He tells you to test the spirits. That is the right instruction. It is the biblical instruction. And across an hour and thirty-eight minutes of careful, well-prepared, theologically serious teaching, he never gives you the Torah's test.
This is the paradox of a sermon that is genuinely good — substantially better than most of what comes across evangelical pulpits — and still structurally compromised. Not by laziness. Not by shallow preparation. By a theological system so thoroughly internalized that the teacher cannot see where the system ends and the text begins.
This is The Docket. Every installment takes a sermon, runs it against the text it claims to teach, and names what holds and what doesn't. Not to tear down a preacher. To build up a people who can read.
The Bench
Preacher: Dr. Robb Brunansky, Pastor-Teacher
Venue: Desert Hills Bible Church, Phoenix, Arizona
Training: M.Div., The Master's Seminary (Sun Valley, CA); Ph.D., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY)
Affiliation: Listed with Founders Ministries (Reformed wing of the Southern Baptist Convention); formerly Desert Hills Evangelical Free Church
Date: Prior to March 9, 2025
Duration: Approximately 1 hour, 38 minutes
Format: Worship, announcements, scripture reading, expository teaching
Primary Text: 1 John 4:1-6
Supporting Texts: John 8:31-51, Matthew 7:13-14, 2 Corinthians 11:13-15
Stated Goals: Teach discernment — how to test teachers by their confession of Yeshua, their resistance to worldly lies, and their submission to God's Word
Teaching Depth: 6/10 — Meat in theology, milk in application. Substantive, textually engaged, Yeshua-centered, but systemically filtered through Reformed theology in ways that introduce specific distortions the congregation has no tools to identify.
Sermon Status: Not published publicly at time of this review
The Charge
The sermon tells the congregation to test the spirits. It provides three tests: Does the teacher confess Yeshua as God's Son who came in the flesh? Does the teacher resist the world's lies? Does the teacher submit to God's Word? These are sound tests. They are necessary. They are not sufficient.
The charge is not that Brunansky teaches poorly. He teaches well — better than most. The charge is that a man trained at The Master's Seminary and affiliated with Founders Ministries teaches through a Reformed theological grid so thoroughly internalized that the system's fingerprints are presented as the text's own conclusions. Imputed righteousness is taught as though Paul invented it in a vacuum. Predestination is hinted at as though Deuteronomy 30:19 does not exist. Perseverance is framed as automatic rather than conditional. And the Torah's own discernment framework — Devarim (Deuteronomy) 13:1-5 and 18:20-22 — the oldest and most specific test for true and false prophets in all of Scripture — is absent from a sermon about testing the spirits.
A shallow teacher can be outgrown. A sophisticated teacher whose system errors are invisible — because the system is presented as the text itself — is the more dangerous finding. Not because the man is dangerous. Because the formation is.
The Exhibits
Exhibit One: The Text That Should Have Started in Torah (00:35:08)
The sermon's anchor is 1 John 4:1-6 — "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world."
The word at the center of this passage — the word the entire sermon should orbit — is ruach (רוּחַ). Spirit. Wind. Breath. It is one of the most theologically saturated words in the Hebrew Bible, and it appears before anything else does.
In Beresheet (Genesis) 1:2, the Ruach Elohim (רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים) hovers over the face of the waters — the Spirit of God present at creation before a single word is spoken. In Genesis 2:7, HaShem breathes the nishmat chayyim (נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים) — the breath of life — into adam, and the man becomes a living soul. The ruach is how HaShem animates what He has made. It is how He communicates. It is how He empowers judges, kings, and prophets. When Yochanan (John) says "test the spirits," the word behind it — pneuma (πνεῦμα) in Greek, ruach in Hebrew — carries the full weight of everything HaShem has ever breathed into the world.
And the Torah provides a specific, detailed, non-negotiable test for distinguishing HaShem's ruach from a counterfeit.
