Session 11: Q&A with Darrell Harrison and Virgil Walker by Jim Osman - 2022 Equipping Conference

♪ Hear us from thee, the devil seeking to devour ♪ ♪

With trembling hearts we hear his roar ♪ ♪

But your strong arm will crush his power ♪ ♪

We look to you, we look to you, for his earthly reign ♪ ♪

We look to you, we look to you, love we look to you ♪ ♪

You will come again to reign, we look to you, we look to you ♪ ♪

All the earth will bow in praise ♪ ♪

While suffering, it won't be long, it won't be long ♪ ♪

Storm -tossed pilgrim, if you're struggling ♪ ♪

It won't be long, it won't be long, no ♪ ♪

Though your flesh is now decaying, it won't be long, no ♪ ♪

God is making, it won't be long, it won't be long ♪ ♪

Kings now bound in prison, it won't be long, no ♪ ♪

It won't be long, Lord, here's your freedom ♪ ♪

Christ is risen, it won't be long, it won't be long ♪ ♪

Christ appearing, it won't be long, tears will vanish ♪ ♪

When we see him, it won't be long, it won't be long, no ♪ ♪

Maker unseen, truly the almighty ♪ ♪

Beyond all measured worth, holy is his name ♪ ♪

Son, this is our

God ♪ ♪

Jesus sent to save us, born unto a virgin ♪ ♪

Lived a perfect life, greatly suffered, dying for us ♪ ♪

From the graves risen, seated now on high, is his name ♪ ♪

Father, spirit, son, this is our

God ♪ ♪

The church proclaim, this is our God ♪ ♪

Jesus will come back again, to judge the living and the dead ♪ ♪

Usher in the age to come, let everyone sing our praise ♪ ♪

Jesus will come back again, to judge the living and the dead ♪ ♪

Usher in the age to come, let everyone sing our praise ♪ ♪

Speaking through the prophets, empowering the church ♪ ♪

By the son and father, worshiped and adored, is his name ♪ ♪

The spirit in the weak will be the strong ♪ ♪

When you come like lightning in the sky ♪ ♪

Thundering sounds of angels' songs ♪ ♪ Our hearts will tremble, filled with holy fear ♪ ♪

Our hopes are fixed on you ♪ ♪

That your promises are true ♪ ♪

And one day you will return ♪ ♪

Our treasure's filled with faith ♪ ♪ So we long to see your face ♪ ♪

Until then, our hearts will burn in sorrow and pain ♪ ♪

They will cease with your return, our king ♪ ♪ Our love's filled with faith, we long to see you ♪ ♪

Until then, our hearts will burn in sorrow and pain ♪

Oh, wow. Life camera action. Yep, yep, yep. Alright, we're gonna get started with our final session, so please come on in and find your seat.

Alright, so this last bit here has gotta be some rapid -fire

Q &A. Okay. So I'm gonna direct questions to whichever guy

I think is best gonna be more dealing with this based upon what you guys presented, how you split up the conference subject matter.

So if you need to defer, you can just say, hey, I'll pass to my brother Howard, if you wanna work that out. Yeah, my brother

Howard. Morgan Freeman says the way to stop racism is to stop talking about racism.

Wrong. Is this, okay, there we go. That was, I mean, that was... It's rapid -fire. Rapid -fire, yeah.

Okay, a little less rapid -fire. Is this even possible? Is that rapid -fire enough for you?

Yeah, is this even possible? It is a biblical concept to say that. And why is that wrong?

It's wrong because there's a moralistic approach to it. So the second question, if it's even possible, is a non -starter because in the beginning, it's a moralistic approach to solving the issue.

What Morgan Freeman's approach doesn't recognize is the corrupt human nature.

We've been talking about this now for two days, so he doesn't factor in the biblical anthropology of what's in the human heart.

So stop talking about it doesn't mean you stop thinking about it doesn't mean you stop that the desire, that the hateful desires of the heart aren't there.

I mean, Martin Luther tried the same thing when he went through all sort of methods of asceticism when he was a

Catholic. Before the Lord opened his eyes to the truth of the scripture, he tried to, you know, he used a cat and nine tails against himself.

He tried to, you know, put himself off into a monastery and hide away from the real world, but he realized that he couldn't run from his sinful nature.

He realized that that was impossible to do. So to take a moralistic approach to racism is a non -starter because it doesn't deal with the root cause of it in the beginning.

So to not talk about it accomplishes absolutely nothing. So would it be more biblical or accurate to say if we stopped inventing racial grievances out of whole cloth and stopped re -problematizing everything for the sake of a narrative that much of the conflict that we deal with in our day -to -day

America would cease to exist? No, it wouldn't.

Because here's the thing, I have to sort of exegete your question a little bit, Jim, because again, what I talked about earlier today when

I tried to walk you through what the Bible says in terms of love, hate, love, hate, love, hate versus isms, phobias, and the terms that the culture uses, a born -again believer, as we made clear as I was walking you through some of those passages in 1

John, a born -again believer isn't going to desire to re -problematize these issues to begin with. So you have to separate your question into two groups.

How do believers handle these issues? And then how do unbelievers handle them? So a believer's going to handle the issue biblically.

They're not going to desire to re -problematize the issue. They're going to take you to the scriptures. Number one, as Virgil pointed out, as we've said often on our podcast, that the

Bible is both a mirror and a window. A believer's going to hold that mirror up to themselves, first of all, before they flip it around and turn it into a window to see everybody else.

But a believer's not going to go that route. And I think it's ironic in that the culture will say, yeah, we want to solve these issues, we want to resolve these issues.

So they see them as issues. But that's the problem. They see them as issues. They don't see them as sins.

So until you see these issues as sins, you're going to, it's like we quote it from J .C. Rowell, you're going to be content with wrong and imperfect remedies.

And this is what Morgan Freeman doesn't understand. With all due respect, dude's got a crazy voice, one of the best narrators that ever lived.

But he doesn't understand. He's fallen into that trap that J .C. Rowell talked about. He's applying an insufficient, imperfect, moralistic remedy to what's a spiritual problem.

And as Virgil made clear today, only the gospel is the solution to that. All right, since you went too long, I'm going to give this one to you and let you speak on his behalf, all right?

This is an excerpt from an October 2020 article written by John MacArthur. Quote, today the evangelical swamp is chock full of charlatans, heretics, socialists,

Marxists, and race hustlers. Yes! Please, yes. There is nothing truly biblical evangelical about it.

