Second Q&A with Pastor Osman & Dr. Strachan

All right, we're going to start our final session, the Q &A, so I've already looked through these and read through these, and I have good news for you.

Since I've already read through these, I know that we're not going to get into another estrogen bath like we had last night with a discussion at Little House on the

Prairie. You said you were sweating during that.

It's because you started menopause halfway through that answer. I don't even know where that came from.

All right, it's behind us. We're not going to mention it ever again, except publicly, maybe publicly, but we're just going to put it behind us.

All right, in what ways, and we got quite a few questions here, so I'll get through as many as we can, so we'll try to do some of these might be rapid fire answers.

In what ways are we image bearers of God? Is it only the communicable attributes?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think that we are supposed to isolate what it means to be the image in terms of one attribute.

There's a lively debate in the Christian tradition over which attribute it is, or is it our relationality?

Is it our reasoning capacity? Is it our capacity for faith?

Luther, Calvin, and others disagree all about what the image precisely boils down to.

In my view, and I wrote about this at some length in my book, Re -Enchanting Humanity, if you want to read more about the image of God as I understand it,

Re -Enchanting Humanity, I spell out that I think we are the image of God. So I don't think even that the image reduces to the communicable attributes.

I think it is simply that God made us as a little representation of Himself.

Now, we are communicating people like He is a communicating people. We are a loving people like He is a loving God to that question.

So there's truth in that. We are like God in some respects in terms of our personal makeup,

I mean. He's of a different order than we are. But that would be what I would say. I would say the image is us.

So the attributes that we have, our functionality, our utilitarian functionality does not undo us with the image of God.

We are able to do those things because humanity is the image of God and the image of God is humanity.

It is our humanness, which is the image of God. That's something unique to humanity that other creatures don't have.

That's exactly right. So I'm in a little different place than some theologians and exegetes because a lot of them in the

Reformed tradition emphasize that the image is lost in the fall or diminished or marred or all sorts of language like that.

I don't actually think that. I think that we are still image bearers, Genesis 6 and 9, if anyone sheds man's blood, his blood will be shed for man is made in my image, those kind of texts.

I think that that actually signals that the image is an ongoing reality, though I affirm total depravity as was quite clear here.

But yeah, I don't think if you have less reasoning capacity, you have lost the image or you are less an image bearer or things like that.

Yeah, I don't think that if you're not married, you're not fully an image bearer because the image actually is relationality expressed in marriage.

That was Karl Barth's view. So we could talk more. So if your image of God is based upon your functionality, then at some point, if you lose your memory, you lose your creative ability, you lose your ability to communicate, you have dementia, you lose your memory.

If that's what gives you the image of God, those attributes, then we would have to conclude that somebody who gets older and loses some of those capacities is diminishing in the image of God and we would never say that.

Exactly. Yeah. All right. What guidelines would you recommend for how much time we spend with the world and how we spend time with them?

Thoughtful question. I'm not going to be able to give any kind of hourly allotment or something, and it's going to vary for all of us.

We want to exercise two principles. We want to be in the world, but not of the world.

And that reduces in exegetical terms to what Jesus says in John 17.

And so we need a lot of time where we are not of the world. So for example, we need to be with the church.

We need to be with the fellowship of the saints to some degree in our week. But then we also need to be in the world to some degree, and we need to be around sinners, even to the extent that people would label

Jesus as a friend of sinners. And I just, there again, I said this in my session, but I think a lot of us are on the far end of being away from the world.

We need to be to a serious degree, but if we're not in and amongst unbelievers, no one's going to be.

We are the light of the world, Jesus says. I heard testimonies from former homosexuals whose churches didn't confront their sin right away, but they still eventually repented and turned to biblical sexuality.

How should a church handle visitors and or regularly attending homosexuals, trans people, et cetera?

Yeah, that's become a thing where you don't address homosexuality head on.

You kind of say, like Tim Keller did a version of this. We're going to set that aside because that's kind of a nuclear issue.

And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to talk to you about idolatry and sin. And that was kind of Keller's approach in Manhattan.

I don't have a biblical basis for that because, for example, in Matthew 14 with Herod, John the

Baptist called out Herod for having his brother's wife being in that sinful pattern publicly and directly.

All throughout the gospels, Jesus engages sinners and he doesn't just say, this thing you're doing, that's wrong, and disappear, vanish, you know, in a cloud of smoke.

He works through the heart. He asks them questions. There's a broader discussion. But fundamentally, he identifies the sin of the people he's talking to, the woman at the well in John 4.

He doesn't say, let's set aside adultery and sexual promiscuity for right now.

I don't want to be too on the nose with you. Let me just establish a general rhythm of sin is bad.

And we'll get to that six months from now. No, he says, you've had five and the one you're with now isn't your husband.

Now, I don't think he's doing that in a hateful way. I think he's doing that in a very kind way, but he's also quite direct with sin.

Homosexual or trans person shows up in a church service, should they be allowed to stay there? Should they be allowed to become members?

No, no, no. No, I mean, upon repentance. Yes. But, and we've got to be clear about that, that we used to have more of a view in some conservative circles where conversion was like a bug zapper with homosexuality for some strange reason.

Homosexuality was treated like if you became a Christian, there's a way to sort of pry out that sin and you would never have that again.

And there, there got to be some pretty interesting and strange, if you follow them down the line efforts at things like orientation change.

And I would affirm some of what was attempted there, but not to the fullest extent because we are in winning people to the

Christian faith, helping them leave behind sin patterns. But a lot of us who get saved have to battle heterosexual lust throughout our lives.

Just to cut it straight for a second. We didn't think that when we got saved, there was a kind of bug zapper way for us to never experience lust in that way.

I don't know why the church 40 years ago was saying, if you convert to Christ, you can kind of get zapped and you'll never have homosexual lust in your heart.

So I don't want to communicate to somebody that if they get born again, that they'll never battle that.

They might. That's not the sign that they're not born again, though. Just like somebody having to kill lust in a heterosexual way, because that's not a sign they're not a

Christian. So you've got to be careful. Is it possible for a man to be truly saved if he is passive and checked out, angry, neglectful of family, not growing in fruits of the

Spirit, prideful, and not willing to hear correction or review? Will the saved always manifest being a new creation?

That's a tough situation right there. Sounds like from that litany of qualities, sadly.

If that doesn't immediately sound like somebody who is experiencing a whole lot of victory in Christ, I guess somebody who's living that kind of life could be a

Christian, but be in a bad place. I think we have to have a category for that. We know that Peter wandered from his

Lord. We know that we can all stumble. We all stumble in many ways, James 3, 2.

