36 Republicans Vote with All Democrats to Join Senate in Telling God We Hate Him and His Ways

Greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line from central, hot, humid Texas. I mean, for this entire trip I've had to have my tank heaters on, all I brought was warm clothes, and then I left Jonesboro and I started heading sort of south from there toward Emory, Texas, where I was last evening.

I gotta tell you, I must have crossed a frontal line or something because it was in the upper 70s and humid in Lindale and Emory and all those places, and now I'm farther west and it was 82 degrees when I got to where I am right now.

In fact, if you look really carefully in the back, right there, that's the song of the KOA. The song of the KOA is normally, all night long, the song of the tractor-trailer at 75 miles per hour, and that's just where most KOAs are.

They're easy to get to that way, and the land is always cheaper, I'm sure. Either that or you have a train track nearby, so you could get those train whistles nice and loud, and then if you're next to an airport, it's just how RV life is, so eventually you don't even hear it.

So tomorrow night, Lord willing, we'll be in Lubbock, and that'll be the last public get-together on this trip. Let me just mention quickly, once again, really, really, really have enjoyed getting out and being with people in the churches.

Some great fellowship and discussion over lunches and dinners. Got to have lunch yesterday in Lindale with some of the leaders from Believers Baptist Church, where I was last night, and with Tom Buck, and the troublemaker from Texas, and we talked about all sorts of things, and that was very, very enjoyable, and then had a real good group last night and discussed sufficiency and reliability of scripture.

Basically, you do the exact same thing tomorrow night. It looks like it's going to be the exact same schedule, because it went really, really well. I have a new test and reliability presentation that I've done for years and years and years, and I'll update it and add graphics and stuff like that, but this time, I sort of freelanced it, and I did use the graphics of the manuscripts and stuff like that, because people like to see that kind of stuff, and then we did a Q &A, and most of it really was on the topic, which was very good.

I mean, we wandered away toward the end, but we went really long, actually, and not too many people seemed to care. I mean, a few families had to leave. You understand that, but had a really great time.

That's how things are supposed to be. You get to meet with people, and it's not super formal. During the Q &A, I just sat down on the stairs going up to the podium, the pulpit there, and just really, really enjoyable getting to do that, and then you get to meet people, and you get to hear their stories, and that's why we do what we're doing and doing it the way we're doing it, and it's really enjoyable.

So tomorrow night in Lubbock, oh, and by the way, by the way, I don't know. I don't know what program we're using for my calendar, but you have to look at the time zone, because once again, last night, we had people saying, well, Dr. White's website says it's at five o 'clock, and it's at six o 'clock, but it's this time zone stuff, so I think we should just get rid of calendar programs in total, because they don't understand any of that stuff, and just simply put local time.

Just put what the local time's going to be, because a lot of these things, especially at smaller churches, aren't live-streamed anyways, but we had the same thing. I had that happen in Jonesboro. I had it happen, you know, last night too, and so you just need to put local time will be and go with that, because my calendar program on my phone was messing me up on this.

I almost missed an appointment because of the same thing, because of, you know, crossing all these time zones and playing games like that, as well as daylight savings time stuff too. So anyways, so we'll be in Lubbock tomorrow night, and then I do have a sort of a meeting with some folks that I've known for years and years and years in Albuquerque on the way home as well.

So far, so good. It's been a learning experience with the new pole vehicle, but a very enjoyable one, and again, haven't cracked up anything. I did, I hate to tell you, Rich, but I did, I've got to, it's, you have to look, but there's a scratch along the side up high on the unit now.

The RV park that I pulled, that I went into in, for the last two nights, is not, RV parks, there's, there are RV parks that are, that people go in and out of all the time, and there are RV parks where people are pretty much there the whole time, and they don't worry about people coming in and out much.

This place didn't trim their trees. It's the only entrance, and I didn't see it. I mean, I, you assume that they would take care of these things. They didn't, and on the way out, I almost ran over their plants just to stay away from this tree that they just haven't trimmed, because I just don't think they have anybody going in and out at this poor place.

