God's Good Design (Part 1): Interview with Michael Clary

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

00:05

I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

00:13

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

00:21

The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

00:26

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

00:37

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

00:44

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Guess what, Edward? What's that?

00:49

It's December. It is December. I mean, it's not technically December. But it will be when people hear this.

00:55

But when people are listening to the sultry sound of your voice, it will be December. Yeah, hopefully they've got those beautiful Christmas tunes playing in their head.

01:06

Yeah, I've been doing that since March. Hopefully, I'll have the Christmas tree up for two months now.

01:13

Yeah, you've got your Christmas lights up. I've seen that on Facebook. Yeah, I hate to even admit this.

01:18

At the time of this recording, I don't even have the tree up yet. So, I've got the one in my office. Hey, welcome to the

01:24

Rural Church Podcast. I'm Allen Nelson. With me is Eddie Ragsdale. And we are joined by a special guest this morning,

01:32

Michael Clary. Say hello, Michael. Hello, guys. How you doing? We're doing good.

01:38

Grateful to have you. You got your tree up? I do not. I'm one of those heretics that would rather have the tree up after Thanksgiving.

01:46

We'll allow that slide. What do you think, Ed? That'll be all right. We don't get ours up until after Thanksgiving either.

01:52

But I have been listening to Christmas music for about a month already. My wife would be in agreement with you guys.

01:58

Yeah, amen. Well, we have a special reason that we have Michael on today. Before we get to that reason, why don't you just tell us a little bit about who is

02:08

Michael Clary? I was born and raised in West Virginia, Huntington, West Virginia.

02:14

And ended up, through various circumstances, planting a church in the opposite of where I grew up, which is the middle of the city,

02:24

Cincinnati, Ohio. But I grew up on Route 75, Wayne County, West Virginia, a rural area.

02:30

But now I'm right in the middle of the urban core of Cincinnati. A bit of a fish out of water in some ways.

02:37

But God called me here to plant a church 15 years ago. 2008 is when I moved here.

02:44

Gathered a core group for a year and a half. We launched a church in 2010 and been here ever since.

02:51

The church is called Christ the King Church. It's a Southern Baptist church. And we're more on the

02:57

Tom Askle founder's wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. So reformed, patriarchal in my theology.

03:07

My wife, Laura, and I, we've been married for 24 years. We've got four kids that are 18, 17, 15, and 12 are the ages of my four.

03:18

Were you eight when you got married, brother? I was 24 when

03:24

I got married. I'm 49 years old right now. I've been hearing lately that people don't believe me. Oh, wow.

03:30

You know, we recently renamed our church to Providence Baptist Church.

03:36

So it's Providence Baptist Church, Christ is King. That's our tagline. Because we kicked around Christ is

03:46

King was going to be our name. Christ is King Baptist Church. We were thinking about that.

03:51

So that's kind of neat to hear. In fact, now that hearing you say that, I've heard that from you before,

03:57

I believe. So that's good, brother. Eddie, you got any follow -up questions there? So what led you to Cincinnati?

04:10

Yeah, that's a great question. So I went to college at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

04:16

Some know it as the Harvard of West Virginia. Actually, nobody does, but that's just my little joke.

04:23

Just a small state school in West Virginia. But I went to Marshall University, and that's really where my faith took off.

04:31

I was raised attending church regularly with my family, but I got involved in Campus Crusade.

04:36

They call it Cru now. Got involved in Campus Crusade crew at Marshall, and my faith just grew like crazy to the point to where I was like,

04:45

I want to do this with my life. Ended up joining the staff with Cru, and they assigned me to the

04:53

University of Louisville. So I moved to Louisville, and while I was there, a couple things happened.

05:00

My heart for the church just really started to blossom. My experience with campus ministry,

05:08

I started to question the approach and whether or not

05:17

I'm a good fit for the approach, certainly. But the approach itself, I had some questions about that, and I started to see the church really is

05:24

God's plan A for the world. Then I respected

05:30

Southern Seminary, and I was excited to go to Louisville because I wanted to take classes there.

05:37

But I ended up taking classes at Southern Seminary, and meanwhile, I'm helping get involved with the church plant.

05:44

And the church plant there, they needed a worship leader, so I led worship for them. I was at the very first core group meeting and led music for them.

05:52

I was there for about three years, helped them launch the church, helped them meet with the staff, and got kind of an insider's look.

06:01

And so I'm going to heart for churches growing. I love the church planting idea, and being able to be on the inside, seeing how they do things was really exciting for me.

