A Few Reflections on Forty Years, John Pavlovitz and the Sin of Homophobia

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name's James White and I'm going to tell you something. I have a sneaking hunch

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I'm going to have to put the splash screen up at some point in the next few minutes. And here's what's going on.

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I'm in Tucumcari, New Mexico. And I just did Iron Sharpens Iron with Chris Arnzen.

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And about halfway through the program, a big old thunderstorm blew in.

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Everything looked fine when I got here, but it came fast. And we're using

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Starlink right now. And it started lightning and rain and wind and everything else.

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And I could see that little receiver out there. I just set it out.

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I wasn't expecting weather. Well, it's moving back and forth, getting propelled with rain.

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Rock solid. Thundercell is gone. Now it's becoming uber windy.

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And like I said, it's not even on truly level ground. So if things start going wonky,

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Rich, just let me know. And I'll throw the splash screen up and find something heavy to put down there on the base of that thing.

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I'd feel a lot better if I went ahead and did that. But I'm also nervous about something else.

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I'm letting you in on all the background secrets, okay, of what it's like to do this stuff live as you travel around the

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United States. I don't know what the guy who pulled in next to me,

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I don't know what his problem is, but he doesn't like this spot over here. And he keeps backing it up, and it's not all that far from our receiver.

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And now he just left. I don't know if he's going to come back and try again, run over the receiver in the process.

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I don't know. We'll find out. But, hey, that's how things work, is you deal with things as they are.

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So, Rich, if it goes wonky, let me know.

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I think I'll know how to fix it fairly quickly. Though, now that I think on it,

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I'm not 100 % certain what I would put on it anyways. But I could come up with something to do so.

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But there you go. Facebook has closed captions for you.

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Oh, okay. So if I start doing Greek, it's going to totally freak out?

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Okay. So hi to everybody on Facebook. I don't use Facebook. Apologia is wedded to Facebook.

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I mean, that is how they communicate. And I don't even have the notification stuff. The notification stuff does not make any noise on my phone.

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So if you ever try to send anything to me via Facebook, first of all, if you're not one of my Facebook friends,

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I'm not going to see it. And secondly, EMVR, I'm not going to see it. So just let it go.

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Anyway, I just did, like I said, I'm doing about four hours driving right now.

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That doesn't sound like a lot unless you're doing it every day. And Harry's back again.

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I don't understand it, but okay. Anyway, I've mentioned before, you know, it's a little prayer request.

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I've somehow injured my left arm pretty badly. Pain is an everyday thing with this.

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Torn rotator cuff, torn bicep tendon. They didn't go down to the elbow, but I can assure you they did.

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And there would just be more torn stuff. And the thing that makes it, that exacerbates it the most is driving.

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So I'm having to learn a different way of driving. You know, driving instead of putting my arm up here, down here.

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And about four hours is about the best I can do. Or I'm going to be paying big time for it that entire night.

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So I have sort of arranged things around that, and that's perfectly fine.

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I just, we just had the opportunity with Chris to be talking about Sean Hannity's comments on his program a while back where he basically was saying to Republicans, you've got to back off on the abortion stuff or we're never going to win the election again.

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And so I can imagine what Jeff Durbin, how he would respond to that.

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And in fact, I have to wonder if they didn't respond to that on Apology Radio.

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Maybe didn't cross their radar screen, I don't know. But we did a two -hour program on that. And I'm on my way home.

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I get home on Friday. This will have been a 26 -day trip. I'll be home for less than a month.

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And then a 33 -day trip, much longer trip going all the way up to as far north as Eli, Minnesota.

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In late June, pretty much all of July. And then the next big trip after that will be out to G3 as well as to a

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Mid -Atlantic Reform Conference the weekend before G3. And hopefully through Louisiana on the way back from G3.

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But I've got to get back in time for our big 40th anniversary celebration right at the beginning of October.

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So lots of stuff going on. Then, of course, we go to St. Charles in the beginning of December.

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And I'm looking at it, and I'm going to be on the road four and a half, five months this year. That's a lot.

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That's a lot. But I'm going to tell you something. I wasn't going to start with this, but I'm going to anyways.

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I've had just such amazing experiences on these last number of trips.

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Getting into churches, I've had a number of people come up to me with tears in their eyes.