Should we abandon the term evangelical in favor of a more accurate term? You didn't know that was where that was going, did you?

No. Okay, so let me back up. That took a twist. Okay, so the evangelical movement, the evangelical swamp, is chock full of charlatans, heretics, socialists,

Marxists, and race hustlers. Is the answer, then, to abandon the term evangelical or to reveal the charlatans, heretics, socialists,

Marxists, and race hustlers? One of the things that I love about MacArthur's ministry, which is why

I was overjoyed, was he's willing to say that the first step is to be able to identify, to say, and admit that there are sharks and evil people who are lurking about, desiring to devour the flock of God.

That was kind of what I shared in the last part of my message. We've got to be willing to say that to begin with, and then to examine what evangelicalism is or has become as a result.

I understand looking at evangelicalism, seeing what's taken place, and wanting to move away from the idea.

That's exactly what Praise Mill did regarding the SPC. We saw the swamp that it is, and we made a decision.

We were going to remove ourselves because it wasn't worth spending the time and energy. We weren't commissioned for the purpose of saving the

SPC. We're commissioned to go and share the gospel. So we removed ourselves from that. I don't see anything pragmatically wrong with doing that, but I wouldn't do one or the other.

I would do a both and. If I were to move away from that term in favor of a different term,

I would all along the way tell you who the sharks were, what the swamp was made up of, and who was actually in it.

So I wouldn't have a problem if we're doing both and. All right. What ripples, if any, does CRT, Black Lives Matter, etc.

have outside the United States? Darryl. That's a good question.

I think one of the things you need to understand about Black Lives Matter is, and you heard this if you listened to our episode, the first of the two episodes that we did on Black Lives Matter, the title

Black Lives Matter with a question mark, their roots seem to be primarily national, meaning they're pretty much rooted here in the

United States. But even as far as that goes, the Black Lives Matters at a national level, they are not, and I think this is interesting for us to point out on the episode, they are not a nonprofit organization.

They are not officially a 501c3 organization under the IRS. And I think it's interesting how they've structured themselves in that what they've done is that they've got this big umbrella of a national organization, but what they've done is that they've taken advantage of an

IRS loophole that allows them to align themselves with suborganizations that are 501c3s so that the donations that they take are funneled through these suborganizations, not to them.

So you really find it difficult to track where their money comes from and where their money is going.

I don't know what type of footprint Black Lives Matters has internationally. To whatever footprint that may have existed outside the

United States, I think that footprint is now crumbling based on recent news that's come out about how especially

Patrice Cullors, who's the former leader, now she's resigned from Black Lives Matters, they are losing leaders at the national and local level left and right now that these revelations have come to the fore about how they've actually been spending the tens of millions of dollars that they've been compiling over the years.

I'll say this for you. I don't know about you, V, I won't speak for you, but I haven't really studied Black Lives Matter outside of the United States because the impact that they've been having have been primarily domestically in urban cities around the country.

So my attention has been here as it relates to BLM as opposed to somewhere else. Nothing to add to that?

Well, I'm trying to be rapid fire. Okay, good. So we had somebody ask about why evangelical leaders have adopted

CRT and been permissive on this. Let's drop some bombs for a second.

Let's name some names. This is a stage where a lot of names get named because, well, we have a crippled guy who gets up here and names people's names all the time.

So let's name some names. Drop some bombs. Don't be reserved. Tell us who the charlatans, the hucksters, the race hustlers are within the evangelical movement.

It seems like we have evangelical leaders who wake up on Sunday morning with their David French under ruse and they sip their free trade coffee with soy milk in it and they wait for the latest

David French column to drop and then to see what Tim Keller says about it and they're just fanboying all the wrong people.

What's going on in evangelicalism with the Gospel Coalition, with the Together for the Gospel? Who are the people who are leading the woke push in these once -reliable evangelical institutions?

Yeah, I think… This is for both of you, so chime in. I'll start out by saying that the seminaries primarily are where we're seeing the biggest push in the problem.

SBC seminary presidents have all jumped on the woke train. I think Al Mohler is probably one of the last that has, at least lately, remained silent on the issue.

I think he's picked places to say things that make sense to those who are conservative.

He's conservative enough so that he's not making big waves about the issue, but he's not taking clear stands, naming specific names, getting the people who are in his seminary, who are promoting these ideas out of the seminary by recognizing that they're doing great damage to the body of Christ.

You mentioned the Tim Kellers of the world who've been compromised, the Mark Devers who have been unmentioned,

Matt Chandler and his ideas around these issues. All of those men have involved themselves to some degree in a push around social justice, believing that it is the right thing for us to embrace, that these are the kinds of ideas that are important.

I think when you mentioned the Gospel Coalition, I mentioned yesterday that that's a whole rebranding.

They're rebranding themselves in such a way as to appear to be the nice middle of the road.

T4G is no more. That's over. So all the push is toward the Gospel Coalition and what they offer.

But they're, again, a compromised organization on this issue. I could go back, whether it was the promotion of men like Thabiti on Wile, whether it was the articles that are written on their social media pages, and they had a massive, massive audience.

All of those things are problematic, and people don't understand that they're drinking down poison when they engage in some of the content from those sites.

So those are the people, I think, to watch out for. TCG is recognizing that when soccer moms show up at school board meetings to talk about CRT, there's a recognition that something's wrong.

And it didn't take a guy like Daryl or me who's studied this stuff. They just know that they don't want their kids listening to it.

So if an organization is going to embrace it to the thing that Daryl has been saying for quite some time, you can't walk in and say, hey,

I'm CRT. You've got to restructure it. So what they've done now is it's been shrouded under the umbrella of niceness.

Well, we've got people on this side who are good people and people on that side who are good people, and what we need to do is figure out a way to talk nicely about this.

And so that's the rebranding of it all. Is the dissolution together for the gospel due to becoming woke?

Is it a go woke, go broke type of a thing? Are they losing followers for that reason? I would argue yes, but if you notice their last meeting together, they tried to stand like they stood where we are standing now.

At the end of it, you had people making statements and making proclamations and claims, and they were really ready to unpack and examine social justice and the social gospel.

But it was too little too late after the fact, and so that's kind of where things landed. So a lot of these men that you've named,

Al Mohler, for instance, Mark Dever, they would like to, and they were known up until a couple of years ago as keynote speakers at Shepherd's Conference.

I was there a couple of years ago when the whole Q &A broke up. These guys were platformed by some of our trusted evangelical leaders for years, and it seems as if they wanted to be known as standing with you guys on this issue, with MacArthur on this issue.

