Marriage or Mirage according to 41% | Ep 15

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If we can have biblical marriages and show what marriage is supposed to be like, I think more and more, those who are on the outside of that are hungering for what we have.

00:11

To see a husband and wife who actually love one another and kids that honor their parents and where the kids, the favorite place for them to be is in the home with their family.

00:21

Like, what would that be like to those who are on the outside looking in? And welcome to Tearing Down High Places.

00:51

This is Average Joe. I got Pastor Jeff and Pastor Tim, not live, but they're live back at their studio.

00:59

And how are you guys doing today? Very good. Good. You can tell

01:04

I'm doing a remote because I'm a little sick. I couldn't make it in. That's why we wanted you to stay away because I don't feel like picking whatever you got up.

01:12

That's right. We need to keep you healthy. You got a big event this weekend. You're going out preaching in Wisconsin, I heard.

01:18

Yeah, yeah. This weekend, I'll be at the TruthScript Conference with John Harris and David Wheaton, Seth Brickley, and others.

01:29

Wow. That's good stuff. And Tim, we were praying for you the other day because I heard you're going to be preaching on Sunday.

01:36

That is true. But the viewers watching this, I probably would have already preached this morning, right? Yeah, that's true.

01:43

But you know what I always do? I usually put a link back to the sermon. So if you go back to the end of the screenshots, there's usually two links.

01:50

Well, there's three. There's one that'll let you subscribe to the podcast, which I suggest you do. We're currently on YouTube and we're on Spotify, and I'm uploading

02:00

Rumble next. So we should start getting that there. But I always put a link back, usually to the current sermon, unless we talk about something that people need some background on, right?

02:12

Because we don't want to... You guys, let me know what you think. I don't want to keep regurgitating the same information so we can point people back to other information.

02:24

You know what I mean? I don't know if you guys read any Jay Adams. Jay Adams does that in all his books.

02:30

He goes, I can't go into depth here. You got to go read this book I wrote, and then you got to read that book I wrote. The guy wrote like 100 books.

02:38

Yeah, but who has those books to go do that? People on a podcast, they're just maybe catching an episode here or there.

02:45

Yeah. We can become a little repetitive though. You want to be repetitive? All right. That's why I asked. No, I'm saying like in a bad way.

02:51

Sometimes we probably are a bit repetitive. Oh yeah. So I got to guard against that. Yeah, let's guard against that and let's point people to the other places so that we can move on and get into more depth, right?

03:02

Yes. Okay, cool. Awesome. So let's talk about today's subject. You know,

03:08

Ivan sent us over an article. It was from the

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Western Journal, and the Western Journal article said the problem with 41 % of churchgoers seeing no biblical problem with same -sex mirage or marriage.

03:28

They said marriage. Can you believe that 41 % of churchgoers apparently see no biblical problem with same -sex marriage?

03:37

Well, that means you still got 6 in 10 of churchgoers that do have a problem with same -sex mirage.

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Now, how many of those 41 % go to Episcopalian and Methodist and mainline

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Roman Catholic churches? Because the Roman Catholic churches that I know of, at least in New Jersey, I would say a majority of people are all for same -sex marriage.

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They pretty much just mirror whatever the culture is. They've been pressed into the mold of the culture.

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So I was amazed that in that article you're citing, Joe, it was something like 78 % now believe that same -sex marriage is a good thing.

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But just going back to the Bill Clinton era, it was down in the 30s. So there's been a huge sea change, and the

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Roman Catholics have just gone along with that. But I wonder if the 41 % that, or the ones that have continued to hold to the biblical sexual ethic aren't just the evangelical churches.

04:41

Right. Yeah, I don't think the article gets into that much depth, but I think the one issue you brought up is very, very much true, that we've got churches out there that are not preaching, they're preaching a weak gospel.

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I won't say a false gospel, but how does the gospel get weakened by a great church?

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And now we're getting repetitive, I guess, but it has to be said. We just said we weren't going to be repetitive, but sometimes you got to be, right?

05:09

Well, I think one of the biggest things is that Romans 12 .2, do not let the world press you into its mold, is essentially what's being said there.

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Because people want to fit in with whatever the culture is saying. You don't want to be the odd man out.

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You don't want to sound bad or lose out on business deals or be ostracized in your family.

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So you tend to go along with what people are saying. People are more often like sheep than leaders.