06:15

Getting a seminary degree and knowing that church work was where I was called long term. At that point,

06:23

I just started to pray, Lord, where would you send me? My wife is from Cleveland, I'm from Huntington.

06:32

We thought it makes sense to be somewhere that's like a midpoint between us, so we have easy access to both our families.

06:38

Cincinnati and Columbus were both in that range. But we wanted to be in an urban environment.

06:48

My thoughts on that have changed a bit since then. But at the time, basically I was drinking the

06:53

Kool -Aid in the city for the city, and everybody was all hyped up about doing urban ministry. So I was like, okay, that's what

06:58

I want to do. So we're looking at what cities would make sense.

07:05

Midwestern Rust Belt kind of city. Cincinnati made a lot of sense, especially because as I connected with other ministry leaders and pastors, it just seemed like the type of church that I wanted to plant, there wasn't a whole lot of that sort of church around Cincinnati.

07:21

It seemed like an opportunity to do something unique. So that's how we ended up here.

07:26

We kind of did a parachute church plant, if you're familiar. You don't know anybody. You just kind of move in and see what happens.

07:33

Trust God and share your faith and gather people. I read a book about that one time.

07:40

It's called Acts. Well, I'm no apostle,

07:47

Paul. Church planting will highlight your weaknesses like nothing else.

07:54

Maybe marriage will do it too. But planting a church is like you realize just all the things you don't know.

08:01

And God has shown me that in abundance over the last few years. Well, praise God. I think we love church planting.

08:08

Obviously, this is called the Rural Church Podcast. But we've said many times, it's just because we don't have a lot of guys we feel like in our context that are talking.

08:19

We like to talk, like I told you before the show. Eddie and I just like the excuse and the accountability to meet every week.

08:27

We're 90 minutes apart, really too far to try to meet in person. So we meet and able to talk about things that we find important.

08:35

So we're grateful for what you're doing in Cincinnati. I think this will segue us into the book, but I can't help but to think about what happened last night.

08:50

And kind of as a pastor in Ohio to kind of get your thoughts, just walk us through real quick.

08:57

I know this is not coming out to December, but what happened as far as the vote in Ohio with abortion?

09:04

Explain that to us a little bit. And then I have some questions

09:09

I think will get us into the book talking about that. But what happened last night? What did the state of Ohio end up deciding when it comes to the abortion issue?

09:17

The state of Ohio had a constitutional amendment on the ballot. And in Ohio, the

09:24

Constitution can be amended with a simple majority. So they needed 51 % of the vote or anything over 50 % of the vote would have passed this amendment.

09:35

And the amendment was to the net effect would be to make abortion at every stage of gestation a legal right.

09:46

And do so as a constitutional right, which puts it beyond the reach of judicial review.

09:54

So it is now a constitutional right in the state of Ohio to abort a child. So there is a distinction before viability, show up at Planned Parenthood and they'll get you an abortion.

10:04

If the child is deemed viable, then there needs to be some medical necessity. And the medical necessity is defined as the mother's life or health.

10:13

And we know how the activists will define health. It's mental health, it's emotional health, whatever health can be anything.

10:20

And so that's after child is viable. So partial birth abortion all the way up to the end.

10:26

It's all it's not. I mean, it's not not merely legal. It is a constitutional right because the amendment itself is called the right to reproductive freedom,

10:37

I think, is what it's called. A lot of people were opposing it, vocal about it.

10:42

I've recorded videos and wrote articles and posted things on Twitter and stuff about it. Our church has been praying for it.

10:48

And there's a lot of a lot of churches and leaders that were opposing it as hard as we could.

10:56

But at the end of the day, the vote came in and the people of Ohio, they voted.

11:02

They voted in favor of this amendment. And there was a lot of misinformation, too. And that I think a lot of people got duped by the emotional rhetoric because all the

11:13

TV advertising would would focus would say things like, well, if you have an ectopic pregnancy, you know, you wouldn't be able to get medical treatment.

11:21

Or, you know, this if you have some 10 year old child who was who was raped, you know, she would be forced to carry this child.

11:27

I mean, it was this very manipulative language and it played on people and they fell for it. But I mean, the sad thing is, and this is where the pastoral response to me, abortion is a crime.

11:40

It's tragic. It is an absolute travesty. We've had up until this point, we've been able to blame

11:48

Roe v. Wade and say it's Roe v. Wade's fault. But now it's not

11:54

Roe v. Wade's fault. God gave us a victory in overturning Roe v. Wade. And then every state has its own decision to make.

