Responding to Christian Homosexuality Part 2

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Stephen Wolfe on the Case for Christian Nationalism- Part 3: Revolution and Liberty of Conscience

00:12

When we talk about the churches or different organizations, I can share some of my experiences.

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Because it's been a journey, and I was healed in the

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Assemblies of God church, meaning God put me there, gave me the brother, and my wife, and the small life group that came alongside of me, and that was my hospital, where they provided a safe environment for me, and that's what

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I want to do with our ministry, is provide a space that encourages and comes alongside. But when it comes to my testimony and the

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LGBT issue, this is where I've learned what hirelings are, and cowardice is, and what itchy ear preaching is, and I say that not out of judgment, but out of concern, because when you love your pastor, and you pray for your pastor, and then you realize what's going on, it's shocking.

01:24

There's a lot of prayer and fasting that I went through, politically speaking, when I realized that my pastor didn't want, even though one of the pastors on staff is actually ex -gay, used to be identified as a homosexual, but has been set free of that as well, and our pastoral counselor, the three of us put together a

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Sunday school with the Assemblies of God position paper, and the senior pastor didn't want us to teach that.

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It was too, I mean, in my words, it's too controversial. My understanding is that we were told that we had to have a meeting outside of the church to talk about why we should talk about that in the church, and so we weren't going to advertise the class, we weren't going to do anything with it, and that was on the tail end of a lot of what

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I now know, in my opinion, is gaslighting. I've been gaslit for a couple of years on why, when they filmed testimonies of a brother who used to be in,

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I think, Hell's Angel as an enforcer, came to Christ, and that's a great testimony to share, and they filmed testimonies and encouraged the body that Jesus can change anybody, why

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I don't get to share my testimony, and when we had a series of reaching out to our community, and there was an example where we were reaching out to the

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Muslim community and the LGBT community, and so we had a weekly series, and the other pastor went up on stage and shared his testimony of coming out of LGBT and what it was, and that it was a sin, and that caused an openly lesbian couple to get riled up and went to the senior pastor and said, are we safe in this church?

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Are my kids safe in your youth group? And what I see now is that's a tripwire. The enemy has tripwires in churches, and it really puts the senior pastors or the board of directors to the test, and the test was, is it a safe church?

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So the next week when it was my turn to share my testimony, they had my good friend on stage with me in case

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I should say something offensive so that they could, you know, buffet that for the

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LGBT community, I guess, and in that, it, I didn't say anything that would be offensive per se.

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I shared my testimony, and I shared it in a way that I want to reach the

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LGBT community so I know how to be all things to all people and how to share without being offensive in that sense.

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The gospel is offensive, but, and in that, my pastor friend was like,

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I've never heard this kind of stuff before. The way you shared it, it was so deep, and it touched people, and, you know, we had people come up for prayer, and I said, yeah, you haven't heard it because I haven't gotten to share this kind of stuff, you know, and then that was the end of it.

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That was, you know, four years we went without talking about this stuff until, you know, we had an opportunity to bring in the best in teaching, the

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Restored Hope Network, you know, I came to the pastor and wanted to have

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Restored Hope hosted at our conference because I was on the committee in Minneapolis in 2019 to bring them here, and when

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I met with one of the pastors, I had been given a dozen reasons why we wouldn't do that.

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You know, it's not my paycheck that's on the line. I don't, I don't have to clean up after them when they leave.

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I'm not going to have to deal with the protesters, and I have a whole list of,

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I took notes, and God told me not to get mad, but to just take notes, and so in that experience, you know,

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I noticed that he, his voice was higher, and he treated me like I was a threat, you know, like there was something there, and I'd never experienced that in my own church before, and then our senior pastor,

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I went to him, you know, after our 21 days of fasting and prayer, and I said, you know, I feel like in rejecting having them come, you know, because you don't want to have anybody, he told me he doesn't want to have anybody that's not of the church, of Assemblies of God on the stage because he doesn't want to risk that.

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Like, okay, that's your church. I can understand that, but after 21 days of fasting and prayer,

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I asked him, I said, I feel like you don't want them here in that testimony, and that you don't want my testimony out there, and he had said something that I took and prayed about it, and in hindsight, he gaslit me, and he told me with not wanting to have external people coming to the church that aren't of the denomination, you know, that's protecting the church, so then this crazy thing happened.

