Welcome to Grace To You. I'm Phil Johnson and I'm here in the studio with John MacArthur,

whose Bible teaching you hear nearly every day on this broadcast. And I say nearly every day,

because today it won't be a sermon you will hear. But I think you'll find the subject interesting

and timely and most important, Biblical. It has to do with events that began as the whole world

became familiar with the COVID-19 virus. And it also has to do with a feature film that is about

to hit theaters. Well, John, I know you're not much of a movie buff and yet there's a film that's

being released and premiered this week that I know you're very excited about called The Essential

Church. Talk about that. How did that come about? Why is it called The Essential Church? Tell us

a little bit about the background of this. Well, this is a full length to our documentary that

are very talented people have put together to tell the story of Grace Church in its conflict

with the state of California, the Health Department, the city of Los Angeles, governments.

We had such an unusual situation because we did not comply with the health orders.

We didn't follow the commands of social distancing masks, vaccinations, and only so many people.

We paid no attention to any of it, really. And we were in contempt of court and we were getting

violations every week and there were fines and prison sentences with the violations.

It was just an amazing, amazing story. We just believe that the word of God

requires us to be faithful as a church and stay open. And when we came to the point that we

knew that the statistics were not true, not honest, then people weren't going to die in mass.

Our people started coming back to the church and so many churches didn't do that. They shut

down. They shut down for a long time. And when it was all sort of over, I said, we need to,

we need to tell the story because we need to make sure we give churches the motivation that

they need to take a stand the next time. Because I don't think this is going to be the end of

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