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If you are listening to this the morning of its release, then this morning at Oak Cliff
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Bible Fellowship Church in Dallas, Texas, they are holding the funeral and celebration
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of life for one of the most important men ever, at least to me in terms of Christian
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ministry.
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And that's Vodie Bockham.
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So Vodie was born on March the 11th of 1969, and he went home to be with his Savior, rather
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suddenly at least to us, it seemed, on September the 25th of 2025.
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So he is a husband and he has seven children, and there is a link in the show notes to a
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Gibson go to try and support his family because it was a rather sudden passing.
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He had just moved back from Zambia, Africa to Florida here in America to start his career
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with founders ministry and to continue his preaching and writing ministry and all that
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has suddenly come to an end.
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But he is one of five giants of the Christian faith that have gone home to me with Jesus
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this year.
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So the great Phil Robertson died in May, John MacArthur died in July, James Dobson died
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in August, Charlie Kirk just died last month, and now we have Vodie Bockham.
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And so obviously I've talked a lot about the Charlie Kirk assassination and what that's
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meant for our country and for Christiandom and the fact that I consider him a Christian
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martyr.
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And I've talked a lot about the ministry specifically of Phil Robertson and John MacArthur.
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I wasn't as much exposed to James Dobson's career, but obviously I understand the tremendous
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impact of focus on the family.
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But when Vodie died, I was like, okay, who's going to be the next Christian to giant to
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go down, right?
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And I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it and I can't shake this feeling that
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God is preparing us for something because nothing happens outside of his purview and
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his control and sovereignty.
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And so he's taking these men off the chessboard.
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He wasn't surprised by their deaths.
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And so what does that mean?
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What does that mean for all of us?
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And so we'll explore that a little bit.
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But today's episode is really unlike anything that we've done on the podcast before.
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I'm going to do my best to encapsulate why Vodie meant so much to me personally as I
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draw you to his work and to his words.
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So first of all, he's a guy as many of you that have followed me for a long period of
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time.
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You knew that I was trying to get him on the show or maybe you didn't know because I didn't
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tell anybody, but I tried to get him on this show for about four years.
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Like I actually went and did the math the first time I reached out to somebody that I
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thought can introduce me to somebody to like get me to Vodie or something like that.
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And really it's been very, it was very, very difficult for a very long period of time
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again, four years, right?
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I feel like I was in college longer than it took me to get Vodie Bacham on the show or
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I was it took me longer to get Vodie on the show than I went through college rather.
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But I got him on the show on episode 505 of this podcast and it was like the funniest
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thing because it was like the least, you know, conniving way that I tried to like sneak in
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and kind of like put all this stuff together.
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They kind of reached out to me and so that worked out in 2023 and then he actually came
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back and made his return appearance about 100 episodes later on episode 604 in 2024.
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And so I put those, both of those in the show notes go back to episodes 505 and 604.
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You should definitely pay attention to those episodes and listen to those episodes.
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They're very evergreen.
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We talked about discovering the ever loving truth, right, or the ever loving truth, which
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was his book that released in 2023 and we talked a little bit about fault lines on that
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podcast as well.
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And then we talked about his tremendous book.
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It's not like being black on episode 604 from last year.
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And I'm not actually sure I tried to think about it and figured out, but I'm not exactly
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sure when or where I was introduced to the work of Vodie Bacham.
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But as I have had the last couple of weeks to really consider his legacy, I can safely
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say that he is one of the very few men that has molded and shaped my Christian mind and
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thinking in a profound way.
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And one of the ways he did that is through his writing.
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And so I have a book list on my website.
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It's the 100 books every modern Christian man should read list.
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So undaunted dot life backslash or slash book list.
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And so C.S. Lewis is the only author with his own section.
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So I think there's five or six C.S. Lewis books in that list.
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But then the only other author on my list that has more than two books on the list is
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Vodie Bacham who has three books on the list.
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And so those are family shepherds calling and equipping men to lead their homes from 2011
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fault lines, the social justice movement and evangelicalism's looming catastrophe from 2022.
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And it's not like being black, how sexual activists hijacked the civil rights movement
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from 2024.
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So family shepherds is a book that I was actually introduced to by Ryan Horn, the horn from
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the forging table.
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And it's the most important Christian book that I know of in terms of explaining how
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to be the head of your household, because a lot of us have heard that we should be the
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heads of our household.
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But this book gets really, really practical.
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And it's one of his books that's kind of gone under the radar.
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That's why I wasn't really even familiar with it until Ryan introduced it to me.
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And then fault lines is the most important Christian book that I know of that tackles
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the nefarious nature of the social justice movement specifically as it pertains to race.
