WWUTT 1595 Q&A Year in Review (Part 2)

We're back, counting down part two of the biggest news stories that happened in 2021. But still remembering that no matter what happens, God is sovereign and he is still in control when we understand the text.

Happy New Year from your friends at When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible study in the word of God that we may shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wtt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky, who is not with me this week. I know, I hear your disappointment. You're going, hang on, Gabe. She was with you for part one of this, counting down the biggest events that happened in 2021.

She's gotta be with you for part two. I know, I feel you. I wish she could be here. There was something that I was working on at home and I was hoping once I got that finished, we could record some episodes from home, but I didn't get it done.

I got delayed on that. Hopefully, God willing, I'll be able to do future Friday broadcast recorded from home. Typically, we take questions from the listeners and you can submit those questions too. When We Understand The Text at gmail .com.

We'll be back to that regular Q &A schedule next week. One other thing I wanna mention before getting to part two of this list. It was released on social media recently, the top 10 most watched what videos for 2021.

Now that's only according to the numbers on the YouTube channel. It's not possible for me to track how often the videos get shared on other social media. So I'm only looking at the statistics that are given to me through the YouTube channel.

But from those stats, we've got a list of the 10 most watched videos for 2021. I'm compiling all of those videos into one video, doing this for the first time. I don't understand why I haven't been doing this in years past, but anyway.

So for the first time, I'm gonna put together in a single video, all 10 videos, the most watched videos for 2021. That's gonna be uploaded to the YouTube channel tomorrow, January the 8th. So go to youtube .com slash WWUTT, subscribe to the channel, and then look for that video when it drops.

Thanking you for watching and for sharing those videos. You are welcome to use WUTT videos in whatever way that you want, as long as you're not trying to profit off of it. Show them in Sunday school, do them in family devotions, show them to Bible study.

I had a guy call me up one time. I just happened to be at the church at the right time. The phone rang, I answered it, and it was a guy in California, in LA. And he said, hey, I am witnessing to this guy on the street here, and I wanna show one of your WUTT videos.

Do you mind if I share this video with him and I use them in my evangelism? I don't even know why he was calling me and asking me that. I told him, man, that is cool. Yes, please use those videos and let me know how it goes.

I can't remember if he ever called me back or not. But so there are people out there doing evangelism and they love that the WUTT videos are just a minute and a half. And so they can bring it up on their smartphones and just share it with people right there who have maybe some deep probing theology questions.

There's just that one thing that's just been nagging at them. I don't know if I can believe the Bible because of this. And maybe a WUTT video will help you give a biblical answer, a defense for the hope that is within you.

As it says in 1 Peter 3 15, in your heart set apart Christ Jesus as Lord, always ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you, but do this with gentleness and respect. And that's what I desire to do even with these videos that I put together, that it's strong biblical answers with gentleness and respect in the way that these issues are approached and the scriptures are preached.

The First Half of 2021: Politics, COVID, and Church Controversies

All right, let's get back to the top 40 biggest events that happened in 2021, mostly in Christianity, mostly in the Western world, although we get to some global things as well. Let me just do a quick review of what we covered last week, the first half of the year.

So number one, January 3rd, it was the amen and a woman debacle in the first congressional meeting at the start of 2021. It was representative Emanuel Cleaver that opened up with prayer. He prayed to Brahma and concluded his prayer by saying amen and a woman.

Number two was January 6th, the riot on the US Capitol. Yesterday, of course, was the one year anniversary of the riot. And you heard the narrative over and over again in the mainstream media that this was an insurrection.

It wasn't, not one person has been arrested and charged with insurrection. Ted Cruz, Senator from my own state in Texas, he said that it was a terrorist attack. Vice President Kamala Harris compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9 -11.

Like this is the next great tragedy that's happened in American history after Pearl Harbor and 9 -11. Over 2000 people died in Pearl Harbor, 3000 at 9 -11. How many died in the riot on the US Capitol last year?

One person. And it was somebody who was shot by Capitol police without warning. So it is nothing like what the mainstream media is spinning this into. And incidentally, it's not just mainstream media, there's leftist evangelical organizations that are repeating the same things.

Dr. Russell Moore through Christianity Today, yesterday also referred to this as an insurrection. Number three, January 20th, Biden sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, only the second Catholic president in the history of the US.

