Arsenokoites: Be Bold, Be Accurate, Be Truthful

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Bring the strangers home, we long to see thy churches full, and all the chosen race.

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May with one voice and heart and soul, sing thy redeeming grace.

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You may be seated. I hope you have a writing instrument, and I don't mean what you give to the kids to scribble on the bulletin.

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I mean the real thing. And I hope you'll notice that there are note pages in the bulletin available to you, because here's the goal today, and it's an important one.

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I want to speak to every person in this room.

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I do not believe that what we're going to be talking about is beyond anyone.

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You can be a new believer. You can be a mom. You can be a dad.

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You can be a taxi driver. I don't care what you do. This is for you, and I am simply stating that I believe that the

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Lord would have us, at Apologia Church, or if you are watching from other places, if you are a believer, you need to be prepared, ready, bold in your proclamation of God's truth in our day while we have the freedom to be able to speak the truth.

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Now, we were joking a little bit with Pastor Zach's statement that I certainly chose a very heartwarming

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Mother's Day topic, because the term arsenikoites, if you're wondering, means homosexual.

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And that's the whole issue. Because today, and some of you saw this,

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I've addressed this literally for two decades now, multiple, multiple times.

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And you might say, why are you doing it again? Well, because the fact that there is a tremendous amount of social media.

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I learned only this past week that there is a movie being made called 1946 that will present the idea that when the

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Revised Standard Translation Committee translated arsenikoite, the plural of arsenikoites, at 1

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Corinthians 6, 9, and 1 Timothy 1, 10, write those references down, know where they are, we'll be looking at them, that when they translated arsenikoite as homosexuals, that they mistranslated the text and inserted an anti -homosexual bias into the

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Bible that had never been there before. And that all the problems we've had, all the non -affirming churches, all the

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Jerry Falwells, and I'm going to date myself here, Anita Bryants, there's only three of you in this room old enough to even get that one, all of those issues that have come up in the opposition of the

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Christian church to the subject of homosexuality is because they blew it. And all the other translations have simply slavishly followed along after the

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Revised Standard Version. Now I personally find that laughable on so many grounds that I wouldn't have time today to lay them all out.

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Anyone who reads the New Testament's original language knows that this argumentation is absurdly fallacious.

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The problem is the vast majority of people in our society do not do that and the vast majority of Christians don't either.

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And hence a lot of Christians go, well then I can never really address this issue. I need to leave that for the specialists.

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The problem is that's not being left for you. That movie isn't going to be just shown to specialists.

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That's going to influence and it already is influencing for many, many people their whole understanding of the accuracy of the

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Bible and the accuracy of the Christian response to the subject of human sexuality. And so we have no choice but to be prepared to give a response, not just simply to shut up and back off and go, well,

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I don't know anything about the RSV Translation Committee and I don't read

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Greek and I know a few people that do, but it's their experts versus our experts and can anyone really know?

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That's exactly what they want. This is not actually a disputable issue.

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There is not a single representative of the other side that could possibly survive a live moderated debate on this subject.

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They would be destroyed and they know it. They know it. I don't care what scholar it is, how many books they've published.

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They will not debate this issue. I can tell you that because I've challenged most of them to do it.

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And we've done it. Isn't it interesting, those of you that know the debates we've done on this subject, where have the last debates on homosexuality been done?

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In the United States? No. I can't get anybody in the United States to do it because they know they already have the media, they already have the culture.

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Why in the world risk it? The last two major debates I've had on this subject were done in South Africa.

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That was the only place we could find someone who could really engage it. We need to seize the opportunity.

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There is an opportunity being presented to us where this cultural moment is being presented to us, where this argument's out there and if we know our scriptures and there's no one in this room that is not able, with the

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Spirit's help, to know these scriptures well enough to give an incredibly strong response and then to move directly into the proclamation of the gospel.

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In fact, when you hear someone saying this, you should get excited. You should be, oh yes, they're opening the door.

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They're giving me a perfect opportunity to speak with boldness to this issue. But there's another reason why we need to do this today because the fact of the matter is there's something called the

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Equality Act in Congress right now. And even if it doesn't pass this year or the next year, you and I have started to figure something out,

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I hope by now, and that is it's not so much what's happening in Congress but in the halls of Google and Facebook that determine what will and will not be allowed to be said in our culture.