12:04

And now the people were voting murder into our own state. And so pastorally, that makes me sad for the babies that are being killed.

12:13

But it is I mean, I feel I feel a little heavy hearted about it. I'm hopeful.

12:20

But for the moment, I'm heavy hearted about it because people have voted for this.

12:26

And I'm like, they're people who voted for this will have blood on their hands. They will give an account to God for for supporting this because they made it legal.

12:35

I mean, in our form of government, we bear the sword. We are we're self -governed. So we bear the sword. And man, we mishandled this one.

12:42

What was the percentage again? Did you say I can't. You do. I don't know.

12:48

The the the polling that I saw with about 50 percent reporting yesterday was like 55, 45, something like that.

12:56

And they they called it. And once they called it, I turned it off. And yeah, so I don't know what the final tally is.

13:03

I honestly didn't have the heart to didn't have the heart to look at it. I don't know. So one of the things that you weigh in on this, too, like one of the things for us as a church, like we stopped giving to the cooperative program.

13:14

You know, we're still technically SBC in this in the sense that we haven't officially left the convention.

13:21

However, it's it's it's really something that I feel like the vast majority of our church we're just done with.

13:28

We're just tired of playing. And I and I and I encourage these brothers that are fighting. And Tom Askell, I consider not just an acquaintance, but a friend.

13:36

And I love I love Dr. Askell and founders. And, you know, I'm appreciative what you guys are doing and other mutual friends that we have.

13:45

Very, very grateful. Fight. Fight the good fight. I think it's I think it's a worthy fight in the

13:50

SBC. But for us, you know, with things that we've been through and stuff, it was just exhausting me.

13:56

And so it's just something that we've just, you know, felt like we can't give energy to.

14:03

However, one of the things that led to that. Of course, we have issues with the North American mission born stuff.

14:09

But one of the things pertinent to this conversation is the ERLC, where we felt like ultimately the

14:16

ERLC was taking a stance on this specific issue. You know, on abortion, that was actually an opposition.

14:25

And I want to say, you know, I know that there are well -meaning brothers and sisters who are in the pro -life movement who would call themselves, hey, we're pro -life.

14:35

You know, and and I think that they're genuine believers. I think that they really in their heart of hearts are trying to stand against abortion.

14:44

However, that being said, I think the pro -life movement as a whole has just shown itself insufficient when it comes to, you know, when it when it comes to these arguments and sometimes not only insufficient.

14:59

I'm talking about best case scenario. There are some certainly within the pro -life movement who don't want abortion to end because this is the way that they make their money or whatever.

15:11

But anyway, Eddie, you want to add anything? You know, the only thing I would I would add, and Michael, it seemed like you were you were saying this.

15:20

But I feel like after Roe v. Wade, after the

15:26

Dobbs decision, you know, that reversed that, I think a lot of us and I'll admit even myself, we kind of sat back.

15:34

We maybe spent too much time celebrating while the other team got back and slam dunked on the other end.

15:43

We kind of said, hey, we won. And didn't realize that we're still in the game.

15:49

You know, we needed to continue, continue seeking to support life and to proclaim the gospel and to help these women in distress not to become now murderers of their children.

16:04

And so I think I think some of this, not just in Ohio, but all over our country, is is a little bit on us for not continuing to be as as adamant as we were before the

16:19

Dobbs decision about continuing to call people to repent of sin and to look to Christ and and to save the lives of these children.

16:28

And and I know some people, I just wanted to clarify. So I listen like, wait, are you not pro -life?

16:35

Well, I'm very much for life. However, I'm for a consistent view in life, whether you want to call that being an abolitionist.

16:44

Yeah. But the idea is I do believe biblically. Children in our country, all persons in our country should be afforded equal protection under the law.

16:57

That is, if a child is murdered in the womb, I don't care how old this pre -born neighbor is.

17:04

If they're murdered in the womb, there ought to be swift and serious consequences, just like we would, whether the child is one years old or or, you know, one minute old or whatever.

17:17

You understand? So just to clarify those that might be listening, wondering. But anyway, that brings us, brother, because you you actually did reference specifically in the introduction.

17:28

Let me talk about your book for a second. Let me introduce that. So we invited you on, brother, because we want to support what you're doing.

17:36

Is this your first book? It is. So, Michael Cleary, God's Good Design, A Biblical, Theological and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality.

