Feminism and Hippocampus

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, "...but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you."
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.
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I think I try to start off the same way every show, by saying welcome. Because I mean that.
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Welcome. We try to talk about biblical issues in a provocative way. I don't know if I try that hard to do it anymore.
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Maybe it just comes out naturally. I like to have people tell me the truth and just be blunt about things.
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Of course, there are social graces, and there's a kind way to say things in a generous way. Then there's the no compromise way.
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A visitor to the church the other day came, and she said, oh, I listen to you. And I said, where do you live? And she said, in Worcester.
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And I said, well, I'm nicer in person. She said, well, I think you're nice on the radio, too. So see,
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I'm very glad for that. And then I never saw her again. I will say that the retention rate, although we don't have any facts, this is only anecdotal, that people who visit the church after hearing the radio show tend to stay at the church more than if someone just drives by.
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I usually ask visitors, oh, how'd you find out about the church? Sometimes I'll say, well, I was driving by, and I tried to find another church, and it was too late.
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And so I saw this one, thought I'd try it. I mean, there's a variety of those kind of things that come up. Some people say, well,
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I drive by the church all the time, and I like your cool, secret sensitive signs.
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But anyway, here we go. I'm still trying to clean up my no compromise space here.
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When you come into the study that I have at the church, some people call it an office, and I try to study more in it than I do office things.
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So that's why we try to call it a study. There's just two microphones and just some equipment here. I don't know, just a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff, and we are up and on and ready and super happy that you're listening.
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Very, very pleased because I want to try to instruct you about the one who never compromises, the Lord Jesus Christ.
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We do. We don't like it when we do, but he never does. The Aquila Report is an excellent website.
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If you want to just go to a couple websites to see what's going on in evangelicalism, the Aquila Report, I think it's .com,
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but if it doesn't work, write .org. And then you can also go to DoNotBeSurprised .com.
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Those are two that if you go to, you can kind of figure out who's who in the zoo, the theological evangelical zoo.
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And here in Denny Burke's article, The Sad Tale of Feminism Gone to Seed, he quotes
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Elizabeth Wurtzel, who back in 94 wrote
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Prozac Nation. She was 24 then, and now she's 44, and it says here that she was living the feminist dream in New York City, successful writer,
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Yale -educated attorney. Well, that's the background. By the way, I like Denny Burke's stuff, and he would be a good blogger if you'd like to read.
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Trustworthy man. I almost said trustworthy young man. Isn't it amazing when Denny Burke is younger than I am? I'm the seasoned veteran.
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No, I might be older, but that's about all I have. And here he quotes her in an article from New York Magazine.
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And so, as we say on No Compromise Radio regularly, we are not against femininity unless it's in men, and we aren't against masculinity unless it's in women.
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We believe by God's grand design that he has created men and women, both as image bearers, both as receiving salvation as it pleases him through the work of Christ Jesus, the mediator and advocate and representative and substitutionary king who has been raised from the dead on the third day, and that women have spiritual gifts, men have spiritual gifts.
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Women are not backseat people in the local church.
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That is to say, they are a part of the church and healthy members. Oh yes, are there differences in function because of God's design?
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Yes, just like there's differences in function with a marriage. We don't have two people who have symmetrical roles.
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While they are symmetrically image bearers and they are symmetrically saved both the same way, both with the same privileges and benefits and responsibilities in terms of obeying
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God generally, there are different functions. And so if I go back to my days of when
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I first started officiating weddings, I always thought it was funny when my kids, I'd say to my kids, I have to go marry somebody.
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And they'd say when they're little, aren't you already married, dad? Yes, that's good.
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I'm going to go officiate the wedding. I'm going to be the, what's another word for officiate?
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I don't know. That's the only word I use. I either go marry somebody or I go officiate the wedding. So I think
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I go officiate the wedding and then I help the people before the officiating starts.
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So there's counseling, there's read a variety of books. Actually at our church, it works very simple for premarital counseling.
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If you'd like to get married at Bethlehem Bible Church or with one of the ministers, then what you have to do is you have to let us know and then you first meet with me.
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And so you bring your potential spouse in, your future spouse in, we all meet and then
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I ask you questions. So this is exciting day and how'd you meet and tell me how you got saved.
