The Gay Revolution - Durbin, White, & Brown

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What's up guys, this is Jeff Durbin with Apologia TV and Apologia Studios. What you're about to watch is an interview that I just did with Dr.

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James White and Dr. Michael Brown on the SCOTUS decision to denigrate marriage.

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That's where you go to sign up for the All Access. And now, here's the interview. In all 50 states, same -sex couples can now,

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June 26, 2015, gay marriage is now legal across the United States because of this 5 -4 opinion.

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Martha, this is a huge moment for people in favor of same -sex marriage. Shannon, you can hear them, their voices are being heard.

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God bless America. I think I'm good on my levels now. Let's do our sound check here.

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Here we go. Alright brothers, so here we are.

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After the ruling from the Supreme Court, gay marriage is now a thing, a legal thing.

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And I wanted to bring you, Dr. White and Dr. Brown, together to discuss this issue because the two of you specifically have been sounding the alarm about this issue for a very long time.

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As a Christian man, can you point to a single public utterance by Jesus Christ about gay people or about a gay lifestyle?

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Matthew 19, he says marriage as God intended it is the union of one man and one woman for life.

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The tipping point, my friends, has come and it's gone. We're past it. Pastors say, I don't want to get involved in politics.

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Okay, how about just preaching the word? And saying with love, adulterous practice is sin and any sex outside of wedlock is sin and homosexual practice is sin and God has a better way.

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Why not say that? The inertia left by generations of Christians teaching on morality and ethics has been wiped from the minds of the populace.

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It's been replaced by a feel -goodism of subjective morality. Leviticus 18 is quite explicit.

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For a man to lie with a man is contrary to what God intended. This is a worldview issue and we're going to have to decide what our ultimate authorities are.

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It is not marriage when they join together. I don't think that I took you seriously, as seriously as I should have.

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I took you seriously, but not as seriously as I should have. I'm not sure that I took it as seriously as,

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I don't know if I took myself all that serious. I mean, we saw it coming, but until it happens and until you really see the ramifications in reality, there was even a part of me that hoped.

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I was about 90%, 10 % on the decision itself. I hoped that maybe there would be an extension of grace, a keeping of Justice Kennedy from jumping off the postmodern cliff.

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So there's always that hope that you have, but reality is reality and that's what we have to deal with now.

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And as a result, I think we really need to think through the ramifications and I think some people are starting to do so on a level they hadn't done before.

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In that respect, the bad news is the good news. People are finally waking up. I say that I felt like an umbrella salesman in the desert, but I knew a storm was coming.

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And soon enough, people are going to have to listen. Listen, my wife Nancy is utterly unimpressed by anything

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I ever do. But the other day she said to me, You need to write an article talking about all the things that you told us were going to happen that have happened.

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So even my own bride recognized that. I found as far back as 1989 in one of my books that I made reference to courts recognizing homosexual marriages.

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1989. 1993, one of my books I talk about gay activist curriculum in the schools.

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And I posted that on Facebook the other day and people were flipping out. I can't believe it. I said, hey, that's over 20 years old.

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But it wasn't until 2004 that I really began to realize that this truly had become the principal threat to freedom of religion, speech and conscience.

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Alan Sears and Craig Austin wrote a book about the homosexual agenda and in that they talked about this as the principal threat to freedom of religion.

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2007, Professor Robert Gagnon, a New Testament scholar, talked about what was coming if ENDA, the

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Employment Nondiscrimination Act, included issues having to do with sexual orientation and gender identity.

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And he said it's going to lead to this, this, this. It will lead to the full acceptance of homosexual marriage by the

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Supreme Court. So in that respect, part of me was hoping that something would not go in this direction.

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But the other part of me said it's going to happen right now, sooner or later, barring divine awakening and great awakening in our country.

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When I began to get involved with this heavily 11 years ago, I looked at it and thought it's too late.

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In the natural, it's too late. It's gone too far in the culture, it's gone too far in the media, too far in the schools, too far in the courts, too far in business world, pop culture.

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It's gone too far. But that doesn't mean that's the end of the story. And we may have different eschatologies, but unless the

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Lord returns in our lifetimes or in the next few years, this is just the beginning of a much more, a longer, multi -generational battle over the meaning of marriage and sexuality here in our country.

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You know, on one level, we're now post, we're immediately post Roe v.

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Wade. I mean, okay, you know, Roe v. Wade's been the quote unquote, law of the land now for many, many years.

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What did we just give up? In reality, most Christians had no earthly idea or even much passion about abortion until Roe v.

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Wade happened. And so I see parallels there, but I also see a difference.

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And that is in this situation, we have a world now that, you know,

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America was not a fully secularized nation when Roe v. Wade took place.

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It is now. And when we look at especially the younger generation, that really is where I am deeply concerned because what we're seeing in the speed of this revolution, it's interesting.

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We can sit here and talk about the reasons for it, and we can give reasons for it biblically. I don't know how non -Christian conservatives can understand what's going on here because there really isn't an explanation in a secular worldview for the rapidity with which millennials have grabbed hold of a radically altered worldview that has massive implications as to how they view everything, including the role of government and freedom of religion and speech and everything else.

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We can look at the Scriptures, and a lot of people didn't see it coming and have been forced to think through the worldview implications of it, but we can give a very strong biblical explanation as to what's happening here.

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And I think what I've been focusing upon since June 26th, which

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I'll be able to remember that because my wedding anniversary is June 25th, so I just missed. I was very, very thankful for that.

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But what I've been really thinking about is Jesus's words, which, of course,

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I've been telling people for a long time, if you get an opportunity to talk about this, do something positive, give Jesus's positive words in Matthew 19, verses 4 -6, memorize it, be ready to explain it, be ready to make application of it.

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But there's one particular aspect of it that has always struck me, and now it's striking me with much more weight, and that is when

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Jesus begins, not only does he say, have you not read, and I've got a whole sermon that just stops right there, basically, because the millennials do not have a word from God because of the next phrase.

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If you look at it in the original language, that the one who created, the creator, that's where it starts in Jesus's own words.

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Now, he shared a worldview with the Jews to whom he was speaking, and it included a creator.

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That's where the disconnect is now taking place because once... This could never have happened.

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This could never have happened without Darwinism. It could not have happened without a thoroughly secular worldview, and this generation is the first thoroughly secularized generation that we have faced.

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They don't have a creator, and when you don't have a creator, you will fill that vacuum with little mini creators.

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And so this is where this decision and Bruce Jenner come together because what you've got now is we've all become our own creator.

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Bruce Jenner gets to create his own reality in rebellion against the reality that God himself has created, and when it comes to marriage, if you don't have a creator and you each are your own creator, then what is the reason that you do not decree that this kind of marriage will take place?

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And this will be followed very, very quickly by polygamy taking place. We literally have this new focus upon the autonomy of the human being as creator, and as Christians, we know where this comes from.

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We know Romans 1. We know where this is coming from, but the world must be looking at and going, what on earth is happening?

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But we have a clear understanding of where it's coming from. And that brings me to, I think, an interesting point, and that's precisely what

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I've been landing on preaching in church about this specific issue. Preparing the church to be a godly witness for the gospel in light of all that's gone on.

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What I've been saying is our culture has adopted a neo -Darwinian, micro -mutation, macro -evolutionary worldview.