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I had a really good friend who was part of my journey out of LGBT. He owned a gym, so my friend and I went to his gym frequently.

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He calls me and says, Darren, I'm doing a conference, and I want you to share your testimony. So we meet at Starbucks, and we're talking about what the conference is and how he wanted me to share, you know, what parts of it would fit in with the conferences, the men's conference.

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I said, well, where are you having it? He goes, oh, we're having it at your church. I just about fell off the seat at Starbucks, because here is a

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Methodist guy coming in and using our church to have a men's conference, and I was told explicitly that that would never happen, that the pastor's done with that, but it was only a couple months later, and I just, that's when things started to understand that this issue is, and I love my pastor, don't get me wrong.

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I love him. He's a brother in Christ. I pray for him, but in the denomination, the board of directors told me that I had to get him on board in this

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LGBT space, and that's what I tried to do. For two years, I was trying to help him reach the

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LGBT topic with equipping him in any way that I could, but yet being resisted, and I didn't realize

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I was being gaslit. I have no other way to put it, and then 2019, after that conference had happened, and I was praying at the conference, like,

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God, here we got the best teaching and the best equippers, which ironically are from the assignments of God, and the assignments of God refers to restored hope, that in that prayer,

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I'm like, God, how am I going to get the pastor on board with ministering in this space, because they'll send people to me to minister to them, but they won't, and I've had people say, well,

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I've gone to the pastors, but they can't help me, and so they said, go to you, and I'm like, why, if I'm working a day job, why are they coming to me?

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Why isn't the pastor equipped? So that's my heart, is to equip, and that's what I'm praying at this restored hope conference, and I felt like the

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Lord told me it's not my responsibility to keep the pastor. He's my authority.

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It's the board's authority, the elders, to bring him into this space, not mine.

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It's not bottoms up. It's top down, and so I went to the board, several of the board members, which

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I've been in life group with them, so like, you know, we're really close. It's been 14 years, right, and I went to several of the board members, and all the board members pretty much said that, well, they're not there to discuss theology and doctrine, but to guide the church in the business dealings, the financial dealings, and my heart sank after I talked to the third board member, third or fourth, and that's when

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I realized so this is a business. This, it's a business running as a church, but the elders aren't there, and when

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I read scripture and what I thought, I thought the whole time that the elder board was there to guide our church in good doctrine, and the politics of it, just the church structure doesn't create an environment where good doctrine can be played out and can equip the pastor in that way, and so they were like, no, this isn't what we're going to, we're not going to bring this up to the pastor, and so having found that the

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Assemblies of God University, we had an event where one of the youth during church service, the youth pastor comes running over to me in the control room and says, you know, we've got a problem, and one of the kids had hooked up with a guy and thinks that he might have

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HIV, and what do we do? And I'm concerned about that, so we go out to dinner with that person, and like, who's your accountability partner?

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And well, it's my professor at the university, and I said, well, you're probably addicted to gay porn, right?

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He goes, yeah. I said, okay, so what's your accountability professor telling you how to deal with that?

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He goes, well, he told me to look at straight porn, and that would straighten me out. You're kidding. I'm not kidding, and—

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There's someone training pastors. Yes, and the pastor that I'm with is, God is my witness, the pastor and I's jaw just hit the floor.

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Like, I couldn't believe it, and then I hear from another student that in chapel, you know, they're doing the—I mean, not literally doing the present sprinkle thing, but that's me saying, you know, they're gay.

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You gotta love them, and you know, you gotta support them and help them, you know, the gay celibacy thing.

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In chapel, you know, agreeing that, yeah, they're gay, and we gotta help them, and so what do you do with that?

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You know, and I've got some other interesting things I could talk about. I'd rather talk offline first. I'm still figuring out how to deal with that, but it goes all the way up to the top of the denomination, and so you talked about Bobby Lopez, right?

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He's on my board of directors, and he's a good friend. I've been friends with him for years.

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I have been friends with him as he went through the SBC stuff, and in 2018, when he put forth the whereas, you know,

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I would say it would be inoculating the denomination against the false teachings of the

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LGBT doctrines, and how him, and I believe it was

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Thomas, got sidelined and kicked out, and that whole thing was buried, you know, and to watch what is happening in SBC.