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And there's a variety of things that I ask and it's fairly informal. And then you have to meet with every elder and their wife, an elder and their wife meet together with you and you meet with every one of the elders individually.
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And so they can give you a little premarital counseling instead of me sitting down for 10 weeks going over a bunch of stuff, every elder and their spouse.
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And you go over there and I say, bring some dessert over or something like that so you can get to know them. And then
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I give you some books to read. You have to read things like When Sinners Say I Do by Harvey, I believe.
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You have to read Christian Living in the Home by J. Adams. The man has to read, oh, there's
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The Godly Husband is one that I offer. Or Exemplary Husband by Stuart Scott.
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And then the wife has to read Martha Peace's The Excellent Wife. And then they have to put together a budget.
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And I don't mean I want to know how much money they make, but percentage wise. So here's your budget because I want them to think budgetarily before they get married.
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Well, they usually say to me, we'd like to have the service go this way.
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And I tell them, you can have the service go whatever way you want as long as I have say over the theological content of the songs.
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He's usually nicer when I say it. I'm going to preach the gospel. And they're always, oh yeah, that's what we want.
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And if you want to do your own vows, now this is early on again, you can do your own vows.
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I just need to check them. So that's how I started letting the couple put together their own vows, or as we say in India, some wows.
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And some of them were so bad they were kind of wows. So that just caused a problem usually when
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I had to try to correct people. Of course, what they want to say to each other, it's fine and dandy and it's expression of love and it's self -identity and it's a personalized deal.
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I understand all that, but this is a worship service. And so I read an article years later that talked about how this particular pastor didn't let people write their own vows.
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They used the standard vows. And I thought, you know what, that's really good because it avoids a lot of the mess and the clutter.
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And we didn't really start writing our own vows until recently anyway. And so let's go back to the old school.
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Not always good to do that, but in this particular case, it was good. And the main reason we were told in the article, the readers, not to let people do their own vows is because the vows usually are not biblical in terms of their responsibilities before God as husband and then as wife.
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And there are differences. In other words, they are not symmetrical.
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They are different. And so when couples, especially today, write vows, I promise to love you. I promise to love you.
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I promise to honor you. I promise to honor you. They're the exact same for both husband and wife. And so when you read
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Ephesians chapter 5, for instance, you'll see husbands love your wives, wives meant to your husbands.
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That's the way the vows should be written. That is to say, what God requires of a woman should be the vow before God, the people and her future husband, and the vows that God has given the man should be what he understands them to be, or what they are rather, from the
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Bible. So I think you get my point. Well, we are pro -women at this church. We are pro -women at home.
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We are pro -women in terms of image bearers and spiritual gift receivers, and they receive salvation the same way.
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But there are different functions for women in the church. And there are different functions for women, and there are ramifications when you try to deviate from God.
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So listen to what Elizabeth Wurtzel says in the New York magazine.
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Burke said it was in a recent article, but how recent, I don't know. It had all gone wrong. At long last,
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I found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City because at 44, my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.
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Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I refused to grow up. And so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up, one of the city's lost boys.
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Remember Lost Boys filmed in Santa Cruz? I think they called it Santa Carla back in those days. I was still subletting in Greenwich Village instead of owning in Brooklyn Heights.
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I loved everything about Yale Law School, especially the part where I graduated at 40. But I spent my life savings on an abiding interest, which is the lot to invest in curiosity.
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By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing. But I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security.
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Kids you do or don't want. Tiffany Silver you never use. That makes life complete.
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Convention serves a purpose. It gives life meaning. And without it, one is in a constant existential crisis.
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If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, everything else will.
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I was alone in a lonely apartment with only a stalker to show for my accomplishments and my years.
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Now, the article that Burke writes is called A Sad Tale of Feminism Gone to Seed, subtitled
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Chasing After Self -Indulgence Leaves Women Lonely and Unfulfilled. Now, he does say,
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I don't believe feminism is to blame for all women who find themselves a single. And he gives some caveats.
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So I keep quoting Elizabeth Wurzel. I was amazed to discover that according to the
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Atlantic, women still can't have it all. Now, see, that's the part that I'd like to focus on right now.
