Human Sexuality, Gender, and God's Creation with Owen Strachan Day 2 | Live Conference

Kootenai Church

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Well, good morning, and we welcome you to our second day of our equipping conference on Saturday morning.

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Hopefully, you all have rested well, and would you please stand as we begin our service this morning with a song,

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Redeemed. Redeemed, how

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I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood of the

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Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy, His child and forever

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I am. Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the

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Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy,

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His child and forever I am. Redeemed and so happy in Jesus, no language my rapture can tell.

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I know that the light of His presence with me doth continually dwell.

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Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the

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Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy,

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His child and forever I am. I think of my blessed

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Redeemer, I think of Him all the day long.

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I sing for I cannot be silent, His love is the theme of my song.

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Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the

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Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy,

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His child and forever I am. I know

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I shall see in His beauty the King in whose law

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I delight, who lovingly guardeth my footsteps and giveth me songs in the night.

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Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the

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Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy,

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His child and forever I am. This is my

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Father's world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.

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This is my Father's world, I rest me in the thought of rocks and trees, of skies and seas,

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His hand the wonders wrought. This is my

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Father's world, the birds their carols raise, the morning light, the lily white, declare their

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Maker's praise. This is my Father's world,

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He shines in all that's fair, in the rustling grass

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I hear Him pass, He speaks to me everywhere.

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This is my

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Father's world, oh let me ne 'er forget, that though the wrong seems all so strong,

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God is the ruler yet. This is my

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Father's world, the battle is not done,

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Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and earth and heaven be one.

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You may be seated. Biblically and rightly about you as you have revealed yourself, and about your work in creation, and about your purpose for that creation.

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We pray that you would be honored through our time here, and that we would be equipped and edified and encouraged together to defend your truth and to advance your kingdom through the gospel of your

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Son, in whose name we pray. Amen. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce again,

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Owen Strand. Well, good morning.

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It's a delight to see you back this morning. We're going to pick up in Genesis 2.

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So we're moving ahead. We were in Genesis 1 last night in our first session and considered the

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Imago Dei in the Latin, the image of God. And this morning we're going to think first about biblical manhood.

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Our second session coming up will be biblical womanhood. And we'll conclude the morning with a look at paganism before lunch.

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When we come back in the afternoon, we'll look at four different types of men, deficient manhood.

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I'm particularly going to focus on manhood in the afternoon. That session that you see there, the final one that I'm speaking in, it was going to be on marriage and family and singleness, but I'm going to make it instead about strong manhood.

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So in one session I'm going to be talking about four visions of weak manhood from Scripture and then

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I'm going to focus in on King David and look at the warrior king and the courage that he showed and then we'll have the

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Q &A and be done for the day. So we have much to cover and we need to pick up in Genesis 2 verse 15.

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The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Work it and keep it.

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And the Lord God commanded the man saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.

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For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

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I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

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And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

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But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God, verse 21, caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

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And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

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Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

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Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh.

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And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Let's pray as we begin. Father, thank you so much for the privilege of opening your

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Holy Word this morning. I ask that you would bless us as we turn to it, as we study it. I pray that there would be conviction from it.

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We all simply are coming to you as needy sinners. None of us has this all figured out.

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None of us as a man is living out biblical manhood perfectly or even close. None of us as a woman is living out biblical womanhood perfectly or even close.

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We need your grace to do this so we pray that you would help us to evaluate our lives in light of your word and we ask your blessing upon our time.

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Pray that you would strengthen and bless and grow us through it. You are such a kind and good

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God. You are the God of the 14 ,000 trees before us that we may eat from and rejoice in and we thank you for that and pray that that would characterize our faith today.

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In Jesus' name. Amen. What we're going to do in this session is we're going to walk through nine truths about biblical manhood from this passage and then we might cover a few others.

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We'll probably dip into Genesis chapter 3 as well. So nine truths that we learn from the early chapters of Genesis about manhood.

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The first of these truths is this the man with the woman is made to rule the earth.

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The man with the woman is made to rule the earth. In Genesis 1, 26 and 28 we saw that.

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We saw that the man and the woman are called to rule the creatures that crawl on the earth.

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Here in Genesis 2, the verses I just read we get more of a picture of what initial creation looked like just after the man was made by God.

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In verse 7, the Lord God formed the man, Adam, from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

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So we learn that the man and the woman weren't initially together. We learn that the man was created first and Paul will tell us in 1

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Timothy 2, 9 -15 that creation order isn't just incidental like when your kids were born if you have kids.

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There wasn't something moral about the first born coming before the fourth born or whatever it may be.

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They just happened to come in the order they came. That is actually not true with regard to the man.

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The man is not better than the woman. The man is not smarter than the woman. The man does not have more gifts than the woman from the outset, but the man is made before the woman and so has leadership, responsibility, headship, even what we call authority in the home, in the marriage.

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Now that has to be stewarded and understood carefully because sadly there are many out there who would pervert and misapply the concept of the authority of the man in the home and it can be not altogether difficult for sinful men to misuse authority and to become a kind of paper tyrant in a home thinking that he is living according to God's design when in reality he sometimes is living in harshness and anger.

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That is a journey that we will talk about as we go this morning. That, though, from the outset is not what we are talking about.

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We are not talking about the man being the only one who speaks, the man being the only one who would teach the kids anything from the

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Bible, the man when there is a decision to be made just making it like making it.

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There is a decision and six seconds later the man has made the perfect decision every time. He has got an unbeaten streak of 11 ,187 decisions in his marriage.

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He is not trying to have that. That is not his goal to have a ticker behind him in his home.

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Like the days without an accident in your workplace. It is not like days without wife being consulted in a decision.

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Days the guy has made the decision without anyone else even saying a solitary syllable about it.

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The man has the authority. We are not here to soften that. I am not a soft complimentarian or an egalitarian or something like that.

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The man has authority in his home. The buck stops with him. But a godly man as we are going to talk more about is the kind of man as the spirit works in him and matures him and grows him and we are all just a work in progress here.

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Every man is a work in progress here and we tend to be either too soft or too strong.

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Many of us in one direction. There is not only one direction to err in. But fundamentally as God grows us in particular we want our wife's input and we want to lead but we want sound counsel from a godly wife.

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We didn't marry her because she was ungodly at least in a lot of cases. Now if we were converted after we got married we know that this woman is given to us for our good and so we want the wisdom of a wife in a marriage.

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We want her to speak into things. We want to talk through a lot of stuff and then yes

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God is going to hold us to account. So it's not that the man as the head to use the

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Ephesians 5 term kephele in the Greek. It's not that the man gets all the good stuff because he's the head and the woman has to do all the underling stuff and just sort of mutely follow him.

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It's that actually the man is the one in the hard position. The man is the one who is held to account for the good of the home.

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The man is the one who is called to try and create an environment where his wife flourishes, where she's doing well and where his children flourish and where they're doing well and there's a lot to say of course about how that kind of culture is created.

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It doesn't happen in two and a half hours. It doesn't happen by reading a single book and you got it.

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It doesn't happen by going to Bible college and you know just all downloaded and now you got the perfect home. These things take the gospel.

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These things take the spirit. These things take a lot of sanctifying work. There's ups and downs and fits and starts through this process.

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With all that said we still stubbornly from the word of God affirm that the man is the one who is made first and he has headship and so what this means is this as go men so go the home.

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As go men so go the church. As go men so go a society.

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It's not because men are better but it is because men have leadership responsibility as made by God.

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It's not that men get to do all the cool stuff and mom and wife is stuck doing the grunt stuff.

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It's actually the opposite. It's that men put themselves in the hard spot. Men are going to be called in Ephesians 5 22 -33 to honor and own the role of Christ.

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That's what the husband is ultimately supposed to look like. He's supposed to look like Christ and men want we naturally want in our flesh.

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This is a weird thing to say about a spiritual reality. We want to be the Christ on the throne post ascension but the

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Christ that we are supposed to emulate in a small way by the power of the spirit is the dying

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Christ. The atoning Christ. Not that we atone for our wife's sin but we lay our lives down for our bride and by extension for the good of our family.

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That is the form of Jesus we emulate. Not the Jesus who returns with his eyes aflame of fire and wreaks havoc on the earth.

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The Jesus who humbly graciously, willingly, lovingly lays down his life for his bride.

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Those are the kind of men we are called to be. Second truth.

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The man is called to protect. We see that in Genesis 2 -15. The Lord God took the man, put him in the garden of Eden to work and keep it.

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I'll talk about work in just a minute. Focus on the second part of that. Keep it. When a lot of us read in our

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Bibles and our devotions that word pair, work and keep, it probably kind of can bounce off of us at 6 .30

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in the morning or whatever time it is. That shouldn't bounce off of us. This verse is one of the most important verses in the

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Bible. It's a verse that helps us understand the nature and calling of men. Men are made to work and men are made to keep.

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The word keep can also be translated guard. It can be translated protect. Men are made as protectors.

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That's why men have a protective instinct in them. It's not a toxic instinct as we hear today.

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It's not in any way toxic for a man to try to protect a woman or men to protect innocence or when there's a crowd for a man to step up and put his life on the line.

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It's not at all a bad thing for men to want to be policemen or firemen or warriors or soldiers or in the military.

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Some of these institutions sadly, tragically have been corrupted in our time by wokeness and other ideologies.

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A lot of people now are saying we give up on the military or a lot of sadly good policemen are leaving the police force because they've been targeted.

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Those are complex matters to talk about. How much you get involved in corrupted

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American institutions today to whatever degree they are versus withdrawing from them.

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Hard call, hard situation, but let me just affirm this for you. The Bible doesn't say you need to serve in the military or the police or the firefighters.

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My brother -in -law is a fireman in South Carolina but it does mean that you and I in some form are protectors as men.

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We want to affirm that in our boys. Not all of our boys are going to win a weightlifting competition. Don't misunderstand me.

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I've never won one myself just to clear that up. You thought maybe

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I had. What we do want is we want to train our sons in these realities.

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We're not just talking together. Let's have a talk together at 920 on a Saturday morning. No, these are the things we have to train our boys.

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Fathers, these are the things. Grandfathers, uncles, these are the things you have to pull a boy aside and teach him and you don't have to harangue him.

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You don't have to yell at him. You don't have to go protect your sisters.

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Just do it. You need to actually do the harder thing as a father, don't you? We have a voice for when things are off the rails as a father, but most of the time the voice we need as a father is a teaching voice.

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Yes, it's a calm, steady, patient persevering voice.

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Hey son, listen. Daddy's going on a trip. I'm going on a trip out to the northwest to where your grandfather is from.

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My father -in -law is from Spokane. Bruce Ware is from Spokane. I'm out in family territory here.

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What I need you to do, I said this yesterday, two days ago, because I got up really early yesterday.

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I said it the night before. What I need you to do is I need you to make sure the doors are locked at night and I need you to make sure that if you're out in the driveway with your sisters and you're doing scooters and all this sort of thing in the neighborhood that you're keeping an eye out for your sisters and I need you to be strong for your mom.

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If there's packages she needs brought in or something like that, I need you to step up and do those kind of things. Alright son?

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Can you do that for me? I know you can. You're a good young man, Gavin. You can get this done.

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Yes sir, he says. He looks me in the eye. He's like ready to go, right? He's all of 13 years old, but he's taking this on.

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He's actually just started mowing lawns in the neighborhood. I'll save that for the next point. Anyway, it's a beautiful thing to see a young man respond to these kind of realities.

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A bunch of you in this room are way ahead of me and you've done these kind of things and we all have our own style. There's not one perfect way to do what we're talking about, but the key is that as fathers we bring our boys before us and we lovingly engage them.

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There's a thing that we have to correct today because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I have a lot of basketball analogies because I love basketball.

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In terms of coaching, who here remembers Bobby Knight? The coach Bobby Knight? Yes? Bobby Knight was an example

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I think he won three NCAA championships, coached Olympic gold, coached MJ, Jordan back in the 80s.

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Just a kind of iconic coach, right? But the style of Bobby Knight fit kind of the general spirit of the age with men because he was basically kind of an iron ruler of his team.

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You did not say anything to him. There weren't conversations even that you had with him as a player.

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He screamed at you. He told you what to do. You made a turnover. He dressed you down in front of 25 ,000 people in Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Indiana on national

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TV. He went after you. He was the unquestioned iron authority of his team and he had a lot of results.

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He won a ton of games. What an incredible coach. What an incredible basketball mind. He also broke a lot of his players.

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He broke them. He pushed them very hard. Some guys need to be pushed. Not every guy does.

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I think there was a sense even in pastoral ministry in the last 20 to 30 years that that's what pastoral ministry to men looks like.

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You break men. There's a place for challenging a man and going after him.

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There's a place for challenging a boy, a young man, and firing him up. We need that. Trust me.

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We need that today. We need some of that fatherly voice. I'll just repeat myself and then

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I'll move on. We so need men who actually, I would argue, aren't like Bobby Knight.

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Men who have authority. Men who are unquestionably the coach of their team, but they work with players.

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They try to help players. They do this really weird thing called encouragement.

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You can actually encourage a young man. You know you can do that. You have permission to do that. They try to strengthen the team.

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Of course there's going to be games where they're upset and they try to rally the team and all that sort of thing. Yes, I love all of that in sports, but in general, the normative voice isn't break this kid down.

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The normative voice of a father, a godly father, is patient, steady, loving, kind.

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The man is given the charge in Eden to keep the garden, which signals to us, by the way, that Eden is not perfect.

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People talk about Eden as if it is perfect in our theology. It is not perfect. It's unspoiled.

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It's unfallen. There's no sin. Adam and Eve have no sin nature in them in Genesis 2, but there are threats that can enter

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Eden and ruin it. They're going to do so in just one chapter. Men are called to protection.