17:48

So God's Good Design, A Biblical, Theological and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality. I would guess this is a big book.

17:55

My guess, rough estimate, is this maybe around like 60 ,000 words or something?

18:01

Is that? Ninety. Ninety thousand. OK, good. That's good, brother. It's a good it's a good size book.

18:07

It's like 300 pages. But one thing you talk about in your introduction and the connection

18:13

I want to make here, too, is you talk about Obergefell in 2015.

18:19

You talk about I have that pulled up, actually, where the gradually of our culture change became a suddenly.

18:27

Talk about that a little bit. Talk about how your book ties in also with the abortion. Connect all this together and just tell us, you know, why

18:36

Michael Cleary took the time? Because it's a lot of time and especially a 90 ,000 word book.

18:41

It's a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of energy, a lot of focus. Why did you write this book? Yeah, the it's a readable book.

18:48

You hear 300 pages, 90 ,000 words. It's so it's very thoroughly researched.

18:57

I'm making a case. And that's that's really the you know, if you could use like the, you know, some of the case for Christ, the case.

19:04

I mean, it could be you could call it the case for biblical sexuality. And that's that's what

19:11

I'm trying to do in this book because I wanted to. So I'm a pastor. First and foremost, I'm a pastor.

19:17

And there are people in my congregation that I love and I want to I want them to understand and not understand something, but also not be deceived about about sexuality.

19:28

And there's so much deception in the air. It's in our culture. It's everywhere. And it's ever. It's pervasive.

19:34

It's constant. And it is very powerful. Just the deception and the lies.

19:41

And I'm like, there has to be we have to be able to oppose it. What I found was whenever you try to oppose or oppose a negative view or promote a positive view without some of the was that some of the foundation, some of the presuppositions, then it's not going to gain a lot of traction.

19:58

A lot of times there's a. So I'd say with with abortion, if you think abortion is if you think if you think it's well, it's not really human until the baby's born.

20:09

Then if that's your presupposition, then abortion, it's going to be abortion is going to be an easy case for you to make and to believe that.

20:18

But if you believe this is a human life, then now you're dealing with with a more a more full picture of why this is an evil thing.

20:27

So I think with sexuality, it's the same thing, because a lot of people that I talk to as a pastor, they they might see they'll see a verse in the

20:34

Bible that says homosexuality is a sin. But they all of the presuppositions and assumptions of their life make that implausible or difficult to believe because they think, well, they just love each other.

20:45

And, you know, marriages, marriage and love is just about, you know, you know, our affection for one another.

20:50

And, you know, why would God create somebody homosexual and things like this? Like they believe that God made a person this way because they've bought in.

20:58

They've bought into all of the lies that the culture tells them. So I wanted to have a single volume that would make the case that here's here is a it starts with God.

21:10

Here is who God is. And here's God's purpose in creation. And here's how sexuality fulfills that purpose in creation, which glorifies

21:18

God. And then here's how that how God created us. He created us as male and female.

21:23

And there's a there's a purpose in maleness and there's a purpose in femaleness. And then these things are are worked out because God has some grand design that is glorifying and good that he he created the universe to express and to fulfill.

21:38

You need all of those things as the as the under as the foundation for some of the specific teachings that you might get to in like, why is the husband the head of his wife?

21:51

Why, you know, why wouldn't we just say singleness is just as good as marriage? Why do men get to be the elders in the church?

21:58

Why, you know, why do they get to be in charge? Why is homosexuality a sin? Why would we oppose transgenderism?

22:05

All of those things need some prior foundation that is supplying the mental framework for how we even understand

22:14

Scripture and engage these topics. So that that's the book.

22:19

It is a case. God, God is a father who is the father over a cosmic household that that he he he rules supreme over as an eternal father.

22:31

And then he created an earth where he would dwell with his people. And this earth, the vision of the book of Genesis chapter one and two, where he created man and woman, and he said, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

22:44

So the wheels were set in motion at Genesis 1, 20, 27, with the creation mandate, dominion mandate, that this planet would ultimately be filled with human beings created in God's image who are worshiping him for his glory.

23:02

That's still God's goal. That is God's goal right now. One day, this will be a renewed heavens and a renewed earth, and we will have human men and human women, eternally male, eternally female, in glorified physical bodies, filling this earth for the glory of God.

23:20

That was God's plan from the beginning. That's God's endgame. And the three of us as men, we have a particular calling and a vocation in that.

