Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 393. I'm Douglas Wilson. I'm glad you decided to join us.

So the thing I wanted to talk about initially here is reputation, testimony, name, and brand.

Okay? Reputation, testimony, name, and brand. Now, I think, considered from a certain

vantage point, these are all the same thing. Brand is kind of a buzzword, a Johnny Come lately,

buzzword, and the Bible doesn't talk a lot about brand, as in the Bible doesn't

talk about brand at all. But the Bible does talk about reputation in the book of Proverbs. It talks

about good reputation and bad reputation. Jesus instructs us to maintain a good reputation. He wants our yes to be yes and our no to be no.

He wants people to recognize that if we said we were going to do it, we're going to do it.

We don't need to buttress our word with a bunch of superfluous oaths because we said we were going to.

That's a good testimony. Paul requires elders to have a good

reputation with those who are outside. Reputation matters. A good testimony matters. At the same time,

you've got to be careful that you don't become fastidious in the wrong way about what a good

testimony is. Because remember, Jesus had a, what was the, what was the Lord's testimony?

Well, his testimony was that he was a drunkard and a, he was a drunkard and a glutton. So that

sounds like a bad testimony. And when Paul says that elders should

have a good reputation with those who are outside, the Paul who required that of elders was

an apostle who had been flogged or whipped multiple times, who had been imprisoned, who had been chased around the Mediterranean

as a troublemaker and a disruptor. So what kind of reputation did Paul have with outsiders?

So you can't take one phrase and absolutize it. You want to say, what does it mean to have a good reputation with outsiders?

And then a good name is to be valued, again, back in Proverbs, a good name is to be valued

highly.

So how does this tie in with brand?

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