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And even though I was a hospital chaplain, I never learned. I never found the emotional switch to turn stuff off.

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And when people come up with tears in their eyes, I'm like, uh -oh, hold on. And it's normally something along the lines of you'll just never know how in this incredibly dark time in my life, very difficult time in my life, time of confusion,

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God and his providence brought me to Alpha Omega Ministries and brought me to the dividing line and gave me hope from the scriptures.

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Not because of you, not because of your backgrounds or anything like that, but you taught me to trust

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God. You taught me to trust his word. You taught me that his word is trustworthy, that you taught me about the trinity.

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You taught me about the sovereignty of God. You gave me a basis for trusting the scriptures and how they've been transmitted to us.

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And I'll never get over that. People always say, I know you hear this over and over again.

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And I do, but it never gets old. It's never the exact same thing.

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And I want all of you to understand, even when I'm rushed, maybe you're rushed, it's the end of a long night,

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I hear what you're saying, and I'm so deeply thankful that you take the time to express these things to me.

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Something that's really blowing me away are the kids. There was this sweet kid.

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I mean, you know, I might have it here. And that's the nice thing about having your own studio.

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Yeah, here we go. Here we go. And I'm pretty sure I can show you here.

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Check out this kid. All right. Okay, so here we are.

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That's his dad in the background. He was still moving. He came up to me, I think it was either

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Friday night or Saturday night. It was Friday night, I'm pretty sure. There in prior

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Oklahoma. And Rich, we need to figure out how, show me how to do picture in picture.

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I know it can do it. I see the little thingies there. But I'm still too small.

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I'm still too small. It's a teeny tiny little thing. Anyway, he came up to me, and I could tell he was really, really nervous.

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And he actually had tears in his eyes. He was scared. He's grown up watching me.

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They watched me all the time in their family. And then his dad said, and by the way, he's a

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Skillet fan. And so I'm like, oh, well, hey. And I whipped my phone out, and I showed him a picture from just a few months ago when

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Skillet came through Phoenix. And me and my wife with the band and stuff, and I said, hey, how about I take a picture of me, and I send it to John.

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And so I did. I sent that picture I just showed you. I sent it to John. And that changed everything.

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No more tears in the eyes. No more fear. But just so many, they were like teenagers.

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They were a bunch of teenagers who came. And they're like, we've grown up listening to you. Your voice is something we have heard over and over and over again.

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And it's really neat to see you in person. It's not that you're saying anything different now. And I do appreciate that.

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I really do. It's not that you're saying something different now. Hey, air conditioning, yay. But to hear it live type of situation.

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When I think back 40 years to Kelly and I and Mike and Linda Beliveau, Kelly and I at the time lived in my parents' garage.

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We had converted it into a little apartment. And we had one tract that wasn't even fully orthodox, as I would discover later on.

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We just wanted to witness to Mormons. We just wanted Mormons to know about the true

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Christ. And that they had been deceived. The Book of Mormon wasn't true. And Joseph Smith wasn't a prophet.

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And that's all we wanted to do. And part of me goes, I am so thankful that God does not tell us what the future is going to be.

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Because I would have been so overwhelmed if someone had told me then, you're going to travel the world.

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You're going to debate over 180 times.

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And you're going to debate all sorts of different topics on homosexuality and gay mirage.

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And I would have been so frightened.

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I wouldn't have known what to do. But God doesn't do those things. He leads us along and he gives us only what we can handle at any one point in time.

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And so now as we, as I'm traveling around, I just,

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I'm seeing, I'm getting to see the fruit of 40 years of labor.

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Because you might say, yeah, but most of those people, they didn't know anything about you in the 1980s. That's true, but you need to understand something.

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And this is important for all of you who are young in the faith, young in ministry.

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Hear what I'm going to say here. I'm not sure if Rich was, yeah,

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I think it was right around the time that Rich had started working with us. Not working as in being a part of staff.

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There were a number of years when Rich was our biggest donor. There were a number of times my teeny tiny little paycheck pretty much came directly from his checkbook.

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But it was right around that time when we called him Slime. We were in this office on 16th

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Street and Camelback in Phoenix. And, oh man, the carpet wasn't even tacked down to the floor.

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You could trip over it. It really had a funky smell. It was old, old.