23:31

And our wives as women, there is a particular vocation and a calling for them to fulfill.

23:38

If we miss that foundational piece, then some of the particulars we get into, the questions that we probably run into all the time as pastors, things like, you know, working mothers, or, you know, why should a wife submit to her husband?

23:56

Things like this. It's like, these are real -world, practical things that we run into all the time in ministry.

24:04

And I have found that a lot of people don't have the basic vocabulary to understand. They don't have the prior knowledge to even begin the conversation.

24:14

I wrote the book to be able to put it in. It's something anybody in your church should be able to read if they have just a basic amount of biblical literacy.

24:28

It's written at Sunday school level, so it's very accessible, and it's very practical. A lot of pastoral care.

24:35

It's not the kind of thing that you would read as a pastor. I agree with this, but I could never give it to my church because everybody would freak out and think

24:42

I'm crazy. It's something that I think any pastor can hand to a member of their church and say, if you want to know why

24:49

God's designed for sexuality, here it is. Even if you don't agree with all of it, it's something that it could at least not freak your people out when they read it.

24:58

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've lost in our arguments here are we've allowed kind of the culture to make this into you're just trying to take us backward type thing.

25:14

You're trying to take us to either a time period where women really were harmed or abused or whatever the case may be, or this is about taking us back to the 1950s.

25:30

We don't want to be in the 1950s. We want to be in the 21st century. You even find that kind of rhetoric and language, again, not to just this show today isn't about bashing the

25:42

SBC, but you find that kind of rhetoric and language in some of the arguments when it comes to the

25:47

Southern Baptist Convention. We've just got to meet the times and those sorts of things. And so what

25:53

I hear you saying and what I know that your objective here is, and Eddie, you weigh in here on this too, is this isn't about a time period.

26:03

This is about an attack on human sexuality. It's not just preferential.

26:11

It's actually assaulting the God who designed the sexes.

26:18

This is God's good design. And so when we distort and twist and get this wrong, when we just say, well, anything goes in the home, anything goes in the church, it doesn't matter about God's design.

26:32

Then, of course, people don't say it that way because they don't think like you said, brother, they're not thinking in those categories.

26:37

But ultimately, what I'm trying to say is when we allow men in roles or doing things they shouldn't be doing, or women in roles or doing things they shouldn't be doing, this isn't ultimately about men and women.

26:51

It goes past that to the God who made us. And so this is a lot bigger issue than some make.

26:59

Anyway, I'm rambling. Eddie, you got anything you want to jump in there? Well, yeah. Michael, you know, thinking about God's good design, it seems like the tip of the spear in the attack against God's good design in the day and age in which we live is the distinction that the world wants to make between biological sex and gender, as maybe they would call it a construct.

27:27

So I just want to ask kind of how would you, if maybe an opponent, a person that's not holding to a biblical worldview, ask you that question or wanted to challenge you on that, how would you define a biblical view of biological sex and gender?

27:48

Yeah. Well, if I were in a debate with somebody, here's how

27:56

I would respond to that, knowing that they would not be persuaded by this, but we'd have to begin with, we come to this debate with different presuppositions.

28:08

My presupposition is that the word of God is true and eternal and infallible and inerrant.

28:14

And so that is the foundation that I'm building on. However, we can also look to nature.

28:21

And so I address this in the book, we have truth with a capital T, and that is the word of God. And we have truth with a lowercase

28:27

T, which is, you know, what things that we observe in nature that correspond with God's word.

28:35

So what I would say is, one, we are embodied souls. We see that in the book of Genesis where God created

28:41

Adam and he became a living creature is what our Bibles will translate. The word there is soul. Nefesh is the

28:47

Hebrew word for soul, which at the very least, it gives some indicator that it's not just here is some thing that happens to be alive.

28:58

I mean, trees are living things, but there's something unique about man and that his embodiment, he is a soul that is embodied.

29:06

So that is the biblical worldview. What the world is doing now is a renaissance of Gnosticism.

29:17

And the Gnostic idea is that you have an inner core of who you are, and then you have this outer shell that doesn't always correspond to who you are on the inside.

29:29

We didn't invent that in the 21st century, that that was a Gnostic idea that the early church had to deal with and the early church condemned it.

29:39

But the Gnostic idea is something that we hear all the time. So Gnostics thought material world is evil.

29:47

It's corrupt. It's bad. It's fallen. So all material things are bad. What's really important and what's really good is the spiritual thing.

