Human Sexuality, Gender, and God's Creation with Owen Strachan | Live Conference

Welcome everybody to our, am I good to start now? Okay, thank you.

Welcome to our 2024 Equipping Conference with Owen Strand. Owen, raise your hand.

I don't think people know who you are. Okay, thank you. No, just kidding. Would you please stand as we begin our conference this evening with a song,

All Creatures of Our God and King. ["All Creatures of Our God and King"] ♪

Creatures of our God and King ♪ ♪

Lift up your voice and with us sing ♪ ♪ Oh, praise

Him, hallelujah ♪ ♪ How burning sun with golden beam ♪ ♪

How silver moon with softer gleam ♪ ♪

All things their

Creator planned ♪ ♪ Worship Him in humbleness, praise

Him, hallelujah ♪ ♪ Praise, praise the

Father, praise the Son ♪ ♪ And praise the

Spirit, three in one, praise Him ♪ ♪

Hallelujah, His blood, rejoice in His great love ♪ ♪

Oh, praise Him, hallelujah ♪ ♪

Christ has defeated every sin ♪ ♪

Cast all your burdens now on Him, praise

Him, oh praise Him ♪ ♪

Hallelujah, He shall return in power to reign ♪ ♪

Heaven and earth will join to sing, oh praise

Him, hallelujah ♪ ♪ Then who shall fall on bended knee ♪ ♪

All creatures of our God and King, oh praise

Him, oh praise Him ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah, oh praise

Him, oh praise Him ♪ We'll sing together now,

Be Thou My Vision. ♪ Be Thou my vision, oh be all else to me, sing that now ♪ ♪

Thou art, Thou my best thought, by day or by night ♪ ♪

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light ♪ ♪

Be Thou my wisdom and Thou my true word, with Thee ♪ ♪

Father, I Thy true son, Thou in me dwell,

I with Thee ♪ ♪

Which is I, He not, nor man's empty praise ♪ ♪

Thou mine inheritance now and always,

Thou and Thou only ♪ ♪ Thou are the peace in my heart,

I King of heaven, my treasure

Thou art ♪ ♪

I King of heaven, by victory won, may

I reach heaven's joys, oh bright heaven's sun ♪ ♪

Be part of my own heart, whatever befall, still be my vision, oh ruler of all.

♪ You may be seated. All right, let's begin with the word of prayer.

Our Father, we give you thanks that we can be here this evening to fellowship around your word, to fellowship in your son, to receive instruction, and we are grateful that you have brought

Owen here and that he is able to be here and to minister to us through your word.

We pray that in light of all of the insanity going on around us in our world, in this nation, and in our culture, that you would, through Owen, equip us to have an answer to every man who asks us a reason for the positions that we take, the hope that we have within.

We pray that you would equip us to think rightly about issues where the church is being pressed today, and that you would be honored and glorified through all that is said and all that is taught here.

Keep us alert, we pray, and attentive to your word for the glory of Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.

Well, welcome to our Equipping Conference 2024. Just a couple of announcements before we begin, and of course, you know the routine as far as there's food at the back, and there will be throughout the conference, between the breaks.

Tomorrow we have lunch that's part of the conference setup that will be provided for you, and I'm not gonna tell you what we're having, but it involves smoked meat.

So I'm looking forward to that. Tonight's Q &A is already prepared, but there should be some three by five index cards on the table, so if you have a question that comes up at any time tonight or during tomorrow's sessions, write down that question and bring it up to the table, center table up here, and drop it off to me, and I will be collating and organizing those throughout the day, tonight, and tomorrow, and then that will form our final

Q &A, which is the last session tomorrow. Our subject is of pressing concern, and not that I think that anybody here is really confused.

We have a, actually, I just realized that there's light shining in here that's blinding somebody. Could we move those shades up, if you don't mind?

You're enjoying the sun? It's the first you've seen of it in like eight months, so it's, not that I think that anybody here is confused about gender and human sexuality, and this is obviously a complementarian church and not an egalitarian church, but it is good for us to spend some time thinking through these issues, and when

I came up with the idea to address this, I thought there's nobody I would rather have address this for us than Owen Strand, who, at one time, was the head of the

Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and that was the first time that I ever heard Owen's name.

I was talking to somebody about a good resource on gender issues, and I said, there's a great book called

Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, written by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, and they are the heads, or started, this

Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and then somebody corrected me and said, those guys are no longer there leading that.

Now, Owen Strand is leading that, and I don't know who that guy is, but since then, I have followed

Owen's work online and appreciated him very much. I met him a couple years ago, so he is the one that I felt would be most equipped and I think probably the best guy we could have to come and address these issues.

Owen Strand is the Provost and Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. He is a native of Maine and did his ministry training at Southern Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

He is married to Bethany and is the father of three children, two of them teenagers. He enjoys watching basketball, coaching basketball, hiking with his family in Natural Beauty and milkshakes.

He likes to hike in the Natural Beauty, and he likes milkshakes. Not to hike in Natural Beauty and in milkshakes, but he hosts the

Grace and Truth podcast and is a Senior Fellow of the Family Research Council. I'm grateful that Owen is able to be here because as we're gonna get into in the

Q &A, he has a lot of things crashing down on him in his life right now. He is in the middle of a lot of occupational and ministry and family changes, and yet as much stress as he and his family are under right now, he is still here, and I'm very grateful for that.

Owen is the author of this book, The War on Men, that you were given with your registration. Extra copies of this are available for $20.

He's also the author of Christianity and Wokeness. I've read both of these books. They're excellent. These are available also for $20.

And then this is not available, but The Warrior Savior, he's the author of this book, A Theology of the Work of Christ, and this has got to be excellent.

I haven't read this one yet, but it's on what I call my short stack. It's one I'm gonna get to relatively quickly.

This just came out in this year, right, January? Is it January of this year? Yeah, so I haven't gotten to it yet.

All of that said, that's kind of my long introduction. Owen wanted it to be much longer because he wanted me to talk a lot about him.

With that, I'll turn it over to Owen Strand. That was not true.

I said, you can be very short. That would befit the subject, but he didn't fit that bill.

That's okay, that's okay. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Pastor Jim, for having me. The team, thank you to Josh for that musical worship, and thank you all for giving your time on a

Friday night to be here. We are here to cover momentous things because our whole culture, our whole civilization is shaking over the issues that we will be talking about.

Even think about this title with me for just a minute. Human sexuality, gender, and God's creation.

That's basically in summary form just about everything that has the church under fire in 2024.

That's put probably a number of you in this room in interesting positions in your workplace, in your vocation.

If we were to speak up, if some of you were to speak up where you work, where you ply your trade, you could be fired very quickly and very easily and become a headline.

In fact, if you say some of the things, I'm just gonna lay out here in this strong sound pulpit in this sound church this weekend.

So this is momentous stuff, not because of me, but because of the subject matter.

If you wanna open to your booklet before I move into my first message tonight, I just want you to understand this conference schedule page.

I just want you to understand the flow of tonight and tomorrow. You'll see that we start with three sessions on God's design for humanity.

That's intentional. We're gonna begin in the opening chapters of Genesis, and we're gonna see just what

God made humanity to be. We're gonna breathe pure oxygen. So all of that, all that madness that swirls out there, that's not in here, praise

God. And we get to breathe the pure oxygen of God's glorious design that is good for us.

It's not just right, it's good for us. It brings flourishing, it brings joy when we live according to it by the grace of God.

Then in session five, you see a turn there. That's intentional, Satan's design for humanity.

And we do two sessions there. And I just want to map briefly with you. I won't be able to do it full justice, but I wanna try to map the system that we're up against in order that we would understand it, but not just understand it and stand far apart from it and maybe throw a few rocks across the stream or something like that, in order that we would be better equipped to then press into this world because we're not actually supposed to, even as we're surrounded by beautiful hills and mountains, we're not supposed to head for the hills.

We're supposed to press into the darkness. It's not a natural instinct for any of us, but we're supposed to press in.

So we're not just trying to critique Satan's design. We very much are. We are calling a spade a spade the whole weekend, but we are actually trying to be equipped to get into the darkness as the light in order to glorify

God. And then we go back to God's design there in session seven in a Q &A. And on Sunday, I'll do a

Sunday school on the gospel as our power, and I'll do a sermon on David and Abigail.

There aren't a lot of us, I think, that have, who has heard, I'm just taking a survey. You can do this when you speak with impunity.

Who has heard a sermon on David and Abigail in their life? Okay, well, we are about to break some barriers, baby.

Apparently, I expected a few hands, but should I be offended? No, it's not my book, but okay, anyway.

We're gonna talk, there's so much to preach. I'm not throwing shots at preachers here. There's so much to preach in God's word, but actually, the reason

I'm in David and Abigail is because a lot of what we're talking about, as Pastor Jim rightly said, is the word complementarity.

That basically sums up, as we'll be going, that sums up, in my judgment, beautifully,

God's design for the sexes, that we are complementary, that we are made distinctly, that we are definitely not the same, man and woman.

We're the same race, but definitely not the same as human beings. We have our distinctions, and those distinctions are not bad.

They can become bad in a sinful world, can't they? We can render those distinctions and differences something that is bad, and they present a real challenge to us in marriage, for example, and even in the home with raising kids, but in God's design, again, they're good.

Our differences are not bad. They're not a matter of hostility. They're to God's glory, just like God the

Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are one God, three persons. They're not the same person.

They're not a carbon copy of one another, just with a different name. They're distinct persons, and so we have a foundation as Christians for both unity, one

God, but distinction, three persons, and that's true in humanity as well. Unity, one human race, all of us image bearers, every single person an image bearer without exception, fully an image bearer, as we're just about to talk about, and yet, man and woman different, and that's good, and that's the opposite, as we start of how our culture talks now about gender, because so much of how our culture discusses these things is it tries to melt everything down into one kind of omnigender, where there's not really distinctions between men and women, and we're all the same.

It's all gender -neutral gray, and with respect to gray neutral tones in your household colors or something like this, my wife likes neutral tones, so I feel like I should say that in terms of the house color scheme.

That's not actually how humanity is supposed to look. We're not supposed to be blended down into one undistinct color.

We're supposed to be distinct colors. When you see a rainbow, remember it's pride month.

Yes, the rainbow's been co -opted, or they've tried to, but they haven't succeeded, by the way, because you can't edit what

God has created, and you can't take anything back from God. If God has told you that he owns the rainbow, with a smile on our face, we say he owns the rainbow.

Nobody else owns the rainbow. But look, think with me just for a second. Think of a rainbow. Those are distinct colors, aren't they?

But that's what makes it beautiful. They're not all the same. That speaks to the world that God has made.

Well, we are running ahead of ourselves. We need to begin by thinking together about the image of God, a doctrinal, biblical reality that is often not treated in much detail.

We don't have a super long session here tonight, so don't worry, we're not about to sit here for four and a half hours, but we do need to give some attention to the image of God.

The image of God is the foundational reality of the human person.

You can't understand who a human being is without understanding that we are all an image -bearer, every single person.

We're going to cover that at some length. But before I get into the image of God from Genesis chapter one, we're starting in session one in Genesis one,

I want to give you five different cultural views of the human person.

