Remembering Voddie Baucham x TS&TT

Thank you for joining us for this conversation today on the Sword in the Trial. Today, Pastor Tom and I talk about our friend Vote Bacham and his life and ministry and the legacy that he left here, and just want to honor him in our conversations, talk about some of our experiences with him, and the plans of Founders and Founders Seminary moving forward. So I hope it's a helpful conversation for you. Take a listen. Welcome to The Sword in the Trial. The Sword and the Trial is a podcast of founders, ministries and founders exist for the recovery of the Gospel and the reformation of local churches. I'm Graham Gunden. I'm as Today what we want to do is we want to spend some time discussing the life and the legacy of our dear friend Vote Bacam. He passed just a few weeks ago on September twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, and he was a friend to both of us and a leader in the reformed evangelical world, and so we want to spend some time honoring his legacy and speaking about the ways in which the Lord used him in ministry here. Yeah, it's a significant loss for everyone who knew Vote and knew of Vote. Certainly we need to be much in prayer for bridget as widow and the children that are now fatherless in this world. But the Vote was a public Christian, very much a world Christian, because his ministry was worldwide. And that's been demonstrated just by the comments that have come in from people that he never met personally but knew of him through his writings and his teachings have been recorded and made available on the Internet, and then people who did know him. And it's interesting. I've tried to assess this over the last few weeks since he's departed this world for the presence of Christ. There's so many people that he contacted that he had some relationship with who feel very close to him, and I think that's a commentary on his personality. I've had one other friend in my life like that who when he died, and I went to his memorial service listening to the testimonies of people all over who just felt, like, you know, Ted was their best friend and because of the way he welcomed them and enveloped them in love. And I think Vote had a lot of that in him as well. And yet you know, he was first and foremost a husband and a father and a grandfather. And so I think sometimes in our grief and in our expressions of appreciation, we can lose sight of the fact. And he was a real man with a real family life, a real private life, and we in our expressions of grief and sorrow and thanksgiving, need to always remember the family. And so we want to do that. And we're grateful. For Voting leading his family to Cape Coral to Grace Baptist Church, and some bridget and their younger children are in the church, and we look forward to walking with them down this road that is sorrowful and yet is hopeful because of what Vote believed, what God taught him, what God entrusted to him, and what he stewarded well with his life and ministry. Yeah, and on that note, just in a practical measure, I mean, there's Vote was the breadwinner in his family, and he made he was able to bring home what the family needed through his public speaking and through his writing, etc. And now their family, the backhom family is without that. And so you know, we just want to let you guys know that you have the opportunity to help the Bockhom family. Pastor Thomas set up a give Send Go in order to provide for their needs financially with the loss of their husband and father. And so we'll put a link to that Give Send Go in the show notes and make sure you check that out. And if the Lord leads you support the Bachhom family and you know he's voting was one his death is one that's felt so broadly because he affected so many people. He said, so many people felt like they knew him, even if they never got to meet him in person, or they maybe met him in person briefly at a conference. And you know, I wouldness this. I don't know how many times. I mean, he was so willing and so ready to engage with people after his public speaking engagements, and he was so kind, ready to take pictures with people, and people felt like they were welcomed by him. People felt like they loved it. But so many just listened to him speak to them for hours. I mean, there are so many who, you know, he was their favorite preacher, and so they'd go on YouTube, or they'd listen to him on sermon audio, and they go to him for mentorship and for counseling on different issues, whether it be on marriage or on family, or on education or the importance of the church. And so it makes sense that so many people feel so deeply the loss of vote. But it's important, like you said, to remember that, Yeah, he was a father and a grandfather and a husband, and there certainly are those who are feeling the loss much more deeply than any of us are. Yeah, that's right, that's right. So pray for Bridget and all the children and the grandchildren as well. The Lord will sustain them. And Bridget's full of faith. She's a strong woman, but living a life now that she never envisioned, never wanted to live. I've tried to assess in the broader picture and then just in the personal relationship dynamics with voting. You know, the significance of his death and that'll be told over time and generations and historians will have to sort out some of those