Speak the Truth in Love?

AD Robles

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It's good. It's good. Yeah, so I was going to, a few people reached out to me on Friday to alert me of this weird

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Canon Press Al Moller situation. I gotta be honest, it's weird.

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So I was going to comment on it today, well, I was going to comment on it Friday, and then

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I decided to wait because, you know, it's good practice when somebody does something inexplicable or just, you don't understand it or maybe it's out of character or something like that.

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It's always best to just sit on it for a minute and just think it through, you know, and in this case

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I'm glad I did because so many things came out since then. You know, we have the Al Moller response, he's very upset that Canon Plus would want to sell his materials, and he kind of sort of like low -key alleges that they did it without proper authority, and then

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Doug Wilson came out and said, no, they had proper authority, and then Michael Byrd comes in here and he tries to zing

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Canon Press, but he actually gives us this gold, this is pure gold, and he says that we should be politically confident pluralists.

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He thinks that Al Moller should embrace confident pluralism, a la Tim Keller and John I don't know that last name.

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There's so much to cover here, and I'm so glad I waited. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually comment on the whole debacle on Thursday on the

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Fight Laugh Feast podcast episode. So AD on Fight Laugh Feast Network will be dedicated to the against all reason celebration that Canon Press had on Al Moller materials, and then

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Al Moller's response, and then the response, and then Michael Byrd, there's just so much that we can cover.

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It's going to be wonderful, so I hope that you tune in on Thursday for the AD on Fight Laugh Feast Network.

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But what I wanted to do today is I've been thinking through the idea of speaking the truth in love, and the reason that I'm doing it is because I'm going to be speaking in a small conference at Ludlow Baptist Church in Vermont, and basically what's happening here in Vermont—I'm in New Hampshire, but in Vermont where my church is—they're going to be voting in November about adding a constitutional amendment that will enshrine late -term abortions in Vermont.

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So constitutionally, if this passes, it'll be part of the Constitution that you can kill children up to,

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I guess, birth. I don't even know how it's worded, but who cares? And so pastors in Vermont are trying to organize to stop this from happening, and so we're having a conference just to embolden and empower and equip pastors to go make this happen in their local areas.

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And so my pastor is organizing it, and he asked me to speak on speaking the truth in love, how to speak the truth in love to men and women who are considering having an abortion.

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And I have to be honest with you, you know, whenever I hear the phrase, speak the truth in love, that comes from a

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Bible verse from Ephesians, obviously, and people employ it, and the only time they employ it is when somebody is speaking the truth, but they're perceiving that it's not loving, it's not coming from a place of love, maybe it's in their tone, maybe it's in the word choice, whatever it is.

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And so people, when they say, you gotta speak the truth in love, A .D., they're always focused on the love part, that side of the equation.

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This is almost never the verse that comes to mind when somebody's saying untruth, right? When somebody's saying something that's not true, this is not usually the verse that gets quoted to them.

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It's usually other verses, or maybe, I don't know, maybe no verses, but this is a verse that's pretty much universally used when people have an alleged tone problem.

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And so, but here's the thing, and this is what I've been trying to think through. I think that's the opposite problem that the church in the

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United States in 2022 has. Sure, there are some people that have a tone problem, and there are some people that say things in an unloving way.

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I mean, that does happen. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen, but that's not our big problem.

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In the United States, when people hear the verse, you gotta speak the truth in love, in 2022, the evangelical church, what we should be hearing is a criticism of the fact that we don't actually have the truth.

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That's what we should be focused on. The truth. That's our big problem. We don't tell the truth.

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And when we do tell the truth, we often don't tell the whole truth. We leave out key details, or if we're not leaving something out, we try to massage the truth almost, to make it more palatable.

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And so many times, we massage the truth to such a degree that it's no longer recognizable as the truth anymore.

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I keep thinking about that video that I posted the other day, of that transvestite.

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And at the time, I thought it was a male, a biological male.

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It's so hard to even communicate when people are making stuff up. But I thought it was a male that had transitioned to female, allegedly transitioned, and then now wanted to be male again.

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That's actually not what the case was. That person that had kind of a deep voice and looked like a man, that was a woman.

