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Responding to a clip that was circulating from Jeremy Boreing who was addressing a whole group of sins that pastors in America often won't even touch. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ. For he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com.
Hey, once again, it's Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky, and greetings, everyone. I appreciate your patience with us as we are attempting to get our voices back. We just got hit with, I don't know if it's allergies or there's something going around.
It's probably something going around because there's a lot of people that have ended up with this same sort of a problem. We're in the middle of what we call our monsoon season here in Southern Arizona, which always kicks up dust.
And with the dust, whatever stuff was in the dirt comes along with it. This is how valley fever gets spread, if you're familiar with that. That happens around here quite a bit as well. That's not what we've got.
It's just whatever we've been breathing in and whatever viral thing has been going around. But it does mean that our voices don't last as long. Becky's just starting to get hers back. I'm preserving mine because of course it's the weekend and I've got to preach.
This coming Sunday, I've actually got to sing. On the fifth Sunday of the month, I lead worship as well. This is the way I got started out. When I first became a pastor, I was a pastor with an emphasis in music.
And so I was leading all of the music programs and leading the worship every Sunday. I still love to do that because that was what, at one point, I thought that was going to be what I was going to do for the rest of my life, was singing.
So I still enjoy doing that and coming back to the keyboard and leading worship. And I'll be doing that this coming Sunday. That takes a different kind of vocal muscle. You use your voice in a different way for that.
So I'm going to hold on to that, preserve my voice. What I'm going to do today, I did a program that published over the weekend. Well, I call it a program. It was one of the videos, a video that was responding to something that Jeremy Boring said on his program, which was the Jeremy Boring podcast.
This isn't an endorsement of Jeremy Boring. He's got a couple of things that I wouldn't necessarily put his program out there and say, yeah, everybody listened to Jeremy Boring. But this particular audio clip was good and gave me an opportunity to share some things that don't often get shared from many pulpits in the United States.
I'll set this up for you here and we'll play the audio clips from Jeremy. And that'll be the program today, just the half hour video that I did. If you would like to submit a question to the program, you can email us when we understand the text at gmail .com or you can go to www .utt .com, click on that voicemail tab and you can record a voicemail either through your phone or through your computer.
So here was the video that I did responding to Jeremy Boring. God bless and thank you guys for listening. In Titus chapter two, verses three through five, we read the following instructions. Older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine.
They are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands that the word of God may not be reviled.
These are very straightforward instructions for women in the church. And of course, feminists in our culture hate stuff like this, submitting to your own husband, working at home. And unfortunately, some of that feminist attitude has crept its way into the church.
So that many preachers in America today won't even confront many of the sins that some women in the church are committing because they just don't want to offend the women. This is something that was talked about recently by Jeremy Boring, one of the co-founders of The Daily Wire.
He has his own show in which he talked about this. And I happened to catch a clip on social media. Let's listen to this and consider what he had to say.
The women in our congregations are just as lost or even more so. And in our feminized culture, virtually no pastor calls it out. Many a church that would never allow a woman to preach or serve as an elder, nevertheless allows backbiting busybodies to run the church at a cultural level without saying a word.
Yeah, and I've seen this firsthand. Churches where all of the pastors are men, even all of the deacons, they will have some sort of confession that is complimentarian or even patriarchal. Yet behind the scenes, the women are running things.
There will probably be committees or teams where there are women who are given authority even over the pastors so that whatever they say goes. If you're familiar with Jesus' instructions concerning church discipline in Matthew 18, he says that every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.
Well, I've seen where a charge made by a woman already has the weight of two or three witnesses. And you're probably familiar with this phenomenon where the pastors and the deacons will get together and they will make a decision for the church.
And then one of those men goes home and he tells his wife and she doesn't like it so much. And suddenly that guy's calling one of the pastors and going, you know, that thing we had talked about, that decision that we made, I don't know, I'm having second thoughts about this.
All because he listened to his wife. Churches that are filled with these eves who have listened to the serpent and they have taken the fruit and handed it to their husbands who also eat from it.