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And once you get the two of them coming together, I could foresee a time when a movie like that could be released and we would not even have the opportunity in social media to give a full response to it because that would be considered breaking the law or being hate speech.

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That's already how all the universities are functioning. Could you imagine if we tried to rent a facility at ASU to talk about this subject?

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Right, sure. Even if we somehow managed to get a room, what would happen?

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People would show up banging on drums in the windows and everything else. We've seen it happen over and over again.

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We know what's going on. So now's our time. And even if they do shut us down in social media, online, on the

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Internet, we still have the opportunity. Somehow the Christian church survived before the

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Internet. It's an amazing thing. But they did. And they turned the world upside down because of the boldness of their proclamation.

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So the question is, what about you? When you hear someone saying they mistranslated this, the

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Bible doesn't say that. Are you wanting to open your

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Bible to 1 Timothy 1 .10, to 1 Corinthians 6 and say, Let's look at this.

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Let's think about what it's actually saying. We need to have that kind of boldness.

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But first, we need to understand what the texts are saying. So my goal is, let's look at the texts. We're only looking at two.

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We're not looking at all of them from the Old Testament. We will have to make reference, of course, to Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20.

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Leviticus 18 .22 and Leviticus 20 .13. We will have to just reference those texts.

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But our focus will be upon the New Testament. And it won't even be on Romans 1.

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We're not covering the whole subject here. The issue is when people say, this subject was never a part of the

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Bible before. I'm not sure what they think sodomite means. But this was never a part of the Bible until 1946.

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And the Bible isn't talking about what we're talking about today. Can you all foresee a situation where you might have that conversation?

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I mean, I can't imagine anywhere in our society anymore where that's not a part of the conversation.

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On a bus, on a train, on a plane, on a street corner, in the grocery store, over the back fence, every place, this is now part and parcel of where we are.

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My grandparents did not have to have this conversation. And they never dreamed that their grandchild would stand in the pulpit of a church and preach this sermon.

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I can assure you of that. But here we are. And we have to be faithful to what

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Scripture says. Especially if we're called upon to suffer for what it says.

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Because right now, everybody in this room knows that if you were to openly and boldly state your understanding of what the

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Scripture states on this subject in almost any major corporate position in this society right now, you'd lose your job.

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Minimally, you'd be told to shut up. But we all know most of us would lose our job.

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I happen to have a job where that's not really the issue. It's okay. Rich isn't going to fire me for this.

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Let's start with probably the least used, but shouldn't be, the least used text.

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1 Timothy chapter 1. 1 Timothy chapter 1. And I want you to hear what is being stated to Timothy.

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The background is that there are, in fact, people who are misusing and abusing the

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Mosaic law in the early church. We know that from the book of Galatians, right? Notice what

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Paul says to Timothy. But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous man, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching according to the glorious gospel of the blessed

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God with which I have been entrusted. Now, there is a lot there.

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There is a lot there as to how law and gospel relate to one another, who the law speaks to in a particular fashion, and the reality that the law is good, that there is a lawful use of the law, an appropriate use of the law, and that this has to do with what is sound teaching, whatever else is contrary to sound teaching.

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So everything that was listed as violations of the law is contrary to sound teaching according to the glorious gospel of the blessed

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God with which I have been entrusted, specifically in regards to his apostleship to the

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Gentiles, but here the glorious gospel of the blessed God is associated with a clear recognition of the violations of God's law.

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People who want to have a gospel that does not speak to man's sin are not going to find that kind of a gospel in the pages of the

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New Testament. It will address the issue of man's sin, and when you live in a day where every restraint is being thrown off, when you live in a culture where it is becoming morally good to be as morally bad as possible, then there is going to be a great conflict between the gospel and that culture.

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But I want you to see something here that a lot of people have not seen.

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I'm sure she won't mind if I mention this, but I was on a webcast you may have heard about before called

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Sheologians. I am not going to discuss the origination of the name, nor Pastor Luke's role in the recording of any of the sound effects therefore.

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Some of you are now going to be asking why I said any of that. You know who to ask.

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Don't ask me. But we were talking about the issue of homosexuality, and when we got to 1

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Timothy 1, Summer will admit when I pointed this out, it was like,

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I've never seen that before. And most of us haven't. So you're going to see something, hopefully, and see if you see it, then hopefully if you really grasp hold of it, you will be able to express it to others.