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Like, I'm watching it happen in the Assemblies of God here in Minnesota, and I don't know other than I wish that it wasn't a parachurch ministry that, like, my pastor took me to a ministry to straighten me out, you know?

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I wish the church would stop kicking against the goads and take this issue on, and get over their fear of man, and get over the fear of their paycheck, because God will meet our needs, and we need righteousness in the world.

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We need the captives to be set free, and the compassion that I have for these people that are struggling in our own churches, and my wife and I, we struggle with what do we say about the politics of it all?

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Because we just, well, I'll give you a hint to what I was going to say, is

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Press and Sprinkle came to Minnesota here in November, the second time, and he's sowing leaven, and I'm seeing it in the largest

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Assemblies of God churches. So the largest Minnesota Assemblies of God church brought Press and Sprinkle in to his church, and then brought him, after he had the conference, then had him come and speak to the staff, and I worked it as best

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I could in the back channel to let the Assemblies of God know what's going on months before this happened, as soon as I found out what was going on, and I was met with not good response.

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I'll just leave it at that for right now. What do you do with that politically? You know, the church is,

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I don't know. I don't know, John. Let's talk about this for a minute, though, just for the Christians listening, the everyday

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Christians living their lives, working the 40 -hour week, just like you were, who are going to church, is thinking the same thing that you were thinking up until fairly recently, that my church is solid.

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We are against sin. We teach righteousness. We believe in freedom for the homosexual.

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That's right. All of that stuff. This isn't, by the way, the only issue I've seen this on. I've seen this on a number of issues, and it's, you know, if you pick one out of a hat, there's so many in my mind, but it's a big one that I've been dealing with since the

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Black Lives Matter stuff started is there's an official narrative of we are against critical race theory.

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Whether people understand what that is or not, I don't know, but we're against it. But then at the highest levels of even those calling themselves conservatives in evangelical denominations, seminaries, organizations, missions, organizations, et cetera, there is an accommodation to it at the same time.

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I've seen this over and over. There's hardly anyone that doesn't fit this, where they want to, in the abstract, to be against something, especially if they know that their people want them to be.

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But they don't want to go too far, right? They don't want to challenge directly the postmodern and Marxist assumptions of that movement.

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Not, you know, there's a limitation there. And I see it with this, where they want to kind of go halfway.

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They want a halfway measure where they can, as you said, keep, well, in your church, it sounds like there was a lesbian couple, but they want to keep at least the fiery darts from the devil and the ire of the world from being, from bearing, you know, putting too much pressure on them.

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They don't want to do that. But at the same time, they know that there's a demand in their congregation to say something.

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So they have to say something. So they take a halfway measure. We're against this, but we're not going to give you any tools, really. We're not going to have that person come and share their delivery story, because that would be too much.

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We see it on the COVID stuff, in my opinion, the same kind of thing, these halfway measures every single time.

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And all it shows me is there's compromise. There's fear. You were reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's very similar to what happened even in Germany in the 30s, where there was all these, you had the confessing church and you had the

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German Christian movement. And in the German Christian movement, there was all this capitulation.

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And it happened progressively over time. But the more compromises you make, the more easy it is to make another compromise.

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And, you know, your spine gets weaker and weaker. And so this is a frustration for myself as well.

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And those listening, I think it's a frustration. Many who are listening are just finding this out in their churches, because I get the emails that I thought my pastor was faithful.

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I thought this church was good. I'm finding out, no, there's a snag. When this particular issue came up, it revealed so much about what my elder board was actually thinking and who they actually want to please.

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And it's man. And they care about their image. And they're so afraid of the media. And so these are the kinds of things that I'm seeing.

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And it's exactly what you're saying. But so here's the thing, though. There seems to be a tendency in conservative circles to just kind of ignore the issue, which that works out well, right?

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And then but in circles that some of them might call themselves conservative, but they're a little more progressive.

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They bring in, in my mind, the Sam Albury's and Preston Sprinkle and Revoice and Jackie Hill Perry and Rosaria Butterfield.

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And the list goes on and on of the people that are sort of the official. I don't know if it's standpoint theory or what they're operating under, but it seems like it is.

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It's sort of like this. These are the official spokesmen. These are the high priests of this particular problem because they have the lived experience and they're not going to they're not going to push too far to offend people.