And all of these relate to these topics, human sexuality, gender, God's creation. I want to give you then five wrong views of who humanity is.

Five bad answers to the question, what is a person, okay?

Because that is actually the most commonly debated subject today in 2024 in America.

What makes you human? So much of the debate is right there.

Five bad views, and then we'll transition to a sixth view, and that is the biblical view.

Man is the image of God. The first cultural view that's around us, that's coming at us from different angles is this.

Man is mere matter. Man is mere matter.

This is often called materialism. It can also go under the name naturalism. All we are is just a collection of atoms.

We are not just that, a meaningless collection of atoms.

It's kind of like when you pick up a toy and there is some kind of company, their logo, their name on said toy.

I have three kids, 15, 13, and 10. My wife and I are currently in that weird stage of grief when there are not that many toys being played with in the house after years and years and years and years and years and lots of money being spent on toys.

So I know toys well, even as they are fading from our life together as a family, as two of the three have launched into teenage -dom.

When you pick up that toy, you see the brand, you know it's from something. This scientistic view, many atheists around us, many skeptics around us say, when you look at the human person, you pick us up, you look at the bottom of our feet, there's nothing stamped there.

No one has made us. There's nothing purposeful about our existence. No one's designed us for anything bigger.

Again, we're just a collection of atoms. We just happened to have come into existence.

Yes, this is an evolutionary worldview. You're well familiar with it. In an evolutionary worldview, there is no, at least in the secular form, there is no divine creator.

There is no being guiding our being. There is just what is and nothing more.

So no one has shaped you. No one has made you for any purpose.

You are just atoms colliding. When you die, as you often hear people say, especially nowadays in 2024, there's no place you go, there's no heaven, there's no hell.

John Lennon, that great theologian of the Beatles, told us this some decades ago, right? It's just fade to black, or maybe it's some kind of,

I don't know, blissful non -existence, however that is defined. In this view, we're just matter.

You and I know some different thoughts about that, and I'm guessing in this kind of church, you get some equipping for how to respond to that kind of perspective.

Certainly you do from the scripture itself, just from preaching the word, preaching the gospel you do. It's important for us to know, though, that lots of people live according to this view.

This is the view, for example, that drives the culture of death.

This is the view that funds abortion to the tune of tens of millions of babies aborted in this first world civilized country.

There's lots of different world views, of course, that factor into a decision, horrific decision to abort, but one of them, one of the key ideas is that the baby in the womb is just a clump of cells.

It's just tissue in a woman's womb. That's all it is.

And you and I know the complete opposite. We know that when a child is in a mother's womb, it is being knit together by God himself.

It is not simply that God has set up certain processes and stepped away, and now he's kind of a deistic figure out there in the clouds somewhere, unconcerned with the world he has made.

No, David and the psalmist tell us that every human life is fearfully and wonderfully made, but that view goes the exact opposite direction of the man as mere matter view.

It's very much a common way to think about humanity today.

Second view, man as technological project, man as technological project.

We're now in the age, as you may have heard 18 ,000 times, of AI.

Every company that is at all trying to be cutting edge is right now trying to figure out

AI and how to use AI, and for some of us in the room, how to get rid of us so that AI can replace us, because that is, it is going so well.

They told us technology, by the way, was going to make our lives easy. Do you remember those?

Do you remember that line? By the way, anybody remember that being, oh, technology, we're gonna, first of all, we're gonna be flying to the moon on a regular basis like the

Jetsons, yes? And then technology is going to solve all of our problems. Have you tried making a phone call to your spouse recently in a moment when you really need to reach them?

Have you ever had a phone call drop? Have you ever had a text message not go through?

I wouldn't be so quick to believe the idea that technology solves all our problems. It's still difficult to get your toaster to work on a reliable basis.

If you have solved that particular human quandary, see me at the break. Mankind in this vision, and this relates to an evolutionary worldview, is basically an evolving animal.

That's what we are. We're an evolving animal, and again, lots of people around us think not only that we can use technology to upgrade ourselves, they go beyond that.

They think we should use technology to upgrade ourselves. They think that is, what's the word

I'm about to say? That is progress, progress, interesting.

Now, we do make forms of progress as time goes on in human civilization.

Air conditioning is nice. I prefer air conditioning. I like refrigerators. I'm guessing many of you do. Probably don't have a whole lot of ice chests represented in this room, and yet be careful with that, yes?

Be careful with that whole view that humanity is, as a whole, progressing. That vision has funded a lot of the worst ideas of the last 200 years or so, but many people are believing this.

They are believing that whatever science comes out with, it's good, take it, update yourself.

Elon Musk, who's doing a lot of good for free speech with what is now called X, which, yes,

Elon, if you're listening, that's way cooler than Twitter, by the way, but Elon Musk, on the other hand, is doing a lot to try to implant

AI, neural technology, into human brains and thereby effectively upgrade the human person, so good on the free speech stuff.

Thank you for saving free speech in America and the West, Elon, but no bueno on changing the human person itself, changing anthropology itself.

That is not a sound project. We are not just technology.

We are not software to be upgraded. God wrote this code.

God wrote the code of the human person. We're not an open -source system in that regard, but many people around us think that we are.

Third view, man as expressive, therapeutic being.

That's a mouthful. Man as expressive, therapeutic being.

What are we after here? Well, this is, again, grounded in what is often called a secular vision of life.

The idea is that at the core of flourishing and thriving human living is expressing yourself, so a healthy life, a healthy existence is not about following anyone else's script, even

God's. A healthy human existence is about chucking any other script and expressing whatever comes naturally to you.

Whatever comes naturally, whatever flows from your inmost desires and passions, that's what is good.

Whatever outside forces try to tell you to do, including religious authorities, including churches, including preachers and theologians, that is bad.

That is very bad, and that is what our young people today, and I see a bunch in the room, praise

God for that, that is what the younger generation today is inundated with, that view, far more than any of us even know.

Part of why we have to be so careful with phones. I'm not here to give a new law or pronounce a new 10th commandment, 11th commandment on technology, the perfect age when kids get phones today, or kids basically are going to get phones today, at least in a lot of cases, but be careful when they do.

Be careful. I would urge caution in terms of age. I won't get us into sticky disagreements tonight or something like that in session one, but I will just say,

I will just say, think that one through. Don't just give a phone because you've got a teen in the home that really wants one, and all the kids in the peer group have one.

My kids back in Arkansas, where we live, we're moving to Kentucky soon, more on that in the Q &A to come, my kids do feel a little bit weird because they don't have phones yet.

My daughter, I guess, now has a dumb phone. She's 15, about to turn 16, but we're trying to be careful on that, in part because even if she's discipled and hopefully somewhat trained in a

Christian home under my wife and I, certainly not perfectly, there still are gonna be a ton of messages that hit her on those platforms, and friends, do not overestimate the maturity of your children.

These platforms are serious, and they are calibrated to get your kids to do nothing other than believe lies about humanity, including the lie that we are expressive, therapeutic beings, that our greatest need is to express our true self, or to switch the lingo to Disney's language, to follow our heart, to follow our heart.

Same idea, yes? If somebody says, follow your heart, that's expressive humanity talking, and the therapeutic part of this third view comes because that's seen as working on yourself.

That's seen as improving yourself. You get the lie there as well. The lie is that, again, those authority figures who tell children how to live from something like the

Bible, those figures prevent us from discovering our true self, and so we don't work on ourself.

You even hear that language as well. I'm doing work on myself. I'm working on myself. You see this a lot on Instagram, and this sort of thing, especially with some of the mom circles, and that sort of thing.

Now, it's true that we all need to grow. That's a fundamentally Christian reality, but that's not what this view is after.

This is after your own self -directed therapeutic growth. You getting more in touch with you, you living as you want to live.

That is seen as being healthy. That is the new gospel, at least one of the predominant ones.

The new gospel is you need to forgive yourself, and you need to discover yourself, and you need to work on yourself, and you need to affirm yourself.

Now, I'm not going to encourage you, by the way, to hate yourself as if there is no image of God, and there is no grace and mercy in the cosmos.

Christians can even crank up the doctrine of sin to the degree that we effectively are communicating, like, if you don't hate yourself, you're not a good

Christian. I actually don't think the Bible teaches that we should hate ourselves. We hate our sin, but we don't hate who

God made us to be in terms of the image of God and a Christian person, but fundamentally, we've got to recognize we don't need to be true to ourselves.

We need to be true to God, and I need to say just a word, especially to the young people in the room.

The affirmation you need is not your own affirmation, or your peers' affirmation, or anyone else's affirmation, or some group online who you kind of gravitate toward, and they take you in, and they give you an identity.

You don't need their affirmation. It might feel good, but the affirmation you need is that which comes from God.

You need the forgiveness and grace and transforming power of God, which overcomes your sin and makes you who you truly are made to be.

That's what we need. Fourth view. Fourth view, we are sexualized beings.

We are sexual beings. You can put it different ways. We're gonna be talking about this at length. I'll talk about this tomorrow in the unit or the message on paganism at some length, but for here,

I'll just quickly identify this with Freud. In psychological circles,

Sigmund Freud, the European psychologist, really the founder of the modern psychological movement,

Freud argued that the human person is a simmering cauldron of desires in our core, and a key part of our desires is sexual desire.

In fact, Freud argued that sexual desire is the engine that drives the personality.

So what makes up a human person? What drives us? What moves us through life?

For Freud, sorry for the straightforward talk here, but for Freud, it was sexual desire.

In fact, Freud believed that both men and women are bisexual in nature and that it is natural for us, therefore, to have all sorts of sexual interests in lots of different directions.

Does that sound a little bit like the way the culture encourages us to think about ourselves?

Have you heard someone reference their masculine side or their feminine side? No one talks about their masculine side, by the way.

I don't think I've ever heard a woman say, I'm getting in touch with my masculine side. Isn't that interesting? I'm not even speaking,

I'm not even passing judgment on that. I'm just saying I don't think I've ever heard a woman say that. I don't think lots of women are trying to get in touch with whatever the masculine side,

I think they're trying to get far away from the masculine side. Okay, like the masculine side of the bathroom is like, you be over there, and the feminine, there is a feminine side in terms of husband -wife bathrooms, we can say that.

And you're supposed to mind those lines very carefully if you're the man. Men, though, do talk about getting in touch with their feminine side, their feminine side.

And I have a friend named Gavin Peacock, we've written some books together, he played Premier League Soccer in the

UK, he was a star in the UK for years. Captain Chelsea, if any of you like soccer out there, and he said at one point when we were preaching together, he said,

I didn't know I had a feminine side. I don't think I do, and that's exactly right. That kind of thinking, in all seriousness, goes back to figures like Freud.

The Bible doesn't teach men that they have a feminine side. We can talk about different traits, and we can talk about men and women showing overlapping traits, or things like that, but fundamentally, if you're a man, you're a man, and if you're a woman, you're a woman.

And by the way, just to cut to the quick here and give you the jeopardy answer at the beginning of the game, there are only two sexes,

God made them, you can't change your sex, no one has ever changed their sex, no one has ever become a woman who is a man, and no one who is a man has ever become a woman, or vice versa, it's never happened.