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And so as Vodie pointed out many times, it shouldn't matter that he's black talking on
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this particular subject, but the fact that he was a black man kind of lent more weight
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to the things that he was saying, especially because it went against cultural orthodoxy,
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I guess you could say.
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And then his book, it's not like being black.
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That's the most important Christian book that I know of that tackles the nefarious nature
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of the LGBTQ plus movement, right?
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Because you might not get it from the title, but you certainly get it from the subtitle.
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This isn't about race.
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It's about how the LGBTQ plus sexual revolution, like those folks, how they hijacked things
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from the civil rights movement to kind of push their agenda.
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And I'm pretty sure I made that my book of the year for 2024.
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And so guys, if you have not read those three books and some of you are readers, physical
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readers, some of you are e-readers, some of you are people that want to listen to books
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or something like that, all that's great.
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I highly suggest that you order them, download them on your phone, put them on your nightstand
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and do it pronto.
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Those three books are three books that you need to read and read quickly.
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And now onto the sermons of Vodie Bockum.
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And so there's a lot of video out there of Vodie Bockum.
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There's a lot of YouTube and TikTok and Instagram videos of him that have kind of gone around.
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And so I collected a lot of those that are some of kind of the highlights of his career.
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At least as it pertains to particular subjects, because you know, in our culture, we don't
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just sit down and listen to 60 minute, you know, sermons anymore, right?
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We'll listen to a 30 second or like a two minute little snippet of something like that.
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But in these clips and from the sermons, most of which I have seen all the way through,
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they deeply impacted how I think about very particular subjects.
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So the first clip I want to look at is how Vodie influenced how I think about female
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pastors.
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So let's actually go to the clip here.
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My wife is not going to let me like go home if I don't ask this question because she can't
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ask it.
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You can answer it after this.
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She just wanted to know why women are not allowed to preach in the church.
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And if a woman feels that she has the gift of preaching, why isn't she allowed to preach
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counsel?
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All right.
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First Timothy chapter two, verse 12, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority
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over a man.
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Rather, she is to remain quiet.
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So because the Bible said so.
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And also Vodie Bockham has deeply impacted how I think about homosexuality because I think
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we're all pretty well aware at this point that homosexuality is discussed in the Bible
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and it is something that is against God and against nature.
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But then a lot of people say, well, homosexuality isn't in the Bible.
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It's not even talked about.
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Jesus never talked about it.
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And so I love this clip here that explains more on that subject.
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We don't have the panic when someone says, well, well, Jesus never addressed the issue
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of homosexuality.
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First of all, you're wrong because he did address it in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19.
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Second of all, Jesus is a member of the Godhead.
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You can't separate the Father from the Son of the Spirit.
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You cannot separate Jesus from the Father and the Spirit on the issue of homosexuality.
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Jesus was there, Sodom and Noah.
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He was raining down fire in brimstone.
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Jesus is the author of Leviticus.
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Thirdly, the Bible is one story, not many.
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You can't separate the teaching of Jesus from the teaching of his apostles.
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And finally, if you take that line of argumentation, you would have to eventually be okay with
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pedophilia because Jesus never said anything about that.
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So can we dispense with that one?
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And Vody talks a lot about cultural topics, but then obviously as things are moving and
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shaking and changing in culture, there were new things that came up.
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And so there was this kind of like exposure to something called Christian nationalism,
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even though people couldn't really define Christian and they couldn't really define
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nationalism.
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And so they certainly couldn't define what it looked like when it was combined.
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So here's a clip about him, about that, that Vody talked about on a previous interview.
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I wouldn't hear about Christian nationalism till all of a sudden when the whole woke social
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justice, racial justice, when people began to stand up against that and they began to
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demand receipts and began to push back.
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And the people who were holding on to that ideology didn't have an argument anymore.
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All of a sudden, there was just this shift and it was as though it happened overnight.
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Kind of like, you know, when all of the woke stuff was going on and, you know, before fault
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lines came out, I was speaking on a lot of that stuff.
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And you know, it was everybody's talking about we need to elevate black voices and people
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will go, well, what about Vody, well, not his, that's too black, not his, not, yeah,
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no, no, not, not, not, not, not, not, not his.
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And obviously I talked about this with fault lines, but Vody did speak a lot about the
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subject of race.
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He talked about ethnic narcissism and some different things.
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But I really like this clip here where he talked about the concept of race.
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Race is actually a social construct.
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The concept of race is not a biblical concept.
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It's not a biblical idea.
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It is a constructed idea.
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You won't find the idea of races in the Bible unless you find it in the proper historical
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context where we see, number one, that we are all the race of Adam, amen?
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But one race, one blood, we are all the race of Adam.
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There is less than a 0.2% genetic difference between any of us in this regard.