things. But you know, his death comes on the heels of other significant deaths this year, and so we lost John MacArthur and James Dobson and then Charlie Kirk, and you know, we've been without rc Sproll for quite a while now. A few years and then voting. So, I mean, what is this? Well, I don't know. There's several things that we just know to be true. And one of the one of the most important things we can do as Christians is remind ourselves of what hasn't changed. Because so much has changed, we think, oh, my goodness, we're without these key voices, these wonderful, gifted men that were doing great work and helped out in so many areas of the world for those of us who know and love Christ and want to see Christ receive the honor that he's due. These were champions in a lot of ways. So what are we going to do now? Well, we need to do what God has always called us to do, because the most important things haven't changed. Jesus is still on his throne. These were servants, and the servants have departed, but the Master remains, and the Master is working all things after the counsel of his own will. He is working all things for the good of those who love him have been called according to his purpose. He is going to fulfill every last one of his promises. And we thank God for those that He entrusts to us have become meaningful and useful to us and helpful to us. But we realize that to they are his servants and he is the master. He is the one that used them as instruments. And so we shouldn't be despondent in our grief. We have hope. In our grief. We remember truth and that's what Vody believed. That's what Vote taught. And he knew that he was not going to be here forever, just like every Christian knows, and he tried to steward his time the best he could using the gifts God's given him. In those gifts in that time was incredibly beneficial or the Church of Jesus Christ. Yeah, I think about the impact of Vote's ministry. There really was not another man like him, you know, particularly when you think about a confessional reform Baptist like solid doctrine, like you know, MacArthur is solid, but he's not confessional, and Arci Sproul obviously very solid, but he was not Baptist. There was not another man like Vote with the skills that he had and the gifts that he had, and the intellect that he had, and the rhetorical abilities and the ability to write, and just his personality that is just is not another man like him, particularly within the Reform Baptist world, and so he will be sorely missed, but grateful for the ways in which the Lord used him for decades leading up to this point. Yeah. You know, it's an interesting point, you know, and I've talked about this privately that sometimes because he was put together the way that he was, and he was received into a lot of circles that many Reform Baptists are skeptical of and would never be received in, people became suspicious within our own camp, the Reform Baptist being suspicious of vote he will Can he really be confessional? You know? Is he? What's more, there's got to be more to the story. And he was just an unpredentious guy who didn't mind having friends that were on various sides of issues that he was opposed to. Yeah, he was too effective and too popular to be to be considered solid by a lot of reformstress. That's right, Yeah, you know this, Why is it this gap getting marginalized all the time. If you're going to be solid, you've got to be a lot more boring than voting blocking. Yeah, and he was wonderfully gifted. I mean, good night, you know he could, he could turn a phrase and somebody out to compile just a book of the vodyisms. Yeah, I have a book in my study called Adrianisms. We need one called Voting Vodisms. That's right, that would be a book. If you want to put that together, contact Founders Press. We'll be glad to talk to you about that. Well. I mean, Voting didn't have a silver spoon in his mouth when he was born. He wasn't born with a lot of advantages. And as a pastor, one of the things that I've tried to think through my own life, my own history, but helping people in our church and especially men, young men, is you know, you can be born with advantages or disadvantages, and all of us are with both in some degree or another, but some have more significant disadvantages than others. And those disadvantages are real, and you can't pretend like they're not real, and you can't just say get over it, or you know, why don't you do what everybody else who's your age that was born with a silver spoon in their mouth is doing right now. I mean, there's just a their real difference. And Baron Trump has had many more opportunities than your children or my children will have. It was just the way that God and his providence ordered things. But that doesn't mean that because you don't have every advantage that someone else has, you can't do what God's called you to do and excel in areas and pursue excellence in whatever sphere God's given you. And Buddy did that. So he was born to mom who effectively was a single mom, and dad left very quickly in inner city LA. She was a Buddhist I think at the time, and you know, everybody in his family, all his friends were just they were going down the gangster life. And that's pretty much where he was headed as well, until his. Mother, out of sacrificial love, took him to live with an uncle in North Carolina, who, if