Dive: Titus 3:3-7
Before you can understand the danger of what's out there, you need to understand what you've been rescued from. This passage gets quoted at comedy shows, at intermissions, in front of all kinds of audiences, because it is so true for so many of us.
At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.
That was the neighborhood. That was the default position. Not moral mediocrity. Actual enslavement. Foolish. Disobedient. Deceived. That word matters, because everyone is deceived until the moment they're not deceived anymore. And what God wants to do, what the Spirit does, is break through and let you know it's okay. You're not deceived anymore. Now you have a little better insight than you did yesterday. Celebrate that. And keep going.
What changed everything wasn't a decision or a self-improvement project.
The kindness and love of God our Savior appeared.
Not because of righteous things we had done. Because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, poured out generously through Jesus Christ, so that having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.
Jesus did not come to make bad little boys and girls into good little boys and girls. He came to make dead people alive.
C.S. Lewis said we are not merely improved. We are entirely different creatures. Horses with wings. The old thing on the garbage pile is not patched up and sent back out. It is made new. And Spurgeon put it this way:
The Christian grows rich by his losses. He lives by dying and becomes full by being emptied.
That goes against everything the world sells. But it is the mechanics of the sanctified life. As you walk with the Lord and your salvation becomes the anchor of everything else, the big losses find their proper proportion. They stop crushing you. The ego wins that used to inflate you get quieter. Not because you forced them quiet, but because you've found what actually lasts.
This is where the equation from 1 Timothy 6:6 lives: godliness with contentment is great gain. We are all seeking contentment. The secret is that it is downstream of the salvation, not the other way around. You don't earn the contentment and then find God. You find God, or rather, he finds you, and contentment follows.
Salvaged by God Deep Dive: 2 Timothy 3:1-9
If Titus 3 is the foundation, this passage is the warning system.
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
Not exactly the triumphalist kickoff people want to hear. But it is true. And pretending otherwise doesn't serve anyone. If you think we are in the last days, if you can see the signs, do you know what that actually means? It means Satan is going to overcome the saints. It means we are going to suffer great loss while simultaneously being victorious in our salvation. Those two things coexist. We don't get to pick only the victorious part.
People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy.
Stop there. Go look at any theological discussion on social media right now. A post meant to encourage people, meant to say I like this teacher because of the truth he shares, can turn into a hundred-comment pile-on of rude arguments in an afternoon. Lovers of self. Proud. Boastful. Abusive. It is right there. In the visible church.
Without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
That last line is important. It is not elitism. It is not separatism for its own sake. But there is a line, and Scripture draws it, and it can still be held in genuine Christian love. You can separate from error without becoming harsh about it. The line is real and it is necessary.
One phrase from verse five gets twisted constantly. People point to denying its power and argue that if you don't embrace the full sign-gifts package, tongues, the five-fold ministry, the whole New Apostolic Reformation setup, then you are the one with a form of godliness but no power. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Power in the New Testament is the power to overcome sin. The power to endure trials and tribulations. The power to keep believing when everything around you calls it foolishness. And most of all, the power to endure to the end. That is the sanctified life. That is the genuine work of the Holy Spirit. Not gibberish that can be learned on your own. Not a spiritual experience that bypasses the Spirit of Truth.
The Spirit is called the Spirit of truth for a reason. There is no way to verify what the gibberish means. There is no content to test against the word. You may be having a spiritual experience, but it is not the Holy Spirit. Do the math on that one.
Verses six and seven deserve honest attention:
They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Don't let the word women narrow the application. In the cultural context in which it was written, it referred to whoever was spiritually vulnerable. And there are plenty of men verse seven applies to. Always learning but never arriving. Forever consuming, never rooted. Perpetually open to the next new thing, which makes them perpetually vulnerable to the next false teacher.
And then verse eight, which is actually the encouragement buried inside the warning:
Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. But they will not get very far, because their folly will be clear to everyone.
Their folly will be clear to everyone. It doesn't feel that way right now. But that is the promise.
On Value: Getting the Balance Right
There is a phrase that circulates constantly in Christian circles: You're so valuable that even if you were the only one, Jesus still would have died for you.
There is a kernel of something true in there. But it is off. And the way it's off matters.