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In fact, we're not even different colors.
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Now, amen, technically from a genetic perspective, from a biochemistry perspective, we're all
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actually the same color, our color comes from our melanin.
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We've all gotten melanin just to differing degrees.
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So it's not that some of us are, you know, this color, some of us are that color, no,
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we're just different shades of the same color.
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Some of us just have more melanin than others.
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And I want you to listen to me on this, listen to me.
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Just because you don't have as much melanin as I do, don't you dare think God doesn't
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love you as much as He loves me because He gave me more.
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You learn to be satisfied with the little you have.
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And obviously, if you've listened to my show for any length of time, you know, I'm very,
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very passionate about the abortion topic and not just trying to eradicate abortion, but
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also to just argue against it.
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And so I really like what He had to say about the subject matter here.
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I want to talk to you about abortion and specifically about abortion as spiritual warfare, because
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that's what abortion is.
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Abortion is, among other things, spiritual warfare.
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Absolutely, it's the taking of human life, but in order to get there, there are a lot
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of steps that we have to take in order to get to the place where you will kill a human
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being.
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Before we kill, we dehumanize, even in war, warriors tend to have nicknames for their
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enemies.
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One of the reasons that you don't call that person a person, one of the reasons that you
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don't call them, you know, a Frenchman or an American or a German, you have to call them
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something else.
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One of the reasons you do that is because before you kill, you dehumanize because there
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is something in us that sees one another as image bearers, and there has to be something
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really wrong with you in order to take the life of an image bearer, because in the life
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of another human being is reflected not only the image of God but the image of yourself.
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And then also you guys have heard us on the forging table and different things like ask
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a pastor where we talk about really reformed, sociology and just what is man's role versus
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God's sovereignty and repentance and faith and all the different things that is required
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therein.
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So here's an interesting clip that he's where he's discussing this and I think it's worth
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our time here.
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So let's go to the clip.
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Now, all the gospel requires is repentance and faith.
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That's it.
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That knows, I pause there intentionally because some of you are really uncomfortable right
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now because you're going, well, what about obedience?
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That's not what the gospel requires, it's what the gospel produces.
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If the gospel were to require obedience from us, then that would mean that we could be
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obedient apart from the person and work of Christ and Jesus died for nothing.
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The gospel produces obedience in us, joyful obedience in us.
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And again, if we get these things mixed up, that that's where we end up in legalism and
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moralism and works righteousness.
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And that's when the good news is really not good news at all.
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It becomes burdensome.
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All right, so this next clip is actually kind of a hard one to watch just because this is
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a clip from his final known recorded sermon ever.
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And so he's giving his thoughts on how people talk about the bride of Christ.
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So let's go to the clip here.
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Be careful how you talk about Christ's bride because he is her head.
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He loves her.
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He's perfecting her and he is one with her.
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We talk about his bride in ways that we would never speak about a man's bride and we do
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it flippantly and we do it constantly because we think wrongly about the church.
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We do not hold the church in the kind of esteem that we ought to if we truly love the Lord
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Jesus Christ.
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And in there are those who say, no, no, I love Jesus just not the church.
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It's like coming up to me and saying, oh, yeah, man, I love you.
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I just, I believe we just should be friends, but I just need you to keep your wife away
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from me because I don't like her.
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I love you and I want to have a close intimate relationship with you, but I hate the one
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that you have united yourself to in a one flesh covenant that we call marriage.
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And that'd be okay and the answer is absolutely not yet.
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That's exactly what we do with Christ and his bride, the church.
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We bash her constantly.
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We badmout her constantly all the while claiming that we love Jesus.
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For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching
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ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.
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I've been asked, I don't know how many times.
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Why is it that these false teachers and these charlatans have churches with thousands of
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people in them?
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Why is it?
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Why is it?
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My answer is because the Bible is true.
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Not because there's something wrong with the church.
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The church is everything Christ says she is, but those are not churches.
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They're goat farms filled with people with itching ears and at times if we're not careful,
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we're influenced by them and we want to shave off the edges of the gospel so that we can
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be more appealing and we, we, we must not, instead we must continue to just be the bride
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of Christ, just be the church.
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It's enough.
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It's enough.
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And also this clip, super duper made the rounds after he passed away, but it was actually
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a warning from Vodie himself that this day would come, but that we should think about
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it a little bit differently than we might just default to.
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Let's go to the clip here.
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You are going to hear a rumor one day that Vodie Walker is no more.
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Don't you believe it?
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Don't you believe it?
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Don't you believe it?
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Because though I die, I will rise with Christ.
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It will not be the end of me because Christ is raised and I too will be raised with Christ.
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That is why he is called the firstborn from the dead.
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Folks, you don't talk about a firstborn unless there's others who are born after him.