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That was a woman who had been taking the hormones and doing the surgeries and did everything that she was told would make her free, and comes to find out that she's not free and she wants to be a woman again.

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And you know, once you chop something off, you can't reattach it. You know what I mean? Once you're on these hormones, some of the damage that's done is not reversible.

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And so she was lamenting and crying and she appears like a man, but it's a woman and she's upset.

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And so many people have lied to her along the way, including pastors. Because pastors tried to massage the truth to such a degree that it's not even recognizable about the truth.

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See, here's the thing. People say, oh, you've got to speak the truth in love. What they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to use different words or language that's a little bit more acceptable, that's not as jarring, that's not as abrasive.

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And my thing is that, no, we have to use the words that fit the situation, right?

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So many pastors are like, oh, you know, the Bible, it doesn't really talk about transvestites and transsexuals that much.

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It talks more about greed and gluttony. And so, you know, look at the gluttonous pastor over there.

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It's like, you've got to use language that fits the situation, because not every sin is equally sinful,

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I guess I could say. I mean, every sin separates you from God, we all know that, but not every sin is as serious as the next sin, is as disgusting, is as subversive, is as degenerate as the next sin.

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It's just, that's a truth that we need to recognize, right? And so, when we're talking about convincing little children to mutilate themselves and to take hormone pills and to do this stuff that's irreversible, that will damage their bodies and souls so much, we need to use language that's as abrasive as the crime is.

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It should fit the crime. We shouldn't soften it, we shouldn't seek to make it seem not as bad as it is.

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We need to use language that rises to the occasion. You see, when we talk about speaking the truth in love, so many of us are focused so much on the love aspect that we forget about the truth.

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It's not possible to be loving and speak an untruth, that's not a possibility. The only way you can be loving is if you have the truth first, that's what we need to focus on first before we start thinking about the proper tone and the proper situation.

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So subjective too, I mean, you know, if I'm talking to my boys and things like that, I'm going to say something in a more abrasive way than when

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I'm talking to my wife, hopefully, if I'm a smart person, right? Obviously, God knows I'm not always a smart person, but you talk to people differently, right?

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Different situations call for different kinds of speech. You know, if somebody is threatening my son, you better believe that I'm going to use different language and you might not even recognize who

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I am about the way I talk than I would at church when I'm just, you know, saying, having a coffee with the brethren, right?

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It's going to be a different tone. It's going to be, I'm going to use different words. I might be saying the same things, but it's going to be very different.

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And that's appropriate. That's appropriate. So let's not focus so much on the love side when we don't even have the truth, right?

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Because you can't skip that. You can't skip the truth and jump right to the love. We don't have the love, right?

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That's our big problem. In evangelicalism, it's that we don't have the truth, right? That's our problem.

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It's not so much the loving stuff. That comes later. And some people do have a problem with that. So again, don't hear me saying nobody has a problem with that, but we don't collectively have the truth.

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We talk to women that are considering getting an abortion. We try to soften it and we're like, yeah, but you're a, you're a victim too.

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Yeah. Don't you, you're just a victim. You don't have to do this.

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You're, you don't have to be a victim anymore. And it's like, no, that's not what's actually happening. You know, that place down the street, you know, they murder children there.

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And if you go there, you're going to be paying someone to murder your child, or maybe you'll be using tax dollars. I don't know, but you're going to be hiring someone to murder your child.

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That's what you're going to be doing. Don't do this wicked thing. We need to tell them the truth.

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You can't love somebody by massaging the truth to such a degree that it's not recognizable as the truth anymore.

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Look, the language has to fit what's happening. It has to. You don't do women any favors by pretending they're a victim.

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It's so, it's so amazing because we love that passage, speak the truth in love from Ephesians, but did anyone read the rest of Ephesians?

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Because Paul practices a little bit of what he's preaching there. And in that he doesn't soften it. He doesn't use euphemisms.

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He says, look, anyone who steals should no longer steal. He doesn't make excuses for the thief.

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He doesn't say, oh yeah, you know, there's a famine and, and you know, these poor people and they're, you know, those, they're really a victim of circle.

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They're a victim of their environment. People talk about thieves like that all the time these days. Oh, he's a victim of his environment.

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And it's like, okay, fine, but we don't soften the crime, right? It's still stealing.