Devarim (Deuteronomy) 13:1-5:
"If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes true, of which he spoke to you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,' you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for HaShem your God is testing you to find out if you love HaShem your God with all your heart and with all your soul."
And Devarim (Deuteronomy) 18:20-22:
"But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which HaShem has not spoken?' When a prophet speaks in the name of HaShem, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which HaShem has not spoken."
These are the original tests. They predate 1 John by over a thousand years. They are the foundation on which Yochanan builds. When Yochanan says "test the spirits," he is not introducing a new idea to the Jewish communities he is writing to — he is applying the Torah's existing framework to the specific heresies of his day. The tests in 1 John 4 are applications of Deuteronomy 13 and 18, not replacements for them.
Brunansky's sermon engages 1 John 4 with genuine theological substance (00:35:08). The analysis indicates that he addresses the Greek homologeō (ὁμολογέω) — to confess, to agree, to say the same thing — in connection with confessing Yeshua. This is correct and valuable. But confessing Yeshua as Messiah who came in the flesh is the what of the test. Torah provides the how — and the how includes details that 1 John assumes its audience already knows because they are Torah-literate Jews.
A congregation that receives the 1 John test without the Deuteronomy foundation has been given a checklist without the operating system. They can ask "does this teacher confess Yeshua?" but they cannot ask the deeper Torah question: "Does this teacher's fruit align with Torah's definition of faithfulness, even if his words sound right?" Deuteronomy 13 warns that a false prophet can perform real signs and wonders. The test is not whether the miraculous happens. The test is whether the teaching leads toward or away from HaShem's commandments. That distinction — fruit over phenomenon, Torah-alignment over impressive results — is the razor's edge of biblical discernment, and it is absent from the sermon.
Credit: 1 John 4:1-6 is handled with genuine exegetical substance. The homologeō word study is the right instinct. The sermon takes the text seriously as a teaching text, not as a devotional decoration.
Charge: The Torah foundation — Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and 18:20-22 — is absent. The congregation is given the New Testament application without the Tanakh operating system. Ruach is never opened to its Hebrew depth. The test remains within the New Testament as though discernment were invented there.
Exhibit Two: John 8 Without Israel (00:18:30–00:19:41)
The sermon uses John 8:31-51 — Yeshua's confrontation with Jewish leaders who claim Avraham as their father — as a supporting text for the discernment theme. The analysis indicates that at approximately 00:19:41, the framing suggests that those who opposed Yeshua "did not truly love Jesus."
This is where a sermon can do damage without intending to.
John 8 is set during Sukkot — the Feast of Tabernacles, the most eschatologically charged of the moedim (appointed times). Yeshua is in the Temple, among His own people, in the middle of a festival that celebrates HaShem's dwelling with Israel and points forward to the day when He will tabernacle with all nations (Zechariah 14:16). When Yeshua says "you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:32), the word for "free" — eleutheroō (ἐλευθερόω) — resonates with the deror (דְּרוֹר) of Leviticus 25:10, the liberty proclaimed in the Jubilee year. This is not a generic freedom metaphor. It is Yeshua invoking the Torah's own liberation framework in the Temple during a Torah-commanded festival.
The confrontation in John 8 is an intra-Jewish debate. Yeshua is not arguing with outsiders. He is arguing with Jewish leaders about what it means to be children of Avraham — a debate that only makes sense within the covenant family. When this passage is taught in an evangelical context without that framing, it slides almost inevitably toward a "the Jews rejected Jesus" narrative. That narrative has a name: replacement theology. And it has consequences that run from the Council of Nicaea through the Inquisition through the pogroms through the Holocaust to the contemporary church's casual assumption that Israel's story ended when the church's began.
Sha'ul (Paul) addresses this with surgical precision in Romans 11:1-2 — "Has God cast away His people? Certainly not!" And Romans 11:17-24 — the Gentiles are grafted into Israel's olive tree, not the other way around. Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) 31:35-37 — as long as the sun and moon endure, Israel remains HaShem's people. These are not optional footnotes. They are the covenant framework within which John 8 makes sense. Without them, John 8 becomes a proof text for supersessionism — and the sermon, however unintentionally, moves in that direction.