They wanted to be seen as being included in that camp, and yet would it be fair to say that men like Albert Mohler did not spend the political capital that they had in order to fight back against it?

They wanted to position themselves as, yes, I agree with the conservative base on this.

They weren't willing to stand up and go to bat against it at a time when the church needed those men to stand up and to draw those lines.

And if those lines had been drawn prior to 2019, you wouldn't have had a resolution in the SBC on that issue of critical race theory.

You wouldn't have had people in the SBC pushing that. Instead, you would have had those lines being drawn and people falling out on both sides of that, and this healthy division, which should come as a result of this, would have already happened, and you could have had an opportunity to push the wolves out before they got a hold of the throat of the sheep.

I think this is an example of what I just discussed regarding a shepherd protecting the sheep.

What you just stated is exactly what needed to be done, what needed to be said, and has been said by all the people that aren't on the other side of that.

I think the book Fault Lines did a fantastic job of laying out who was on which side of the ideological lines regarding these issues.

All the things that you said are right, true, and correct. Had these men, rather than being comfortable sharing pulpits and platforms for the purpose of politics and their own platform growth, if they would have stood on the issue, saying the hard things when they were hard to say, now they're willing to say some of the hard things because it's easy to say, it's obvious to everyone where these issues are and where they should stand.

They're doing so, again, from a pragmatic position. Hey, it's smart to say the right thing now, so I'll step up and say those kinds of things.

I'll take a step further and say this. In the days to come, what you'll end up seeing, because of the silence from these men, some of them that we've named, what you'll begin to see over the course of time is groups, organizations, platforms being rebranded to bring them back into the fold.

You're going to see the owl molders be brought back, dusted off, and pushed out as, hey, these guys, we need to bring these men in.

They were with us all the time. Yeah, they've been with us all the time. They had to navigate their own cultural environment in specific ways.

They had to navigate their issues in a contextual way, and now it's time for us to bring them back in and understand that they've been with us all along.

My stance on that position would simply be they made public proclamations about these issues, and they need to be publicly repenting with regard to those issues as well.

Yeah, we're going to be gaslit into thinking that these men were taking nuanced positions in the moment, and really they were with us even though it didn't seem like or look like they were with us.

We get some criticism sometimes that we are, we admire John MacArthur way too much in our church.

People say, oh, you guys are just too much. The Second Grace to You employee that we've had here in a row, one of the things that I've admired about John MacArthur, and this is not just a fanboy out about John MacArthur, is that when we have needed him to, when evangelicalism has needed him to, he has taken the public stand, the right stand at the right time, and has been unbending on it in the moment at the vanguard, at the front of when that is needed.

And at times, as Justin has pointed out in a recent interview that he did with John, these stands that he has taken has cost him friendships with some of these men that you have named, and yet John has stood unwavering on those issues, and he has done so sometimes to the detriment of his own reputation in the larger evangelical community, and yet he's been right every time.

On every fight that we've needed him to fight, he's been there, been the man fighting it in the moment. And sometimes looking behind him, and people say,

I'm behind you all the way, and you're looking way behind you, not even close. All right, define race.

You said race is a myth. Ethnicity is real, but I've always thought the two are synonyms. How are they different?

They're different, as you heard me explain this morning and yesterday as well. They're different in that race is a social construct.

It's a moving target. It's a moving goalpost. Race is nothing. Really, when you look at it, race is nothing because any term that can mean anything means nothing.

If a term can mean anything, it doesn't mean anything. So when we speak of ethnicity, when you say ethnicity, you're talking about skin color.

No. No, it's just the opposite. When the culture uses the word race, they're talking about skin color.

Primarily. Think about this for a second. When you want to go to, you see

Ancestry .com or 23andMe commercial on television. Say, yeah,

I want to go get a trace on my ancestry and find out what's going on.

They don't ask you to send in a snippet of your skin. Do they?

They don't do that, do they? No. You have to either give a sample of your blood or a sample of your saliva.

That which lines up with what we know from Leviticus where it says the life is in the blood.

You don't go take a graft of your skin and send it in to Ancestry .com. They put it under a microscope and say, hmm, yeah, your ethnicity is, well, is zero because your ethnicity has nothing to do with your skin color.

That's how the culture defines race, though, primarily in terms of the color of your skin.

Now, that's where it starts. But as you heard me talk this afternoon and also yesterday, race in the culture can mean anything now.

Anything. Okay, whereas according to Acts 17, 26, and then

Genesis 11 as well, biblically your ethnicity is who you are in your blood.

In your blood. That's who you are. As a matter of fact, we just found out. I'm going to embarrass Melissa and put her on the spot right here.

We just found out, what was it, last week? Just last week. Melissa got her results back from Ancestry .com

DNA genealogy assessment, and you know what? She is 81 % African.

This is a stereotypical view of race that says, wait a minute, her skin's not dark enough to be 81 % African. Are you kidding?

Yeah, 81 % Nigeria. But see, if you look at the culture's construct of race, you say, absolutely not.

Her skin's too light. Your ancestors can't be from Nigeria. Well, it's 81%. Again, this is why you have to reject that term, that vernacular, in the context in which the culture uses it, because it doesn't mean anything.

Not only is it wrong, as you heard me quote from Dr. Gloria Lance Billings this afternoon, even she acknowledged that race has no scientific basis.

So it's nothing. Ethnicity is what we are. We are one human race, and by the way, the word race in scripture is translated to mean a type.

A genus is the Latin word. A genus, a type. We are one type of creation that God has created in his image.

So when you see the word race in scripture, that's the context of that. It has nothing to do with how the culture uses that word today.

As CRT, via force from the government, continue to put pressure on the traditional Christian family, do you think that abortion agencies will now not only have to fight on faith issues, but also restrict child placement based on skin color regardless of the needs or merits or the fit for the children?

I mean, there's a lot there. That's a yes or no question. I'm sorry.

It was a yes or no question. That's a yes, V. Okay, good.

There was a lot there, and I was trying to parse it out as you went, and I'm going, what in the world? That's a yes, bro. So you think that's going to continue to be a thing?

CRT is going to work its way into adoption agencies? Oh, absolutely. Yes, it will, everywhere. There's no doubt about that.

And you think that adoption agencies are going to want, of course, diversity. They're going to want black children being raised by white homes, white children being raised by black homes?

No. Can you clarify how

SEL in schools is bringing CRT Marxism into the schools and discuss how a Christian teacher can address these issues with students?