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So we're comfortable with them coming and representing us. We won't speak on that because it's sort of this false humility.

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We're not qualified or where we're not. All we have is the Bible, right? It's just kind of funny.

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We're fully qualified in Christ. That's right. You don't need all this lived experience. We have God's word, right?

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So I want you to talk about that a little bit. Just what is the message being promoted today?

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What's the halfway measure that's being promoted? Because I hear things like don't pursue holiness, not heterosexuality.

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I'm like, what does that even mean? So could you just explain to us why what is the halfway measure or spectrum of measures and why are they wrong and how is that different from what you're trying to do?

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Um, this is definitely an area of fasting and prayer that I've been in for the last couple years. And I want to go into it saying that I want what the

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Lord wants for Jackie Hill Perry, Rosario Butterfield, Christopher Yuan, Press and Sprinkle, which is, you know, it's a space that it can sound good.

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But the depth isn't there for actual fruit of change. And of course, have you heard the differing views of Christian doctrine, the four columns from Portland Fellowship?

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I don't think so. I'll just hold it up here. Sure. You know, we can share it in the comments of the thing.

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Yeah, let's put it in the link section. Um, and so that's a really good 101 start is it puts it has four columns.

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The left two is the LGBT identity and the right two are Christian identity. And then the doctrines that really fall into those spaces.

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And so without going into it, I'll just say that you got your side A and B, gay Christianity, which is core gay identity.

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So that would be Matthew Vines, right? Randy Thomas, Justin Lee, the reveling in gay partnership.

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And then the other side of that is the Press and Sprinkle, Nate Collins, Wesley Hill, the resisting your nature, that that's in your nature, but you're resisting it.

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You're gay identified. That's your identity. But the words that they use is historical, sexual, biblical ethic, right?

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So it sounds good. And it's wholly compromising. And it's untenable.

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I've lived side A and side B. Side A, actually, when scripture says hot or cold, like living as a gay, openly gay

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Christian was somewhat freeing because scripture says that you're free of righteousness. So that moment when people come out and say, oh, this burn is just lifted.

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I'm a gay Christian. Now, the burden is righteousness that you're feeling the burden of righteousness.

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The calling to holiness is what's been lifted. You've left it and God's turning you over.

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It's horrible. I mean, scripturally, doctrinally speaking, that's what happened. But they think that it's freedom.

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It takes a while for the fruit to bear. And then on the other two columns, you've got the

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Christian core identity. And I want to praise Rosaria Butterfield. She got me from column two as being gay identified to column three of renouncing that identity and repentance.

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And so this is the rinse repeat model of grace. Well, God gives you grace to not sin, which is true.

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But it's absolute hell to live in that, to be tempted nonstop.

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And I'm sorry, but in the LGBT space, everybody is trying to tell you outside of your immediate church, right outside of the faithful.

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Everything is culture is telling you and throwing you into the LGBT space. And the lust, the opportunities to lust are everywhere.

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So column three is the renounce and column four is the rebuild. And that's the restored hope.

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Joe Dallas, Ann Polk, Annie Kaminsky, Stephen Black, myself, Robert or Bobby Lopez, right?

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It's the transforming, a transformed life, a renewal of the mind, a healing that it's to and I would go a little bit farther than them is, you know, it's godly living.

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Well, I'm not going farther in this, but we're found in Christ, right? It's living by the spirit, not by the flesh and crucifying and being resurrected with Christ and the gospel.

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It's just not Jesus crucified, but Jesus resurrected. And so Sam Albury, Christopher Yuan, Rosaria Butterfield, formerly

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Jackie Hill Perry would be column three, where, yeah, I'm same sex attracted, but God gives me grace to not act it out, right?

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Now, the last interview that I just heard from Rosaria, she said that she has no desires.

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So her experience is column four that she's been fully transformed, but she operates in column three with the way she presents the gospel and what have you.

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Where Sam Albury, you know, would admit and Christopher Yuan, and I just met Christopher Yuan in person.

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He came to the church on a mat now in October and, you know, he's still same sex attracted.

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He'll beat around the question, but it's there. And we've got

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Preston Sprinkle though, and Jackie Hill Perry partnering with him now in column two, where it's the gay identity and Preston Sprinkle coming to Minnesota is a big deal.