15 of American women are on prescription medication for depression, more than twice the rate of men. Among women over 60, the number approaches one in four. Add to that wine mom culture and alcohol deaths that have risen faster among women than among men for over a decade, millions of our daughters and of our wives are regulating their anxiety not through prayer or surrender or self-development, but through drugs and through alcohol.
Now listen, I'm glad these drugs exist for those who truly need them. I'm glad wine exists. But if our male congregants drank whiskey and took speed all day, I suspect that would get at least some attention from the pulpit.
Our daughters being functionally drug dependent usually goes unaddressed. As does the fact that so many of them read smut. The most graphic pornographic content in America today isn't even on websites with triple X in the URL.
No, dark romance with graphic depictions of rape by animals or elves or monsters is now one of the fastest growing genres in romantic fiction, which is already a $1 .4 billion a year industry. It's everywhere.
It's in the tote bag at your women's Bible study. And pastors are silent. You'll preach a whole series on lust to a room that's more than 55 women, and yet every illustration in it will be geared toward men.
Why? Yeah, there was a young woman in my church. This was over a decade ago. It was back when Fifty Shades of Grey was big. She was a volunteer in our nursery, and she had posted on Facebook that she was excited about the movie Fifty Shades of Grey because she enjoyed the novel so much.
Well, she had to be confronted on this, of course. And she was asked to repent, as Colossians 3 .5 says, put to death what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, and against such things the wrath of God is coming.
We had appealed to her out of love that she would turn from her sin. Well, instead she turned from the church, and it wasn't difficult for her to find a church that she could be a part of where they were accepting of her watching and reading such things.
How many pastors in America are willing to confront women over these kinds of sins? Now, they may be willing to confront it privately like that, but they will never address it from the pulpit because, again, they just don't want to offend the women.
And then there's the true crime phenomenon, the single most popular subject among top-ranked podcasts in America today, which has convinced an entire generation of women that they're smarter than everyone else, that they see reality when everyone else can't.
This has opened them up, of course, to all sorts of evil and manipulation by cult leaders and narcissists who profit off of their gnosticism. It's led many of them to participate, along with Candace Owens, in the public torture of Erica Kirk, possibly the worst act of defamation in the history of the United States.
But it's wine 30, and the ladies are on the case.
Now, Jeremy doesn't mention it in this clip, but another one is the Lindsay Clancy case, this mother in Massachusetts who had murdered, strangled her three children. And there are women all over social media who think that Lindsay Clancy is innocent, either because she was experiencing postpartum depression or because they even think her husband is the one who killed these children.
And they're being influenced by other women across platforms like TikTok, Facebook, X, and Instagram. That's something I'm gonna come back to in just a moment.
Pride, false religion, and abusing widows seems firmly in the church's domain to me, yet this evil is running through American Christian women right now, and the church is almost completely silent about all of it.
The instinct God built into a woman to protect her children has been perverted and weaponized by online influencers and aimed at strangers she will never even meet. It's doing tremendous damage, and the man who could have taught her the difference between righteous judgment and bearing false witness has been standing at the podium 40 feet away once a week for years, making her feel welcome, and occasionally maybe wagging a finger at her husband and never saying a word about feminine sin.
In every church where I have been privileged to pastor, I have done a series through the pastoral epistles of 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus. I was a pastor for 10 years at a church in Kansas, and in my last video, I mentioned being a pastor at a church in Texas.
I've been here at Providence Reform Baptist Church in Casa Grande, Arizona, since 23. And I've loved each one of these congregations dearly, and each one of these churches, I did a series through the three books of 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.
And in those pastoral epistles, you will find specific instructions that are geared toward the men of the church and the women of the church. And I've used that as an opportunity to confront sins that will try to capture our men and sins that will try to capture our women.
Here's just some of the things that I talked about with the women in the church. Look at the next instruction in verse three. Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips, nor enslave too much wine, teaching what is good.