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That's where we're at. We have gone to the very core of all of life. No creator.

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There's no God. We are all just protoplasm in a purposeless universe bobbing along the surface of the cosmos.

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That's what we are in this world. There is no ultimate ought. There is no justice ahead of us.

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It's sky above us only. And so we go to the very core of what all of that means in life.

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So no creator. That means no special creation. So Jesus' statement in Matthew 19 is really meaningless.

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There's no special creation. There's no gender identities. No distinctions. There is no harmonious relationship.

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Like you say often, Dr. White, it's mirror images now being married together. So what are we doing?

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We're taking out creator, special creation, gender identities. We're taking out harmonious sexual relationships, and we're going to the very core in our culture of what

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God says in the beginning. In the image of God, he created them, and he tells them, be fruitful and multiply.

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Our culture says no to God, no to gender distinctions, no to what you call marriage, no to your blueprint for all of society, and if we have kids and we don't want them, kill them.

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And that's what we're facing, is cutting out the very blueprint of society.

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If you think back to Genesis 1, the foundation of all foundations is

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God exists, and then the next foundation of all foundations is that God created the universe, and then when you zero in on that, the high point of that is that God created humanity in his own image, and that he said that they're male and female, and he brings the two together as one.

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So if you think of the larger rejections in our society, the vociferous attack on the existence of God, it's no coincidence that marriage has been redefined at the same time that we're having the rise of new atheism in our culture, which is not just simply saying, hey, we just don't see evidence for a

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God. It's a hostile attack on the God of the Bible. It doesn't surprise me at all that on our very active

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Ask Dr. Brown Facebook page, we're getting flooded with the most ugly, profane, vile attacks you could imagine either on us as individuals or on the

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God of the Bible, and almost every one of them the person has the gay colors on their

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Facebook icon. Very interesting. So the rejection of the existence of God, the extreme hostile rejection of anything that would challenge

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Darwinian evolution, then the attack on human beings created in the image of God, the attack on gender distinctions, the attack on marriage is the foundation.

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So it's all the foundations that are being attacked. It's almost like you ever have little kids talking and they don't think the parent or the teacher can really hear and they start telling you what they really feel?

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You're kind of eavesdropping and oh, that's how they really feel. It's almost like people now feel that this supposed

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Christian oppression that they've been under, this rule of God, this imaginary American theocracy that they've been fighting against, they've now cast it off and they can speak freely about how they really feel and the hostility, the anger, whether it's out of hurt, whether it's out of rebellion, both, different manifestations of it.

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It is this overt rejection saying, like Psalm 2, we don't want the

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Lord and His Anointed to rule over us. That's ultimately the root of it. Of course the good news is that revival is going to bring

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God front and center but we've done the same thing in the Church. We don't start preaching the

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Gospel the way Paul did in Romans talking about the wrath of God and universal sinfulness before we get to justification by faith.

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We begin with, you're having a rough life. Jesus understands and wants to make you happy. If you give

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Him your guilt, He'll fulfill your dreams. We start with self the same way.

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If we can go back to starting with God in the Church, then there's a chance we can get the society to start looking to God first.

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I'm not sure why I don't hear anyone else talking about this but me. I'm going to throw it out here and see if I'm just weird.

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I'm really seeing the fulfillment of a principle that is laid down in Scripture where if you are presented with the truth and you refuse to love the truth, then

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God can justly cause you to love a lie. 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. I really see that happening.

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We ask, why are these people so passionate about something that if they would just sit back and use their

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God -given capacity to think things through they would see this is tremendously negative to them.

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The end result has to be the culture of death. The end result has to be a culture that is lacking in freedom and liberty and all these things and yet it seems that people are absolutely in love.

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Embracing it and they're changing their Facebook avatars and they're willing to give money and time and everything else and we go whence cometh this?

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All I can say is it seems that this is clear evidence of the judgment of God.

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I cannot see any other way of explaining it because it is against the self -interest of these people.

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Don't they realize that if you aren't having children that your culture will eventually disappear?

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They don't look to the future. They don't consider these things. It seems to me that there has been so much truth available for so long in our culture that you first had a movement toward apathy and now you have outright rejection and therefore you're going to love something and what you end up loving is a lie.

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The lie is that we are ugly bags of mostly water that were biochemicals fizzing around.

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Why would anyone ever want to embrace that or find anything positive in that and yet that's exactly what's happening right now.

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It can only be and I agree with you Dr. White the judgment of God falling on a people. I absolutely agree with you. You know it's interesting

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Dr. Brown, Dr. White I think that if you listen to the

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President's address after this ruling came down when he spoke about it he even offered some solace to everybody that's fought in this fight by saying that the really encouraging thing here essentially was that this almost happened overnight.

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I know change for many of our LGBT brothers and sisters must have seemed so slow for so long, but compared to so many other issues

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America's shift has been so quick. And here's what I said this week on our radio program. I said he knows exactly what he's talking about because in terms of the time of the light of the gospel and the truth of God in this culture specifically in the

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West that it took essentially a generation. And Dr. Brown this is where I wanted you to address something.

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A lot of people don't know this because maybe not everyone's read your book. I have. And in your book

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Dr. Brown you talk about Stonewall Inn and how a lot of this goes back to the initial

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Stonewall riots the President heralded the beauty of that movement in his inaugural address this last term.

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And a lot of people don't realize that this movement and its aggressive nature, its disciplined nature, its consistent nature, this movement began at Stonewall and it really began to flourish after that.

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You talk about that because you begin your book with the common claim, there is no gay agenda, there is no gay agenda, but then you show

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Stonewall. Can you talk about that? Yeah, certainly. The denial of the gay agenda is part of the agenda.

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And basically every movement you have conservative agenda, liberal agenda, feminist agenda ecologist agenda, everybody has an agenda except homosexual activists with all their organizations, with all their funding, with all their planning, with all their strategies with all their goals, somehow they don't have an agenda.

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So what you can look at is for years and years and years there have been stated goals from different groups expressing different things that they were after and these things have unfolded one after another in our country.

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We can go back into the 50s with certain individual gay activists who were protesting being fired from a job or things like that, but it's really in the midst of the counterculture revolution of the 60s that this arises.

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It's no coincidence this is 1969, the same year as Woodstock.

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It's no coincidence that this is in the decade of great turmoil with sex, drugs, rock and roll, the anti -war protests tremendous social upheaval along with positive things like the civil rights movement.

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So this was a violent attack on police. There had been a bursting of emotion.

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Some actually say it tied in with the death of Judy Garland who was kind of an icon in gay circles and many of the men were more emotionally distraught.

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I've read that in gay histories of the movement but basically it came to the point of saying enough is enough and when they fought back violently against cops,

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I mean cops were in fear for their lives. Think of that being commemorated and celebrated. Think of some horrific riot that's taken place in recent months, the

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Baltimore riots say, now commemorated and celebrated as a great moment in civil rights history.

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It's an absolute travesty but our president did talk about from Seneca, women's rights, to Selma, civil rights, to Stonewall, gay rights.

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The people declared today that the most evident of truths that all of us are created equal is the star that guides us still.

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Just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall So you can actually see there was the initial we're here, we're queer, get used to it.