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But it has to be firmly in your own mind, because the more clarity you have in your own thought, the greater the clarity of your explanation to someone else.

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If it's muddled in your own thinking, it's going to be muddled when you explain it to somebody else. But did you see the list of sins?

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The law is not made for a righteous man, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane.

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Now stop right there, and when you look at those sins, unholiness, godlessness, profane, those are references to violations of what's called the first table of the law, the first three commandments of honoring

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God as God and not having other gods before him, being in subjection to the one true

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God. But then notice what comes next. For those who kill their fathers or mothers.

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Now think back to Sunday school. Think back to what you're doing in homeschooling kids.

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If you know the 10 commandments, I think, aren't they on the wall back there? I think that's where they are back there. If you know the 10 commandments, then you know we've covered the first three.

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Interestingly enough, there's nothing specifically about number four there, but what's the fifth one?

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Honor your father and your mother. Huh. For those who kill their fathers or mothers.

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For murderers. What's the sixth commandment? You shall not murder.

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You shall not kill. Now it seems like there's, in Paul's crafting of this, he's connecting them together because he says killing fathers and mothers, that would certainly be a violation of the fifth commandment, but then by using killing, you're sort of sliding and connecting those together with the next commandment for murderers.

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And then you have immoral men and homosexuals.

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Now I'm reading from the 1977 edition of the

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New American Standard Bible at that point, which still remains one of my favorites.

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And what you have in this particular section is you have, of course, pornoise.

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Pornoise, pornia, is the general broad category of sexual sin, which includes the commission of adultery, the next commandment, sexual sins.

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So he has pornia, pornoise, those who commit pornia.

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And remember, Jesus used that terminology when he talked about except for pornia, committing of sexual sins.

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Remember, he used that terminology in regards to marriage. And then the next term is arsenicoitis.

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Our key term. Translated by the NASV as homosexuals.

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But then before we define the term, what's next?

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Kidnappers and liars and perjurers. Hmm.

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Kidnappers, you shall not steal. And one of the strongest applications of that in the

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Jewish thinking of the commandments was you shall not steal a man to make him a slave.

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And then, of course, not taking the Lord's name in vain was being honest, oaths, et cetera, et cetera.

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So what is Paul doing? Well, if you read the

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Greek translation of the Old Testament, which Timothy would have, which anyone at Ephesus or Corinth or Colossae or Philippi or Rome would have, then you already have picked up just naturally what

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Paul is doing. Paul is summarizing and expanding upon the

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Decalogue. He's saying the law is good and the law has application and the law speaks to all these different aspects of man's sin, and he's drawing that from the 10 words, from the 10 commandments.

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He's using the same terminology. But what does that mean? Well, that means that when he's gotten to the section on sexual sin, he defines it using the broad term porneia and the term arsenikoites.

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He brings them together. So whatever arsenikoites is, it's related to porneia.

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It is a sexual sin. Now, is there really any great conflict as to what this word means?

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Because a whole movie is going to be coming out saying, yep, they blew it. It doesn't refer to homosexuality at all.

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Well, what do they say it refers to? Well, they're not all that sure.

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It might have something to do with rich men who paid to have boy toys available to them.

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And that did happen. I mean, Roman society was a debauched society and was becoming worse and worse and would continue over the next centuries until Rome collapsed as a society.

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That certainly did take place. The Greeks certainly spoke of that kind of sexual sin and relationships.

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But when you ask the question, what does a word mean? Scholars who actually try to do scholarship rather than try to press politics, and by the way,

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I hate to tell you this. If you have the idea that seminaries and Bible colleges are free of political influence,

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I need to disabuse you of your naivete. Even published lexicons today, you can see clear evidence of a push toward a particular direction.

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No question about it. But in sound scholarship, if you're reading

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Paul and 1st Corinthians, 1st Timothy, Pauline, even though you go to the

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Christian bookstore, if such things still exist, and you buy commentaries, you'll discover very quickly that there are many people who believe

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Paul did write 1st Corinthians but he didn't write 1st 2nd Timothy or Titus. There are people who have a limited

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Pauline canon. It says, but, it says at the beginning of 1st

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Timothy 1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus. Right. They're saying it's a forgery.