Now we'll stop there for now, because where we go on from there is how the older women may instruct the younger women. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior. It was just said to the older men that they're to be temperate, dignified, and sensible.
That is reverent behavior. So now it's said to the older women in like manner, they are to be reverent, a word that is synonymous with sacred. You might be familiar with that word, a reverent, in the way that we'll sometimes title a pastor as a reverend.
This is to behave in such a way that is suitable for sacred character. The elders of the church, the pastors and overseers, certainly they should behave with reverence. Here Paul is saying that responsibility and that duty is also for older women.
And it's interesting to consider how much of this instruction given to older women is like the qualifications that we read previously for an elder or an overseer of the church in chapter one. In Titus 1 .7 we read, for the overseer must be beyond reproach as God's steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, and he must teach what is good.
What is being said here to the older women? She's to be reverent, not malicious gossips, nor enslave too much wine teaching what is good. Now that doesn't mean that we see some similarities in the instructions there.
It doesn't mean that older women are qualified to be pastors. The context here clearly states whom she is to teach. Going on to verse four. She is to teach the younger women how to be respectable in their conduct and their behavior.
Here the older women are being given a huge responsibility in the church. For Paul to speak to these older women in the same way that he called elders to godly conduct. He says to them, be reverent in behavior, or as it says in the King James, if you prefer that translation, be in behavior as becometh holiness.
Next part, right after that. Women, the older women are not to be malicious gossips. About this, the London preacher John Gill said, quote, they are not to be false accusers of the brethren and sisters, which is to act the part of the devil.
And indeed the same word is here used, which is commonly given to him, the accuser. She is not to raise false reports of bringing false charges against members of churches and sowing divisions among them, unquote.
Women, control your tongues. That's basically the instruction being given here. Just like the older men were not to be given over to wild ideas, do not let your mind wander in the way of assuming the worst of your brothers and sisters in the Lord.
Or if your mind does begin to wander to such things, have enough self-control that those thoughts and ideas don't come out of your mouth. So the older women are to be reverent in behavior, not malicious gossips.
What's the next part? Nor enslaved to much wine. Malicious gossip is what comes out of your mouth. Enslaved to much wine is what goes into your mouth. And both of these things demonstrate a lack of self-control.
Notice that we're not just talking about a glass of wine with dinner here. It says that she must not be enslaved to much wine. Being enslaved to alcohol demonstrates a lack of self-control over your appetites.
And then given over to drunkenness, you tend to lose control of yourself altogether. How many of you are familiar with the wine mom phenomenon in our culture? According to a 2021 article in Good Housekeeping, this is not a magazine that I frequent, by the way, wine mom culture says that the best and the only way to mom is with a glass of wine in hand.
That sounds to me like being enslaved to much wine. Doesn't it to you? There's a whole subculture for this. You can buy wine glasses that say, mommy's sippy cup. I saw a baby onesie that said, mommy loves me more than wine.
You can buy throw pillows that say, mama needs some wine. And there are even memes going around on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that say things like, the most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink.
Wine is to moms what duct tape is to dads, it fixes everything. Motherhood, powered by love, fueled by coffee, sustained by wine. When you go to Google Trends and you look up the term wine mom, over the last 10 years, Google searches for that term has spiked as much as 400 in the months of May and December.
What do those two months have in common? It's when kids get out of school. The biggest spike was in 2020. What happened then? It's when everybody was confined to home and schools were shut down in the pandemic.
And it was estimated during the days of the pandemic that drinking just among mothers went up 50%. In an article for the Atlantic, Lisa Jacobson, a history professor at the University of California suggested the following solution, quote, maybe what wine moms need isn't a supersized glass of alcohol, but social support in the form of affordable healthcare, paid family leave, wages, equitable wages, and of course, an equitable division of labor at home, unquote.
So according to this liberal professor, wine moms just need socialism, that will solve the problem. But what did the scriptures say? Ephesians 5, 18 says, do not get drunk with wine for that is dissipation, but be filled with what?