So anyway, you know, it's hard to tell when you're looking at a map going, well, the closest place to the church is there, and you find out that they're not really up on keeping their, their place. I mean, everything else worked fine, but you would think that would be an obvious thing.

Anyhow, so another trip almost in the books, and very, very thankful for everyone who makes it possible for us to do this. Today, I wasn't really listening much to news. I was listening to some books, trying to get through some, some audible books on the drive today, but the Profaning of Marriage Act, I'm not going to use what is a clearly a lie for the name, the Respect for Marriage Act.

Right, it's, it's a profaning, the Profaning Marriage Act. Joe Biden will, of course, attach his name, I don't know that he even knows he'll do that, but to the Profaning of Marriage Act, and, and I, I hope, you know, God takes into consideration the fact the man's senile, but he'll do it anyways.

And the people that are really responsible for it are the people in charge of him, whoever they are, the unelected people who run our country right now. But we know the Senate, and we know that Republicans joined the Democrats in passing it in the Senate, and that the Senate version had less, quote-unquote, religious protections than the House bill that had been passed in July, so much so that seven Republicans that voted for it in July voted against it this time.

They voted against the Senate version, but it was still had 39 Republicans that voted for it, so I guess 46 voted for it in July, and now 39 did, so it's 258 -169. And you, you simply have to recognize that this kind of action is an extended middle finger toward the God that this nation used to say was the source of our blessings and our security, the, the very God that defined marriage in Scripture, and yes, I, I'm well aware of all of the Froot Loop university students who think that, well, that's not really what the Bible says.

Yeah, I, I know. I'm, I'm well aware, you should be well aware of those things, too. You should, every Christian should be fully, functionally able to refute the YouTube level, well, look at the marriages under the Old Testament, and, and, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, and you should be able to go straight to Jesus' teaching in Matthew chapter 19.

You should be able to say, you know, Moses allowed for divorce because the heart is your heart. Go directly to the use of husband and wife as a sign of, symbol of the church, Jesus and his people, and just be able to blow that stuff right out of the water.

The fact that most Christians can't is why that kind of argumentation does as well as it does in, in the world, but we, only a few decades ago, this would have been utterly unthinkable, but, but here we are, and as we've discussed before, this is not just about marriage.

This is the next step in a very purposeful pathway of the, not only just the destruction of Western civilization, which is based upon the family, and based upon the gender binary, because it's all based upon recognizing that God is our creator, and that he is the origin and source of human rights and human dignity, and that by rejecting all of that, you, you bring down Western society, and so when you see Pelosi and Schumer and all the rest of them, you know, celebrating the destruction of marriage, these, these are people who will be judged by God for their actions, and that's something that most Christians don't really believe.