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They're saying it's a forgery. I could go through and have, on the dividing line in the past, go through all the reasons for that and respond to them, but that's what you're going to encounter.

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The point is, how would you answer the question where, what does this word mean?

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Well, the first thing you do is you'd go, did anyone use it earlier? And the answer is no.

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There's one, there's one possible source that we're not really sure exactly when it was written.

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Most people would say this is, the Pauline use, is the first use of this, of this term.

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Well, that's interesting. Then where did it come from? Where would this come from?

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Well, arsenikoites, if you read Greek, is made up of two words.

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Now, I have studied a lot of different languages. One of them is German. Anybody here do a little

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German? What my

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German friends do is, if they want to describe something in a way it's not been described before, they just take a bunch of currently existing words and cram them into a word that can be like a paragraph long.

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I remember I was in Germany, I may never get to go back again, but I was in Germany just a few years ago, and out in the, in the parking lot,

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I found a sign, and I took a picture, I remember sending it to my family from over there, and it was, it was like two lines long.

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But it was just a bunch of different German words crammed together into one word. And that's just how they do it.

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And it makes for tremendously long, doesn't work well on Twitter, let's just put it that way.

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Well, in this case, what you have are two words. Arsenos is the technical term for a male.

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It is a male, it is a man. And they were not confused as to what that meant.

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They did not have anybody with PhDs in gender studies back then, thankfully. So everybody understood what a male was, everybody understood what a female was.

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And arsenos is not a female. But koitein, koiteo, that's what men do with men in bed.

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That's sexual intercourse. So arsenokoites would be what men do with men in bed.

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It's homosexuality, if that's what the word means, unless you come up with some new meaning of it. And later on in history, we find people using that to describe all sorts of other bad relationships.

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It's even used in regards to animals. So no one was confused about what the second word meant.

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But most importantly, if Paul's the first one to use it, did he coin it? And you might think it's strange, who makes up new words?

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Actually, in the past, a lot of people did. Only in our day has it become pretty common, you know, you don't just come up with new words.

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Well, I guess we do. Meme didn't exist a few decades ago, and we do come up with stuff, but the apostle uses a number of terms that we do not have evidence of having been used before him.

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And when we encounter one of these, the first thing we do is we go, is there anything in his

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Bible? And what Bible did he have? Well, Paul could read

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Hebrew. No question about it. He could read the scrolls. But what

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Bible was he preaching out of? He was preaching out of what's called the

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Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. All the apostles quoted from the

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Greek Septuagint. And it just so happens there are two passages in the

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Mosaic Law, in what's called the Holiness Code. Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 that specifically make reference to men lying with men as you would lie with a woman.

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And the terms that are used in the Greek Septuagint are arsenos and coitain.

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They're right next to each other. Everybody who knew the Mosaic Law and had the

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Greek Septuagint who read 1 Timothy 1 .10 was not confused as to what

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Paul was talking about. Right there in Leviticus 18, right there in Leviticus 20, you have the very source of the term.

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And this is how you would interpret it for anything that Paul would speak on. Where you're asking the question, well what does that term specifically mean to Paul?

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Its use in the Old Testament and in the Greek Septuagint would be absolutely determinative.

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Except when it comes to something as politically useful as homosexuality.

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When all of a sudden you will have people who would never think about doing this on any other subject are running off to references from four centuries after Paul to try to say, well this has something to do with economic things and oppressing people.

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Isn't that what everything has to do with anymore? It's all some type of economic oppression I guess. Anyone who would handle

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Paul correctly would want to hear what Paul is saying in looking at 1

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Timothy chapter 1 would stand back and go in light of what Paul says.

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He's just said the law is good. Where do you find the law? Leviticus 18 through 20. Does it use this language?

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Yes it does. Are all the other terms found in the Greek Septuagint? Yeah they sure are.

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So you come to one reference, one word and it's sitting there right in front of your face in Leviticus chapter 20 in the law itself and he connects it with pornia.

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He's going through the 10 commandments so what does that mean?

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That means 1 Timothy chapter 1 identifies homosexuality as a sin before God just like all these other sins that are being listed.

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Period. End of discussion. Now you can stand on your head and you can spin in circles and you can say well

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Paul didn't understand any type of monogamous committed homosexual relationship.

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I guess you'd really think Paul was naive. Well we didn't, no one back then knew anything like this.

