The Same Sex Controversy

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Matthew chapter 19, now, when Jesus finished these sayings, he left Galilee and went to the region of Judea beyond the
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Jordan River. Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. Then some Pharisees came to him in order to test him.
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They asked, is it lawful to divorce a wife for any cause? He answered, have you not read that from the beginning, the
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Creator made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
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So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.
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We live in a day when you simply cannot turn on the television, you cannot open a newspaper, you cannot attempt, for example, to remain cognizant of what is going on in our society.
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If you're one who feels that you should be aware of political developments, especially those developments that touch upon your freedoms and upon morality in our land, you cannot help but be aware of the fact that it is a major issue in our society that to be considered to be loving, to be considered to be advanced in your thinking, to be considered to be tolerant, and of course, that is the great word today.
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The great word today is tolerant. If you want to describe yourself in a positive way, you say you're tolerant.
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If you want to paint your opposition as closed -minded, you say they are intolerant.
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Of course, we cannot push that term very far because as soon as we begin asking for some level of consistency, everything falls apart.
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Obviously, those on one side are intolerant of the views of those on the other side, et cetera, et cetera but you cannot function our society and desire to be seen in a positive way without recognizing that the issue of homosexuality, the issue of marriage, the issue of the relationship of man and woman in our society is on the front burner.
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Unfortunately, the very foundations of our society, the laws that gave form to our constitution, the laws that gave form to our society which were based and no one could seriously argue this, though there are people like Barry Lynn and others who try to, no one could seriously argue that this culture was not based upon a
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Judeo -Christian view of morality, a Judeo -Christian view of the family and of marriage and yet only this past week, if you were following things and I've actually simply been pretty much flat in bed until I flew out here and even
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I was aware of the fact because I would get up and I'd look at my news sources on the internet, that in the state of California this past week, there was an effort, it just barely fell short to be the first state by legislative action rather than by judicial action in essence to attempt to change the law in their particular state.
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I think they view it as their own land to be perfectly honest with you and in fact, sometimes I wish that right along the border, just sort of crack, float off, things would be much better.
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I'd be able to buy some beachfront property over there in Arizona and all would be well but they are attempting to change the law concerning the nature of marriage so as to allow for homosexual marriage.
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If I began the list of all of the things that we see, the television programs, very popular television programs that have over the years sought to in essence, expose us over and over and over again to certain aspects of this lifestyle so as to numb our senses, so as to at first make it an issue of comedy and then over time to attach you to those characters and to make it an issue that if you say there's something wrong with that behavior, you somehow are being unloving and now it has come to the point where many of the major corporations in our land extend the very same kinds of benefits to live in lovers of the same sex that they offer to husbands and wives who are in their employ.
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And so we face a situation where you can't hide from this anymore. It might be your desire to just simply never hear it discussed.
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Let's just not worry about it. Let's not talk about it. Yeah, every once in a while we have to read
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Romans one and we'll just sort of go zooming past that. It's a little bit like I was on a,
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I forget which flight it was on anymore. Flights just sort of all meld into one and actually now
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I remember it was from Atlanta to Phoenix and there was a little girl about six or seven years old behind me and she and mommy were talking and they were talking about Star Wars and I heard the little girl say to mommy, mommy, how did
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Padme get pregnant? And mommy said, that's a conversation we will have later.
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Everything else mommy said was in very little terms when she said that one, it's a conversation we'll have later and that was it, she just moved on from there and that's how we deal with this issue today.
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I don't wanna talk about it, I don't wanna think about it but we can't, if we're going to engage our society, stick our heads in the ground and just say, you know what, it's not going to impact me.
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Well, actually it is. We don't live on an island. What happens in our society, what happens in our society regarding the nature of marriage and the family will impact every single one of us.
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We can't avoid the subject. There are those today who are cranking out books right and left from a
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Christian perspective saying that there is nothing wrong with the homosexual lifestyle, there is nothing in the scriptures,
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I can't tell you how many times I've heard it said, Jesus never said anything about homosexuality.
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Well, if we start a list of things that Jesus allegedly never said anything about, I don't remember him saying anything about mass murder either, that doesn't exactly make it a moral thing.