Most Christians really believe that you'll only be judged for your personal actions, not what you do in politics, in life, and especially politics. That's certainly how, what I was raised with, the myth of neutrality, that you can do something over there, and there's no, there's gonna be no judgment for them, and I was, I was thinking, I'm seeing people, and you know, it's just, it's just a few weeks, literally, until we see, once again, the Bible reading through the year stuff, and I have some people I follow on Twitter that are already doing that, you know, do that regularly, and that's great, that's wonderful, but when you, when you persevere in one of those programs, and you get into the minor prophets, well, it's, when you get into the prophets period, I mean, major and minor, that's, that's a very modern designation that we use, for convenience sake, but especially when you do read what we call the minor prophets, these shorter prophets that generally have a more focused topic, I mean, you know, you cover a lot of ground in Isaiah, you cover a lot of ground in Jeremiah, you cover a lot of ground in Ezekiel, a little bit more focused in Nahum or Habakkuk, Habakkuk, actually, in Hebrew, and I was, I was thinking about the fact that, like Amos, much of Amos is, contains oracles against the nations around Israel, and we can learn a lot from listening to what was said by God, and remember, Jesus doesn't make the distinction that we make, functionally, for many of us, saying major and minor makes minor less important than major, right, and so I think that's one of the reasons that there are many Christians who've never even read all of the minor prophets, let alone have any idea what the content of any of these books is, even though they're, they're regularly quoted in the New Testament, they really are, and in Amos, I'm just giving an example, I mean, we're used to all the judgment oracles against Judah and Israel, and in those situations, Judah and Israel have the scriptures, they have light from God, they have centuries, by the time of the minor prophets, they have centuries of God's activity amongst the Jewish people, and bringing judgment, and bringing revival, and, you know, a common heritage, but in Amos chapter 1, verse 13, thus says Yahweh, for three transgressions of the sons of Ammon, and for four, I will not revoke its punishment, because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead, in order to enlarge their borders, so I will kindle a fire on the wall of Rabbah, and it will consume her citadels, amid war cries on the day of battle, and a storm on the day of tempest, their king will go into exile, he and his princes together, says Yahweh, so here is a foreign, but neighboring nation, Ammon, the sons of Ammon, the Ammonites, and it's, it's a formula that Amos uses for three, and I will not, and for four, so in other words, there's multiple sins, and the one that is specifically cited, because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead, in order to enlarge their borders, I was thinking about that phraseology, and we have to be careful, we, we have a tendency to want, you know, to want to read our current situations into everything in the past, I get it, but when you think about what, you know, God's going to kindle a fire on the wall of Rabbah, that means there is going to be destruction coming against one of the chief cities of the Ammonites, frequently the, a fire on the wall, if you remember what happened at Masada, when the Romans broke into Masada, what they did is, they had a siege engine, they brought that up, and they lit, lit the wall on fire, because it was a, the, the stone they could break through with their battering rams, but the wood, the battering ram would just bounce off that, because the wood, because it could absorb it, so you had to burn that, once it was burned, then it becomes stiff, then the battering ram would go through it, so a fire means, you know, judgment coming upon these individuals, and upon this city, and the king going into exile would indicate, you know, a complete change of government, he and his princes together means, you know, the, the change of royal family, all those, that's, it's a complete overthrowing of, of the nation, and why?

Why? Because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to enlarge their borders. Now, war, down through history, has normally been over land and borders. Lebensraum, remember Germany? Lebensraum, living space, living room, and it's always been the excuse, and here Ammon had expanded his borders, and in the process, they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead, and again, without trying to be overly dramatic, haven't we seen, over the past few years, the shout your abortion movement, and article, after article, after article, after article, about how women who have access to reproductive health services, that is the freedom to murder their children, earn more money, are more successful in life, however you define successful in life, if dying early and alone is success in life, but the idea is that judgment is coming from Yahweh against a people who do not have the light of the Hebrew scriptures, because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to enlarge their borders.

They engaged in the murder of pregnant women, and until recently, until our society, even pagan societies, even the most heathen societies, the most unadvanced societies, recognize the particular importance of the pregnant woman, the value of the life within her.

We have become so perverse, we don't know what a woman is, we now speak of pregnant persons, we literally have political leaders saying that men can become pregnant, we have this TikTok lunatic, I guess a former male comic, he's still a male, always will be, pretending to be a girl, talking about tampons and the like, going to the White House and meeting with the shell of a leader, and I mean, we are so far beyond this category.

I mean, how many pregnant women were ripped open? 300, 400, maybe 500, maybe at the most. How many babies have died? Blood been spilt in the United States of America since 1973? You can't even compare them.

And for what? Well, not so much an expansion of the national borders, but of one's personal borders, that is, you know, I can't afford a child right now, and so I'm going to murder this child, and I'm going to be more successful as a result, and I'm going to be able to have a house and a car, and all the things we think are the signs of success and are absolutely necessary for life.