I remember right, I think he was Vietnam Vet. He was a military guy, and he whipped vote in shape, I mean vote, learned about authority, he learned about respect, he learned about honor, and when they moved back to Texas, he became a high school football star. Really had a lot going for him. Back then, we didn't have five stars or four stars and that type of thing. We had blue chips, and vote was a blue chip athlete in San Antonio, tight end, and he wanted to go into one of the military academies and that didn't work out or something happened where I don't know, if you didn't get an appointment or something. So he wound up at the last minute going to New Mexico or maybe New Mexico State was a college in New Mexico. Played for a year, did really well, transferred to Rice. But in that year in New Mexico, God send him there, which I think the coach that recruited him left where he got there, you know, so it was just really weird. But while he was there, a Christian campus minister took him under his wing again to witness to him and led him to christ and he became a Christian. Goes to Rice, I think, spends a year there. I think that's where he met Bridget actually, and as new Christians, you know, he or he's a new Christian figuring out what to do. So he transfers to Houston Baptist. He football is no longer an interest to him, and he goes to Houston Baptist and enrolls and you know, tries to matriculate and they tell him, well, you can get a discount on your tuition if you're Southern Baptist. And he said, or what's what's a Southern Baptist? And I said, well, you've got to be a member of Southern Baptist Church. He said, okay, where are they? And are there any black ones? And it joins the Southern Baptist Church and gets the discount and finishes his education there, and I mean, God, just God gifted Imy went to Southwestern Seminary, Southeastern Seminary, did a d men there was in all the right circles. People looked at him and said, man, here's a gifted man. This is a guy that's really gifted. Quite honestly, he and I talked about this as, oh, you know, he's a black man. He's a gifted black man. And so he had all these kind of things that were afforded him and made available to him because of that until they began to realize what he believed, and he began to develop his theology and his convictions, and some of those convictions were way ahead of the curve, at least in my orbit. So I remember I think I met Vote maybe two thousand and three four something like that, because he was on the circuit then speaking for homeschooling organizations and we were homeschoolers and we had just produced over the I don't know a few years before that, the Truth and Grace memory books for kids, catechising kids. And every once in a while, man, we get these massive orders for these Truth and Grace memory books and where did this? Why you know, who is where are we getting this? We started tracing it down. It was like everywhere vody spoke. You know, those were the original truth and those are those beauties there? Yeah, you know that's uh, yeah, those are what do you call those vintage? That's the way I'm looking for, a very vintage. But the content was basically the same. And then somehow I just connected with him because he started ordering them to so he and I talked on the phone, and finally we were able to meet in person here in Southwest Florida, like two thousand and five, two thousand and six. But back then I remember him reaching out. To me because he and uh, I think a guy named Bruce Short had worked on a resolution on public education, basically saying get your kids out of the education system, the public education system and I thought, you know, I mean, yeah, we're not putting our kids in there, but for you to tell everybody not to do that all Christian shouldn't it just seemed a little bit beyond the pale for me. But he was dead right. He was just writing a lot sooner than I came to see it. Yeah, he was that way on a lot of things. I remember just recently there's a clip going around with him being interviewed on CNN and the interviewer is just grilling him on feminism and he just is not backing down at all. And that was in a day. I mean, this probably was fifteen twenty years ago at least. This was in a day where you know, people in evangelicalism didn't necessarily like feminism, but they're not going to go on CNN and trash feminism, you know. But Bodybach, much like John MacArthur, just did not care. He is going to speak the truth. And there are so many issues like that that he was just ahead of the curve on cultural, political, philosophical, theological issues. And that's one of the things. I mean, like he was so. Solid when it comes to you know, biblical theology, covenant theology, the doctrines of grace, all that kind of stuff, which amen for that, but when it came to cultural issues, boy, he was just he was He was so good and he was so insightful. And again that's that's another thing that we just we just don't have a lot of that, particularly in reform. Back to circles. Yeah, that's that's right. I think his giftedness to think about culture and from an apologetic standpoint, you know, I mean, he realized what he came from, what his circumstances were, of which the Lord delivered him out of, and he just always had a burden for the world and for culture, and so he was thinking about things a lot