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But people will tell us there's nothing in scripture, we've misread the scriptures all along and because we've misread the scriptures about homosexuality itself, then we've misread the scriptures in regards to what a loving married relationship is all about.
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If you live in this society and if you're a Christian who dares to open your mouth and of course we recognize that the enemy is very, very satisfied when he can make us as believers silent.
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He doesn't mind too much if in the silence of our own little world, we believe
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X, Y, or Z because we're not gonna impact anybody else that way. But if you're one of those folks who at work in the culture, in however you're interacting with people around you, you're going to take the opportunity of saying, the
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Lord Jesus addressed that or the word of God talks about that or this is what I believe about this and this is why
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I believe about this. If you're going to do that, then you're going to need to know why you believe what you believe.
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Now I'll confess, I got out of seminary and even as a seminary graduate, as I look back,
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I don't recall any discussion, any serious discussion.
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Maybe in one class in a very passing way and it wasn't biblical, but I don't remember a biblical discussion of the issue of what the
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Bible said about homosexuality. I mean, all I knew was, well, there's something relevant in Genesis.
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I think there's something in Leviticus someplace, but let's be honest, how many of us have spent much time on Leviticus of late?
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There's something in Romans and I think Paul may have said something someplace else, but that would have been about the best
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I could do. I mean, I had never been challenged until I started doing radio programs and things like that.
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Then all of a sudden I start hearing, for example, the pastor of the local homosexual church on the air.
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And these folks have prepared presentations, I'll never forget. I've written a book called
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The Same Sex Controversy. I coauthored it with a friend of mine, Jeff Neal, and we did a debate on KPXQ radio in Phoenix, Arizona.
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And I had heard that the talk show host, it's the same talk show host that you hear a few weeks ago, a little over a month ago, the talk show host in Pittsburgh that was fired because he was talking about the issue of the
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Pope. Well, this was the same guy, except when he was in Phoenix. And I had heard he was going to have a week where he was going to be discussing the issue of homosexuality, homosexual marriage, homosexual churches, et cetera, et cetera.
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And I really hadn't paid much attention to it. I was in the midst of preparation for something,
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I don't remember what it was. The day he was gonna have this pastor and one of his parishioners on the air,
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I woke up about an hour earlier than I normally do with the worst migraine headache of my entire adult life.
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Just one of those debilitating, don't you dare turn that light on, my head will split open, and some hideous creature from Star Wars will come out of it type of a headache.
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And you feel like one of those hideous creatures in Star Wars. And as I am suffering with that, the phone rings, which also is an annoying thing.
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And it is the station asking if I would come in and debate this pastor, same day.
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Well, I contacted my friend, Jeff Neal. We had actually not done a lot of talking about this, but I knew that he had been preaching on the subject over the past number of months, he had done some research.
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Thank the Lord for a good chiropractor that I saw at three o 'clock in the afternoon. And by five o 'clock, I'm sitting in the studio, headache gone, and we have a two hour debate.
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I wish it had been taped, the tape was lost, and we've never been able to find it. But it was an incredible encounter.
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When we went to each of the passages, there was a ready response given.
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When we went to Genesis, and this is not just this pastor, you can find literally a dozen of these books, and one comes out every year.
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There's a book that was just released three days ago, that interestingly enough, presents the idea of it being a moral
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Christian thing to be engaged. In fact, it argues from Christian morality that we should allow for homosexual marriage.
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It's an amazing thing. But every year, new books are coming out, promoting this, presenting this, more than are answering this.
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And so that means you can encounter people that will start naming off names, people who teach at this seminary and that seminary.
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Princeton Theological Seminary has put out a book where their theological staff was divided down the middle and debated the issue.
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And so people will be able to cite these things, and there are answers given to every one. I mean, when you think about it, when you think about the passages that address the issue of homosexuality in scripture, where do you go?
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Well, you think of Genesis 18 and 19, do you not? Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, you've missed the boat.
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Sodom and Gomorrah has nothing to do with homosexuality at all. You see, in the ancient world, hospitality was a very important thing.