We have raised two generations of children being told they can be anything, that they are so awesome and perfect and the whole family should arrange itself around them. That message has entered the church. It produces a version of the gospel where you're so worth it gets preached without any honest accounting of what we actually deserve apart from grace. It gets twisted into life improvement. Add Jesus and things go well. The American dream with a Christian veneer. That is not what this is.
The honest accounting goes like this. We are fallen, sinful people with no hope and nothing that impresses God. We cannot even stand in his presence with sin on us. The wrath of God is due us. Every single one of us. That is the starting point, not a footnote.
But here is the other side. God values what he makes. A painter keeps paintings because he made them, even the ones that aren't that great, even the ones that will eventually go in the trash. There is something in the relationship between a creator and what he's created. And then Jesus redeems. He gives new life. The thing that deserved the garbage heap becomes an entirely new creation. And because of the sacrifice that paid for that, the value of those who are in Christ is immense to the heavenly Father.
When you look at the ancient picture of a father going to seek a bride for his son, the sacrifices he makes, the provisions he lays in, the lengths he goes to, that is the frame God has given us for understanding what he has done for his people. The whole game is that he is going to present all the saints to his Son as a bride who will reign with him forever. That value is real. It is extraordinary. But it flows entirely from him, not from us.
So when we say we are not that valuable on our own, that's not despair. And when we say Jesus would have gone to the cross even for one, there is something true in that. But you have to hold the whole picture, not just the half that feels good. Any value we carry is the value God places in us. The moment that gets unmoored from him and turned into inherent human greatness, it becomes something different. Something the culture already sells without any help from the church.
On Context: What We Actually Missed
One of the greatest joys of serious Bible study is the moment you find out you had something wrong.
It happens to everyone. You can write a five-hundred-page book, put up two hundred and fifty sermons, spend your whole life in the word, and all of a sudden learn something and realize you've been seeing it differently your whole life. That is not a crisis. That is sanctification. What you do with that moment is the test. Some people double down because they don't want to be wrong. What God wants, what the Spirit does, is break through and say: it's okay. You see it now. Let's keep going.
The widow's mites. For years the conventional reading is that Jesus is commending her, holding her up as a model of radical, sacrificial generosity. But look at the context. Jesus had just finished warning about the scribes who devour widows' houses. What he is expressing is not admiration. It is grief. Sorrow that a corrupt religious system had deceived this widow into giving the very last of what she had to people who didn't deserve it and would not use it rightly. It is not a commendation. It is an indictment of the system.
The Good Samaritan. Most people hear it as a lesson about loving your neighbor. Here's how to do it, go and do likewise. But the context is a lawyer trying to trap Jesus. Jesus raises the bar so impossibly high, love your neighbor the way this Samaritan loved his enemy, that the only honest response is: I cannot do this. I need God's righteousness, not mine. The parable is not showing us how to be good neighbors. It is showing us that our very best, the highest righteousness we can manage in our own effort, is filthy rags before a holy God. We need a Savior. That is the point of the story.
Context changes everything. Who is Jesus talking to? Why is he telling this particular parable at this particular moment? What was just said, what conflict was just raised, right before he felt compelled to speak? Skip those questions and you can make Scripture say almost anything. This is how heresy gets traction. This is how sweet-sounding teachers lead people astray, not always by inventing things, but by pulling one thing out of context and letting it float free of everything that holds it in place.
This is why the method matters as much as the content. Get into the word. Study it. Find teachers who did the same. And when God opens something up to you that you had wrong, when the text cracks open in a way it never did before, there is an excitement in that like an archaeologist who has been digging in the dust for years and finally brushes off something real. That is the payoff. And every time it happens, you decrease a little more. Jesus increases. That is what the sanctified life feels like from the inside.
Final Thoughts
We do this because we believe the church must be strong, and the church is in danger right now. More from the distortion within than from any persecution without. We do it because new believers deserve better than what the algorithm hands them. We do it because the word of God, rightly handled, still changes everything.
Not because we have it all figured out. Not because we started with a big audience or a polished operation. We started with forty views a week on the audio side. We have lived Titus 3:3. Foolish, disobedient, deceived. And then the kindness of God appeared. And once that happens, you can't just sit around and tend the hostas.
If Fresh Road Media is something you want to put your resources behind, your time, your subscription, your financial support, freshroadmedia.com is where to go. Every person who comes alongside and says this is worth something is a confirmation that the work is worth doing.
Get into the word of God today.
And go and serve your King.