Credit: John 8 is used to address the reality that religious identity does not guarantee genuine relationship with HaShem — a point Yeshua Himself makes. The application to discernment is legitimate.
Charge: The Sukkot setting is not developed. The deror / Jubilee connection is absent. The intra-Jewish nature of the debate is not framed, allowing the passage to function as a "Jews rejected Jesus" text rather than as an internal covenant confrontation. Romans 11 and Jeremiah 31 are not cited to protect against replacement theology. The congregation is given a text that, without its Jewish context, can be read as evidence for Israel's displacement rather than evidence for Yeshua's fulfillment of Israel's story.
Exhibit Three: The Narrow Gate Without Deuteronomy 30 (00:55:00–00:56:00)
Matthew 7:13-14 — "Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it."
The analysis indicates that this passage is used in connection with the "few saved, many false" theme — and that the framing carries a predestination hint (00:55:00), suggesting that the smallness of the number is determined rather than chosen.
This is where the Reformed grid does its quietest and most consequential work.
In the MacArthur/Master's Seminary tradition, the narrowness of the gate and the fewness of those who find it tends to be read through the lens of unconditional election — TULIP's "U." The few find it because they were chosen to find it. The many miss it because they were not. The text becomes evidence for a predetermined sorting rather than for the difficulty of the path.
But Yeshua is speaking within a Torah framework. And the Torah passage that most directly parallels Matthew 7:13-14 is Devarim (Deuteronomy) 30:19:
"I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live."
Choose. Uvachar'ta (וּבָחַרְתָּ). This is an imperative. It is a command to choose, which presupposes the capacity to choose, which presupposes that the choosing is real and not the performance of a predetermined outcome.
The narrow gate is narrow because the path is difficult — because Torah-obedience in a world that incentivizes compromise is genuinely hard, because following Yeshua costs everything, because the derekh (דֶּרֶךְ) — the way — requires daily death to self (Luke 9:23). The fewness of those who find it is not evidence that HaShem has limited the guest list. It is evidence that most people, when faced with the cost, choose the broad road. The choosing is theirs. Deuteronomy 30:19 insists on it.
A congregation trained in Reformed theology hears Matthew 7:13-14 and receives comfort: if I'm on the narrow path, it's because God put me here. A congregation trained in Torah hears the same passage and receives urgency: the path is narrow, the cost is real, and every day I must choose to stay on it. These produce different people. Only one of them matches Yeshua's tone, which is warning, not reassurance.
Credit: The remnant theme is genuinely biblical — Isaiah 10:22, Romans 9:27. The sermon takes the narrowness seriously rather than softening it.
Charge: Deuteronomy 30:19 is absent. The framing carries a predestination current that removes the urgency of choice from the passage. The congregation is given the narrowness of the gate without the Torah's insistence that the choice to enter is theirs — and that the choice must be made daily.
Exhibit Four: Imputed Righteousness Without Obedience (01:16:30)
The analysis identifies a teaching moment at approximately 01:16:30 where righteousness is presented as imputed — credited to the believer's account through faith, apart from works.
This is one of the hallmarks of the Reformed tradition, and it is not entirely wrong. Sha'ul teaches in Romans 4:3 that Avraham "believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness" — quoting Genesis 15:6. The crediting is real. The faith is the basis. This is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is what happens next.
The Reformed formulation — particularly in its MacArthur expression — tends to present imputed righteousness as a completed transaction. You believe, righteousness is credited, the account is settled. Sanctification follows, but the standing is secure regardless of what the sanctification produces. This is forensic justification: a legal declaration that precedes and does not depend on the life that follows.
Torah tells a different story. Or rather, it tells the rest of the same story.