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And by the way, they're right. I mean, when there weren't very many cities, taking care of someone who was traveling was an extremely important thing.
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And when a stranger, quote unquote, a traveler would come into a city, you had to take care of that person.
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That was just simply how the culture functioned. You can see that even in the life of Abraham, for example. Remember when the
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Lord and the two angels come and Abraham's sitting by the Oaks of Mamre? What does
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Abraham do? Man, you go slaughter animals and you feed people. And I mean, that's just the way it is in that society.
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And so, see, we've missed the mark there. We've missed the whole idea.
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What happened to Sodom and Gomorrah was God judged them for being inhospitable to the angels.
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Had nothing to do with homosexuality at all. And in fact, they can go to the book of Ezekiel and there
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God talks about Sodom and Gomorrah and talks about how they were ungodly towards strangers.
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So there you have the fulfillment, right? That's what people will say. How would you answer?
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When you go to Leviticus, anyone, I did not see this because I just don't watch a lot of television.
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What I do watch is generally associated with news or something like that.
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I've never gotten cable, not because there's anything implicitly wrong with cable, but cable almost always comes to the
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History Channel. And if I had the History Channel, I would never get anything else done. And so I just know myself and therefore
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I don't have cable. But there was a program on, which
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I understand did not exactly have the same political perspectives that I do called the
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West Wing. And there was an episode, some of you may recall this, where a individual representing in real life,
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Dr. Laura was on this, was talking to the president and was talking about homosexuality.
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And the president responded with this straight out of the homosexual apologist handbook response to the
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Leviticus passages. Well, Leviticus says that if a man lays the man that says this is an abomination and they are to be cut off from their people.
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Well, don't you know that it also says that someone who touches a dead animal's skin is an abomination before God.
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So does that mean the NFL that uses a pig skin that we should stone everyone in the NFL? And it says that a man can sell his virgin daughter and it started going through all these old laws in Leviticus and just slam this person for being so stupid and so selective in their use of the
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Old Testament law. But once again, how do you respond to that?
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I mean, that's not an easy issue for most evangelicals to deal with, to identify the difference between a moral law and a ceremonial law and explain that to someone else, is it?
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And so you have apologists addressing the very text of scripture in the popular media of our day and giving a very unusual spin.
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But of course, no one gets to respond to those things, do they? The other side gets to talk about those things.
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You don't get to respond except on your own programs which don't exactly have the same reach that the major media has.
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And then when we got in this debate to Romans, 1 Corinthians 6, by the way, 1
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Timothy 1, those are the other references, if you're wondering in the New Testament. When we got to the passages in 1
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Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 9 -11, 1 Timothy 1, 10, there
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Paul uses a Greek term, arsenikoites. And you need to realize the folks that we are dealing with in our society will go so far as to know what these words are.
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I debated Barry Lynn on the subject, is homosexuality consistent with biblical
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Christianity? A number of years ago on Long Island. How many of you have ever heard of Barry Lynn?
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All right, I bet you more of you have seen him. He is an ACLU board member.
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He is the head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. If anything happens, it has any type of religious bent to it at all.
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He's gonna be on Hardball. He's gonna be on NBC. He's just everywhere. He is the left's poster boy.
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He is an ordained United Church of Christ minister, which will tell you something. And we did a public debate at a
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Presbyterian church on Long Island. Just to give you an idea, this is a man who has stood before the
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Congress of the United States and testified that child pornography is a guaranteed
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First Amendment right. And yet in the course of this debate, he brought up the
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Greek terms, presented his arguments. I honestly think that he had heard that he'd be debating a
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Baptist. He probably thinks that was B -A -B -T -I -S -T from Arizona.
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So he expected me to show up wearing shorts and with my hound dog and married to my first cousin and a few things like that.
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And because he threw out the surface level responses that are probably have always been sufficient for him on the national media.
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It's not like the national media is gonna ask the tough questions of someone like Barry Lynn. I was writing the same sex controversy at that point.