quicker than certainly I did, and that I think many in our circles did. And he realized that our theology actually speaks to these things, because again, so much of the world in which we inhabit theologically looks upon scientification and Pietism as almost a narrow. Subjective type of reality. You know, we wouldn't say it this way because we see the fallacy in the Me and Jesus idea, but it's pretty much that, you know, me and Jesus are maybe in the church in Jesus. But whenever you start talking about politics, whenever you start talking about authority, whenever you start talking about power, Oh no, no, no, no, we eschew all that, because Christians should not seek power or authority. You know, if you do that, well, then what do you have to say about the meek and mild Jesus? You know. So vote he saw. Through all of that and realized, no, no, no, no, you know that the whole world belongs to King Jesus, and the whole world needs to be addressed by their king and held accountable to do what their king says that they ought to do. And that developed in him over time. He became more articulate about that. But he saw those things way sooner than anybody else I know in our camp in the reform Baptist world. Yeah. And you know, if you want a taste of that, I mean, you can go on YouTube and listen to a lot of his sermons on education, or on marriage, or on family or cultural Marxism. I think he preached a wonderful sermon on cultural Marxism and then ethnic gnosticism. At the Founder's pre conference. Was it five four or five years ago? Longer than that? Was it I gets in twenty eighteen or something. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah. But then also, you know, there's a Founders at the Founder of Study Center has a course from Vote on theology and ethics where he talks about a lot of those things. And so there are college level lectures. Go to study dot. Founders dot org you can you can get a hold of those lectures there. But he was he was so helpful even for me, but also I think for founders in the broader evangelical world as well. You know, when we especially thinking about like ethnic gnosticism. Boy, we just went crazy back in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and even before you know, you think about like the Ferguson riots, we went crazy on race issues in the conservative evangelical world. And once again, Vodi was one of the first to kind of stand up and say. No, we're not going We're not going there. That's all. That's all dumb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you remember when Michael Brown was killed in the altercation with the police officer outside of Saint Louis and me and everybody lost their minds. Well, Vote wrote an article for TGC that broke the server. I mean, it just crashed. It couldn't handle it because he basically said Michael Brown was wrong, Michael Brown was a thug, and Michael Brown had justice dealt to him and people accused him of just being anything but a Christian basically, and so it's Stetzer organized this deal I think was in Memphis, and I believe that was like twenty fourteen or something that he called a time to Speak and so he had vote and as one of the Lyritz maybe Brian Leritz, I think the BEADI was on there, Darren Patrick was on there, and I forget several others, but it wound up being voting against the world, you know, time to speak about race relations and vote. He took them on one by one, I mean, and they came at him in every direction, and he just kept cutting it down, not at all the beat. He comes out with the name of a lot of black folks that had died, you know, on his T shirt and body addressed that in a very effective way too. I remember watching a video of that. It's on YouTube, you can watch it. But when we met in Dallas in what was that two thousand and eighteen, I guess it was to justice, right. Yeah. We met in Dallas in June twenty eighteen to see what we could do about the whole social justice movement because Vody had been doing this for a long time. I've been engaged maybe a year or two in it. Others has been there longer than me. But there was about thirteen of us I think that met at Herb's Coffee Shop in Dallas, and part of. The pictures somewhere there are pictures, Yeah, there are pictures, and anyway, there are pictures. We had a video set up in that little conference room and we played this clip of Vody on this panel with all these guys and Ed's coming at him, everybody's coming at him, and Body just man, he deflects and he parties and he just he nails them. And John MacArthur's sitting there, he's watching it. And so after we finished it, he turns and looks at Body. He says, you just pitched a no hit, shut out. And he God gifted him with a quick mind and with a real careful and studied understanding of things, and he was ahead of the curve on certainly the race issues. Because the whole evangelical world. I mean, certainly the SBC, but not just the SBC got played horribly by race baters and people who thought that they were honoring Jesus by the way that they believe we ought to be talking about race. And part of the difficulty of that is, does you know racism to cinful partiality exist? Absolutely did vote the experience it. Absolutely he experienced it. I mean, I've been with him in some of those situations, and yet he didn't let those experiences cloud him to biblical truth. And