Vayikra (Leviticus) 18:5 — "You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, which if a man does, he shall live by them: I am HaShem." This is not legalism. It is covenant expectation. The life that follows the crediting is not optional. It is the evidence that the crediting was real.
Ya'akov (James) — Yeshua's own brother, writing to Jewish believers — says it with no ambiguity: "Faith without works is dead" (James 2:17). And: "Was not Avraham our father justified by works when he offered Yitzchak his son on the altar? You see then that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made complete" (James 2:21-22).
The Aqedah — Avraham's offering of Yitzchak on Moriah — is the completion of the faith that was credited in Genesis 15. The crediting came first. The obedience came after. But the obedience was not optional — it was the proof that the faith was alive. Reformed theology tends to treat Genesis 15 as the whole story. Torah treats Genesis 22 as the completion of it. A faith that is credited but never tested on Moriah is a faith that James calls dead.
Sha'ul himself, the apostle most associated with justification by faith, writes to Titus: "The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age" (Titus 2:11-12). Grace trains. It does not merely declare. The imputation is real, and the obedience it produces is the evidence of its reality.
When a sermon presents imputed righteousness without the Torah's expectation of obedience — without Leviticus 18:5, without James 2, without Genesis 22 completing Genesis 15 — it gives the congregation a settled account without a living walk. The standing becomes static. The faith becomes intellectual assent rather than covenant faithfulness. And the congregation is left without the Hebraic framework that holds faith and obedience together as two expressions of the same reality: emunah (אֱמוּנָה) — faithfulness, trustworthiness, the lived reliability of a person who has been entrusted with covenant.
Credit: The doctrine of justification by faith is genuinely biblical and correctly anchored in Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4.
Charge: The obedience that completes faith — Genesis 22 completing Genesis 15, James 2:17-22, Leviticus 18:5, Titus 2:11-12 — is absent. Imputed righteousness is presented as a forensic transaction rather than as the beginning of a covenant walk. Emunah — the Hebrew word for faith that inherently includes faithfulness — is never engaged. The congregation is given a settled account without a living obligation.
Exhibit Five: Perseverance as Guarantee vs. Perseverance as Command (01:17:30)
The analysis indicates that the sermon hints at the Reformed doctrine of the perseverance of the saints — the "P" in TULIP — suggesting that believers will automatically overcome the world's opposition because the Spirit within them is greater.
1 John 4:4 — "You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world."
This is true. The Ruach ha-Kodesh dwelling in a believer is greater than any opposing force. That is the promise of the text, and Brunansky is right to teach it.
But the Brit Chadashah does not present perseverance as automatic. It presents it as a command that requires sustained engagement.
Hebrews 3:14 — "For we have become partakers of Mashiach if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end." If. The conditional is in the text. The writer of Hebrews — writing to Jewish believers who know Torah — does not say "you will hold." He says "if you hold." The holding is real. The risk of not holding is real. The call is to endure, not to relax into a guarantee.
Hitgalut (Revelation) 2:10 — "Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life." Be faithful. This is a command, not a description. Yeshua does not say "you will be faithful." He says "be faithful" — the imperative presupposes the possibility of unfaithfulness.
Yeshua Himself in John 15:4 — "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me." The abiding is not automatic. The branch must remain connected. The possibility of disconnection — of being cut off and thrown into the fire (John 15:6) — is stated plainly by Yeshua, and no amount of systematic theology can soften it without contradicting Him.
The Reformed doctrine of perseverance produces a specific kind of believer: one who trusts that the outcome is secure regardless of the struggle. The Torah's framework produces a different kind: one who knows that HaShem is faithful and that their own faithfulness is required as a response to His. These are not the same posture. One produces confidence. The other produces emunah — the lived, daily, costly faithfulness that Avraham modeled on Moriah and that Yeshua commands in every "follow Me."
Credit: 1 John 4:4 is correctly taught — the Spirit within the believer is greater than the spirit of the world. This is a genuine and necessary encouragement.
