- 8 months ago
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2210487/episodes/17994756-ctp-s3eoctspecial7-rage-language-and-responsibility
CTP (S3EOctSpecial7) Rage, Language, and Responsibility
[BOOKS / AUTHORS Weeks - Week 1 sub-episode 5 (Fri. 20251017)]
We challenge lazy narratives and boil big fights down to clear choices: precise language over slogans, real action over outrage, and local responsibility over scapegoats. From Gaza proposals to ICE law, from faith and metaphor to primaries and election rules, we push for less talk and more doing.
• conditional peace frameworks and credible deterrence
• expedited removal explained and media myths
• lowercase faith versus uppercase Faith in culture
• plant seeds, show don’t tell persuasion
• victimhood traps and mirror-first responsibility
• election deadlines, audits, and transparent counts
• tough love: share, organize, act between cycles
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2210487/episodes/17994756-ctp-s3eoctspecial7-rage-language-and-responsibility
CTP (S3EOctSpecial7) Rage, Language, and Responsibility
[BOOKS / AUTHORS Weeks - Week 1 sub-episode 5 (Fri. 20251017)]
We challenge lazy narratives and boil big fights down to clear choices: precise language over slogans, real action over outrage, and local responsibility over scapegoats. From Gaza proposals to ICE law, from faith and metaphor to primaries and election rules, we push for less talk and more doing.
• conditional peace frameworks and credible deterrence
• expedited removal explained and media myths
• lowercase faith versus uppercase Faith in culture
• plant seeds, show don’t tell persuasion
• victimhood traps and mirror-first responsibility
• election deadlines, audits, and transparent counts
• tough love: share, organize, act between cycles
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2210487/episodes/17994756-ctp-s3eoctspecial7-rage-language-and-responsibility
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Welcome to the Constitutionalist Politics Podcast, a.k.a. CTP.
00:07I am your host, Joseph M. Leonard, and that's L-E-N-A-R-D.
00:12CTP is your no-must, no-fuss, just-me-you-and-occasional-guest-type podcast.
00:19I really appreciate you tuning in.
00:22As Graham Norton will say, let's get on with the show!
00:25Hello, everyone. Welcome to Books, Authors, Weeks, October of 2025.
00:37I had Health Weeks in February of 2025.
00:43I had a Music Weeks, three of those, in the month of March 2025.
00:49So, here we are October. I have a lot of fellow authors I have the chance to have discussions with.
00:58So, Books, Authors, Weeks, October 25.
01:04Without further ado, let's head into a discussion with a fellow author.
01:10Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Constitutionalist Podcast.
01:22Kind of experimenting with dropping the politics part, because it's still implied in Constitutionalist there being on the end.
01:33At any rate, and for the behind-the-scenes video, yes, I am wearing my The Book of Kennedy, 6th International Fair Release promo shirt.
01:49And no, that is not Sydney Sweeney.
01:54I'm enjoying, though, getting a bazillion questions.
02:00Did you get Sydney Sweeney to pose for your book?
02:06That looks like Sydney Sweeney.
02:08No, it's not her.
02:16At any rate, enough of that.
02:20Welcome back to the show, J.R., how are you?
02:25Joseph, thank you.
02:26I appreciate you having me.
02:27I'm looking forward to our discussion.
02:29It's always entertaining being on with you.
02:34Yeah.
02:36Before, you're here because you got a book.
02:40I do.
02:40Hey, what a shock.
02:43What a surprise, right?
02:45I have a whole lot of authors on.
02:49I have quite a few singer-songwriters on, too.
02:52But at any rate, this is a return appearance for you.
02:59So before we get to the book, because I want people to go back in the catalog and find when you were on the fore to get into all that great stuff we talked about then.
03:14We're not going to talk about now, but give us, for this episode, the quick cliff note, who are you, where were you born, raised, that kind of stuff.
03:27My name is John J.R. Rennie.
03:30I'm born again son of the Most High God.
03:34Married to my wife, Buffy.
03:36We have three kids, five grandkids.
03:37Buffy, the vampire slayer, you're the one.
03:40Yes, that's the one, yes.
03:42It was either her or me, and we were able to make that work out.