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The first form of protection men are called to is physical protection. Men, on average, you'll never hear this in our gender neutral age, have 60 % more upper body strength than women.

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Men and women aren't even remotely the same in general terms. Men, on average, are way stronger than women.

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We could just state that straightforwardly. Men are made by God for the role

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God has called them to. That's what we're saying here. That's a good thing. That's not a bad thing.

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That strength is not made to be used against your wife. That strength is not to be used in an abusive way against your children.

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That strength is to be used for your wife and for the good of your family.

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And if there are men, if there is a man who's experienced the bad form of what I'm talking about, if there are people in here who grew up in a home that was too strong and wasn't loving enough, or if there's somebody who has sinned in their past along these lines of being too strong, let me just say a quick gospel word.

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There is forgiveness for that. You understand that there's no category of sin where the gospel does not secure forgiveness.

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In all categories of sin, all types of sinners, there's total forgiveness of sin.

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It doesn't excuse sin. Men should be held to account if they fail in these ways, just as women should be held to account if they fail in their own ways.

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But fundamentally, there is grace that will grow a man and take him from a harsh man and make him over time a steady, godly, kind man.

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And that is real needed growth for many men. Third, the man is called to work.

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It's our third truth about biblical manhood from these opening chapters of Genesis. Put him in the

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Garden of Eden, Genesis 2 .15, to work it. To work the

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Garden pre -fall. So work is not an effect of the fall. We don't work now in our lives because sin happened.

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We need to work. We were made to work. And the man and the woman alike are made to work.

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We're made for a purposeful existence, as we said at the end last night. We're called to take dominion together of the earth.

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So we're not called to sit around. But men are fundamentally called to lead in working.

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And we call this, of course, in the church, provision, providing. Men are therefore made, we can say, to be a provider of their family.

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A man is only going to flourish then, at least as he is able -bodied in physical terms.

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Of course, there's different types of work. There's mental work, so you don't even have to have a body that can get outside and work and that sort of thing.

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We're all made as men to work. We're made to be a provider. Men will only thrive then when they are trained to be a provider and a worker and then when they are given opportunity to enter that.

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And that is part of why we are in such dire straits today. Because lots of men, one reason, lots of men are not working.

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Now you might think I'm about to attack men for that. Stupid idiots, why aren't you working?

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That sort of thing. Well, there are definitely lazy men out there who aren't working and that is not good.

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There are definitely many young men who are on video games and have not been trained to get out there and work and are frittering their life away on devices and screens and that is a bad situation.

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But there also is a climate that does not value men working and does not help men find good work and when men do hard work, doesn't think much good about it.

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Do you understand how dependent we are on men doing hard, dirty jobs in all corners of our society?

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People today seem to think that you can just magically be on devices and lead a very nice life and get your door dash and have all your food and take all your fun vacations and the world will just magically stay stable and good and roads will work and telephone lines will be up and if a fire happens there will be somebody who comes for that and there will be a police force protecting you and overseas there are men who are ostensibly at least helping to keep us safe in these sorts of realities.

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People, what I'm trying to say is this, people take men for granted. We take honest, hard working men so much for granted today and we even dare as a society to teach our kids that such men who have assertiveness and aggressiveness embedded in them, those kind of men we hear, to repeat this term, are toxic men.

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Those are toxic men. Those instincts are not at all toxic. The instinct to provide, the instinct to do hard work, the instinct to do dirty jobs, to use

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Mike Rowe's term, those are good and God glorifying instincts.

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We need our boys to know what it is to work and work hard, not again in a shouting, you stupid young man get out there and work.

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What we need to do again is arm around the shoulder with a young man, with a grandson, with a nephew, with a boy at church and we need to say, hey have you ever tried this?

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I don't know what the forms of lower level work are for teenage boys in this area, but I can tell you in Maine it started with lawn mowing.

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I mowed lawns when I was 12 and 13 and then in Maine, I think we can connect northeast and northwest here.

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We're a little bit apart from each other. We respect each other. We have a little bit of a rivalry as to which region is best.

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Is New England best? Is the Pacific Northwest best? Frankly, we're both in beautiful country.

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We know this, but we're a little standoffish with each other. I'm not going to try to reconcile all that.

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You have beautiful country, you have natural resources, so do we in New England. This is all a joke. My wife and I are from opposite coasts and we have a rivalry in our marriage.

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It's never been completely reconciled, but that's okay. That's what the gospel is for. Being from Maine, you rake blueberries.

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You rake blueberries. It's very hard work. People laugh when I say this because it sounds very simple. You just pluck the blueberries and put them in a cup.

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Any of you out here who harvest fruit, though, know, I guess now it's more mechanized, but especially growing up, you would get a rake with a handle and a bunch of tines like this and you would get low to the ground like this.

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These are low bush blueberry bushes. You would sweep your rake like this and you would sweep over and over and over and over again in the sun, typically in July and August.

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If you think I'm making it sound harder than it was, no. It was very hard work. Some of you know that in all seriousness from farms and agricultural work and fruit harvesting work and those kind of realities.

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It's not easy work and that is so good for boys. It's so helpful for young men to go do something hard they don't want to do, but it shapes them and it builds character in them and boys need that way more than they need six more hours on screens.

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Men are made to work. If you have a young man in the home, it takes time.

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You've got to be able to trust him and those sorts of things, but try to find an outlet for him to start working so that he can have that which is wired into him as part of his nature develop and grow.

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It takes time, but you want him to be working more and more and more and eventually you want him to be earning some money ideally so that he can have the satisfaction of being a provider in a small form and you're training him to take on more responsibility and eventually he's ready to launch.

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You're not looking at an 18, 19 or 20 year old really frustrated because he's not working, because he doesn't like work, because he never developed a taste for work, and because he has no work ethic.

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Sadly, if a lot of parents are in that situation, you have to start asking, was he trained?

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Did anyone train him to do this? Because he's got to be trained to work. The good news is, if boys are trained to work, a lot of them at least, we'll get a growing capacity for that and we'll have a real satisfaction and happiness, even joy, in hard work well done.

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Whether that is in a field, whether that is in a service industry, whether that is in a trade, or whether that is in front of a computer doing digital design, or whether that is being a chef, or whether that is being a musician.

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There's all kinds of ways to work. That's one of the most amazing realities of this created world, is that work isn't only raking the blueberries or mowing the lawns, right?

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Because we are such multi -dimensional human beings, there's so much that we can do to the glory of God that helps others and that improves our surroundings.

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And so, a father and a mother working together we want to push our boys into different experiences that will shape them and develop them.

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We also, though, want to be learning who they are and trying to figure out how they can grow and what will bless them and help them.

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Okay, number four. I'm going to have to hasten on. Adam is subject to God's command.

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Fourth reality of manhood. Adam is subject to God's command. Genesis 2 .16.

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This is what we were talking about last night. You're free to eat from any tree of the garden, the

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Lord says, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.

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So we've talked about this principle already, but here's the point for us. Men do not flourish when they think that they are free.

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So the kind of bumper sticker manhood where you have no rules and you just do whatever you want, that's actually not what men are made for.

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Men are made to live under the rule of God. Men are not made to be free agents doing whatever we want, living it up with no accountability to anyone.

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Men are made to be soldiers under orders. That's what we're made for, and specifically the orders of God.

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And so we will flourish and we'll find joy and peace in life, not when we live it up according to our own desires, but when we follow

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God's plan. That is what God was signaling to Adam. Adam, I am generous.

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Adam, I have this whole forest for you to walk, this garden paradise that you're in. I have tons of fruit for you to eat.

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It's delicious. I want you to eat it because I'm a good and generous God in my core, but there's one tree you must not eat from.

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The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is mine. Don't touch it. And so boys need moral training.

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They need spiritual training to know right from wrong, and they need to be pointed, of course, ultimately to the reality that they need a

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Savior. No man is his own Lord. No man is his own master. We all need a

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Lord and a master and a king over us as men. This is what we're learning in this text.

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Fifth, the man is called the lead in the home. The man is called the lead in the home.

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Just moving quickly through these last realities, we saw in verse 24 that it is the man who leaves father and mother and holds fast to his wife, and then they become one flesh.

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It's not the woman who holds fast to the man, which goes against the emotional trajectory of a good number of homes, even in the church, where the man's kind of checked out and thinks he's not really emotional, and the woman is the one trying to hold the family together furiously.

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And that's not the design of God for our homes. The design of God for our homes is that the father, the man, the husband, the head, is the one who is not ruling like a king, as if every edict he wants immediately gets performed, but he is the one who is planning the family's life with the woman's input and wisdom very much in the mix.

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He's the one who is held responsible by God for shepherding his wife and shepherding his children.

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He protects them physically, yes, but he also offers spiritual protection. He's the one who knows what his kids, at least in conversation with his wife, that is, what they're watching, what they're reading, what's on their devices.

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He's the one who is making sure that friends and friend situations aren't getting compromised.

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He doesn't know everything. He's not omniscient. Don't misunderstand me. But he is the head of his home. He is the one who is holding fast to his wife.

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He is the one, 1 Peter 3 is going to say in the New Testament, who lives with her in an understanding way, so he's marked by tenderness, listening, kindness, gentleness.

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That's not being unmanly. Jesus is the true man, and Jesus is the kindest man who ever lived.

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That doesn't mean Jesus was only kindness. We know that Jesus made a whip of cords and scourged the temple and drove out the money changers.

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So, a godly man is a blend of toughness, yes, real toughness, but also tenderness.

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He's a blend of the two. A godly man is gentle, but a godly man is also strong.

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And these aren't realities that are easy to arrive at in our flesh. This is what you need

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Jesus for. You need Jesus to save you, and you need Jesus to give you his spirit, and you need

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Jesus and the spirit to change you over time and remake you and grow you and kill your sin.

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You're not who you should be. None of us are, man or woman alike. None of us has this figured out.

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We have to grow in all these realities. The good news is that that is what

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God is here to do. So God will do this work. God will help us men who don't lead.

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Some men, in the right way, some men are passive and checked out. They don't provide any real leadership in the home.

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They don't disciple the kids. They don't ever gather the family to pray, sing songs to God, read scripture.

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They don't teach anything. They've never even thought of trying to read a book with their kids or something like this about Christianity.

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In a lot of cases, I think men haven't been discipled themselves, and they don't know how to disciple others.

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And so I don't come at them and punch them in the jaw. I come at them in compassion. Nobody trained them.

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How would they know how to train others? But then, as I'm at pains to say, some men are way too much on the other side, and they're cranked up and they're overseeing every single click of the mouse or something like this their wife makes, and they're too strong.

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We need to be balanced men. We need to be men of grace and truth. We need to be tough and tender men who lead in our homes.

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And we need to be the ones who hold fast to our wife. All of this by the grace of our

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God. We need to be men who look our wife in the eye, in love, and say, I'm never leaving you.

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I'm never walking out on you. We are together to the day we die. To the day

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God calls us home. And we need to be men then who in much prayer and dependence on God, ask

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God to make us faithful men. There's a lot of temptations out there, aren't there men? There's a lot of ways to blow ourselves up.

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There's a lot of ways to lose our wife. There's a lot of ways that we could walk away from our precious kids or our grandkids or whatever it may be.

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Don't think this is only a temptation of young men. You can blow up a marriage all through your life. Sadly, you see marriages increasingly ending, you know, even in the sort of golden years of life.

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What we need are men who cultivate their marriages. Who love their wife.

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Not just say that. Not just buy a Hallmark card, right? But who strive to show love to their wife.

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I think some men are afraid of being seen as effeminate for being loving, gentle, kind, understanding, good listener, all those kind of things.

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You're not effeminate if you do those things. You're being a godly man.

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You're being like Jesus. So let's pray. This isn't a harangue.

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Let's pray that God will make us more and more these kind of men.

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Sixth, godly men honor marriage. Not every man is called to marriage.

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Some men are called to be single, and that's an honorable calling from the Lord, 1 Corinthians 7. Many men are called to marriage, and so that's a major work of a man's life, to cultivate and strengthen his marriage by the grace of God.

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And that is the only context given in the Bible for sexual activity. There's nothing outside of marriage that God has said to us, oh yeah, dating, you're good to go, whatever you want to do up to this line, you know, all the way almost down the line, that's great, you know, just sort of coming together, you know, one night stuff, all that sort of thing, long term relationships.

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No, the vision God gives us for sex that honors him is marriage.

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So we want to honor marriage. I don't think we want to push our kids to marriage too young, as if, you know, the stroke of midnight when they turn 18, they need to be married.

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I personally would say it's good to get either life experience, work experience, college, those kind of things.

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I don't think you have to, but I think there can be a lot of good in those years in getting more skills and developing and getting education and getting training, those kind of things.

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But whatever the case, we know that God has given marriage to us for our good and his glory.

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Seventh, the Lord holds Adam responsible for the fall. Adam and Eve sin against the

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Lord in Genesis chapter 3. The serpent tempts them to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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They do eat it, and the Lord doesn't hold Eve responsible for the fall. She gets indicted.

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She bears an effect of the curse herself, a powerful one. She gets pain and childbearing, and she's going to be under the unkind, ungracious rule of a man.

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Those are her effects of the curse specifically that she deals with. But the man is the one the

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Lord God comes to in Eden in Genesis 3 and initially says, where are you?

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The man is held responsible for what has happened. That's the concept we're talking about in action. That's headship.

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That's responsibility. It shows us that God holds the man responsible for what has happened.

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So we want to take that very seriously as Christian men. We want to know that God will hold us responsible for the good of our marriage and the good of our kids.

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It's not that we can single -handedly sanctify our wife. It's not that we can save our kids. We can't do that.