And God brings judgment. And it's not that the people of Ammon had the law of Moses, but they had sufficient light, just in the natural order of things, to recognize ripping open pregnant women to expand your border is utterly evil.

Opening the womb, you saw the video that Laura put out that sort of went viral for a little while, the story of the ultrasound tech that watched as a baby girl was torn apart in the womb by an abortionist, and how they just, they left the field, they could never do that again.

That has happened over and over, and it's not just over the course of a few months where Ammon is expanding their borders. This is now part of what is considered to be good and virtuous, a part of human rights.

It's a human right to be able to tear human beings apart in the womb if the big human being thinks that's what the big human being wants. The irony is when you think about the foolishness of the culture of death, and we are now truly living in the culture of death, the Profaning Marriage Act is a part of the culture of death.

LGBTQ plus is part of the culture of death. Grooming children for sexual abuse is part of the culture of death. They're all associated with abortion as culture of death. But that's at the beginning of life, then early in life you've got the destruction of the body in transgenderism.

And then you look at Canada to see the story of the Canadian veteran who can't walk, and so she was applying for help and getting one of those stair chairs, lifts for her house, and nobody would get it done.

Socialism doesn't work well for things like that. And one of the responses that she got from the government was an offer to help her commit suicide if she was really, really upset about it. So you have abortion, you have the destruction of bodies, puberty blockers that stop brain development.

I mean, in a sane world, medical doctors would understand that disrupting the natural developmental process with puberty blockers will have uncountable health ramifications in the future for this person.

Any person who quote-unquote transitions, which is a myth anyways, but any person who transitions is making themselves a lifelong medical patient. They will never be healthy again. They will always have to be injecting, taking pills, having surgeries, visiting doctors for the rest of their lives.

Now some people have to do that because they get leukemia or something like that. This is done voluntarily based upon lies. And the detransitioning movement demonstrates this. So that's at the beginning, but now with quote-unquote, well, can we even call it end?

The euthanasia movement, as we're seeing it in Belgium, Netherlands, Canada, it started with death with dignity. We're only talking about people who are going to be dying very, very soon. And instead of just dying in agony, they want to die with some dignity, but it never stays there.

It keeps creeping down and down and the reasons for it expand and expand and expand and expand. So that now depressed teenagers, and anybody remember being a teenager? No matter who you are, the hormones start raging in imbalanced fashions.

And I don't care how firm a foundation you have, it is a confusing, difficult time where you experience highs and lows all the time. And so now they're making it available to teenagers who are depressed, middle-aged people at the first sign of, oh, what was that?

Is this it? I better get it over with. It is the culture of death at every point in the spectrum. How many failed transition people do you think will be availing themselves? We already know they have a massively higher suicide rate, massive.

And they use that, they blame people like us who speak the truth about these things. Well, it's because culture doesn't accept it. We already know that they commit suicide at a massively higher rate. But don't you think the whole thing is so that the government can now offer this to them as well?

I mean, it's the culture of death. You want much more death than you have life. Jesus said, I've come that they might have life, they might have it more abundantly. So if you hate Christ and you hate his ways, then what you want is you want death.

Those who hate me love death. That's what God says. You detest God's wisdom, you love death. And we are watching a society where people are being indoctrinated in the public education system to love death.

And so the fact is, when you look at what has been done in our government, and within the next few days will be signed into law, when you look at these things, there is an appropriate place for righteous indignation and wrath.

But at the same time, you have to look at these people, and there has to be a level of simple pity. The culture of death is a... I was thinking about many, many years ago, I and a friend went down to Tucson, Arizona, for the District Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses, and sat through the morning session.

I just realized the friend who went with me isn't with us any longer. This was a while back. And we sat there and watched these people as they sang, as they listened to what we would call sermons, or talks, or presentations.