But over the long haul, a godly man will be able to hear correction at some level, will want to grow, will fight his sin, will confess his sin.

And so that person that is being described there, it sounds like, could either be a man who's unregenerate but thinks he's a

Christian. That might be the most likely reality. Or he might be a Christian who's just really not doing well, and he needs kind of the electric clamps to his chest from the

Spirit, and he needs to wake up and start repenting and confessing a whole lot of sin. At the very least, he should be warned that given his current trajectory and his current manifestation of those qualities, that that could very well be indicative of the state of his soul.

For sure. And if, honestly, if that is representative of a situation in this room, then

I would encourage a woman who has a husband who is professing faith and maybe smiling on Sunday morning, but then is living in the utter gloom of misery

Monday to Saturday, I would encourage her in a respectful way to reach out to godly women in the congregation, talk to them, and then it really may be the case that there needs to be elder care for that couple.

Not in a kind of, you know, Navy SEALs break the door down in the middle of the night on the guy, handle him carefully, but try in a gracious way to get this couple with a wise and godly elder and maybe his wife and talk through some dynamics of marriage.

Had a lot of questions about this, so if I don't get to your specific question, just know that I'm trying to hit this subject and probably incorporate a whole bunch of different questions that all kind of do the same thing.

If a family rejects you because you won't use their pronoun requests, do you step back and wait or try to engage?

And if you engage, how? To put it another way, do we go ahead and honor people's requests that we use their preferred pronouns?

No, no, I don't think so. No, I don't think we can.

This is a sticky one because I don't think that we have to go in and, like if we're trying to engage family members,

I don't think we are trying to have an explosion socially, you know, from the outset.

We're trying to talk to that family member to have some kind of communication going on, so we're using wisdom and how we address people.

You know, if there's a transgender individual, I don't know that I would be trying to use a ton of pronouns or something.

Like what I'm trying to say is you don't need to be obnoxious as a Christian to be a witness.

You don't need to say, well, what he is doing is he is saying this and what I would disagree is he, you know, right?

So you can do this, I think, in honestly a wise and careful way, but you should not consent,

I would say, to we will use your preferred pronouns. So I think I cannot use the preferred pronouns but still exercise some degree of pastoral sensitivity in that situation.

Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, and if you're using, if you do bend to that and use their preferred pronouns, then basically you're affirming a lie.

Right. You're saying something with your mouth and with your demeanor that is that is patently untrue and in fact is affirming their rebellion against God as creator in the created order.

Yeah, like I can't use their pronouns if they want to be called kitty cat. Yeah. I'm not trying to be silly, like if that person, if that family member,

I'm trying to be a witness to them and we finally get to the table and they say, I will talk with you, but you need to refer to me as kitty cat, you know, and I'm a cat and my pronouns are cat pronoun, you know, seriously,

I can't do that. But I'm not necessarily, if they say that, going to then go ballistic about all

I'm going to, I am going to try to be, try to engage them well.

What do you say to them specifically? They make that request. This is your niece, your grandchild, or your aunt.

What do you say to them? How do you respond to that request? Look, I'm here at Thanksgiving and I heard you speaking about me in the other room.

You said, I'm a she, and I'm not, I identify as a he or they, them. And I want you when you're referring to me and I'm not in the room to use them my preferred pronouns.

I think you need to do what we were trying to talk about throughout the conference.

And you need to have that good, open, honest communication. And you need to say something like,

I love you to the core. I want your good. I am not here to get in a fight over what you are called.

I cannot use those pronouns that you request that I use, but what

I can do is I can talk with you. Let's talk together and seek to hear the other and reason together.

And I want to show you love. And just like you wouldn't be loving me if I was doing something wrong in my life.

And I said, affirm this from where I stand, I can't affirm you.

But again, I want to talk to you. I want a relationship with you. And let's see if we can reason things out and at least have a civil, mature conversation.

I would start there. And in that conversation, I would try to get to the gospel and sin and those kinds of things.

That's a better answer than I would give. I would tend to be far more sarcastic and biting and flip the premise on them and say, okay, every time you refer to me,

I want to be referred to as handsome and brilliant. And when you're speaking to me in any situation, anytime you refer to me,

I get my own adjectives. You get your own pronouns. I get my own adjectives, handsome and brilliant. Maybe that's the best strategy.

Okay. So how about, you know, on a similar vein, um, your, somebody was once known as Jackie and now they want to be referred to as Jack.

Um, those are, well, other than Jackie Chan, I guess I was trying to think of, of non, you know, dual gender names or Michael wants to be referred to as Michelle.

Uh, do you go along with the name change and begin to use a different name for that person? Uh, there again, my personal approach would probably not be to aggressively repeat their birth name 20 times in a 10 minute conversation.

Honestly. Um, just like if I'm talking to a gay person, let's say

I'm probably not in a 10 minute conversation going to say 20 separate times being gay is a sin.

But what I am trying to do is, is be truthful, you know, hue to the truth, stand for what is true.

And, um, and I'm, I'm, so I'm neither afraid of using their birth name, nor am

I, uh, acting as if that is the ultimate issue. The ultimate issue is the heart.

And that's where I'm not where those churches are that say, we're not going to talk about homosexuality, put that to the side for eight weeks.

Just hear us out on idolatry, you know, the idolatry of identity and chasing work and satisfaction and money.

That's what we're going to talk. I'm not there. I'm not there. I'm not, I'm not willing to say let's set that to the side, but I'm also not the guy who's going to come in and use a bullhorn and shout at you directly about the one sin.

I know that you're in mesh and I'll talk about it with you, but I am happy to talk about sin more broadly.

And I don't think we What I'm trying to say, Jim is, and these, what these questions are getting at is

I fear that sometimes we feel that we're being unfaithful in evangelism. If when we're face to face with a sinner, we don't only say this sin is wrong, like repeatedly.

If you don't do that, you're a bad evangelist, you're compromising the gospel. And what I want to say to people is no, look at how

Jesus converses with sinners of many kinds. Look at where the conversation goes. He's able to talk with them.

He's able to reason with them. We, I think we can laugh with them. I think we can form a bond with them. If there's something we like in terms of movies or culture or sports teams,

I think we can forge that connection. Christians don't have to be the weirdest, most offensive person in conversation that they possibly could be to be a faithful conversant.

When I talked earlier about Rosaria Butterfield, the pastor there has, I think his last name was Smith, the pastor who engaged

Rosaria, you can read her testimony. Some of you probably read this, Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.