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That's ridiculous. The Greeks had their homosexuals and they wrote about it and they talked about it and he was a man of the world.

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He had been around. He well knew about all these things.

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It is simply an attempt to get around what is being said here. When you follow the text what you have is

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Paul identifying the sexual sins part of the Decalogue as pornia and arsenic coitus.

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There's no question about it. Well where else is it used? Well it's used in 1

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Corinthians chapter 6. I will not spend as much time on this because we've now looked at it because I want to make some application but 1

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Corinthians chapter 6 it's important to remember very important to remember that in 1

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Corinthians chapter 5 Paul had to deal with a very very difficult situation in Corinth if you remember.

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He had to deal with a situation of incest.

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Now where do we find the scriptures saying that incest is wrong? Well in the same sections they say that homosexuality is wrong.

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That's the preceding chapter. And now we get into 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and Paul says these things verse 8

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And such were some of you but you were washed but you were sanctified but you were justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ in the spirit of our God. It is stunningly clear that what the

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Apostle is saying do not be deceived these behaviors do not mark those who will inherit the kingdom of God people who are engaging in these activities will not inherit the kingdom of God.

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Don't let anyone there in Corinth and Corinth was the Las Vegas of the ancient world.

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It really was. And so there was a danger that there would be people who would come along and would say you know we're so used to this kind of behavior we're so used to this kind of lifestyle can't we sort of meld

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Christianity together with what we're used to that'll be a lot more attractive to people we could build a building a lot faster.

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And Paul says do not be deceived do not be misled that means there's a danger it could happen but as you know the issue is right at the end of verse 9

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Interestingly enough in the context of adulterers well where have we seen that one before again going back to Ten Commandments the broad category of pornaya here you have specifically idolatry and then moikoi and then you have two words and if you're looking at the

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ESV you may be going your verse is a little longer than my verse right because the

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ESV simply has homosexuals whereas the

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NASB has homosexuals and effeminate or effeminate and homosexuals.

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Why is that? Again amongst those who are seeking to honestly handle the text this isn't all that much of a controversial issue but there are some areas of disagreement and I'll lay them out for you so you can understand them the two terms are moikoi and arsenikoites now moikoi is used in the gospels of people of men who have soft clothing and it is a term that we know of from other sources outside the

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New Testament referring to a soft or effeminate man not a soldier not a guy in the

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SEAL teams but every time these days that I see some fashion show someplace

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I go ah moikoi have you seen that stuff oh my goodness doing everything possible to turn a male into something utterly unrecognizable it's just so obvious what is going on we don't want any toxic masculinity moikoi is soft effeminate and so there are those who would say no we need to translate this as homosexuals and those who are effeminate we need to have a category of effeminacy as sin well

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I think you have that one way or the other whatever you do with this particular text but why does the

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ESV simply say homosexuals is it just getting rid of the phrase moikoi the soft the effeminate no never thought

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I'd be preaching on this from behind a pulpit but we need to be honest with the text many people today and I think they make a very strong case see the use of these two terms together as something that's very important and that is that arsonikoites would be the active aggressive man and the moikoi the receiver of the action hence the aggressive male and the submissive male in a homosexual situation

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I won't go any farther than that you can figure out the rest for yourself what they're saying is because there were the idea was there were people in the ancient world that thought that being the aggressive male was perfectly fine you're just being a man and if there wasn't a woman available why not but what was truly wrong was being a man who would submit to that be the moikoi the soft effeminate one that was a denial of your manhood and so there were

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Greek philosophers and moralists who made a distinction and if that's what's behind this and what

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Paul's saying is no there's no distinction at all because the entire relationship is a denial of the created order that God made and so if that's the case and putting the two words together like this that's what the

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ESV is saying homosexuals doesn't matter what role you play so you will find conservative believing theologians who will line up on those two sides they're not arguing that this text is not condemning homosexuality they say it is but is it doing so by being so specific as to identify those two roles or is it just one word referring to homosexuality and one word referring to some general category of effeminacy alright once again it's the same term that Paul uses in 1st

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Timothy 1 .10 it's the same term derived from Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20 it's the same language and it was never a mistranslation the most you could ever try to argue and this is what they do try to argue is that well but Paul didn't

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Paul wasn't talking about what we think should be accepted and celebrated and made part of the greatest good of mankind in our day and that is a monogamous loving homosexual relationship may

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I point something out every study that's ever been done says that monogamous homosexual relationships make up less than one half of one percent of male homosexual experience less than one half of one percent 99 .5

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% are never monogamous so if you're trying to make the argument based upon half a percent you may be trying to pull the wool over somebody's eyes you may be missing the real reality the real numbers say that male homosexuals are incredibly promiscuous and that that is the normal experience now they'll claim you force us to be that way by what?