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And the Assemblies of God, the largest Assemblies of God church sponsoring him is a big deal.

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That's bringing in a spiritual authority that's aligned with the enemy. And what do we do with that, you know?

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And so to get back to the question, it's

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Christopher Yuan. Someone asked him at the Q &A part, you know,

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Christopher, have you experienced any canceling, you know, social cancels being canceled socially or persecution for your book?

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And he's like, no, you know, I really haven't. And I know that other people in this space have, but I don't, you know,

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I don't know. No, I haven't. I don't know why. And afterwards I went up to him as a brother. I said,

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Christopher, the reason that you're not being canceled is because you don't have anything that's cancelable.

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You're not, the message that you can be a celibate gay Christian and fidelity in marriage isn't anything that the world is going to argue.

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It's acceptable to the world to be a gay celibate. Or to be, you know, monogamous in marriage, that's the moral issue.

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And I told him, I said, when you start preaching that Jesus Christ can transform the homosexual and that restore you to heterosexual as God designed you, that's where you get discrimination.

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That's conversion therapy. Yes. Jesus Christ has converted me from the death and sin that I was experiencing into life.

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And I'm an adopted child of God. Yes. I was a child of Satan and now I'm a child of God. So yes, there has been a conversion and it's been a conversion of my heart, my mind.

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And when several people say it's not about heterosexuality, it's about holiness.

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Um, first off we speak in spiritual thoughts and we, or we think in spiritual thoughts and we speak in spiritual words.

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That's, I think Galatians 5 somewhere, I think. Um, and to take the word holiness, which is a

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Christian thought and word, and then to take heterosexuality, which is a concept of the world and put it together.

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It's just, it's bad if you're mixing water and oil. We heterosexuality, sexual orientation is the world psychology, putting lipstick on a pig.

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It's we've gone so many generations. Like in my walk,

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I've had to unravel and ask God because I bear the fruit of sin, which was death.

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And when you bear fruit, guess what? That fruit came from a tree or a vine, which came from a seed, which was watered.

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And like, I've been wanting to unravel. Where did I make the errors Lord? Like I, and it's not

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LGBT issues, but anything in your life. You know, if you're abusing your wife, there is a seed that was planted in your life and Satan watered it.

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And it's bearing fruit of, of not loving your wife. Right. Right. And, and if you go to Jesus and Jesus transforms your heart and reveals to you that you were abused child and you have a generational curse and you want to break that generational curse under Jesus and you forgive your parents for abusing you.

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And then you're released of that sin because it's come under the authority of Christ and you've been transformed.

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That's all that I'm talking about. It's, it just happens to be that God or whatever, this is what

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I've come through. This is my lived experience. I can't change what I've gone through. And so Jesus has transformed this and that's the message that you're not allowed to talk about.

28:40

Well, in scripture, you see there's men, there's women, there's responsibilities men have and women have, uh, when it comes to parenting, uh, even service in the church and society.

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I mean, they're totally different, different, uh, designs that God has made both equal and worth.

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And, and the, I think you're right. The heterosexuality, homosexuality, these categorizations are not the, it's like we've kind of imbibed those many of us.

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And then we go back and read them into the Bible and try to, instead of starting with, okay, these are the biblical categories and then holding

29:15

Freudian psychology or wherever we're getting this accountable to what the Bible has to say. And so, um, and so all these people kind of floating around out there in these different categorizations you just mentioned, it seems like to some extent they've capitulated to definitions that aren't coming from the

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Bible. They're reading, they have a distorted lens as they're looking at reality. And so what you're saying is that, um, look, look at yourself the way the

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Bible talks about you. You know, you're a man. If you're a man, you're a man. Uh, there, there's not like this spectrum of between man and woman and you're falling somewhere.

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You're a man. God's designed you a certain way and there are responsibilities and desires and all kinds of things associated with that.

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And so that's the starting point. And then I understand it's a, it's a challenge to when you believe lies to, uh, climb that hill, but then, but you have to start somewhere.

30:08

You had, if you want to climb it, you can't, there's no shortcut. So, um, so, so when you, um, have someone reach out to you and say like,

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Darren, Darren, I'm trying to fight this, you know, like, like what, what's the process?

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What do you go through with them? Um, well, it's connecting to Jesus.