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And there was a conference room that you could sign up for.

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And so we started doing these little training things where I would put together notes and we'd invite people.

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Mike and I found that carpet out back of the Baptist Foundation. Well, yeah, I bet so.

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I bet so. Well, that's because I lived outside, out back of the Baptist Foundation at that point in a little $225 a month apartment.

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Anyway, I remember so clearly this one night that we advertised to whom.

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We were just kids. I was in my early to mid -20s. But I put a lot of work into putting together notes and I was going to do something on the

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New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses, which, by the way, is a rather important subject.

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And in witnessing to Jehovah's Witnesses, you've got to know about the NWT. You've got to know about the curves it's going to throw you and mistranslations in it.

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And so we had copies made. I don't remember if my dad made the copies or if by then we had a photocopier.

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I remember that was the biggest investment we had ever made was to lease a photocopier.

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Man, that was big. I remember what that thing looked like. And it was supposed to be 7 o 'clock.

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And so I'm down there and the lights are on. I've got the seats out and I've got the handouts.

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7 .05, 7 .10, 7 .15, about 7 .20.

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You put the chairs back where they're supposed to be and you take your handouts and you put them back in a pile and you turn the lights out.

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You take stuff down to your office and put it away and you get in. I don't know what

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I had back then. It was probably that 1974 Sunbeetle, a little Volkswagen. Maybe it was the 64

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Dodge Dart. No two body panels were the same color. And you go home to your little wife and very little kids.

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Not sure where we were at that point. And driving out to the radio station way out in like Levine or wherever that place was out west of the city and doing a

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Saturday afternoon radio program. Nobody listens to radio on a Saturday afternoon. But we'd go out there and we'd do our thing.

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And those years of just faithfully trying to do what

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God gave you the opportunity to do, those are why we are able to do what we do now.

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That's why The Dividing Line has a global audience. That's why there are people watching this program all around the world.

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And we've never spent a dime to advertise this program. But it was the 1980s and the 1990s.

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That's what built that foundation. And we didn't have some big... I didn't have some five -year plan, ten -year plan, any of the rest of that stuff.

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No. We just tried to do the best we could with each opportunity that God gave us.

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Be faithful in the little things, you get to be faithful in the bigger things. And that's what we're doing now.

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We really haven't changed. For a while, the big things were

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London, and Kiev, and Johannesburg, and Sydney.

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That was great. I'm thankful I got that exposure to the rest of the world.

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Samara, Russia, wow. 28 degrees below zero. I'll never forget that.

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But that didn't change the fact that still our focus has always been the local church, people in the local churches.

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And seeking to encourage faithfulness, not only by ministers, but by the people in the church.

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Because they're the ones that are going to be doing apologetics. They're the ones that are going to be reaching the

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Mormon missionaries when they knock on the door, the Jehovah's Witnesses when they come by. We can't do that. But they can.

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And we can help to prepare them. And so here I sit, watching the wind blowing like anything, feeling the unit moving back and forth.

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Honestly, the only thing I'm thinking about on that level is, boy, I wish I had put that satellite receiver down a little bit more firmly than I did.

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But here we are. And some people might say, well, you're not doing what you were doing only a few years ago.

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I'd say we're doing more. And we're seeing the fruit of all those things that we've done for years and years and years and years.

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And I'm going to tell you something. The Lord has protected us. We'll never see in this life all the ways in which the

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Lord protected us. But there have already been things.

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Rich and I will be sitting around talking, and we'll go, hey, remember when that one guy came along, and he had all this money, and la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

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And we just never did that. We never went after those types of people.

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We had enough experience with them early on to realize, man, that always comes with huge strings.

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And I remember the Lord gave me the opportunity to go over to California to a well -known big ministry.

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And I've told the story before. I remember I got there, and I was ushered into this room, and I was just sitting there waiting for the big -name guy to come out.

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And I'm looking at this big whiteboard, and I'm listening to what's going on around me because I don't have a staff.

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Rich and I, we is the staff. And on the whiteboard, almost everything on the whiteboard is donor, contacts, maintenance, follow -up.

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It's all fundraising stuff. And I'm just watching all of this and going, we're never really going to be able to do this type of thing.

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We just don't have the skill set to do this, and I'm just uncomfortable in that context.