03:47Yeah, it'll be 46 years of marriage, actually, next month.
03:53And in 2016, God redirected me from being a CEO at a software company that I founded to establishing the Brushfires ministry.
04:04And I have been full-time doing that, trying to help the Christian church get back to discipleship and to become what God created it to be.
04:13Amen.
04:14The very reason this show was created, constitutionalist, biblical community, free will, choice, charity, not worldly communism, theft, force, no choices involved.
04:34Right?
04:35God gave us free will.
04:36We are to want to be our brother's keeper and to take care of widows and orphans.
04:42But the Bible also makes the distinction that people want to leave out the tough love parts of the Bible and just focus on the, oh, kumbaya, singing around the campfire version of Jesus.
04:57The tough love parts where we have no obligation to the unwilling, only the unable.
05:05Well, but at any rate, indeed.
05:07So, we can keep this a shorter episode since it's a return appearance.
05:14Let's dive right in.
05:16What is the name of the book?
05:19This recent book is called Sparks Turn Into Brushfires.
05:23And it is a faith-guided autobiography of my life of how God has directed me, saved me, plucked me out of obscurity, if you will, provided for us, and redirected me on multiple occasions through either dreams or my writings or words of knowledge and so forth.
05:50Oh, I'm glad you said dreams, because that's how my books come to me.
05:57I like to say I may be the one typing it out, but they aren't really from me.
06:04They are through me.
06:06Exactly.
06:07And that's how the Bible was written, that God used the minds of men, that they had a free will choice to be able to write what they wrote.
06:17And they did, but they did it with the guidance of the Holy Spirit to be able to make sure that it was written exactly as God would want it to be written.
06:29But the reality is that if you look at a writing of, say, Solomon or a writing of his father David or Paul, there are different personalities in every one of those.
06:41I mean, I would think that the song of Solomon would make the apostle Paul blush.
06:48So there are some real differences.
06:52Oh, and we are all unique and different humans, right?
06:57And hence that free will thing, right?
07:00We choose to do good or we're allowed to choose to do evil.
07:06And there's sadly a whole lot of people on this planet who prefer to choose to do evil stuff instead.
07:14But, yeah, we are all unique, even though DNA strands have a lot of similar data in it, right?
07:24We are our own unique personalities, as you stated.
07:29And even within ourselves, there's not talking schizophrenia here, right?
07:36Mental illness.
07:37We are all sub-personalities, right?
07:41We have good days.
07:43We have bad days where our more negative side might come out.
07:49And what, right?
07:50Where there is our serious side, our humorous side.
07:54Yeah, so we would distinguish between your personality given to you by God, the attributes that he has given to your soul.
08:03We would differentiate that between behavior because behavior is an outpouring of all kinds of things, some things which are good, like your design and your gender and things of that nature that God's given you.
08:19Some things are bad because of your past experiences, good and bad, your family, where you've grown up and so forth.
08:26Nature versus nurture.
08:28And then there's also this aspect of true and false beliefs that we all have in us that we believe they're all true, but some of them are lies.
08:39That you'll never amount to anything.
08:41That you are no good.
08:42That God doesn't love you.
08:44That God's got it out for you.
08:45You're talking the whole book of Kennedy there.
08:47Yes.
08:48Life and living and indeed people who want to drag you, the devil who wants to drag you down and others who want the best for you and to lift you up and try to find positivity in things.
09:02Right, and so those things all impact our behavior.
09:06You know, the good behavior is those things that are based upon truth and God's purposes for your life.
09:13Bad behavior are going to be based upon false beliefs, things that we've been deceived by the enemy to actually believe to be true.
09:21So, and in fact, the book takes you through a series of different things like that in our lives that I've experienced that God used, intervened, prevented the most worst of consequences from happening.
09:41I'll give you an example.
09:43So, my wife was 16 and I was 21 when we got married.
09:47But, the statistics for us to last more than a year are really, really low.
09:54There's just, there aren't that many people that were, in fact, at our own wedding.
09:58You were a Romeo and Juliet couple.
10:01Yeah, very much so.
10:03And the groomsmen of my wedding party were actually taking side bets that had long the marriage was going to last.