And of course his vice president is Kamala Harris. Number four was on January 22nd, when Pastor Tom Buck, our pastor here at First Baptist Church in Lindale, had made a comparison between Kamala Harris and Jezebel.

He said, I can't imagine any truly God-fearing Israelite who would have wanted their daughters to view Jezebel as an inspirational role model because she was a woman in power. He doesn't even mention Kamala Harris there, but everybody of course knew what he was talking about.

And it became a smear in the mainstream media, not only that he had compared Kamala Harris to Jezebel, but also the slanderous accusation that was made of him was that he was making a racial slur. Absolutely not true.

Number five, February the 3rd, what is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today ran an article talking about Christian nationalism, and that was something that we were gonna hear all year long, not only in mainstream news, but even in evangelical publications.

Christianity Today, the gospel coalition, David French can't stop talking about it. It's been his favorite subject ever since. Number six, February 5th, the Supreme Court blocks bans on religious gatherings where some states had implemented these bans preventing people from going to church unless they were masked or vaccinated or even putting restrictions on how many people could be in the building.

The Supreme Court said, nope, the states do not have the right to issue those bans. Number seven, on February 7th, James Coates goes to jail. He was the pastor in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada who wanted to go to church.

And because he did, he was arrested and put in jail. There were other pastors in Canada who have gone through this as well. Tim Stevens, a pastor in Calgary is another one that I think of, but the highest profile case would have been that one that we had heard about regarding James Coates.

Number eight, February 25th, the Equality Act passed the House. It is since stalled in the Senate. We're waiting to see what's gonna happen with that. But if it does pass, it would basically make it illegal to discriminate against anybody based on their sexual orientation or sexual preference.

So if you have a job, if you're a business owner, for example, and you've got somebody in your business, a man that decides he wants to be a woman, you can't fire him over that. And if you did, you could go to jail or be charged with hefty fines.

You've got somebody that comes into your store that says, my preferred pronouns are these, and you address them by any other pronouns, you could be fined or shut down. That's what the Equality Act is going to do, that there will not be any more male and female.

As I made the point last week, it just makes everybody potato head. Number nine, March the 1st, Bethany Christian Services will allow LGBTQ parents to foster and adopt. This was the largest Christian adoption agency in the country, and before the Supreme Court even came out with their decision on whether religious organizations had to give children to LGBTQ families, Bethany Christian Services went ahead and made a preemptive decision.

Nope, we're going to start giving our kids to those who identify as LGBTQ, these sexually depraved families, and that's where Bethany Christian Services is putting these children. Number 10, on March the 9th, Beth Moore leaves the SBC.

Russell Moore would follow shortly after. Number 11, March the 26th, Little Nas X launches the Satan Shoe. You know, popular music is filled with paganism, and demonism. I mean, it's outright, they don't even hide it.

It's right there in front of everybody, and this is a perfect example of that. Every once in a while, one of those stories breaks through, and they're like, oh, wow, pop music's really bad. Yes, it is.

It is, folks. Number 12, April 6th, Votie Bauckham releases Fault Lines, and Becky and I had also talked about a lot of the amazing things that had happened to Votie over the course of the year, almost dying, and by the providence of God, was able to get to the United States for a life-saving operation.

Number 13, April 7th, Dear God, Help Me to Hate White People. Yeah, that was the book that was written by Sarah Bessie entitled A Rhythm of Prayer. It featured a prayer by Chaniqua Walker Barnes under that title, Dear God, Help Me to Hate White People.

It was as racist as it sounds. It was sold at Target, but as Becky and I talked about that last week, this is where the wokeness movement goes. It does not abolish racism. It spreads racism. Number 14, April the 20th, Pseudo-Historians Attempting to Rewrite American Evangelicalism.

We talked about the release of the book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr, also the popularity of Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Dume. There were responses that were put out by Kevin DeYoung and also Denny Burke, but there is this push right now, and Big Eva, what we call Big Evangelicalism, has embraced these women and these kinds of books.

Amy Bird being another one who's published one of these books. It really attempts to push this narrative that the understanding that a man is the head of his household and a wife is to submit to her husband is not actually a biblical reading of a passage like Ephesians 5.

It's actually a cultural interpretation that has been imposed on that text, and that's what these books attempt to do. They want to destroy patriarchy and subvert the church, and it should be of no surprise to you that people like Beth Allison Barr and Kristen Kobes Dume are also pro-LGBTQ.