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I really, really, really am. And so we made commitments early on.

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We're never going to be a church. We're not going to compete with the church. We are here to help the church and to be an aid, a resource to the church.

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But we're going to require that the people that are involved with us be a part of a church.

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And we're just never going to do what a lot of other people were comfortable doing. If they're comfortable doing it,

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God bless them. I'm not going to sit there and judge somebody else.

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I can only look at us. But now, 40 years in, I look back, and I look around me, and sometimes when the thought comes up, why aren't other people saying the things you're saying?

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The answer is because we did it differently in the past. We did it differently in the past.

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And so I can go ahead and address controversial topics that other people will stay far away from because they can't address it because they know this portion of their necessary income comes from a person or groups of persons who will be offended by that.

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And then you've got this group over here and you've got that group over there. I can't do that. I'm not smart enough to do that.

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We don't do that. And that's why we can address the things that we do.

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And people are thankful for that. It's not because we were super smart.

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It's the Lord protected us. The Lord gave guidance, not in the sense of voices from heaven or anything else.

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The Lord opened doors. The Lord closed doors. Sometimes the Lord slammed doors. But the result, 40 years in apologetics ministry is a long time.

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It's a long, long time. And I was thinking about, and Rich, you've probably already beaten me to this, but I know we have some old file folders.

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I think they're in my office on the same wall as the studio.

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We have some old file folder boxes with a bunch of the old dividing lines that my dad printed.

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I'd write these newsletters up. Man, I don't know how big the biggest one was. They got pretty big.

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I think we even had a theological journal for a while. But, man,

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I think we need to dig some of those out, some of the pictures we could show, even on the program.

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And, again, you all may have beaten me to this already, but it was just something I was thinking of. Because I look back at some of this stuff and I go, oh, yeah, that guy.

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I remember that guy. I wonder where he is now. And stuff like that.

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And you start thinking about all the witnessing in Salt Lake City and Mesa. I'm sure there's pictures in there of us at the

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District Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses. Remember the big signs we had forever? Good grief, where did we store those things?

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I don't even know where they went once we moved to your place. We had these big signs that we had made for the

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District Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses. And that's always during the summer. Oh, that was lots of fun when it was at the

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Civic Plaza in Phoenix. You'd literally be hiding in the shadow of your sign so you wouldn't broil to death out there.

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Yeah, 40 years. But you had to prove yourself faithful in the little things before you can do the other stuff.

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And so, yeah, it's been a great trip. I'm very, very thankful for the acquaintances that I've made, people

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I hadn't seen for years. But then again, it's after I speak, these lines form.

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And it's that time that you just hear amazing things and you just can't help but sit there and go,

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I could never have imagined how the Lord was going to use this. There was no internet when we started.

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You couldn't have even... I could not have even thought about how, when

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I first went to South Africa and went to Potsdam, here's a homeschool family that comes up to me and they've been following us for years.

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There was no... that didn't exist when we started. That wasn't even a possibility.

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So it is truly amazing. The Lord knows exactly what He's doing, even when we don't have a clue what it is going on.

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Just try to be faithful. And there you go. So I knew

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I would forget about that. There was a screenshot, and I can't remember now what it was.

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No, it wasn't that one. Well, I'll just go with this and we'll be okay today.

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I saw a tweet go by, and I was reminded once again of the fact that I had to go to a very leftist, well, leftist now, it was certainly to the left of me at the time, seminary, because that's all there was in Phoenix at the time.

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I went to Fuller Theological Seminary. I had to study not only under professors who were well to my left, though I have said repeatedly that Fuller drew a lot of their professors from Grand Canyon.

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So I had the same Greek professor I had in college and a few things like that. But I did have

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Fuller professors that came over from Pasadena. And I had to struggle being the conservative, and it wasn't enjoyable.

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Jeff Neal and I got together a few weeks ago, and we both remembered the same event where one night after I had already graduated from Fuller, he was a year behind me, and in the class that he had been in that night, they had been mocking

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Reformed theology. And he showed up on my doorstep of our little apartment in tears, and we both remembered that.

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And at the time, you're just sort of like, why is the Lord having me do it this way?

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There were all sorts of seminaries I could have gone to if we had moved, but the

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Lord never gave us the freedom to do that. And so years down the road, you're like, okay.