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This whole Virginia Slims mentality. I remember watching the cigarette commercials, I think probably in the mid 70s growing up and the whole feministic
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Helen Reddy, you can have it all. I did meet Helen Reddy one time, by the way, it was in Brentwood, California, and I would go play basketball down on maybe 13th
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Street or 14th Street or something like that in Santa Monica. And on the way back, I'd need a Gatorade and I wasn't saved at the time and stopped in the liquor store and I would buy a
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Gatorade on the way home and really pretty much never bought anything else. But one day
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I saw a lady pushing a whole cart of alcohol, a variety of different gins and fizzes and slows.
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I forgot what was in the carriage, the cart, shopping cart. See, I'm so New Englander, I'm such a
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New Englander now, I call them carriages, horse and carriage. And so I looked down at the person who just came right up behind me in line and it was
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Helen Reddy. So women still can't have it all.
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Now, women can have all that God has ordained for them and all the blessings in Christ Jesus that women can experience and receive.
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They can have the fruit of the spirit. But in terms of you can have it all, meaning you can have a career, you can have a husband, you can have your own rights, you can have everything that men can have and all the other things that go along with it.
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It's not true. Actually, men can't have it all either. Bah humbug, women who have it all should try having nothing.
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Now, listen to this. I have no husband, no children, no real estate, no stocks, no bonds, no investments, no 401k, no
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CDs, no IRAs, no emergency fund. I don't even have a savings account.
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It's not that I have not planned for the future. I have not planned for the present. I do have a royalty account, some decent skills and apparently a lot of human capital.
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But because of choices I have made wisely and idiotically, because of I had principles or because I was crazy,
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I have no assets and no family. I have had the same friends since college, although as time has gone on, the daily nature of those relationships has changed such that it is not daily at all.
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But then how many lost connections make up a life? There is my best friend from law school, too busy with her toddler, the people with whom
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I spend New Year's Eve in a Negril bungalow not so long ago. All lost to me now.
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Every man who was the love of my life just for today, roommates, office mates, classmates, for everyone who is near, there are others who are far gone.
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Danny Burke calls that the trap of feminism. Now, I don't think we should respond with pride.
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I don't think we should respond with, I told you so. I think these sad tales are teachers.
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And the good news for Elizabeth, she is only 44 and the answer she is looking for is found in a person, the
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Lord Jesus Christ. It does say here by Danny Burke, the Associate Professor of New Testament and Dean of Boyce College, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he did not make us, speaking of God, unisex.
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He did not make us genderless humanoids with no direction for our intimate lives.
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He made us male and female. And for those to whom it has been given, he made us to give ourselves away to years of finding stale
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Cheerios in every hidden crevice of the minivan. Our Fruit Loops, I think we buy the plain label
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Fruit Loops from Hannaford, so they're easier to, I think they break down over time and then they just dissolve.
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I take calcium pills occasionally. And if you put a calcium supplement, vitamin, and they're hard, right?
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Hard and heavy. You pick up, out of all the supplements you can buy, it seems like calcium ones are the heaviest. If you put one of those calcium supplements in a glass of water, it is amazing how fast those things dissolve.
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It should be a chemistry experiment. To seasons of graduations and of anniversaries and of emptiness, to gray years with the love of your life who is your best friend, to lifetimes of covenant love.
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Feminism is the killer of that dream, even though precious few seem to notice. Well, very, very insightful.
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You ought to be rejoicing that God made us differently. You should rejoice in that.
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There are things that men and women differ, we differ in our strengths.
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And when I think about my wife and how many strengths she has that cover my many, many weaknesses,
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I am very, very happy. We complement one another. That's why at No Compromise Radio and at Bethlehem Bible Church, we are complementarians, because men and women complement one another, equal in the eyes of God, equal salvificly, equal bearing opportunities to—you thought
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I was going to say bearing children, didn't you? I think the closest
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I could ever get to some unisex, metrosexual, that kind of thing,
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I think the closest would be, I do like the smell of Calvin Klein One, but it's too expensive, and so I usually go to some surf shop kind of place,
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PacSun kind of place, and they have a cologne there that I buy instead. That's the extent of it.
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So, No Compromise Radio today, we've talked a little bit about the Aquila report in an article by Denny Burke, Sad Tale of Feminism Gone to Seed.
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I am very surprised that so many other Christians are egalitarian. If we are complementarian, we believe that men and women complement one another, and you could get the
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Biblical Manhood and Womanhood website and see some of the articles there. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was published,
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I think, by Good News back in the day, which is now Crossway Piper, and Grudem, I believe, collated that.