Number 15, May the 3rd, Strip Mall Seminary. It wasn't the launch of Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, but that was the day that it earned the title Strip Mall Seminary when Owen Stran announced that he was leaving Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City and going down to Arkansas and becoming a professor in residence there.

I highly recommend Strip Mall Seminary, by the way. Number 16, May the 10th, Israel and Hamas' 11-Day War. Number 17, May the 18th, Kevin Max, former singer in the band DC Talk, announced that he's an ex-evangelical.

I didn't mention this, but he also was lead singer of the band Audio Adrenaline. That's just weird to say. Mark Stewart will always be the lead singer of Audio Adrenaline. There will never be another lead singer of Audio A, but Mark Stewart.

Whatever the band became after that, different band. It was not the real Audio Adrenaline. That's just a little side note there. Number 18, June the 16th, the Southern Baptist Convention. Always a plethora of headlines will come out of any Southern Baptist Convention, and 2021 was no disappointment as far as newsmaking headlines go.

By the way, there was something else related to the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021. Becky and I didn't mention this last week. So there were over 20 ,000 people that were in attendance, and that has been the largest attendance in over 20 years to a Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.

Shortly after that meeting, this would have been about, it was about a week later, USA Today ran an article on an outbreak of COVID that had happened at SBC 21. Now, of course, we would have expected somebody to catch COVID from that.

There were over 20 ,000 people in that big room. Guess how many people it was who were infected with the small outbreak that came out of the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting? 10, 10 people, over 20 ,000 in attendance.

But USA Today tracked down 10 people who had caught COVID. And there's no telling that it actually came from the convention. It could have been the flight or sitting in a restaurant, not being in that giant, massive room there at the convention center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Folks, just go about your normal lives, please. I mean, take some necessary precautions. Use those precautions that you would use to try to avoid catching a cold or the flu. COVID is a very infectious disease.

It's most likely that you are going to catch it. We've had it go through our office here at the church. We've had members in our church catch it. I have known people personally who have died from it. So most people are going to get over it, but there are going to be those few who will catch a very serious case and it could take their life.

But it's a virus and there's nothing that you can do to avoid it. I've known people who were completely quarantined. They were in their home. They did not go anywhere. They even had groceries delivered to their house.

They still caught COVID. There's nothing that you can do to avoid this. If you're going to catch it, you're going to catch it. If you're going to get a serious case of it, that may happen. Put your life in the Lord's hands.

If you know that you are saved by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, don't live in fear. Live your life. Anything could take your life at any given moment of any day. But trust in God. Seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God, as it says in Colossians 3.

When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Number 19. This was June 17th. The Supreme Court rules that a Catholic group does not have to consider LGBTQ parents.

This was in the city of Philadelphia that was forcing a particular Catholic group to give children in this adoption agency to LGBTQ couples. But the Supreme Court said, no, that is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

They do not have to do that. Now, this was the decision that Bethany Christian Services should have been waiting for, but it didn't matter to them. Didn't matter to them one way or the other which way the Supreme Court was going to go.

They went the unbiblical, godless route and instead started giving children to sexually depraved families. Number 20, June the 22nd, and this was where we stopped. It was the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the podcast that was when it debuted there was on June the 22nd.

Now, I wrote a blog about it. I was somewhat praising of at least the production quality of the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, but it was very clear even from the very first episode that the effort here was gonna be much like books that I had mentioned earlier from Kristen Cobas-Dumais, who was a guest on the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and from Beth Allison Barr.

This was an attempt by Christianity today to subvert a biblical understanding of manhood and womanhood. That's what they used that podcast for, and it was the most popular Christian podcast in 2021. All right, so now picking up from there, here are the 40, or yeah, the next half of these 40 big news events from 2021.

I'm picking up with number 21. This is on June the 25th. It was the Ed Litton sermon plagiarism scandal. Now, I mentioned last week that this is the first year I made my own list, and this is that news item.

I was the first one to say something about Ed Litton's plagiarism scandal, or at least the first one to put something on social media. It started with a tweet that I made about Ed Litton preaching the same thing that J .D. Greer had preached a year before from Romans 1, that God whispers about sexual sin.

Now, I had listened to that particular sermon, the whole sermon that I took the clip from of Ed Litton saying that God whispers about sexual sin, and I put it on Twitter. Little did I realize, even though I listened to the sermon, I did not realize how much it was like J .D. Greer's sermon from the year before.