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So when culture back in the 1980s and earlier said one thing, but most everybody just went along with it, not because they had biblical conviction, but because that's just what people believed.

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And now the opposite is true. As the culture has changed, many people, even in these woke churches, claiming to believe the

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Bible are actually just being pressed into the mold of the culture. I feel that tug every day. I think a lot of us do.

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Because you don't want to be combative all the time. You want to be, dare

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I say, winsome. I hate that word. But you want to come alongside people and you want to help people.

06:24

You want to ask more questions than barking out, let's say it the Lord, right? I think the natural tendency is to want to be liked or to want to be popular with everyone.

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So even if you don't agree with it, you're not going to come out and say it. You're just going to be like, I'm going to let them do their thing.

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I'll do my own thing. And he can do that thing. But we all can coexist. Sure, sure.

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Big challenges. So we discussed, so we got the article here. I'm going to pull up this article and maybe we'll dig through it a little bit here and see what it says.

06:58

Did some stuff here on the article. This is by John Welnick. Again, we want to give him proper credit. Thank you for writing this article because I think it's so important.

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The first thing I saw was since 1996, American analytics company

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Gallup. So that's the one that's been doing the poll. They've been monitoring support for so -called gay marriage, right?

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Because he says it's right. That same year, Clinton administration signed into law the

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Defense of Marriage Act, DOMA, which Joe Biden, I do recall was a big fan of that back then.

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He promoted it, signed off on it. In fact, I think the entire Democratic Party signed off on that.

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Isn't that right? You guys remember that? Yeah. Well, it says in this article that it was under the Bill Clinton administration.

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Bill signed off on it. Yeah. Well, and he was very accommodating and signed whatever.

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He was just an accommodating guy, wasn't he? But even Obama in his first term was against same -sex marriage.

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100%. It's incredible. I actually thought from a policy perspective, again,

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I'm not saying the guy was a moral guy or anything. I thought Clinton was a better president than George Bush, the junior.

08:16

Interesting. Well, the Iraq war, if you're referring to that.

08:23

Well, yeah, I wasn't a big fan of that war. I was never a big fan of that.

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At the time, I thought it was all let's go. What'd you say? Oh, at the time,

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I was let's go. I was 16 years old. Okay. Yeah, I just believed,

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I'm sure it's a valid cause. Weapons of mass destruction, whatever. Let's go.

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So at the time I was towards the end of my college career and I was not a

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Christian. I was unsaved. And so me and one of my fraternity buddies, the plan was that we were going to say that we were homosexual marriage, married people so that we could get out of going because they wouldn't let gays in the military then.

09:11

Wow. Yeah. So that was my plan. That was very easy, Joe B .C.

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Joe, by the way. I wouldn't do that before Christ, before Christ. Exactly. I actually regret not being in the military.

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I think I my mom was a hippie and talked me out of it. I wanted to fly and I had good eyesight back then.

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But anyway, punches, pilot washing hands. That's what they call

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DOMA, allowing the decision to be made by the states. And he says, like, that's any better. And I think that's one of the biggest problems we have is, you know, not recognizing who actually has authority.

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I think it's good that it went back to the states because they are the ones that have authority. And as a culture, we're not very good at that.

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How do we how do we get so messed up on on knowing who's in authority? Well, I think you just got to go back to the founding of the nation that these were supposed to be a united states of which means nation.

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States means nation. It kind of changed. Definitions changed now, but it was a state like France or or or Germany.

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It wasn't a state like, you know. Yeah, I think there was more central debate between the

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Jeffersonian and Madison versus Hamilton.

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Hamilton wanted a bigger government, bigger central government, and Jefferson wanted it to be more power in the states.

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Right. But yeah, there was both, you know, they would some some power left to the states and others like national defense was obviously at the federal level.

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But writing laws, moral laws about marriage or abortion, any of these things that should have been in the hands of the states, each individual state.

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Right. And so so the next part he talks about, because the federal government didn't take a leadership role, there's an avalanche of state after state and governor after governor passing gay affirming bills, starting with civil unions and then full fledged redefinitions of marriage.

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What do you think of that? Yeah, well, that just shows where the hearts of the people are at.

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So the as the people move farther left and embrace these ideas, then they were able to pass.

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And the same thing's happening after the fall of Roe versus Wade. And in Dodd, push it back to the state.

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Well, now you have even in Ohio siding with the baby murderers. So like, where are we as a country?