Yes, so SEL as it relates to Marxism, again, number one, just a reminder that if you see

SEL either abbreviated or social emotional learning spelled out, you need to have your antenna up.

You need to have your antenna up because what it's doing is, number one, it has nothing to do, the term social emotional learning has nothing to do with social emotions or learning.

It has nothing to do with that. What it is is a covert effort to indoctrinate your children to hate

America, as I said yesterday, to hate you as their parents, and to embrace anti -authoritarianism, starting with rejecting your parental authority, rejecting your

Christian biblical worldview that you're trying to bring your children up in, rejecting the Western Judeo -Christian value, rejecting, as I said earlier today, all kind of even rudimentary tenets such as universal principles of math, universal principles of how to speak proper grammar.

It's all of this thing. It's all sort of a Marxian dialectic to get your children indoctrinated into a hate -filled worldview where everything that exists around them today, they hate it.

They hate it. It has nothing to do with social emotional or learning. It has nothing to do with any of that.

So as far as a Christian who is a teacher, was a Christian teacher? A Christian teacher in school.

A Christian teacher in public schools. How do you address it with the children?

Yeah, how do you address it with the children in the school? Yeah, that's tough.

That's tough because the thing with SEL is that you're so restricted in what you can say to the children.

You can only follow whatever the lesson plan is that the public school system has developed for you to teach.

So my counsel would be this because even in a broader sense,

Christians in any work environment right now, you're going to face decisions that you're going to have to make that are very tough because the goal is to ultimately remove any

Christian influence from any of these institutions. That's ultimately the goal. But how a

Christian teacher might respond to that is number one, stand strong on your

Christian beliefs. Do not waver. Virgil talked about this earlier about how you're going to suffer.

You're going to suffer, but how you address it with children, that's a very fine line you have to walk because in the classroom, they're your students.

You do not want to usurp the parental authority of the parents of those children who are your students.

So what I would do, I would try to network with the parents of those children outside the classroom.

Meet them at a restaurant for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Get a network, get them all together on a

Zoom call or something like that so that you can educate those parents on what you're being required to teach their students so as to keep them abreast of what that content is.

Obviously, I would attend church regularly and dialogue with those parents because there's a lot you can do outside the classroom to fight against that indoctrination.

But I would say, as it relates to your Christian witness, you don't want to be an obnoxious, sort of purposely defiant person and making trouble on the school property.

But I think there's many things you can do outside of that classroom. But all that's not to say that the

Lord may convict you. I say may, I don't know that this is going to be the case for you, but the Lord may convict you that what you're being required to do is so in violation of your biblical principles that you may end up having to leave.

And many teachers are having to do that today. My answer was going to be much shorter. I was just going to say, get out.

That's what people have been saying about the SBC for a long time. I get it. Bro. This dude right here, man.

Virgil, this one's for you. Do you change up your message or approach when you speak to a mostly black community? No. You'd say the same thing in the same way that you did to us today?

Absolutely. We're probably even more amped up if we're in front of a black audience.

I would say the same words. There may be a little more passion about it than otherwise. I wouldn't change anything that I've said.

In fact, Darrell and I would love more opportunities to be in front of predominantly black audiences if they would have us.

I'm not partial. They won't have us. I told you last night, neither of us are trying to build platforms for ourselves that we're asking to be on someone's platform.

We're available to whoever asks us to come. I would probably be probably more passionate about it because I recognize that there are so many who don't get the kinds of things that we are sharing.

Many of them are in environments where they're exposed primarily to some form of black liberation theology whether they recognize it's called that or not.

Most churches, predominantly black churches, don't hear me say that there are no good black churches.

I'm simply saying that the predominance of churches are either teaching some form of a prosperity gospel that's attached to it in some form of social justice.

I'll give you a quick example and get back to the rapid fire. When Justice Katonji Brown Jackson was being examined, when she was going through her process of examination and was being asked by the

Senate different questions, the question that she was asked had everything to do with what a woman was or honest questions about her judicial philosophy.

Black churches on Sunday were actually preaching about Katonji Brown Jackson and telling their congregants that what she was facing was simply white systemic oppression and racism.

That was their Sunday morning service. Over and over and over again we saw video after video of this is the diet, the spiritual diet that is being fed to predominantly black churches.

In many instances, not all, not all, not all, but in many. If those of you who follow me on Twitter were following me during the course of those examinations of Katonji Brown Jackson I told you two weeks in advance what was going to happen.

I told you two weeks in advance that once she's done with her confirmation watch these black church pulpits sermonize those hearings and make it all about her and how her hearings are symbolic of the struggle that black

Americans have had in this country for 300 years. We were at an airport on a trip back when we heard the news that she was nominated and I was sitting with Darrell as we had this very conversation about how all of the charges, if you asked her a question it was going to be identified as racist.

Alright, if the CRT movement proceeded unhindered how would it ultimately end?

Not spiritually, which was in hell, but in the physical world.

What does this physical world look like? What's the end result, what's the goal of CRT? Yeah, there's no end result.

The end result for CRT is to not end it. The end result of CRT, people ask us this question all the time what's the payout for CRT?

Well, there's no payout. It's to constantly get paid. It's to reproblematize the next problem.

It's to find the next victim class. It's to identify the next problem for this to constantly go on and on.

It's a perpetual cycle to nothingness, to utopia, a nowhere place. That is the whole point and purpose of it.

So it's designed for that purpose. It's to deconstruct the Judeo -Christian worldview that built the

United States of America for the purpose of their own financial benefit which there won't be enough of.

It'll be a constant monster. This was happening with the first civil rights leaders after King.

Jesse Jackson and Sharpton and the like. Did that stop? No. It morphed into what we're seeing now which is worse than they were.

The folks who are doing what they're doing now, the others had nothing to do. There's no comparison.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the coffers of Black Lives Matter.

What Jackson and others had were pennies compared to what's taking place now. You'll recall that in my last message,

I quoted from Dr. Elizabeth Last Quinn from her book Race Experts where she made the point that coming out of the civil rights era into the 60s, going into the 70s, one of the reasons that we got here is because you had woke, critical race

Marxist legal scholars who filled a void that was left after the 70s passed with the critical legal studies movement.

What's going to happen is once this current generation of critical race theorists is gone, there's going to be another wave looking to fill that void.

It's going to be cyclical. It's not going to end. If it ever gets a foothold into American culture, they're going to do whatever it takes to retain that foothold.

Whatever is required right now to get rid of white people, because that's the goal, is to get rid of white people, get rid of their influence.

