I did not see nor do I intend to see our episode on Viceland, but a dear brother, Pastor Derin Stidd, I partner with in ministry wrote this commentary. Duty is ours, the results belong to God. Pray for Jamali. We did directly minster the Gospel of the Kingdom to his lost soul.

So I’m watching Hate Thy Neighbor on Viceland. And they basically spend the entire show totally smearing Operation Rescue/Operation Save AmericaApologia StudiosJeff Durbin and Rusty Thomas, as well as a bunch of other brothers and sisters in Christ, through the whole show. I mean, they really go out of their way to make some friends of mine look crazy. Especially in the scene where they recorded the OSA worship service, they very clear cut that scene in such a way, so as to make the people who were there look like nut cases.

It’s harder for me to read whether or not that was happening with Durbin, and Apologia because I don’t actually know them in person, but it seemed to me like Jamali, the guy who basically runs the show, was put off by Jeff almost from the beginning. And it seemed like he was actually projecting his own thought processes related to things like studio quality, and personal fame, on to Jeff, through the entire show.

But then there’s this moment in the show where Jamali, after finishing his first interview with Rusty, he comes out of the interview and he says something like “Rusty is a different kind of guy. He genuinely believes what he is saying, and if he went to jail for the sake of Jesus then he would be perfectly okay with that.”

Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when a progressive/atheist walks away from the conversation with you and says “Hey, this guy might actually be the real deal.” God did something in that conversation. When you do this kind of ministry people love to project the worst things about themselves onto you. They love to assume upon your motives. They love to quickly find the smallest way in which you are coming up short, and then use that to delegitimize everything else that you are doing. So when they walk away with their interest in what you are doing genuinely peeked, that’s a God thing.

What was demonstrated in this show, regardless of how crazy they want to make us look, is that there are people in this ministry who genuinely want to do the work of God’s Kingdom, who genuinely care about these babies, and who genuinely care about these women. More importantly than that, what the world got to see is that this is the way that Christian men behave. When someone weaker is being harmed, when the voiceless are being oppressed, Christian men rise up, sacrifice of themselves, bear all of the reproach, and speak up to defend the weak. And finally, more importantly even than that, in this video the church see’s front and center that this is how the world responds when you do what God has called you to do.

Rusty Thomas is preaching at Aletheia Church this Sunday at 10:am. We welcome you to join us, not so that you can hear from Rusty, but rather so that you can hear the Word of God proclaimed.