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Where is the populace? Because that's the thing about democracy. If the majority has left the morality of biblical ethics, then pushing it to the states is not going to be a big help.

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No, well, not not going to be a big help. But I do think the authority has to remain where the authority is legally.

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If we write this power to the federal government, then, you know, we search. We we have strengthened them so much.

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They have so much control over so many things. I mean, thankfully, they don't have control over everything.

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Thankfully, they see some. They see some stop points that they have to.

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Right. But if if wouldn't it be great if as a Christian, if I didn't want to,

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I didn't want my tax dollars to be spent on murdering babies, I could move to a state where they didn't do that.

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Yes. Yeah. And that's what's happened. Yeah. There's this great migration from the blue states to the red states.

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And it's largely the conservatives that are fleeing the authoritarian states.

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And that makes the red states even redder. Yeah. How about what does this do to our marriage laws in general?

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I think I think one of our panelists today is getting married soon, right? Yeah, that'd be me.

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Yeah. Tim's getting married soon. So, Tim, what do you I mean, does this type of legislation, does it dilute the meaning of your marriage in any way?

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I don't think it dilutes the meaning of my marriage. I think that it's sad that more lies about what real marriage looks like are out there.

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But I think that, you know, really strong Christian marriages are still a beautiful testimony of who

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God is. Yeah. Well, it says here that, you know, the Obergefell versus Hodges Supreme Court ruling guaranteed the right for same sex couples to redefine marriage in every state around the country.

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I don't like it when so -called and I don't know this author, but so -called authors repeat something like that as if it's fact.

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It's not fact. That's an opinion. Um, judges are not supposed to legislate.

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They're supposed to generate opinions based on individual cases.

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Am I wrong? No, that's right. Yeah. Legislate. Legislators are supposed to legislate and they're supposed to decide cases.

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Right. Right. And that's and that's not what's happening, though. I mean, they say guarantee the right for same sex couples.

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We need the problem. I think the problem is always in the legislators, right? They just don't want to legislate anymore.

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So how do we fix that, guys? Well, obviously, where we always come down is that we've got to get back to evangelism and discipleship because it's got to be a ground up kind of movement.

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Like you said, Joe, until you have what something like 90 percent of this country

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Christian, you're never going to have a quote unquote Christian nation. You're not going to establish that in the government.

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It's really a moot point until we see a massive movement toward Christ. So but, you know, a lot of that is in how we demonstrate these things.

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I love what Tim said. If we can have biblical marriages and show what marriage is supposed to be like,

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I think more and more those who are on the outside of that are hungering for what we have to see a husband and wife who actually love one another and kids that honor their parents.

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And where the kids, the favorite place for them to be is in the home with their family. Like, what would that be like to those who are on the outside looking in?

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So what I hear you saying, Pastor Jeff, I think I hear you saying if we could some way differentiate our

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Christian marriage from all these other types of what they want to call marriage, then we might get the public to actually see the value of a

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Christian marriage. But right now, we're we're just jumbled up in the mix. Yeah. And like they're already noticing they're they're beginning to see how vacuous the secular humanist worldview actually is and how horrible the results are.

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So Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist, recently said, Well, I'm actually a cultural

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Christian because he's looking around and seeing England overrun by mosques. The Islam is now rising and Christianity has receded so much that the whole country is falling apart.

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And so he wants to be a, quote, unquote, cultural Christian. And he's saying, no, I don't believe in any of it, but I think we need to get back to Christmas carols and and churches and cathedrals and and all the outward form of it, because he's seeing that without those things, the things that made

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England what he inherited and then he was part of what squandered that inheritance in in the

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United Kingdom. He's saying without it, there's nothing but ruin. So families, the devastation of the family.

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What has that done to the United States of America? Well, you get rid of marriage, you get rid of God's design and you sow the wind and you reap the whirlwind.

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And I think they are starting to wake up to see, you know, there's something that we're missing, that we thought we were getting rid of the the bonds of the patriarchy and Judeo -Christian oppression.

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But really, we've just destroyed ourselves. That's pretty amazing. God's desire, one of his desires for for people is to be fruitful and multiply.

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You can only do that in a marriage, first of all, when you have a husband and a wife, a male and a female.

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If everyone in the whole world were to support that and then, you know, like Sodom and Gomorrah, it seemed like the entire city turned homosexual, were they right?