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In your face kind of attack and that was the tactic that was used. It was seen that that was a failing tactic.

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That the in your face marching down the street naked in the gay parades and saying God is gay and we want your boys and some of these slogans were counterproductive and there's a book written, it's so funny, gay activists all say we never heard of it, we never read that book.

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It was a best seller for some reason in Village Voice and other cutting edge gay friendly publications were praising the book.

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A book came out in the late 80s by Kirk and Madsen, two gay sociologists Harvard trained and it was called

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After the Ball, How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. And it laid out there the plan of attack.

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So on the heels of the counterculture revolution, on the heels of the attack on morality and family and sexuality, after all it's 1960 that the birth control pill comes out so now you have sex for recreation separated from sex from procreation.

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That's right at the beginning of the 60s and all these things unfolding. Now you have these strategists basically saying okay what we have to do is instantly it has to be a gut level reaction.

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The moment that you hear someone opposing our agenda, our viewpoint, that person in your mind has to immediately become like the

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Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan or some backwards preacher. It's almost like you push a button.

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They say that we will have a sustained attack of propaganda coming through the media so that if your average

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American thinks that all homosexuals are child predators, we will make all homosexuals like the sweetest nicest neighbors next door in a stable monogamous relationship.

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Even if that's an exaggeration one way, well we were being lied about the other way so we'll swing back.

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We'll pick these numbers, you know the 10 % 10 % of the population is gay and on and on and here's how we'll have our impact.

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We will be the victims. Those who oppose us will be the victimizers. When you look at the goals that they lay out in the book you think these aren't goals.

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This is normal life. That's how stunningly successful it was and they say that what they wrote in the book is just the fruit of numerous gay activist organizations, leaders coming together and brainstorming in their war room and they basically put together their strategies.

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This didn't happen in a vacuum. It doesn't mean that every homosexual man or woman in America has an agenda or a plan.

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It means that you have lots of activists out there who are say in Hollywood who are writing certain scripts.

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A few years ago I had seen part of an X -Men movie while in flight. I hadn't seen the others and I thought how open can you be about the mutants, they're gays and that's the whole message there.

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Mutant is a code word for gay. So I wrote an article. I went through, looked at different scripts, the different backgrounds, who was involved, the producers, the actors and I wrote an article called

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Mutant as a code word for gay in the X -Men and gay websites ridiculed me and said we all knew this.

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We all knew this all along. It's in the cartoons. You're just finding this out buddy. Bryan Singer when he asked me to play

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Magneto was very clear about it. He said you're a gay man Ian. You know what it's like for society to point the finger at you and to pass laws which inhibit your behavior and your happiness.

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That's exactly what is at the heart of X -Men and Marvel who publish the comics on which they're based agree.

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That's what X -Men is. It's not just entertainment. It's not just special effects. It's not just spectacle. It's actually about the real world.

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I especially, I think we need to also address how going forward, now

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I know Michael I've already been talking about your upcoming book on Surviving the Gay Revolution and Dr.

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Moeller's putting out a book on the same subject around the same time I think so there are going to be some good books that are going to come out and we're going to have some guidance there but the reality is we're going to be seeing a lot of what

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I would simply call general apostasy on this subject. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to go, this is not a hill to die on.

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If we want to remain relevant to the culture then we need to you know if we want to be friendly and affirming

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I mean these are all such wonderful words then we need to find a way to accommodate this theology and as Michael knows there are, neither one of us

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I think could keep up with the flood of books that are coming out right now on the subject of providing the mechanism and the means that churches will use to be able to say well you know we've discovered that there's another way of reading these texts, there's another way of interpreting the

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Bible and so we really have discovered we were a little bit too, in the past, we've become enlightened basically and so you have a letter to my church and you have

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Torn and of course you have Matthew Vine's book and you know anything coming out from Brownson and so on and so forth and so they can point to that and say see here's material that provides a basis for us to say that we've been misreading these things and the churches that remain firm, the only way they're going to be able to do that meaningfully, now there's going to be some churches that remain firm simply because they don't have the right reasons already, they've got a strong bigoted feeling and there is that element of things out there we have someone in our own area that recently became well known for blasting away along those lines in very unbiblical and unloving fashion but if a church is going to remain firm on a biblical basis then we're going to have to respond to those things we're going to have to know where the errors in this argumentation is on a level that we've never probably even publicly discussed before.

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I know in my generation we grew up we never talked about these things, it wasn't an appropriate thing to talk about in church you don't talk about sex, you don't talk about homosexuality, your parents say well they're homosexuals and then maybe when you get home they might tell you really quickly sort of an embarrassed way.

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Those days are past and unfortunately we have to be very clear in addressing these issues and to do that is going to require a lot of churches to do some soul searching as to how much they really believe the

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Bible and how consistent they are in their exegesis because the only reason to continue holding to a firm position is if you believe

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Sola Scriptura, you believe Tota Scriptura and you recognize that this is in fact a gospel issue and that well

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I preached on Hebrews 13 .4 on Sunday and it's very clear that the scriptures teach that marriage is to be held in honor by all and that the koitain, which is fascinating that half of the term arsenokoitas ends up being there in that term, the marriage bed is undefiled and then the very next word after undefiled is pornous those who are fornicators and adulterers

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God will judge and will the church be faithful in communicating the fact that there will be a judgment upon sexual sin and upon what basis?

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Yes, see and that's what I wanted to get to and I really wanted the two of you to speak to this

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Dr. Brown the reason why I asked you that question was really to lead into this and you're going right where I was hoping we would go in this discussion the people who identify as LGBT either they're living the lifestyle or they're advocates for, they have had a consistent disciplined approach to taking over culture, to taking over the minds and hearts of the people in the west on this particular issue and let's be honest they were very successful and not completely but they were very successful in being able to take a nation and it's moral heritage and flipping it on it's head within a generation essentially on this specific issue now they were disciplined, my fear guys my fear is that the way largely the

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Christian church is reacting to this is not in a way that has the same level of commitment and discipline and sacrifice that they have, they have very big checkbooks, they're committed to this way of life and convincing the world around and my fear is that we don't know how to respond to this we think that love for a neighbor is saying nothing,

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I've been criticized in the last week and a half for the sermons for the radio shows, for even saying anything at all people are saying things like you know

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Jeff that's just the wrong approach, you really need to take these people out to a cup of coffee, like that's the approach and my answer is

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I don't have enough money to buy cups of coffee for all these people, the role of the church is to speak prophetically into the culture, now listen

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I understand that we don't get to solve every issue in a Facebook chat box,

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I understand that and that's not always the best way of communication but the point is that those who hold to this way of life are using every means at their disposal to communicate their world view and it's a question of not whether somebody's going to adopt a world view but which world view and my fear is that as a church we're not in a place where we've abandoned our love for self and love for comfort and that's what

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I want to address how do we rightly approach this guys? Do we prophetically speak to the culture and say things like God will judge those who do these things

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Let me answer that on several levels Joe Dallas has pointed out, who himself came out of homosexuality, bisexuality that when the

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AIDS epidemic happened that the homosexual community was in terror was obviously wondering what is going on, what's happening to us and when churches began proclaiming this is the judgment of God that Joe Dallas who's absolutely step for step on the right side of these issues, that the church missed a great opportunity to reach out to people who were hurting and devastated right then and that the pronouncements coming the way they came and with the tone that they came rather than having any positive effect on those men ultimately confirmed to them all the more that God hated them and the church hated them

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So on the one hand I'm 100 % with you saying America is under divine judgment in many ways.