If you want a good book about a pastor engaging a professor of queer theory, which is all these situations, right?

He did it well. I didn't say perfectly, but he did it well. And he was clear from the outset in a gracious, firm way.

He didn't agree with her being a lesbian, but he let the relationship develop and he let the conversation go all sorts of places.

She had lots of questions about the Bible, and he would patiently talk through Old Testament passages.

You know, oh, so you do believe in mixed fabrics being sinful? You know, all that sort of stuff, right? And he wouldn't say, no, I'm not talking about that.

You must repent now. He would talk all the way through it. And it took her time.

I'm not saying we don't share the gospel in a given conversation. I think we do. But it took her a long time to become, she calls it her train wreck conversion, because it was just an unfolding series of smashes in her life.

And it took a long time. So I think the church today, I think our wing feels too much pressure to kind of get the bullhorn out, click it in and just go at level a thousand.

I think we need to calm down and we shouldn't do relational evangelism in terms of setting sin aside, but we should feel free to be friendly and kind and nice and hospitable and loving and funny and truthful.

And truthful. On a similar vein, this is going to get increasingly more difficult.

Your HR department— More difficult than this? Yeah. Your HR department sends out an email saying, we would like you to include your preferred pronouns in your email signature from now on, so that everybody else in the company knows how to refer to you.

Do you go by that? Do you abide by that? Or is that affirming a lie? I don't know that it is a lie for you to say that you are he, him, or she, her.

So I don't know that that's in itself sinful for you to say. But isn't it a lie to affirm that any of us has a right or responsibility to prefer our pronouns?

Yeah. Pronouns are a feature of reality, so it would be a lie to affirm the premise, because really what we're talking about is the premise of their position is that we should abide by other people's preferred pronouns.

The premise of their position is that one can choose their pronouns and make that known so that they can be referred to however they want.

If that's the premise, the premise of that is a lie, the premise of that is rebellion. And if we go along with that with our

HR department, isn't that affirming a lying or an untrue premise? Yeah. I mean, it could be.

I want to leave open that possibility. I guess I'm not convinced that if you ask me, am

I a he, her, or a they, them, I think I can say I'm a he, him. I might have said that wrong just a minute ago.

I think I said he, her. It's 3 .20 at the end of seven sessions today.

After last night's book episode that we had, we're all a little confused right now. I'm starting to get a little bit internally confused myself.

No, I don't know about that. You were confused before you showed up here, I think. Go ahead. Listen, you just need to like literature more.

There's some good literature out there written by women. These are hard questions, and I want to be a little bit careful about like, this is the line in the sand.

I just want to be careful because people are in humongous corporations where you have to say your pronouns.

I want to leave some room for conscience. This is me. You may be in a slightly different position. Your position makes sense to me.

I don't the line for me. Here's the line for you. I can't say,

I can't even play by the preferred pronoun game. That's defensible. Someone else might say,

I'm going to say I'm he, him, not he, her. I'm he, him. But what

I can say as a red line is I don't think you should use preferred pronouns of someone who is going against their

God -given sex. That to me is a clear red line. Okay. How about I'll give you a tactical response to this.

Would it be appropriate? Because this is how I would suggest handling it. Tell me what you think about this, yay or nay. I would email back and say,

I am a biological male. So you use what pronouns are appropriate for biological males.

It's good by me. Right? I'm not picking pronouns because I reject the premise that I can choose my own pronouns.

But the reality is the truth is I was created as a biological male. Therefore use the language that is appropriate to refer to biological males.

I will not give you my pronoun. You use English. Try that. Again, back to this.

This is my default. Sarcasm is my spiritual gift. So I go back into the default sarcasm and I have to always pull back from that to be gracious like Owen, right?

So there's sarcasm and then there's Owen. I don't know about the standard is Owen, but I don't want that pressure, but I would.

Yeah. I like that. And that's actually, that was maybe not articulated on my part a minute ago, but I can actually say my pronouns are he, him.

That's not a preference. So I think we're ending up in a very similar position. This is how you should refer to me,

HR. I'm a he, him. There's no preference so something like that is great by me.

Yep. All right. A little bit of a more difficult situation. And I bring this one up not because anybody asked it, but because I know that there is a family in this room here who knows somebody who has family.

There's a person in this room who has family members who are in this situation where I've dealt with this situation recently. You own a business.

You hire somebody as a receptionist. Michelle comes in. She does a her, it's

Michelle Smith. This relationship goes on for five years. Then you find out that this was once Michael Smith.

And because of surgery, because of drugs, because of the presentation, you had no idea that this person is actually a biological male.

They pull off the female act very, very well. Now that you know this information, how do you refer to this person?

You refer to this person as he, him? Do you refer to him as Michael? Because you do that, you're going to jail in the state of California.

It was almost at that point. How do you handle a situation like that? That is a very difficult situation from the outset, so let that be said.

But it's probably one that a number of us are going to face. Because in that situation, you've been affirming a lie for five years, not knowing it.

You've been going along believing what you thought was true and acting according to what you thought was true. Now you find out that something else is true.

You continue to do that, then you are living by lies and affirming something, affirming an act of rebellion. Yeah, I mean, the employer relationship is a sticky one because you get into discrimination law.

And so you have a place as an employer, as a

Christian, I mean, for going, this does not cut it with what

I know to be true from scripture. But that can be a very sticky reality in terms of getting sued and those sorts of things.

So someone just has to know that. To make it a little more of a handhold morally, this premise you're giving me would be similar to you have friends who you find out one of them is transgender, so to speak.

One of them transitioned the way that you're talking about. They didn't actually become the opposite sex, but they tried to. And you've been affirming their marriage.

Can you go on affirming that marriage if one of the individuals transitioned, so to speak?

And I would say, no, no, I don't think I can. I can't pretend you're

Kathy when you're Michael. Yeah. But that is going to be a whole barrel of monkeys fun and trying to be a witness to people in that situation.

I think that there we come back to the principles. The underlying principles is we have to be truthful and honest.

We have to speak the truth in love. This may sometimes cost us. And I think unless the Lord brings revival and changes some things in our nation, there's going to come a point where we are going to be, it's going to cost us to affirm things that are basic truth.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. All right. Dial off a little bit. Those were tough ones. Let me back up a bit.

What about those who want to dress as a boy when a girl or a girl want a boy and they want us as family to support their change?

How do we deal with friends who support their child's or grandchild's change, even when they are believers? You have

Christians who have children that have gone through the people who claim to be Christians, their children are doing this and they want to affirm it.