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And now today, when you look at what we are now calling progressivism and certain big names on Twitter, a lot of evangelicals just don't even know how to start to understand where these people are coming from.

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But I understand where they're coming from, because I had to be exposed to all that stuff a long, long time ago.

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And so there's a fellow on... He's on Twitter, he's got his own website, and who doesn't?

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There's lots of dogs that have websites today. But there's a fellow by the name of John Pavlovitz.

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John Pavlovitz. I looked him up. A lot of these guys we'll talk about there, they were in the evangelical church and they were doing the church thing, and then they realized it was all not what

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Jesus would have taught. And so now they're doing this progressivist home church type thing or whatever.

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He was, as far as I can tell from his own website, he was a youth minister.

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Now, that, by the way, I hate to tell all of you youth ministers out there, is not a biblical description.

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But for like 10 years, and at least among Southern Baptists, if you're a youth minister for more than five years, you might as well go into IT.

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You missed it. Missed the train somewhere. But he had his deconversion thing.

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Okay. And he put out a...

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If you go look him up on Twitter, or if you don't want to, you shouldn't have to. But he will put out these wildly progressivist stuff, just like that Kevin Young guy.

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I've not seen both of them in the same room at the same time, so I'm not sure they're not the same person. But he put out an article on...

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No, I don't... This says March 3rd and March 22nd of this year. I'm not sure which one, but evidently it got retweeted or something.

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And it's called The Sin of Homophobic and Transphobic Christians.

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The Sin of Homophobic and Transphobic Christians. Dear conservative, homophobic, and transphobic

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Christians, I want to express my sincere regrets at how our recent exchanges have left you feeling.

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It seems I've offended you in some way, and I want to apologize for that. I'm sorry you feel persecuted when I confront you, that you feel unfairly judged by my pointed words, or that it seems like I'm being purposely cruel, as that isn't my intention.

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It's just that sometimes my faith gets the best of me, and in my sincere desire to help people, I can come off a bit abrasive, or rude, or intolerant.

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Come to think of it, I guess I am intolerant of sin. Your sin. You see, that's all this is.

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I know what God wants for you, and for the world, and as someone aligned with God, I feel singularly burdened to make sure that you're aligned with me.

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I know you didn't start out this way. I know you were influenced, persuaded, groomed, if you will, by the people who raised you, and the media you've consumed, the culture you've grown up in, and you think this is what

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God wants. Actually, it's a perversion. The teachings of Jesus are actually pretty clear on this, and if you could see what

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I see, you'd agree that what I'm seeking is the best for you. I need you to understand that this isn't an attack on a

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Christian. I simply can't support the sin of your homophobic and transphobic lifestyle. I know that you weren't born this way, and that for whatever reason, you made the choice to reject

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God's plan for you. You see what he's doing. I hope you're following this. And so in love, I can't allow for that. What is actually an act of kindness, a sacred gesture?

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To not confront you with your blind hatred would be the most unloving act of all. To just leave you alone, let you live as you please, and to allow you to continue this blatant rebellion.

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Well, I would feel like a really terrible Christian. So every time my words and manners seem intrusive, every time you feel violated by my invasion of your privacy, every time it seems

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I've completely disregarded your humanity, forgive me, I only have your best interests at heart. I'm hopeful you will receive these words in the spirit in which they're offered, and that they love you enough to change, and that they love you.

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I wouldn't want to resort to actually passing legislation to force these things on you. I mean, we can't control people's bodies with laws that reflect our religious beliefs.

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That would be theocracy, which of course, Jesus wanted no part of. All this to say, this is up to you.

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You can fix all this with a little help. You can change. You can move away from the sins of your fears and phobias.

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You can find freedom from the evil that has taken hold of you. You just need to come to Jesus and repent. Read his teachings.

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It will become clear. If it isn't clear, you haven't prayed enough. You can leave your sin behind. Again, please don't be offended.

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I'm just speaking the truth in love, which one day you'll thank me for. Homophobic and transphobic Christians, you can pray your hate away.

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Note, in case it's not obvious, this is satire tongue -in -cheek. It's trying to help the homophobic and transphobic

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Christians reading this to understand how hurtful and condescending their assertions are as they mistreat the

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LGBTQ community and try to both pass the buck to God and to pretend they are being loving when they are not.