There was no joy. There was no happiness. It was incredibly dreary. And I just remember, that was one of the reasons I felt, you know, I learned to feel such pity, empathy, sorrow for people trapped in Jehovah's Witnesses, in the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

Because there was no joy. I had been to Kingdom Halls, and it was the same thing. Here, you have... that's due to false teaching. Now, in the culture of death, it's everything. It's how you view yourself, how you view others, your gender, everything of a family.

It's all wrapped up in death. There's no transcendent meaning. There's no hope for the future. There is zero hope. That's what euthanasia is all about, is to have an easy death. Because after that, there's nothing.

The only hope is to avoid suffering. Because that's the worst thing in the world, is to suffer. I mean, it can't build character. Because why does character matter for fizzing bags of chemicals that will only fizz for a certain amount of time?

We're just like those, you know, the chemically based lights. You crack them, and they glow green, or blue, or red, or all sorts of different colors. They really are cool. But they're only cool for a while.

Because they don't glow forever. It gets dimmer, and dimmer, and dimmer over time. And secularism, all it can offer you is, you know, in the flower of life, is unbridled sexual experience. Shallow, on the same level as the neighborhood dogs and cats.

No commitment, nothing that would be called, in a biblical sense, love. But you can do that for, you know, a while. You know, as long as you're, you know, they do, they do want you to work. They do want you to produce.

Not children, but they want you to produce, and to consume. So they can tax, and do the same thing for themselves. But then once you start becoming a burden, then it's time for a good death. And our society has known the dangers of this.

I've seen Logan's Run. Remember Logan's Run? There were a lot of these themes in Logan's Run. Soylent Green. In fact, I saw an advertiser, I saw an advertiser on Facebook recently, for Soylent. And it's, I guess their idea is, it's so old, no one will make the connection.

But us old folks are like, I'm not buying that. No, not, I'm not going to eat that. Just like I'm not going to eat cockroach burgers, and all the other stuff that the global elites want us to actually like, because they want all the good food for themselves.

And the rest of us, while we die off from their poisonous injections and things like that, can eat bugs and live in boxes. That's pretty much what the World Economic Forum is all about. Anyway, it's one thing to cry the culture of death.

Our assumption is, well, yeah, as long as we point this out, then everyone's going to go, well, I don't want to be a part of the culture of death, I want to be a part of the culture of life. But scripture doesn't say that's what people will do.

Those who hate me love death. That's a biblical phrase. And men hate the light. They love the darkness. Well, darkness is death. Life is in the light. And so we can point this out. But a large majority of the people in our society will just look at it and go, so?

You don't really have anything to offer in its place. Well, we do. And it has struck me many times that, especially with young people, because who is pushing the culture of death? The young people who have been indoctrinated in it, in the public education system, all the way through the level of university, for decades now.

And they are going to keep voting. And they are going to vote for death. They're going to vote for destruction, their own death and destruction. And you go, how can they be so foolish? That's something my wife and I discuss all the time.

And in her frustration, she says, how can people be this foolish? Can't they see? And the answer is no, because it takes spiritual insight to see the connections between these things. And when we don't realize that, we get really frustrated on Facebook or wherever we are, because people just don't see what's right before their eyes.

And it's very, very plain, very obvious to us. Why isn't it plain and obvious to them? Because it's spiritually discerned. It's a spiritual reality. And despite what many evangelicals actually believe, total depravity is true.

And it's not just a theological construct that Calvinists argue about. I don't know how anybody looks at the left today. And could we please stop calling them liberals? By the way, I was listening to someone this morning.

They were talking about liberal this, liberal that. They're not liberals. They're leftists. Liberals believe in some level of freedom. Leftists believe in totalitarian control. So let's get the right terminology going here.

But these individuals are spiritually dead, but they still engage in spiritual rebellion, because death is not non-existence. I mean, if you want the proof of total depravity, it's hard for me to understand how you can't see it right now, because it is so plain, so clear, so compelling.

It really is. So we decry it. But what we need to be saying to young people is, when you turn your music off, when you turn off the digital screen in front of you, when you experience silence, and I know a lot of young people that are frightened by silence, when you experience silence and you honestly evaluate your life, you consider what is going to have lasting value.