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But God does expect that by his power we will strive to cultivate a joyful, godly

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Christian home. And then I'm just going to condense two into one here.

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I said nine, but I'm going to leave you with eight. The final thing we see about manhood is that men cannot be their own savior.

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And we see that in Genesis 3 .15. We need one who will come and do this.

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Genesis 3 .15, the Lord God to the serpent says, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.

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He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. This is that principle that I already have alluded to a number of times in several different ways.

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But it's very simply this. Now Adam has become a sinner. Now Eve has become a sinner.

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Equally sinful. Men are more sinful than women. Equally a sinner. Equally an image bearer.

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Equally a sinner. And now mankind needs a savior. And that is exactly what the

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Lord God is gracious to provide. You and I can't triumph over the devil.

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You and I can't make atonement for our sins. But the one who will come in fulfillment of Genesis 3 .15

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can and does. Jesus comes to crush the head of the devil.

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Which means, if you play it out biblically, Jesus comes to die in our place drinking the wrath of God for us so that we don't have to be judged in hell eternally for our sins.

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And even more than that, we can know the love of God that pours into our life from the moment of our conversion into all eternity beyond all time.

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That is the good news. The point of this whole thing. The point of everything

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God has made is not simply that we would be holy. Holiness is paramount.

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Without holiness, no one will see the Lord. Holiness is what the Lord Jesus provides in His righteous life.

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His active righteousness and His atoning death. His passive righteousness. Holiness is what

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God gives to us as a gift by His grace so that in the moment of saving faith in Jesus when we trust in Jesus as our

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Savior and we turn from our sin the holiness of Christ is credited to our account.

01:03:08

It is like going from 50 billion down 50 billion against your name that you can never pay.

01:03:15

You'll never pay it. It is like going from that to 50 billion in the black. And now you have more than you could ever ask, imagine or dream of in terms of the righteousness and holiness and goodness of God.

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That is what Jesus does for us as the one who comes and crushes the serpent head and makes atonement for our sin.

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But the point of all of that work is not simply that we would be holy.

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The point is that God would be able to love us because God wants to love a people for Himself.

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That makes some people feel scratchy and itchy like that preacher is up there talking about all this love.

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I understand holiness. I like holiness. Holiness is something you work on holiness.

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Let's get to work. Let's do some work, practical stuff here. Don't get all squishy with love and grace.

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That's the whole point of everything. That you would go to be with God when this forsaken world is over for you, when your shift is up and you would be translated to glory and you'll live forever with God in a world of love and all your existence will be.

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Whatever heaven and the new heavens and new earth is like exactly, all your existence will be is going to be love, no pain, no tears, no sadness, no sin.

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God loving you and you loving God back by His grace. That is what has already begun now.

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The life of love has already begun and so in conclusion, whatever has happened in your past, whatever your relationships are like or were like with your father and mother, whether those were happy or unhappy, whether there is unresolved pain for you right now in your life, you can know this.

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We have a good father. We are not the men we need to be in our flesh.

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None of us is, but we follow a great loving kind God whose purpose in all of this is quite simply to love sinners for Himself.

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Let's pray. Father, please help us men. We're so inadequate.

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We're so needy. We're not wise. We're not the protectors we should be. We're not the leaders we should be.

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We're not the providers we should be. Even if we do those things and even if we pat ourselves on the back for doing those things, we don't do them as we should.

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We don't do them perfectly. We need your grace in every dimension of our life. I pray, Father God, that you would work in us men and you would continue to change us and grow us if we are a

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Christian. I pray that you would make us more and more like Christ. And I pray, Father, for those in this room who do not yet know the grace of Christ, the mercy of Christ.

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I pray that you would give them ears to hear and eyes to see, not through the persuasiveness of my words. I don't have anything to offer, but simply through the working of your

01:06:19

Spirit. Help them to see, Father, that they need Jesus and that Jesus is right here, arms open wide to forgive sinners.

01:06:28

In his name we pray, amen. Ten minutes. We'll start at ten. Welcome to Rose Wilder Lane's Theory of Literary Criticism.

01:15:58

We really can talk about that at the break.

01:16:11

I just want you to say that. And we also thank westerns.

01:16:17

We can talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly with these characters who don't even talk almost, at least

01:16:24

Clint Eastwood doesn't, in the age of the late 1960s. And we can talk about manhood as seen by the

01:16:32

Italian director Sergio Leone in that strange era of flower power when all these guys, you know, are living the hippie dream.

01:16:40

And here's Sergio Leone making these movies where these men are out in the desert trying to kill each other, not even saying anything.

01:16:47

And, yeah, so get your money's worth. Talk to me at the breaks. Talk to me when things are done at the end of the day.

01:16:55

Because these are vital matters, literary criticism and western films. In all seriousness, we need to talk about biblical womanhood now.

01:17:04

We need to talk about womanhood. We're still in Genesis 2 in our progression, intentional progression of exegesis in the conference.

01:17:16

We talked in the last session about biblical manhood. And as we move ahead in Genesis 2, yes, we got into Genesis 3 at the end there, the fall.

01:17:26

We needed to do that. We know where this story is heading. Yes, Eden does not stay what it was made to be.

01:17:33

But we've got to go back again and we've got to talk about verses 18 and following. Because in verse 18 of Genesis 2, we learn that it is not good for the man to be alone.

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Now, this does not mean very quickly that singleness is bad or wrong. We know from 1 Corinthians 7 from a single man, the

01:17:49

Apostle Paul, who was saved by a single Savior, Jesus Christ. He was never married in physical terms.

01:17:57

We know we have a good case for biblical singleness. But fundamentally, we also know that it is

01:18:03

God's general design for the human race, for men and women to come together in one man, one woman, lifelong, covenantal marriage in terms of the design of God.

01:18:14

I have a category for divorce if there are allowable circumstances. I think there are biblically and even remarriage in biblically allowable terms.

01:18:23

There's debate in the Christian community and the conservative evangelical world over that. I don't know where everybody in the room is on that.

01:18:28

I know there's some different positions and we respect those. I personally believe there are grounds for both of those realities.

01:18:35

But we know that in foundational, intentional terms, marriage is good.

01:18:43

Marriage is God's design and marriage is not whatever humanity makes marriage to be.

01:18:50

Marriage has been defined from the outset. This goes back to last night where I tried to assert to you from the biblical text, not from me, but what

01:18:59

God has made, man cannot unmake. The ancient mark that God has set, man cannot move it.

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Man can delude himself don't misunderstand me, into thinking he can move the ancient mark, can't he?

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Mankind can assault the design of God. Mankind can try to undo the design of God.

01:19:23

But do not be mistaken, marriage has been made by God, has been defined by God, and no one can redefine it.

01:19:32

They may tell us they can. Pride Month for example may be a prime opportunity for people to signal that marriage has changed in America.

01:19:42

And yes, in 2015 our society did allow at the federal level for homosexual marriage.

01:19:50

Some of you may have confusion over what I'm saying. You may be thinking, understandably, but they have redefined it.

01:19:56

They have tried to redefine it. They have passed redefinitions into law.

01:20:02

But I'm simply trying to say to you this point, no one has redefined marriage. No one has redefined humanity.

01:20:09

No one has actually found a way for men to become women or women to become men. People think they have.

01:20:15

They very much think they have, and they're going to tell you they have. Yes? And they're going to hold you to the account of their ideology.

01:20:22

And you're the bad guy, and they're the good guy. But we are breathing pure oxygen here, aren't we?

01:20:28

And we're trusting in the Word of God, are we not? And we stand on the Word of God, and we say, let

01:20:33

God be true, and every man a liar. And that's what we say. And that's how we live. Not in anger, not in hatred of flesh and blood.

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We do not wage war against flesh and blood, Paul tells us. But we wage war against the devil. We wage war against principalities and powers.

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And we stand in the armor of God, Ephesians 6, and we dare to say, no, God is true, and every man is a liar.

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It is not that God is a liar, and every man is right. It is the opposite. And that's...brothers

01:21:01

and sisters, you have to have that conviction. You have to have it from the Word of God. God gives it to you as a gift.

01:21:08

But you also have to nail that in. Or, to switch the metaphor, you have to be like ship captains of old, you know, when the seas would get wild.

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This is a very New England -shaped metaphor, as you can imagine. But, I mean, some of you know, when you're out to sea as a ship captain, a whaler, or something like that, those waves aren't 5 feet or 10 feet or 15 feet, right?

01:21:31

Those waves are 20, 30, 40, 50 feet. It's like climbing a hill.

01:21:37

It's like climbing a mountain when they come at you. And the ship captains of old in the 19th century, they would take a rope and they would tie themselves to the mast when those waves got so big.

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There's nothing to do. There's no bailing water that's going to get you out of this. There's no rowing that's going to get you out of this.

01:21:55

There's nothing for the crew to do. The crew has done everything the crew can do. The last thing to do in very bad circumstances as a captain is tie yourself to the mast, come what may.

01:22:06

Here we go. We're looking at a 50 -foot wave. We don't know whether we're going to live or whether we're going to die.

01:22:12

But I'm tied to the mast and I'm trusting in that. In a spiritual sense, that's what every

01:22:20

Christian needs to do. Not some of you. That's what every one of you needs to do in 2024 in America.

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You need to tie yourself to the mast of the Word of God and the

01:22:34

Gospel of God. And you need to know that the waves are high. You know this already, but you need to know they may very well get higher.

01:22:42

I don't know. I'm not telling you they will. I don't know what's going to happen. We've got an election coming up.

01:22:47

Have you heard about that? Did you know that? We have an election coming up. So good. We're already divided. We can be much more divided again in the fall.

01:22:55

That's going to be really fun. Whatever happens politically, whatever is going to play out there, whatever is happening civilizationally, that is not given to you to know.

01:23:05

That's not given to podcasters to know. That's not given to conservative talk show hosts to know. That's not given to pastors and theologians to know.

01:23:13

What we do know is that we've got to stand on this. Yes? So tie yourself to this.

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Go deep in this. Drink of this. Draw near to God and experience

01:23:26

His love through this. And know that whatever happens in your own localized life and in your community and in your country and in your world, whatever shakes us, whatever 70 -foot waves we face and we are headed toward, if we stand on the

01:23:44

Word, we stand on the solid rock and we will be secure. And God will get us all home.

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God is going to get every last one of you who is a believer in the Lord Jesus home.

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You're going home. You're going to be safe. He's going to keep you.

01:24:04

He's that strong and that sovereign and that good. So let

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God be true. And every man a liar. God has said it is not good for the man to be alone.

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We know this is true, at least for many of us, that God uses that not goodness that you feel in some undefinable way in your bones when you're starting to be in those teenage years or late teens or early 20s.

01:24:32

So many of us know that it is not good for us to be in this state, man and woman alike.

01:24:38

Marriage is getting delayed and more delayed in our society. The average age of marriage is getting higher and higher and many young men and young women are languishing because of that in this civilization.

01:24:50

Again, I wouldn't be one who would push for marriage at a certain time and I wouldn't say you've got to get married as soon as you possibly can, but I would say we've got to know that God's plan for many of us to enjoy a happy life by His glory is for us to enter marriage and so we want to honor that and know that that is true.

01:25:12

The Lord said that the man needed a helper fit for him in verse 18 of Genesis 2.

01:25:21

This is pre -fall. This isn't God saying to the man that he's an idiot or a goofball or he can't get anything done without a woman to hector him and lead him and tell him what to do.

01:25:31

That would be feminism talking, not the Bible talking. The Lord did, however, see that the man was not made to be self -sufficient.

01:25:42

Men aren't made, most of us in terms of marriage, to be a loner. We're made needing a helper.

01:25:49

So it's like God looked at Adam and said, bro, you need help. You need some help.

01:25:56

I'm going to provide help to you in the form of the woman. Specifically, of course, the help is going to come in multiple dimensions, but it's going to come through them coming together in marriage and bearing children as God leads and then living out that dominion mandate, taking dominion of the whole earth together.

01:26:13

But we don't want to gloss over this reality. We want to know that God has defined womanhood.

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If manhood is defined as, that was a bad sentence, excuse me, manhood is defined as stepping up for the good of others, taking responsibility for the good of others.

01:26:35

Manhood, definition, there you go in your notes. Ready? Manhood, taking responsibility for the good of others.

01:26:43

Biblical manhood in a nutshell, I believe. Womanhood is helping and nurturing for the good of others.

01:26:55

Helping and nurturing for the good of others. You don't want one or the other in terms of a family.

01:27:03

You need both. You don't only need your kids to have a father.

01:27:10

You need your kids to have a father and a mother in ideal terms. Of course, we know terrible crises happen in these sorts of things.

01:27:16

I'm talking about the design of God, the plan of God, the way God has formed things to be.

01:27:21

This tells us that the skills and abilities that the man provides are essential.

01:27:28

They're essential. This tells us that the skills and abilities that the woman provides are essential.

01:27:35

One is not more essential than the other. This is why we use the term complementarity, as I said last night.

01:27:41

I love that term. I prefer it over patriarchy. Some people in here may claim patriarchy. Some of our friends may claim patriarchy.

01:27:47

If so, I'm not here to start a war at the break, people throwing coffee at each other or something like this. Please don't do that.

01:27:53

You can throw huckleberries at one another. I've been told about huckleberries.

01:27:59

I want you to know I hear you when I see you. I like huckleberries. I'm not going to start a war of berries between the coasts,

01:28:07

New England and Northwest. I will say that huckleberries are very good. I had a huckleberry milkshake when

01:28:13

I came out ten years ago. I was like, okay, I could do this on a regular basis. Be seen.

01:28:20

Be heard. I have huckleberry tea right down there that was given to me. I'm looking forward to trying it at one of the breaks.