Whatever way, shape, or form they can. That's the goal, and the goal is to keep it like that so there is no end to critical race theory.

In CRT theology, if you want to call it that, there really is no room for actual forgiveness, no room for actual atonement.

It's a perpetual grievance state, and it's a perpetual pursuing this thing that is a mist, it's a cloud that's always outside of your grasp.

That's what I said. It's a stealth ideology. It's like what I quoted from Booker T. Washington yesterday in his book, My Larger Education.

He says a group of race hustlers. Race problem solvers is what he called them. They're race problem solvers that reproblematize.

When they get what they want from one reproblematized issue, they find another one to bring into the contemporary culture so they can get what they want from that.

Then they find another one to bring that in, and this is what you're seeing happening right now with DEI, where most of those positions are going to black females.

You're seeing it happen with ethnic studies where one public school system after another, you're seeing black teachers and administrators being able to teach that America's racist, that white people are racist, that even your parents are racist.

Your parents don't want the best for you. Your parents are liars. So they're getting everything they want, and after they get one thing, they reproblematize something else to get something else from it.

With regard to CRT, the original sin is whiteness. There's no repentance.

There's penance that you can pay. The works -based righteousness that people are to engage in, the anti -racism that people are to engage in, is never for the purpose of making that person righteous or seeing them come into the fold.

They only have to continue to pay that penalty in an effort to maintain their status as an anti -racist, not as a person who's now in the fold of those who are woke, but the person who needs to continue anti -racist works in an effort to maintain some form of really servitude.

That's the intent. It's never to bring one in. So while they talk about racial reconciliation, really they're not aiming for racial reconciliation.

That's a lie word. Racial reconciliation can never actually happen, and they don't want it. Those words are used to pull the strings of white guilt for the purpose of fueling the next thing that they want to push forward.

Pulling those strings has worked so effectively. As a matter of fact, it's the pulling of those emotional strings that made Black Lives Matter as powerful as they are.

You know who you can blame for Black Lives Matter having the influence that they have? You can blame white liberals.

Because it's white liberals who caved. It's white liberals individually and corporate executives who caved to the pressure, the emotional narratology of Black Lives Matter.

They caved, and then they started donating one after another, just lining up like they're at a fast food drive -thru, donating $10 million, $8 million, $20 million.

I could name some companies, B of A, McDonald's, Amazon. You could go on and on. I think by the time we dropped our two

Black Lives Matter episodes, I think we had totaled up close to $200 million that BLM had been committed, just from corporate donors, not just individual donors.

But if you want to blame BLM, you want to blame one group for enriching BLM and making them so influential in society today, it's for white liberals, those white liberals that did it.

Reconciliation can never actually happen because they can never admit that their races are finally reconciled.

Here's the problem, though, Jim. That's a presuppositional statement. Listen, Virg, here we are, two black guys in a room with, what, a couple hundred white people?

Am I at a place of discordant relationship with any of you? Totally debunks the idea of racial reconciliation right there.

So it's presuppositional. It's put to you as if it's a fact, it's a reality, it's a collective reality.

So you guys are white and I'm black, and by virtue of you being white and I'm black, then there must be some kind of reconciliation that needs to happen.

I haven't stolen a single white person's wallet in this room. I haven't cursed anyone.

I haven't offered any sort of ethnic epithet towards anyone. There's nothing to be reconciled between me and you. So if there's no disruption of conciliation, what need is there for reconciliation?

There's not. So you need to reject that presupposition because it's presuppositional. And what

I want to encourage you to do is something I alluded to yesterday. Don't be afraid to reject that mess.

Don't be afraid to reject that mess. Don't be afraid to respond to questions with other questions. Put the onus, put the heat back on them.

This whole idea of racial reconciliation, it's just dumb. It's stupid. It's nothing.

It's condescending. There's a whole lot more I can say about it. Can I say one more thing?

As you deconstruct this idea of racial reconciliation further, what the narrative is is that racial reconciliation, the very concept of it, only has relevance as it relates to two people who are of two different ethnicities.

But when you look at the idea organically, racial reconciliation also should apply to two people who are of the same ethnicity.

If you're really talking racial reconciliation in a pure form, it also applies to me and Virgil.

Why should racial reconciliation only apply when you're talking about people of different ethnicities?

So again, you have to think these things through. And the more you think about them, the more you realize, man, that's pretty stupid.

That's pretty dumb. But it's really easy to deconstruct when you really take the time to think logically through it.

So racial reconciliation doesn't apply to two people of the same ethnicity, but it should. So you should ask the question, well, why doesn't it apply to you two?

And then you get them in the presuppositional assumptions again. Well, you two are both black. What problem do you have with one another?

You see how stupid that is? So they rule us out because we're the same ethnicity. They impart to each of our hearts that we don't have issues with one another.

Now we don't, but that's the kind of assumptions that they make subjectively because this doesn't fit the narrative, but this does.

This fits the agenda. This doesn't. Another question is kind of related to that.

What does the Marxist, CRT, LGBTQ, eschatological end state look like according to their views?

Who's in charge? What does that utopia, eschatological vision look like? And I think we kind of talked about that, that there is no action.

We did. It's nebulous. It's for the arbitrary convenience of the person positing the idea.

Whoever wakes up and thinks that they've got an advantage in a certain circumstance or situation, there's no cabal where they're meeting to figure out whose form of utopia is going to be advanced.

That's not what's happening. What's happening is I'm black, I'm in a situation at work that I can see an advantage where if I cry racism or I cry systemic oppression,

I can have something advantaged to me and so I leverage it in that situation. That's more of what's taking place than anything else.

So it's not as organized as you might think it is in some ways. In other ways, it's very organized.

There's a very real effort afoot to circumvent society and culture in major ways.

But for us to pay attention to that big picture stuff, it's a waste of your time. It may serve your own emotional thought process.

I wonder what this is. I think I can strategize. I'll figure out what they're going to do. You can do that, but it's a waste of your time.

What I would encourage you to spend time doing is spend time in the Word of God. Spend time on identifying how you can proclaim the truth of the gospel.

I'll give you this one example. I'll say this for those who love evangelism. I would spend more of my time waking up trying to figure out how over the course of a 24 -hour period

I could effectively share the gospel with at least one person. Your time would be better spent there than trying to figure out what the cabal of the utopia of the eschatological

Marxian... My challenge to you would be this week, as we turn the page, the

Lord's Day tomorrow, think about who you're going to encounter that week and how many ways in which you could figure out a way to insert into the conversation a natural proclamation of the gospel.