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I'm 100 % with you in saying that we're reaping what we've sown and that this is just another step and another part of our moral and spiritual decline and it will have all kinds of detrimental effects on families as well and on the institution of marriage as well

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I would rather focus first on judgment beginning with the House of God that we must get our own acts together that we must repent of our sin.

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Look this happened on our watch if there had not been no heterosexual divorce in the church if there had not been rampant pornography in the church if there had not been all the scandals with our leaders in the church if there had not been such a compromise of the

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Gospel in the church I don't think the culture as a whole would be in the state that it's in. So I would first start with judgment begins with the

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House of God. I do believe that God is even using these things to wake us up right now as unpleasant as they may be because let's remember there was not a master conspirator head homosexual orchestrating aspects of homosexual activism rather it was people in various strata of society in the education realm, in the media realm, in politics and they were homosexual or friends of, straight allies and they said we're going to fight for these things so all of them in their different spheres fought.

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If we do the same on our end, if we begin to repent, if we begin to cry out if we become unashamed of the

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Gospel, if we begin to preach holiness if we begin to preach on the wrath of God as well as on the love of God so now bring these larger subjects to society and yes warn holistically about the coming wrath and the eternal sentence of punishment and the mercy of God that's extended and preach the cross again,

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I believe we can have awakening at the same time I've operated under the philosophy of reach out and resist for 11 years now reach out to the people with compassion, resist the agenda with courage so every opportunity in that respect to sit down with someone face to face and to reach out to them in love and to be a neighbor to them and to introduce them to Jesus, I'm going to do my best to do that and my emphasis is going to be that sin is destructive, that sin separates us from God as opposed to you're the worst sinner in the world because you're attracted to the same sex and unfortunately sometimes

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I see that those that do want to speak out don't know how to speak out and they think the best thing they can do is be dogmatic and nasty and re -quote

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Leviticus 18 .22 ten times over so we've got to do better than that as well.

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I think there's a very very important distinction that has to be made and a lot of people aren't making it and it disturbs me.

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There is all the world of difference between an individual who experiences same sex attraction, maybe is involved in the lifestyle, doesn't want it wants out of it or a person who already names the name of Christ and who recognizes that same sex attraction is fundamentally disordered, that it's dishonoring to God and they come to the church and they say

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I want to be pure, I want to live under the lordship of Christ will you stand by me and let's just be honest there aren't a lot of churches that would feel overly comfortable in that situation.

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If someone came to them in that situation and said this is what I experience, will you help to keep me accountable

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I want to be celibate, I know this is dishonoring to God and there's all the world of difference between that person and the person that comes to the church and says

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I experience same sex attraction, God made me this way, this is a good thing and you must change your beliefs so that you not only affirm me, that's not enough you must celebrate, you must call this good, you must abandon and repent of all of the years where you did not celebrate those who came before me.

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There is a grand canyon of difference between those people and I think where a lot of struggle is taking place is that for many people making that distinction and seeing how to respond differently to those two different groups is very very difficult to do and a lot of evangelicals struggle on that I see the exact same thing for example in dealing with Islam there's a world of difference between the

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Muslims that I debate who would call me a friend who would never want to kill me and the commander of ISIS, I mean if you can't tell the difference between those two but sometimes for some reason some people don't want to be able to make those distinctions and they refuse to make those distinctions and if they won't make it in that area they're certainly not going to make it in the area where it comes to homosexuality and they're just going to throw everybody in the same thing and that's where you get the unloving responses, you get the nastiness that definitely is out there as people are pushed because they don't recognize that there are different people at different levels and it's been said over and over again that one of the reasons that this movement has succeeded of late is that more and more people have come to know homosexuals.

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If you just get to know them then you'd realize that well there's really nothing wrong with this etc. etc.

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There is an element of truth to that in the sense that that's why it has had some of its success but what's frightening is for many

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Christians, yeah, getting to find out that the really nice guy at Starbucks that you've been getting your coffee from every morning in the drive -thru is actually gay.

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Why should that change your views of homosexuality? It shows that the foundation that you have for your morality is not a biblical foundation in the first place.

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We're all sinners. Did you think that that guy was perfectly sinless in any other area of life?

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It doesn't make any sense. The lack of having a solid foundation is really what is leading to I think a lot of Christians struggling to make the appropriate distinctions because we do need to recognize some of these people are false teachers who are specifically attempting to overthrow the faith of the saints and as such they need to be resisted and resisted appropriately and it's finding that appropriate balance that is a real major challenge for us today.

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I've been trying to encourage the church that God has called me to care for and to shepherd that look we have to have a humble boldness on this issue and that is recognizing first and foremost that it's the grace of God that separates us from anybody in terms of salvation.

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It's God's grace that has brought us to where we're at but there's also boldness because it's the very truth of God.

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Paul says that those who practice such things will inherit the kingdom of God and so there has to be a humility recognizing that look it's not any one particular sin that sends us to hell like it's just because this one thing and God wants you to clean up in this area then you're good with Jesus.

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No, it's all of us. It's our whole life. It's our whole way of thinking. Everything is in rebellion against God and he's a holy

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God. So what separates us from all of the world whether it's the heterosexual adulterer or the person who identifies as LGBT listen we're all sinners and it's

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God's grace that separates all of us in that sense but there's a boldness because there's a necessity that we understand that it is the gospel that is the power of God for salvation so what

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I'm trying to communicate is that listen we don't win those who identify with the homosexual community by withholding the gospel from them and like Dr.

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Brown like you mentioned the clear communication of the wrath of God against sin is where the gospel begins that's where the call to repentance comes in and so there has to be a humble boldness and I think that that has to be something we consider as a church.

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I think it's very important for us to make sure that we communicate to the people who identify with this community that listen the gospel is not

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Jesus wants you to be a straight person and so if you can make yourself straight then he'll accept you one day the gospel is recognition of my sin before a holy

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God. You've mentioned many times Dr. White I think it was in your 5 hour response to Matthew Vines which

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I highly encourage that we are all broken sexually and we need to communicate listen this is an aspect of your life that is in opposition to God an aspect.

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It is not the identification of you you need to turn from sin against a holy

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God to come and embrace Christ to fall on him to trust in him and his work and I think that needs to be communicated by us as Christians that it is not simply that God is calling you to fix yourself up polish yourself up and not be gay and then he'll accept you.

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It's repentance from sin. So I think that's important. Dr. Brown? Yeah the other thing is if I'm sharing the gospel with someone who is say an alcoholic or a guy who's living with his girlfriend

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I don't focus on the fact well you're living with your girlfriend or you're drunk all the time.

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I focus on the fact that that person is alienated from God. Now perhaps they'll recognize because of specific things they're doing that they're not right with God.

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They may be more quick to acknowledge it than to someone who outwardly seems to be more clean.

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But the fact is I'm not focusing on the fact okay you've got to give up alcohol or you've got to stop sleeping with this woman and then you can be saved as if you clean up your life first and then somehow merit salvation.