How do we handle those people who are affirming that? Yeah, very similar kind of approach to what we've been talking about.

We're trying to be as loving as we can. And we recognize there are broader issues than just the clothing decisions, but we cannot affirm that.

And I believe that love would, especially with a child in question, call us to try to have a conversation over that, where we would warn them of the danger of what they are doing.

What is first wave feminism, second wave? Oh, sorry. I am so sorry to be rude, but that's what kicked up in our circles a few months ago.

That's exactly what happened with a certain very famous preacher.

And it's all over, it's all over the nature of what it means to be loving of people living in lies.

And the broader principle that you and I are getting at here, there's going to be some gray areas.

There are in this, we need to honor that. But at base, at base to find the wall behind us in all the fog of this gender confusion.

It is not loving to affirm somebody's lie. And so the grandparents who have a grandchild who is getting married to someone of the same sex, right?

They are not being loving in going to that ceremony, in sending a gift, in any way affirming that all the loving thing for that genuinely loving grandfather or grandmother.

What a horrible situation to be in. We have great compassion for that. But the loving thing is to do what we're talking about.

It's to have hard conversations. We're so terrified of having hard conversations, by the way. We're just terrified of it.

And I understand why, because there can be severe consequences that come to us, but we can't be terrified of hard conversations.

We've got to draw on in a David -like way, the power of the spirit. And we've got to pray a lot of prayer.

We need a lot of prayer, a lot more prayer than a lot of us are giving about these things. And we've got to then say to grandma, who is very confused about going to the gay wedding of her grandchild, do not go.

Do not send a gift. That was terrible counsel that was given publicly. Devastating, awful, damaging counsel.

Instead, what needs to happen is hopefully you, grandma or whoever it is, you know, grandpa,

I don't know who it was, but you try, reach out to your beloved grandchild, set up a time to talk to them and say, say,

I love you so much. I love you because of the gospel of grace that has forgiven a sinner like me.

I'm a sinner just like you. And I've got to say to you, you are putting your soul in mortal peril by going further down the road in the sin of homosexuality.

Please, in love, I beg you, don't do this. Run away from your sin and run to the forgiving arms of Jesus.

He will wash you clean to the uttermost. You are not in a different category of super sinner over me because I'm a heterosexual sinner.

You are just like me. That's the advice that should have been given, not because I'm perfect, but according to scripture.

That is the advice that should have been given to that precious grandmother facing a hard situation. Never to affirm the sin of any sinner, not just homosexuality, that's culturally palatable now, but of any sinner.

You have to try to do the hard work of having a, I'm sorry, having a hard conversation, but a true conversation, a gospel conversation, and pray for their soul and pray for them to come out.

You're talking about Alistair Begg, just in case anybody didn't catch the illusion. What is a first wave feminism, second wave feminism, third wave feminism?

What are the distinctions between that? Quickly, just kind of give a brief description of it.

First wave feminism centered in the right to vote, the right for women to vote in public elections and related issues, women in the workforce, some of those kinds of things.

Sometimes first wave feminism is presented as like, yay, evangelicals affirm all of that. I'm personally good with women voting.

I don't have any biblical basis to say women shouldn't vote, which would be a separator with me and some in the patriarchy camp who would say, men of rulers of the household, they're the only ones who should vote.

I find that an extension beyond what scripture would say. I understand how you could get to that position.

I'm not saying it's wicked of the devil. I just think that's probably a click or two beyond where scripture is.

And there was a lot of feminist energy and some very bad theology in first wave feminism. Second wave feminism is 1950s and 60s feminism.

It's women rejecting traditional gender roles. Third wave feminism is feminism of the 80s and 90s.

Feminism expands to include homosexuality, lesbianism as a cause that's linked up with feminism.

And then fourth wave feminism embraces even further transgenderism as a dimension of the feminist project.

And so feminism has gone, I reversed the direction, has gone further and further to the left to the degree that now the feminist cause has lost its way because there are men who are supposedly feminists who are presenting themselves as women.

And that does not fit in particular with the second wave feminists who were totally about womanhood and a real understanding of womanhood.

We would disagree with them strongly on a number of issues, but they really did believe in womanhood. And so the movement is eating itself.

Yeah. I've heard an analysis of all four waves of that basically saying that the seeds for fourth wave feminism, second, third and fourth wave feminism were laid with the, we would look and say women should have the right to vote, but the arguments that they used and the way they went about doing that paved the way and laid the foundation for second, third and fourth wave feminism.

So basically the fourth wave feminism today is not a refutation of women have a right to vote with the arguments that they used.

Fourth wave feminism now is a, it's really the fruit or the flowering of that first wave feminism.

Yeah. There are, there are, for example, first wave feminists who believed in the motherhood of God.

God is mother, like clear as a bell. And that is a no bueno reality.

They may have argued for some things like you just said that I think I can affirm from a biblical standpoint, not their standpoint.

I think women can vote. I'm personally good with that. But yes, the seeds that were planted were not actually all good seed.

So went from women being equal to men to women don't need men to women can be men.

Yep. Kind of a full circle. It's not even a spectrum. It's just, we'll get right back to the point now where they're eating their own really.

Yeah. And you would expect that the feminist movement would be up in arms at men, transgender men entering girls' bathrooms and changing rooms, for example.

And there are a few of the old guard feminists who have spoken up, but largely they have been silenced.

And these are all secular people, very secular people. Largely the older feminists have been silenced by the newer pagan forms of feminism.

Yeah. And so they're not defending girls much at all. And now you've got a video of, you know, some hulking kid in a eighth grade girls' basketball league in Massachusetts, like smashing these little girls and all the liberal parents are just watching and clapping.

And you're like, Oh my word. But this is a missions moment for us because there are people out there on the left and middle and right who are not

Christians. And we can say, I think we should point them to these things and say, do you believe this is right?

Do you believe guy at, you know, the local grocery store? If you get into a conversation, do you believe it's good that men are going into the little girls' rooms?

And you should absolutely take that as an evangelistic opportunity to say, the reason you know that's wrong is because God gave you a conscience and we ultimately need

Jesus. So use these moments. Everybody wants to, sorry, Jim, everybody always wants to evangelize the left, the far left.

What about people on the right? What about conservative people who actually agree with us on some of these things, but they're not, they're not born again, not even a little.

We need to use these moments to evangelize them too. And show them that the reason that these, they objected these things is because they're borrowing a worldview that they will not affirm by faith.

Yeah. So, so, but basically feminism now has ended up resulting in an attack upon women.