01:28:28

Jim, what was I talking about? I got into huckleberries. My time is up.

01:28:35

Let's talk about Rose Lane. Does anyone remember what

01:28:41

I was saying? I got going on huckleberries. Gene, squirrel, what was I talking about? Pineapple shouldn't go on pizza.

01:28:50

That's exactly what I was talking about. Thank you. As if we're not confused enough. It was why the term complementarity.

01:28:56

Thank you so much. Complementarity is a term. Why that term? Because it emphasizes that both sexes bring essential skills and abilities to the table.

01:29:07

That's why I love that term. I do think that patriarchy, father rule,

01:29:12

I do think it's getting substantial reality right about biblical manhood.

01:29:18

As we were talking about, men have headship in the home, headship of their wife. Specifically, men are called to be elders and teachers and preachers in the local church.

01:29:28

We recognize headship in the home. We recognize spiritual headship in the church as well.

01:29:34

We're not soft on that in any form. I don't love, though, that everything reduces to rule of the man of the father because I read

01:29:43

Genesis 3 16 to 20 as saying not that the rule spoken of there is positive.

01:29:50

I think that the rule in Genesis 3, the man will rule over you,

01:29:56

God says to Eve. I don't think that's speaking of happy rule, the kind we were talking about last session.

01:30:03

I don't love father rule in that sense. I do, though, prefer that the sexes are complementary.

01:30:11

They fit one another. They work together with one another elegantly in the design of God.

01:30:17

The man brings strength to the table. The woman brings strength to the table. I personally think that honors scripture even though I know patriarch is a biblical word.

01:30:27

I honor patriarchy. I'm going to overlap a lot with many in the patriarchal world on core issues.

01:30:33

Let that be said. The woman is a helper. That's her identity. Let's talk then about how many do

01:30:41

I have? Six realities of biblical womanhood. I had many about manhood. Now I want to talk to you about six about biblical womanhood in this session.

01:30:50

First, the sexes are made by God. The sexes are made by God. What that means for womanhood is that we can define what a woman is.

01:31:03

Did you know that? It's so weird today. Part of living in this upside down society is that we are told that we need to respect women and listen to women.

01:31:17

Remember Me Too? What was basically the tagline of Me Too? Believe all women, right?

01:31:25

But then, in hearings for major public officials in this country, it was, for the

01:31:34

Supreme Court, it was stated that a woman, womanhood, cannot be defined, right?

01:31:41

So we're being told we have to believe all women at the same time that we're being told we have no idea what a woman is. And so we need to replace the term woman, in fact, with the term birthing person or, if you'll excuse me, menstruating person.

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And I am, I don't know about you, I am not bringing that one home to my, hello birthing person, how was your day?

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You can try that one out if you want. I will not be, I like living in my house and I like my marriage.

01:32:10

Womanhood is made by God. Womanhood is defined by God. Like manhood, womanhood is indissolubly connected to the body.

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The woman has a womanly body. We don't have to get into the weeds here, but the man is a manly body and the woman is a womanly body.

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And so what this means is that if you have a woman's body, you're a woman. Made by God, I mean. And if you have a man's body, you're a man.

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There are only two options. There are no other options. There's no in -between categories. There's no extra gender categories.

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On Facebook now, there's over 75 gender options. You can be lots of different things.

01:32:44

You can be felis gender, that's when you think you're a cat. I'm not kidding. You can be dimogender, that's when you have the gender of a supernatural being.

01:32:53

Okay, there's lots of different genders. I'm not kidding. These are real options today, supposedly.

01:32:59

There are only two sexes. God made manhood, God made womanhood.

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If you have a manly body, you are a man. If you have a womanly body, you are a woman.

01:33:10

There is a tiny percentage of cases where a child, through no fault of their own and no fault of the parents, but just through the fallenness of the world in our biology, which is a very real reality, right?

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Sin and fallenness warps everything in this world, including our biology, including, sadly, the bodies of some, a tiny minority, babies.

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Those babies are born with both male and female genitalia. The condition is often called intersex.

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A better term is disorder of sexual development. If you'd like to read more about that, there's an ethicist at Midwestern Seminary where I formerly taught named

01:33:49

Alan Branch. If you want a resource on this, I get asked about this at conferences, and understandably so, because the left will take the intersex condition, and they will say, see?

01:33:59

There is such a thing as a third gender or something like this. It's this group of people who are born with both anatomy of the man and the woman, and that blows all your categories,

01:34:10

Christian. What we say, and Alan Branch has said in his helpful work, Alan Branch is his name.

01:34:16

He's got a few books out on intersex. He has termed it better disorder of sexual development,

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DSD. When that occurs, you go to the genetic level, and you look at those genes, and you look at chromosomes, and if it's

01:34:31

XX and XY, then you know what that child really is, and you then do shape the body to fit that chromosomal reality.

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That is a hard situation to be sure, and we don't take that lightly, but even there, hear this, even there at the genetic level, there is clarity.

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Do you understand? The left doesn't tell you that, but there is clarity at the genetic level, praise

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God, and you raise that child according to the genes. Something has tragically gone wrong, and that's going to be a hard condition.

01:35:05

It often is, and that's where, listen, we are a people of truth. We are absolutely a people of compassion, and we want to help babies and children born with that kind of condition, again, through no choosing of their own, but that is not, you understand the point?

01:35:20

That is not a third gender or something like that. That is a warping of the body.

01:35:25

That's a malfunctioning of the design of God. God has made men, and God has made women.

01:35:32

That's all there is. Today, there are lots of people who are very confused.

01:35:38

Today, there are lots of people in broken homes. Today, there are lots of people rebelling against the design of God, and they are telling us there are not two sexes, but we confess that there are two sexes made by God.

01:35:52

That's it. That's all there is, and so we know what a woman is, and we honor and celebrate that reality.

01:36:02

Second, the woman's identity, as I've already been at pains to say, is helper. Helper. Now, we don't mean by that, again, that every woman is going to be married and express helping in marriage, but I think,

01:36:16

I am at pains to say, the woman being called the helper of the man tells us vital truth about the nature and gifting of women.

01:36:26

Women are gifted in ways, frankly, that are hard to sum up all that this comes to be.

01:36:34

Women are gifted to help. Women are gifted to, the common term we use in Christian circles is nurture, which basically means develop living things, sustain living things, bring living things to flowering and fruition, and you see that, of course, we know that a major part of that helping ability, that nurturing capacity is through childbearing and child raising.

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That's a major area of gifting God has given to women, and again, it's hard to even map out all the ways that a

01:37:11

God -glorifying woman nurtures life and brings her children to flourishing and all the emotional connection and all the physical connection and all the handling of difficult problems and all the ways she makes a home and sets it up and brings beauty into it and creates an environment that if it was led by men would be very utilitarian and pragmatic and bare bones, and there probably wouldn't be a lot of flowers and a lot of beauty in the home and a lot of cultivation of the surroundings, but the woman comes into this and helps.

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And the woman also helps in spiritual terms. She is, I believe, made to be, at least in ideal terms, made to be a wise voice in her husband's life.

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She is supposed to help him. That's not a threat to his manhood. That's not a threat to his leadership.

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That's a blessing of God that she would have God -given wisdom and she would bring that to bear on all sorts of things that the couple faces together.

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In a sinful world, we've already talked about the fall of Genesis 3. Don't misunderstand. A woman is going to be tempted not to submit to her husband, and she's going to be tempted to take over the home, at least that's going to be a common temptation.

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That's what the Lord God tells us. He tells the man and the woman that, just as he tells the man the man's temptation.

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One of them is going to be to be domineering and harsh to his wife, as we talked about prior. So it's a real thing, as feminism calls for, for women to try and usurp their husband, wear down their husband, harangue their husband, be upset with their husband at all times.

01:38:55

He's never doing things right. These kind of dynamics are out there and alive and sadly well, and they are poisonous, and tragically, feminism like bad manhood has had a major effect on our world, and even before the ideology of feminism, just that unruly, unsubmissive spirit of a woman, it's caused a lot of damage.

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Just as men have caused a lot of damage. That's not what God has called the woman to be.

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But God also hasn't called the woman to be, as I'm at pains to say, mute and thoughtless and agency -less in the home.

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And so the woman being a helper as a reality, there's so much to say about it, but in fundamental terms, it means that we in the church honor womanhood.

01:39:44

We know that women bring all sorts of skills and abilities to the table, and we know in the context of marriage, for example, and marriage in the home and the kids, wow there is so much that women are gifted uniquely of God to do, and we love that, and we celebrate that and celebrating that is not squishy, or weird, or bad that is what we should do, because as I am at pains to say,

01:40:11

God's design is beautiful. We are just surrounded by the perversions of God's design and the attacks on God's design, and we ourselves struggle to live out

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God's design, even as regenerate people. But God's design is good, and God's design is good for us, and I pray that your church, and any other churches represented here,

01:40:37

I think you're mostly from this church, but any other churches represented here will show this to the world.

01:40:44

Hey, we have a missionary moment right now. Every Christian marriage is a missionary marriage.

01:40:52

Every Christian family is a missionary family. In fact, it's one of the best ways to be a witness in a fallen world.

01:41:01

Every single man or woman who is living to the glory of God is a missionary single.

01:41:08

Because there is so much chaos and brokenness and fallenness all around us in marriage and family and even the marriages that are intact, even the couples who are still married, there's just a lot of chaos and wreckage out there.

01:41:25

There's a lot of unshepherded, undiscipled, unloved kids out there.

01:41:32

And just to have Christian homes, you don't have to be superstar husbands and wives, superstar dads and moms, you just need to be normal Christian men and women, that's what we all need to be, that's what we are, and that's what we need to be.

01:41:43

The world doesn't need spectacular all -stars as husbands and wives. The world needs men and women who are saved of God and by the power of God are striving to live out this glorious design that we're talking about.

01:41:57

And that will be evangelistic. That will be powerful in this community, in this region, in this state.

01:42:07

Just being a husband and wife who love each other and through thick and thin forgive each other.

01:42:17

Even that, you may say, our communication isn't great. We're not always living in flowers and roses on a daily basis in terms of this marriage.

01:42:29

We've had some ups and downs with parenting. We've had some challenges. You may have raised your kids. Your kids may be out of the house.

01:42:35

There may be even be some regrets about that. There may be some hard things. You may not have a great relationship with all of your kids.

01:42:41

But I'm here to say that God uses those kind of people.

01:42:47

You actually weirdly are almost more equipped to minister to fellow sinners.

01:42:54

If you yourself have battled sin, God doesn't need perfect unscarred people to go out and reach the world.

01:43:00

And too bad you guys messed it up. You would have had it if you had a perfect marriage and a perfect family like you were supposed to.

01:43:06

But now you can't really be a witness. No, it's those of us who have a testimony. It's marriages where you are battling to stay in the game together, to keep loving each other.

01:43:16

It's when you're having to forgive each other through small things, medium things and some big things that you now have a testimony to bring to people.

01:43:23

That's how God has set this all up. God wants us forgiven sinners to go to other sinners and not say

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I'm better than you and I have it figured out and you are a stinker. God wants us to say

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I'm just like you. I've messed a lot up too. I need

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God to save me just like you do. And I have good news. God will save you and God will work in you just like he's working in me.

01:43:53

If having chaos and turmoil in your past at any level disqualifies you from being a witness, then the

01:44:01

Apostle Paul never should have been in ministry should he? Because the Apostle Paul helped kill people in the name of God.

01:44:08

But part of why the Apostle Paul is so important for us is that the Apostle Paul demonstrates really the key principle of the whole

01:44:16

Bible. The forgiveness principle. The principle that we're just a sinner who needs grace and God gives it to us and then

01:44:26

God changes us for his glory. And so if you, even now I mean even today at this conference, if your marriage and family isn't in the perfect place, you can pray and God can grow in that marriage and work in your family and work in your home and God can heal things with kids who are estranged.

01:44:44

And that can actually be not you and your husband or your wife or your family being set to the side, living in shame and sadness.

01:44:56

That can actually now be you and your loved ones going. We're no longer living under the delusion of perfection.

01:45:04

We're no longer trying to make everybody around us think we didn't drive to church and we didn't get into a mild disagreement that husband and wife are then doing the whisper disagreement.

01:45:15

Some of you know about this, maybe a couple of you. No, I thought we were going to park in the other lot.

01:45:22

You said that we were going to have the kids wear their glasses today. Oh, okay, well

01:45:28

I misunderstood that. The kids are going, Daddy, Mommy, are you guys okay? And you're going, yes, we're doing great.

01:45:34

How are you guys doing? And then you pull up to the church and your wife is like, okay, well I guess we'll just do it this way.

01:45:39

And you say, okay, that sounds good. And then you walk into church smiling and holding hands together, right? No one's ever had that experience

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I'm sure in this room. We all have. We all have.

01:45:52

We need a lot more realism and honesty in our marriages, in our families, and in our churches.

01:45:59

We need to not approach each other as if we're all batting a thousand on the legalistic scale.

01:46:05

And we need to be real with each other. Our marriages aren't perfect. Wives can be unsubmissive.

01:46:12

Husbands can be too strong or too weak. And we need to then press into that with one another and say, you know, you look like you might have had a hard morning.

01:46:22

Are you guys okay? Not like are you about to, you know, drive to Spokane TV station and, you know, enact divorce proceedings in front of the watching world, but like are you guys okay today, you know, kind of mid -level.

01:46:33

Let's talk through that. You don't always need to say everything is great. Everything's great.

01:46:40

You can actually say to a brother or sister in Christ, yeah, we've had a rough morning.

01:46:46

It's been a little challenging. And you can say that not merely when you're 26 and you're newlywed. You can say that when you're 43.