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And so it was rather easy to respond to those arguments and to demonstrate the actual meaning of those terms, to demonstrate, for example, that when he says that arsonokoites that's found in 1
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Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1 .10 does not refer to homosexuality, but instead to some type of child molestation instead, that in reality,
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Paul was borrowing directly from Leviticus at that point. He's taking two terms found right in the Greek septuagint, putting them together.
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He's being very clear in the kind of behavior that he's referring to. And it was very obvious that no one that Mr.
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Lynn had ever encountered on this subject had ever bothered to respond in that way. The debate did not go well.
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He as much as admitted in the closing statements that he had lost that debate and was so angry about it that the next day he informed us that we would not have his permission to distribute that debate.
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Now here's a man who tells Congress child pornography is a guaranteed first amendment right. But when he in public, knowing it was gonna be videotaped, agreeing to that beforehand loses the debate.
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He threatens legal action if it is distributed. Isn't that nice? The first amendment's only for one side of the political spectrum.
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By the way, if you're wondering, you can obtain that debate because when his lawyers wrote to us and a cease and desist letter for distributing the debate, and you know where they wanted to file their lawsuit?
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The Ninth Circuit. You wonder why? The one based in San Francisco.
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Yes, indeed. We contacted Christian attorneys and there was a, there was no end to Christian attorneys who wanted to take
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Barry Lynn on. It was very, very, they were lining up at our door. Can we do it? Can we do it? And so we actually sued him.
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We filed against him first in Virginia, which is where copyright issues are supposed to be dealt with anyways, and which also had the jurisdiction over where the debate took place and where his office was.
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And the day before, our attorneys would show up and start taking depositions. They gave in and we have been able to distribute that to that debate.
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So you might wanna take a look at it and see how that kind of an encounter went. It was interesting during the cross -examination,
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Mr. Lynn had to borrow my Bible to read from Romans 1 because he hadn't brought one to a debate on whether homosexuality is consistent with biblical
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Christianity. So anyway, these kinds of individuals do know how to provide a response.
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They know how to provide an argument. They're not good arguments, but sadly, they seem to work most of the time because we don't know how to respond to these issues.
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Homosexuality is not an issue where you just go to a couple of passages. Yeah, you have to go to Genesis. You have to go to Leviticus.
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You have to go to those passages that specifically address it. But folks, this is a fundamental foundational issue that reflects what we believe about God as our creator and the intentions and purposes why he made us the way he made us.
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And when especially we start talking about the current rage regarding marriage, it is so sad for me to listen to so many of these national programs where someone who is even opposed to the practice, someone like a
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Michael Medved, who is a Jewish individual, will have the lines open and I'll listen to these conservative evangelicals calling in and bless their hearts.
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I'm glad they want to do something. I'm glad they want to say something. I'm glad they want to give a defense, but they can't go past just, well, it can't be good because of what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah.
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Well, okay, but can we go beyond that? When they start talking about the purposes of marriage, when the defenders of homosexual marriage start saying, how does it affect you?
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What's wrong with my doing something as long as it doesn't have any impact upon? Why are you threatened?
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At that point, I don't hear a whole lot of in -depth discussion. And part of it is because I'm afraid we have been deeply impacted by the thinking of our age so as to be ashamed of the fact that we believe
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God is our creator and that he created us in a particular way for a particular purpose.
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We're afraid to start talking about that. We're afraid to say anything about that because, well, we all know, especially,
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I know my fellow Scottish brother down there who has the tartan tie -on like I do today, would tell you this because I believe you're an engineer by trade, that within the scientific community, within that community of academic training in mathematics and science, the quickest way to utter suicide, especially in the university setting, is to say something about God as our creator, especially if he somehow continues in that role.
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It seems that there's at least some people that allow you that God wound it up but he went on vacation to Haiti and hasn't bothered to come back.
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As long as he's not doing anything anymore, well, okay, he started a long time ago or he sort of created the rules by which things would evolve and then he left and we're just left on our own.
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If you actually believe that God is our creator and that because he is our creator, he makes us for a purpose, and because of that, he can determine what is right and what is wrong and that all societies are beholden to him and accountable to him for his law and his purpose, well, that's just not acceptable.