Totally. The second, third and fourth wave feminism has now resulted in women under attack. As one podcast host

I heard recently said, if you, you think that this country is horrible under the patriarchy, wait till you see it under the matriarchy.

That's going to be bad. Is there a difference between gender and sex? There is in the, in the handbook of the left.

Yeah. Okay. More on the biblical handbook in just a second, but gender is how you perceive yourself.

Sex is your anatomy. Sex is your biology. So if you're at a public school around here and it's a secular public school, kids are being taught these things.

Your gender is different from your sex. In the, in the same way, your body is different from your gender identity.

So you might have the body of a girl, but you perceive yourself to be omnigender, which is a real thing beyond gender, all the genders.

And so your gender identity is your true self. And what we need to say is, and that's why

I've used the word sex most here. There's some reasons why you don't always use that because it can get confusing, but the best term is sex to talk about manhood and womanhood, because sex refers to something that is fixed and sex means the correlation of body and identity.

So I don't actually like the term gender very much. I don't, I try not to use it. I'm sure I have used it, but just because it's in, it's in the stream, but the best term is sex.

And to stay away from the term gender entirely. Because gender, not necessarily for somebody you're talking to in a church might hear gender and mean sex, something fixed by God.

But on the other side, talking with a leftist person, let's say they, you might use gender and they will hear you to be saying, oh, that which is your perceived self -identity.

Yeah. So it's, it's best not to use gender to refer to one's sex simply because of the way that the world is using it.

So to back up until about five minutes ago in human history, we all recognize that sex and gender were synonyms. They were the same thing, right?

So sex, the world would say refers to your biological reality, whether you're X, X, or X, Y gender refers to your perceived reality, how you feel on any given day.

And therefore they have divided these things so that they can talk about, yeah, your sex is a fixed reality, X, X, X, Y, but gender is how you feel.

And so that what they want to do is conform the body to the way that they feel, never questioning whether or not their perception of reality is accurate.

They always assume that the presentation of their body is what is the problem or inaccurate, not their perception of themselves.

And so they want to try and change the appearance of their sex to match their gender.

And this is where the confusion comes in. So it would be helpful for you guys to recognize the distinction between gender and sex in terms of how the world is talking about those issues, which

I think creates a lot of confusion in people's thoughts. Exactly. That's very well said. And yes. I should have just answered that myself.

Using that whole framework as you building a house in midair, because this is what we see with youth who embrace some kind of cross -gender identity.

You know, my identity isn't the same as my body. When you do that, you are rejecting the firm ground of your

God -given identity. Not that that's saving. You're not saved in affirming that. But God made you that.

So that's good. And you are then catapulting yourself into the heart of a hurricane.

And that is why, tragically, so many LGBTQ, et cetera, affirming youth end up committing suicide.

And it's not first and foremost because lots of people say hateful things to them at Starbucks in the drink line.

I'm sure there is sin that occurs in that way in our world. There's not always love toward people in those situations.

That's true. But the major reason is because you are leaving behind firm ground and you are entering the whirlwind.

And outside of the grace of God, you will not come out of it. If you start leaving behind your

God -given sex, and if you start beginning to experiment with, you know, dressing like a girl, if you're a boy, or even haircuts and these kind of things, you should watch out.

Because that is a way that Satan wants to lure you away from the solid ground of your

God -given identity. This is something that's important. It's not that there's a perfect hair length, you know, in terms of how long a woman's hair should be.

But we do want to honor God's design, for example, in 1 Corinthians 11.

And we recognize that Paul, in a very pagan context, a context where temple prostitutes are shaving their heads, the apostle

Paul does not say to the Corinthians, hair length doesn't matter, your hair doesn't matter, what matters is your heart and trusting

Jesus. Paul says the woman's long hair is given to her for a covering. He goes on to say it is her glory.

So God, what my point is here is, especially with our younger people, God's glory is in presenting ourselves as a man, if we are a man, and presenting ourselves as a woman, if we are a woman.

Of course, there's some gray areas there, right? What is the perfect hair length? People always ask me when I say this. I don't know.

But what I know is honor and glorify God and don't go the way of the gender -neutral androgynous culture.

We want to raise our girls understanding girlhood and womanhood is good. We want to raise our boys understanding boyhood and manhood is good, and they're distinct.

And so since we're on this subject, 1 Corinthians 11, the head covering, is that something for today? Should women be wearing hats and head coverings in church?

I think that is a possible position, and some are convicted because of their study of 1

Corinthians 11 that a woman should wear a, you know, kind of head covering on their head in that way.

The passage, 1 Corinthians 11, goes back and forth in some interesting ways.

Paul's talking about the angels, for example, in it. And so it's a challenging passage. You know, preachers and teachers can affirm that there are some passages that are more challenging than others.

That's a challenging one. I land, personally, I do think what is happening in Corinth is that some women are using a hair shawl or whatever you want to call it to show that they are under authority, the authority of their husband.

But if you actually read through the whole passage, I think what he says in verse 16 that her long hair is given to her for a covering means that you actually don't have to be wearing a kind of hair covering.

Your long hair is your covering. It is your glory. It's the woman's glory. So that would be my position, which doesn't mean a woman has to have, you know, waist -length hair until she's 90.

In a lot of cases, women can't because of how a woman's hair changes over time. It does mean that a woman is trying to distinguish herself in a godly way, joyful way, for men.

That's my position. Okay. Is it cutting out back there? I'm sitting on my belt pack.

Mercy, sakes alive. I'm getting heat for my literary choices. I'm sitting on the belt pack.

The sound guy's blaming me. I'm having to handle head coverings in public.

No, I'm just kidding. All right. We've got 15 minutes left. As someone who grew up with an angry, harsh Christian, quote -unquote,

Christian father, how do I now learn to submit to and respect men as leaders and someday as a husband, seeing as how the only example

I know has lost my respect? I have an embittered view of men and I struggle to trust them to lead me without causing great pain and harm.

I absolutely love the honesty and open communication of that question.

Praise God whoever wrote that and had the courage to say that in public.

We need more of that. It's going to be hard. It's going to be hard for that woman, young woman perhaps, to trust a man.

What a young woman in that position needs to know is that it is possible for her to read that experience, which is a real experience sounds like, onto all men.

If she lets herself do that, that won't necessarily be a good place to be because that man sounds like he was harsh.

Let's just assume he genuinely was harsh, but not all men are that way.

Not all men who lead in a genuinely biblical way are harsh. Be careful.

Whoever this is in the room, be careful. Treat each man as he comes.

Don't make the devil's mistake that the devil wants you to make and read one man onto all men.