Charge: Perseverance is framed as a guarantee rather than as a command. Hebrews 3:14, Revelation 2:10, and John 15:4-6 — all of which present faithfulness as conditional and commanded — are absent. The congregation is given assurance without the urgency that the Brit Chadashah consistently pairs with it.
Exhibit Six: The System Behind the Sermon
This exhibit does not correspond to a single timestamp. It corresponds to the entire sermon — and to the formation that produced it.
Dr. Robb Brunansky was trained at The Master's Seminary, founded by John MacArthur. He holds a Ph.D. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary under Al Mohler's presidency. His church is listed with Founders Ministries, the Reformed wing of the SBC. He hosts a podcast called "Relentlessly Biblical."
None of this is hidden. None of it is shameful. It is stated here because it is the interpretive key to everything the sermon does and does not do.
The Master's Seminary produces some of the most textually engaged, exegetically rigorous pastors in American evangelicalism. They read the Greek. They know the argument flow. They preach verse by verse. They are serious about the text in a way that many evangelical institutions are not. This is genuine and should be honored.
But The Master's Seminary also produces pastors who read the text through a specific Reformed grid — one that includes unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. These doctrines are not drawn from the text inductively. They are a theological system developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, codified at the Synod of Dort (1618-1619), and refined through Reformed confessionalism (Westminster Confession, 1646). The system is then brought to the text, and the text is read through it.
This is not unique to Reformed theology. Every tradition does it — Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Dispensational. The question is not whether a teacher has a grid. Every teacher does. The question is whether the teacher can see the grid — whether he can distinguish between what the text says and what the system tells him the text means.
A sermon on 1 John 4:1-6 that tells the congregation to test the spirits but does not provide the Torah's test — Deuteronomy 13, Deuteronomy 18 — has been filtered. A sermon that uses John 8 without Romans 11 has been filtered. A sermon that teaches imputed righteousness without James 2 and Leviticus 18:5 has been filtered. A sermon that frames perseverance as automatic without Hebrews 3:14 has been filtered.
The filter is not malice. It is formation. And formation is harder to see than malice, because the man formed within the system experiences the system as the text itself. He is not lying. He is not hiding. He is reading the Bible the way he was trained to read it, and the training is so thorough that the grid and the text feel like the same thing.
The congregation at Desert Hills Bible Church is being well-fed. The teaching is substantive, Yeshua-centered, and delivered with integrity. But the food has been prepared in a kitchen with a specific recipe, and the recipe adds ingredients that are not in the original text — and removes others that are. A congregation that cannot identify the recipe cannot evaluate what it is eating.
The Berean standard applies here with particular force. These were not uneducated people checking a shallow teacher. They were Torah-literate Jews examining a brilliant apostle — and finding his teaching worthy because it aligned with what they already knew from the Tanakh. The Berean standard is not "check the sermon against your feelings." It is "check the sermon against Torah." A congregation that has never been taught Torah cannot perform a Berean examination. And a teacher trained in a system that treats the New Testament as self-contained — exegeting Paul without Moshe, Yochanan without the Prophets, Yeshua without Torah — has, however unintentionally, disabled the Berean standard in his own congregation.
Credit: The formation is serious, rigorous, and text-engaged. Brunansky is not a shallow teacher. He is a well-trained one.
Charge: The training introduces a systematic filter — Reformed confessionalism — that is presented as the text's own conclusions. The congregation cannot perform a Berean examination against Torah because Torah is not provided as the baseline. The system is invisible to the congregation because it is invisible to the teacher.
The Pattern
Six exhibits. One text — 1 John 4:1-6 — taught with genuine skill and theological substance, supported by John 8, Matthew 7, and 2 Corinthians 11. An hour and thirty-eight minutes of serious engagement with the question of discernment.
And across all of it, a consistent pattern: the New Testament is treated as a self-contained document.