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So sometimes when we're talking to someone that we realize either they say it or we recognize it that this person identifies as gay or lesbian we make that the focus but I'm not going to bring that up if they don't bring it up.

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That's not my focus. My focus is much larger and much deeper than that. Now along the way the issue of repentance specifically is going to come up and either

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God's going to deal with them specifically or we'll bring the things up specifically. But the issue is people coming into right relationship with God.

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And look when Dr. White mentioned you know the guy at Starbucks and he's a nice guy well look

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I can introduce you to rabbi friends of mine Orthodox Jews who have written lengthy treatises against my five volume series on answering

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Jewish objections to Jesus and humanly speaking they're some of the finest people I know if I tell them this is just between the two of us

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I know it'll be kept there. They're caring people. They're family oriented people from their own viewpoint they earnestly want to please

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God and would be terrified of doing anything to disobey Him. They talk about loving God and things like that.

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I'm sure Dr. White's met Muslims like that for our culture which is so emotion based rather than word based for so much of the church which is emotion based rather than word based we can give a hundred scriptures they say but Bobby and Billy you're such nice people and you realize that's the bigger problem it's scriptural illiteracy it's unfamiliarity with God it's lack of intimacy with Him and His Word and if we can fix the deeper problems we've got to do that we can't just look at the symptoms we've got to repent of the deeper issues in the church of America today that's the only hope of the turning of the nation the other thing though that's important to remember is that this culture that denies the importance of gender or even the distinctions in gender that makes marriage just so completely malleable that it could be fundamentally redefined as Dr.

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White said it's not one that is given to real reproduction and there's no way that homosexual couples are going to have the numbers of kids that they're going to bring up the way heterosexual couples are there's no possibility that those that are continually making gender into a meaningless thing are going to have the same male -female relations with families that are going to have over a period of time so that means that if we can give ourselves to being godly it's one of the theses in my book

44:55

Outlasting the Gay Revolution that gay activism has within itself the seeds of self -destruction and that God's ways are the lasting ways just like with Roe v.

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Wade and the pro -abortion crowd that they're going to have less children and be less family oriented than we're going to be that we can ultimately be the last man standing if we can get our act together and at the same time expose the bankruptcy of those that oppose

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God and His ways. Of course in the process we keep sending our children off to be trained by Caesar that sort of undoes the child advantage thing we have there but I do want to emphasize that when

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Michael was talking about witnessing to someone you don't focus upon that particular sin.

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The problem with many homosexuals however and what makes homosexuality such a well

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I think it's the reason that Paul used it as an example in Romans 1 is when you have someone who has been given over to identifying the entirety of their self by that very thing.

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I mean how often is it? Let's use an example from 1

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Corinthians 6. One of the other sins that's mentioned there is swindlers. I've never met anyone in my life who self -identified, who found their very worth and their reason for getting up in the morning to be a swindler.

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I am just the world's greatest swindler and so I think we do need to recognize that in Romans 1 there is an element of biblical teaching that this is such a fundamental part of what it means to be human that God has made us and there has been this twistedness there that it's a very difficult field to try to obviously as Paul himself says such were some of you that's the great word of hope that of course entire state legislatures are trying to banish from our land but that is the word of hope and therefore it's not an impossibility but we need to recognize

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I don't know of any swindler Christian movements. I don't know if anybody's trying to get the church to accept this as a good thing.

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And for the record we would be equally opposed to that movement as we are at this. But I think there is something to keep in mind there that again the distinction between a person in whom the

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Holy Spirit is working who desires to not experience the same sex attraction.

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When I've talked with those folks they don't call themselves homosexuals because they don't want to be identified by a sinful inclination but when a person gives in to that and says this actually defines me that is a tremendously frightening thing to see happen in a human being's life.

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That's a good point. If there were a movement in society that was celebrating and heralding the beauty of the adulterous lifestyle.

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I'm an adulterous Christian. Isn't that called television? There are websites that are built for the specific purpose of adultery and those sorts of things.

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But here's the point. People need to hear this from us as Christian ministers that it's because this has been planted on us that we are responding as a

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Christian church in the way that we are because it is being accepted because it's being preached as a good and beautiful holy thing that we have to respond and if it were a movement that was identifying as any particular sin saying this is good for us as a society, let's embrace this and you're a bigot if you don't we would be equally against any of those.

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I've sat down in front of group settings before where the issue of homosexuality has come up and there's unbelievers in the room and everything else and I can distinctly remember somebody identifying as homosexual but somebody over here claiming to be

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Christian but was in a sexual relationship outside of marriage. I didn't even address the homosexual person

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I addressed the person who was professing to be a Christian who was living outside of the context of marriage and I condemned that before I even went over here to the person who was not a

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Christian and practicing homosexuality. See the issue is sin and as Christian ministers it's our call to speak the truth, to speak it in love and love does the hard thing.

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It's not what our culture says that it is it's an emotional thing, it's just about feelings. Love is an action love is patient, love is kind, love believes all things, hopes all things love never fails.

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Love does what is necessary to reach the other. Love gives of itself to the other and I think it's important for us to make sure that we are communicating to the world around us as Christians Alright guys, so just quickly

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I'll give you some bursts and you guys respond because these are the things that as a church we need to be prepared, we need to know the text.

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Here's a couple bursts You guys are being cafeteria Christians You are picking and choosing because I'm sure you probably eat bacon and I'm sure you probably eat shrimp and I'm sure you have mixed fibers in your clothing and you just have a secret hatred you two in your hearts for the homosexual because you obviously are perfectly fine disobeying the

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Levitical laws regarding the holiness code but you just love to harp on homosexuality

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Why is that? Well actually I don't eat bacon and some of those other foods number one. Number two, this is not something

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I went asking for. I didn't ask to have Bruce Jenner as a woman on magazine covers.

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I didn't ask for the Supreme Court to make this ruling that affects the whole country. I didn't ask for Tylenol to have a commercial

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When did you first fight to be considered a family? When you fell in love?

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When you got married? When you had kids? Family isn't defined by who you love but how

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Tylenol. But in point of fact I read the Bible consistently from beginning to end.

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There's not a single text anywhere in the Bible saying a single positive word about homosexual practice and the contrary, every single reference to homosexual practice in the

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Old Testament and the New Testament categorically condemns it in very very strong terms

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As for the Levitical laws it's very simple. God gave certain laws to Israel to keep them separate from the nations like the dietary laws, like not mixing two seeds in a field or two fibers in clothing.

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There are other laws that God gave Israel that were based on universal moral principles. For example, don't murder was a universal moral principle for all people.

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You say how can you distinguish the laws that were just for Israel to keep them separate from the universal moral principles?

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Easy, the Bible tells us. It either judges the nations for these same things. In other words

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God says to Israel and the nations if you do this I'll judge you. That's the case with homosexual practice.

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Read Leviticus 18 from beginning to end. It's the same with incestuous practice and bestiality and other things that are listed there.

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God will judge all nations for those things. If it's wrong for the pagans it's wrong for the follower of Jesus.

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Also if it's not explicitly stated in the Old Testament it will be then reiterated in the

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New Testament that this is for all people. So if we see something that the Old Testament says is a universal moral principle or we see it restated as a prohibition in the

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New Testament we know it's for us today. All we're doing is reading the Bible consistently. Whenever anybody says to me you're picking and choosing and they do the

52:50

West Wing thing. I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination.