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It's the furthest thing from calling gender identity and sexual orientation a choice, but rather it is saying the active hatred of LGBTQ people by conservative

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Christians is a choice. This point was to expose and confront the fraudulence of phobic

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Christians who hate and persecute people and then pass the buck to a Jesus who never once condemned anyone for their gender and orientation.

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Again, if the piece doesn't read consistently with that, I apologize. Now, so here you have satire.

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But here you have a real insight into what you have to be and to believe to be an affirming

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Christian to accept the existence of the LGBTQ community as if it is actually a community rather than an alphabet soup describing numerous forms of sexual perversity and rebellion creating sins, all of which

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Jesus died for on the cross. We are heading, in case you haven't noticed,

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I hope this doesn't concern you too much, but we are heading for degradation month.

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Degradation month is the month of June. I don't know when this became,

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I don't know when this started. I don't remember. In fact, it's funny. We're working on a project that will allow, we hope and pray, in the not too distant future, you to search, digitally search, the dividing line.

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And this is going back, I think we have archival copies, at least to 2001, maybe a little bit earlier than that, but I don't remember exactly when it is.

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But nearly a quarter century worth of me talking. It's a little scary to me, by the way.

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It should be scary to anybody. But it is just a reminder of the fact that everything we say and type will be judged someday.

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For me, it will just be a little bit sooner because we're doing it this way. But we did a search, and I had always wondered, when did

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I first use the term Uber rights in regards to homosexuality and the homosexual movement?

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That they do not want equal rights, they want Uber rights. And it came up, okay, 1998 plus the stuff from the 1980s.

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Well, okay, it's going to be a lot. It came up with 2001 as the earliest place where I'd mentioned it.

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But the funny thing is, when it comes up in that 2001 thing, I actually am saying, as I've been saying for a long time, they do not want equal rights, they want

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Uber rights. So who knows when I first used it.

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But I don't remember when June was declared Pride Month.

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But honestly, it wasn't... Before 2010,

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I can never think of anything like what you see at Target today. I mean, there's a

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Target right next to my house. And it's the most convenient place to go.

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And I remember last year, in July or August, I was getting cat food.

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I have two and a half kitties. We have two kitties and a stray that we sort of take care of.

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He's actually starting to wander away a bit, but hey, whatever. Our kitty is getting old.

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And my favorite kitty, I'm literally hoping he holds on till I get home.

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I may have to take care of things over the next few weeks. I hope not, but it's possible.

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Anyway, I was getting kitty food and I turn around and there is a section in the pet food section at Target with gay pride stuff for your pets.

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This wasn't during June, I haven't seen it there. Evidently, these were the leftovers because I'm sure that sold real well.

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But there it was, and I'm staring at rainbow -themed stuff that you can get for your doggie and your kitty and your fishies or whatever.

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And I'm just stunned. I don't even know what words to say.

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And the stuff that I've seen about what Target's doing this year, I don't know that I have any choice.

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I'm just going to have to go no more. I've tried to put no more on.

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But where do you go? Because if it's a corporation, it's been taken over by this stuff.

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It doesn't matter who it is. They're all doing the same thing. But the stuff they're doing this time around is just satanic.

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And I mean literally satanic. I mean, they hired some satanist.

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They've got stuff that says Satan respects pronouns. I mean, you're just like, what?

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It is thrown in your face during the entire month of June. And I'm reminded of Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah and the description that is given that his righteous soul was tortured daily by what he saw around him.

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And that's where we are. That is where we are. We are at that point.

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And the question, what

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I want to just close out the program with, we've got about 15 minutes left, I think. We can either pray that God will use these

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June experiences to sanctify us, to make us thankful for his truth, thankful for his law, thankful for the goodness of his creation, husbands, thankful for that wife, that woman that God has brought into your life and her patience in putting up with you, wives, that husband, provider, protector for our families, our children, our churches, and the fact that we know beyond all doubt that what we are seeing will not last in God's world, that there is a day coming when it will all be wiped away.

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There will be no more Pride Months, no more Drag Queens.

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I'm sure you're all aware of the story that broke yesterday, right? Dodgers, Los Angeles Dodgers, apologizing to, what was the name of that?