Every text is read forward from the apostolic witness without being rooted backward in the Torah and Prophets that the apostolic witness assumes. 1 John 4 is taught without Deuteronomy 13. John 8 is taught without the Sukkot context or the Jubilee deror. Matthew 7 is taught without Deuteronomy 30. Imputed righteousness is taught without Leviticus 18:5 or Genesis 22. Perseverance is taught without Hebrews 3:14's conditional.
The effect is a congregation that knows the New Testament well and the Tanakh poorly — which is precisely the condition that makes it impossible to perform the Berean examination the sermon itself calls for. The Bereans did not check Paul against Paul. They checked Paul against the Tanakh. A congregation without Tanakh literacy cannot be Berean, regardless of how many times the word "Berean" appears in the church's vocabulary.
This is the specific danger of the MacArthur school. It is not that the teaching is wrong in the way that prosperity gospel is wrong — obviously false, easily identified. It is that the teaching is right enough to be trusted and filtered enough to be incomplete. The congregation receives meat — real theological substance — but the meat has been processed through a system that removes the Torah connective tissue that would make the theology covenantally whole.
A church that calls itself "Relentlessly Biblical" — as Brunansky has described his ministry's aim — has a higher standard to meet than a church that makes no such claim. The claim is that the Bible, all of it, drives everything. If that is the claim, then Torah must be present not as background but as foundation. The Prophets must be present not as proof texts but as the covenantal voice that holds Israel's story together. And the New Testament must be taught as what it is: the fulfillment of that story, not a replacement for it.
A Word to the New Believer
If you attend Desert Hills Bible Church, or if you have listened to this sermon, here is what is worth keeping — and where you need to go deeper.
Keep the call to test the spirits. That is real. That is essential. The world is full of teachers, and not all of them speak for HaShem. You need discernment, and this sermon tells you to develop it. That is a gift.
But take the call further than the sermon takes it. Go to the Torah's tests — the ones that predate 1 John by over a thousand years. Read Devarim (Deuteronomy) 13:1-5. A false prophet can perform real signs. The test is not whether the miraculous happens but whether the teaching leads toward or away from HaShem's commandments. Read Deuteronomy 18:20-22. A prophet who speaks presumptuously — claiming HaShem's authority for words HaShem did not speak — that prophet is to be rejected regardless of how impressive or well-credentialed they are.
Then read Romans 11. All of it. Understand that the olive tree is Israel's, that you as a Gentile believer are grafted in, and that the root supports you — you do not support the root. Any teaching that sidelines Israel, that treats the "Old Testament" as background material, that reads John 8 as "the Jews rejected Jesus" without the covenant context — that teaching has cut itself off from the root.
Read James 2:14-26 alongside Romans 4. See that faith and works are not opponents — they are partners. Avraham believed, and it was credited. Avraham obeyed, and the faith was completed. The crediting and the obeying belong together. Any system that separates them has divided what HaShem joined.
And test everything — including this review — against the text. Not against a system. Not against a tradition. Not against what your pastor says, or what a seminary teaches, or what a confession codifies. Against the text. Torah, Prophets, Writings, and the Brit Chadashah read as one story of HaShem's covenant faithfulness to Israel and, through Israel, to the nations.
That is the Berean standard. It requires that you know the Tanakh well enough to evaluate what you hear. If your church does not teach you Torah, find it yourself. It is yours by right of grafting.
The Verdict
Teaching Depth: 6/10 — substantive, textually engaged, exegetically rigorous within its framework, Yeshua-centered, and significantly above the median for evangelical preaching. The depth is real. The filter is also real. The score reflects both.
Credit: Genuine exegetical substance — the homologeō word study, the engagement with false teacher typology, and the structural argument from 1 John 4:1-6 are handled with skill that reflects serious training and genuine care for the text.
Credit: Yeshua is exalted as central — the sermon consistently points to Yeshua as the standard against which all teaching is measured (01:13:35). This is correct and covenantally grounded, even if the covenant framework itself is underdeveloped.