No one has ever changed their sex. You can't change your sex.

You can, tragically, get on very powerful drugs, you can go through body -altering surgeries, yes, you can be told all sorts of lies, you cannot change your sex, because God made it.

God is the one who formed it, and you can't change it, just like you can think you can become a mouse, but you can't become a mouse, and some of you are still chuckling, but there are people around us who think they can become a mouse, okay?

So the confusion is very real today, and we can laugh at that, we really can, because it's crazy, but people are in these positions, and even if that thought is wild and wildly off -base, these are people who need the gospel, these are people we've got to go toward, not away from, and reach in compassion, and there but for the grace of God go us.

Without the grace of God, I know this is strange to think, but you might not just be a garden variety sinner, you might end up thinking that you are a cat, that you are a furry, this is a thing now, in public schools there are increasingly litter boxes for kids who identify as furries, and think that they are cats or this sort of thing, now that is altogether ridiculous, it is, but these are lost sinners just like us, who need the gospel, we've got to go to people who think they're furries, but again, just to establish the point, just to nail it to the wood here at the outset, no one has ever become a mouse who was a person, or no one's ever become a tree, or changed back, because what

God makes you can't alter, you think you can, you can try, but you can't.

Freud did a lot of damage, as did Alfred Kinsey, in the same period of time in the 1940s, he famously did a lot of experiments about human sexuality,

I'll spare you the details in polite company, mixed company, but basically, with a lot of kids in the room, but basically, it's now all sides acknowledge, the political right and the political left, the academic right and left acknowledge that Kinsey's subjects were in many cases, people who for various reasons, many of them tragic, were inclined to what we would call, deviant sexual practices, so Kinsey treated these people, many of them prisoners and this sort of thing, people who really do need a great deal of help along these lines, he treated them as if they were normal, and then he did all this research and presented it to the public, as if everybody is effectively a sexual deviant, and that is not true, we all struggle with sin, and sinful desire runs through all of our hearts in some form, but Kinsey cooked the research from the start, this is a majorly impactful view, that we're a sexualized being,

I don't even really have to keep going in that regard, but let us just note that for now, we'll be engaging that view as we go, fifth view, man is a racial being, we are a racial being,

I don't have time to go into this in depth, but the academic theory most associated with this view is critical race theory, which teaches you that the world is made up of power dynamics, it owes to what is called critical theory, behind even critical race theory, and critical theory argues just that, according to Marx and others, that the world is made up of two categories, oppressor and oppressed, the people who are in the majority become the oppressor, the people who are in the minority are the oppressed people, they are wronged by the majority, that was applied to race starting in about the 1980s and 90s in legal studies under Kimberly Crenshaw and other figures, and what this has come to mean in layman's terms in America in the last 10 years roughly, as critical race theory got out of the tiny little discipline of legal studies and somehow went viral and went global, what this all means is that in the most basic form, white people as the majority group, white people in air quotes, are the oppressors of people of color, and we're racial beings, it's argued, and so this is the most important fact about us, and this is the most important fact of our civilization, and this is why it has been argued, as many of you have heard in lots of different forms, that we are in a systemically racist or systemically unjust society, who has heard some form of those terms in the last five to 10 years, most of you, okay, that's because we have been fed that vision.

The concept of race itself is not a biblical concept, the concept of ethnicity is different peoples who have a shared culture, shared language, shared region of background, that's valid, there's

Jew and Gentile, of course, in New Testament categories and Old Testament categories, to be sure, but there's not a sense that because we have slightly different shades of melanin, we are effectively different people groups, and we have no unity as human beings, that owes to secular thought as well, and that whole argument, again, applied to America in the most direct form, that has caused horrific division in this country in the last roughly five to 10 years.

It has caused many so -called white people to be told that they are oppressors, and they commit injustices against people of color at all times without even meaning to, and basically just by virtue of a lot of us being a majority group, for example, in America, we are a wicked people group.

The same thing, of course, could be said of any majority people group in any society, right?

So you could take that argument and apply it to Asian territories or African countries, et cetera, but it has been used here to do great damage in the church, for example, and teach people that they have an extra sin that they need to repent of, the sin of whiteness, for example, and so that has done, as I say, great damage because, just so you hear this, it is not wrong to have what is called white skin.

The Bible does not extra condemn you if you are white. The Bible does not condemn you if your skin is not white.

In past generations in America, people thought that people who did not have white skin were inferior.

Nowadays, people with white skin are called inferior. Suffice it to say, we are believing the same lies just directed at different people that we were believing in the 19th century with the same horrible results.

Can I give you a better vision just quickly? We're all one race, Acts 17, 26.

We're all one human race. We do have differences in terms of culture, and there can even be distinctions in terms of how people live, and some of that clusters around skin color, let that be said, but there's nothing hard and fast that makes us a different kind of vision of humanity from one another.

We have way more in common than we have apart, and there is no biblical basis for labeling a majority people group, for example, an oppressive group, just by virtue of being a majority group.

There's a lot more to say about these things. As Jim kindly said some minutes ago,

I wrote a whole book on this. There's a lot of complexity here. There's a lot of things to unwind.

My book, Christianity and Wokeness, gets at that. I'm gonna sign, I'll sign every stinking book you buy tomorrow at lunch, okay?

So they're all $20. I shipped them from my author account with my publisher.

I tried to give you a sharp discount. You can see the salesman up here, sorry, but if you wanna buy it, it's 20 bucks, and I'll sign every book tomorrow at lunch, books aside,

I'm just trying to get these units shipped and sold, but so the church doesn't have 800 books sitting in some corner somewhere for the next four years.

That does happen, sadly, to some of us, but these are complex matters, and they're divisive matters, but praise

God, we have the image of God, as we were just about to talk about briefly, and we have the gospel, and the gospel is what unites us as Christians, and wherever the gospel takes root, in a people, and in a community, at least in a lot of different places, there's going to be some form of diversity, and that is beautiful, and that is glorious, and we love that, and we want that.

We're not trying to artificially manufacture that in a cheesy way, and there's plenty of that out there, but wherever the gospel goes, and sinners get saved, and Christians join churches, that diversity naturally comes, and that is a beautiful thing, and we're the people then, who have the biggest stake in diversity, because we are a global body of believers from across centuries and millennia, so we have a big stake in the diversity of the body of Christ, and just a final word here, be wary of critical theory on the other side.

Be wary of critical theory that would tell you that because white people are targeted today, white people, and they are, that therefore we should go into some kind of project on the opposite side, not of hating our whiteness, and repenting of it, but of making our whiteness something to be celebrated, and that's our identity, more than the gospel is, more than unity and Christ is.

That is a rising danger today. Our Savior is not an

Anglo -Saxon European. Our Savior is a Middle Eastern Jew, who died on a

Roman cross for us, so you be careful about those message boards that tell you that your whiteness is your identity.

You may have one form of skin color or another, it honestly doesn't matter like the world tells us it does.

You know what matters most, is that a man named Jesus Christ died for you, and died for a whole bunch of people, some of whom look something like you, and a lot of whom don't look a lot like you, but you have unity in Christ.

In fact, Paul says, Ephesians 2 .15, we are one new man in Christ.

That is what the world needs to hear. That's the message of the gospel. Sixth view, those are five bad views.

This is the sixth, oh, I don't know what that was. This is the sixth, and it's this, man is the image of God.

We are the image of God. So we learn in Genesis 1, 26 and 27.

After making everything, except for the human person on the sixth day, God said this, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

Verse 27, so God created man in his own image. He created him in the image of God. He created the male and female.

This is where we go in fundamental terms. We have more to say than this, but we can't say less than this about what it means to be human.

This is the core doctrine of humanity, that every single person is made in the image of God.

What that means then, and this is quite a statement, is that when you see another human being, you're seeing a little, little, but real reflection of God.

That's remarkable. This shows us that we are made in glory.

We are fearfully and wonderfully formed. We are not genetic accidents.

We are not atoms colliding. We are not purposeless beings. We are not evolved apes.

God specifically made the human person in his image.

In fact, it's broader language. It's plural language. It's let us make man in our image.

Theologians debate, exegetes debate what exactly that means, but I think you have to say at minimum that it means that we are reflecting the

Trinitarian God as human beings. This means that every person has dignity and worth.

The image of God is not something that is unlocked when a person gets married.

You don't become more human based on your marital status. The image of God is not dependent on intellect.

Those who are geniuses are not more human than the rest of us. The image of God is not inhibited by physical difficulties.

So a person who is born with physical challenges is less human than others.

The image of God is not kind of present in a baby in the womb, such that yeah, you kinda can abort that baby if you need to because of convenience, a classic modern

American virtue, value. But then when the baby's born, it really does kinda get upgraded to a full image bearer.

No, a baby in the womb is fully made in God's image, though growing and developing, of course.

And on the other end of that, you don't lose the image of God as time goes on and your capacities maybe, at least in some categories, diminish a bit.

So for example, an elderly person who needs care towards the end of their life in at least some ways, if we're being honest, they aren't less human then.

You're not more an image bearer if you make a big salary than if you don't make a big salary.

The image of God, to use a single word, is ontological.

That's a big word, but write it down, please, if you're taking notes, trust me. It's ontological, O -N -T -O, logical.

Ontological. And that means that it's in us, it's our structure, it's in our being.

The image of God isn't something we do. The image of God is what we are.

And that is why we get involved in all these swirling issues and debates and controversies about God's creation, about the human person.

Because you see, we are the ones who know who our fellow human beings are.

And we know that the baby in the womb is just as much an image bearer as you and I are, just as much an image bearer as the most famous lauded athlete on our

TVs. We know that the elderly family member who we go to visit when we're traveling or we go to visit in a nursing home or we take into our home at the end of their life and they don't even remember their name.

We know that they are still an image bearer, that they have not lost their

God -given dignity and worth. And to repeat myself, they never can, they never will.

No one can take it from them. A few years ago, we're almost done with this first session.

A few years ago on British TV, there was a program that makes me angry even as I'm talking right now, because it was a program that featured a broadcaster walking through all stages of society with a person who has the condition we call

Down syndrome. And the purpose of the program, I'm not making this up, was to show the person with Down syndrome that they cost society a lot.

I believe the program even tabulated the cost of caring for a handicapped individual, a challenged individual, however you wanna frame that.

And it was something like $30 million or something like this. The cost was pretty staggering in terms of human money.

And the takeaway of the program was that basically these people with this condition aren't worth the cost.

And that's where you see these visions of the human person coming to roost.

People being told their life is too expensive to play itself out.

And that's what we're up against, brothers and sisters. We're in a culture of death.

I don't mean this in a shouting, angry way. I mean, these ideologies truly come from the realm of darkness, and they prey on people, and they take people out of this life and send them into a

Christless eternity. The stakes are so high here, and that is why it is so vital that you and I know from the word of God who the human person is.

Every person is an image bearer. And if you and I, listen, you wanna do something about this,

I hope, coming out of this. You don't have to do anything fancy, okay? You don't have to, you do whatever you want for the glory of God that's moral.