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So, um, we're switching into ministry versus the other. Oh, if you don't want to leave what we were talking about, keep going, keep going.

30:34

Sorry. Okay. Well, back to, to that, what distinguishes the message that I'm bringing versus others is talking about, you know, what we just said with psychology is that our minds we've been normalized into homosexuality already by our language and our thoughts.

30:54

When was the last time you heard someone say sodomy or sodomite or effeminate, right?

31:02

Um, and so the, the word of Ben in our lexicon the whole time I've been alive. And so we have to back it way up and homosexuality.

31:13

Um, when you're talking psychology and when that word was invented, it was invented to describe the behaviors of men who sodomize each other in contrast to heterosexuality, men who had normal relations with women.

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And at the time they did see heterosexuality as normal. And so they, the psychologists at that time, we're trying to figure out why are they doing this?

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What's the root of it? Um, and the psychology today with the

31:42

APA, both APAs, medical association, those kinds of things, they're wholly owned subsidiaries of the

31:49

LGBT. Um, if you look up, I mean, I'm going to spend 2022 breaking this down.

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So if not two years, but, um, look up division 44 of the

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APA, everything that has to do with human sexuality goes through that division 44, which is the

32:09

LGBT. So when they had their task force in 2009 to explore, um, sexuality and whether or not conversion therapy is a thing, they didn't allow anybody that believe that change is possible to even beyond the task force.

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And so I've gotten to know over the last five years, the psychologists who have been battling for the

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Christians, um, and fighting the conversion therapy bands, which I have evidence that the conversion therapy bands have always been a proxy attack against the church.

32:43

I believe that. Yes. And they literally, the spokesperson has said it at Google headquarters.

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It's on the internet. I'll give you a link. You can, I clipped it down to one and a half minutes, but it's there.

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And, and so we have to speak of Jesus in the terms that scripture uses, not in the terms that the world uses.

33:08

I didn't go from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Jackie Hill Perry recently said that she's a functional heterosexual and she admits that she still has same sex desires, but that's not her identity.

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Her identity is not in her sexuality. It's in Jesus. And she admits that she said,

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God, you don't have to deal with that issue. You know, I just want to know you. And I kind of butchered how she said it, but that's the spirit of it, if you will.

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And I've got that video too. And it was recent, it was within the last month. And she's admitted that she's still same sex attracted, but that God gives her grace.

33:47

And she's functionally heterosexual because she's married a man and has kids. And so, you know, some of the doctrines would say that that's a mixed orientation marriage.

33:58

Well, no, it's my, I don't have an orientation. God. And she'd say,

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God's not in the business. And she says this, God's not in the business of making people heterosexual or changing heterosexuality, homosexuality into heterosexuality.

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And when she said that, you know, Jackie, like you doubt

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God, we were literally created male and female. He gave us marriage for procreation so that we could carry on the glory of God, which is we're image bearers.

34:28

You know, like, this is good news. Jackie, you were actually created heterosexual. You doubt

34:34

God can heal you in this space, but he can. And if you listen to the last few interviews, to me, it's clear she's doubting

34:44

God. And she says, well, God doesn't change this area. So like you said, she has a lens that she can't see this.

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I believe she's saved. I just believe that she's still bound. And I want her to be set free because she is so articulate.

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She has a gift of communication. And I want her to be teaching the whole gospel.

35:07

But now she's went from column three to column two and partnering with Preston and in his, you know, you're gay and that's just the way you are.

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And the enemy is going to keep eating at her. You know, she's going the wrong direction. And my prayers for her to be set free and to believe that God actually, you know, when you're in the spirit, but anyways, it's more doctrine.

35:29

And so, yeah, to move on to your next question of how do you even deal with somebody that, you know, is struggling?

35:38

Well, first off, where are they in the columns? What is their identity? What do they believe about scripture?

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You know, do they believe that they're gay? Where do they want to go and how fast do they want to get there?

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And what is the resolution? Have they gotten over pride? And your assessment of my testimony,

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I'm going to have to take that and pray on that because that I think really spoke to me about breaking my pride.

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And so where is the person? And through the whole thing, the first thing we have to do before we get to doctrines and sexuality and all that kind of stuff, we've got to get them connected to Jesus, you know, to have a real relationship with Christ.