Credit: The sermon welcomes scrutiny (00:47:30) — a pastor who invites examination of his own teaching has earned a measure of trust that most teachers do not offer. This is the Berean instinct in action, and it should be honored.
Credit: No financial manipulation — the breakfast fundraiser (00:06:46) and the "spend a little more" encouragement (00:07:00) are communal, joyful, and entirely aligned with voluntary giving (Deuteronomy 16:17, 2 Corinthians 9:7).
Credit: The sermon rejects easy belief (01:15:30) and stresses obedience (01:28:30) — this is a genuine corrective to the shallow faith that characterizes much of evangelicalism, and it aligns with Torah's covenant expectations even though it is not rooted there.
Charge sustained: Torah's discernment framework absent — Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and 18:20-22, the oldest and most specific tests for true and false prophets in Scripture, are not cited in a sermon about testing the spirits; the congregation is given the New Testament application without the Tanakh foundation.
Charge sustained: Ruach never opened — the Hebrew word for spirit that carries the full weight of HaShem's creative, communicating, empowering presence from Genesis 1:2 forward is never engaged; the spirits being tested are treated as a New Testament category rather than a Torah reality.
Charge sustained: John 8 without covenant context — the Sukkot setting, the deror / Jubilee liberation framework, and the intra-Jewish nature of the debate are absent; the passage risks functioning as a replacement theology text without Romans 11:1-2 and Jeremiah 31:35-37 as guardrails.
Charge sustained: Predestination hint without Deuteronomy 30:19 — the narrow gate / few saved framework (00:55:00) carries an unconditional election current; uvachar'ta — "choose life" — the Torah's explicit command to choose, presupposing the capacity to choose, is absent.
Charge sustained: Imputed righteousness without obedience — righteousness is presented as a forensic transaction (01:16:30) without the Torah's expectation of covenant faithfulness (Leviticus 18:5), the completion of faith through obedience (James 2:17-22, Genesis 22), or the grace-trains-obedience framework (Titus 2:11-12); emunah — faith as faithfulness — is never engaged.
Charge sustained: Perseverance framed as automatic — the Reformed doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is hinted (01:17:30) without the conditional language of Hebrews 3:14, the command of Revelation 2:10, or the abiding requirement of John 15:4-6.
Charge sustained: Reformed systematic theology presented as text — the grid of The Master's Seminary, Founders Ministries, and Reformed confessionalism (TULIP, Westminster Confession) is operative throughout the sermon but never identified as a grid; the congregation receives the system's conclusions as the text's own findings and has no tools to distinguish between them.
Selah
The sermon says: test the spirits. Torah says: here is the test — does the teacher lead you toward or away from HaShem's commandments? A sermon about testing the spirits that does not provide Torah's test — what has it actually equipped the congregation to do?
Brunansky was trained at The Master's Seminary and earned his doctorate at Southern Baptist. He is serious, credentialed, and text-engaged. The Bereans were untitled, uncredentialed, and living in a provincial town in Macedonia. They examined the apostle Paul — a man with better credentials than any seminary can confer — against the Tanakh, and the examination was their honor. What is the relationship between credentials and the Berean standard? Can a congregation perform a Berean examination of a teacher who is more educated than they are — and if so, what do they need that the teacher has not given them?
Imputed righteousness is credited by faith. Avraham believed, and it was counted. But Avraham also climbed Moriah with his son and a knife. What does faith look like when the crediting is taught without the climb?
The church calls itself "Relentlessly Biblical." The Bible begins with Beresheet — Genesis, Torah, the books that Yeshua said testified about Him (John 5:39). If a ministry is relentlessly biblical, where does the relentlessness start? With Paul's letters — or with the voice at Sinai that said, "I am HaShem your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt"?
Shalom v'shalvah — may the peace of our Abba guard your discernment and give you the courage to test everything against His word, beginning where His word begins.
Your brother in the Way,
Sergio
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