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Oh, they're just disgusting sexual perverts. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, that's right.

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The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These, this group of perverted men, their entire reason for existence is the mockery of Christianity as a whole and Roman Catholicism in particular because they dress as nuns.

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The monastic movement, cloistered nuns, this is not apostolic, this is not what the apostles envisioned or taught.

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But when I think of nuns,

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I don't think, there's, my heart is broken for them.

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My heart is broken for them. And my hope, my deep hope is that for many of them, they are ignorant of the substance of the teaching of the

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Roman Catholic Church on what justification is, relationship with God.

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And my hope is that many of them just have a simple faith in Jesus and they've got all this other stuff in the way of growing in faith.

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That's why my heart is broken for them. But I hope and pray that for many, they just have a simple faith in Jesus and all that other stuff is just so much stuff that gets in the way.

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Anyway, these people are sexual perverts. They are mocking the words of Jesus.

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They specifically have a line, go and sin some more. So they're taking specific words of Jesus, perverting them.

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They're mocking anything that is righteous, true, good, honest, just.

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And the Los Angeles Dodgers apologized to them for having,

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I think they had been invited, then they were disinvited from Pride Night in June at a

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Los Angeles Dodgers home game. And now they've extended an apology and they've been invited to Pride Night at the

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Dodgers game in Los Angeles. I hope that stadium is pretty much empty that night.

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And I hope the only people there are just a bunch of flaming sexual perverts so that even the baseball teams are like,

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I never want to do this ever again. That'd be wonderful. That'd be wonderful.

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But yeah, it's easy for me to understand why I just, I can't do professional sports anymore.

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They're all the same. They're all run by the same organizations. They all bow and scrape to a tiny little minority of sexual perversity.

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They don't care about the rest of us. It's just amazing how quickly this has happened.

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And everybody who had said in the past, hey, you go this direction and this is what's going to, oh, you're nuts.

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There is no, there isn't any kind of slippery slope.

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Well, here we are. And the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are prancing around on the baseball diamond.

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Baseball, apple pie, Chevrolet used to hold us all together.

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Everything that held this culture together is under attack, so as to destroy the culture.

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And this nation was at one point the biggest barrier to the kind of globalist culture of death movement that Klaus Schwab and all of his satanic minions ever dreamed of.

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And they're very successfully taking all this stuff out. Anyway, as we go into June, we can mope and be discouraged and just look forward to July 1st when some semblance of normalcy might approach again.

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Or we can recognize this is the day in which, this is what we've been called to deal with.

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And so how can I turn this into something that's glorifying to Christ? Only we can do that with the

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Spirit's guidance and the Spirit's empowerment. We can take the time to, for example, consider the words of the psalmist when he says,

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I will put no worthless thing before my eyes. So we can concentrate upon the purity of our thought, the purity of what we see, read, expose ourselves to.

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We can be thankful for all the good that God has placed in our lives, in our families, our wives.

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We can redouble our efforts to invest in our children, our grandchildren, our great -grandchildren, to encourage them in the life of godliness, to explain to them what it's like to live as pilgrims in this world amongst those who hate

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God and hate His ways. And we don't have to do this in discouragement.

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We have to recognize this nation, the

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United States of America, is not the be -all and end -all of God's kingdom.

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God has used nations greatly in the past and then cast them off.

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And the United States may well be cast off by God.

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And His judgment would be absolutely, positively just. But for us as believers, we don't want to be called homophobes.

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We don't want to be called transphobes. You know that if you're walking through a store and someone all of a sudden pointed at you and screamed, he's a transphobe, that everyone's going to turn and look.

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And we're all like, what do you even say? We should think through what we would say if someone said, you're a transphobe.

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My first one thought that immediately crosses my mind is, you are a linguaphobe.

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Throw something back that just leaves them wondering what to do. I'm going to write that one down.

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You all can do the same thing if you want. You'll have to give me credit. You're a linguaphobe.

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What? You're distorting language. You must hate language.

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What do you mean? Well, because transphobe doesn't mean anything. There's no such thing as transitioning.

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God made us men and women. You can't change your genetics. You can mutilate your body. But you can't transition to anything else.