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That simply is not acceptable. So we come back to the passage that I read at the beginning and we think of those who would say to us today that we should be like Europe.
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Oh, how many people want us to be like Europe today? A lot of folks right here in the good old
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People's Republic of Massachusetts, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Massachusetts.
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Y 'all did know that that's a particular system fell apart. I'm not sure if the word got here or not, but what was it you said,
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Steve? This is Massachusetts where people used to rebel against tyranny, something along those lines, yeah.
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Yeah, especially around here, there's a lot of folks that want our nation to be like Europe.
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I go over and talk to my European Christian friends and they go, you people are nuts. Have you seen what it's like around here recently?
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In Scandinavian nations, there are Christian young people who marry in secret because marriage is so dishonored in their society.
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Marriage is so dishonored in their society now that you cannot even gain employment in certain sectors or advance in your employment because to be married is to demonstrate that you are not advanced.
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You are not open, you are not tolerant. They're intolerant of things like marriage.
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And the result is a degradation of the society at its most basic level.
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So many want us to be like Europe. You heard Elton John's getting married?
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Yeah, seriously. England has passed a law allowing for partnerships.
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Well, you know what, they always argue, well, we're not talking about marriage, we're just talking about partnerships. No, you're not, you're talking about marriage. What else do you call that arrangement anyways?
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What does the scripture say? Here in this passage, Jesus addressed marriage and notice some of the things he says in verse four.
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He answered, have you not read that from the beginning, the creator made them male and female?
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See, there's a start, there's where we differ right away. For so many today, there is no creator and he made nothing male and female.
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Maleness and femaleness is nothing more than the chance result of the means of reproduction.
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It has no purpose, it has no intention. The creator has no purpose for the male to act as a male or a female to act as a female.
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That's where the division immediately starts. That's why it is crammed into our brains in our society that what we're reading here, we can't really believe.
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This is all just myth. And sadly, what is taught in many of our seminaries is that in reality, what you have here, the best you can get out of this is that, well, this is what certain religious people used to believe and they use this to keep people under control.
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It helped to form society in a more primitive day, we've grown past this.
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I don't understand why anyone would call themselves a Christian and say,
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I trust Jesus Christ for my salvation and then turn around and say, but what he himself said about human institutions and here about something as fundamental as the creation itself, what he said about that was just conditioned by society.
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It's not really something that we need to believe any longer. Well, how do you determine which part of Jesus' words are true and which ones aren't?
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How can you think I will believe him when he says, I will raise you up on the last day, but I'm not gonna believe him when he says, from the beginning, the creator made the male and female.
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I will, Jesus just didn't know as much about genetics as we do. Really? The Jesus I see in scripture created genetics.
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What do you mean he doesn't know about genetics? And of course you gotta realize for the vast majority of theologians today in both
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Protestant and Catholic circles, they don't function on the idea that Jesus is actually God incarnate.
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They'll say, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's just, you know, that's 300 years after Christ.
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That's the council of Nicaea. You don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. Jesus begins with the created order.
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He begins with at least what he and the Pharisees would have agreed on for certain. And that is that God was the creator of all things.
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And when he created, the way he created it was good. That it was right, that it was proper.
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And that you can go back to that. You can go back to the way that he created and that you can use that as a foundation.
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Sin may disrupt that. And that's what this whole discussion is about. He's gonna say from the beginning,
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God made them male and female. Marriage was not just simply something he allowed them to do. This was a part of his purpose.
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And this divorce issue is about sin. It's about hard heartedness. But to answer the divorce issue and to have a solid foundation upon which to deal with it, you have to start with God's perfect intention and creation.
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And from the beginning, the creator made them male and female. That is
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God determines that. God determines that.
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It's not just simply the chance result of the cast of the cosmic dice.
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I guess it's die in plural, I don't know. Not exactly something I'm overly familiar with. I was raised the
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Baptist, you know? So amen, that's right.
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God made them male and female. To play around with that is to play around with God's creative purpose.
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And oh, the danger that we face in modern society today.
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Because those who now control the advanced technology of medicine are so often the very ones who most detest
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God's sovereignty and his law. And why is that? Have you ever wondered why that is? I have a theory.