01:46:52

You can say that when you're 55. You can say that when you're 70. I don't know if the 70 -year -olds really need to say that because you guys do seem like you're doing pretty good, but you may need to say that, honestly, and that's okay.

01:47:04

I'm not Mr. Squish, but it's okay to not be okay all the time. And sometimes people, especially women, sometimes women are trying to hold everything together and things aren't ideal, and they hold it together and they hold it together until they break.

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And that's not good. And so I'm not advocating some weird secular psychotherapy.

01:47:26

I'm trying to say do the biblical thing and be real about sin and real about your need for grace and real about the need for help.

01:47:35

Sometimes men, we don't want to get help. We don't want counseling. We don't want to talk to a wise older couple because we feel like we've failed in the, we have a great life sweepstakes, and like, man, oh, we're not one of those couples.

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I've never had to go to marriage counseling with my wife. No, we're in the good box. Those other couples, they've had to get help, and they're actually in the dependent box.

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I'm over here in the independent box. Some of us men need to humble ourselves, and we may not need crisis counseling, praise

01:48:07

God if that's true. You may, though. You may need that, and if you do, get it. Get it.

01:48:13

But you may also just need regular kind of discipleship instruction, and that's normal.

01:48:21

We've got to normalize the body caring for the body, and people speaking into one another's,

01:48:29

I don't mean every last little thing, but at least at the level of encouraging each other and being real.

01:48:36

Yes, we preach the ideal. Yes, we preach the design of God, but we also know we're not going to hit it at all times, and we need

01:48:45

God's grace and God's forgiveness, and we even need the sheep. We even need people to speak into our marriages.

01:48:53

We need people to speak into our parenting. We're not perfect parents. We don't have it all right.

01:48:58

We need feedback from godly couples in the church who say, do you need a little help training your child to be obedient in a loving way, but obedient because I don't know, do you know how to do that?

01:49:10

And we need to be honest enough and humble enough to say, I could use some help here. That's not you failing,

01:49:16

Christian. That's you being a person who needs God's grace.

01:49:23

We need women who understand themselves as helpers, just as we need men who understand themselves as leaders, protectors, and providers.

01:49:31

Third, the woman of God has plenty to do. She has plenty to do in the Bible. I'm moving now out of Genesis, and I'm in Proverbs 31.

01:49:39

I can't read the whole chapter. That would be a wonderful thing to do. Let me just quickly spritz through several realities of the

01:49:46

Proverbs 31 woman. Don't hear me reading the Proverbs 31 as, women, this is everything you should be doing, and you're probably not, and so you're failing.

01:49:56

Hear the Proverbs 31. Read the Proverbs 31 not as an indictment upon you women, and not as you going to your girls as they're 12 to 16 and going, you better be all these things all the time.

01:50:08

Hear this instead as a celebration. You understand? Please hear this. Hear this as a celebration of godly womanhood.

01:50:17

Okay? You may not do everything she does. That's not the point. It's not an imperitival section.

01:50:23

There's not commands in it. It's like a beautiful painting. It's like a beautiful painting of godly womanhood in action.

01:50:32

It doesn't mean you do everything she does. It does mean that god celebrates biblical womanhood.

01:50:39

God loves womanhood. That's what it means. Verse 15, she rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens.

01:50:48

So she works very hard. She's a hard worker. It's not the case that men work and women don't work.

01:50:55

It's not the case that because men might be the provider, as I think we are called to be, and we earn the salary, at least most of it, women can contribute in different seasons and we have some gray areas and some

01:51:06

Christian freedom, but fundamentally it's not that the woman doesn't work if she doesn't earn a salary. She works hard.

01:51:13

Work does not equal salary earning as in our Marxist system.

01:51:20

That is not true. Some of the most valuable work done on planet Earth does not draw a penny.

01:51:27

A woman who is working day and night to raise, keep alive, and feed little children isn't drawing a salary from anyone that I'm aware of.

01:51:38

You don't become a millionaire by having a bunch of kids. Kind of goes the opposite direction.

01:51:44

Doesn't it? Yes. But that is just about some of the most valuable work on planet

01:51:50

Earth. Work that has no salary attached to it. So men are called to work hard. Men are called to be hard workers.

01:51:58

And women are called to work hard by God. God honors hard working women in this celebratory way in Proverbs 31.

01:52:06

She makes wise decisions. Look next at Proverbs 31, 16. She considers a field and buys it with the fruit of her hands.

01:52:13

She plants a vineyard all throughout the scripture as we were talking about with planting gardens in Jeremiah 29.

01:52:19

Wherever there are gardens being planted or vineyard here, there's celebration, there's joy, there's happiness.

01:52:26

My wife and daughters got one of those little box gardens in the backyard.

01:52:32

We're in the suburbs and so we don't have a lot of gardening territory. But we've got a little one.

01:52:39

And even that speaks to things being cultivated and nourished and brought to life.

01:52:44

That's what the Proverbs 31 woman is doing. She considers a field and buys it there in verse 16.

01:52:50

This isn't a play -by -play of commands upon Christian women. This is a celebration.

01:52:55

It's a portrait and it's showing us that the man, the godly man, trusts in his wife to make decisions.

01:53:02

There's an over -correction going on right now in conservative evangelical and reform circles where again, as I've said, men over -control.

01:53:10

They're domineering. They're making every decision for their wife or they're following behind her. Why did you make that purchase?

01:53:16

Why did you spend $2 at Target? Why did you spend $1 at Come and Go? You know, that sort of thing. A Christian man is shepherding and leading his home including financially, yes.

01:53:28

And he may have to speak into certain things. But this guy, this dude, trusts his wife.

01:53:34

Trusts his wife. She considers a field and buys it. Don't shoot your arrows at me.

01:53:40

That's the word of God saying she does these things. Of course she's doing these things with her husband. We can infer, right?

01:53:47

That'd be an interesting conversation. Honey, I bought, you know, a million dollars worth of property in Alaska today.

01:53:52

Okay, I don't think that's exactly what Robert Stoneman is saying. But nonetheless, I think you understand the point.

01:53:58

Verse 22, she makes bed coverings for herself. Her clothing is fine linen and purple.

01:54:04

We kind of sometimes have a poverty mindset in the church where you're not supposed to have anything nice. It's bad to have nice things.

01:54:11

There's sort of an undercurrent of that in some conservative evangelical churches. In this text, the

01:54:18

Proverbs 31 woman is actually kind of nicely clothed. I don't think she's sinning, obviously.

01:54:23

The Bible's celebrating this. This doesn't mean on the basis of this weird theologian coming into town this weekend ladies go out and, you know, buy up Nordstrom Rack or whatever it is.

01:54:33

Is that a thing? Nordstrom Rack? Or Pinterest things? Or I'm going to stop and not try to do that.

01:54:39

Whatever it is that is nice clothing in your mind, I'm not saying go empty the checkbook.

01:54:44

I am saying that this woman's home is a home of beauty and refinement. This is praise.

01:54:52

This is praise of a godly woman. They're clothed like royalty, honestly.

01:54:58

Now we know, of course, we should be careful with our money, and we know we should do things like save wisely, and we know 1

01:55:06

Peter's going to talk about women not adorning themselves in a gaudy kind of way, attention -drawing way.

01:55:12

So there's different texts to bring in, but this text at least honors women who bring beauty to the home and have the instinct to beautify the home.

01:55:22

That is a God -given thing that women do. Her core is character.

01:55:28

Verse 25. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.

01:55:34

That's not because she's living a self -driven life and she, unlike you ladies, is so strong in herself that she, in God, laughs at the time to come.

01:55:45

It's that God has worked in this woman, and God is working in this woman, and she doesn't fear the future.

01:55:51

It's not because of her. It's because of God saving her and changing her and transforming her, and now, unlike so many women around her, she doesn't live gripped by anxiety.

01:56:05

She doesn't live in the thrall of fear. Instead, because God is her

01:56:13

God, and God is a big God, and God is a kind God, now she can laugh at the days to come.

01:56:23

That's not a slash at your tires, ladies. That is an encouragement to you to pray to God to make you that kind of woman more and more by His grace.

01:56:36

She teaches her children, verse 26, she opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

01:56:45

She's a teacher. There's a lively discussion in evangelical circles about women teaching and women preaching, and there's lines to draw here, but fundamentally, in the context of the home, many of us complementarian men are just men who are trying to practice biblical manhood and are doing so imperfectly, but we want our wives to teach.

01:57:06

We're not trying to shut teaching down in the home in that sense. We understand we need to be the shepherd of the home, not in a formal, but in an informal way, but we want our wives to be godly women, and we want that godliness to be transmitted to our kids.

01:57:21

My wife is, in fact, homeschooling our kids. You have freedom there. You have Christian freedom with what you do with education.

01:57:27

You can do different things, but at this stage, we're doing that, and I am grateful that I can come home at the end of a day and know that this godly woman has transmitted godliness to my kids.

01:57:35

Praise God for that. What an incredible blessing that is. Last thing, she shows us true beauty.

01:57:45

Last thing to say. There's so much more, but she shows us true beauty. Verse 30, charm is deceitful, beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the

01:57:53

Lord is to be praised. Women are often those who battle with the desire to be beautiful and seen as charming by the world.

01:58:05

You can absolutely easily lose your soul on social media today.

01:58:10

You can do that man or woman alike, young man or young woman, but wow, because of how girls and women often struggle with body image and beauty, social media needs to be handled very carefully with girls and young women because it can easily, so easily become about comparison and not measuring up and all sorts of problems that then result.

01:58:36

Don't just, whatever you do, don't just hand your girls a phone and assume all's going to go well.

01:58:42

If your teens have a phone, fathers, not just mothers, fathers, you have to be plugged in, you have to be engaged.

01:58:50

You probably need some controls on that phone. That is a good form of control. You need to have an ongoing conversation with your kids about what they're seeing and what they're thinking.

01:59:00

I've had so many wise counselors say to me, the key with your kids is not first and foremost the rules you write on a chalkboard in your home.

01:59:09

There can be some rules, but the key is a gospel driven home and then flowing out of that is all sorts of healthy communication.

01:59:20

I don't know about you, as I go in life, I'll wrap this session up in just a minute, as I go through life,

01:59:26

I think communication really is almost the key to so much. Flowing out of the

01:59:31

Word of God, flowing out of the design of God, I mean, according to these biblical truths, but a husband and wife communicating, communicating, a lot of communication.

01:59:41

Isn't it amazing how much communication it takes to have a healthy marriage? Isn't it incredible?

01:59:46

Do you ever just stop and go, how much more can we talk about this marriage? We have talked about everything.

01:59:52

It takes more and more and more and more. I think that the same is true with parenting, fatherhood and motherhood.

01:59:58

So much of the key is not just your kids being silent and over here and doing their thing and you assuming all is well.

02:00:05

So much of the key, as a father or mother, is you getting communication going. Not just once a week, but regular communication.

02:00:12

An honest communication that, yes, is spiritual communication, but communication that helps your kids understand that you know that they're just like you.

02:00:21

You know that they're a sinner battling sin, and that's normal. So if there's ever sin in their life, you can deal with that.

02:00:27

You can handle that. You can talk them through that. Here's how God will work in you to help you with that.

02:00:32

And so you're trying to communicate with your kids honestly, but spiritually, and you want them talking to you.

02:00:40

And you have to go after them and have that back and forth. And it's not going to be perfect. And it's not going to be ideal.

02:00:47

And some days they don't want to talk. And some days you're in a bad mood. And so let's adjust the equation for reality.

02:00:55

But fundamentally we need so much communication. Husband to wife.

02:01:01

Wife to husband. Father to kids. Mother to kids. Kids to father and mother.

02:01:08

Honest, biblical, healthy communication. I'm struggling with this.

02:01:13

I need help with this. What did you see on your friend's tablet? What are your friends talking about?

02:01:20

What have they been watching? Why do you think that's not a good thing to watch? Why do you think that is a good thing for us to just,

02:01:27

I mean, 10 ,000 things we need to talk about. And that's so much of where these dynamics play out.

02:01:35

Fourth reality. We're almost done. Fourth reality. The woman of God respects her husband.

02:01:42

Ephesians 5, moving ahead to the New Testament. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the

02:01:48

Lord. And then verse 33, let each one of you men love his wife as himself in that Christ -life self -sacrificial way.

02:01:58

And let the wife see that she respects her husband.

02:02:04

If there are some challenges in your marriage, there's a bunch of things to do. Men need to love their wife in a

02:02:11

Christ -like way. They need to pray for that. That's no easy thing, but God will help us to do it. And then wives need to think hard about, am

02:02:20

I, let me change the pronoun, am I respecting my husband? Does he feel not just like he can make the decision and I will be quiet and go with it.

02:02:33

Does he feel respected? Verse 33, she respects her husband. Does he feel respected by me?

02:02:41

Am I showing respect toward him? Am I showing honor to him? 1

02:02:46

Peter 3 indicates that that is part of how a godly woman trapped in a marriage to an unconverted harsh man, that's how she's going to help win him to Christ by the grace of God.

02:02:59

Not by going toe to toe with him and battling him into the kingdom, but actually by showing respectful loving submission.

02:03:08

Actually by honoring him where she can. Not in sin, don't misunderstand. Don't follow a wicked husband into sin.

02:03:15

Don't submit to sin. Just like with the government. Submit to the government as much as you possibly can, but not where the government calls you to sin or violate your conscience.

02:03:25

It's the same thing in marriage. Same thing in marriage. So a godly wife respects her husband.

02:03:31

Can I encourage you? Talk about this honestly but lovingly, carefully together, husband and wife.

02:03:38

Honey, do you feel like I love you in a Christ -like way? Let me reverse that.