18:05

No. Even though everyone did it, didn't make it right. But say everyone in the world did that and didn't listen to God's command to be fruitful and multiply, they would be unfruitful and they would divide until there's no one left.

18:19

Yeah. So it's clearly seen as destruction. Wow, very well said.

18:28

All right, we go back to this article here. We see here the question of gay marriage seems like ancient settled history.

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Is this settled for you guys? No, I wouldn't say so.

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I mean, maybe in the short term in this culture, we're not expecting a sea change right within the next couple of years.

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But like I've been saying, we need to be optimistic about the future because we don't know when the

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Lord is coming and we don't know if the Lord will send revival, if there could be a change that in our kids, in that generation, that they will see things that we never imagined.

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For 50 years, it did not look like the conservatives would ever overthrow

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Roe versus Wade. Oh my gosh. It never looked like that. Think about that. It did not look like that.

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It got to the point where the woke ones were really just excoriating us. You still are saying the same thing.

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You're going to elect a conservative president who's going to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices to overthrow

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Roe. Well, yeah, you've been trying that for 50 years now. And then it happened. Just like we've been striving to do.

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So yeah, that's a huge flex for the Christians. Yeah, I thought they had us pinned in a corner, like this legal corner you just couldn't get out of.

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We allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked and just strong armed into this unbelievably hard thing.

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And that's why it makes me so passionate about state's rights over the federal government rights, because I feel like they nickeled and dimed and twisted and turned and they chipped and they chipped and they chipped and then boom, they got this and they started killing babies.

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Crazy. And just that level of evil. And I feel like marriage is the same way.

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I think they have us demoralized. A lot of Christians are just demoralized, like it's only ever going to get worse.

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So I'll tell you what, I don't think most Christians understand the deep, deep problem that we have with marriage or how big this impact is.

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You know, I've shared with lots of Christians, I've asked a lot of questions of Christians about marriage and what they know about marriage licenses and no fault divorce when they've asked me questions about some of my experiences with family court.

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And then when I shared certain things with them, they would say, well, I know that will never happen to my marriage.

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Like, what about your kids? About your grandkids? You know, we're supposed to leave an inheritance to our grandchildren, right?

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Is that what the proverb says? And I don't think kids are getting married.

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I mean, Tim, I mean, you're unique. You're not, you know, your generation doesn't want to get married. Yeah, I don't think they see they see the value in marriage the way that God sees the value in marriage and the way that Christians see the value in marriage.

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And it's sad because it's a beautiful thing, but they don't see it as such. Well, if you're not a

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Christian, though, what does it matter really? You know, so, well, there's a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the destruction of of the inner city, of the breakdown of society.

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Look at the college campuses and just the uproar like at Columbia University. We almost went out to Princeton today.

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If we had had enough time, we wanted to go and just because there's just rioting out there. We wanted to go preach the gospel.

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Heck, we should go to Columbia. Yeah. So the world sees the world sees the breakdown, but they don't connect at all that the breakdown of sexuality and God's design for marriage.

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This was the same as in the days of Israel. God had stopped blessing Israel and stopped regarding the offering that they were bringing.

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And they didn't know why. Like, what's wrong? In fact, it's Malachi chapter 2 verses 13 to 15.

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Malachi 2, 13 to 15. And this second thing you do, you cover the

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Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand.

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So they're recognizing that God isn't pleased. Things are not good. Not everything is just working out.

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But they say, why does he not? So they're confused. What's going wrong? Malachi 2, 14.

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Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.

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Marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman. And then it says, did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union?

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There's the spiritual importance of marriage, that the spirit of the living God is in that union, that the two become one flesh, but it's the spirit of God that unites them as one.

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This is a spiritual thing that's happening. It's not just whatever you want to make of it.

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This is God's design and his spirit is in the union. And then it says in verse 15, and what was the one

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God seeking? Godly offspring. This is

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God's design for the very world. Be fruitful. Who said that? Was that you, Tim? Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

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It goes back to the very design of the world in which we live. And if you have gay marriage, which doesn't produce offspring, period, then you don't have godly offspring.

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And if you don't raise your children in the wisdom and admonition of the Lord, they're not godly. So guard yourselves in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.

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I got to the faith part. I couldn't get the rest. So on the banner.

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So yeah. Now, offspring is not the only reason

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God gives us marriage, but certainly it's a critical component, right? You can't have it.