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Don't you pity me.
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You pity the one who wants to hold on to Jesus without holding on to the resurrection.
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You pity the one who has absolutely no hope because they have no resurrected Christ.
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And now we've come to my favorite clip of all time from Vodie Bockam from perhaps my
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favorite sermon of all time.
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This was a sermon that he delivered from John MacArthur's pulpit and it is the most blistering
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presentation of the gospel that I have ever seen or heard.
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So here we go.
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What we do in the midst of this since its age that has rejected the gospel and perverted
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the gospel and replaced the gospel with that which is not the gospel is that we call out
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that wickedness.
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We call it my name and we remind people of the good news of the gospel again and again
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and again until it tastes sweet to them.
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When people say no, our problem is this, our problem is that we say no, no, no, no.
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Our problem is that God created the world and God created man and he put man in the garden
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to keep the garden and he gave the man a command and he held that man to perfect perpetual obedience
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to that command and he promised him life if he kept it and death if he didn't and he didn't
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keep it.
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He ate and because he ate because of that one man sin entered the world and death through
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sin and everyone born from that man through ordinary generation inherited that man's sin
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nature and because of that sin nature sins proceed from it and our world is broken because
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of that sin and we stand guilty before our holy and righteous God and we know that he's
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holy and we know that he's righteous and we crave justice.
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But the problem is that if God gives us justice, we all die and so that God in his goodness
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and in his mercy sent forth his son who was not born of ordinary generation but was born
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of a virgin.
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Yes, the virgin birth matters.
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Why?
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Because if he's born of ordinary generation, he's born in sin but because he's not born
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of ordinary generation, he's not born in sin, he's clean of sin.
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His record is clean and he keeps his record clean and he obeys God's law and because
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he's fully God and fully man, he obeys the law of God on our behalf and his active obedience
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and then in his passive obedience, God made him who knew no sin to be sinned for us, all
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we lack sheep but God is straight, each of us it turned to his own way but God laid upon
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him the iniquity of us all and Christ died for sin once for all the just for the unjust
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and God imputes our sinfulness to him and he nails our sinfulness to the trees and Christ
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dies and raises again on the third day for our justification.
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And there's another imputation, the righteousness of Christ is actually imputed to us so that
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God can be both just and the justifier of the one who places faith in Jesus Christ so
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that all those who come to Christ may enter in, so that all those who place faith in Christ
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might be saved but not only saved but sanctified because he's the first born of many brethren
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were justified and were adopted into the family of God and was sanctified and as his children
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we began to bear the family resemblance and were further sanctified throughout this life
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by the very same gospel that saves us until one day when it's all said and done, we're
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not just saved from the penalty of sin, we're not just saved from the power of sin but one
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day we're glorified and saved from the very presence of sin, that's the gospel that we
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preach, that's the gospel that we need and that's the gospel that's more than enough.
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Man, I mean the level of emotion, it's substantial, it's just absolutely amazing and may that
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message be on our lips for the rest of our days because as I kind of alluded from the
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beginning, you know, we've lost these giants of the faith, we've lost Vodie, Charlie Kurt,
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James Dobson, John MacArthur, Phil Robertson and everyone seems to be looking around to
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see who will replace him, right? Who's the next Phil Robertson going to be? Who's going
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to replace Charlie Kirk, who's going to fill Vodie Bockham's shoes and the like, right?
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But that's not how this works because we only get one Phil, we only get one J-Mac, we only
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get one Dr. Dobson, we only get one Charlie Kirk, we only get one Vodie Bockham. You see,
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the reality is, is it's not who is going to fill in for those men, who's going to replace
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them. It's how many of us are going to start taking our roles seriously as it pertains
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to ministry. And that starts with us individually. And for us with spouses, then it goes to our
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marriage. And for us with children, then it goes to the children that we're supposed
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to raise up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And then it goes to everyone
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else, it goes to our family and extended family, it goes to our coworkers, it goes to our
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business partners, it goes to the people that we share a church with, it goes to the people
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on our kids baseball teams, it goes to the people we train jujitsu with, it goes to those
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people, those strangers that we run into at the airport or somewhere at the grocery store,
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something like that, our ministry is with us at all times. And we have a calling to make
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heaven crowded, right? We are to take the message and the good news of the gospel to
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the ends of the earth. So we don't just wait for one of these giants, these Christian giants
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to do some a sermon or some speaking engagement in our city and then just invite people, right?
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Or just send people clips around of their favorite pastor or podcaster or professional
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speaker or author or something like that. No, it's on us to be serious about the gospel
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and to share it around. So from me, thank you, Vodie, you ran your race. The rest of us
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are still running ours? Let's make heaven crowded.