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refusing to compromise this? refusing to give up to your rebellion? so when someone says to you so we've looked at 1

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Corinthians 6 I'm not done looking at it because I want to make an application but let's

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I'm almost tempted but I won't because it's a sermon but I'm almost tempted to role play in this situation

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I used to do that a lot in training people to deal with Mormons and Elliot's palms just began to sweat as soon as I said role play heart rate went up 47 beats per minute

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I can tell all the way from up here but I won't I'll do it with Wade instead since he's turning around and talking to you anyways

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I want each one of you because everyone in this room every teenager in this room knows that you could find yourself in this situation in our day you could literally stop at a store on the way home tonight and find yourself talking about this subject you know it's true where are you coming from?

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oh we were just at church what church is that? is that an affirming church? affirming?

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yes we affirm that God's law is good that's not what they mean are you people that hate people?

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no because if I hated people I wouldn't tell them the truth of what God's law says and what the gospel is see most of us have already had a lot of these conversations and know how to challenge the presuppositions but sometimes when someone comes along and says well wait a minute is that a church where you accept the inserted mistranslation of homosexuality in the

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Bible? now see a lot of you have been trained to deal with Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses and as soon as a

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Mormon says certain things we just automatically know they're heading for James 2 .20

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I'm going to get there before them and I'm going to use it right we know how to go there we need to be just as bold here when someone says so do you use a

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Bible as mistranslated about homosexuality? what are you going to do? here's what

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I would suggest well you haven't run into one of those TikTok videos recently that says that homosexuality is the improper translation when

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Paul used it in 1 Timothy 1 .10 or 1 Corinthians 6 .9 is that what you're referring to? now already 99 % of the people you're talking to are going uh oh because yeah it was a

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TikTok video I saw and that sort of sounds like the reference but I don't know

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I never looked it up I don't have a clue but you need to know it you need to know what the references are and so you want to take the advantage and so you know

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I think it's just great to hear about the opportunities out in Mesa again I just hope

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King James Only guys don't show up that's a long story there too but I'm excited about that opportunity to get a chance once again to talk to try to get to talk to some

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Mormons I can guarantee you Mormons are not as easy to talk to today as they were when I first rode out there during the

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Easter pageant on the back of a Kawasaki 440 with my brand new bride in 1980 oh

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I'm getting the I'm getting the eye excuse me

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I'm melting up here a few decades ago ok we need to be honest in church it was 1983 and she was 2 little carrier on the back it was really cute anyway what was

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I talking about there oh the point is ever since that point in time I've been training people this is how you control the conversation not in an improper way you need to know the material well enough to control the conversation to get where you need to go where do you want to go if this subject comes up if you don't have a goal guess what you won't get there it's like your

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GPS you know when I tap the screen in my car I finally have a car that has tech in it

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I didn't have one for years and years I've got it now and if I want to work it says enter a destination otherwise what can it do for you and when you have that opportunity and it may come up and you weren't thinking about it and you've got a million other things on your mind but all of a sudden here's a person in front of you and they have opened the door wide you have to have a destination you've got to have a goal what do you want to communicate to this person because they're going to throw up roadblocks and the only way around the roadblocks is you keep your destination in mind same thing with the

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GPS I put a destination and if they close the road what's the GPS do it routes me around it but it still sticks to the final destination and most

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Christians get lost in conversations because you don't have a goal that you're wanting to get to when

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I walk away from this situation what will this person know what do

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I want to make sure they know with clarity and so if someone says to me well you use that Bible it's been mistranslated and it creates hatred toward the

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LGBTQ community when someone asks you a question they have just given the ground to you so you've got to take advantage of it immediately and so you need to be quick and bold and fearless because you have the truth and they don't your motivation cannot be oh

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I can't wait to win this debate your motivation has to be

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God's put me here, this person's been deceived there's a blockage between them and hearing the gospel with clarity here