24:51

Yeah. Well, if you go back to Genesis, you get all of the purposes there. It is for union, for the unity of husband and wife, that there would be a companion because it was not good for Adam to be alone.

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So God made a helpmeet who's corresponding to him, the Edzer Conecto, the different in corresponding ways, which in gay marriage you don't have because basically you're, quote unquote, marrying a mirror image of oneself.

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But without that correspondence of Edzer Conecto, the helper that's meet to him, then it's not marriage at all.

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So yeah, that companionship is God's design, that union, the godly offspring, and even the pleasures and joys of sex is part of God's design.

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You know, there's a joy in that, that is a gift of God that the world is trying to steal.

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It's like taking the fire that God created out of the fireplace and allowing it to run and burn up an entire house.

25:54

Well, you know, it's interesting you bring that up because I've argued that one of the big problems we have in divorce, that divorce is actually, if someone is wronged and they can't make an argument that they've been wronged in divorce, the government takes away a

26:15

Christian's ability to have access to the one thing that God's given them to prevent sexual sin, which is marriage.

26:23

Yeah. So very difficult and very dangerous. I mean, for Christians, again, to allow ourselves to be painted into a corner there, where we're called to just submit to this, not a

26:36

Christian government. I mean, we've talked about many times how we were a Christian government at one point, but we're just not anymore.

26:43

Right. You know, and but we've allowed our Christian brothers and sisters to be subject to this, so we won't.

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Yeah, and you're referring to 1 Corinthians 7, you know, the first five verses of 1 Corinthians 7, people should reference that this is

26:57

God's design. Yeah, that's one of my favorite chapters in the book of gospel.

27:05

It's, you know, I think I've mentioned this before. It was a very impactful chapter. And it's, you know, it's something that doesn't get talked enough about inside the church, because the church has become so, feels so much pressure from a culture that no longer thinks the way they do, you know, like sexual purity just doesn't exist anymore.

27:33

So, yeah, let's talk about the rest of it. Let's go to this other part of this article here, where we talk about 41 % of weekly

27:41

Congress. We're talking about Christians feeling the pressure of the culture and believing that homosexuals should be allowed to marry.

27:50

As we go down the article, we see some other things that might have had an impact on it.

27:58

One of the things was President Trump, who we've talked positively about on this show, on this podcast,

28:07

President Trump was a big proponent of gay rights. They say it's not uncommon for people to see gays for Trump at so -called conservative political rallies.

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What do you guys think about that? Yeah, in fact, the person that they mentioned in that article, the Grinnell guy that Trump appointed, he's actually friends with somebody from our church, somebody who's very strong in biblical ethics and yet is kind towards this person and knows him very well.

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It's a travesty, because Trump is not a consistent moral person, obviously.

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This is like a glaring deficiency, because when you give up this area and people think, well, you know, if we just capitulate here, then we'll be more liked in other areas.

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But you've completely undermined your movement, because you've destroyed the foundation.

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So I've been really upset with Turning Point USA and then even

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Ben Shapiro's whole movement there, Daily Wire, because they completely compromise on this point.

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And they'll stand real strong against transgenderism and against men competing in female athletics, but they're willing to just give up on yesterday's battle, which was gay marriage.

29:35

And they even have that Dave Rubin guy come on and talk about his gay adoption. What a harm to the children of this so -called marriage.

29:47

Awful, awful, awful. Yeah, I think that flows. I was going to say something else, but I want to flow right into the other part of his argument here, because it's exactly what you're talking about.

29:56

You know, when you get down into these two options.

30:02

Right. So we all we all recognize that people are suffering from they're suffering from trying to get along with other people.

30:13

Right. They want to get along. But I also would argue, hey, too many Christians are putting their identity into whatever politician that they're following.

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Right. It might be Trump. It might be Biden, might be somebody else. My identity is in the personality that I'm following.

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And if that guy leads me somewhere, I got to do whatever he says. No, you don't. Yeah, that's the same thing.

30:35

It's the same thing with abortion, though. Like if you do like a 15 week fetal heartbeat ban or something like that, you're you're essentially granting the major argument of the left, which is until those 15 weeks are up.

30:51

Right. You have you have the choice to kill as if killing isn't killing. You have to be consistent.

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If not, you're you're destroying your own argument while at least you're consistent as the, you know, the opposing side who comes out.

31:07

Right. I really believe this, but I'm going to let you do that. Right. And now at least.