10:12And they didn't hear me, they didn't know that I could hear them.
10:15But what they, the highest we got was less than a year.
10:22And next month, we will celebrate 46 years of being married.
10:26So, these are things that defy what the world believes to be true.
10:31The software company that was established by myself and my business partner back in 1987.
10:39Still going now, 40 years later, even though I've been trying to close it down since 2016.
10:47It is still going, still servicing clients throughout North America.
10:52And so, there's a series of things that I look back on in my life and I point to where God has intervened.
11:01I'll give you another example.
11:03So, I was not a practicing Christian when I got married.
11:08I was saved at 12 at a vacation Bible school.
11:12I was baptized at a church we were attending for a short period of time at 16.
11:18But there was no real evidence other than I was a quote-unquote good person.
11:24And I went to bed one night and our oldest son was crying.
11:29And my wife was dealing with our youngest son, Patrick.
11:32And so, I went over into his room and I, you know, wanted to see if he was okay.
11:38And I wound up falling asleep in his bed.
11:41That night, God gave me a dream that he and I were floating in darkness.
11:47And a bright light came in between the two of us and we were being forced apart.
11:53And I knew instinctively that my son was going to be hurt irreputably.
11:59That I was not going to be able to help him.
12:02I woke up immediately after that dream and I had one message from God.
12:08Get your family to church or you're not going to be able to help your son.
12:13And a real church.
12:16A Christ-based church.
12:18Not these, as Dennis Quaid calls it, churchianity, humanist club churches.
12:25With, again, the kumbaya and leaving out all the tough love parts of the Bible.
12:31Right.
12:32No, it was a real church.
12:34And what happened was, it wasn't as if going to church all of a sudden
12:39magically fixed whatever was going on.
12:42See, simultaneously at that point, my wife was about to get diagnosed with
12:48a giant cell tumor in her ankle.
12:51Our youngest son, the baby then, was going to get diagnosed with epilepsy
12:54about six or eight months later.
12:56And I started a business.
12:59All three things happened at that exact moment in time.
13:03But I did what God told me to do and I got our family to church.
13:07As a byproduct, my wife was saved.
13:09Our three kids have made professions of faith.
13:14I'm not so sure about all three of them.
13:16I know our youngest son certainly is saved and I'm hoping that the other two have.
13:21I'm waiting for that demonstration of fruit to be able to prove that.
13:25Yeah, it must be their free will choice.
13:28Agreed.
13:29You trying to force your will upon them to be better, real Christians, isn't helpful.
13:39And in fact, human nature, right?
13:43Yeah.
13:44Pushing sometimes creates withdrawal.
13:48It just, it does the opposite of what you want.
13:52So, let's say the book title again.
13:57Sparks Turn Into Brush Fires.
13:59And the unique thing about it is that when I, when God asked me to write it, I told him no.
14:05Because there was a couple things in there that I needed to share that I didn't want to share.
14:11Because very few people knew about it.
14:13I've heard this theme before.
14:15Yeah, I spoke with, oh, Dan Parr, who wrote EUR, the easy to understand, EUR Bible.
14:28Easy to understand and read Bible.
14:30Like, do we really need another version of the Bible?
14:35Aren't there enough already?
14:36But God, he feels, put it upon him to do it.
14:41And he, kicking and screaming, said, no.
14:45But, oh, eventually, okay.
14:48Yes, like you.
14:49I mean, there's things in my terror strikes coming soon to a city near you book.
14:53I am not happy to talk about on other shows and share, but do, right?
15:00These are things that are uncomfortable, but important that we share as an overall thing.
15:08And I think I'm pretty clear what the answer to this is.
15:14Since we already were talking about dreams, the emphasis of the book indeed was being pushed by a dream.
15:21Well, the book itself is a faith-based autobiography.
15:30And so I used the story of my life, the various different things that probably should not have happened that were good,
15:36that I certainly didn't deserve, and God did it anyway.
15:40The turns and the directions that my life has gone in based upon God's active presence in my life.
15:53In 2001, another dream, God made it clear to me that I would be raptured in this lifetime,
16:04which means Christ is going to return in my lifetime.
16:10I was 42 at the time that I had that dream, and my dream was very clear that I was significantly older.