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So the term transphobe is absurd. What you're trying to say is that you think that it is absurd to change

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God's created order and to think that you can become a woman if you're a man or a man if you're a woman.

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All of humanity has believed that up until just recently. But that's not a phobia.

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That's just simply dealing with the reality of God's world. See? So we need to be thinking about how we can utilize.

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Now, that may get you beat up. It could. There may be enough people around you to cause a real problem.

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But most of us would probably be able to do that fairly safely. And you have now taken the high ground.

55:11

You are now the one pressing the issue. And you can now make the connection and say, and the thing that's really bad about this abusive language and these silly words like homophobia and transphobia is that they fundamentally mask the fact that we're talking about the very sins that put

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Jesus on the cross. Our society is honoring the things that Jesus died to bring us forgiveness.

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Now you're in the gospel. Now you're in the gospel. And a lot of these folks are going to be running for the hills pretty quickly.

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But you need to think through what you would do. And you have to do this in light of what you know you're capable of doing.

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Not everyone's public speaking. Not everyone can do street ministry or debating or whatever else it might be.

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But if you are someone who wants to make a difference, wants to say something during this time period, that would be the way to do it.

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You simply cannot, as a Christian, put yourself in a position of feeling in the least bit embarrassed or cowered by the terminology these people use.

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Phrases like homophobia and transphobia are nothing more than a clear indication the person using it is not overly bright.

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They've not thought this through. They're just repeating mantras. They've never given consideration to what that would actually mean.

57:12

It's actually simply used to people who don't buy the current narrative. That's all it is.

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And so we can take advantage of that. And we can use that as a mechanism of opening up the door and saying, let's talk about what this is all really about.

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You're promoting rebellion against God. And that is going to bring His judgment.

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Now get ready for vile responses. But in the vast majority of instances, there won't be much substance to it.

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And as long as you keep in mind that, as you stand there, there may be 20 people around you.

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There's only one that matters. That's God. What does He think of your testimony and the reasons why you're doing what you're doing?

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These people are not going to judge you on that great day. But He will. Lord, I want to be an instrument in your hand.

58:14

We have the opportunity of doing it. I don't want to get to July 1st. I don't want to just crawl into July 1st and go, oh, 11 more months until that happens again.

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No, let's speak God's truth and do the right thing. All right, once again, we made it through.

58:35

Did that actually work, Rich? I am stunned because it's still blowing like anything. If that little thing held up through that, you say it worked excellently.

58:47

We did not expect this. I mean, when we had first tested it,

58:54

Zoom hated it. But I'm now at three hours on the

59:04

Starlink system in Tucumcari, New Mexico, in lightning storms and wind storms, and it's been absolutely perfect.

59:16

Unbelievable. Thankful. Very, very thankful. It makes this awesome place all that much more useful.

59:26

And I know one thing I'm doing is I'm getting back to more people who've asked, could you be on the program, on our program, because now

59:37

I can do it. And when I'm traveling, why not? Why not?

59:43

This is the perfect place to do it. It's great. So anyways. Okay, thanks for watching the program.

59:51

What's today? Today is Tuesday. Yeah, Thursday.

59:58

Thursday I'll be in Flagstaff. We'll try.

01:00:06

The only thing that gets in Starlink's way are trees. And I'm thinking about the

01:00:14

I'm thinking about the Flagstaff KOA. A lot of trees. A lot of trees. But they may have a good 5G connection there.

01:00:23

There may be a Yeah, we have a 5G.

01:00:29

And we'll see if we can do it that way. So we'll see. So we've got two methodologies.

01:00:36

Three, if you count the Wi -Fi from the RV park, which

01:00:42

Sometimes, I've been in some parks that had lightning fast 5G.

01:00:47

But that's the exception, not the rule so far. So we'll see. Anyway, so we'll try to see you on Thursday evening as I'm wrapping up this trip.

01:00:56

And then we'll be back in the main studio next week for about three weeks or so.

01:01:04

And then back here, Rich says he's got stuff that he wants to do in here.

01:01:09

I've got some suggestions myself. I think a light over there is probably going to be useful.

01:01:16

I'm going to have to do some work on our wall back here. It looks really cool, but I realize it needs some more work.

01:01:23

And stuff to do. So I'm excited. I'm thankful that you're there. Thanks for listening today.