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I'm not gonna say I can prove it. But I have a theory. People who can study and examine
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God's creation and see his fingerprints all over everything, who can study the genetic code, which is so complex, and yet suppress the knowledge of God on a daily basis and say, it's random, it's random, it's random.
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No creator, no creator, no creator. That takes so much energy that many of them truly cannot hide in some myth of neutrality.
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They have to be open in their hatred of God. That's a theory that I have.
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I won't attempt to prove it. But we live in a day where we need to pray concerning God's mercy toward our society.
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When we begin to play with the very essence of life itself, the
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God who made them male and female also said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife and the two will become one flesh.
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Marriage is not defined by circuit court judge.
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Marriage is not defined by a
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Supreme Court judge. Marriage is not defined by a legislature.
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God instituted marriage before he instituted any other human institution.
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And I say to you, a nation will be judged by God that does not honor the institutions that God himself has established amongst men.
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When a nation chooses knowing what God has done to rebel against what he has done, to in essence spit in his face and say, we know what you've done.
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We know what our forefathers believed you did. And yet, despite all of that, we are going to go our own way.
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We are going to change what you have established. That nation will experience
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God's judgment. And indeed, one may well ask the question, is it that action which brings
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God's judgment? Or is it in fact already a manifestation of his judgment?
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Might that not be the case? Is not the husband, wife, father, mother, children relationship so basic, so much a part of the way that we're made that the only explanation for what we see going on today is that it is the same kind of judgment where God in Romans 1 speaks about giving men up to their depravity?
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You want to see what happens when I let go? God says, when
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I open my fingers, when I let go of the restraint that he exercises every single day, and I hope you thank
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God for the restraint that the Holy Spirit places upon evil as common grace around us every single day.
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If he were to remove that restraint and allow men to truly act upon it, act upon the desires of their hearts, you could not walk outside the front door of your home on any given day.
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We are the recipients of grace every moment of our lives and so often we never even see the dangers that God has delivered us from.
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And hence we very rarely thank him for them because we don't think of these things. But could it not be that we see
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God just loosening that restraint and you see the result?
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You saw what happened in San Francisco. I mean,
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I know you've heard this before, but it's because there's so much truth in it. If God does not bring judgment in what we see going on in a long -term basis, he will owe
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Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. They've done nothing more than what we see going on in our own land.
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God will not be mocked. It is so natural to recognize father and mother that to see television stars, movie stars, celebrities openly campaigning that it should be mother and mother, father and father, is a direct slap in the face of God's word and his truth.
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And we cannot sit silently by. Jesus said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife and the two will become one flesh.
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There is something special about the marriage relationship.
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I was sitting next to a couple as I flew out here on Southwest. You just, you know how it works in Southwest Airlines, right?
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Cattle car airlines. You have to get up at midnight to check in.
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If you haven't figured that one out yet, you need to do that. I found out last year, I got to the airport two and a half hours early and I was already in the
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B group. All the A groups already filled up. And so I'm asking everybody who's staying in the
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A group, how did you do that? I've been here for two and a half hours. We checked in last night. Oh, okay.
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So this last Friday morning, 1159, my little timer went off and I dragged myself into the other room and Southwest Airlines, I'd put my little reservation number down and I'm sitting there trying to put it in.
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And it was a ZI and I put in 21, so it didn't like that. I honestly checked in by five minutes after and I was the 12th person to do so already.
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So it was a full flight. And so everybody knew there was, you know, and I'm always afraid that somebody even bigger than me is gonna sit in the middle seat.
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That's just gonna be a bad, bad thing. You know, four and a half hours of this is just, you know, really, really good.
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And so I was really thankful when an elderly couple decided to sit down next to me and the lady sat next to me.
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So I was like, oh, good. I can steal that three inches of shoulder room over here because she's not even there.
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And it was so fun to listen to them. Very elderly couple. You can tell they have been together forever.
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You know those couples I'm talking about where, you know, she still looks at him adoringly.
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It was just so sweet. I wondered how long they had been married. My parents have had 50 years now.
