The Speck and the Beam

Pastor Livingston has been at Central Church in Charlotte for nearly forty-nine years. That is no small thing. A man who has weathered every charismatic tremor since the Latter Rain, who refuses to stock Bethel or Hillsong in his worship rotation, and who still preaches the sovereignty of God over nations and kings — that man has earned a hearing. What follows is not a dismissal of his ministry. It is an honest reckoning with a sermon that, for all its fire against the New Apostolic Reformation, reveals blind spots large enough to sail the very errors he condemns clean through.

What He Got Right

Credit where it is due. Livingston's catalog of charismatic excess is accurate and his courage in naming it publicly is rare. The Toronto Blessing, the Brownsville "revival," the Word of Faith prosperity racket, the Shepherding Movement, Rick Joyner's pay-to-prophesy conferences — he has personally watched each of these movements chew up congregants and spit out the scarred remains. When he tells the story of the woman who paid a thousand dollars to learn to be a "prophetess" down the road at MorningStar, the anguish in his voice is real. He is a pastor who loves his sheep, and he is watching wolves circle.

His instinct to reject Dominionism — the NAR teaching that the church must conquer culture, business, media, and government in order to hand the earth to Christ before He can return — is biblically sound. Jesus said plainly, "My kingdom is not of this world." The church is not tasked with building a theocratic infrastructure. That impulse has always led to tyranny, whether in fourth-century Rome or twenty-first-century megachurch boardrooms.

So far, so good. But the sermon does not stay on solid ground.

The Beam in the Eye

The trouble begins the moment Livingston pivots from exposing Bethel to articulating what the church is supposed to do. His prescription is a familiar evangelical formula: preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize in the triune name, and wait for the Rapture. Simple enough. But embedded in that formula are theological assumptions just as unexamined — and just as dangerous — as anything rolling out of Redding, California.

1. Replacement Theology by Another Name

Livingston correctly identifies that the NAR has "done away with Israel" and reassigned her covenant promises to the church. He calls this out as error. But in the very same sermon, he presides over a baby dedication in which he prays Lamentations 3:25 over Gentile infants — a verse from Jeremiah's anguished lament over the destruction of Jerusalem and the shattering of Israel's covenant. "The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him." That is not a nursery blessing. It is a prophet weeping in the rubble of a covenant his nation broke, clinging to the faithfulness of God in the aftermath of judgment. He invokes "the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit" in a quasi-sacramental formula, never pausing to ask whether this ritual has any basis in the apostolic writings at all. (It does not. Infant dedication ceremonies are a Baptist invention designed to approximate infant baptism without getting wet.)

This is not a minor inconsistency. It is the very same hermeneutical error he accuses the NAR of committing: taking promises made to Israel under the covenant and applying them wholesale to the Gentile church without covenantal warrant. If Bethel is wrong to claim "Ask of me and I will give you the nations" for the church, then Central Church is equally wrong to lift Jeremiah's covenant lament out of its devastated context and repurpose it as a baby dedication prayer. The text belongs to Israel's story of judgment and restoration. If you want to use it, you had better have a covenantal framework that explains how and why it transfers — and Livingston does not offer one.

2. The Dispensational Escape Hatch

At the climax of his sermon, Livingston turns to the Rapture as the Christian's great hope. The church is "not here to take over the world" but "to be taken out of the world." This is classic pre-tribulational dispensationalism, and it carries its own set of problems that Livingston never acknowledges.

The pre-tribulational Rapture doctrine was unknown in the church before John Nelson Darby systematized it in the 1830s. It depends on a rigid separation of Israel and the church into two parallel programs of God — a separation that, ironically, makes the NAR's "the church replaces Israel" error look almost inevitable. Dispensationalism created the theological vacuum that Dominionism rushed to fill. If Israel's promises don't belong to the church, and the church is just a parenthetical footnote waiting to be airlifted out, then what is the church's relationship to the kingdom? The NAR answered that question badly. Dispensationalism refuses to answer it at all.