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I don't say homosexuality is an abomination Mr. President. The Bible does. Yes it does. Leviticus 18 .22.

53:06

Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21 .7

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She's a Georgetown sophomore speaks fluent Italian always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?

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While thinking about that can I ask another? My chief of staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the

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Sabbath. Exodus 35 .2 clearly says he should be put to death.

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Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important because we've got a lot of sports fans in this town.

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Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11 .7. If they promise to wear gloves can the

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Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother

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John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?

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Think about those questions would you? One last thing. While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the ignorant tight ass club, in this building where the president stands nobody sits.

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I automatically know this is a person who has not seriously dealt with that text of scripture because if you go to Leviticus 18 and following they never talk about the fact that's also where you find such texts as you're to rise up before the gray headed.

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You're to honor your father and your mother. You are to not allow the wages of the worker to be with you overnight.

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You are to be fair in all of your scales. Economic. All the stuff that no one would ever argue is actually just for the nation of Israel.

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I've never encountered a person who, and I know they're out there, but I haven't run into them, who actually had fairly read those texts and hence made that argument because if they do read

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Leviticus 18 through 21 or so they're going to realize you know there's a lot of really important stuff in here and in fact at the end of one verse just sort of in passing is you shall love your neighbor as yourself which

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Jesus then said is the second greatest commandment and so any serious analysis of those texts will cause you to go

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I need to be careful how I handle this. So when people do that I actually have to fight the temptation to go into Bible scholar mode and say you don't have a clue what you're talking about do you because in general they don't, but they've gotten away with it because the vast majority of Christians may have read that section one time.

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That one time they did through the Bible and actually survived Leviticus without giving up during the leprosy section.

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That one time they said okay and they don't really understand it and they don't really see its relevance.

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Alright Dr. Brown we just want to say how grateful we are that you joined us today. I know you have such a busy schedule and just want to pray for your ministry and ask people to get a copy of A Queer Thing Happened to America, one of I think the most important books written on this subject and so we're grateful for you

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Dr. Brown and just pray God continues to bless your ministry. Thanks I appreciate what you're doing always great to team up with my dear friend

56:46

Dr. White and listen I'm grieved but I'm not in the least bit discouraged. We felt things were going in this direction we felt this day was coming but I also feel that there's another chapter yet to be written and that's a chapter of awakening in the midst of the darkness.

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So let's stay the course, let's repent of our sins let's pray all the more and let's expect God to do amazing things but thanks my joy to be with you.

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Thank you very much Dr. Brown. So I want to continue to address the most common objections to sort of repair other believers with the proper argumentation and scripture references and those sorts of things.

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So the common things, social media arguments. People should be able to love anybody they want it's none of my business as a

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Christian who somebody else loves. Love should win. Well yes, love does win when it's defined the way

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God defines love and that the very first thought in the mind of any

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Christian when this illustrates is how we are schizophrenic as Christians.

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We have our secular world and we have a religious world because if we were in our religious world and someone said you should be able to love whoever you want.

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We would automatically go well wait a minute. God defines love. He defined love especially on the cross of Calvary.

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Love is self -sacrificial. We don't get to define that. We can't say to God well you should have come up with another way of showing your love for us other than the cross.

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It would be second nature to people but transition them out of their religious world into their everyday world and all of a sudden it's like oh well yeah

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I don't want to tell anybody they don't have rights and freedoms and stuff like that and it shows how we are inconsistent and we do not have a single worldview but we have a schizophrenic worldview and so when someone says

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I should be able to love whoever I want the Christian response is well the very first commandment is to love the

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Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and when you do then you're going to love what He loves and He's told us what is true and honest and just and pure and lovely and what we should love and so the issue is they're claiming a freedom that as creatures they have not been given by God.

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God made us and He knows what we should love and what we should hate and if we love what

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He will have us to love that results in life if we choose to love what He would have us to hate that results in death.

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There's the distinction. And also the inconsistency of our president speaking after the judgment's been made and talking specifically about this

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Dr. White saying you know people loving whoever they want to love it's the same, same love and right?

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I mean that's the mantra of the culture but we're not consistent with that and neither is the president because what about the

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Pederas? What about I brought it up during my sermon two weeks ago what about Misty Atkinson in California?

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A nice California woman who 32 years old hooked up with her biological son 16 years old and was having a sexual relationship with him.

01:00:03

She's picked up. She's arrested. She's caught doing what she was doing both her and her biological son.

01:00:08

Her argument is I have genetic attraction disorder. You don't understand your honor.

01:00:14

I was born this way. Oh yeah. But what about Misty Atkinson? Does she get to love whoever she wants?

01:00:21

How about the guy who after the ruling in Montana went to go and apply for a license for a second wife?

01:00:27

I don't think there's any way to escape that, but yes. Unfortunately in our society then what you get is all you're talking is slippery slope and all the rest of that stuff.

01:00:35

There is no slope anymore. We jumped off the cliff a long time ago. There isn't any way to argue against these things consistently, and that's why in the

01:00:42

Christian world you have to come back and that's what I tried to bring out when I was on the Dr. Drew show on HLN was you've got to have ultimate authorities.

01:00:50

It's the ultimate authorities that are going to determine these things, and as long as we're just playing around down here on emotional level, we're never going to accomplish anything.

01:01:00

I'm really concerned that I do not hear any discussion of the world view issues that should give the foundation for any meaningful discussion of this subject.

01:01:08

If we don't discuss the world view that gives rise to our decisions, then all we're doing is giving our own personal opinions.

01:01:15

That's not how you deal with societal issues. It doesn't harm anybody though. This is very popular right now.

01:01:25

I mean it has been, but listen Christians, this doesn't harm you.

01:01:32

Dr. White, the thing that has bothered me the most is to see the men who occupy the sacred place of the pulpit with the

01:01:41

Word of God before God's people act in ways to say, well this doesn't affect the church that's the world.

01:01:48

Let the world be the world, and we'll be the church. We've sort of just embraced it.

01:01:54

Their argumentation we've gone, yeah, that's the way we should go. It doesn't harm us,

01:01:59

Dr. White. This is just people doing what they want to do. Well, first of all, let's make sure we understand it certainly harms them.

01:02:08

Falling in love with a mirror image is not the way of life. It does not mature.

01:02:15

It denigrates and it destroys the number of, the percentage of the male homosexual group, however you want to define that, that actually seeks after a monogamous long -term relationship by all of the studies that have been done is significantly less than 10%.

01:02:38

And so the result of that in all the studies has been a reduction of life expectancy of two decades.

01:02:47

So don't tell me it doesn't hurt people, because it hurts the people that actually engage in it. But the question was, but it doesn't hurt us.

01:02:54

And once again, in 1982 I married

01:03:01

Kelly. Now the verb is determined by its subject and its direct object.

01:03:09

And by that verb, I became a husband and she became my wife.

01:03:20

And when you change this verb of necessity you're changing the identification of husband and wife.

01:03:30

So we now have states that are removing that kind of language. We have situations where you have two wives and two husbands.