that's happened so often. So even like right now, Southeastern Seminary, you know, they had this Kingdom Diversity Department, they had a Kingdom Diversity Vice president. You know, they want to make Southeastern. Seminary look like the Kingdom of Heaven, like Heaven, you know, I mean, it's just a joke. So they've changed the name of that because that no longer plays, and so now it's what is it the Revelation five seventeen or whatever program, But it's the same thing. They give scholarships to anybody who's who is in what they perceived to be an a pressed. Category, anyone who's not a white man. That's pretty much a straight white man, you don't qualify but anybody else and Vote he saw through all that nonsense, and you know he I mean, I don't know. One of the last conversations I had with him one day, maybe we'll talk about it, but it was on this very issue and his own experiences with it, and just you know how grateful he was to be a part of the founding of a founder seminary, to be the president of this seminary because it was free from that kind of nonsense, and he just he saw it. He didn't he didn't try to manipulate that, he didn't take advantage of it, which he could have very easily. He resisted it even when it cost him well. And that's one of the things about Vote is he was not he was not steerable. Was he was a man of conviction that he could as successful as he was, as effective as he was, he could have been more successful in a worldly sense had he just kind of gone along with things. Yeah, in so many different ways. I mean, he was promised the moon in different periods of his life, and he just said, I'm not going to go there. I don't believe that, I don't I can't do those things. And he sacrificed for almost ten years in Africa, you know, gave up everything to go see African Christian University established and to be the dean of theology there, the School of Theology, and he labored there hard, and then he sacrificed to come back and to be the president of a startup seminary where he could have, you know, done anything else, but he believed in it. And he was not going to be steered by wealth, or by the leftist gaze, or by the female gaze, or by anything else. He was going to do what he thought was right, and he was going to operate based on his convictions. Yeah, and I've seen that up close and personal and certainly worked with him in those kinds of initiatives, and most recently and lastingly, God Willing is Ilpt and Founders Seminary. I remember one time. Shortly after we met, he was in my living room. We're sitting there and he had to take a phone call. And so this phone call he got pretty animated, you know, and I mean his voice was rising and he was digging in his heels. And so when he was finished, he said, man, what was that all about? Had He said, Well, said, it was a phone call about a publisher that had a book from him that you know, they already had contract on. Everything's moving forward, and because of pressure from an outside source about something that he said in one of the chapters, they wanted that chapter taken out and Vodie said, no way, And so the agent was talking to him said well, if you know, this is going to kill the deal, so I don't care, I'm not taking that chapter out. That man, he was hot and so I'm right, you know, he was right, and again could have been very easy for him to take it out, very lucrative for him to take it out. I mean, I just know I know of situations, even some that have happened in the last year when he was moving from Zambia to the United States coming back home, of opportunities that were dangled in front of him, and things that people used to try to entice him that he just said no to. And you know, and he did it because of conviction and just one of the things that man made me so excited about what we had in mind, and we're wanting to pursue together for founder seminary because you recall you were here back in twenty twenty. You know, the world's lost its mind, COVID's nuts. And we made some efforts at founders to try to do some very significant things. God shut the door at the last minute on one of those. But in shutting that door, the idea dawned, well, why don't we just do something here in KKR. And so, man, I'm the first phone call that I made when it became clear to me, yeah, we ought to try to do. Something to train men to handle what we're living through. Because a lot of the pastors I knew, loved and respected, and certainly myself, we didn't. We weren't trained this way, you know. And so many guys just folded. They just good guys, just folded. The one really good pastor, somebody asked him in a phone conference. I was on, when are you going to open the church doors again? He says, when the government tells me I can. I mean, So that was just and this is not a bad guy, This is a really good guy. So my first phone call is devoting. It was the middle of the night in Zambia. I didn't I always would text him first to make sure, you know, we could find a time to talk. I's called him said, man, here's what I'm thinking. What do you what do you think it would love for you to be a founding faculty member. I said, I'm in. I mean he did in thirty seconds. It's done with him. And then whenever last October, Peter Samons and I had been talking for weeks. What seemed like God was developing before us was hey, man, you got the opportunity