That's what I would spend my time doing. Have you guys seen the latest iteration of the gay pride flag? Do you know how many stripes there are on that thing now?

Like 65 stripes in that flag now. I'm serious, if you'd have been on social media,

I forget who tweeted it, so June 1st is pride month. As a matter of fact, Virgil and I have both, we have sort of taken over pride month ourselves.

So for the entire month of June, what we're doing, and I encourage you to do this as well if you're on social media, tweet Bible verses that have to deal with pride.

Tweet out Bible verses that have to deal with pride and use the hashtag pridemonth2022.

Because they'll see it. I've been doing that every day since. It started out

June 1st, boom. So I'm tweeting out Bible verses that have to do with real sinful pride, which ironically is pointing to them because your pride is incredibly sinful here that you shove your fist at God and then boast in your sinfulness.

But yeah, the gay pride flag now, it's not just a gay pride flag anymore. It's got like 60 stripes in that thing and it just represents everything now.

And what's going to happen is it's going to end up being a cannibalistic ideology because there's no way that all the platforms, all the agendas that are represented in that gay pride flag will ever come to fruition.

You can't. You can't satisfy everybody. They're going to find that out and they're going to end up cannibalizing one another and then it's just going to poof and disappear but then another movement is going to spring up.

It's going to spring up in its place. Recently Congress passed and Joe Biden signed anti -lynching legislation.

Do you guys feel safer? Every time I see that silliness or the reinvention of the conversation or some committee, congressional committee that's going to look at reparations,

I just shake my head. It's just another false flag to stir up emotional black folks so that they can get to the voting booth.

That's the whole reason it's done. It's a two -year cycle for the midterms but they'll find some issue, some situation to stand on.

The latest was the shooter, the Boston shooter, right? No, it wasn't

Boston. It was Buffalo. The Buffalo shooter, right? He's white. He goes into a place. Well, what do they do? They fly there for the purpose of shining a light on the situation so they see this white supremacy is awful.

Now, the tragedy is real. The horrific events that took the lives of the people in the store that happened was real, that we should mourn that loss based upon the fact that they're image bearers of God but to believe that there's this white supremacist thing that I'm worried about that causes me not to be able to go out to work or to the store, that's not real.

I would argue to say that the vast majority of black people if they're halfway sane are going to tell you that they don't fear those things.

They're not afraid of those things but politicians leverage those things to stir up those who are in their emotions because they recognize if they don't have the black vote, they can't win.

So they must stir it up and the way that they do that unfortunately is time and time again they look for some anti -lynching law that means absolutely nothing not to anyone anywhere really and cause senators to have to vote for it because you don't want to be the guy, the white guy in particular that says, oh,

I didn't vote in favor of the anti -lynching law. Not that it's affected anybody but you don't want to be that guy.

So you vote in favor of it, everybody votes in favor of it so they can say, see, I'm for black people. I voted for the anti -lynching law.

Get out of here with that nonsense. Here's an additional hypocrisy to what Vernon's talking about.

The hypocrisy of President Biden signing an anti -lynching law is that it was Democrats who were lynching black people.

That's exactly right. So why didn't you guys sign this law back in 1961, 62, 63, 64?

Listen, I'm not elevating the Republican Party as some sort of virtuous entity either. What I'm saying is,

I'm just presenting to you historical objective facts. Every single hurdle that black

Americans have had to overcome in this country has been because of white supremacist

Democrats. Slavery, Democrats wanted to keep slavery legal.

After slavery was outlawed, they invented what's called the peonage system in the

South. It was Democrats that were behind Jim Crow. It was Democrats that were behind the black codes.

It was Democrats behind not supporting the Civil Rights Law. Democrats did not support the Voting Rights Act.

Democrats did not want to support Brown v. Board of Education. I can go back even further.

The Dred Scott case in the 1850s where you had Supreme Court Justice Roger B.

Taney who told, in his ruling, in his decision, said that black people were not equal to white people, that there was no government that a white person, or black person rather, would submit in obedience to a black person and recognizing the personhood of that black person.

That was a Democrat justice of the Supreme Court. I could go on and on. The irony here is that you have

Joe Biden boasting that he signed an anti -lynching law when it was a Democrat party. It's irrelevant today, but when it mattered,

Democrats were lynching black people left and right in the South. You see?

This goes back to your question about the point that Vern and I were making earlier about how we don't get invited into black churches.

Because they don't want to hear stuff like this. They don't want to hear facts like this. An additional irony is this.

You have today, in 2022, more than 90 % of black voters vote for the

Democrat party. It's stunning. What's sad about this,

Virgil just said it correctly, without the black vote, Democrats cannot win. But Democrats know that they have at least 9, listen to this, this is a stunning number, 9 out of every 10 black voters predictably is going to vote for Democrats.

The Democrats know that. They've got 9 out of every 10 black voters in their back pocket already. And yet it's people like Virgil and me who make up the 1 % who aren't locked into that sort of tribalist political mindset that we get ridiculed.

So what they want, what black liberals want, they don't want the Democrats to just have 90 % of black voters.

They want one party to have 100%. And they call that power. They call that influence.

The Democrat party has made beggars out of black people. They've made political beggars out of them and they've been doing it now for almost 70 years.

When you study American history, coming out of the Civil War, coming out of Reconstruction, there was a reason that the vast majority of black people voted

Republicans. They were the ones who freed them. Democrats didn't want to free black people.

If it were up to Democrats, black people would still be slaves right now. And the reason

I get so animated about this is because I'm sick of people believing the lies. It's totally irrelevant.

Nobody's being lynched in America today. What purpose does that law serve? Nobody's being lynched today.

Well, the last black person who was lynched was lynched by Democrats. If you have a party, act like he's done something.

Add to that, lynching resulting in someone's death is a charge of murder. So what's the need for it?

Right, what's the need for it? It's redundant. It's like a hate crime. As we just read in this book.

If you're stealing from me, you hate me. Why do I have to add a hate crime? The crime is the hatred.

I'm going to add an extra five years because it was done in hate. I'm going to add an extra five years to your sentence because you hated him as you murdered him.

All right, you lamented in one of your sessions, Daryl, that emojis have become a language in ourselves, that this is bad.

Does that apply to clowns? See, I have to use clowns because there's a character limit on Twitter.

You only have 240 characters to say what you have to say. So sometimes I have to use clowns.

You said, I think it was you as well, said Obama's the most racist person that you think is alive today, that you know of.