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I am Lord, use me use me now because if you don't have compassion for them in your heart this is going to go nowhere and you may win but maybe the last time they ever listen to anything a

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Christian has to say too you hear me alright so if they ask you that question what you want to do is you want to immediately establish that you know what you're talking about so that's why

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I say are you referring to the assertion that in 1st

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Timothy 1 .10 1st Corinthians 6 .9 when Paul makes reference to sexual sin and he specifically refers to homosexuality are you saying you think that's a mistranslation because it may not be where they're going they just may have heard something on the radio and they just may be completely confused and so dropping a nuclear bomb of Greek exegesis on them may not be the best thing in this situation but by raising the text that person automatically knows wow this is someone who's actually thought about this before so if there's a hesitation well

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I'm not sure exactly where it is depending on where you are if you're in a situation where you can open a

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Bible you're going to have some time, you're going to respond one way if it looks like this is going to be a quick situation then you need to try to get the information out there a little bit faster sometimes you can't tell, you have to rely upon the

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Spirit if you can open the Bible, then you want to go if you've got the time, then you want to go to 1

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Timothy 1 you want to say, well you know, it's really interesting because what Paul's doing in this text is he's walking through the 10 commandments he's saying the law is a good thing but it's interesting that when he gets to the commandment about not committing adultery he includes this term which he plainly has drawn from the law that he says is good and then if you have to go back to Leviticus 20 you can if they want to challenge you to do that be ready to go back there but say he's going through the 10 commandments and it seems obvious that he is identifying homosexuality as a sexual sin because he's drawing those words from Leviticus it's what men do with men in bed and he's saying that will separate you from God that it's a sin it's not the only sin, but it's a sin and when he wrote to the

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Corinthians and if you're sort of making those points jump over and bring the other one in why?

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because it contains the goal you want to get to and when he wrote to the

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Corinthians he said don't be deceived these things will preclude you from inheriting the kingdom of God and there's a lot of things in there but one of the things he says is homosexuals and the way he expresses it he probably expresses it with such clarity he wants to make sure that we know however you engage in that activity whether you are the aggressor or the passive recipient it's sin in God's sight now

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I said you need to have a goal I said I wasn't finished 1 Corinthians 6 look with me back at it again after he lists all these things after he says none of these things will inherit the kingdom of God and such were some of you but you were washed but you were sanctified but you were justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God there is your good news but what are we facing today?

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we are facing a situation in the church today where there are many people who want to change the tense of the verb they want to change the tense of the verb what do

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I mean? they wanted to read but such are some of you such are some of you it's called the hermeneutic of love

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God loves you as you are he made you a homosexual he made you a transgender and it won't be long and I'm sure we could already dig it up on the internet some place he made you a pedophile he made you to love horses oh

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I'm sorry but that's out there too and people say that's how God made you and God loves you in that way so how dare you create hatred for anyone that's the language now isn't it?

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that's what we are being told such are some of you now let me give you a piece of technical information that I will admit would not be something that would be generally available to the general populace

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I've tried to keep this pretty much focused on what you can communicate to everybody else but you need to hear this part there is not a single manuscript on planet earth that says such are some of you

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I've checked I do that kind of weird stuff and I have those kind of weird resources and there are no textual variants there are no manuscripts, there is no possibility that we are mistranslating it it says were such were some of you but you're not anymore something radical happened something radical happened you were washed you were sanctified you were made holy you were justified, you were declared righteous in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ in the spirit of our God that church of Corinth was a mess and the people in it had been messes such were some of you that's the message of hope that's the very message that politicians in Washington, in Canada in the

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European Union and in many states in the United States want to make illegal

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Australia? Man, I was in Melbourne at the end of 2019 beautiful city, wonderful folks got to run a 10K along the beach it was awesome

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I'll never go back there for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is they have become absolutely draconian and have now passed law to where parents can literally run afoul of the law for praying for their children in regards to their sexual orientation because that can bring about hurt the civil authorities in Melbourne hate what 1

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Corinthians 6, verse 11 says because how many places now are saying you cannot proclaim that you can change any sexual orientation the spirit of God says you can but the world says no why?

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Because the world is in the throes of the culture of death but such were some of you not are, were that's where you want to go that's what you want to communicate now the person may not be themselves a homosexual so you want to communicate to them we're not talking about hatred if you think that what

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I'm saying is hatred then when you look at the cross you think you're seeing the hatred of God in a sense you are what do you mean?