That's what has happened so much. That's one reason why there's so much discussion of toxic manhood because there are nasty men out there who have caused terrible damage.

I think a lot feminists out there, at least some of them, are women who went through genuinely bad circumstances, but you know the mistake they made?

They made the mistake of now writing off men. If you read feminist literature, you read it and you try to be perceptive.

You're like, this woman was sexually abused. Now she thinks that all men are out to get all women.

It's not at all true. Even outside of Christianity, it's not true of all men. It's just not. But then within the church,

God saves men. God changes men. God will help this young woman if she finds a godly man.

He will help her. It's going to be a process, though, for her. It's going to be hard, probably, to trust that this man she would marry, if that happens, loves her.

If he gets upset at her, as even godly men do in marriage, in the early years in particular, as they're working things out, that may flare for her.

She may need a godly woman to call and talk to, like really someone who's kind of on notice, because she's like,

I'm about to freak out and I'm about to drive to, you know, Tacoma here, because this guy, I think he's just like my dad.

And she really might need godly women around her to say, okay, I don't think he talked to you the way he should.

That's not good. But you know, that's also not blow the marriage up and leave. And from a pastoral counseling perspective, you should have that conversation with your prospective fiance to tell them, this was my experience.

I don't want to judge you by that, but understand that there's stuff there that's from the background that needs to be known walking into that marriage.

That's the kind of honest, healthy communication we have to have a ton of. Exactly right. Where she signals to him,

I may freak out if you get a little too upset with me. I don't mean he's, you know, doing something horrible to her, but even just the way that it happens in marriage, right?

It fights. And she needs to say to him, to any man who would win her heart. Yeah. Exactly.

Like you said, I may, I may freak out. Stay patient with me. Stay calm, stay gentle.

That's going to help me. You don't want to ramp up. I've learned this in my own marriage. Sometimes if my wife is upset,

I ramp up and get upset. And that is, oh man, it's just so often the case with a girl in that situation that you need to calm down.

You need to, you need to be gentle. Does it help her to tell her calm down? You need to calm down.

Hey, how does one know if they've been called to singleness or marriage? Uh, it can be hard to know.

Uh, this can be one of those difficult gray areas of the Christian faith. The Christian faith is not all perfect, black and white sliced and diced like cold cuts on a tray.

The Christian life can be difficult. And, um, sometimes you're not sure, but in general, a lot of people, uh, are, are driven toward marriage because they want to be married.

And so that desire drives them to then be in the market, if you'll excuse the crass terminology.

And then, you know, if there's a suitor on the other side, or if there's a girl they potentially like that pushes them off the sidelines, right.

But then there are difficult situations. And that may be behind this question where you have a desire to be married, but you don't have the circumstances to be married.

And that can be challenging in a, in that case, if that is what is behind the question, then you keep praying, you keep trusting the

Lord, you keep, you know, storming heaven with your requests. If you want to be married, sadly, I alluded to this.

There are a lot of people today in our delayed marriage culture who want to be married. There are a lot of young women who want to be married, but the young men are not mature and are not pursuing marriage.

And that leads to, to hard circumstances. That doesn't necessarily mean though, that you can't get married. Okay. If Adam tried to stop and warn

Eve, but she didn't listen, would God still hold him responsible? This would go for husbands who warned their wives.

Um, God would still hold Adam responsible. Yes, but not, he wouldn't be in the wrong, you know, so culpable.

He's not culpable. He tried husbands. This is a very important question.

Actually, if you double click on it, husbands are not responsible for single handedly keeping their wives from sin.

And this is part of what troubles me about some of the patriarchy stuff, including some of the stuff that's in Idaho.

I, I have real concerns with any language that is like husbands. You are the one who keeps your wife from sin.

No, you are not. You are not the one who keeps your wife from sin. You are a voice in your wife's life and you have authority to shepherd her.

And so yes, there's, there's responsibility there, but you don't have charge of her heart or your mind.

And the more you try to take that over, the less good I think occurs.

Instead, do all the things, I think, hopefully we put some things on the table that are helpful from the

Bible. Do all the things to be a godly husband, to love her well, to point her to the Lord, to, to, to have a culture in the home of the, of, of, of going to the word.

But, but don't think that if your wife, and this is part of your joking about, you know, calm down or whatever.

I'll just tell on myself here. Some of us may have been in a situation where our wife, you know, maybe wasn't hitting an all -time high in the

ESPN top 10 list of submissive moments in marriage. And maybe we said something to the effect of, you know, would you just please just submit?

And, and now I lost the women in the room after the conference. But honestly, honestly, as a young man, let's, this is the honesty we need to have.

Husbands say these things to their wives and wives say some pretty spicy things to their husbands too. If, if, if, if that's, if that's your approach to, to dialing up submission in the home, have fun with that.

Better, better to, better to hear me in the right way. Let her sin.

If she's not in a submissive moment, don't, don't, don't try to forcibly stop unsubmissiveness.

Instead, choose godliness on your part. You ramp down,

I mean this genuinely, you ramp down and you, you effectively say to yourself, I will meet her when she calms down.

But I'm not going to try to wrangle. You stop being unsubmissive to me. That is not, that's not the model for us.

I mean that genuinely. I think though, with some of the patriarchy stuff, the rule, the rule of the man,

I think men are tricking themselves into thinking this sort of overbearing leadership is, oh, that's the way a wife's going to become godly.

No, it's not. She might even conform to you. She might even, she might even perform the behavior you want from her.

But probably what you are doing is creating a little legalist or fomenting a little legalist or a man dependent wife, not a god dependent wife.

It's hard to live with a sinner, husband to wife, wife to husband. But we have to be pointing each other to the

Lord, not taking, taking control of each other. Women do this too with men. Women try to control men too.

We, this is what the sexes do in a sinful world. We try to control each other. And honestly, we influence each other.

We speak truth to each other. Yes, all sorts of ways. But we don't control each other. Stop, stop the controlling project.

Wife to husband too. Don't control him. Don't, don't, don't nag him to death. Don't, don't, you know, oppose him.

Don't make nasty passive aggressive comments that are communicating anger at what he's doing.

You, you gotta, you gotta lay off of that and you've got to do what we've tried to talk about.

You've got to say, all right, I'm really ticked right now with this man. He's a sinner and it ticks me off, but I'm going to let my blood cool.

I'm going to ask him if we can have a calm time to talk. And then I'm going to say this, I don't think is, is you at your best.

Can we kill sin together in this area? You know, those kinds of things. That's a way better approach than him controlling her or her controlling him.