The Holy Spirit. You don't need booze to help you be a better mom. You need Jesus. Now there's one thing I will give though to this woman's solution, this professor at the University of California. Notice that she said, maybe what wine moms need isn't a supersized glass of alcohol, but social support.
What are we reading about here in Titus two? We're reading about social support, not in the socialistic way that she was considering it, but seeing the responsibility that we have to one another, to build each other up in love, to encourage one another, to sometimes correct each other when needed.
Older women are to be sober and not addicted to much wine so that they can teach what is good to women who are younger. Galatians 5, 16 says, walk by the spirit and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh.
Did you listen to David's prayer this morning when he talked about being filled with the Holy Spirit for God's word gives us all the answers that we need for all of our hurts and troubles that we go through in this life.
And sometimes we have brothers and sisters among us who need those reminders and we need to be able to come alongside each other and build each other up. Galatians 5 goes on to say that those who carry out the desire of the flesh will not inherit the kingdom of God.
And those works of the flesh include drunkenness. Now let's not limit this just to merely wine. There are many ways to be intoxicated, right? In 1966, the Rolling Stones had a song called Mommy's Little Helper.
It was a song about women who take Valium. According to a recent study, the drugs most commonly abused by women after alcohol were stimulants such as Adderall, depressants such as Xanax and Valium, and opiates such as Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Percocet.
There are many ways that we can give our minds over to intoxication. And ladies, if that's you, if I've said something here that convicts your heart, I hope that you'll talk to someone lest you let yourself be given over to judgment because of your substance abuse.
What does Galatians 5, 22 to 23 go on to say? Not to be devoted by the works of the flesh, but instead to be in the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
That last one, I believe, is the most often neglected of the fruit of the Spirit, self-control. And yet here, the older women of the church are being told to have self-control. And older women, we need this kind of example from you.
But if your mouth is given over to gossip or wine, then how can you fulfill the latter part of this instruction? Look at the end of verse three. Older women are to instead be teaching what is good. That's what you should devote your mouth to, speaking words that honor God and build up the people of God.
And what is the good that women should be teaching? And who is it that these older women should be teaching? Verses four to five. So that they may instruct the young women in sensibility, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands so that the word of God will not be slandered.
And unfortunately, many of the Christian women's conferences today or the books that are geared toward Christian women, they don't do a lot to lead women in righteousness as we have it spelled out for us in scripture, but rather they will regurgitate a lot of the same counsel that you can get from the world.
Things like believe in yourself or follow your heart. Now, my friends, it may not look like I belong there, but I have actually attended many women's conferences. My wife has been to several of these women's conferences and I can tell you from experience that what we're reading here in Titus two, verses three through five, to older women and younger women, this is seldom taught in any of these women's conferences.
They might talk about how to get away from your husband and kids for a while, or they'll talk about how you can still pursue your own hopes and dreams while being a wife and a mother. And really a lot of these conferences, they just kind of geared toward wanting to provide a pick-me-up.
We're just gonna tell you you're wonderful and awesome, and God has the best in store for you. And everything's just like a pep talk rather than any instruction or real exhortation. I cannot remember the last time that I listened to one of these women's conferences and heard a woman teacher say, ladies, be a loving mom.
Be subject to your husband. Be holy. Be kind. Be workers at home. So the word of God will not be slandered. In 2018 and 19, the best-selling Christian book for two consecutive years was Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis.
She started that book by saying, this book is about a bunch of hurtful lies and one important truth. And you might think that one important truth is Jesus, right? Not according to Rachel. She said, you and you only are ultimately responsible for how happy you are.
The book is framed around 20 lies that women often believe, and Rachel said that she used to believe. A good life means being happy, and happiness means overcoming lies. My friends, that's been the world of philosophy for the last 2 ,500 years.
To have a happy and fulfilling life, you just need to pursue happiness. And your own state of things is in your own hands. We need God to help us overcome the trials of this life, right? Well, again, Rachel says no.
On her Instagram, she said, it does not matter what your religion is or who you worship, but that you recognize that today is a gift. Makes you wonder, how in the world did this book end up on the Christian charts for two consecutive years?