Or you recognize the worldview that you live in. There is no such thing as lasting value. That's a pipe dream. There is no lasting value. When you're gone, that's it. I mean, for you, that's it. You cease to exist.

And there really isn't any reason to say that you made a difference, because there is no purpose. The universe is heading to eventual heat death. It's all just going to become an even sameness. And that's it.

So there is no purpose to be even discussed. And if you realize that, and how empty it is, there will be another voice that will tell you, you know, that's not true. You don't live according to these ideas.

Your conscience knows that there's something more. And our prayer for you is that you would realize that the reason the government needs 13 years of public education, including kindergarten, and another four years at the bachelor's level after that, so a good 17 years, is because they are in that period of time doing nothing but numbing your soul.

They're numbing you spiritually. They are trying to rob from you the reality that you know. You know God exists, and you know you're his creature. And they are trying to give you the tools to cut that out.

I was visiting with a pastor friend last week, and he had surgery on his ankle. And they used a nerve block. And I guess it's a really effective way. It just basically shuts off all the nerves to that part of the body, and you feel nothing.

You know, once they release it, you feel lots of things. But at least initially, you know, there's nothing there. Well, that's what's happening in our society, is a 17-year brain block, spirit block, soul block, whatever you want to call it, where you are constantly having it drummed into your mind that that sense you have that there is a God, and that you should give thanks to this God, and that you're going to be judged by this God, and that you're more than just a bag of fizzing chemicals.

You're not just an ugly bag mostly water. You're not a moist robot. Whatever phrase floats your boat, you're told that's all you are, but you know better. And when you come to realize that reality, then we need to be the ones to say to people, here's how you can have peace with the God that you know is there.

Here's what he's done in history. Here's how he has left a record of himself. Here's how he revealed himself in the person of Jesus, who is now enthroned in heaven. And here is how you can have peace with God, fulfillment in life, by bowing the knee to his lordship and saying he's king of kings and lord of lords.

Because he's the creator of all things who entered into human flesh, he provides that center, that centering point that allows everything else to come into harmony and be understandable. Because the secular world, you're stuck in the middle.

You have to make sense of everything around you. We were never designed to do that. We have to have the triune God in the middle revealed in Jesus Christ. We have relationship with that triune God through union with Jesus Christ.

Then he makes sense of everything else because he created everything else. And we then can have true and accurate knowledge of everything else as we have it in light of our relationship to God. Of course we have to live our lives out that way.

So every time we, every time I give in to worldly ways of thought, give in to the myth of neutrality, give in to the temptation, and it's found in almost every film, it's found in almost every book, at least modern books especially, and the world sees us violating our own principles at that point, then we contradict our own testimony.

But that's why we need to seek to live consistently in light of what it is we're saying to the world. And so all of these thoughts came to me as I was considering what this nation has done just over the past couple of, well not even a couple of decades, just over the past few years in reaching a level of depraved rebellion.

And my struggle, and it's your struggle as well, this is as I speak with Christians, everyone's saying the same thing. And that is I feel torn different directions. I know I need to be growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I know I need to be in His Word. It's not a magical thing. Again, if this is what Jesus said it was, and we are to be in Him, being conformed to His image, then what God does with these inspired words, the world will never understand.

I was just thinking, and in fact, let me, I don't have it up, but let me see if I can grab it real quickly. Trying to remember where it was off the top of my head. There is a, again, it's strange how as I, my birthday's nine days from today, and it's a big one.

It's a big one. And I have to admit that once you start going into your older years, once you're the age I'm going to be, I'm going to be 60. That's not that old. I'm still on track for 7 ,800 miles on bike this year.

I can't run and do stuff like that anymore, but I'm still pedaling. I'm fighting it, but it's fascinating to see, and Rich knows all about this, because he's been past 60 for forever, but it's the nature of memory health.