I had listened to that whole sermon too, but it just did not click with me that Ed Litton was basically preaching the same sermon. Well, there was somebody who follows me on Twitter. His name is Jacob, and he caught that tweet that I made.

He listened to both sermons and spliced them together, and it's pretty evident that Ed Litton plagiarized J .D. Greer. So I released that sermon, and it was that day, or I released that video that Jacob had sent to me.

It was on June the 25th, and I mentioned that, hey, these two sermons are really, really close. Well, following that, people started downloading sermons from Ed Litton's church website, and it turns out there were dozens of sermons that were ripped off from J .D. Greer.

Then it was discovered that he had been ripping off some other guys as well, including Tim Keller, a sermon that he and his wife, Ed Litton and his wife preached together in 2012. So this scandal went back at least nine years, and Litton lied and lied and lied.

He's still lying to cover this stuff up. Keeps changing his story. The narrative keeps changing. There's a lot of people around him who are helping him lie and lying for him, and it's the lies now that have become worse than the plagiarism itself, and even worse than that is the doctrine that he preaches and the fact that he platforms his wife along with him to preach these sermons in tandem.

So he platforms women preachers, and you would think the leadership in the SBC would stand up and decry this, call for his resignation, not just as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, but even as the pastor of his own church, but the leadership in the SBC has been largely silent.

Really the most prominent voices that have come out and called for Litton's resignation have been Denny Burke, who I mentioned earlier, and Jim Hamilton, who are elders at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

They wrote, we believe that Dr. Litton would do well to resign voluntarily. His credibility as a leader and a preacher has been too compromised for him to continue. He may choose to muddle through the next convention or two, but we believe that would be a mistake.

He should resign, and absolutely he should, but it's looking like the leadership in the SBC is not going to do anything about it. This has made Ed Litton and the Southern Baptist Convention into a laughingstock.

The last article that I wrote at the end of 2021 chronicled the events of the Ed Litton plagiarism scandal. You can still find that article at pastorgabe .com. Since I was involved in exposing it, I figured I would be the one to kind of write a summary of the events, and there's also audio.

If you listen to the audio version of that blog, it plays the audio of Ed Litton's sermons, splicing it in with J .D. Greer or Tim Keller or whoever he was plagiarizing for that particular sermon, and you can hear the evidence for yourself.

Next news item here, number 22. This was July the 1st. We get to the month of July now. The PCA, Presbyterian Church in America, General Assembly, debates human sexuality in St. Louis. I'm turning to an article here from Dr. Carl Truman, who summarized the events that happened at the General Assembly.

This was in an article he wrote for First Things. The summer of 2021 is proving to be an interesting time for the conservative Protestant denominations of the U .S. First, the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting witnessed the contentious election of a new president who was engulfed in controversy, almost as soon as the result was announced.

Then, the Presbyterian Church in America, PCA, met in St. Louis for a General Assembly that was inevitably focused on questions of sexual identity and Christianity that have been brought to the fore by Revoice.

And if you're not familiar with that, Revoice is a conference that was held at a PCA church that was praising same-sex attraction as something that was godly and good. Dr. Truman goes on, in particular, is it acceptable for a Christian minister to identify as a celibate gay Christian, thereby legitimizing gay as an identity, while still maintaining the traditional Christian teaching on sexual acts?

To outside observers of the PCA, like myself, the result was encouraging and surprising. What happened was that the Assembly voted to propose several changes to the denomination's Book of Church Order, the manual of church law, that would prevent anyone who identifies as gay or same-sex attracted from holding office in the denomination.

Well done, PCA. Of course, there was a lot of pushback against this, as the liberals in the PCA took to social media and really smeared those as bigots who decided that a person who identifies as same-sex attracted cannot be a minister in the Presbyterian Church of America.

We go on to number 23. This was July 11th. Kamala Harris says, love your neighbor by getting vaccinated. Now, this becomes a Christian headline because this was something that Kamala Harris claimed the Bible teaches, that Jesus teaches you're supposed to love your neighbor by getting vaccinated.

Listen to the audio here.

The act of getting vaccinated, the act of administering the vaccinations. Well, these acts are the very essence of what the Bible and so many faiths tell us about the importance of our role and our power when we say love thy neighbor.

And I truly believe in the power of that.

We saw divisions among Christians all year long regarding masks and vaccines and some of the big evangelical leaders trying to guilt trip Christians into getting vaccinated. Russell Moore wrote in the Washington Post that loving your neighbor means urging people to get vaccinated and that you must also take the vaccine for the coronavirus.