But you don't have to be the person who saves the world in an afternoon. You just need to be a

Christian who believes these things, lives by these things, and yes, at some level, let me push a little bit here, by God's power in you, by the spirit in you, spirit indwells every single

Christian there is, you speak up, speak up for these things.

Speak up on a Facebook thread. Speak up in a conversation at work. Speak up in a classroom of high school sophomores.

Speak up with your coworkers at work, whatever it may be, and tell people the truth about who the human person is.

Here's my final word for this session. We're not supposed to just look at the human person and say, image bearer, made in God's image, a little reflection of God.

We are supposed to be living displays of the purposeful existence

God has given us, said more simply, we love life.

We love life because God loves life.

God didn't make nothing. God made something.

God wanted a theater, as Calvin called it, for his glory.

God wanted, of his own desire, there to be this created world where there would be people roughly four and a half feet to eight feet tall, depending on the tallest

NBA player currently, who would roam the earth, at least normally those heights, and then give him glory.

That's what verse 28 says of Genesis 1. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And God said, behold, I've given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, every tree with seed and its fruit, you shall have them for food.

And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life,

I've given every green plant for food and it was so. And God saw everything that he'd made and behold, it was very good.

God made this world to flourish. God is a generous

God. God is a good God. God is the one who provided little tiny plants yielding seed, not just for the human person initially, but for the birds, for the beasts of the earth, to everything that creeps on the earth.

So we're not actually just talking about the human person as we begin our time together this weekend, we're ultimately talking about God and the character of God and the

God we're talking about. The God of the Bible is a God of justice, as we will see.

He is a God who judges sin to the uttermost. He is a God who sends the wicked and unrepentant to an eternity we call hell.

And so we're not here to soften the hard edges of God's word, we affirm them and we affirm them without blinking, we must.

We cannot move the ancient mark that God has set. But I leave you with this, the focus of the

Bible is not on God damning the wicked, that's a sub -theme.

The focus of the Bible is on a good God, a God who creates a world where there is food, abundant fruit for the man and the woman, where they can, once placed in Eden, as we'll talk about tomorrow morning, they can eat from every tree that God has made except one.

We focus on the one. We focus on the one and we say, is God really good? Oh dear,

I need apologetics for this. And God said, there's 15 ,000 trees you can eat from.

We need those conversations, we all do, we all hit those moments, me included. But some of those conversations can be helped by the 15 ,000 trees that Adam and Eve could eat from.

Don't focus on the one they couldn't eat from. That was good, that was right, that God said, don't eat from this one.

But don't miss this, there weren't two trees. There's a forest of trees.

You understand this in Idaho, my goodness, I don't have to sell this to you. You live in trees, you stinkers, they're everywhere.

Those of us in different regions, we yearn for your trees. I'm actually from Maine, I love trees,

I miss trees. My dad was a forester. My dad walked the woods of Maine for a living, so I'm all in on trees.

And trees are at the center of the biblical narrative. It is the tree of life that we'll eat from in the new heavens for all eternity to come from, bearing its 12 kinds of beautiful fruit.

Okay, so all this to say, all this to say, don't lose sight of the creative vision of God.

Don't lose sight of who humanity is, or made in God's image. And don't lose sight of the

God who made humanity. Don't focus on the one tree. Focus on the 14 ,999 that the man and the woman could eat from in your life, dare

I say. Most of you are Christians, many of you are. Don't focus on the one.

Focus on the 14 ,999 blessings God has given you.

Let's pray. Father, help us to understand who you've made us to be.

We haven't said nearly everything we need to say about the human person. We've just gotten started in this first session.

But Father, help us to understand the glory of being an image bearer. And Father, strengthen the people of this church and the churches that are represented here, and the sound churches in this area across denominations.

Strengthen them to be salt and light here, and stand for the reality of the image of God.

To stand for the truth that every man and woman, boy and girl in this community, in this area, in this region, is made in God's image.

And so we are the ones who know who humanity truly is, and humanity will not flourish when we live according to our own desires, but we will only flourish when we live according to your design, by the power of your grace, out of the image of Jesus Christ, the true man, the one who is the tree of life for us and for our salvation.

In his name we pray, amen. You have a 10 -minute break, 10 -minute break.

We have with us here tonight, and this is not in your bulletin, in your schedule, but we have with us here tonight one of the missionaries that our church supports.

We've been supporting him for about a year, less than a year now, I think something like that. Evan Burns, you remember him? He's preached here a couple of times.

Evan has a ministry in Indonesia, and he's here with his two boys. And he asked, because he can't be here on Sunday, he asked if he could just address everybody here, say hi, and introduce himself, and show a little update on his ministry.

And Evan and Owen know each other, and I found this out because I picked up one of Evan's books, and Owen wrote the foreword for it.

And so then I thought, oh, okay, these guys know each other, and I know each of them, and now all three of us know each other. So anyway,

Evan, come on up and have your time here, about 10, 15 minutes. When I was doing my

PhD work, I'd fly back to Louisville, and Owen would kindly allow me to drive his car whenever I was in town, so that was how

I got to know him. And Christy, my first wife, was at Moody with his wife, and so they knew each other, they were on the same floor.

Not sure if they were roommates, but the same floor. So there's a little bit of connections there. Want to show you a video that we just made in January about our village and the ministry there, and what

I do. It was put together by a group called

Kingdom Coffee, and one of my former students is a successful businessman. He sold all his businesses, and is basically, he spends his time traveling the world helping village indigenous pastors start a micro -enterprising business so that they can be self -supporting.

And he partners with missionaries like myself who live in areas where there are coffee plants growing, and then we harvest the coffee, we teach the pastors how to start their own coffee business so they don't have to essentially live in the slums, and they can give themselves to the work of the ministry.

So I'll show you a video in a second, but if you go to our ministry website, FrontierDispatch .net,

FrontierDispatch .net, on the donate page is this video and information on how to purchase coffee, and all the proceeds go to our ministry.

The company, the company Coffee, King Coffee, excuse me, doesn't take any profits, it just goes to us.

So that's what this video was for, but it's more of, it just talks about what we do. And then after the video,

I'll just share a few things with you, but I will not be able to be here tomorrow, or on Sunday, I'm teaching a seminar in Spokane on apologetics, so that's what

I'll be doing this weekend. And then these are my boys over here, Elijah and Isaiah. We go back, we go to Alaska next week, and then we'll be there for about a week, and then we head back to Thailand.

And I'm not sure when we're coming back to the States again, maybe next April, but I don't know for sure.

So enjoy the video, and then we'll talk a little bit about what we do, thanks. My name is

Evan Burns, I am formally at Asia Biblical Theological Seminary.

Non -formally, I work with various hill tribes, churches, and pastors, and I specifically focus on training pastors and translating materials into their languages, so that they can raise up a godly generation behind them.

I am the Director of Frontier Dispatch, and that's the ministry through which I do all those things. I love living here with my family,

Dow and Elijah and Isaiah, and we've been here in Thailand since 2012.

My life is centered in a small, remote little Lahu village, a dialect of a thousand people.

I first sensed a call to the mission field when I was eight years old. I grew up with epilepsy, and one night

I was having a seizure, laying in my bed, waiting out a migraine, and I was listening to the story of Jim Elliot on the radio.

Him devoting his life to reach the people of the Aka Indian tribe. And I remember thinking, if God is gracious and he grants me life beyond my childhood, that's what

I wanna do with my life. I wanna give my life to the unreached, to the Bible -less peoples, to the undiscipled, and I'm here in Northern Thailand, and I wouldn't wanna be anywhere else, and I thank

God for the calling he's given me. Thailand is a Buddhist kingdom, and that sets up so many challenges.

One of those is that they are very resistant to the gospel. They pride themselves on having never been truly colonized or converted to Western or outside religion.

What Buddhism does, because it infiltrates everything in society, is it sets up this karmic filter or grid or framework through which they see all of life.

There's such a heaviness, a resolve that life is not necessarily gonna improve, and then the afterlife, the reincarnated life, isn't gonna necessarily be better, so there's kind of a sense of dread that they can never be good enough.

They do not find Buddhism to be liberating or inspiring or freeing. It's actually chains, it's shackles, it's bondage.

Cutting through that with the good news of the gospel of grace and Jesus Christ is a very difficult task, but it's a very life -giving task, because when they get it, the lights come on, and they see for the first time, like the old hymn says, my chains are gone,

I've been set free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee. And when they respond to the gospel, it's powerful, and it's immediate, and it's life -giving and hope -giving.

On the micro level, I work particularly with hill tribes people who are not technically

Thai. They're in a lower caste. You're born Aka, you're born Lahu, you're born Karen, and you're always gonna be that way.

With those people, they're not so much resistant to the gospel, there's confusion with the gospels, confusion of law and grace.

There's a lot of merging what God has required in the law and what God has provided in the gospel.

As with all of us, it's a very human problem, but it's especially accentuated in some of these villages because they have no resources.

Many of them don't even understand their own Bible translations, so they often will choose to read another Bible translation that's not their heart language.

So you have to give them resources that help carefully, sensitively undo their old thinking and show them how to find

Christ in the scriptures. Two great stories about how

God has used some of our resources. In one country, I was teaching a class and I had one pastor.

He came up to me and he said, I think I was born again today. I've been a pastor for 20 years and I've never heard of receiving

Christ through grace alone. We've always trusted in doing our best and God does the rest. We've always added on to what

God does for us solely in Jesus Christ. Another example is a pastor in a far -flung village. Put into practice my lessons on faith alone, grace alone,

Christ alone, scripture alone. He emailed me a couple of weeks later and said, Dr. Burns, I think we've had a revival in our village.

There are so many people who thought they were believers but didn't understand the freeness of the gospel in Jesus Christ. I've never seen people respond like this to Jesus in all the years

I've ever pastored. God has opened amazing doors for me working in very remote

Lahu villages. I get to go to places where many missionaries have never gone before. I get to meet with pastors and teach in churches, minister alongside them at their invitation in ways that you only read about in books sometimes.

God has given me immense favor. With one pastor in the village, he has me come up and preach in his village occasionally and considers me a good friend.

On my opinion, I think Dr. Evans and his family is a good example for me as the servant of God to work for God, to do the church or to preach the gospel.

His preaching touched my heart. People in my church say that it's good to hear his preaching again and again.

One of the things that God has done in my years in Southeast Asia is given me opportunities to remain in the lives of students after they graduate from the seminary

I teach at, ABTS. They go back to their hill tribes, churches, and their various other remote areas, and I stay in contact with them.

One of my favorite examples is Jared. It's such a privilege to be able to do ministry with my graduates.

Dr. Evan Burns has made himself available to me as also to my father. He has a heart for the

Burmese people. He has gone to the Thai Burma Border Church to teach there. The lay ministers have very little training and mentoring, and when he was there to preach and to teach, they said that they were very blessed because he opened their eyes to the scripture.

You know, they were bringing a lot of things into the scripture that were not in the scripture, so he goes back to the roots of the message.

I believe that training trainers or teaching teachers is one of the best ways to spread the message.