Livingston's sermon exposes what he calls the NAR's over-realized eschatology — the belief that the kingdom is fully here and we just need to seize it. But is that actually wrong? Yeshua Himself declared, "The kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:15). Not far off. Not waiting for a rapture bus. At hand. He told the Pharisees, "The kingdom of God is in your midst" (Luke 17:21). He told His disciples to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10) — not "in heaven after the earth is destroyed," but on earth. The kingdom is here. It is near. It is to be seized — not by cultural conquest and not by political domination, but by every soul that repents, believes, and walks in the commandments of the King. "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12). The NAR misidentifies the method of seizure. Dispensationalism denies there is anything to seize at all. Both errors stem from the same root: a failure to understand the covenant structure of Scripture.

3. The Trinitarian Formula Without the Covenant

Livingston emphasizes baptism "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, because there's a Trinity." He is correct that baptism matters. But he presents the Trinity as a bare doctrinal fact — a theological checkbox — rather than as the living covenantal reality that gives baptism its meaning. Baptism is not a "testimony" or a "sermon illustration" about burial and resurrection. It is a covenant sign. It marks entry into the New Covenant — the covenant Jeremiah prophesied in chapter 31, the covenant Yeshua sealed with His own blood at the Last Supper when He said, "This cup is the New Covenant in my blood" (Luke 22:20). Not a renewed version of something old. A new covenant, with the Royal Covenant — the eternal vows of the Bridegroom, the Ten Words lifted from stone — inscribed upon the heart by the Ruach HaKodesh (Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10). Torah was the temporary tutor imposed after the golden calf (Galatians 3:19). The Royal Covenant is eternal. If you strip that distinction out, you are left with what most Baptist churches have: a public relations exercise in a heated swimming pool.

This matters because Livingston's entire critique of the NAR rests on the claim that they misunderstand the church's mission. But if your own theology cannot articulate what the church is covenantally — if the best you can offer is "we preach, we baptize, we wait for the bus" — then you have not actually answered the NAR. You have simply offered a quieter version of the same confusion.

4. The Canon Within the Canon

Livingston declares that the church must preach "the whole Bible, rightly divided and properly defined." This is a noble aspiration. But the sermon itself demonstrates how selectively he applies it. He quotes Paul extensively. He references Genesis and Daniel. He invokes the Psalms over babies. But the Torah — the actual covenant document, the Ten Words that are the foundation of everything else — is conspicuously absent. There is no mention of the Book of the Covenant. There is no engagement with the actual commandments of God as a living standard for the church. "Righteousness" is treated as a purely imputed legal fiction rather than a covenantal walk of obedience empowered by the Spirit.

This is the great evangelical blind spot. The same churches that rightly reject the NAR's dominionist overreach have collapsed all of God's instruction into a single monolithic "law" — and then thrown the whole thing out as "bondage." Livingston even says it from the pulpit: "We're not under law. We're not under the bondage of the law." And in one sense he is right — we are not under Torah, the Book of the Law, the temporary tutor imposed after the golden calf breach and added until the Seed came (Galatians 3:19). But Paul was carefully distinguishing that tutor from the eternal covenant that preceded it. The Book of the Covenant — the Ten Words spoken at Sinai, the Royal Covenant of the Bridegroom — was never abolished. It is the very thing the New Covenant writes on the heart (Jeremiah 31:33). When you collapse that distinction, when you treat "law" as one undifferentiated mass and discard it all, you lose the plumb line. And when you lose the plumb line, every wind of doctrine — NAR, prosperity gospel, or otherwise — can blow you off course, because you have no fixed standard to measure against.

5. The Arrogance of the Gatekeepers

There is a moment in this sermon that should stop every honest listener cold. Livingston announces — proudly, to applause — that Central Church will not sing music written by Bethel, Hillsong, or Elevation. He frames this as doctrinal faithfulness. His congregation claps. And nobody in that room seems to notice what just happened: a pastor declared that a song written to glorify the risen Christ is unfit for worship because he disapproves of the theology of the people who wrote it.

Think about that. A believer, somewhere, sat down under the weight of the Holy Spirit and wrote a song of praise. The words glorify Jesus. The melody lifts the heart toward God. The Spirit moved in its composition, as the Spirit moves where He wills — and He has never once asked a denominational credentialing board for permission. But because that believer attends the wrong church, holds the wrong eschatology, or sits under the wrong pastor, the song is banned. The praise of God Almighty is filtered through a doctrinal litmus test, and the congregation applauds as though this were an act of righteousness rather than an act of breathtaking arrogance.