16:19My 42-year-old version wrote down in the journal that I wrote at the advice of my pastor,
16:28I'm old but not decrepit.
16:31And so I'm 66 this year, and I'm still not decrepit, but that's somewhere between the next 10 to 20 years.
16:39Right, but that's all on God's time, God's plan, God's term, not ours.
16:49It bothers me at times.
16:51I've talked about this before, so I'm not going to let it go past and just fluff it off.
16:57Some who talk about some who talk about the rapture, because then it all becomes about them and their hubris.
17:06Oh, I'm out of here, suckers.
17:09I don't got to worry about what's going on now, because I'm out of here soon.
17:14It's your problem.
17:16Actually, I've got a different spin on that, because in 2001 when I got this, I shared it with my pastor, my wife, and a handful of other people.
17:29But in the 25 years that have gone on since then, I only shared it with 30 people prior to writing this book.
17:38And I knew it was one of the big things that God wanted me to share within this book.
17:43It can be controversial, because, I mean, the whole notion of the rapture is a more modern evangelical Christian thing, even though the words existed then to speak about it now.
17:59But it never was really thought of.
18:02There were always those, of course.
18:04The end is nigh since the time of Christ.
18:08The end is nigh, and the world's coming to an end tomorrow, and doomsday.
18:14But again, that's all God's time.
18:17God's plan, not ours.
18:19That's what upsets me, and one of the reasons why I wrote Terror Strikes, coming soon to a city near you.
18:25Like the Om Shrinyoko Supreme Truth Christian cult in Tokyo, are like the modern Islamic radical Gijia, as I call them, 12ers of today, thinking, oh, well, I will be forgiven for doing evil if it helps hasten Armageddon.
18:48The Bible does not say that's okay.
18:51Yeah, that's really a twisted perspective.
18:56And let me just sort of complete the thought on the book.
18:59So when I had that dream, it was like, what am I supposed to do with this, God?
19:05It's 2001.
19:06It was April 2001 prior to 9-11, so that hadn't happened yet.
19:11And it's like, I don't have a platform.
19:13I'm a software president.
19:16I'm a programmer.
19:17What am I supposed to do with this?
19:19And I really spent about six years just trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with this information and, again, sharing it with very few people.
19:27In 2016 and 17, when he prompted me to start the ministry, it was about getting people to do what it is that God created them to do, what you created for.
19:38And at some point during this process, I was able to connect the two together.
19:44I was given that dream because the church needs to wake up and start getting back to discipleship because there is a reckoning.
19:55The end of the church age is coming.
19:57Now, when I say that, I don't say that in fear.
20:02I know I'm walking around doing things.
20:05I'm still being me in that midst of that dream.
20:09I know exactly what's going on.
20:11There is some form of persecution for the church, but I'm still able to be a presence and mobile within that time when this all happens.
20:23So what it's telling me is that the church, the American church, needs to start discipling again, creating strong believers.
20:34It is my personal belief, and I can't support this other than I know the heart of God, is that he is going to have a bit of a revival prior to the rapture.
20:45And it's going to come through persecution, not from some kind of, you know, political movement or any of that stuff.
20:53Well, in part, I think it is political because we're seeing this from the anti-Semitism, the anti-Christianity from the left.
21:02Indeed, but remember, too, to what you're saying, it will be used for good because think back to the 60s.
21:11And if it feels good, do it, crowd, and we're getting that, again, from the left.
21:18Consequences be damned.
21:20Me, me, me.
21:22What do I get?
21:23How do I get it now?
21:25It's all about me.
21:27Well, remember, those hippies eventually grew up, and most of them realized, wait a minute.
21:37There's more to all this than just me, and the Jesus Revolution, that great movie, came out of it.
21:47And that's why I've got an article on thelibertybeacon.com that says, let the left keep pushing their secularism and their immorality because there's a backlash.
22:01A new Jesus Revolution is underway.
22:05Agreed.
22:06Great, and so within that environment, there's a sense of fear that can be raised as your rights are being sampled on or as persecution is happening.
22:20I don't respond that way.
22:22I'm looking at that as that's the mission.
22:25There is a launching off point for the church coming at some point in the next 10 to 20 years or so.