You just had an episode of your podcast a couple weeks ago. Should, should a man dominate his wife? Yeah. Which was excellent. I would point you to that episode of truth and grace.

Since you brought up Doug Wilson, your thoughts on Christian nationalism, what is it good or bad? Does it focus too much on patriotism for America and not enough on the sovereignty of God or maybe not enough on the gospel?

And then what are your thoughts on Doug Wilson? I think we got into some of it last night, but to reiterate,

I don't agree with Christian nationalism. I don't think the great commission teaches that we are called fundamentally as believers to Christianize our nation.

I don't think that we are called many Christian nationalist people emphasize this to bring old

Testament civil law to bear on the public square. When you look at Paul's, this is such a big conversation.

I just wrote a 20 ,000 word article for G3 about Christian nationalism. You can find it on my social media.

If you can find my social media, good luck with that. But if you find it, I wrote a 20 ,000 word response to Christian nationalism.

It took me months. When you look at what Paul talks about in the new covenant for government,

Romans 13, first Peter two, first Timothy two, Matthew 22, Jesus words, you don't see any call to change

Caesar, to stop Caesar from being Caesar. You actually kind of see Jesus and the apostles saying you're under Caesar.

So the call of the church, the mission of the church is not to make Caesar Christian.

That may happen. Leaders may be Christians in nations. And if so, that's wonderful. They should make good law, but the church's mission, here's how

I'll, here's the last thing I'll say. The church's mission and the state's mission are distinct. The church's mission is to make disciples and be the church corporately and then scattered.

The state's mission is to restrain evil and to reward those who do good.

So create a civil order. I think it's a pretty minimal mandate, frankly, for government in the new

Testament, but that's what the state does. But the state in no new Testament text, this is in the old

Testament, it's different. There's a covenantal switch. In the new Testament, the state does not police doctrine.

The state is not responsible for recognizing the lordship of Jesus even. And you say that on Twitter and people then say, you don't love the lordship of Jesus.

Don't you want it expressed everywhere? Well, I want it expressed everywhere it's supposed to be expressed, but I don't go to my local donut shop and pressure them and harangue them and yell at them.

You should be recognizing the lordship of Jesus. I recognize I'm in a world where people may recognize it or not, but my mission is not to get the donut shop or the local police office to have a

Christian flag flying over it. The mission of the state is to punish evil and reward good.

And it is not to get into theology. It's not to say what is blasphemy. It's not to hold heresy trials.

And so I am in a different place than men in Moscow. Men in Moscow have done good work on a number of issues.

Doug Wilson has said a lot of true things about manhood. There are some things he says about manhood I disagree with. He called for men who are courageous, but not careful men.

He said the careful men will come later and write the biographies of the courageous men. And I think that very idea, that picked up a lot of steam in COVID days.

I know why it did, because there wasn't a lot of courage. So Wilson has been a voice among the public leaders of the church.

Wilson has been a voice who has showed courage, for example. But if you are not both courageous and careful, you will end up in the territory

I fear the CN movement is in, the Christian nationalist movement is in, and it is not being exegetically careful.

It is not careful about the mission of the state, and it is not careful about the mission of the church. It is fusing them.

It's fusing them in part because we're in evil days and it's very hard. And so Christians are going, oh no, we're losing

America. We've got to Christianize it. And that's fusing the missions. And I think that's, even though it's very hard to be in evil days, we need to be exegetically careful.

Joshua 1 .7 says that we should both be courageous. Joshua needs to be courageous and very careful to do all the law.

So for men, this is a pioneering mission Joshua's on. You would think the Lord God would say, just be courageous.

Just go take the promised land, right? It's not what He says. He says to a strong young man, be courageous, but also be very careful.

So I think Wilson's error starts out small and ends up big. Part of the problem with the

Christian nationalist movement is that you don't have clarity on what it means to be a Christian nationalist. So probably five, six weeks ago, you had somebody on the left who said, if you believe that your rights are given to you by God, that makes you a

Christian nationalist. Well, I happen to believe that, but I'm not a Christian nationalist. So it's best to avoid that title altogether in terms of what my political philosophy is and say,

I refuse to let you label me and then define your labels. I agree. Yeah. All right. What do you think about women saying that they should have a right to vote?

Is that feminism? I guess we covered that one. Sorry. I don't think it is. Is Samson in heaven? I think he is.

Samson prays at the end of his life and he seems to recognize the truthfulness of God and the need for God.

And so I read Samson. I mean, there's debate in the commentaries among scholars, but I read Samson as a very flawed, but true follower of God.

I mean, I think the door to heaven might've hit him on the way in, on his ankle.

Kind of bumped him. I think he kind of bumped into the king. All right. But I think he got in, maybe. Isn't Samson in the

Hall of Faith, Hebrews 11 Hall of Faith? He's a man of faith. So I think that would be your answer.

I think the door to the hall closed on his ankle. I think we're going to see him there. How far do you take the biblical directive that men are to lead and women are to nurture and help?

Does it apply only within marriage? Can women lead in men in business, in industry, in government positions, women soldiers, female marriage counseling, counseling a man?

Oh my word. You're throwing this at me at four o 'clock? Well, okay, let's do this.

Yeah. Can women lead men in business? Yes or no? I think so. Yeah. I don't want to, that's where I'm trying to be exegetically careful as a complementarian.

Okay. She can. I think she can. There might be situations though where we would say, I think she can.

That might not be what I'm training my daughter to be. Like I'm not training my daughter to be a CEO. We're more ordering our daughters, pointing our daughters that is, in the direction of marriage, family, homemaking,

Christian ministry, that sort of thing. But I'm not going to say it is sinful if my daughter becomes a manager at Panera and there's a couple, there's young men under her.

I'm not going to say that. I don't have any biblical text that I know of to say that's wrong. Okay. So when I say this or this, that's like a yes or no for the next part of this.

Okay. What about in government positions? It's okay.

Yeah. It's permiss... I'm serious. I think it's permissible. I do think...

I'm not being squishy. I mean, you have Isaiah saying in Isaiah 3 .12 that it is not good that women are ruling over Israel.

Deborah... That was a judgment of God. It's a judgment of God. And Deborah knows. Deborah, who's acting courageously and righteously and did what she should have done is saying to Barack, you are being a wuss and this is not good, basically.

Right? But we're not in the Old Testament. So what I'm trying to do is say, it seems like the biblical trajectory is that men lead in the home church and in public, but I'm not willing to say, on the other hand, it is absolutely sinful for a woman to hold public office or something like that.