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The hatred of God for sin the hatred of God against evil that brings about the greatest act of the love of God that makes it possible to be washed and sanctified and justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and the spirit of our God but people today, the

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Biden regime just suggested since 12 years of public education doesn't seem to be enough to create complete zombies let's go for two extra years to start and two extra years at the end let's do 16 years of inculcation of the culture of death maybe then everyone will have it drilled into them that if you dare repeat what

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Jesus taught in Matthew chapter 19 you're just a hate -filled person if you dare repeat what the apostles taught you're just a hate -filled person many in this room have already gotten that treatment, haven't you?

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you've already been called a hate -filled person and if you haven't yet, you will and let me tell you right now if in your heart you have acted and spoken out of love for God and love for people then you cannot allow yourself you cannot allow yourself for a moment to be made frightened or impacted by the accusation of being a hater by people who themselves are consumed in their hatred of God you must have it clear in your mind every morning when you wake up it cannot be the 4th or 5th or 10th thought the first thought when you rise in the morning

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I'm a servant of Jesus Christ I need to walk worthy of that calling today I need to speak in accordance with His truth therefore what any man says to me

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I must judge in accordance with God's truth that's why Peter said what he said we all know the verse this is

01:02:14

Apologia Church which is why Peter didn't say

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Apologia he said Apologia, but anyway you know the text, it's on our little symbol but in 1

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Peter when he tells us to be ready what does he tell us to do first?

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sanctify the Messiah as Yahweh, he's quoting from Isaiah it's an

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Old Testament citation he is telling us, you know what the command there is? the command there is not to do apologetics

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I hate to have to tell us that the command, the imperative in that text is sanctify, treat as holy the

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Messiah as Yahweh in your heart and what that means is each and every day we have to make the decision that Jesus is who

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Jesus is He is the creator, He is the maker He is the one who entered into this world

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He gave His life, He gave His life for me He's called me to be His follower and I need to order every aspect of my thinking in light of who

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He is and that will change me so that I will respond to difficulties in this world so that people will ask me for a reason for the hope that's within me, and that I give that reason then with gentleness and reverence that's what it's all about and if we do that and we will have to do that then we will have the proper foundation for the blowback that you will get when you speak the truth from these texts the job loss, maybe even the lawsuits and someday the handcuffs unless God brings a revival in this land young people, teenagers you already know there is great confusion amongst your peers, amongst your friends they're hearing all sorts of things and you're being taught correctly, you understand what a man is, what a woman is but they have strange ideas that doesn't make you better than them that means you've been given grace by God you've been given light by God don't let yourself become arrogant pray that God would use you to bring light to your friends but young people all of us are we ready for the cost of speaking the truth about this we all know we all know that we are facing the situation of having to make the decision will

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I open my mouth do you want to be used of God to proclaim

01:05:52

His truth do you want to glorify Him do you want to be an instrument of peace those in the culture of death do not have peace with themselves or anyone else you can be the one that brings that message of peace but we have to be prepared we have to take advantage of the opportunities that are given to us that's what we face today, let's pray together indeed our gracious Heavenly Father you have brought us to this time and to this place and Lord we do not want to fear the face of men we do not want to be man pleasers we want to be

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God pleasers your word is clear there can be no gospel where there is no clear revelation of what is right and wrong in your sight we cannot call men to repentance if there is no law that has been broken so Father we ask that you would write upon our hearts your truth

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Lord you would help us to remember these things and even when these opportunities come upon us we are not prepared our minds are elsewhere that you would bring these things back to our minds that you would give us clarity of thought and clarity of expression and use us to bring the message of peace to those who need to hear it so badly

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Father if there be any in this room that have not bowed the knee in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ if there be any in this room that have fallen into the sin of homosexuality the sin of rebelling against your ways have begun to hear the world's call to question their own gender given to them by your sovereign creation we pray that today you would draw your people to yourself that you would reveal

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Jesus Christ as the only way and Lord that you would bring healing and salvation in their experience

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Lord let no one leave this room that wants to know more about how

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Christ can give them deliverance from these things without coming and talking to the elders the deacons draw your people unto yourself we pray in Christ's name amen we now have the great privilege and it is a great privilege to partake of the