02:03:44

Honey, do you feel like I respect you in an Ephesians 5 -like way? Okay, well maybe there's going to be some yes and some no.

02:03:52

How can we grow in this? How can I love you better as my wife? How can I respect you more as my husband?

02:03:57

Not in an angry way. Not in raised voices. Not in shouting. But in calm conversation.

02:04:04

Brew the coffee. Sit out on the deck. You certainly have the advantage of natural beauty all around you here for your conversations.

02:04:11

And just sit out there and talk. Get a couple hours and just talk.

02:04:18

You might be amazed at what comes from that. And then at the end hold hands and pray together.

02:04:25

It doesn't have to be anything fancy. And then schedule it again for a couple days from now.

02:04:31

And then schedule some time with each of your kids to do the same thing. Pour some apple juice.

02:04:37

Get some fruity pebbles. I don't know what this is. I don't know where I'm going. But you know, sit out there and talk.

02:04:43

And then pray with them. Very, very simple. Okay, I've got to go to my last truth here.

02:04:51

The woman of God has a gentle and quiet spirit. 1 Peter 3. I'm going to close with this. Gentle and quiet spirit.

02:04:57

A gentle and quiet spirit doesn't mean that all Christian women have the same personality. I don't believe. I think it goes back to that Proverbs 31 woman.

02:05:07

And the God -centered fearlessness she has about her life. She does not fear what is before her.

02:05:18

She does not live in anxiety. She lives in by the grace of God, imperfectly,

02:05:25

God -centered trust. And the gentle and quiet spirit she has in 1

02:05:32

Peter 3 .4. Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

02:05:43

That context is with an unbelieving husband, which is, for a Christian woman, some of you may be in this position, that can be a fearful reality because you're under a man who doesn't love

02:05:58

Jesus and who doesn't repent of his sin. And that's not a fake challenge.

02:06:05

That's a very real challenge. But Peter is saying, in that context, don't live gripped by fear and anxiety at your core.

02:06:16

And you're not eating and you're not sleeping well and you're gripped.

02:06:21

Your life is a fearful, anxious life. That's a temptation. Instead, unburden yourself to God.

02:06:30

Cling to God. Depend on God. Pray to God when you feel fearful, as you will.

02:06:37

And God will help you trust Him by the power of His Spirit. And that will then, as we conclude, that will then result in a demeanor that is very different from women who are not saved.

02:06:54

Women who are not born again. Women who do not have the Holy Spirit living in them, helping to bear the fruit of the

02:06:59

Spirit, Galatians 5, 22 -23. It's not that you're going to stand out because you're some perfect rules follower. You're legalistically batting a thousand, as I've already said.

02:07:07

It's because these women, sadly, are not saved and they don't have that peace, the peace of salvation.

02:07:14

And you, by God's sheer grace and grace alone, you are saved. And so even though you too, like them, have challenges and trials and hard issues before you, you are known by God and you are loved by God and you are forgiven by God eternally.

02:07:31

God loves you. And that's the gentle and quiet Spirit that will come forth in you, even though the days are evil.

02:07:40

Let me pray. Father, these realities that we're talking about, these are serious things and in a sense it's easy to stand up here and talk about them, but the harder reality for me and for everyone in this room is to live these things.

02:07:58

Thank you, though. Thank you, Father, that your grace is perfectly suited for our good and your glory.

02:08:07

So here's my prayer, Father. My prayer is that whatever's represented in this room, in terms of challenges and trials and not living up to the biblical ideal for men and women alike, young men and women alike, boys and girls alike, my prayer is that by your grace you will change us, you will transform us, you will take what is unhealthy and you'll make it healthy.

02:08:28

Where there is bitterness and a lack of communication, you'll bring forgiveness and open communication.

02:08:35

And I pray that the families of this church will thrive, not by their own efforts, but by the power of your grace.

02:08:43

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Eleven o 'clock.

02:08:50

Sorry for the six minutes. My last session, I'll end it sooner. Thank you for praying for my voice.

02:16:01

A number of you have told me you are. I appreciate that. God's strength is magnified in our weakness.

02:16:07

It's not that we're not called to be strong in God, but it is that our strength is powered by God through our own weakness.

02:16:16

And that is very much true of me. And by the way, again, I will sign any book you want me to sign.

02:16:24

I may sit at that table right there and put a chair behind it and just sign books.

02:16:29

If you want your book signed, you may not want your book signed. It will decrease the value of the book. It's like driving the car off the lot at the car dealership.

02:16:38

The minute you drive it off the lot, it goes down like $7 ,000 or something like that. Unless you have a

02:16:44

Miata -like squirrel, in which case, Miata's never die. But I will sign anything you want me to sign at lunchtime.

02:16:55

In this session, we're going to transition a little bit, and now we're going to think about Satan's anti -design.

02:17:02

So we have been talking about God's design. Thank you for your attention, by the way. I'm throwing a lot at you this morning, and this is not lo -fi content.

02:17:13

My wife tells me I'm fire -hosey. That's a term you can use. I'm kind of fire -hosey.

02:17:19

So I appreciate you bearing up under all this material. We're going to talk now in this session about paganism.

02:17:27

And this reminds us that we're not just up against the sexual revolution. We're up against something much bigger than just the

02:17:35

American sexual revolution, which is a massive cultural force. What we're up against is much more ancient than the sexual revolution, as it's often called.

02:17:48

It's a system I call paganism. And we're going to define this as we go.

02:17:54

What I want to do with you is just a few things. We're going to look first at Romans 1, 18 -32.

02:18:02

Because I believe it's in Romans 1 that Paul gives us a biblical unpacking of paganism.

02:18:10

Basically, living according to your flesh. That's what paganism is in a really succinct form.

02:18:18

If someone's a pagan, they don't walk in the ways of God. They walk according to the flesh.

02:18:23

Now, if someone's a Christian, they've been freed from the power of the flesh. They're no longer a slave to sin.

02:18:31

Romans 6, is this sounding familiar? If you are in Christ, if you're born again, you're no longer a slave to sin.

02:18:38

Not because of your own effort, or your own will, or your own concentrated powers. Because of the work of God. Because of the work of the warrior

02:18:45

Savior, Jesus Christ, who by His blood has overcome the power of sin on your behalf.

02:18:51

And now that has come to fruition in you, as the Spirit has regenerated you and given you a new heart.

02:18:58

And now you've trusted Christ by faith, and you've repented of your sin.

02:19:04

Not as a work that you and I do. Not as a merit based reality. But because that's what people regenerated by the

02:19:12

Spirit do. If you give a plant life, if you plant it in the ground, and water it, it lives.

02:19:21

That is not because the plant has performed good works that have made it live. That is because that is the nature of a plant.

02:19:28

In the same way, it is the nature of a Christian, it is the nature of somebody born again through the

02:19:34

Spirit to live, to trust Christ, and to repent of sin. And that then means that you have not just a calling to walk in a godly way, you want to walk in a godly way.

02:19:49

People who are truly born again don't have to be harangued or harassed into godly living.

02:19:55

We all have our ups and downs, as we've talked about. But fundamentally, born again people want to follow

02:20:00

Jesus because of the Spirit's work in our heart. That is really the fundamental marker of a

02:20:07

Christian, that you want 1 John, really the whole letter, you want to follow

02:20:13

Jesus because God has given you a love for Jesus. But a pagan has no such instincts.

02:20:22

A pagan has no regeneration that has happened. A pagan does not have the Holy Spirit, and so what a pagan wants to do is walk according to the flesh, live out the desires and passions of their sinful heart.

02:20:38

And that's not the people out there, that's all of us in our natural state. We're all naturally a pagan.

02:20:48

This is what Romans 1, 18 -32 maps. Let's turn there and consider now paganism.

02:20:56

Romans 1, 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

02:21:07

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely

02:21:13

His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

02:21:20

So they are without excuse. For although they, the Gentiles, knew God, they did not honor

02:21:25

Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

02:21:31

Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

02:21:40

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the

02:21:51

Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

02:21:57

For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women, and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men, and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

02:22:12

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

02:22:18

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

02:22:25

They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

02:22:36

Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

02:22:47

Let's pray. Father, as we turn to this portion of your word, and to the topic of paganism,

02:22:53

I pray that you would help us to understand and apply your truth for our good and your glory. In Jesus' name,

02:23:00

Amen. I will not attempt a full scale exegesis of these verses.

02:23:05

What I will do simply as we begin here is walk through and grab several key realities of this passage in order that we would understand the condition of sinful man with first reference to the group called

02:23:22

Gentiles. But in reality, what we will see is that even as the

02:23:28

Jews have fallen away from God, tragically, we all live in pagan ways naturally, and so this passage,

02:23:36

I believe, applies to lost people writ large. Lostness as a condition is expressed in verse 18 by suppressing the truth.

02:23:50

Suppressing the truth. It turns out, according to the Apostle Paul, that no one is an honest atheist.

02:23:59

Lots of people say they are, lots of people think they are, but in reality, verse 19, for every human person, what can be known about God, Paul says, is not obscured.

02:24:13

He says it is plain to them. It is plain to them.

02:24:19

And he goes on to say, the things of God, the existence of God, is plain to all people.

02:24:26

Why? Because God has shown it to them. God has made it very clear that he exists and that he is not the creature.

02:24:39

We are all a creature. He is the creator. God has made that clear.

02:24:45

Verse 20 goes on to unfold that further. His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been distorted in the world, right?

02:24:56

Is that what he says? No, have been clearly perceived for all time, ever since the creation of the world,

02:25:04

Paul writes, in the things that have been made, in the created order. So they are without excuse.

02:25:11

This tells us yes, that there are people who fall into a trap of atheism. There absolutely are, don't misunderstand me.

02:25:18

But there's nobody who is actually justified in atheism. People are not lacking proof about God.

02:25:27

People are not lacking evidence about God. They say they are, and they think they are, but they aren't.

02:25:34

Because God has clearly displayed his eternal power and his divine nature.

02:25:42

You can see it in the creation, in simplified form here. Living in this natural beauty, even as an unbeliever, you know at some level that you are not

02:25:56

God. And you know that there has to be a God to make this and sustain this.

02:26:01

That, in simplified form, is what Paul is saying. This is part of why, in seminary training and in the theological teaching

02:26:11

I do, I try to help people understand that our greatest burden with the unbeliever is not to convince them through proofs that God exists.

02:26:20

That's what Aquinas and others in the Catholic tradition argued, and there have been a number of evangelicals who have embraced that idea, and they spend a lot of energy and time trying to convince people of these proofs that God exists.

02:26:33

The proofs themselves, the five proofs, by the way, philosophically, are not necessarily bad. I'm happy to talk about them with an unbeliever.

02:26:41

But the fact that there is cause and effect in the world, for example, is not what

02:26:47

Paul identifies as what is needed to convince an unbeliever of the truth of the gospel.

02:26:53

The unbeliever knows that there's cause and effect. They know in some deep, buried sense in their heart that there can only be something because there has been a cause, and they know, according to these words, trust

02:27:07

Paul, not me, that they have seen proof in the creation that God exists.

02:27:15

So my duty, what I'm trying to say is this, and your duty as a Christian witness, isn't to get really philosophically smart as if you have to do that, and then handle all these philosophical matters.

02:27:30

Our duty is to point people to these truths and say, these things may be obscured in your own heart and your sight, but God is real.

02:27:41

God made you. God exists. God is the ruler of everything in this world.

02:27:47

And actually, fellow sinner who is made in the image of God, you know this.

02:27:54

You know that God exists. And you are actively right now suppressing the truth.

02:28:01

That's what verse 18 says. It says that unbelievers, look at the end of the verse, by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

02:28:11

It's not that they don't know the truth. I don't mean the gospel, but they don't know the creator exists.

02:28:18

They do know the creator exists. We all do. Every person does. It's not that we have an information problem, and we need a lot of philosophy podcasts to get us up to theistic levels.

02:28:32

It's that we have a suppression problem. We suppress what we know to be true.

02:28:41

As a result of all of this, we have become fools. Verse 22. Mankind would rather live as a fool than as a follower of God.

02:28:52

And not only that, verse 23 indicates that we all are worshipers.

02:28:58

Our hearts are made for worship. Your heart is not a little bitty Thomas the

02:29:03

Train steam engine. Your heart is a Japanese bullet train in terms of its power.

02:29:10

It really is. That's the worship capacity you have in your heart. Every person in this room, including these precious little babies, they have, developing of course, they have a capacity for worship that if you could somehow assess it, it would knock your socks off.

02:29:27

We have a speeding bullet train of worship in our heart. We are worshipful beings, and the question is not whether we will worship, as numerous theologians have pointed out, the question is what we will worship.

02:29:42

Everybody's worshiping something. A common target of our worship is ourselves.

02:29:52

That's probably the most common expression of worship in this sinful world.

02:29:58

But it's not the only one. We will worship just about anything, won't we?

02:30:04

You see, it's not that atheists worship nothing. It's that in our sinful condition we all will worship something.

02:30:13

And we can even end up worshiping everything, which means you worship nothing. But atheists don't have their worship capacity, like the little switch right here.

02:30:24

This is the worship switch, just so you know. Click! Their worship switch is not off, and ours as conservative

02:30:30

Christians is on. Click! It's on. No, it's that everybody's worship switch, click!

02:30:36

You get the sound effects for free. Everybody's worship switch is on. It's on at all times.

02:30:43

It's just a matter of what you'll worship. You worship self, you worship the person you find beautiful, you worship images resembling mortal man, you worship birds, creeping things, nature, rock bands, deprivation chambers, military heroes, celebrities, athletes, novelists, parents, children, and on it goes.