Talk to me about Colin Kaepernick. Oh, Kaepernick runs a close second, if you want to put it like that.

It's amazing how when you follow... I follow a lot of college football. So I remember when

Kaepernick was playing at Kansas State. Totally different persona and presentation of himself while he was at Kansas State.

Even as he got drafted into the NFL by the 49ers, he put himself...

I'm sorry, was I wrong about that? No, it's irrelevant.

It's irrelevant, like that lynching law. Stick to the relevant details. So he gets drafted, right?

But then he doesn't make it in the NFL because he had put himself... As a matter of fact, he's kind of like the parable of the laborers in the vineyard in Luke chapter 20.

Kaepernick thought that he deserved a place in the NFL, but now that he's out of the league, all of a sudden he's taken that personal.

He's got all of his feelings and emotions. First thing he does, what does he do? He grows an afro. That's the first sign of a problem.

First sign of a problem right there. You see a black person with an afro across the street or do whatever you can.

He grows an afro, then he changes his personal logo to this. Which is a communist symbol, by the way.

This is not black power, this is communism. So yeah, you've got people like him, but the irony is that Kaepernick right now is trying to get back into the slave plantation.

He's trying to get back on the plantation. He's called the NFL the slave plantation, but he's trying to get back on it.

He's having tryouts with teams now and everything, trying to get back on the plantation. Now I don't know any slave who wants off the plantation and ever want it back on.

But Kaepernick, his visage of slavery is so capitalistic that he's chasing the money.

He would be the first slave that I've ever known to exist who got paid to be on the plantation.

Tens of millions of dollars, by the way. That's the kind of slavery I'd love to be involved with.

You want to pay me tens of millions of dollars? We can talk about something. We can talk. So ridiculous.

But it's just an example of how, in the case of Obama, Kaepernick, how your environment can shape your worldview.

Here you have a guy like Obama who grew up poor, but was mentored by a guy like Saul Alinsky who shaped his entire worldview of things.

And he's never let go. It's in his DNA now. Kaepernick, the people that are around him have influenced his worldview.

So he has now a totally different perspective on America, on white people than he had when he was playing in front of crowds at Kansas State and then in the

NFL with the 49ers. My bad. And to add to that, the family that raised him was a white family who adopted him, loved him, cared for him, and brought him up.

49ers. Right. So Booker T.

Washington talked about how you need to be careful who you associate with. I mean, Proverbs talks about that as well.

But here are two examples of people who have grown up and done incredibly well. I tell you, it's amazing how much they hate

America, but how much they've benefited from it. You cannot go to any... Put Barack Obama over in Zimbabwe and see how materially well off he would be.

Put him back over there. Put Kaepernick over in Africa while you're... With the Afro.

Take your Afro over to Africa. Take your Afro over to Nigeria or Kenya, and we'll see how well you do.

All right, I think this is our last question. The institutions, and I'm not just talking about the

SBC, seem to be... The institutions in our country seem to be entirely given over.

So you have addressed the... I mean, we've got police departments who are doing sensitivity training and racial sensitivity training and adopting pronouns, and every corporation, every major corporation in America, every institution that we used to trust, the firefighters, the police officers, the sheriff's departments.

We used to defend corporations. I remember going to bat and defending Bill Gates and Microsoft and Steve Jobs and Apple and all of these years ago.

The CIA, the FBI, the government, state, local, everybody seems to have adopted this.

You've made the comment that you see how widespread all of this is. It has infiltrated it into everything.

It truly is the spirit of the age. Everything, and I do mean everything, is given over to it, and they have adopted it.

There seems to be no end in sight. There seems to be no turning away from this.

Can you change it? How does this end? Can you stop it? I don't know that stopping it is necessary.

Here's what I would say. If you think all of those organizations all of a sudden woke up and now felt like they hated black people, and today now they love black people, you're fooling yourself.

A lot of them recognize what's happening in culture, and they're jumping on a bandwagon.

They're checking the box. Why? Because they're fearful of what would come if they didn't.

First of all, there's not a problem with black people that they need to address so that they need to have these organizations and other programs within the corporations.

It's not necessary. There's not more care or more concern or more compassion now than there was on May 19th, the day before George Floyd was killed.

There's nothing different. What they've seen is if they're to continue to make the majority of people happy in their mind, they check this box.

Now, there are some companies that are recognizing that the pendulum is swinging backwards. For example, Netflix realized just recently that catering to the woke skulls of their company and the corporation is not going to be beneficial to them.

So they stood up to the woke skulls and the pendulum is swinging back. Other companies and corporations are going to come online, but this is just an ebb and flow of what they believe is beneficial for their financial long term.

Secondarily, you mentioned police officers and organizations that we know, love, and have a tendency to trust.

I was in the military at the time, which toward the end of late 99, 2000, when there was sensitivity type training that was happening, there was diversity type training that was happening, and I knew it was garbage.

And everybody who sat through it knew it was garbage. They just sat there, checked the box, and went back to doing what they were doing to begin with.

So they weren't necessarily buying what was being sold, but they knew they had to check the box in order to get by.

And many of them did things that way. Will there be people who will be influenced by the philosophy of the age?

Absolutely. We're seeing that at record numbers and record pace. In fact, in the area of this gender revolution, we're seeing that in big ways.

We're seeing young women, children, who are making decisions early on to involve themselves in surgeries that are going to have an impact on their anatomy and their physical well -being for the rest of their lives.

That kind of stuff is really scary. And those are issues that I think we need to confront in bigger and more vocal ways.

But I would simply say that I see what the companies are doing. I see what the corporations are doing. It doesn't frighten me in the least.

They're riding this ideological wave. They see it has a financial advantage for them, and they're taking advantage of that for the season.

And when the pendulum swings back, they'll be the ones, when it's a welcoming environment for them to stand up to wokeness, they'll do the exact same thing.

And so I think we'll see an ebb and flow. I don't think things are over in that regard. But for the Christian, again, I think it's imperative that we know what's happening, we're wise about it, and we stand strong with the

Word of God in our faith. Yeah, I like what Virgil said there at the end. Remember, Jesus said that he's sending us out into the world to be as wise as serpents, but as harmless as doves.

So I think it is beholden upon us to be as informed and as educated on these issues as we possibly can be, but just understand that what we've been reiterating in the past couple of days,

Christ came to save sinners. He didn't come to save society. So do not expect this world to change, because it's not going to change.

I think we need to remember what Jesus himself said. He said, don't think that I came to bring peace.