It's just ripple effect from formal seminary to hill tribes to the generations. The work we do is urgent in the sense that kids grow up so quickly, the generations move on so fast, and there's such a short window of time to access kids when they're in their formational years and they're not being discipled, and put four or five years into a curriculum project and that whole group of kids is gone.

There's such an urgency to get good materials, even simple, even short materials, into the hands of the younger generation so that they have ways to access the knowledge of God.

I do pray that we will continue to put out resources that affect and train up the younger generations to be disciples and disciple makers for Jesus Christ.

The donations of Kingdom Coffee can help us in a couple ways. One, they can go to helping pay for the translation and the publication and printing of our materials.

Another project that we have ongoing is we're saving up money to help build a Sunday school building to train the younger generations in our

Lahu village. And then another way, they can just go to helping our family with our various ministry expenses. So those are three ways that the donations of Kingdom Coffee can help us.

Join me in disseminating and spreading and publishing the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ and getting materials into the hands of people, the

Bibleless peoples, undiscipled peoples. All right, thank you.

Again, it's FrontierDispatch .net, and then on the donate page, there's information about the coffee. And if you do buy it, just indicate that you want the proceeds to go to Evan or the

Burns family or Frontier Dispatch. I'm the only Evan, and I'm the only Burns there. So it's pretty easy.

A couple of things I just wanted to reiterate just to recap what we do. Training and translating, that's what

I said on the video. It's an easy way to remember what I do. I work formally at Asia Biblical Theological Seminary, and I use that.

I train various church leaders around Southeast Asia. It's based in Thailand, but I have a lot of work with Burmese people in the

Philippines. We are in Delhi, where we have two sites in Delhi in February, and I was teaching, and we're opening a new site in the

UAE, and I'll be teaching there in November. When I'm not in a formal classroom, which is usually about five days long in an intensive,

I'm out in the Hill Tribes, where we live in the Hill Tribes, and that village is a Lahu village, and Lahu is a,

Dao's dialect is Lahu Bakio, which is only 1 ,000 speakers, and we're the only missionaries among the

Lahu Bakio in the world. They don't even have an alphabet. They don't have a written language.

It's completely oral, so they don't even use a Lahu Bakio Bible, because there's no such thing. So I work with a variety of different Hill Tribes not related to them, and then some are related to them, but I find that there is a vestige of Christianity among some of these

Hill Tribes. It was introduced in many of the translations. The Bible translations are bad translations.

They have really confused a lot of terms, including justification and sanctification. They flatten those and make those the same word, which, if you can imagine, that just brings out the

Galatian heresy. It's you're in by faith, sort of, but then you stay in through good works in addition to faith, which is just classic

Roman Catholicism. So my work is essentially evangelizing people who are nominal believers with some sort of blend of animism.

So it's the work of an apologist, and that really is my heart. I'm a trained theologian, but at heart,

I'm an apologist. It's what I love to do. I say to my students, clarity is the enemy of error.

The more clear you are, the less room you have for ambiguity and the less room you have for error.

So I really work at defining and defending the gospel. That's kind of my blade.

That's the way I cut. I wanna be the Bible guy. When I come into the classroom, I come into the village, I want them to know that this is where God speaks, not through the prophet, not through the seance, not through the tradition, not through their experience, but through the book, that this is where God speaks, that the authority is here, not in the missionary, not in the

PhD, not in the pastor, but here. And so that's what I emphasize.

I love it. I hope to die there. That is my life. That's my home. My tribe.

And we're welcomed into it. They consider us Lahu because we've moved into their culture.

I wanna share with you just something briefly out of Matthew 24. You know the passage in Matthew 24 about the prophecies, about the end of time and before the

Lord returns, signs of the times. It seems to me that at least verses 11, 12, 13 describe kind of the pressure that Dr.

Strand is talking about, this pressure, the pressure cooker of the culture that we're living in now. Verse 11, many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.

That's my life. A lot of my work is undoing bad teaching, doing damage control for foolish missionaries who have misled a lot of people.

Verse 12, because lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold.

Lawlessness and lovelessness will increase. Describes our age, does it not?

Verse 13, but the one who endures to the end, he will be saved. So there's hope. There will be endurance of the saints.

As Hebrews talks about, this is a call for endurance. There is a people, there is a remnant named

Jacob and they will endure to the end by faith in the Messiah. But here's verse 14 which is the classic missions text which so many well -intended missiologists use as an imperative that we must usher in the return of Christ and this is what they'll say.

This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come.

And so many missiologists, very famous ones who have influenced very large missions organizations say, this is,

Jesus can't come back until we do this. And there's no imperative in this verse.

This is all indicative. This is all promise. This is an assurance passage. This is Jesus saying, you know what?

As time is winding down and we're getting ready for the return of the Messiah, it's gonna be a call for endurance of the saints.

Lovelessness, lawlessness will be increased but this gospel, this gospel of the kingdom will be preached as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come.

You can take it to the bank. The Great Commission will run and triumph in the darkest of days.

It cannot stop. So you can go for broke in your church for the Great Commission knowing that it is not mission impossible, it is mission imperishable.

It will happen. It will happen. God will cause his gospel to triumph in all the nations and there will be a people faithful just like in Elijah's day.

There will be 7 ,000 who do not bow the knee to bow. 7 ,000. The perfect, the completion of the people of God.

They will not bow to bail and so you can give yourself to the discipling of the nations, to the preaching of the gospel among all the peoples and we can go serve among the

Bacchial who've never had a missionary work with them before knowing that there will be people coming from those tribes and nations and even in these days of intense lawlessness and intense coldness of heart,

God will get his work done. So thank you for your support. Thank you for praying for us and in the back on the missions table, there's brand new prayer cards.

You can pick up some of those and I'd love to talk with you at the end and again, sorry we won't be able to be here tomorrow. So thanks.

All right. You look at Evan and it makes you wonder what you're doing with your life, doesn't it? Wow. That was -

Sluggard. That was quite a imperative there. All right, let's begin with something that is on everybody's mind.

I've been asked about this and we need some clarity. How do you pronounce your last name? It is a

Scottish last name. It is a Gaelic pronunciation, a subgroup of the

Scots and you pronounce it in two different ways. You can pronounce it Strachan which is very masculine and which

I would personally prefer or you can say Stran. Which sounds effeminate. Thank you.

Thanks Jim. And so that's how, that's the Gaelic form. Okay, so you went with the

Gaelic? Somebody went with the Gaelic. I don't know who but I'm saddled with it so yeah.

How and when, let's begin with your salvation testimony. How and when did the Lord save you? I grew up in a Christian home in coastal

Maine. My mom is from a believing family. Her father was an elder at Grace Chapel in the

Boston area, a well -known large church there. He did radar work for MIT for many years.

On my dad's side, not a single Christian to this day except my dad. They met in college.

My dad got saved in part through my mom's witness and raised my sister and me in a tiny

Baptist church in coastal Maine, about 40 to 50 people, big. And it was there that I heard the gospel and honestly, no joke, it was at Vacation Bible School which is happening all over America right now.

It was at a VBS that I remember, you don't necessarily know when the spirit regenerates your heart but I remember hearing about hell and thinking

I deserve that for my sin and then hearing about heaven and thinking

I can only go there because Jesus died for my sins. And so I think I was nine or 10, probably five kids at a backyard

VBS, probably no one there remembers anything about that but that's when

I believe the Lord got a hold of my heart. That's when you believe you were saved? That's when I believe I was saved. When were you baptized? In a

Baptist church did they dunk you the next Sunday? I'm not entirely sure why it took me a while but I didn't get baptized until college.

I was not as confident in my profession of faith as I could have been but I look back at my high school and junior high years before that and then into college and I think

I was apart from sin in a positive way, in a good way by God's grace but I had to really own it and it took some time for me to own my profession all the way.

It took some time for discipleship to happen. The discipleship that I would wanna set up wasn't necessarily all there.

So did you say what age you were? I think I was 19 when I was baptized. Okay, all right. Did you attend that Baptist church all the way through your childhood till you went to college?

Do your parents still attend there? It was First Baptist Church of East Machias, Maine. I attended it all growing up into college.

The church no longer exists because like a lot of New England churches it just dwindled and dwindled and then eventually was sold to a drug rehabilitation ministry about five years ago the building was and so my own home church literally today doesn't exist and for years,

Jim, I thought very hard and prayed and talked with my wife, my long -suffering wife about going back to New England because of that darkness, because of watching things like that.

My home church doesn't, I mean that's a serious thing to say. It happens but that's a serious thing to say. My home church does not exist anymore but the

Lord does not seem to have called me back to Maine but at the very least

I'm very thankful that that church existed for a time and I came to faith through it. Have you always had your current theological convictions because I would say broadly speaking you're in the theological camp that this church would be considered

Calvinistic in its doctrines of soteriology, not necessarily eschatology, maybe, maybe not

Baptistic, not paedobaptist. Right. Have you always had those theological convictions growing up at a

Baptist church where you kind of raised and reared in a more Arminian setting? I was, I was raised in a free will conservative

Baptist church so we weren't monkeying around with biblical errancy or miracles aren't real or anything like that.

It was a the Bible says it, we believe it kind of church. It wasn't fundamentalist, there are some good fundamentalist churches out there but it wasn't that which is interesting to me.

There was Christian liberty on a bunch of issues and I'm really thankful for that looking back because it taught me both about, you know, conservatism, both about structure and order in the

Christian life. So, so following what God teaches, obedience would be a clear word as I fumble here on stage but it also gave me a category for liberty and as I've, as I've gotten older and we've even talked some about different heresies in the church and different systems that prey on people,

I've realized a lot of people in conservative circles grew up where there was basically no liberty and they struggle with that and thankfully

I had both structure, the call to obedience but also the freedom of the gospel but it wasn't until I got to college and my college roommate liked a girl and a bunch of us in this, in this little circle,

Baptist guys, we were all free will Baptists. We'd all grown up in conservative, free will Baptist Northeastern places and then this, this dude liked this girl and she said,

I can't date you because my dad is a pastor and if you wanna date me, you have to read Jonathan Edwards' Freedom of the

Will and so he said, okay, I'll read Freedom of the Will. So he read Freedom of the Will, he became reformed and then he came back to Bowdoin College, my main college and he then launched into cage stage

Calvinist debates with us Armenians, the three Armenians in the group and we fought him tooth and nail for like six months our sophomore year and then

I said, all right, I was the most kind of red blooded, I'm like, all right, here we go. I'm gonna read the

New Testament and I'm gonna refute you and I'm gonna show you it's free will, the New Testament is. So I had biblical instincts, you know, but not the right ones.

You couldn't figure out how it is that free will Baptist and the Freedom of the

Will by Jonathan Edwards, how this guy wasn't agreeing with you after reading that book, right? I could not, I could not. So I got to Ephesians and stopped and said, you win.

True story. Ephesians one. Ephesians one, I was done. I became, I got in all seriousness, the

Lord, that wasn't my conversion, but the Lord opened my eyes to the glory of the sovereignty of God that it is not a bad thing that God is

God, is divine, is sovereign. It's a wonderful thing that God is sovereign and divine and in control.