01:03:37

That's a completely different institution. Now in one sense it doesn't hurt my relationship with my wife in the sense that before God, anybody else can go do whatever they want, we covenanted before God that we would do certain things.

01:03:55

So there is a sense in which you could say in a very limited way. But the problem is when a society decides that we are not, it's going to dishonor what you did by paralleling it with all these other things.

01:04:07

Right now, one particular thing, but we all know it's going to end up being multiples of necessity by logic.

01:04:14

Then you are fundamentally altering the nature of that thing.

01:04:20

And again, a society that will encourage behaviors that destroy its citizens is a society that has lost its collective mind.

01:04:29

And I think, what about the children that are raised in homes with the guarantee of no mother or no father?

01:04:42

And this is the thing that gets lost in all of the propaganda, the love wins. Does love win for the child raised in a home with two lesbian mothers who will never have a father figure?

01:04:56

Or how about the testimonies of the people who were raised in homes with gay parents?

01:05:03

And these girls saying, I never knew what it was like to be a woman. I didn't know what it looked like to have how a husband was supposed to treat his wife.

01:05:12

I didn't know what that was supposed to be like. And we have the testimonies of children raised in this context.

01:05:19

And we see that when you rebel against God's order, it has implications for all of the world around us.

01:05:25

Sin never existed simply in a vacuum. Sin always affects me, and it affects the world around me.

01:05:32

And as soon as we say that, the immediate response in the world is, yeah, but husbands die, mothers die, there are exceptions to the rule.

01:05:42

It's thinking that the exception destroys what the rule is. That's what happened on the Dr. Drew show was, well, you're saying that everybody has to be perfect.

01:05:49

No, the point is that when a soldier would die on the battlefield and had boys at home, the community would come together, and men in that group would seek to try to help fill that vacuum, because they knew there was a vacuum there.

01:06:07

They knew that that boy would need guidance from a man. We have now come to the point where we don't care about any of that.

01:06:13

That my love for a mirror image of myself is more important than providing for a child and giving them a foundation upon which they can grow up to be a mature adult that actually is able to function as God would have them to function.

01:06:27

That is where the giving over is really taking place. And when you live in a society where you can have 8 -year -olds where you start pumping their bodies full of foreign chemicals so as to try to change their gender and keep them from going into puberty, that is a level of insanity and a level of evil that is difficult to comprehend.

01:06:51

It is. It's difficult to comprehend. It really is, and so when we think about the

01:06:56

Lord Jesus and what He says about marriage, you say it often, and it needs to be embraced by all of us.

01:07:01

From the beginning, the Creator made them male and female, but it's interesting that we hang oftentimes on Jesus saying a man shall leave his father and his mother in the sense of he's leaving to go cling to his wife, but we forget what

01:07:14

Jesus says as what He's leaving. He's leaving a father and a mother, and so here you have

01:07:22

God in the flesh, Jesus telling us that this is the order that you leave, a mother -father, and we're actually suggesting that the

01:07:33

Creator of the cosmos, the Creator of all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, that this

01:07:39

Creator doesn't know what His order is to be and that we can somehow flip that on its head and not reap the consequences from it, and it really is compelling to me, and so Dr.

01:07:53

White, last one, because this is the one everyone gets. How dare you judge me? How dare you judge me, you bigoted

01:07:59

Christian? Because you see, your own Bible says, don't judge lest you be judged, and here's the thing.

01:08:08

It's interesting that we even have to provide an answer to this, Dr. White, but it is the most common thing

01:08:13

I'm seeing, and the thing that Christians are always asking, how do I respond to that? That's almost frightening.

01:08:19

I would almost think that any Christian who has read their Bible has encountered so many references to where God judges, and where we are called to proclaim

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God's judgment against sin, that it would be second nature as to how you are to respond to something like this.

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It's a glaring, obvious example of taking one verse, ignoring its context, the fact that Jesus is talking about judging.

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You're going to be judged by the standard by which you judge. He was talking to hypocrites. He was talking to people that, just read

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Matthew chapter 23. You'll get a good idea of the context in which that's going to be flowing out of, and we are commanded to judge with righteous judgment.

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The very foundation of God's throne is righteousness and justice. He is going to judge, and as we saw earlier in Hebrews chapter 13 verse 4, it is specifically said in the context of altering and violating the gift of the covenant of marriage that fornicators, that is anyone who does something outside of what

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God has said this is the appropriate way of sexual behavior, fornicators and adulterers God will judge.

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So, really we are not the ones, I'm not the judge. I don't get to be the judge.

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But God does call me as His servant to proclaim His righteous judgment, and here's

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His standards and you tell me, if you stand before Him today what will the judgment be that He makes of your heart?

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That's what's so effective about bringing God's law to bear in that way is that that allows the

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Spirit of God to bring conviction upon that person, and we of course can then immediately put ourselves in the exact same position and say, if I stood outside the righteousness of Christ, I know my own heart,

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I know my own sexual brokenness, I know my own thievery or whatever else it might be, my anger, my hatred all those things, and if I had to stand before God and be judged based upon who

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I am, I would be eternally lost but my message for you is the only way that anyone will stand before a holy

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God is if they are clothed in the righteousness of another and that is that we have already given up any right to define ourselves we stand before God with our mouths closed,

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God's righteous judgment has been pronounced on us, we're not like those people we see on TV all the time, on court

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TV, who are blabbing away about, I'm not as bad as that guy, I'm not as bad as that guy, etc.

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we're not like those people, we stand before God, our mouth is closed, we acknowledge the justice of God's judgment upon us and as repentant sinners, we throw ourselves totally upon God's mercy and grace and that is the person who will find

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Jesus Christ's righteousness to be imputed to him, that's the only way we're going to stand before God, it doesn't matter what the sin is and so that is why, however, we have to stand so firm for what

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Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, because if you can change what he says there, where he says, none of these who continue in these practices will inherit the kingdom of God such were some of you, but you were washed you were cleansed, you were justified in the name of God and the spirit of the

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Lord if we collapse on that, that's the gospel and we have no gospel left, we have no way of proclaiming to people the forgiveness of sins, and hence we have no reason for continuing to exist as a body in this world and so this is a gospel issue and if we collapse upon it, then we collapse upon functioning in this world in the way

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God has called us to function Okay, so one thing Dr. Brown brought up that I thought was interesting when you think about it, because it shows that it doesn't make a difference when it comes to particular side issue, eschatological beliefs as important as they may be, there are certain presuppositional commitments that every

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Christian has as to Christ and his lordship Christ is king of kings and lord of lords

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God's authority, his rule in the world, so you have a pre -millennialist an amillennialist, a postmillennialist, it doesn't matter, you have to understand as we have to understand as Christians that it is our basic commitments as Christians that make this issue an issue we should all approach with the same message and we're all supposed to rise up in the same way against this sort of a thing so these issues cannot stop us from surfing together and being on a mission together in this issue and I want us,

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Dr. White this is very important, I want us to be able to address the people that might be saying whoa, whoa, whoa and the sky is falling and this is just the end of all things because Whitefield came at a time where the

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Christian church is preaching a lot of sloppy, make your grass greener be a better dad kind of messages and there was a decline and he came in a time of real darkness and that's really interesting people don't know that about him often times when he comes with this clear communicated gospel and then

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God brings light. Edwards, you look at history and all these moments where it seems like the world was against the church and nothing but darkness was creeping in and the light of the gospel comes in in full view once again and I want you to talk to us about the sovereignty of God.