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And Paul says it's stealing. And if you're a thief, if you steal, no longer steal.

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He doesn't try to massage the truth there. Speaking the truth in love, he just comes directly and said, look, if you're engaged in this kind of beat, you stop it right now.

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That's what you do. Paul would be accused of not speaking the truth in love with pretty much every paragraph that he's ever written in his entire life.

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Jesus would be accused of not speaking the truth in love all the time. It happens all the time too.

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I mean, you see people quote Bible verses. Bible verses without giving you the citation, right?

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So Brian Sauve just the other day said that man is the image and glory of God, and woman is the glory of man.

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And he didn't quote, he didn't say 2 Corinthians, you know, whatever. He just said that, and he said there's some deep truths there.

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And so many Jesus followers in their bio, they say they're Jesus followers with their pronouns and their anagrams, whatever numbers in their, anagrams in their bio.

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We're like, this is heresy. This is abject heresy. I mean, you probably already knew that Brian, you're preaching heresy.

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It's a Bible quotation. That's what the Bible says, but word for word, it's a quotation. God doesn't speak the truth in love apparently.

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See, this is the thing. We spend all this time analyzing if we're saying things the right way to like, to massage it, and people will like me if I say it in just the right way.

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I'm not going to use the word sodomite. I'm going to use the word gay because that's more, it's hospitality and stuff like that.

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We spend all this time worried about the tone. We don't even know if we have the truth right yet. No, it should fit the disgustingness of the sin.

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Sodomite's a great word because it's abrasive. And so when people see what's actually happening with two men that have sex with each other, that's an abrasive kind of shocking thing.

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And we need to find a word that matches the shocking nature of the degeneracy. That's what we need to do.

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We shouldn't soften it and use euphemisms for it. But no, if you use the word sodomite, which is a biblical word, that's the prototype of not speaking the truth in love.

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These people are so twisted that spend all their time, oh, speak the truth in love, and they don't even have the truth.

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So you want to know how to speak the truth in love? Speak the truth. That's how you do it. Speak the truth. And then, you know, when we get that right, when we figured that out, then maybe we can spend some time saying, are you saying it the right way?

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Are you saying it the right way? But that's not our big problem right now. But I'm not saying it can't be a problem.

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Of course it can. But that's not our problem today. Our problem today is that we're trying to massage the truth.

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The problem today is that we're trying to bend the truth. Our problem today is that we're trying to be so sensitive that we actually mutilate the truth to such a degree that it's not even the truth anymore.

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It's just like that stupid article, that brain -dead article that John Piper wrote about all the people that are being pressured to not get the vaccine that really know it's the right thing to do.

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This is completely insane. I'm not saying that couldn't possibly happen, but that has nothing to do with reality today.

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In any case, so that'll be a fun presentation. I think my pastor, you know, knows me well enough to know what

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I'm going to do during that presentation, but it'll be good. And I hope that God uses it.

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And man, like Vermont has so many problems, and this is just like the tip of the iceberg, but this is just so objectively just in your face, thumbing your nose at God, hating people in the constitution of the state.

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But I can't see how this doesn't just bring the wrath of God to bear on Vermont.

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And I don't want to see that. There's so many people I love that live in Vermont. In any case, I hope you found this video helpful.

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God bless. You may have noticed me uploading some fishing videos on this channel.

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Well, that's coming to an end, but I'm not going to stop making fishing content. I actually started a new channel called

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Fishing with A .D. Robles. Go ahead and subscribe to that channel to get updated on all my fishing adventures and all of that.

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Right now, I'm just uploading different catches and things like that. But eventually, I plan to put content out there for anyone who's interested in getting into fishing, how to get started, how to teach your kids, how to do all kinds of stuff.

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And so, that's the plan. And well, you might get a few tidbits of theological information along the way.

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I'm definitely not above praying to get fish. Look at this guy.

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Beautiful fish. Let's take a picture of him. Got him on a worm.

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I'm feeling good. That is a 2 .4.

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Nice fish. Great -looking fish. That's a good one.

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So, subscribe today. It's Fishing with A .D. Robles on YouTube. I'll put the link in the description here.

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Sign up for all the fishing content your heart desires. And along the way, a few theological tidbits here and there.