22:33And that means that the church needs to get ready because as that persecution starts to rise, new people will be coming to the church, and they're going to be going, all right, church, what do you got?
22:45Because the world's gone crazy.
22:46We saw this in the Middle East when the persecution got really, really bad for people, and all of a sudden Muslim people are having dreams of Jesus, and they're going to their Christian neighbors to try to figure out because the rest of everything else in this world has gone completely mad.
23:06I am so glad you said that.
23:08I ducked out a screen and grabbed the book by Kamal Salim, The Blood of Lambs, literally a former terrorist memoir of death and redemption.
23:20And indeed, Jesus came to him, and he turned his life around.
23:26So again, the whole Jesus revolution is underway.
23:31It is.
23:32Well, and one of the things that is like such an outlier but is being reported across this country is that young men are going to church on their own.
23:42There's an influx of young men.
23:45Why?
23:45Because the core identity that God has given them has been rejected by society, that they're supposed to be effeminate.
23:52They're supposed to be this beta male thing, and they are revolting against that being placed on them.
24:02They want to be men as God created men to be, not bullies, not bigots, not abusive individuals, but they still want to be real men.
24:14And the church is a place where they can be real men.
24:18Actually, the true church.
24:19I would say.
24:20Yeah, thank you.
24:21I would say exactly.
24:23Some churches.
24:24Yeah.
24:26There's a whole lot of woke, fake Matthew 23 churches again.
24:32Let's talk about the peace and love part and leave out all that tough love part stuff.
24:37Yeah, we don't want to talk about sin and offend anybody that might actually be a donor or something like that.
24:42Now, I get that, and that's why – so when I connected that ministry, the Brushfire's ministry, to getting ready for the coming of Jesus, it wasn't a matter of like, okay, this is a doomsday cult or anything weird like that.
25:02It's like, no, the church, you and I, the people that are part of the church, God is going to be leading the last of those that are going to accept Christ before the rapture.
25:13He's going to be leading them to us.
25:15We need to be prepared.
25:17We need to know what Scripture is.
25:19We need to understand how to lead them through discipleship, to how to teach them how to pray, to teach them how to read their Bible, how to apply personal disciplines so they don't get ensnared in sin.
25:31And then we need to introduce them to the Father that wants to lead them individually just like he led Jesus when he was here the first time.
25:44One of the things that a lot of people don't understand is that when Jesus came, he left his divinity in heaven.
25:51He didn't do anything based upon his own power.
25:55He went every morning to Dad, the Father, and said, all right, what do you want me to do today?
26:01He could have healed everybody that he came across, but he didn't.
26:05He healed the ones that he was led to heal.
26:08He's in a crowd of people bustling around him.
26:13And one woman of faith with a bleeding issue touched the edge of his robe, something that he would have never felt physically.
26:20And the power of his being left him, and he said, who touched me?
26:27Well, everybody touched him.
26:30But that one woman had his cloak and was able to do that.
26:34Why?
26:34Because the Father wanted him to heal her.
26:38So that's how we are supposed to be responding here on earth now.
26:42We need to understand who God is.
26:45We need to be doing what he has equipped us to do.
26:49The parable of the talents is not some kind of nice story.
26:55Have you been given the gift of charisma and communication and intelligence?
27:02You're supposed to be using that for God's glory.
27:05Are you a leader?
27:06Well, are you leading people to enrich yourself and to make you and get your next mission?
27:11Or indeed, are you one of those thinking, I could just sit on the couch.
27:16I'm going to be raptured tomorrow.
27:18I'm out of here, suckers.
27:19Yeah, well, if that's your mindset, I would point you to the lukewarm people that Christ spits out of his mouth.
27:28And I would also point you to the servant who buried his gifts and did not use them and did not come up with a return.
27:35God rebuked both of those to the point that their entire salvation was in question.
27:42So we're supposed to be actively doing what God created us to do.
27:46And that direction and that empowerment needs to come directly from God to us.
27:53We don't need it to be redirected by some hierarchy of other more mature Christians.
27:59We need to figure that out.
28:01Now, our ministry can help you figure that out, but how you walk it out is between you and God.