And even in my life, I won't go on here at length, but even in my life, that's led me further as I've gone through life and there have been some struggles and challenges and hardships and trials.

It's led me to realize God doesn't just allow hardships and suffering, God appoints hardships and suffering and he does so for his glory and my good.

So I'm so thankful he helped me discover all that because honestly, I don't know how people who don't believe in the sovereignty of God make it through life.

Did that sort of conversion in your thinking happen before or after you met your wife? That was before.

I was a sophomore in college when I became reformed in my theology and then after graduation from Bowdoin, I went to Washington DC and interned under Mark Dever for six months and then

I interned at the US Department of State for six months and then I went to Southern Seminary in 2004 and I met

Bruce Ware, the theologian and I was in his discipleship group at Southern for two years and in the second year,

Dr. Ware and his wife pulled me aside and said, we think you could be a good fit for our daughter.

I went over there, I said, Dr. Ware, I need to talk to you about PhD, where I should do my PhD because I'd had a bunch of men,

Al Mohler and Dever and others had said, you should do a PhD. I didn't have a category for doing a PhD as a kid from Maine.

My pastor didn't have a bachelor's degree, he had an associate's degree and most of the pastors in Maine went to Bible college and that was it and they were good preachers and I didn't see any need to go further but those men, anyway, those men said, there's freedom with all this but those men said, do a

PhD. So I said, Dr. Ware, I really trust you and look up to you, what should I do? They had me over for dinner and I went over and they said, so we've talked about your subject, here's our subject,

Bethany. And I said, tell me more. And so I did a

PhD in Bethany and got married and I'm still enrolled in that program and still learning there but yeah, we got married

July 2006. How many of you know who Bruce Ware is? You heard that name? Okay, how many of you knew who

Owen was before I announced that we were having him here for our conference? It's humbling, good.

Yeah, well not everybody, you want everybody to know who you are. Hey, hey, it's humbling. How many kids do you have, three?

Three kids, Ella. Ages and names. Ella is 15, Gavin is 13,

Ainsley is 10. So girl, boy, girl. You homeschool, private school, public school? We have done

Christian school in the past to some degree but they are all three currently homeschooled.

We would, we could do a classical or Christian school but we are, oh man, you know what they don't tell you about homeschooling?

It's hard. Okay, it's hard, yes, thank you. But they also don't tell you the flexibility, right?

You know, it's like, oh, you've got to take ownership of your kid's education. That's really noble and good but also you can go on vacation whenever you want and it's great and in all seriousness,

I'm being a little glib but like if I have a ministry trip, I'm not frantically emailing six teachers, can

Gavin please have your permission? This is my kid by the way but can my kid have your permission so we can go on a trip?

I'm like, we're going, you know? I email the director of Strand Classical Academy, my wife and we go, man.

So we love it. It is challenging. It's a lot for mom. It's a lot.

It's a real sacrifice. My wife is a baller. She is a great wife and a great mother and I love her to pieces and there's grounds and treasures for the hard work she's doing but we do.

Man, it's hard to give up that flexibility for us. Speaking of challenging, what is the most challenging aspect of being a father and a husband?

Since we're talking about gender roles, human sexuality, et cetera. I see how ministry families can have ministry be what you do professionally and that can almost make it hard to do ministry in the home so things like family discipleship and over the years, the

Lord has convicted me of the need to step up my game in going after my individual children to make sure they're not just in a ministry family and going to church and going to Christian stuff but I as the dad am discipling them in some form.

I don't mean by that necessarily, I'm not the type who's like, you've gotta do formal 30 -minute family worship six nights a week.

I don't see that in the New Testament so I can't bind people with that but I do think we're doing

Deuteronomy 6 ministry and so that's what I really am trying to do in this season.

Trying to do some formal family worship stuff, yes, because that's good but also like, okay, can

I bring Gavin on a ministry trip and we talk about stuff in the car?

I coached him in basketball this last year and that was so positive because it gave us so much father -son time and it was father -son time not with me going, this is what you must believe, let me catechize you.

It was him and me having fun and then that opened up all sorts, he liked it so then we could have all sorts of meaningful conversation.

Explain what you mean by Deuteronomy 6 ministry just so everybody doesn't have to read the entire chapter and then wonder what you're talking about.

So in Deuteronomy 6, the Lord God calls Israelite fathers really but both fathers and mothers to train their kids in all the normal activity of life while you're in the field, while you're on the road, while you're at home and so I think we're not under Deuteronomy 6 in an old covenant sense, we're in the new covenant now but I do think that that informs

Christian fatherhood and motherhood a lot. The New Testament doesn't say, you've got to sit everybody down at night at 7 p .m.

but we should, I think, be having these conversations and trying to disciple all throughout life.

Yeah, you have been busy as long as I've known of you and followed your ministry publicly, privately.

You've been busy, you write probably a book every 18 months, you're in the speaker circuit for G3 ministries, you're speaking at national conferences, a lot of regional conferences, you speak all over the country, you're head of a seminary, you're teaching classes, you're a professor, you have your doctorate, how do you balance the demands of family life and ministry life with a schedule like that?

You just asked about what is a challenge and that is a real challenge and I don't mean that in a silly way,

I mean it is a real challenge because it feels like there is a lot of ministry to do.

Jesus says in John 4, 34 and 35, the fields are white for harvest and so the fields are white for harvest and he also says the laborers are few.

I was thinking about that with Evan's presentation. The laborers are few so I'm not what the church needs,

I'm not the one anyone's been waiting for but there's a lot of need out there and honestly,

I'm just gonna cut it straight here for a minute, unlike the sexuality stuff that we're talking about, there aren't a lot of guys in my generation who really talk about that stuff and I, in some corners, have a bit of a reputation,

I think, for being like a tough talker or something but part of that is because there aren't a lot of guys who will clarify doctrine and I'm not in this to yell at people and win

Calvinist fights, I'm in this because the sheep need the truth of God and God seems to have called me to that role and that's part of the

Maine background. In Maine, I think there were like two Christians in my high school of 160 kids so that's like a .05

% rate and then I went to Bowdoin College which is kind of like a Dartmouth or something like that, it's intellectually tough and there were like 20 kids who would show up for the inter -varsity

Christian meeting on a weekly basis out of 1 ,600 so I am used to being in a lot of darkness with the wind in my face and I think that shaped me,

I think God put me in that to call me into this. At a young age. Yeah.

Where do you currently serve in ministry? Explain what you do. So I'm in a moment of transition but I have, for the last three years, been the provost of a small seminary in Arkansas called

Grace Bible Theological Seminary and I've taught theology at that school and the school has about 80 students.

Before that, I was at Midwestern Seminary which is where I crossed paths with Evan and that was a very different school, that was like 4 ,000 students and I ran a

PhD program and taught theology so I went through a major job change and our family went through a major life change in moving to Arkansas.

Now I'm actually changing jobs again three years after coming, I think by the call of God and I'm, you guys know

James Dobson. He started Focus on the Family but then he started a different ministry in 2009 called the

James Dobson Family Institute and they have a radio program called Family Talk.

I don't know if anyone has heard it. I'm seeing some nodding heads. It's a very good program. Anyway, Family Talk. I would have a few differences with Dobson on some things and I'm not changing on those matters but anyway,

Dobson has been a bold voice in the public square on a lot of tough issues and I started doing some writing and stuff for them three years ago and I just got named to be

Senior Director of the Dobson Culture Center so that's gonna be my new full -time role.

It's gonna be a remote role and I'm moving my family to Louisville, Kentucky to be near family and then I'll work remotely.

JDFI is in Colorado Springs. So earlier I talked about everything kind of crashing down on you at the same time.

That's all happening right now while you're coming out here to minister with us. I told

Jim I signed the rental truck moving agreement from the Atlanta airport today and the amount of money

I signed my name to from the Atlanta airport was a little staggering. It's like, it is good business moving books and T -shirts.

I'm in the wrong line of work here but no, the Lord is giving us a lot of grace.

It is an intense time for my family and for me if you out there can pray for me and if you would be so kind as to pray for my voice.

It's been a just intense season for us. We've had a lot of meetings and stuff because we're leaving and we wanna leave well and we love many people where we are in our church and it's just been a wrapped up season for me.

I lost my voice earlier this week so I'm praying that God will give me strength while I'm here. So I wanna ask us a question of clarification on that because James Dobson is typically not known as hanging out in our theological circles.

More Arminian, more kind of a political wag not necessarily theological wag. You being named to that center to direct that center when

I heard that on the phone with you a couple weeks ago I instantly thought obviously one or two things is happening there bringing you on because they want a distinctly theological cultural engagement voice there that is of your theological camp or they have no idea what they're getting when they ask you to come and head that up and this will be about a year and then you'll be moving somewhere else and looking for some other place to live.

So which is it? How do you navigate that? What's going on there that some guy like Owen Strand can strike and would be welcome.

Strike at, yeah. Yeah, that's a very good question. It is,

I don't remember which one of the options it was but yes, it is that I am a conservative Christian voice in the political realm in the public square and that's where,

I overlap with Dobson a good bit but that's especially where their mission overlaps with my work.

They had, JDFI is the ministry. You can look it up. I just put on my social media a link to all of this so if you look up my name it's in the booklet

Owen Strand Twitter, you'll get my account. This is very, this is not the way to do this but I need like a

QR code on my hand. Just scan this code. Anyway, but there's a website you can go to and I'm doing a new weekly newsletter and those sorts of things.

And so what we're trying to do with this new venture with the Dobson Culture Center is we're trying to equip the church to be salt and light in these evil days and extend

Dr. Dobson's legacy in terms of marriage, the family, religious liberty, human dignity, culture of life, those kind of things.

And that's what I'm speaking to. I'll be doing articles, videos, resources and that sort of thing to try to help

Christians. Exactly what I'm doing at this conference. I'll be trying to do a lot more of that through this ministry just like Dobson did in his own way for decades.

What church do you attend now? I currently attend Grace Bible Church in Conway, Arkansas. What kind of a church is it?

It's a Reformed Baptist 1689 church. Large, small? Medium.

It's medium to large, I guess. It's about 400, 450. And what's your role there?

Do you serve as an elder there? I haven't been an elder. I am a care group leader. So put that on your

CV. I lead a care group and my wife and I have loved doing that. I've been an elder in past days and hope to be an elder at a church going forward.

How much do you preach in your home church? I haven't preached a whole lot in part because of the speaking schedule.

I typically preach or speak one to two times a month. I try to watch that carefully, but I haven't preached a whole lot at my home church.

How did you decide to go into full -time ministry? Evan had a seizure and was listening to Jim Elliot.

I don't have any, I wish I had something so cool and Jim Elliot was involved. That's like the

Christian gold standard right there. When I was a freshman in college,

I got, yeah, this is my exciting testimony. I got cut from the basketball team. What is that?

I couldn't even make a division three basketball team is what I'm trying to say to you as a five foot seven overheated point guard from Maine.

So I got cut from the team. And as we were talking about earlier, I was a Christian, but basketball, this is silly, but it was kind of an idol for me.

And in all honesty, I was trying to find my identity in it. And so when I see young people who are Christians perhaps, or maybe are grappling with Christianity and they're struggling with identity issues,

I understand that because I tried to find my identity in being a good basketball player.