That feels like a step too far. That feels like I'm going beyond what Scripture says. And I want to affirm what

Scripture affirms, and I want to prohibit what Scripture prohibits. Okay. Rapid fire. The cult of death, abortion, euthanasia was the foundation for the

Nazis in the Third Reich. How do the proponents of this modern day cult of death deal with that reality? How do they interact with that?

Do they recognize that those things were part of the Nazi regime, that the culture of death is part of that?

Some of them probably do, but I think they've taken Rawlsian rights, this is political philosophy language, but they've taken that concept of rights.

Every person has sovereign rights, basically, and they've applied that to their bodies. And they say, yeah, the

Third Reich devalued life, but that's not us. We're not trying to put anybody in a concentration camp. This is just about me as a woman reclaiming my body.

And by the way, there's all these horrible patriarchal men who force us to have all these kids, and we don't want to have them. So that's how they get a lot of steam in the public square.

And what we have to say to them is, yes, God has given you your body, but God has also given you the child in your womb, their body.

Yeah. So the problem with the Third Reich is they just didn't have the right people in charge. The problem with socialism, all the past attempts at socialism, is they just didn't have the right people in charge.

It failed. They never tried it the right way. That's right. What was your toughest conversation, and how did it end?

Toughest conversation, what? And how did it end? This one, and it's ending soon. All right.

This one should be quick. How are we as leaders and parents to emphasize God's non -utilitarian purposes of humanity as we obey

Him? What are God's purposes for us as His image bearers? A huge question, very good question.

We have to show people, in part, by the way we live, that we value human life, and human life is itself valuable.

It's not valuable because of what we extract from it. We need to communicate to people that humanity has intrinsic worth, not extrinsic worth.

Extrinsic worth identity means that you have worth as you prove your merit, or you prove your value, or you earn your capital, and we are saying something very different.

We are saying that human beings have intrinsic merit by virtue of being human, and then the whole human experience is itself

God -given and, in moral terms, valuable and meaningful, and all dimensions of life have meaning.

And so we're not simply saying, as I talked about earlier, that, for example, worship is only what happens on Sunday morning. We're saying that all of life is enchanted by the glory and the grace of God, and just living—honestly, we're always trying to figure out this, like, what's the secret to evangelism, the secret to winning a post -Christian culture?

And there's no secret. It is to plant gardens, build homes, and have sons and daughters, meaning, by which

I mean, it's to live out the Christian life, but to not live it out in a compound, closed off from people, to live it out where you're inviting others in, and you're trying to be a witness, and not to shame people, but to show them what

God does in sinners like us. Is there a war on women? Yeah.

Yeah. Feminism is a war on women. It's a war on women that weirdly conscripts women into the war against themselves.

Yeah. But that's been the war of prior decades. Now there's a war on men.

How much fun was it to drive squirrels Miata that got thrown in here tonight? Extremely. Extremely fun. All right. And I think

I'm going to do it again. Are you going to sing the Christian rap song that people wanted you to hear?

I got what's hidden. Shock is his optimism. His optimism is avoided like a logarithm. Can't stop it, keep it, drop it. It is locked in prison.

Not a cop, a cop's song is to see God within him. Robbed of venom, like it's softened, and let him in. He's sinning, winning, grinning, winning, awful. And it's blend of venom,

I will with present on the scale, while so many transgress the shine. Some mnemonics will find the lines between some of the cons of divan. It's a kind of being that realize the real prize.

It's feeling what's real, not to tame a strain and maintain it. I just deal, not trust and steal. I trust to heal. Disgust is a must and the dust to kneel.

I must appeal to the God who defies. The man denying in his soul what he sees with his eyes. This might be the first time anybody's ever spoken tongues in this church.

The first and the last. Yeah. We are a cessationist church, so Owen will not be preaching tomorrow.

All right, just a couple of closing announcements. First, thank you, kitchen staff and volunteers for all your help in putting together food.

For Brian Ashby and his boys who spent the night in a tent outside here next to the smoker so that they could make that meat for you.

Wow. Wow. And one last round of applause for Owen.

Thank you. Hold on. In the midst of all of your moving and all the chaos that you got going on in your own life, your own busyness, you still came here to do this when you could have just called me and said, hey, is there any way

I can get out of that because things are in chaos? So that was a huge sacrifice and I'm grateful for it, brother.

I really do. Give him a round of applause for that. Thank you. All right.

And then next year's conference is Jeff Williams. Jeff Williams is on the board of directors with grace to you.

He has the notable distinction at one time of holding the record for the most time spent on the International Space Station in consecutive days, and he's somewhat of an amateur photographer.

So he's taken a bunch of videos and photographs from his time on the space station. He's going to be here next year, the first weekend in June, talking about the

Christian worldview in science and whether there is a conflict between science as it is rightly done and the

Christian worldview is going to be dealing with the science that is necessary to put somebody into space and to keep them alive in space.

And then he's going to be backing up sort of that science and that Christian approach to science with not just Scripture and what

Scripture teaches about those issues, but also with photographs and videos of his time spent on the space station. So that's going to be a very curious and interesting one.

He's going to do the very same thing Friday night, Saturday night, and then preach and do Sunday school and preach on Sunday morning.

So Saturday day, right, correct. It's Friday night, Saturday day, and then preach on Sunday morning. So that is next year and registration for that will probably open up in February sometime.

I'm going to close in prayer and then I would just ask for some of the gentlemen who know how to set up tables and chairs to give us a hand with that to set up for church tomorrow.

And Owen can be at the back signing books and we'll get this ready for church. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for the time that we have had here for again, bringing

Owen out here. And we pray that your rich blessing would rest upon him and his family during this transition time.

Thank you for the work and effort that he has put into preparing this for us and ministering to us.

And we would pray that it would be abundantly rewarded and that you would make this transition easy for him and for his family and keep them united in their purpose and intention of serving you, alleviate their stress and anxiety over these things.

And pray that this new phase of ministry may be abundantly blessed by you. You would use him mightily to advance your kingdom and your truth.

Thank you for the fellowship that we enjoy with him and with one another around these things. And we pray that the truths that we have heard here would sink deeply into our hearts and that we would rejoice in your word, in your goodness, in your good nature and your love for us.

Thank you for reminding us again of the power of the gospel and how these things apply in the lives of those around us, in our families, and in the difficult, challenging decisions that we have to make in the future.

So we pray that you would equip us and encourage us to stand bold in the truth and be willing to pay the price, whatever that may be, and to do so with joy, trusting you for the outcome and looking to Jesus, who is the author and perfecter of our faith.