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And what does that look like? What does the prayer life look like? What does the Bible study look like? What does the accountability look like?

36:28

It's not just problem solving and jumping in and diagnosing. You know, yes,

36:33

I agree with everybody when we say sin is the issue. We can all agree that they would all say that.

36:39

Yeah. Yeah. But where are the barriers that are preventing them from connecting to Jesus?

36:47

Mine was pornography. You know, as much as I love Jesus and Jesus is there, I'm sorry, but Jesus isn't going to relate in a space where you're dealing with where you are sinning.

37:01

Right. Jesus isn't going to come into that space. Well, OK. Yes, he will.

37:07

Well, I know articulating what I what am I trying to say here? I think what you're saying is if you are walking in a pattern of disobedience and expecting

37:18

God then to somehow come in and a sin that's actually the root sin that's behind a lot of this, which which for you, it sounds like I mean, it's for all of us.

37:29

It's pride. It's not at the root of it. Yes, all our sins, whatever shade they are evil.

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But pride is the thing behind it that says I I'm going to do it my way. Think about it in the terms

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I want to think about it. I'm not going to submit to what God says. So if you if you're if that's not broken, if you're still kind of like operating in a category of pride in some way, you want to keep some of it to yourself, whether knowingly or unknowingly, then

37:56

I think I agree with what you're saying. Like, don't expect that God's going to take away the consequences.

38:03

My camera just I just realized so literally just died. It literally just died. So I'm going to I'm going to let you close it out a little bit here and just tell me kind of what you do for people who come to you.

38:15

Yeah. So in in that relating to them, you know, when you go in a hospital, if you're bleeding out your neck, they're going to fix that before they get to, you know, your hangnail on your toe.

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Not that homosexuality is a hangnail on the toe, but, you know, connecting them to Jesus, doing an assessment, prayerfully considering what the

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Lord has for them and where they want to go and just coming alongside them and being a brother, giving them space, praying and agreeing with scripture with them.

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And, you know, scripture says that we bear one another's burdens, but each has to carry their own load.

38:57

And it it has come down to I've noticed that some people don't want to change and they'll straight up admit it.

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Like I literally have had people say, I'm not going to go there. And and so that's where they're at.

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But if they're hungry for the Lord, if they're humble and teachable and like they're not resisting good doctrine, then they're going to find healing.

39:30

You know, the research shows if you spend a year, you know, I'm just quoting

39:35

Freedom Realized by Stephen Black. He's been in the ministry for 35 years. If you stay in a program, and to me, it's just with your brothers in Christ and seeking truth in a year with people that are able to help you through this kind of thing, you'll experience change.

39:55

And so, yeah, it's it's about connection to Jesus and connection to each other.

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If we don't have this connection, this connection won't work. And then, you know, like in my testimony, it was fear of women.

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It was being shamed, body shaming. It was the abuse of my stepmother over me, emasculating me and my father, allowing that to happen and actually agreeing with it and forgiving them and and breaking those vows.

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So there are causes. I believe scripture says how we are created and what we're created for.

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And therefore, the enemy comes to kill, steal and destroy and to bind us up. And I do believe that we're not born desiring sodomy.

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I just don't. And I don't believe that we're born in the wrong body, that you are a male in a female body or vice versa, a female in a male body.

40:58

When it comes to transgender religion, I'm a Christian through and through. And I've experienced scripture being infallible and actually being the life.

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You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Back that up. If you remain my disciple and in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

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And so in ministry with Agape First, we are connecting people to Jesus and to the word.

41:28

And that's that's the first order of business. So, amen. Well, hey,

41:34

I appreciate you sharing so much, everything that you've just shared. And if people want to go check out your ministry and even contribute in any way or get help, darrenmelblog .com

41:46

or voiceofthevoiceless .info, right? Agape First. Yeah, I'll put my, we can put my link out there.

41:54

I'm a self -funded missionary as of 2022. So, yep.

41:59

Yeah. And there is a donate section on Voice of the Voiceless. So you can go and you can give if you are so inclined.

42:06

I just appreciate it so much. We're probably going to divide this into two podcasts because it's so much, but it's so good.

42:12

Uh, Darren, let keep us in the loop. Let me know kind of how things go during 2022.

42:19

And we'll be praying for you. Thank you. I covet your prayers. That's the thank you. God bless.