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So here's the thing. When you have someone who's perpetrating this abortion holocaust and desiring to advance it beyond what it is now, which

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Trump is trying to leave it alone. We're going to talk about abortion for a second. He wants to leave it in the states. Right. Right.

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Which is where it belongs anyway. On the other side, you have Biden trying to say, well, we need to make a federal constitutional right, federal law that grants, you know, the ability to kill your baby.

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There's a level of evil in that which far surpasses what the other guy is saying.

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So even though your guy is compromised and inconsistent, the level of evil that you're facing with the open border and so many other things we could talk about is just so outrageous that you have to stand with the guy who's going to stop it.

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So otherwise we're just not going to have a country left. The authority, the authority is vested in the people in the

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United States. So the people are also accountable and we could do any kind of constitutional amendment.

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It's the it's the mechanism that we use. That's it's so important. I mean, I would be all for an amendment that said that we we stand for life and we protect life, you know, and that could be a federal amendment.

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That would be wonderful. But yeah, it's it goes to the states otherwise than that. But but look in here.

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I did like this guy's argument here. He said the Christian has two options because the

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Christian does not have the option of compromise, which I thought was wonderful that he said that. He said the first option is is having an uncomfortable conversation and losing support.

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Of people you desperately need to talk about in political situations or the second option is to keep your mouth shut, adopting the libertarian mindset that neither condemns nor supports homosexuals lifestyle like, wow, that's a tough that's a tough call.

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And he goes the later the latter optional allow you to sleep well, believing you haven't betrayed your convictions and your friends sleep well, believing he is no endanger of eternal damnation.

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But Christians do not get to adopt a you do you attitude. Too many of us do.

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What do you guys think about that? That's an important part of the article. I agree. Yeah.

33:37

Yeah. We don't have that the right to just hide what we believe and shade the truth just to kind of get along.

33:49

Yeah. Um, so, you know, I'd say that the problem is just that none of us we've all capitulated too much.

34:00

I mean, my present company included. I just you know, we don't allow we think

34:05

Jesus is OK with us not bringing him everywhere we go. You know, we leave him home sometimes.

34:11

We don't bring him here or there. And if this kind of stuff I mean, and all this stuff, this is all out of business to man with the

34:19

DEI stuff. You know, this is it isn't like we can go to work and just just go to church on Sunday.

34:27

I mean, the secular culture is in our workplace. I mean, they've invaded.

34:32

They've taken over. Right. Right. And it's a different thing to say, like, let's say you work at a major company and there's these

34:39

DEI officers sending you ridiculous woke articles that you need to go storm into their office and like rebuke them for doing that.

34:48

There's a sense of, yeah, you can mind your own business and ignore. But what you can't do is compromise and start capitulating.

34:54

So you can't start like preaching the very thing that you hate. And that's what happens with these politicians.

35:00

They want to get the vote. And so they start saying things which are blatantly untrue to get the vote.

35:06

It's one thing to to pick your battles. You got to be wise and prudent about what battles you pick in life.

35:12

But what we're talking about here is a politician who is actually saying the opposite of the truth.

35:18

He's lying to try to to get elected because he needs the gay vote. What do you guys think about him saying this is a slippery slope for Christians?

35:29

He says his issue is not now nor has ever been president candidates, but the slippery slope upon which

35:35

American Christians have seemed to place their moral values. You will not give an account for your politics when you get in heaven.

35:43

You will give an account for your loyalty to Jesus Christ. What do you guys think about that?

35:52

I'm curious to see what Jeff thinks about that. It's just such a weird dichotomy.

35:57

You won't give an account for your politics. Yeah. Is that what he said? Yeah. All right. Let me bring it up again.

36:03

How come he's allowed to like politics and and people are allowed to have opinion on politics, but Christians aren't?

36:12

Yeah. Isn't it? Give an account to Christ. Yeah, we're going to have to give an account for every word that we speak, whether in public or in private and everything that we do.

36:23

Even the thoughts of our heart will be before the judgment seat of God. So, of course, our politics are included in that.

36:29

If we go out and I heard a preacher, this was awful. He was sadly someone from our denomination at a district conference saying you need to be a politically diverse church and you need to have.

36:42

He works in Washington, D .C. So you need to have Democrat staffers, people who work as staffers in a

36:49

Democrat office and people who are staffers in a Republican office just for the sake of diversity here that you're not going to be political.