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I'm feverishly planning 25, which is the summer of 2007 for me. I was 19, she was two.
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And she's not even here for me to say that. What a wasted compliment that was. But I was gonna say,
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I never know when she's gonna find something online. So I have to be very, very careful. And it's a wonderful thing.
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You know, some of you may have followed the trials that my daughter went through when she wrote a letter for a high school project.
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And her teacher failed her, gave her no credit whatsoever. Even though the class had given her a standing ovation on her letter, the problem was what she said.
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She was writing against embryonic stem cell research. And despite meeting with the principal and the whole nine yards, her grades stood.
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The funny thing was, because I published her letter, we were able to send it to the president through the back route.
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Someone who was his former correspondence secretary saw it. And she was the only person in the class, even though the teacher had forbidden her to put her letter in the envelope to send to the president.
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Everybody else's envelopes were sent to the president. She was the only one who got a signed response from President Bush.
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So she figured that was worth the 50 points. But in that context, at first, the teacher had accused her of plagiarism.
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She couldn't believe that a 15 -year -old could write what my daughter had written. By the way,
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I talked to my publisher this past week. I had proposed a joint authored book, myself and my daughter.
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I thought that'd be really cool. You know what the publisher said? We'd rather just have your daughter. That gave me mixed feelings.
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Pleased for my daughter, but I'm sort of wondering what my future with my publisher is. But anyway, one of the things
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I said to, in a letter that I wrote about the charge of plagiarism is, you know, I said, I understand.
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My daughter had told me when she first went to this school that in the PE class, when they were filling out the little cards, that she was the only girl in the
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PE class that lived with both of her natural parents who were still married. Only one. I mean, they're having to fill out, you know, 14 lines of all the different contact people.
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And the teacher comes to her and it's like, what's wrong with you? Well, I just live with my parents, you know?
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And I explained, I said, you need to realize Summer's from a very stable home.
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Her parents have been married for 23 years. Her grandparents have been married for 50 years. And, you know, it's just so sad that that is so unusual in our society today.
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The two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what
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God has joined together, let no one separate. And we normally think about that in the sense of people disturbing the marriage relationship.
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And that's quite true. We normally think of that in the context of divorce and what
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God says about it and the sanctity of marriage. But I would like to suggest to you that to rebel against God's intention for the reason he created us as male and female, to seek to establish within a society the concept of homosexual marriage, to try to seek to establish the normality or tolerance for that which
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God has identified as abomination is to do exactly what
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God is warning against here, what the Lord Jesus himself warned against in messing with the marriage relationship.
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When people say, why do you care? I care because blessed is the nation whose
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God is the Lord. And if it's a blessing upon a nation, for that nation to recognize the source of moral law,
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God made us, God has revealed how we are to live, he has revealed how we are to function as male and female,
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God made us and when we decide that he no longer has the right to speak, the right to define, then your actions, you may say, hey, what takes place in the privacy of my home is my own business.
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Yeah, but when it impacts the society as a whole, it becomes my business. And you need to realize there is no neutrality regarding these issues.
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We are so often deceived. You're trying to force your religion on me. Well, you're forcing your anti -religion on me.
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You've got a worldview, you're just sneaking it in and making me live with it.
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You're the one forcing your views on me. My views started this place, hello? It's my views that built this nation you're now enjoying and you're trying to destroy it.
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It wasn't your views that did. It's not just a matter of your views and my views anyways.
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The one who said these words also said it is necessary that I go to Jerusalem and that I die and I rise again the third day and he did.
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And I think it's wise to listen to someone who rises from the dead. And so we cannot be coward by those in our society who would say to us, keep your mouth closed, be silent.
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There is every biblical and moral reason to speak directly to these vitally, vitally important issues.
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Let's pray together. Our heavenly father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you continue to build your church and you continue to draw people to yourself and you place in their heart a desire to know your word and to be obedient thereto.
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We thank you for that. We thank you we can trust you will continue to do that. We ask that you'd make us salt and light.
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You'd help us to speak with words of grace and yet to speak with boldness about what is true.
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We thank you for being with us this day. We ask you to be with us as we worship you in the next hour as well.