And I was never satisfied. I was living under a law. I was living under performance.

So I got cut and I was like, I was just devastated.

And then I went to church. I went to a midweek church at my college church, Berean Baptist Church. And the speaker was my youth camp speaker that I'd known all growing up.

And he preached on blind Bartimaeus, crying out to Jesus as Jesus passed by.

And he was like, this was Bartimaeus' shot. He was, Bartimaeus was not in a great position.

He wasn't gonna be able to follow Jesus all around. This is it. The Messiah is here. Like the

Messiah of heaven and earth is 10 feet away from you and your moments now. And he cried out to him and received his sight.

And I was like, that's me. I think I was a believer, but I need to live for the Lord. I need to find my joy and my identity in Jesus.

So that kickstarted two years of very intense growth, study, prayer, preaching, and so on.

And then my college roommate, a different one than the Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will one, my other college roommate, went to Washington, DC and came across Capitol Hill Baptist Church under Mark Dever.

This is 20 years ago, and told me about it and said they had a pastoral internship that would pay you, pay you to go there.

So I applied and got in and went to Washington, DC in 2004 and trained under Dever.

And it was just explosive for me. It was so formative. And I was like, that's what I wanna do.

But I thought I was gonna be a pastor because when you're in seminary, nine of 10 guys or 19 of 20 are gonna be a pastor.

And so that's the norm and that should be the norm. But Moeller took an interest in me and other theologians at Southern.

And they were like, I think you should do the PhD. And then when I did the

PhD, I got called to teach at Boyce College and then Midwestern Seminary and then Grace, and on it goes.

So the Lord redirected me from the way I thought I was gonna go. So it wasn't a single moment of calling.

It was just kind of you pursuing what interested you and what people suggested is a good fit for your ministry, for your giftedness, your capacity.

I'm an impatient guy, and I've always wanted the Lord to give me. Remember MapQuest?

You would print out MapQuest and you would have 29 different directions. Those were good days, weren't they?

Because the iPhone, the screen goes out and you're, I don't know where I'm going. But anyway, the MapQuest days when you printed out the two sheets and you had 29, that's what

I want. I wanna MapQuest Christianity. And the Lord has frustrated me because he's never let me know what's coming.

He doesn't let any of us know. But it's been a spiritual battle for me to trust him in that respect.

And it's been really good for me because he has just led me turn -by -turn directions.

How did you come to serve at the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood? You're stepping into big shoes with Wayne Grudem and John Piper.

Yeah, definitely. I was writing on my blog.

I started blogging because of Moeller because he was blogging and I loved seeing Al Moeller.

This was a little different than Deborah, doing the expository preaching that you do and others do. I saw

Moeller do something different. I saw Moeller do what Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til and apologists and other figures like that did.

And that was take the culture and what it's thinking and take the Bible and smash them.

And I watched Moeller do that on his radio show and stuff. I interned for him and I was like, you can do this.

Like I know about the pastor thing, but you can do this. You can be a thinking Christian and that's good.

People want that, so I wanted that. And I started blogging about manhood and womanhood and then

I get this call out of the blue in late 2011 that CBMW was kind of, some of the energy behind it,

I'll put this carefully, had diminished and they wanted like a young guy. And I was a young guy,

I was like 28 years old. And so they hired me to be the executive director. I wasn't planning on this, but I took it over and by God's grace, we kind of turned it around financially and it grew and we started getting fire from a lot of people because we kind of came back online and it was a very formative.

It was a hard time, but it was a formative time for me. How long were you there? 2012 to 2016,

I became the president of the organization which was truly intense for me.

In the second half of that. And you were married by that point? I was very much married, yes. Did this issue of gender, human sexuality, complementarianism, egalitarianism, biblical manhood, womanhood, et cetera, did that become a special interest to you through the influence of Moeller Endeavor and your time there in crashing together culture and Christianity?

It was Moeller. He wrote a good bit about manhood.

He did a booklet called From Boy to Man, The Marks of Manhood that you can find online.

It was a three -part series. It was excellent and I was like, I was just all in on biblical manhood because growing up in New England, there wasn't a lot of strong manhood.

It was very much kind of a feminist context, especially the academy that I was in and there were a lot of women preachers in New England and that sort of thing and I was never drawn to that.

I always knew that was wrong biblically. And then I go to Southern Seminary and I see Al Moeller in this kind of Winston Churchill way, standing against culture but doing so respectfully and thoughtfully and with the gospel at the center.

And again, I was just like, that's what I wanna do. So over the years, the Lord has done a lot of work on me because I'm no perfect guy in ministry.

The grace and truth balance of John 117 is hard to hit. It's easy to be a truth guy or a grace guy and the

Lord's done work in me to convict me and I think I'm growing into more of the balance but that's what

I wanted to do. I wanted to speak and call a spade a spade but at the same time, hold out the hope of the gospel.

You grew up in a freewill Baptist church. Yep. Arminian to the core.

Were you exposed to independent fundamentalist Baptists at all in that neck of the woods? I was. A little bit of the legalism side of that.

Recently, for those of you who don't know, Owen has a podcast. Tell them a little bit about the podcast. I have a podcast called

Grace and Truth that's aspirational as I was just talking about because I'm trying to be like the post -it note that you put on the dashboard, like be a

Christian as you drive this car. It's hard for us. I want to hit that grace and truth balance and so my podcast is on the

Salem Podcast Network, the large conservative network. And on the podcast,

I try to tackle a blend of theology and culture. That's just my thing. Yeah, but recently you've done a series with Tom Locke on the subject of Gothardism and Bill Gothard's influence in Christianity, sort of the legalistic side of that.

Gothardism was huge here in North Idaho for a long period of time, especially in the early years of my spiritual walk, a formative,

I went to a Gothard conference and had a lot of that influence there. Talk to us a little bit about what you learned about that.

Were you ever exposed to any of that? What were some of the dangers that you've talked about in your podcast? A lot of my work in a kind of molar influence fashion has been try to understand what is hitting the church, what

Satan is slinging at the church in terms of systems and ideologies and grapple with that and get your arms around it and then communicate that to the church so the church understands the system and then communicate the truth and the grace that God gives.

And so I did that with Wokeness, like we were talking about that, this book, The War on Men, I did that with Toxic Masculinity.

And with Gothardism, that's been a recent one where I'm like, whoa, I've been dealing with Beth Moore and the

Southern Baptist Convention. I wrote a blog when not many guys wanted to speak against Beth Moore preaching on Mother's Day, for example, and I got a ton of heat for it in the

SBC, I don't regret it, because I was dealing with soft complementarity like five to seven years ago, so much of that, like people saying they're complementarian but then kind of softening things with women preachers and stuff.

So I thought, oh man, that's where the threat to the church is, the softness, the squishiness, the liberal stuff.

What I have learned in getting my arms around Gothardism is that it's a good thing, because a bunch of people in Arkansas were very much influenced by it.

I mean, that's where the Duggar family was based, and the Duggar family was really the export internationally for Gothardism.

And let me just say, Gothardism didn't get everything wrong, and there were a lot of good people who embraced

Gothardism to some degree because they were told it was good and sound and faithful, and so I wanna be careful in how

I handle it. I think there were genuine Christian families who loved Christ who nonetheless embraced

Gothardism. So with that said, it is not a good system. It is a twisting of scripture, and it really is a system where Gothard's opinions reign supreme over even the word of God.

And Gothardism really approaches the Christian life from a fear -based paradigm and tells you that you need to be under the umbrella of authority and authority structures, and if you get out from beyond the authority structures, you're gonna be in a really bad place.

It anchors you in that instead of anchoring you in the gospel of grace, which is what the

New Testament does, where you're not living according to a fear -based paradigm as if God is gonna get you if you listen to secular rock.

No, instead, you know the goodness and the mercy and the kindness of God in Christ who shed his blood for your sins and has brought you to the

Father, and now the Father actually loves you. So pleased with you. The Father's pleased with you. Like, what a thought.

So many Christians, this is so tragic. So many Christians, because of Gothardism and legalism and other systems, this is the problem from the right.

Beth Moore's problem on the left, one of them. This is the, Andy Stanley and others, this is the problem on the right, and it's a real vicious problem, and it traps people in a system where God the

Father basically is angry with you if you don't have the perfect quiet time or if you don't, you know, say the perfectly cheerful word to your husband, and if you don't wear the, you know, ankle -length skirt, and we have freedom in some of those things, and there can be some good principles of modesty, of course, but that system is a legalistic system.

So I've tried to respond to that and help Christians understand, yes, we can offend the

Spirit. We can grieve the Spirit, Ephesians 4 .30. We should live our life to please God, and God hates our sin, even as a believer, but fundamentally,

Christians are loved by God, forgiven by God, God has

His smile upon us. Yeah, if people wanna follow you on social media, what's the best way they can do that?

Where are you at? Where am I at? I am on Twitter, or X.

You can just Google my name, Owen Strand X, because my name is weird, so I'm not gonna try to give the handle, and if you

Google Owen Strand Instagram, you'll get that. I'm on Instagram as well, and I'm on Facebook. You post on Instagram under a different handle.

You have a ministry to young men and boys, kind of like a Christian, art of manliness type of an influence on Instagram, right?

Is that a big thing? No. You post there often? I have done more in the past, but my current one is

Prof Strand. That's my Instagram handle, and I did something called Make Ready. That's what you're talking about.

Make Ready. So yeah, that's where you can find me. And I would encourage you to follow him on social media.

Owen always posts things that are worth reading. They're good. They're culturally engaging.

They're always strong, clear, and you get a lot of heat from people, but it's a voice of one crying in the wilderness, and it's a good follow.

I'd recommend it. What are your hobbies or non -ministry interests? Well, as I've now told the group,

I love milkshakes. You can do fewer and fewer milkshakes as you're in your forties.

It's like seeing a comet. Like, hmm, I don't know about that, buddy. Once in a while. Count the cost.

I love, you know, I love family time. I really do, because we've gotten to do, as the kids get older, you know, we can do family vacations.

So we've done a bunch of those, and we love doing that. We love going to Colorado. We love going to the ocean.

So that's a hobby. I love Winston Churchill, as I've already alluded to. So I read

Churchill biographies. And I love Western films. If anybody wants to talk to me at any break about the movie

Tombstone, I'm down. I do love film. I love the movie 1917.

So, and then I love hip -hop. I've done a hip -hop album. Ask Phil Johnson if he's done a hip -hop album.

So I love hip -hop. So growing up in the, well, you were growing up in the 90s, basically, when you were kind of coming of age, right?

So your emphasis or your interest in culture and things that are affecting culture in the church, that kind of bleeds into observing what's going on in the culture in terms of music and film and other things.

I mean, we could even do a rap snippet in this very conference. At some point.

Right now? We could do now or we could do another time. I mean, I don't know. Doesn't have to be now.

You choose. I'm not doing anything, but you. If they come tomorrow, there's a

Q &A tomorrow, right? There's a Q &A tomorrow. All right, if they come tomorrow and they want it tomorrow, if the people want it.