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S. Lewis Johnson, I believe, wrote an article in that book. And you can read Wayne Grudem, who writes the most feminism from a
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Biblical perspective. I'm trying to see it. I can see the book here in my library, but I can't quite make out the title.
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But many other, most other people, I think of Gordon Conwell, for instance, are egalitarian, and that is men and women are equal in God's sight by nature and by function as well.
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So whatever you can do, I can do better. Isn't that Annie Get Your Gun? Is that the theme song for egalitarians?
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Anything you can do, I can do better. Bernadette Peters at Broadway, I think she was the best
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Annie. So I'm now deviating. Well, what else do we have here? No Compromise Radio.
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Think about this. On philly .com, anything and everything Philly, it said last year, being born again is linked to more brain atrophy.
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Study says, okay. Wednesday, May 25th,
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Health Day News. Older adults who say they've had a life changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in the size of the hippocampus.
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Now, I believe I'm correct when I know that. I think, I think my mind remembers this bit of trivia.
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The college at Princeton, New Jersey, now we call it
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Princeton, was made, you know, established quite some time ago.
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And there wasn't all these streets that there are there now, even though it's a fun place to go hang out. And the field that was in the back, one of the professors looked at the field and said, that's the campus because I believe campus in Latin is field.
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So, uh, I don't know what a hippo campus is. That would be a horse field.
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Maybe, why is our hippocampus called the hippocampus? Maybe it looks like a horse field, a horse in the field.
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I don't know. Hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory. New research finds, well, maybe that's the same research where we found that in McRibs, there's no rib.
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It's just like pig nostrils. So bad. I dare you to find out what's in a
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McRib. I thought they were good when I was a kid, but I couldn't eat one now. According to the study, people who said they were born again,
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Protestant or Catholic, well, it's interesting, born again. What's that mean? Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation had more hippocampal shrinkage or atrophy compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born again.
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So if you're a liberal Episcopalian or Methodist or Presbyterian USA, you're smarter, and you know what?
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Actually, that just might be true. That just might be true. And you know what, if it is true, the issue of the kingdom has nothing to do with smarts now, does it?
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Where is the one who is wise? Where's the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
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For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom. It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
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Paul goes on to say, for consider your calling brothers, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards.
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See, but God chose the foolish in the world, or what is foolish in the world to shame the wise?
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So if this is true, I guess it's true. In the study, researchers asked, see how subjective these things are.
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268 people, aged 58 to 84, about the religious affiliation, spiritual practices, and life -changing religious experiences.
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Over the course of two to eight years, changes to the hippocampus were monitored using MRI scans.
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Woo. One interpretation of our finding, that members of majority religious groups seem to have less atrophy compared to minority religious groups.
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And I always think that's fascinating because I think I'm in the majority, the super majority in evangelicalism.
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But if you look at how many people are in liberal churches versus evangelical churches, you'll realize that we aren't not in the majority.
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All right. Something is what you feel is that when you feel your beliefs and values are somewhat at odds with those as a society as whole, as a whole, it may contribute to long -term stress that could have implications for the brain.
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Amy Owen, lead author and study and a research associate at Duke University Medical Center, said in a
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Duke news release. So what happens is if you will go across the grain as a follower of Christ would, as anybody who would be born again would, and in this life you will have persecutions and difficulties and troubles, then that reduces the size of the hippocampus.
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Well, if you'd like more information, you can go to Brain Atrophy at the U .S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
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Well, I don't know. I don't know if that moves you in any way, shape or form in No Compromise Radio. You might want to go to the
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YouTube. A biker just rode by. You might want to go to a YouTube and type in NoCo90 and see if there's any videos there that might strike your interest.
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I think the first one is entitled, Where is Beth Moore's Husband? How does that strike you? Well, maybe it doesn't strike you at all.
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Maybe you say that it's a problem of my hippocampus. Why is it called the hippocampus?
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That's what I want to know. Hippo isn't campus field and hippo horse. Hippodrome. Have you ever been into a hippodrome before in Verona or in Rome or something like that?
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I don't know. My Verona. Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio. You can write us at info at NoCompromiseRadio .com.
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If you like the show, write the station. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's Word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.
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You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.