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Well you know there is a difference we will have to admit I think between a lot of the previous experiences of the church in this matter and right now and that is in the situations for example in the colonies or in the early period of the

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United States there was still a general profession of faith.

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It had just become an empty faith. It was a hypocrisy is what it was. It was a dead orthodoxy.

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What we have now that is somewhat unique is what was once a culture that was founded upon at least principles that openly recognized maybe not consistently applied which may be part of the problem but openly recognized the fact that God had spoken that these are principles that gave rise to our liberty and everything else in full knowledge of that there is an unabashed, unembarrassed rejection and embrace of the opposite of that with passion and with a level of technology that we have never possessed before and so we may be facing persecution that will have a technological aspect to it that we've never even considered before and so we need to be very serious but you actually talked about earlier just briefly the little sermon that I have been giving to myself almost every time

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I've spoken on this subject and that is what we need to recognize is yes

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God sits in the heavens. He laughs at the nations that attempt to overthrow his rulership and it is pretty amazing to think about the fact that creatures who every breath they take and every beat of their heart comes from God's hand can somehow successfully rebel against God.

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The stupidity of the pot rebellion is truly madness but when we think about how we are to respond to this, the sermon that I keep giving myself is that the only power this world will have over me is the power that I give to it.

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Now how would I give the world power over me? The world cannot touch my soul my life has been hidden with Christ in God and there is no power in this world that can thereby touch me, can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

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We know Romans 8, etc. So what power could the world possibly have?

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But that which I give the world by loving the things of the world. If I love my things, and what are my things?

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Well the obvious things are my gadgets for me my bikes my physical fitness, my martial arts those things that we love to do in this world that we enjoy our televisions, our computers, our homes our cars, our boats, our vacation homes our 401k's or whatever they are our money, our retirement our bodies, our clothing, our standing all these things will pass away and there is that stark, stark text in 1

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John 2 if you love the things of the world, the love of the Father is not in you. The only power that any evil government of the future would have over me

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I give it by loving the things of this world because those are the things they can take from me and say if you don't do what we want you to do we will take these things from you.

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And so I preach to myself and in the process preach to others you look at Corrie Ten Boom in a

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German concentration camp has nothing. No health, no possessions no nothing.

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And that's why the world couldn't do anything to her and take her faith from her. Because all those things that we end up dividing our devotion with were gone.

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And so when we ask ourselves how will

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I respond when the world finally says you will bow the knee to Caesar. I've often said if someone just came running into a church service where I was preaching on the subject and has an

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AK -47 and puts it to someone's head and says renounce Christ or die in that sudden situation most of us are not going to deny

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Christ but it's the day in day out grind That's how

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Islam destroyed Christianity in North Africa. It wasn't take the sword and lop your head off. It was pay the jizya, never have the ability to advance economically, have to live on the margins all the time day in day out.

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Eventually it's easier to be a Muslim Why? Because you love the things of the world. And that's what we're going to be facing

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I think is obviously we can sit here and very cavalierly say wow that's going to be a purifying thing.

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Isn't that wonderful? But when I think about the stuff we complain about every single day in our lives, little things almost always just have to do with what?

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The things of this world Then I'm not going to sit here and pretend that it's going to be easy to give those things up and to stand firm, but that's what's going to be required of us.

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One of the things that's blessed me a lot, Dr. White, about your ministry was there's always sort of like just generally as a

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Christian God is sovereign. He's in control of all things So I think

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I had that there but I still would sort of operate as a

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Christian in terms of yeah, but I had the whole idea of there's still the issue of man's freedom and what he does and I don't know that I fully ever really took in the truths of God's word that are just pervasive everywhere about him declaring the end from the beginning

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And what I found, Dr. White, is since I've had that foundation planted underneath me now,

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I can face the world with whatever comes at me as a Christian, whatever comes at us as a church with the knowledge that God declares the end from the beginning.

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That this enemy that's been raised up right now that we're facing now as a church is something that God intends to put under his feet.

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That he will defeat it. Eschatological positions aside, it doesn't make a difference when it comes to the general truths that we know about God and his sovereignty.

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This is who he is. This did not take him by surprise He has not been thwarted and I want you just to end with this.

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Give us all that foundation that you talk about in your books, the potter's freedom and all that your ministry is known for this.

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The absolute sovereignty of God over human affairs and all things. A lot of people struggle with this because we look at this situation and we go, well, if God is sovereign then why would he allow this to happen as if we supposedly are to know all of his purposes?

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We are never held accountable for the content of God's secret decree.

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We are only held accountable for that which God has revealed to us and what he has revealed to us is that he is the maker and creator of all things.

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He does not learn anything. He did not take the cosmic dice and throw them out there and go, oh good,

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I win. Worship me. Instead he is accomplishing his purpose. His purpose is going to be the absolute perfect glorification of the

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Father, Son, and Spirit in the very way he desires to be glorified in the demonstration of all of his attributes.

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His love, his mercy, his grace, his justice, his wrath, and his power. It's all going to be seen in the exact balance and the exact way that he wanted that to be revealed.

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If you want to spend some time really being encouraged in that, I'd say read Isaiah 40 -48.

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There's some sections in Jeremiah. There's a tremendous sermon by Jonathan Edwards that I can't read anymore because it's only in such small print.

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I can't see it anymore, but thankfully I read it when I was young enough to actually see it. On the sovereignty of God and just to be reminded of that biblical teaching that God is in control and then join to that the reality that he has decreed whatsoever takes place in time and he has decreed that what takes place in time is going to be the very area where he glorifies himself and that therefore it is extremely meaningful.

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We think in such narrow categories that if God determined everything that's going to happen, then there's no freedom and there's no human will and it's all just a game because we've squished it down into just two dimensions rather than recognizing the ultimate demonstration of the fact that what

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God has decreed is real and meaningful, and that is the incarnation. He also included that he himself, the eternal one, would in the person of his son enter into his own creation and give his life as a ransom for many.

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To me, that is the absolute demonstration of the importance of what takes place in time, the importance of the fact that we can call men.

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You will be held accountable by God for acting upon the desires of your heart, acting upon the fact that God has revealed, this is what

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I would have you to do, this is what I would have you not to do. There is a solid basis for that and it all goes back to recognizing the incarnation and recognizing that because Christ has entered in we are not just puppets on strings.

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Jesus didn't become a puppet. The incarnation was not the puppet master becoming a puppet. And so when people struggle with that,

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I found at least for some Christians it helps to think about it along those lines. But yes,

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God is in control of exactly what's going on here. I believe his judgment is happening all around us.

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We cannot see the future and so God calls us to be a prophetic voice, to be salt and light.

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Only he knows if he's going to bring repentance. Would the fall of this nation and mighty and great would be its fall.

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Would that not possibly be a tremendous warning to the whole world of what the result of closing your eyes to the light of the gospel would be.

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We have to see that as a possibility and no matter what he calls us, the

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Jews could never see. Remember when Jeremiah is preaching at the temple. This is the temple.

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Yahweh's name is here. God's not going to allow this to be destroyed. What are you talking about? Jewish exceptionalism.