29:55

And that's all the inside, the inner person. So, so a

30:01

Gnostic, you know, the way that they would play this out in their, in their views, it's like you had some Gnostics that would abase the body.

30:07

You know, they would kind of do self, that would kind of mutilate the body as a way of kind of punishing and purging this, this physical thing.

30:17

Other Gnostics would indulge the body. And they say, well, and Christians would do this. And Christians like, well, you know, the body is going to do what the body is going to do.

30:26

So it's not me having sex with this prostitute. It's my body having sex with a prostitute. The real me is this, you know, sanctified man because I'm, I'm a spiritual being.

30:35

The same idea is now happening in the modern world where you could say, well,

30:40

I'm Eddie. No, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a man on the outside, but who I am on the inside is totally different. You know, people can say

30:46

I'm a man trapped in a woman's body or vice versa. Those are, those are pagan ideas that are,

30:53

I mean, even the ancient pagan religions, there are the goddess Ishtar was in modern language.

31:01

She would be considered transgender because Ishtar was a, was sexually, she would change.

31:08

She could, she could manifest as a male, manifest as a female. And this was, it's represented in, you know, some of the, you know, the pagan mythology around Ishtar, which is in the

31:21

Old Testament. I believe it's, I believe it's a fair connection of Ashtoreth. You see

31:26

Ashtoreth and the, you know, as, as, as one of the, the idols that the

31:32

Israelites were tempted by. But it's a, it's, it's this sexual idea that who you are on the inside doesn't match who you are on the outside.

31:39

So whenever somebody says gender and sex are different things, I say gender is a social construct and sex is a biological thing.

31:47

And I would say, well, you are rebelling against reality.

31:53

Your body tells you, your body gets, gets, is a, is the determinative factor.

32:01

But people say, well, sex is assigned at birth or we're not going to assign sex at birth. And I mean, I know some parents,

32:07

I mean, this is the most insane thing. You know, I hear of these really crazy liberal parents that will, they'll say, well,

32:14

I'm not going to assign a gender to my child. My, my, you know, whenever they're, you know, as, as they grow up, you know, they'll, they'll figure it out for themselves.

32:23

I mean, that, that is, that is insane. Good, godly parents train their children from the very earliest ages to, there are certain ways that, that's good for boys to behave, and there are certain ways for girls to behave.

32:39

And then we train them virtuous life, holy life that is somewhat determined by their sex.

32:48

And that's a good thing because we learn to live as adults, as men and women that have, you know, these distinctions being a good thing.

32:54

But the world is just, it's rebelling against all those things. I'll stop, I'll stop right now. No, no. Oh, that's great, brother.

33:01

It's great. And, you know, one of the things that I try to communicate here is when the serpent, when, when

33:10

Satan made his attack in the garden, he doesn't go to Eve because it's just like, oh, well, she's dumb, you know?

33:18

I mean, like, she is a, she is a worthy image bearer, created in the image of God to, to, to fulfill her roles.

33:28

But he goes to Eve for a specific purpose. In the garden, he is reversing the very created roles that God has made.

33:39

Man first, then woman, Adam, headship over the woman. I mean, Satan is turning all that, and that's, some people may, maybe you've not thought about it that way before, but that's exactly, like, there is, there is a purpose to Satan's attack here.

33:54

And so all I'm trying to say is from the beginning, God has had this good design in the, in the created roles of male and female.

34:04

And from the beginning, Satan has sought to thwart that and to invert that.

34:12

And all we're doing today is seeing that, you know, played out. That's what feminism is.

34:18

One more, yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the things I did want to get to, chapter 10, you talk about sexual dynamics in the church.

34:30

By the way, I did want to mention this too. Brother, you've got some great endorsements here. Michael Foster, C .R.

34:36

Wiley, Megan Basham. That's wonderful, brother. You've got some great, some great folks that are kind of on the front lines of these things that have read your book and said, hey, this is something you need to read.

34:47

So, again, I commend the book. But you have this quote.

34:53

It's on 243 from William and Barbara Mauser. Men who are led in the church by women are less than men.

35:01

Women who lead men in the church are less than women. And that's going to do it for part one.

35:08

You'll have to tune in next time to part two to get my answer, Michael's answer, Eddie's answer on this quote.

35:14

As we continue the conversation about God's good design of gender roles and specifically next episode, what that looks like in the local church.

35:24

Thanks for joining us on this week of the Rural Church Podcast. Catch you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

35:44

God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemas, the masterpiece of God.