I know this spirit. I grew up Baptist. I watched deacons refuse the Lord's Table to visitors — not because those visitors were unbelievers, not because they were living in open sin, but because they were not members of that particular local church. The body and blood of Christ, offered freely by the Son of God to every soul that trusts in Him, reduced to a members-only benefit. A velvet rope around Calvary. That is the same gatekeeping impulse at work when a pastor bans a hymn because he doesn't like the worship leader's theology. It is the ancient sin of the Pharisees dressed in Sunday clothes: straining out the gnat of someone else's doctrinal error while swallowing the camel of your own pious arrogance.

Livingston says, with evident satisfaction, "We'll write our own music, won't we?" And the crowd loves it. But the God who inhabits the praises of His people did not say, "I inhabit the praises of people with correct ecclesiology." He said He inhabits the praises of Israel — and by extension, every grafted-in branch that calls upon the name of the Lord. A song of praise belongs to God the moment it leaves the lips of a sincere worshiper. It does not belong to Bethel's royalty structure, and it does not belong to Central Church's doctrinal review board. It belongs to the King. And the arrogance of deciding which of the King's songs are fit for His own throne room is a presumption that ought to terrify any pastor who claims to fear the Lord.

The Deeper Problem

Livingston's sermon is the sound of a faithful man fighting the right enemy with the wrong weapons. He sees the disease — a church drunk on self-appointed apostles, counterfeit prophets, and cultural imperialism — but his diagnosis stops at the symptoms. The NAR did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from the same dispensational, covenant-illiterate evangelicalism that Livingston represents. It is his tradition's orphaned child, and it learned its bad hermeneutics at home.

When you teach people that the Old Testament promises belong to Israel alone, that the church is a "mystery" parenthesis in God's plan, that every commandment God ever gave is abolished bondage, and that the best we can hope for is to be raptured before things get really bad — you create a theological hunger that the NAR is only too happy to feed. People want to matter. They want their faith to engage the world. They want a kingdom that is more than a waiting room — and they are right to want it, because Yeshua said the kingdom is at hand, not that it would be someday. The NAR offers engagement with that kingdom — falsely, manipulatively, and at great spiritual cost — but it offers it. And it will keep finding takers as long as the alternative is Livingston's well-meaning but ultimately hollow "preach and wait for the bus."

What Would Serve Better

The corrective is not less engagement with the world but a covenantally grounded engagement. The Ten Words — the eternal vows spoken by God Himself at Sinai, written by His own finger on stone (Exodus 31:18) — are the incorruptible plumb line. They are not a cultural mandate to seize Hollywood, and they are not a dispensational permission slip to ignore the present age. They are the standard Yeshua said He came not to abolish but to fulfill (Matthew 5:17–19). They are the Royal Covenant — the eternal vows of the Bridegroom — that the New Covenant inscribes on the heart by the Spirit (Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10). They are the commandments John says we keep if we love Him (1 John 5:3). The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17) — and that kingdom is not a future waiting room. It is here. It is at hand. It advances every time a believer walks in obedience to the King.

A church that knows its covenant — that can distinguish the Book of the Covenant from the Book of the Law, that understands baptism as entry into the New Covenant sealed by Christ's blood, that reads the Psalms as the hymnbook of a covenant people to which Gentile believers have been grafted (Romans 11:17) — that church can answer the NAR without falling into dispensational escapism. It can reject Dominionism without retreating into irrelevance. It can honor Israel's calling without erasing the church's identity. And it can proclaim what Yeshua proclaimed: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17).

Pastor Livingston has spent forty-nine years fighting for his flock. That deserves respect. But the speck he sees in Bethel's eye is dwarfed by the beam in his own tradition's theological framework — a framework that cannot distinguish the Book of the Covenant from the Book of the Law, cannot locate the Royal Covenant at the center of the Bride's life, and cannot offer the church anything more than a holding pattern until the trumpet sounds.

The trumpet will sound. But in the meantime, the Ten Words still stand. And any church that claims to preach "the whole Bible, rightly divided" ought to start there.

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Soli Deo Gloria