28:08We can help give you resources and point you to training and teach you in various areas.
28:14But the walking it out is between you and God.
28:19He's the one that you're going to be talking to like Jesus did in the morning saying,
28:24all right, Dad, what do you want me to do today?
28:26That is what we're supposed to be doing.
28:29Well, thank you, J.R.
28:35Time has flown, of course.
28:37Like with everybody, we could talk hours upon hours upon hours, but then the show would be too long for anyone to pay attention to.
28:45So to wrap it up, sparks ignite brush fires.
28:52Sparks turn into brush fires.
28:56Sorry.
28:56And it will eventually be on Amazon, but I am currently making it available to all your listeners at no charge.
29:04If they simply go to brushfires-digital.com, that's brushfires-digital.com.
29:12That's the teaching site for the Brush Fires Ministry.
29:16And they register as a new user.
29:18They will get the book as soon as they register.
29:21It will be in their enrolled products.
29:22And they can print it.
29:24They can get a PDF copy of it, or they can read it online.
29:28But we're making it available because we want people to know that God wants to talk to them.
29:33It's not just me that he wants to talk to.
29:36He talks to Joseph through his dreams.
29:38He talks to people through scripture.
29:40He talks to them through prayer.
29:42He talks to them through words of knowledge of strangers.
29:45God wants to talk to you, and you need to be willing to listen.
29:49And that's what the book is all about.
29:51But sometimes, like the Garth Brooks song, sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers, right?
29:58The answer isn't always going to be yes, because it's his plan, not what your plan might think it is.
30:06Yeah, the answers typically are yes, no, or not no.
30:10So, again, and it will be on the scrawl at the bottom of the behind-the-scenes sneak peek video, brushfires-digital.com.
30:24People, definitely check it out.
30:27Please go back into Christitutionalist Politics Archives and see the other episode with JR.
30:34We talk about Brushfires Ministries.
30:37And I joked about you, joked with you in the email when we were setting up this show.
30:43It's like, why do you sound, right?
30:48And I said in my email, I knew Brushfires Ministries sounded familiar, but it was lost in my brain until I went back and looked.
31:00I appreciate you having me back.
31:02We really want to help people and churches build a vibrant discipleship program.
31:09And so, whether you read the book or not, our resources are available, and we want to work with every Christian institution out there to really get them ready for Christ's return.
31:22Thank you, JR.
31:23Take care.
31:24God bless.
31:25Thanks, Joseph.
31:26For tuning in to books, there will be several different books, authors, several different authors, books, authors, weeks for October of 2025.
31:41And remember, you can check out my books at josephmleonard.us slash shop.
31:49And again, Joseph M. Leonard, it looks French, it's not Lenard, it's Lenard without an O, and I have to put the middle initial in there because there is a Joseph Lenard who is also a Christian author out of South Carolina, so I have to make that distinction.
32:12And going in line with books, authors of weeks, I've joked as guests on other shows, I am not he, he is not me, and neither of us will be confused for Shakespeare.
32:27And frankly, most writers out there are not going to be confused for Shakespeare.
32:33They're not trying to be.
32:35There might be a few that, you know, looking for that Renaissance-era feel, but hey, it's a new millennia, people.
32:47Right?
32:48This is the here and now.
32:50It isn't Shakespearean Renaissance-era.
32:54If you're looking for Shakespeare, re-read Shakespeare.
32:59Take care.
33:00God bless.
33:00Love you all.
33:01Like and subscribe to the Christitutionalist Politics Podcast and share episodes.
33:08We need your help.
33:10Thank you for having tuned in for Christitutionalist Politics Show.
33:15If you haven't already, please check out my primary internationally available book, Terror Striped, coming soon to a city near you.
33:25Available anywhere books are sold.
33:27If you have locally run bookstores still near you, they can order it for you.
33:33And let me remind, over time, the fancy high production items will come.
33:39But for now, for starters, it's just you as a very appreciated listener by me.
33:46All substance, no flow.
33:48Just straight to Key Discussion Points, a show that looks at a variety of topics, mostly politics, through a Christian U.S. Constitutionalist lens.
34:00So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
34:03Take care.
34:04God bless.
Comments