How many of you want it tomorrow? Yeah, there we go. All right. Some of them are like, not tomorrow. We're not coming tomorrow.

What five books have most influenced and shaped you? Oh, wow. I love books.

My wife is like, please stop buying books because we just are out of space. So that's a very hard question to me, but.

Do this one then. Which, give me a list. Start naming the books where when you read them, it was paradigm shifting.

It was like, never thought of that. This just put me on a whole new level, opened my eyes to something profound.

Yeah, there's a biography of Jonathan Edwards by George Marsden called Jonathan Edwards, A Life that had that effect on me.

I read it in college and it just gave me a vision of the God -centered life because Edwards had such a big

God. He had the scriptural God, I would argue. And so that shaped me. Have you read Martyn Lloyd -Jones' biography of Edwards?

Do you mean Ian Murray's? No, you're right, Ian Murray. Ian Murray wrote Martyn Lloyd -Jones and Edwards. Yes. Ian Murray's. I love both of those.

Ian Murray's biography of Edwards. Yes. Yes, okay. And I actually love Murray on Lloyd -Jones.

That's one of my favorite books as well. So I'm gonna steal that, thank you. I wasn't thinking of that.

J .I. Packer, Knowing God. I love Packer. As a theologian, I love how Packer does theology.

He doesn't do it to speak above the heads of people. So many theologians in the seminaries and colleges, they want their fancy little group and they wanna speak above Christians and they're not really in scripture that much.

And my goal, I'm no perfect theologian, but my goal is to be like Packer, who is a man of scripture and could care less about his academic reputation.

He's a very, he was a brilliant man. He didn't get everything right. He's a brilliant man. So that's kind of my, so Knowing God is a very readable book.

It sold two million copies, a theology book, you know? And that's just wonderful to help people by.

Piper's Desiring God was very influential on me because it rightly recovered joy in the

Christian life, kind of like we were talking about riffing about a minute ago. Reformed people, conservative people have a hard time being happy.

They think they're sinning if they're being happy. And so Piper, Piper recovered some of that for me.

And then last book, William Manchester's, you can tell I like biographies.

William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill. Manchester wrote a trilogy called The Last Lion Trilogy. And the second volume is called

Alone. And it's Churchill in the 30s when he was just about the only figure who was boldly and bravely saying,

Germany is not stable and Hitler is a bad man. And what he is doing is not going to be good.

And nobody listened to him. And he was hated. And he lost just about everything he had.

And even though he wasn't a Christian, I have drawn on that example and found it to be true in the church.

All these men have good salaries, founded on the truth of God and the word of God, and yet massive ideologies targeting the sheep.

And they can't be troubled to say anything. And so I am no

Churchill. But Moeller introduced me to those books. And Dobson loves

Churchill. And I love Churchill. And I want to be like Churchill in that way. And just tell the truth, hopefully in a loving way,

Ephesians 4 .15, no matter the consequences. That is my goal in my life and ministry, to tell the truth no matter what it costs me.

John Knox said, one man with God is in the majority. And that's right. What books have you written?

I've written a few books. I've published about 20 books. I've written

Christianity and Wokeness, The War on Men, Re -Enchanting Humanity, The Colson Way, The Grand Design.

I've written a few books. What books are you writing now?

What do you have in the making? I don't have a project right now because I just had a conversation with my wife because I have to clear my writing projects with my wife.

Because if I don't, I could end up sleeping outside. So I clear my book projects with her and she has rightly advised me in feminine love to not write right now with all the changes that are going on because another thing

I do is I take too much on, even as you might have perceptively been noting. Had you started a book before you asked her that?

No. Do you know what I want to write? I want to write a book called Plant Gardens because in Jeremiah 29, the exiles are going into Babylon.

The Israelite exiles, they're in a horrible place. Israel has crumbled into nothing.

And to the Israelite exiles, God does not say either take over Babylon, just launch an effort,

Christianize Babylon. There's a lot of energy today in the Christian community, including in Idaho, to Christianize America and to overcome

Babylon, overcome America and make it Christian through theonomy largely. And that is not at all what

God says to the Babylonian exiles. He doesn't say take it over, but he also doesn't say build a shed.

Monastery. Yeah, build a monastery in the hills and do nothing. What he says to them instead is plant a garden, build homes, have sons and daughters and raise them.

And it's beautiful. I don't think we're the Babylonian exiles. It's not one -to -one.

We're not in the old covenant. These things matter greatly. But in terms of a vision for what you do when you're in darkness and not some darkness, not a little darkness, a lot of darkness,

God says do the most counterintuitive thing. Don't leave and don't attack

Babylon exactly. Plant a garden. Like what? Plant a garden?

Plant a garden. A garden is not planted, is not cultivated in a night or a month or a summer.

That's a 20 -year project. But that's what God said to do. And I think that's what we do now.

We plant gardens here. We stay here. We're not called to Christianize America.

We're also not called to head for the hills. We're called to be salt and light, which is very similar to that.

Plant gardens. It's Jeremiah 29. Read it in your devotions and see how it strikes you. I was reading it in my devotions.

I'm going way too long, I'm sorry. But I was reading it in my devotions and it jumped out and bit me. It was so beautiful.

Plant gardens? So there was a book published a couple years ago. Was it

Rod Dreher? Yeah. Was basically the Christian monastic movement for today, kind of an idea, right?

And then on the other side of that spectrum is the Christian nationalist movement, which is the opposite of that.

And by the way, he was alluding to Doug Wilson against some of you. None of you caught that when he's talking about Idaho and a big thing here in Idaho, because Owen has been going back and forth on social media and the public square on the subject of Christian nationalism and how that's not what we are called to promote.

And those guys, the Moscow guys and others affiliated with them, they have a boldness about them.

They have a joy about them. They have a plan for darkness. They certainly see some things in scripture.

Wilson has some commendable emphases. He's a unique figure. He's a gifted man.

But I do not see in the New Testament the mandate to Christianize the nation.

We are a holy nation. First Peter 2 .9, we're a holy nation. We're the

Christian nation. That doesn't mean we don't seek to be influential where we are in tons of ways.

I'm at the Dobson Culture Center to try to help Christians be salt and light in a small way.

But it does not mean that the Great Commission, this is really where we get into the disagreement. The Great Commission is not theonomize, is this called

Sandpoint? Sandpoint, yeah. Sandpoint, like get old covenant law in Sandpoint. We should make good laws here and that can be out of the basis of biblical law, but that's not our mission.

Our mission is not furthermore to make Sudan Christian. Our mission is to get

Bob from accounting to understand the gospel by the grace of God and saved and join this church.

That's the Great Commission advancing. A single sinner repenting is the kingdom of God advancing.

That's what God has told us he's promised to build. That's what Jesus said he's going to build. Nations are gonna rise and fall.

We should be salt and light here, but nations will rise and fall. Don't give up on them, be salt and light, but don't put your hope in this country.

What books are you reading right now? I am reading a book about Christ and Israel by Brent Parker.

That's in my book bag at my very nice Bonvoy Hotel here in town.

Wow, is this hotel nice that you have, the Marriott. And I am reading, this is left field.

I am reading the biography of Rose Ingalls Wilder.

Did I get that right? I think so. Laura Ingalls. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Daughter. This is my wife's area.

Laura Ingalls Wilder. You get in touch with your feminine side? Oh my word. I just lost all the cred, whatever cred

I had. And after that, don't tell me you're doing Anna Green Gables. No, no, no, no, stop, stop.

I actually, we do love those, those are great stories. And that's near from where I'm from, the Anna Green Gables stuff.

But okay, anyway, let's stop. Okay, I'm reading about Rose, Laura's, whatever her name is,

Laura's daughter, because living in Arkansas, you're only four hours from where they all lived in Mansfield, Missouri.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about in here? My wife read all these books to the kids. We watched Little House on the Prairie. Okay, Little House on the

Prairie, thank you. Yes. Let's try to recover this. And so we did a family trip to the

Ingalls home, and then there was a book there that talked about Rose, and it turns out, this is like literary criticism hour now, it turns out that Rose shaped more of Laura's books than most people know.

Because Laura was more of a straight -ahead writer, and Laura had a very hard life on the prairie, right?

I mean, very hard life. And so Rose gave the stories more of a narrative focus and hopeful emphasis.

So I don't know why I'm reading it exactly, but I'm reading it. I thought the answer to that question was gonna be far more interesting than it actually is.

Did anyone find that interesting? Did anyone? There's like three women who found that interesting. Three women, yeah. See me at the break.

The guys have all fallen asleep. Yeah, the guys I lost. So quickly, I don't wanna keep people too long here. Yeah. Just a couple more questions.

What are some subjects that interest you that you have not studied, but that you plan to study in the next, say, five years?

I just started sweating over the Laura Ingalls Wilder stuff. I'm sorry, I'm like literally sweating now. What are some subjects

I wanna study in the next five years? I would like to write a book about planting gardens if the

Lord would lead. For a theological study,

I would like to write a book entitled The Self -Revealed God, because in the theological world, there are a bunch of debates over the

Godhead and who God is, and theology proper, and there are theologians who are emphasizing, and some of them are gifted and have some good thoughts in some areas, but overall, they're emphasizing a kind of vision of God that accords with Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Aquinas argued that the simplicity of God as a theological doctrine means numerous things, but one of them is that God does not change in any way, and what that meant practically for Aquinas and others is that God doesn't have interpersonal interaction with people, so when you're reading

God going back and forth with Moses, that's not really a conversation that actually interpersonally occurs, and so I'm very interested in defending the biblical

God who is not in the creation like in pantheism at all, but, we hold to the creator -creature distinction, but the biblical

God, the self -revealed God of the Bible, loves his people, hates sin, shows grace, engages us, is patient with us as a father as we've been talking about, so I'd like to write a book defending the biblical doctrine of God.

Excellent. All right, well, that is it for our time here tonight, so tomorrow morning, doors open at eight, is that correct?

Is that what the thing says? And there will be some breakfast -type snacks out there on the table for you, so.

And the first session is comparing the literary achievements of Rose, well,

I'm sorry, just kidding, versus, it's not what it is. A critical review.

A critical. The difference between Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie by Owen Strand.

Yeah, we'll forego that one. All right, let's close in prayer, and then we'll be dismissed. Our Father, we are grateful for the time that we have been able to enjoy here tonight, the fellowship that we have in your son for bringing

Owen here. Again, we are grateful for that, and we look forward to this time of equipping that we have tomorrow. I'm grateful for what we have learned here tonight, and we pray that you would sustain his voice so that it is able to minister and serve us well through this entire weekend, and that you would graciously and abundantly reward

Owen for his time here, his sacrifice, and his willingness to serve. We pray that your hand of grace may rest upon him and his family during this transition time, that you would use him to accomplish your purposes and your will to serve you well in his new position, and we pray that you would work out all the details of the move that is to come so that he is able to not endure the stress of that, but able to transition well into that new position and to serve and advance your word and your truth.

We thank you for his boldness, his clarity, his theology, and the time that we could have here tonight. In the name of Christ, our

Lord, amen. Amen. Thank you. You are dismissed. ♪