for a new seminary here because we have been training men. Praise God for that, but the iopts, not specifically for pastors. That's the way we started. But there was so much interest in other things, and we had so many other opportunities we couldn't say no to to try to develop out a little bit that it became apparent, well, we need something even more rigorous for pastors who are going to be in the trenches in this world, in the world to come, and so could we should we consider starting an actual seminary that's going to have a rigorous. Program to it. The way that we came to articulate it was we want to see men with sharp minds, warm hearts, steel spines. And we agreed to do that. I mean, Peter was here and it was just like Okay, this is what we think to be God's will. And then within two weeks Vote texts me and said, hey, you're never going. To believe this. He said, We've got a buyer for our. House cash and it's enough that we're going to be able to move to Southwest Florida. At Quarrel said, the only hitch is we got to get out by December first, and so this is like six weeks, you know. So I called him, I said, well, you're never going to believe and what we just decided, Mas, we'd love to have you come be a part of this, said what are your plans? And so we were negotiating all that over the next couple of months because he, you know, wasn't sure he wanted to give up completely his Iinerant ministry, but he didn't want to do it as much as he'd been doing it, and he still had some other plans for projects. We're going to be very time consuming. But by the time the Founder's conference rolled around in twenty twenty five January, he was fully on board. We can announce it, and then shortly after that we were able to announce he's going to be the founding president and man we had great we had great plans, and those plans are going to go forward by God's grace. I mean, there's some incredible opportunities. Vote lent his power, his energy, his thoughts to what we were doing. They're baked into the foundation of where we are headed. And we you know, I don't look forward to doing this without him, but we're not slowing down and we're going forward, which is exactly what he. Would want us to do. I mean, I just even the thought of, well, no, what do we do? We've got to shift gears. I mean, you know, Vote would just have all our heights if we just said no, no, no, we can't do it, not now, no, not at all. This is the time. The need is greater than it's ever been. Founder seminary is going forward. We've got some great changes coming with iopt as well that he was very much on board with, and God has done some wonderful things there. So, so his legacy, his final mission, in his stewardship of the gifts that God has given him. I'm so happy that it's that it's right here with what we believe and what we're laboring to see God do in providing training for men through Founders, shaven men and women, through what is now iopt, and through the ongoing proclamation of the Gospel that he knew, loved and wanted others to come to know and love. Yeah, and the Lord will continue to use Vote. I mean, the Vote has has received his reward and he's rejoicing in heaven now. But the Lord will continue to use him here much the same way that the Lord continues to use Martin Lloyd Jones in his books and in his sermons and as a model that you know, the students of Founder Seminary and many of us will look to and say, Yeah, that's a man the Lord to use and gifted in these particular ways, who had these particular virtues. And I'm going to follow him as he followed Christ. And I'm going to try to have the same ambition that he had. I'm going to try to develop the same skills that he developed. I'm going to believe the way that he believed. Yeah, that's right. And he he died well, you know, he he died without scandal. Yeah. You know, I. Hate the fact that he's gone from us, but I praise God that the Lord Captain preserved him. And you know, one of my funeral hymns is Oh sacred had now wounded, And so my family knows this, But the line in there that just rivets me is, so Lord, let me never never outlive my love to the you know, should I fainting, be let me never outlive my love to THEE. And so if I die tragically or unexpectedly or whenever and haven't been scandalized, then God's answered my prayer, you know. And that's what I think all of us as Christians want. And yeah, his legacy lives on and maybe in ways that they are going to be even more broadly appreciated than some of those other guys you mentioned, because I mean, voting has been out there for so long on the internet. I'm thinking John MacArthur has these institutions he built, he's got books, and he's got his sermons on the radio that primarily is where they were first distributed. But Vodie, as almost as soon as it was accessible, people began recording him and making it available through the internet. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So when I first came across the vote, he must have been like twenty ten or something like that. Two thousand and nine, just kept fresh out of high school. And it's such a weird story. So one of my friends was in a gas station. Somebody was stopping for gas and decided they were going to evangelize my friend. Now my friend was already a Christian, but he gave them a thumb drive with a bunch of sermons on it. And this thumb drive started passing around in my friend's circle and it was just loaded up with vote Bockam sermons and Arcy's Sproll sermons and H. Paul Washer's Shocking Youth Servant. Yeah. Absolutely, and everyone's like, who is this guy at the gas station? It must have been maybe God sent an angel something, because every one was like digging into reform theology for the first time ever. I came to find out later that this guy was actually so weird story. The man who had become my brother in law. It was his cousin's husband visiting from out of state. Nobody knew him. It was crazy, but that was my first introduction to vote in this little thumb drive. You know, you could back when we used MP three's and we'd listened to his sermons and then we started to find them online. And it's just that kind of the Lord uses today with modern technology, his kind of teaching his sermons in such an interesting way, a way that you know, radio was the medium of the past, and before that just spoken word and books and writing. But the Lord uses different mediums now because we use different mediums now, and it's just it's more invasive than it was previously, which when it comes to the breaching of the Gospel, is a wonderful thing. Yeah, And I would just come if you have not watched and listened to Vote's last two messages, you got to do that. The last sermon that he preached on the Lord's Day was preached here at Grace Baptist Church just five days or four days before he died. So he preached on this on a Sunday, and then the Lord took him home on Thursday and he preached on Ephesians five thirty two. When we'd asked him to preach. You know, he was really excited about it because he had not preached in our church as a church member. Yeah, and so this is the only time that he preached as a church member to Grace Baptist Church. And so we were talking. He said, well, man, what kind of things you want to preach about so I don't know, you know, we're always good to just kind of shore up what. The church is. So he preached on Ephesians five thirty two, and. He never told me the title of it until he was preaching it. He said, you know, he said, Tom asked me what the title was, or you know, I was going to tell Tom what the title is. It's be careful what you say about Christ Bride. And it was just awesome. And the next day he and I were talking about that. He said, I got to preach my church. I got to preach in my church. And that was Sunday. Saturday before was our convocation, first convocation for Founder Seminary. He delivered the convocation address, and it is brilliant. It's brilliant in terms of what Founder's Seminary is and by God's grace, what we are going to be, what we're going to do going forward. So we're going to link to. Both of those messages in the notes of this episode, but encourage you to listen to them to pray as you do that God would grant to Founders that which we desperately need if we're going to fulfill the responsibilities he's entrusted to us. And when you pray, thank God for voting, and pray for Bridget and pray for his children, his grandchildren, and thank God for giving it such a wonderful gift. Amen. And you know one thing that you often say that voting would echo is find a healthy church and build your life around it. So Vody had a big fan base, and people would follow him around to different conferences because they'd love to hear his preaching. And he preached the truth, and so people who loved his preaching felt like, yeah, I love the truth and I want to hear the truth. But you know a lot of people would follow him around to the conferences to hear his preaching, but would never unite themselves to a local church because they felt like, well, vote, he's my pastor. Vote would abhor that. Yeah, vote would hate that. There would be people who would treat him as their pastor just because you listen to his sermons, but you wouldn't have your own pastor, you wouldn't have your own elders, you wouldn't have your own body that you were united to. And so this is a challenge if there are any of our listeners out there who are not members of good, healthy local churches because you think that you can get what you need spiritually just on YouTube and online listening to vote sermons. Vote would tell you that is not true. Just go and listen to his last sermon that he ever preached in this world, and it become clear to you that you need to find a good local church and build your life around it. And if you have the opportunity, as we mentioned at the beginning of the show, go to the gifts end go that's going to be in the show notes and see if you're able to support Vode's families. Got four children still at our four seven children still at home. I mean there's a lot of mouths to feed, and many of them are getting ready to launch out into the world, and now they don't have their father, and so there are a lot of needs there. And so if you can go to that give send go page and see what the Lord we would put on your heart to give to bridget into the children. That would be a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing. Thank you for joining us today for this conversation about votees of life in industry. If it's been a helpful conversation for you. You can like and subscribe We appreciate that, and then also share with people that you think it might be helpful to as well, and we will see you next time.