02:31:17

Everybody is worshiping something. We have very powerful worship capacities in us.

02:31:30

And to turn this around to positive news for just a second before we dive back into the darkness here, this helps us understand what happens when we are regenerated.

02:31:41

When we are regenerated, the bullet train is redirected. It's redirected away from hell and the realm of darkness and it is shot into the stratosphere to worship

02:31:53

God and Jesus Christ. You're a way bigger worshiper than you think you are.

02:32:01

Your capacity to worship God is way bigger than you know it to be and that is what your soul is made for.

02:32:10

Your soul isn't made for lesser things. C .S. Lewis is really, with Edwards, the best figure in the

02:32:16

Christian tradition at expressing this. I disagree with him about a few things, but nonetheless C .S.

02:32:22

Lewis understood in a powerful way just how full throttle the human heart is in its capacity for worship.

02:32:31

We don't have 42 horsepower in this heart. With apologies to those who love cars and car culture.

02:32:37

This is like, I shouldn't say the word Hellcat, I was going to say this is a Hellcat engine, but that's not good.

02:32:46

That's self -editing on the fly in public here. This is a Dodge Ram, you know, max horsepower 800 horsepower engine in us for worship.

02:32:58

So Christian, you weren't made for lesser things. You weren't made to worship humanity. You weren't made to worship an interest group.

02:33:05

You weren't made to worship a sport. You weren't made to worship the creation. You were made to worship God. You were made to worship an infinite being.

02:33:14

And that's where you will find joy, not when you worship yourself or this world, but when you worship

02:33:19

God. That's where all the joy is in worshiping God. Worship isn't just when there's singing up here.

02:33:26

That's great. That's a part of worship. That's a key part of worship the Bible teaches. But worship is all of life.

02:33:34

And our growth as a Christian is bit by bit, day by day, realizing that more and more and more.

02:33:44

Wait, my whole life is worship. It's not that I worship when

02:33:50

I go to church alone. That's corporate worship. That matters to God. It's very valuable. It's that all of life is worship.

02:33:57

You see, all of life is worship for the pagans. Do you understand that? That's what we're in.

02:34:05

We're not just in a culture that has featured different stages of the sexual revolution.

02:34:11

We're in a war of worship. And the question before us is, are the pagans going to out -worship us?

02:34:20

Or are we going to out -worship them? Said differently and slightly less contentiously, are we going to show the pagans that our

02:34:29

God is worth giving up their worship for the true worship of the living

02:34:34

God? And the answer is, to give you the answer key at the beginning of the test, yes!

02:34:41

This is the only reality worth worshiping, God in Christ.

02:34:47

And this world is not worth it at all. But they are worshiping too.

02:34:53

The smartest atheist with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge is a worshiper.

02:35:00

The celebrity who's living out the perfect blend of work -life balance and is doing all the juice cleanses imaginable and has the perfect airbrushed home and the kids sitting on the couch smiling, that celebrity on Instagram is worshiping.

02:35:16

We're all a worshiper. We're all a worshiper. It's just a matter of what we are worshiping.

02:35:23

The positive form of that, to understand, is that when you are born again, now again, all of life is worship.

02:35:33

And that doesn't just mean the easy parts of your life. That's how Christians tend to think. Quick word here and we go back to paganism.

02:35:39

We tend to think, when I'm happy, when my life is good, as I was saying some in the last session, then

02:35:45

I'm fitted for worship. Then I'm able to worship. No.

02:35:51

No, that's the wrong way to think, honestly. We all think it's the wrong way to think. Do you know some of the best opportunities for worship of the living

02:36:01

God? Do you know when they come? Suffering. Pagans worship in large part because they are getting to do what they want.

02:36:16

Their worship is dependent on their circumstances. Christians worship in good seasons and definitely worship

02:36:28

God in good seasons. Give thanks for all the good in your life. But Christians also worship

02:36:33

God in bad seasons. Christians don't just worship when it's the happy wedding day for their child or their kid is doing well and has become a missionary and moved overseas.

02:36:49

Something happy like this. Christians worship God when a child is sick and is not quickly healed.

02:37:02

Christians worship God, worship God when a child dies.

02:37:09

That's how far Christian worship goes. Christian worship unlike pagan worship isn't dependent or driven by your circumstances.

02:37:22

And that along with the end of worship God, that is the difference.

02:37:29

And that is a huge part of the witness we are supposed to provide to the world.

02:37:35

It's not just Billy Graham renting out stadiums 80 years ago and witnessing to people.

02:37:41

There was some good in that. Not all, but there was some good in that. But actually the normal form of witness we are supposed to provide as believers isn't anything fancy.

02:37:53

Most of us aren't going to be a globe traveling evangelist. The worship the world needs to see from us is worship that is expressed in good seasons, medium seasons, and bad seasons.

02:38:08

And don't underestimate how powerful that worship will end up being.

02:38:14

Some of you have seen this on social media. Just a quick word here. But there's a family. I believe their last names are the

02:38:20

Morgan family. They live in New Jersey. The husband is in Christian ministry. Strong ministry that he has.

02:38:28

Reformed guy. And went to Southern like I did. And they were just on a sabbatical, pastoral sabbatical, like four months off or something.

02:38:39

First sabbatical of his pastoral career. Pastors don't often get a lot of that, do they Jim? A lot of hard work in the pastoring.

02:38:47

Pastors need sabbaticals by the way. But I think they should have them. Anyway, they go to Maine to my home state.

02:38:54

Just happened to go there. I don't know this family or have any connection to them. But they go to Maine and they have just begun their sabbatical and the kids are playing and they're by the lake and everything is good.

02:39:06

This is days ago. This is all true. This is days ago. Like a week ago. And the kids are playing badminton or something like this in the backyard and there's some kind of terrible freak accident and a piece of the racket splinters and goes into the skull of a little girl named

02:39:22

Lucy. Lucy. This is pastor's daughter.

02:39:30

And so immediately the family swings into action and they go to Maine Medical Hospital.

02:39:37

I know Maine Med. In Portland, Maine. And over the next three days they storm heaven with their prayers and this pastor, last name of Morgan, asks for people to pray on social media and writes several blogs.

02:39:54

He wrote them days ago, hours ago. And long story short, just a couple days ago,

02:40:00

Lucy died. So this pastor and his wife are finally getting a break.

02:40:06

Finally getting a sabbatical. They go to a beautiful place to rest and relax and not have hardship happen.

02:40:13

That's the whole point. Pastors don't just need sabbaticals.

02:40:19

In some sense, Christian families all need them to some degree. So good for us.

02:40:24

That's what they were doing. But little Lucy in a freak accident that no one could have prevented, as I understand it, has part of a racket go into her skull and she dies.

02:40:36

And they have returned home from their vacation with one less child in the back seat.

02:40:44

That's their sabbatical. And they are crushed as you would be and I would be.

02:40:50

But here's the point. In everything this pastor has communicated, he's expressed trust and faith in God.

02:41:01

And so the worst possible moment in their life has become, you understand the point, it has become an opportunity for worship of the living

02:41:08

God. It has become in a way they never would have planned for, never would have asked for, an opportunity to worship

02:41:15

God. To show that God is greater than anything in this life and to show that even when circumstances truly are at zero of a hundred in terms of goodness, yet God is good.

02:41:30

Isn't that the message of the book of Job? Job loses everything including his children, his precious children.

02:41:37

He's a good father. He offers sacrifices for them in an old covenantal form of worship if they have done something and he doesn't know about it.

02:41:45

He's such a godly plugged in father. But even all that godly fatherhood does nothing to save his kids, their physical lives.

02:41:54

They're all killed. Satan attacks Job. Satan attacks Job's family in order that Job would curse

02:42:02

God and die. And that's exactly what Job's wife sadly says to him. She says in her own absolute despair, curse

02:42:11

God and die. And we all can understand hitting that low. Paul himself says in 2

02:42:17

Corinthians 1 .8 that he despaired of life itself at points in his ministry.

02:42:22

Paul knew going into the abyss and looking down it and almost walking off the cliff.

02:42:29

Paul knew that. It's not nihilistic to acknowledge that you can get to that place even as a believer.

02:42:38

Paul did. He despaired of life itself. That's dark. That's low.

02:42:44

He was right beside Job. He was right beside Daniel in the lion's den, shoulder to shoulder.

02:42:50

Have you gone there? Are you there? Has someone you know been in that pit?

02:42:57

Some of us may be called in days ahead to go to that pit and stand shoulder to shoulder with those men and many women we could name.

02:43:09

But the Christian by the grace of God does one thing different from the pagan.

02:43:16

The Christian worships God. The Lord gives and the

02:43:22

Lord takes away. Job says blessed be the name of the

02:43:28

Lord. That's worship. God work in us.

02:43:36

God work in us that we would offer that kind of testimony in that kind of darkness.

02:43:43

Some of you may have. Some of you may have done this. Praise God if you have. We are all worshippers.

02:43:52

The pagans, verse 25, have exchanged the truth about God for a lie and they worship and serve the creature rather than the creator.

02:44:01

The stakes are very high here. And then following the God giving them up in verse 24.

02:44:07

God has given up the pagans in the lust of their hearts to impurity. Verse 26 has a second giving up.

02:44:14

There's three in this passage. For this reason, verse 26, God gave them up to dishonorable passions and what follows there is all sorts of sexual aberration initially in a heterosexual form and then in a homosexual form in verse 27.

02:44:32

And because of that, verse 28, they did not acknowledge God. God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done and now follows a

02:44:43

Pandora's horrible box of every evil imaginable that floods the world.

02:44:49

And all of this is because they did not see fit to acknowledge

02:44:54

God. And that points us to just how high the stakes are with acknowledging

02:45:00

God and giving thanks to God and seeing the 14 ,999 instead of focusing on the one in our lives.

02:45:10

If ingratitude is allowed to seep into our life bit by bit by bit like a tide coming in as the day goes on imperceptibly, quietly.

02:45:21

If bitterness and anxiety is allowed to creep into our heart bit by bit by bit quietly, what will end up happening is that we will not acknowledge

02:45:30

God. We will not give thanks to God and we will not worship God.

02:45:37

The stakes are high as I am at pains to say. And all of this will mean that we have a debased mind and that is what paganism is militated to creating.

02:45:51

It wants to create a debased mind because behind paganism is not

02:45:57

God but is the anti -God, the devil. Behind these developments in American society that we've been talking about and will continue to talk about is not

02:46:11

God in terms of one who wants these things to happen. I mean God is sovereign over it all.

02:46:16

But the one who is wanting this wickedness to increase is the devil.

02:46:22

And so as the old biography of Martin Luther captured we are caught between God and the devil.

02:46:29

Every human person is. And it's a matter of whether we will worship and follow the devil or whether we will worship and follow

02:46:36

God. So, this is where we are. We are amidst the worship of mankind.

02:46:46

We are amidst worshippers of the flesh. It's not just that people are confused about their gender.

02:46:54

The body of ideology that is targeting our children and our college students is demonic ideology.

02:47:02

It is trying to get us to live out an alternate design of God's design.

02:47:10

We've talked about God's design for manhood and womanhood. We've talked about God's design for sex and sexuality already.

02:47:18

Satan's design is the opposite of all that. Satan doesn't teach one man, one woman marriage for life.

02:47:27

Satan teaches marriage can be anything you want it to be not just with one person but with any amount of people whoever they may be man or woman that you would prefer.

02:47:38

So God creates and Satan perverts. God creates and Satan twists.

02:47:46

Satan is fundamentally the twister. He is the one who doesn't necessarily undo creation.

02:47:54

He is the one who comes into creation and warps it. And he wants to warp the minds and the hearts of our young people today.

02:48:05

The Bible teaches biblical manhood. Satan teaches warped manhood where men are either too weak or too strong.

02:48:14

The Bible teaches biblical womanhood. A woman is a nurturer and a helper. But Satan teaches what we call today feminism which is not the biblical ideal of the woman.

02:48:26

The Bible teaches that sex is for marriage. But Satan teaches that you can enjoy sex with whomever you would like at any time.

02:48:36

The Bible teaches that there is one man, one woman. That there are two sexes. That's it in the creation and you can't change your

02:48:44

God given sex. But Satan says you can change your sex. Has God actually said there's just man and woman?

02:48:51

No. There's this thing called transgender. And there's many different gender identities.

02:48:57

And so however you perceive yourself to be, that is who you are.

02:49:03

The Bible teaches what we call heterosexuality as a design. But Satan teaches that homosexuality is good to the degree that, verse 32, back to Romans 1.

02:49:16

They know God's righteous decree. They know God's righteous decree. Paul says. That those who practice such things deserve to die.

02:49:25

The pagan knows that what they're doing deserves death. They know it. As they're celebrating pride month right now, don't be confused.

02:49:34

They know at some level that this is wrong and that it's the way of death.

02:49:40

But they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

02:49:48

What we are seeing with pride month is the flowering of this, isn't it?

02:49:54

Take pride in your flesh. Take pride in homosexuality. Take pride in transgenderism.

02:50:02

Take pride in polysexuality. Take pride in having sex with whoever you want to have sex with.

02:50:09

Excuse the direct language, but that is the flowering of paganism.

02:50:16

And this is the system of worship of paganism. This is how you worship according to Satan.

02:50:22

That's Satan's book. Worship according to the flesh. That's what he wants us all to practice.

02:50:35

This is nothing less than an ideology that culminates in basically a worldview.

02:50:43

It's a worldview. It's how people are being deceived to live.

02:50:50

All of this alternate worldview that I just mapped with all those differences, those distinctions, all of that is trying to get you to deny the goodness of God's design.

02:51:04

Where the gospel calls you to honor the goodness of God's design.