David French said that reluctance among Christians to get the vaccine demonstrates a disregard for the health and wellbeing of neighbors. He says, Christians who do not get vaccinated do more harm to the health of the church than the worst of Joe Biden's culture war regulations or the most radical developments in the sexual revolution.

Not even kidding. Karen Swallow Pryor, professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary said on her Twitter that pro-life Christians who do not wear a mask have brought a culture of death. And just a couple of months ago, John Piper wrote an article and it was full of all kinds of silly reasoning as to why Christians should get vaccinated, but he linked to a video by a guy named Curtis Chang and Chang basically preached heresy in that video to convince Christians to get vaccinated.

Listen to what he says here.

Now, this idea that what began in death could be reworked into life, well, it's hard for the human mind to grasp. This is why we need images of redemption in the world. We need examples that can serve as metaphors of what Jesus accomplished that show us Jesus' redemption, well, it's kind of like that.

I propose that the COVID vaccine is an image of redemption. Yes, the vaccine may have a distant origin story in abortion, but that past has been reworked and redeemed into something that saves life. We can point to the vaccine and say, Jesus' redemption is kind of like that.

And indeed, the production of a vaccine in less than a year, it's really a miracle. Something like this has never happened this quickly. I personally believe God's redemptive power was present in the process.

So my invitation to pro-life Christians who may distrust the COVID vaccine currently is this. Please remember that the Christian story is the story of redemption. Every one of us has an origin story in sin.

None of us can avoid this. Yet each of us has had our story reworked by Jesus into new life. That's what it ultimately means to be pro-life. To be pro-life is to be pro-redemption. And to be pro-redemption, in my view, means being pro-vaccine.

That's just absolutely astonishing. And that was Curtis Chang from Duke University. That video was linked to by John Piper. It's astounding, the level of false teaching that people have gone to, to try to convince Christians to either wear a mask or get vaccinated.

This is a matter of conscience. This is a difference of opinion. And Romans 14, one says not to quarrel over opinions. If somebody is convinced that they need to wear a mask or get vaccinated, then do that.

If somebody is convinced that they should not wear a mask or not get vaccinated, then let them, in their freedom of conscience, make that decision on their own. But they are not any less loving their neighbor.

See, that's actually a slander. You see somebody not wearing a mask or not getting a vaccine, and you say of that person, well, they don't love their neighbor like I do because I wear a mask and I get vaccinated.

You are puffing yourself up like the Pharisees, dude. That is virtue signaling. That is a slander against your brother or sister in Christ to say of them that they do not love their neighbor because they're not wearing a mask and getting vaccinated, when nothing in the scripture tells us to do any such thing, even during a pandemic.

Listen, we have been lied to over and over and over again about the COVID stuff that has been going on. Joe Biden said that if you get the vaccine, you will not catch COVID. The CDC director, Andrea Walensky, said that vaccinated people do not carry the virus and do not get sick.

Rachel Maddow said that you will not get COVID if you have been vaccinated. Let me just play all three of those clips for you in succession here. Joe Biden, Andrea Walensky, and Rachel Maddow telling you that if you get the vaccine, you won't catch COVID.

You're okay. You're not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Our data from the CDCs today suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real world data.

Instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person, potentially mutating and becoming more virulent and drug resistant along the way, now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.

A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus. The virus does not infect them. The virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.

That means the vaccines will get us to the end of this.

And we now know that's not true. If you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still pass it on. Some extended members of my family were on a trip just recently, a couple of weeks ago. They've been vaccinated and boosted and on their trip, they caught COVID.

So yeah, you can still catch it and you can still become contagious to other people. It's a virus. It's what this does. And the vaccines are still experimental. We've only had them for a little over a year.

It will be four more years before we'll see the five-year studies on the effects of this vaccine. And another five years after that, before we'll see the 10-year studies. Vaccines typically have a long history of study before they get released to the public.

That has not been the case with the COVID vaccine. And the further we get into this pandemic, the more we are seeing that there have been side effects to these vaccines. One that I just saw this week is something that has been talked about for months, but it's now making its way into the mainstream media is that for women taking the vaccine has been affecting menstrual cycles.

Not in every woman, but a large number of women. And some women are reporting that they can no longer get pregnant after they have had the vaccine. It is really, really sad to see Christians guilt tripping one another over this.