I didn't come to bring peace, he said. I'm so glad Jesus said this and not one of the disciples, because it would be easy in this age of milquetoast evangelicalism to just dismiss the disciples.

But Jesus said this himself. He said, I came to pit a mother against her daughter, a father against his son.

And he was very explicit in mentioning those relationships. So my point here is that the truth divides people.

The truth divides. The idea of unity with the church and the world is a myth.

It's a myth. We talked about this in our episode on church and culture. We talked about that. The reason

Christ left us in the world was so that we would be not of the world. It's totally antithetical to what he prayed in John 17 for the church to try to make friends with the world.

The scripture is clear. To be a friend with the world is to be God's enemy. And I don't think you want to be God's enemy. I don't think we want that.

So the question is, can it be stopped, can it be changed? I would say this to that question.

No, but our desire should not be to stop it or change it. Our goal, our objective should be to be faithful to Christ as we serve him where he has us.

You be faithful to Christ in your home. Be faithful to Christ in your job. Be faithful to Christ as you raise your children.

Be faithful to Christ as you serve your wife, husband. Be faithful to Christ as you respect your husband, wife.

Be faithful where God has you, using your gifts to serve him where he has you.

And then trust this world, as Virgil pointed out, that God is sovereign over.

Trust the rest of the world to him. You serve him where you are. You serve him where you are and let

God handle everything else, which he has done since the dawn of time.

So that would be my comment on that. That's it. Do you have anything else you want to say to wrap up to these folks that are here, either one of you?

Pastor? Oh man, don't do that. Just thank you. I had a great time with all of you.

I think we're going to be out with books or whatever out in the four year. We're just grateful for the time that we've had to spend with each and every one of you.

It's been a joy to be here. We're grateful for the opportunity. I hope it's not the last time that you have us out this way.

We'd love to come back. I just encourage you in the gospel, encourage you in the peace and the grace that is

Christ, to continue to serve him, continue to honor him, continue to love him and proclaim his truth.

There's a Bible verse, first of all, I echo everything that Virgil said. I say this with all sincerity.

Kootenai has just absolutely spoiled us. You guys have spoiled us here over this weekend. You can tell when a congregation genuinely loves one another.

You can tell you guys love one another. What Virgil and I and Melissa have experienced is that the love that you have for one another, first of all, that that love has been extended to us.

We're already talking about when we can come back here. This place is...

applause You all have a very special church here at Kootenai Community Church.

I don't expect you guys to stay this size for long at all. Word of mouth is going to get out about who you guys are.

People are going to start coming here from all over the place. I would just encourage you to continue to love one another.

Continue to love one another and continue to love your pastor and support him, pray for him. He is unique.

Jim Osmond is unique. He is unique and a courageous, bold pastor when those adjectives are being increasingly said of fewer and fewer men in the pulpit today.

Now, having said that, I would leave you with this. There's a Bible verse that Melissa and I use frequently in our biblical counseling.

It's Luke 4, verse 13. This is where Jesus has come out of the wilderness after having been tempted by the devil.

Jesus obviously has withstood those temptations. In Luke 4, verse 13, it says that after the devil had finished those temptations that he left

Jesus alone until an opportune time. I want to just encourage you to highlight that verse and in your own individual walk with the

Lord just remember that Satan is always looking for an opportune time. Do not let your guard down in your marriage.

Do not let your guard down in your parenting. Do not let your guard down in servicing one another here at the church.

Do not let your guard down in your prayer life. Do not let your guard down in representing Christ on your job.

However the Lord has you serving him, remember that the devil is real and that he is always looking for an opportune time to trip you up.

I want to encourage you with that in your own sanctification and walk with the Lord. Just a couple of announcements as we wrap up.

First of all, tomorrow Daryl is teaching an adult Sunday school class which starts at 9 .30. Virgil is going to be taking the message in the worship service at 10 .45.

Can I mention what I'm going to be teaching? Yeah, go ahead please. So the title of my message is The Danger of Discontentment. So if you're unhappy right now, you need to be in Sunday school.

And you are preaching on? Ephesians, Texas, Ephesians chapter 2 verses 11 through 22.

It's a dusting over, remember? A dusting over of that text and we're going to talk about true biblical reconciliation.

Good. Alright, now if you are here from another church in our area, those are going to be live streamed and recorded so you can pick those up later.

We would never encourage somebody to leave their church and come here for that because we like to have other churches that are involved in the conference.

It's not necessarily going to be on the subject that our conference is on. So though yours is kind of related to it, you're not going to miss anything if you stay with your home church.

So we want to encourage you that way. But if you have traveled here and you're staying here for the weekend, then of course we welcome you to join us tomorrow morning for our worship service.

Daryl and as soon as I close in prayer, Daryl and Virgil are going to go out in the foyer and stand out there by the table to sign books, to take pictures, anything else that you want to do with them while we clean up in here.

And I would just ask Kootenai folk, if you don't mind helping us stack the chairs. There are two types of chairs.

There's the light gray chairs with the dark frames and the dark gray chairs with the light frames. If you are shade blind or color blind.

You got black and white chairs here, Jim? Is that what

I just heard? In the interest of diversity and inclusion. Indeed. Indeed.

So we want to keep those separate because they go in separate parts of the sanctuary. So please just stack them and leave them.

Separate parts of the sanctuary. Jim, you're going downhill, bro. We must keep the chairs segregated.

Thanks, man. You're welcome, Jim. That went south fast. Yeah, it did.

So we're going to do that. We're going to wrap up the tables and just leave the chairs stacked where they're at. We're not going to set them up tonight.

We'll get some folks to do that tomorrow morning. And lastly, there is some food on the table at the back.

Leftover food. If you want to take some of that, some bags of cheese and there's some meat and lettuce and things like that that are left over.

And a little donation can if you want to give to the cost of that. You can back there as well. Let's give a thank you to these two men.

Thank you. All right, let's close in prayer.

Our Father, we are very grateful for the time we've had this weekend, for all that we have learned, the ways that our souls and our spirits and our minds have been refreshed and educated, equipped and encouraged together.

We're thankful for the love that we share in Christ, for the reconciliation that Christ has done on the cross in bringing us to you and us to each other.

Thank you for these blessings, the richness of the gospel, and we pray that you would strengthen us and encourage us to stand in every place that you have placed us and to be faithful in all that we do for the sake and for the glory of Christ our

Lord. Amen. All right, you are dismissed. Thank you.

...great and greatly to be praised.

Yes, you are so great and greatly to be praised.

You are, you are so great and greatly to be praised.