By the way, did you see what I tweeted? I had somebody express sincere disappointment that you weren't with me, because you've got some fans out here. You really do. I can't tell you how many people say they love the banter, and you have deceived many people into thinking that you're just the saintly victim of my meanness.

But I told somebody, I told somebody, I said, you put Rich and I in a 30-foot RV for two and a half weeks, and that would pretty much be the end of Alpha Omega Ministries. In fact, it'd probably be the end of one of the two of us, because we're both armed.

There's a reason why your office is at one end, and my office is at the other end, because we've figured out how life works. It works. Anyway, I'm trying to see here. I was talking about how memory works, and how memory sometimes doesn't work.

I just thought back to a class in college, and like I said, it bothers me anymore how bad my short-term memory is, and things like that. But it is amazing how you can think back to things that happened long, long ago, and the clarity with which it pops into your mind.

So it was second or third year Greek. I think it was second year Greek. Yeah, it was second year Greek. One of the guys in the class, Rich, did you know Tom DiBiase at North Phoenix? Does that name ring any?

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I didn't remember all the relationships there, but he was in that class, and I think he translated this verse, because we were doing translations. In second year Greek, you do syntax, and so you give your translation, and then Dr. Baird would be going, okay, how would you understand this if we were looking at participles?

You'd want to look at the participles, et cetera, et cetera. 1 Thessalonians 2 .13, and for this reason we also thank God without ceasing, that when you receive the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but what it really is, the word of God, which also is at work in you who believe.

And I'm pretty sure Tom translated that. Now, how in the world would you remember who translated a particular verse in a class, and that would have been 1985? I don't know, but I do know that I'm correct in remembering that.

And I remember the conversation that took place, because it talked about the description of the word of God in verse 13. And so notice it talks about the unceasing giving of Eucharist, thanksgiving to God, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us.

So in this instance, we're not talking about the written scripture specifically. We are talking about the oral proclamation of the gospel message by the apostles themselves, which is described as the word of God.

Now, when you don't have apostles, then what do you have? You have that which they have left for us. But notice the description of the word of God, which also is at work in you who believe. It's at work in you who believe.

What they heard orally, remember what Paul's going to say in 2 Thessalonians, you heard the traditions we delivered to you by word of mouth, proclamation, and by letter for Thessalonians, which is what we're looking at right here for Thessalonians 2 -13.

And so it's a unique period of time where you have both in existence at the same time. We don't have apostles anymore, so all of that is now given to us in the form that God wants to have it in. And that word of God is active.

It is at work in you who believe. And that's what we focused on, the last phrase, choskai energeitai, enhumim toispis juusim. You, the believing ones, which also, it is at work in you. It is accomplishing.

It is energetic. That's where we get the term energetic. Energeitai, energetic. And sometimes I think, maybe because of putting the charismatics at arm's length, Reform people resist thinking of spiritual force in this way.

There is a spiritual activity that the word of God, it is at work in you who believe. If you are a believer, then the word of God must be at work in you. And therefore, if you want that work to continue, what do you need to be doing?

Constantly exposing yourself to that which will be at work within you. And we know how that works, by the work of the Holy Spirit. That's the tool. That's the mechanism. But that's, you know, when I was, when my mind was thinking through how we can live consistently with the proclamation we're making the secular world.

Somehow, that poor little brain cell that's been, I've been carrying along with me for, let's see, 85 would have been what, you know, 37 years ago? All of a sudden fired off. And I'm literally remembering a discussion of the syntax of Energeitai in a class.

I remember it was in Fleming classroom. I remember which side of the building it was on and which desk I was sitting in, which way I was facing. That's weird. But I'm glad I can still do that. I just wish I could do it on command.

It's more of a random thing, you know, a flow of conscience thing. But I'm thankful that I had the opportunity of being in that class. I'm thankful for Dr. Baird. I'm thankful for Grand Canyon College.