This is again, a matter of conscience. If a person feels like they must do it, then let them do it. If they feel like they can't, then let them. But once again, do not quarrel over opinions. We're discriminating against one another between vaxxed and unvaxxed.

Where is their biblical precedence for this? On the contrary, it says in James 2 .1, show no partiality as you hold fast to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We go on in our news items here to event number 24.

This was on August the 8th, going to church on the internet. Now, this wasn't a strictly August the 8th. This has been something we've been talking about since 2020. Can you go to church on the internet?

But I picked that day in particular because that was the date that Colin Hansen of the Gospel Coalition had an article published in the New York Times about whether or not Christians can go to church on the internet.

The answer to this question is no, you cannot. The name church, that word church itself, the word in Greek that is used in the New Testament that we have translated into English the word church, it means assembly.

It means a gathering. And this concept of internet church, of virtual church, this is brand new in human history. This has only come about in the last 10 to 20 years. This is not something that for the previous 2 ,000 years of church history had been talked about.

Only since the internet has come around has there been such a widespread movement among tons of churches, even small churches, to be able to stream their services online. Now, we've probably been having this debate even going back to the 50s when church services were being televised, right?

You could watch a church service on TV. So I'm sure there was probably debate in there over 50 years ago with people going, hey, you know, I went to church, I watched whatever preacher on TV. So that was the same thing, right?

No, that's not the same as getting together with the body of Christ. In order to practice the one another's, love one another, look out for one another, forgive one another, the only way to practice those things is to be with one another.

You can't do that virtually online. The Lord's Supper is to be practiced together in communion. As we've been studying this going through our First Corinthians study on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when I was just recently in First Corinthians 11, and Paul talks there several times, he makes this statement.

He says, when you gather, when you come together to partake of the Lord's table, this is something that we do together in person. And those elements are administered there as the bread and the cup, not all these other different things.

This is something you're seeing pop up online here and there, somebody saying, hey, I had apple juice and a leftover slice of pizza. There's my, that would be a gross combination anyway. Somebody just grabbing some random elements out of their fridge and saying, here was my Lord's Supper today.

No, that's, no, that kind of thing was strictly forbidden when Paul wrote to the Corinthians in First Corinthians 11 and said, I do not commend you in this because what you are doing when you gather together is not practicing the Lord's table, but that we remember these elements as Jesus gave them to his disciples.

He did not consecrate pizza and apple juice. The Lord consecrated the bread and the cup. And so those are the elements that we use for the Lord's table. We must gather together, really not online. You must go to church and we must continue to encourage and build up one another.

In our most holy faith, we must continue to practice the Lord's Supper in a right manner. And we do these to the praise of God in the ways that he's commanded these things according to his word. Number 25, August the 12th, Joshua Harris deconstruction starter pack.

So Joshua Harris is the I kiss dating goodbye guy. And you might recall that in 2020, he left the faith. He basically deconstructed was the word that he used. So no longer a Christian and decided even to leave his marriage.

He was later photographed at an LGBTQ event in Great Britain. So who knows what direction this guy is going now after deconstructing and leaving the faith. But following a swath of high profile Christian leaders who have recently renounced their faith, celebrity ex-evangelical Joshua Harris is taking it a step further.

According to Newsweek Magazine, Harris has just announced that he's launching a course about deconstructing one's faith to, as he puts it, pass on to others what I've learned about the process. The course entitled reframe your story, which includes a deconstruction starter pack costs $275.

Yeah, so this guy went from making money off of Christianity to making money off of not being a Christian. The pushback that Joshua Harris received as a result of this, he was so roundly made fun of that he dropped the whole program a couple of weeks later.

But all of that started on August the 12th. 26th news event of the year is on August the 15th. In my opinion, this was the biggest story of the year. We heard about January 6th the most. That was repeated over and over again.

We had the anniversary of January 6th yesterday. The biggest news story of the year really was this one on August the 15th, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Here is how Vox recalled the incident in their publication online.

On August the 15th, 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. The Afghan president fled the country. Almost all of Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. It marks the end of an era.

America's longest war is now over and America lost. It happened fast, stunning the world and leaving many in the country racing to find an exit. But even among those surprised by the way the end played out many knew the war was destined to end badly.

And this really all falls on President Biden and his administration. It falls on them. Like the previous two presidents are not, they don't have clean hands in this either, Donald Trump or Barack Obama, even George W. Bush.