Rachel followed up that book with another bestseller, Girls Stop Apologizing. She said, women, all that really matters is how bad you want your hopes and dreams and what you're willing to do to make them happen.
Love yourself, then reach for more. Jesus said, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself. Take up his cross daily and follow after me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
For what does it profit a man or a woman to gain the whole world and lose her soul? And by the way, these words of Christ are at the heart of these instructions that we're reading about here in Titus 2.
In honor of Christ who gave himself for you, be willing to give up yourself for his body. Do you love God? Then love the people of God. Rachel Hollis and her husband, Dave, made a fortune selling these books, building a self-improvement empire and putting on huge conferences for two years until 2020 when they got divorced.
In February of this year, Dave was found dead in his home of a drug overdose. My friends, do I need to make any more light of this story to tell you how devastating this advice will be if you accept it?
We wanna protect you from these lies. They will destroy your life and even worse, they'll destroy your soul. The godly woman is not the one who is telling you to believe in yourself. The godly woman is the woman who says to you, believe in Jesus.
In 2 Timothy 3, beginning in verse one, the spirit says the following, but understand this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.
Avoid such people, listen to this, verse six, for among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
And one of the ways these people creep into households and capture weak women is through our screens, through smartphones, through your computer, tablet, or otherwise, listening to these voices, scrolling through video after video and filling yourself up with the knowledge of the world, but never arriving at the knowledge of the truth.
Are you familiar with that old Sunday school song, be careful little eyes what you see, be careful little ears what you hear, for the father up above is looking down in love, oh, be careful little ears what you hear.
That's a reminder for kids, but for us as adults as well. Whenever I have taught through 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, I have asked my congregation, do you believe that there is a doctrine that saves? Do you believe that there is teaching that when you hear it and you believe it, will save your soul from death and grant you eternity with God in glory?
And the answer to that question is most definitely, yes, that's the gospel of Jesus Christ. Knowing that the son of God died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, he rose again from the dead so that whoever believes in him will not perish under the judgment of God that we all deserve because of our sins, but we have been reconciled to God through Christ.
We have eternal life with him in glory. That is doctrine that saves. But the follow-up question to that is, do you believe there is doctrine that damns? Teaching that when you hear it and you listen to it and you believe it, would actually keep you from the kingdom of God and you will actually perish under the judgment of God forever.
And on that day, when you stand before God, you will not be able to say, well, my flesh made me do it. It was depression that I had no control over, so it's not really my fault. It was the world that made me do it.
All these videos that told me to do these things or voices in my head, it was the devil that made me do it. You won't be able to blame anyone else. As said in Romans 14, we will all have to give an account of ourselves before God.
The only way to be saved on the day of judgment is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. That is something I have been committed to teaching, the full counsel of God in the scriptures.
But so many pastors these days are not teaching what the Bible says, even calling out sins that people in their own congregations may be committing. We must be committed to the teaching of the full counsel of God.
Later on in 2 Timothy 3, you're surely familiar with this verse. Verse 16, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
And that's for everyone, men and women. We all need to listen to teaching that comes from God's word. We need to be reproved and corrected when we do something wrong. And we need to be trained in righteousness that we would walk in paths of righteousness for his namesake.
It's talked about in Psalm 23. And this all comes through God's word, which sanctifies us. Jesus saying in John 17, 17, he prayed for us saying, God sanctify them in your truth. Your word is truth that the man of God or the woman of God may be complete and equipped for every good work.
I hope that you attend a church where the word of God is preached. It's like as Charles Spurgeon said, go where the gospel is preached and go often so that we may help one another, keep each other from sin and walking in the path of righteousness, fulfilling what is said in 1 John 1, 7.
If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his son covers us from all sin when we understand the text.
This is when we understand the text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the web and we thank you for selecting ours, but this is no replacement for regular fellowship with a church family.
Find a good gospel teaching Christ-centered church to worship with this weekend and join us again Monday for more Bible study when we understand the text.