02:51:11

The gospel calls you to want to be a man to God's glory. The gospel calls you to want to be a woman to God's glory.

02:51:20

The gospel doesn't just call adults to this. The gospel calls 10 -year -olds and 13 -year -olds and 7 -year -olds and 18 -year -olds and 25 -year -olds to live for the glory of God.

02:51:34

The gospel makes us a worshiper of Jesus Christ. That's what the gospel does.

02:51:39

And in making us a worshiper of Jesus Christ, God overcomes the power of the flesh that Paul has mapped out in Romans 1.

02:51:48

You and I still have pagan instincts to different degrees.

02:51:54

Everyone in here, let's get real for a sec. Everyone in here has a certain wildness in the heart.

02:52:00

The heart is not a neat and tame reality. The heart is not a hallmark heart.

02:52:05

A little heart on a card. Now men do this in public. Like soccer players.

02:52:11

I like soccer. European soccer players will do this to the camera after they score a goal. And I'm like, I said to my kids the other day,

02:52:17

I try to be balanced and nuanced and I said men should not do the little heart in public. I'm sorry. I apologize for being a legalist, but I don't think that men should do a little heart in public.

02:52:27

You can do it to your daughter or something. Okay, anyway, let's move off of that. God's glory is in us living in these ways, but Satan has this alternate ideology and this alternate worldview that he wants us to live.

02:52:44

What should we do in this kind of context? I'm going to conclude this session earlier than I have a few of the others, so I'm going to just rip through five ways we respond to paganism.

02:53:00

Five ways we respond to paganism. As you're prepping that, hear that last thought.

02:53:06

Let me just say a quick word about that last thought. It's not just that the pagans have these instincts. It's that we have these instincts.

02:53:15

This is why you hear the reports about some pastor who has had a seemingly very sound ministry.

02:53:22

I don't mean in far off circles. I mean like in our circles. And all of a sudden his marriage blows up and he leaves his wife and children after 20 to 30 to 40 years in the

02:53:33

Christian ministry. And you're like, how could that happen? It can happen because he has a certain wildness in his heart that we have in our heart.

02:53:43

The power of sin is overcome by the cross of Christ. That's good news, but we have to live carefully, don't we?

02:53:52

Isn't that what Paul says to Timothy? Watch your life and doctrine closely.

02:54:00

This is a young man trained by an apostle. If anyone has good preloaded software, it's

02:54:06

Timothy, right? But the apostle Paul has mentored him. It's a pretty good CV reference for the church to call when you're interviewing for a pastorate.

02:54:15

Who are your references? Well, Jim from the next town over, this weird guy

02:54:23

Owen, and then the apostle Paul. Okay, all right, we'll call your references. Apostle Paul is a good reference.

02:54:28

It's to Timothy, Paul says, watch yourself, careful.

02:54:34

That's not because we are pagans as Christians.

02:54:40

That is because we still are battling the flesh. We're still battling it.

02:54:46

We all are battling it. All of us. A lot of sin to battle until we die, and we have to watch ourselves carefully.

02:54:55

We all have the seeds within us of our own destruction, man and woman alike, and that applies not just when we're young, but all throughout life.

02:55:05

So what do we do? What do we do? First, first, help people understand lies.

02:55:15

Help people understand they're living not under one lie, they're living under many lies today.

02:55:22

There are lots of lies that are being sold to us in America, in the West, in 2024.

02:55:29

And here is a major part of Christian witness, to calmly, temperately, steadily unpack those lies for people.

02:55:40

I don't mean in a shouting match at work, or your neighborhood. I mean as you get to know each other and you build a relationship as a

02:55:47

Christian witness, you're talking things through and they say, well, I just think it's wonderful now that we've moved into a more inclusive society.

02:55:55

And you say, ah, what do you mean by that? How do you define inclusivity? Do we include everything? Do we include pedophilia in what we affirm today?

02:56:04

Do we include, you know, murder? What are the limits of inclusivity? Are there any limits as you understand this?

02:56:11

And then as the conversation goes on, in steadiness and love, you are clear, you look back at this person made in the image of God and you say, these are lies.

02:56:21

These are lies that we've been fed. These are not true. This is not God's truth that you're believing.

02:56:27

Some of you know the story of Rosaria Butterfield. Who knows that name? Just quickly. Rosaria Butterfield, quick example of this, professor of queer theory.

02:56:38

How about paganism there? At Syracuse University, massive platform, very gifted woman, very smart.

02:56:44

Hundreds and hundreds of students in her classes. And this local pastor reaches out to her through a variety of circumstances and Rosaria ends up, she's a curious person, so she's like,

02:56:55

I'll go talk to a Presbyterian pastor even though I'm as far away from that as I can possibly be. And they end up starting a friendship.

02:57:01

They have dinner multiple times. She comes to his house, Christian Hospitality, and involved in gospel witness there.

02:57:08

And long story short, through a very winding process, this professor of queer theory is born again.

02:57:17

The kind of person you look at and you're like, they're never gonna cross the line of faith. I don't have the resources.

02:57:25

Maybe like some apologist out there that we could fly in. That guy could be a witness maybe to these people, but this person but not me.

02:57:33

No. No. No. It's not about your background. It's not about your credentials.

02:57:38

It's not about your qualifications. It's about the power of the gospel. It's about the spirit in you.

02:57:44

So, that's a wonderful example of how that pastor didn't just share the gospel, he did, but he walked through lies.

02:57:55

He exposed the lies of godless ideologies. That's what Paul talks about in 2

02:58:01

Corinthians 10, 3 -6. We destroy strongholds, he says. We destroy strongholds.

02:58:08

Destroying strongholds is walking people through the lies Satan has entrapped around them.

02:58:16

Like those horrible, horrible, horrible spiders. Massive spiders in the Lord of the

02:58:21

Rings movies that you can barely stay in the room. You're like, Peter Jackson made these spiders.

02:58:27

So freaky. We want to introduce our kids to the Lord of the Rings films, but I have one daughter who is so freaked out,

02:58:33

I don't know that she's gonna come back from seeing these spiders. So, we're still, we're delayed. But anyway, we have to do that unpacking work because people are not living free and clear and living their life in actuality.

02:58:47

People are trapped in a spiderweb, a spiderweb of Satan's making, and they're in thick, and they can't get out.

02:58:56

And so we come to them with the sword of truth, Ephesians 6, and we slash that spiderweb in love to get them out as God works.

02:59:04

Second, we have to help people understand lies. Second, we have to show the distinctness of Christianity.

02:59:11

We have to show the beautiful distinctness of Christianity. We've talked about this at length,

02:59:18

I won't go into it here. But that's where the doxological effect of our life takes place.

02:59:25

That's where you're worshipping God not just when you go to a worship service, but you're worshipping

02:59:30

God by living a Christian life in your community, in your neighborhood, around your peers, around your co -workers at school.

02:59:37

That's what is needed. We don't need a Christian prince. We don't need a huge celebrity to come and make

02:59:45

America right. We don't need ten more Billy Grahams. I mean, God may give who

02:59:51

He may give. If He gives us an amazing evangelist in this generation, praise God. But that's not what the

02:59:57

New Testament tells us to expect. Do you know what our world needs? Do you know what America needs?

03:00:02

It needs a whole lot of Christians who are normal, steady people who just live a Christian life. That's what's needed.

03:00:09

But I don't just mean the ideal. Do what's right, Christian. I mean people who make clear to fellow sinners,

03:00:16

I'm just a forgiven person. I've taken to saying that in our family times when we read

03:00:24

Scripture and we have some song nights in my home. And I'm trying to help my kids understand.

03:00:31

Christians are not perfect people. Christians are forgiven people.

03:00:38

That's a Christian. A forgiven person. And so we need to help people around us who are not forgiven understand the line between them and us is not we're really consecutively performing righteous people.

03:00:53

It's forgiveness. We've got to show the beautiful distinction of Christianity in love.

03:01:00

Third, we need healthy churches that preach these truths in love.

03:01:06

We need healthy churches that preach these truths in love. Churches that aren't fundamentally angry at the world and scared of the world.

03:01:15

There's a lot that is fearful in this world. We need something better than fearful

03:01:21

Christians. We need Christians anchored in the truth of God who are secure in God so they can go out and they can be salt and light.

03:01:32

Fourth, we need Christians who see themselves as salt and light. Individually.

03:01:37

I just talked about that. But just to line it out here. We need Christians who see themselves as salt and light.

03:01:47

When you see a skittle -haired person. When you see somebody who is clearly transgressing the bounds of their

03:01:54

God -given sex. You know, you've got kids. Your kids will nudge you. Dad, is that a man dressing like a woman?

03:02:01

The way you respond is so important because it is right to see that as not good at all.

03:02:08

To see that as pagan rebellion. Fleshly rebellion. That's Satan's system.

03:02:13

That person is living in. Make no mistake about it. Call a spade a spade. But what you're trying to train your kids to understand is not that, oh get out of the restaurant now!

03:02:23

That what you're trying to help kids understand is hopefully we can talk to this person. Hopefully we can befriend this person.

03:02:32

Hopefully we can invite this person to church. Hopefully they'll show up and hear the Word preached. That's success.

03:02:39

That's faithfulness. That's salt and light. There won't be a shred, as point one tried to articulate, of buying into that person's system.

03:02:49

We won't affirm their sin. One bit. Just like we don't want our sin affirmed. Right? But what we do want to do is be like Jesus, who was called the friend of sinners.

03:03:05

And I'm going to cut it straight with you right now in our Reformed community. We don't have enough of this right now.

03:03:11

We have a lot of the instinct to withdraw from the world. To not go to Disney. To boycott this outlet.

03:03:18

To cut the cord with Netflix. And some of those things maybe we should do. That's Christian freedom. That's liberty.

03:03:24

You may have very good reasons for taking some of those actions. Certainly there's a lot we don't watch and there's a lot of places we don't go as believers.

03:03:30

Right? Absolutely that's true. But we have too much withdraw instinct and not enough engage instinct.

03:03:40

Don't buy the lies of the culture. But you and I are called to press into the darkness.

03:03:48

Not to retreat from it and wait up on a hill somewhere until Jesus returns.

03:03:56

We've got to press in. Is it easy to do that? It's easy to say this. Is it easy to do?

03:04:02

No. No. It's hard to stay in the restaurant in the line right behind the person living a lie.

03:04:11

A man dressing as a woman. You feel very uncomfortable. You're uncomfortable for your child.

03:04:17

And of course there are all sorts of ways we are careful and we do shield our children in particular from these evil ideologies.

03:04:23

But in terms of people, at some level we don't want to leave.

03:04:28

At some level we pray to stay and engage this person just like we were engaged.

03:04:37

And God saved us. They're no worse than us. They may be expressing their depravity more publicly.

03:04:46

They're a sinner just like us. We've got too much withdraw right now in the Reformed community. We've got too much withdraw in the conservative evangelical world.

03:04:55

We need more. We're not a military garrison over here. Just hold away in our fortresses.

03:05:03

You have to have garrisons, don't you? But we have to think of ourselves more as forward operating bases.

03:05:11

That's what we are. We come back in the walls. We need the walls. We protect our kids in our homes.

03:05:16

We absolutely do. We shepherd our kids. It's not a free for all in our homes where anything goes, right?

03:05:22

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. We live according to God's design by the power of God's grace in our homes.

03:05:28

We have. We have shelter, baby. We've got shelter. These kids live under our protection.

03:05:34

We fathers and mothers, we love these kids. We are plugged in. We are engaged. We communicate with them.

03:05:39

We love them. But then that's not it. Then we go out on missions, on missions to save sinners as God works.

03:05:50

We're forward operating bases. We're not static garrisons.

03:05:56

Fifth and finally, we've got to preach the gospel. And we've got to do so confidently.

03:06:05

Satan makes you feel so weak when you preach the gospel. All you're doing is preaching the gospel.

03:06:12

That's all you're doing. That's the power of God unto salvation. Romans 1, 16 and 17.

03:06:17

That's the power of God. The power of God is not called in the New Testament civil law.

03:06:24

The power of God is not called philosophical persuasion. The power of God is not called a great personality.

03:06:32

The power of God is not celebrity that you then can use with your platform to reach everybody.

03:06:37

The power of God is the gospel. That's where the horsepower is. So that's what we need to be.

03:06:43

We need to be people who are confident not in ourselves, but in the gospel and do not fear the world.

03:06:51

And that is witness. We need people who out worship the world.

03:06:58

Not in our own strength, but by the grace of God. I'll pray and pray for lunch.

03:07:04

Do I pray for lunch? Do you want that? Okay. I get to pray for lunch.

03:07:10

Just so you know. Father, thank you that you have entrusted divine power to us.

03:07:19

Thank you that you have saved us and made us a worshiper. Help us to worship you far, far, far, far, far more than we often do.

03:07:30

Father, I look at my own life and as my recent conversation with my wife pointed out in my existence with the weight on us,

03:07:38

I've gotten into a pattern of complaining and grumbling, sometimes in small ways. But Father, I confess to you and these brothers and sisters that too often

03:07:48

I focus on what has been prohibited and kept from me and I lose sight of everything you have given me.

03:07:55

And my life thus does not look like, at least as it should, a life of worship. It looks like a kind of defeated, gloomy

03:08:04

Christian life. Father, I pray for myself and I pray for everyone in here that we will, by the power of your grace, out -worship the world.

03:08:13

Help us to show the world that Christ is a great Savior, though we are great sinners.

03:08:19

Thank you for lunch. Thank you for good food. Thank you for a thousand kindnesses you've given to us.

03:08:24

In the name of Jesus we pray, amen. I'll be back there at that black table and I'll sign books.

03:08:35

Okay, I was going to say have Owen's table go first. Thank you.