36:58

Well, that's the most ridiculous thing. If you're working as a staffer in the Democratic office promoting their their platform, the

37:05

Holocaust of babies, that the mutilation of of bodies, that the theft of property in socialism, you're working for that.

37:15

That's your politics. And you're rejecting the lordship of Jesus Christ over every one of those areas.

37:23

And when I get on an airplane, you'll give an account for that. And when I get on an airplane,

37:28

I'm going to hire the guy that's in an Eskimo because I haven't I don't have enough diversity in my my flight path at all.

37:36

Yeah, it's nuts. It is. I don't think that's what the author is getting at, though.

37:42

I think he just used it a little bit more vaguely or something, but I don't think so either.

37:47

I think I think when he said slippery slope, I mean, he's talking about compromising on homosexuality, like everybody's mad about transgenderism, but they're not mad about homosexuality, homosexuality anymore because they're so mad about transgenderism.

38:01

So now we're going to give up marriage, too, in order to get something else. I think that's the point.

38:07

I think that's what he meant. Yeah, I think he had the right right frame of mind. Maybe not worded exactly the way we thought, but he had a good heart and a good heart.

38:17

Bless his heart. Like curse word in the South or something. Yes. That's how you nicely reject somebody.

38:26

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So the end all be all is we really need to still be looking at this marriage thing.

38:35

I mean, you know, we can't allow this to be over. Right. Obergefell did not was an opinion on a single case.

38:44

It does not does not translate to legislation because it's coming from the judiciary.

38:51

But at the same time, when people say it's the law of the land, it kind of is because all of our politicians are laying over and letting it be.

39:01

Yeah. How do we change that, guys? I say at this point, we we focus on making disciples here in New Jersey.

39:14

There's there's little we can do at this point in time. You know, there's not going to be a grassroots movement to ban homosexual marriage.

39:24

So we just live to fight another day. I don't know. Is that good enough for right now?

39:31

I suppose, you know, the author of the article says this at the very end, and it was a good article.

39:37

I recommend it. Gallup, 41 percent would likely argue that the reason for their answer was to promote the health and wealth of American life, to let people pursue personal happiness.

39:50

The Christian, however, must believe that the only way human life truly prospers is when it is in perfect obedience to the will of the

39:58

God who created it. I love that line. I thought it was great. Very well said.

40:04

You should invite this guy on to TVHP. I'm going to have to. Yeah, why not?

40:09

Let's get him on. Yeah, we got it. We got to get some more guests here. I got a couple of people trying to look at what do you think of this platform now that your

40:19

Apple devices are working better? Yeah, we can do this from time to time. Works for me.

40:25

All right. It's good for guests, right? If we've got a guest, it's a little easier. Yeah. You know,

40:31

I think. But anyway, so next week, we're going to cover war. Yes.

40:37

Well, wait a minute. We did marriage today. It's almost like covering the same thing. Oh, no, no, no, no.

40:43

Let's go back to Malachi. I didn't get that. It was funny, Joe.

40:49

So so we had we had we had some people asking about our comments about the war for independence, also known as the

40:59

Revolutionary War. Some people call it one or the other, depending on their opinion on that war.

41:07

We're going to talk a little bit about was it a just war? Maybe we'll get into some just war theory next week to love it.

41:15

That'll be fun. OK, great. What else, guys? Anything else we want to cover today? No, I think we're good.

41:24

Tim, you want to tell us about your marriage? What are you doing to prepare for your big wedding day?

41:29

Keeping in. I am just excited and feel very blessed. And I think like when

41:37

I first became a Christian, I was I was afraid to to let go of my old life and lose my life to find a new one.

41:46

And I did that. And and I found that God has blessed me way more abundantly than than I thought.

41:54

I thought that it was going to be a hard life living as a Christian. And it is. But God has also blessed me way more than I can imagine and has been way more kind and gracious to me after becoming a

42:06

Christian than than before. So so glory to God. I'm marrying a godly, beautiful woman, the woman that is that I hope for.

42:16

And the exact woman I want to marry is the one that I'm marrying. So I'm very, very happy.

42:21

I agree with you. As long as you've got a godly woman, it doesn't matter how wicked those laws are.

42:28

Right. Amen. All right, guys. Well, till next time, if you see a brother down, pick him up.

42:36

See a high place. Tear it down. Tear it down. All right.