Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to think deeper podcast presented by Focus Press Jack Wilke, joined by Joe Wilkie, will harab once again for another pride month episode. We do one every year. We're going to take some different angles, a bit of a freewheeling discussion on this national issue we're dealing with. Maybe it might be getting better, I don't know. We'll talk about that. We've got some angles to take a look at with it. But before we get to that being pride month, we're going to put Doctor Brad Harab's lessons on sale. He's got some dvd's available, one called Truth Trump's tolerance. This is an older one, but it's still very valid. Back when the gay gene and born that way and all those things were kind of all the rage, he did a fantastic series of lessons breaking that down, breaking down what the Bible has to say, giving the truth on it, and then changed dvd. He did on transgenderism more recently.
Very valuable material there. And so be sure to check those out on focuspress.org. and yeah, just trying to get the material out there, trying to say what needs to be said. And it's such a pressing issue, which is why we're doing an episode on it, why we do one every year. And I don't know, is that all we have to cover?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: I would say, too, also, if you're a focus plus subscriber, dad's got the, I forget what it was called, but a video about transgenderism as well, like almost an hour long, 45 minutes, something like that. One of the first offerings we did on focus plus. So if you already subscribed to that and are not aware of that, go back in the archives.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: And you said search. Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Take a look at that. So that's all I've got.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: All right, well, Joe's driving this episode, so go ahead and get us into it.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Absolutely. So with it being pride month, we really wanted to take a look at how we got here and break down. Yes, some of the problems, talk about why Satan specifically went after sex and sexuality and then maybe look at some of the solutions and some of the, as we would say, white pilled approach, where there's black pill and very negative and the white pill and why maybe we have some reason for optimism. But what I find it interesting, and I did not know this just in researching this goes back to 1970, this pride month, which I think everything basically starts in San Francisco. So I think it started in San Francisco with the gays back then.
But 1970, this goes all the way back to. But it doesn't. I don't think you have to be plugged into the culture very much, very much at all to know, like, this is really bad these days. We got drag queen story hour. I think over 30% of Gen Z identifies LGBTQ. Plus, you know, ia, two s, whatever it is. Then you look at something in the culture. Harrison Butker. Right. His. His speech. Jack had a great video on this cultural breakdown. Make sure to check that out if you have. Not from Jack. But, yeah, he gets up there and I think he hit, like, nine or ten different things. It was amazing. But one of the things that he talked about was this sinful, the sin of pride, which we have an entire month to, and people just lost it. They went absolutely crazy, getting very upset at. How could you possibly say that? And yet, if you had said that 50 years ago, it's like, yeah, which point, you know, everybody knows that. But we have slid so far to where if he mentions it, everybody online is coming after him, attacking him. You look on Twitter, I mean, everybody hates him. Um, NFL is having to come out and give statements as to why they don't agree with him. And they're asking Patrick Mahomes, his teammates, right, Travis, Kelsey, and guys like that. It's just a ridiculous thing that he can say something like that. And this is. You don't attack. You don't attack feminism, which he did, and you don't attack LGBTQ, which he also did. And again, as this is kind of slid down, you see all of the businesses that are willing to change all their colors to rainbow and everything else just to celebrate this month. Like, it has gotten very, very bad. And the sexual perversion is probably at an all time high in America. I don't know that it's been worse. We've seen it worse around the world before, but we're in a very, very bad state. And in some ways, it is getting worse. We're starting to see. We just saw something come out of Germany where they have now taken, I think, child pornography down to misdemeanor.
So around the world, it's getting. They're starting to lessen the punishments for sins against and sexual sins against kids and such. So not in a great place. And that's where we kind of stand today is how in the world did we get here? So, fellas, before we kind of jump right into discussion, any other intro points that you want to make before we just slide right in?
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say. I think it's probably the approach of most people, specifically within the church to view some of these things as, man, those things are really bad. That. That's awful. Can't believe those things are happening. But almost kind of in a, it's all futile mentality, like, what are we going to do about it? You know, there's just so much perversion. There's so many. I mean, I was telling the guys before, you know, there's, you see guys like RuPaul, who's. Who's big in the drag queen community, who's out here parading drag queens that, you know, bragging about having double mastectomies. You've got, obviously, the. The thousands and thousands of dollars that are being made off of mutilating, you know, young children's bodies and just all kind of perversion. It can be so it can be very easy for somebody to look at this and go, what on earth are we supposed to do about this? What on earth? You know, the problem has gotten so big. How on earth are we ever going to, first of all, shield our kids from it because it is all over the place. But then, secondly, could we ever turn the tide? Is there ever anything that we can do or. Because even in my lifetime, it's gone from homosexuality being the big thing to. You don't hear about that much anymore. Now it's really all about the trans movement. Obviously, there's still the. The homosexual movement worked in there, but it's a ton of trans stuff right now. And so it just seems like it's perpetually getting worse. And so that's one of the things that we do want to talk about in this episode is, is there any hope? Is there a path out of this for our families, for the church itself?
Because we have to live in this society. We have to live in american society. Is there any path? Is there any hope? And so that's one of the things that, that we want to address in this episode.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to talk about the slippery slope itself. I think I'll save that and might be a little more relevant here in a few minutes. And so I guess we'll start with the idea of why sex? Why is that? I mean, there's. There's so many sins. There's things that the Bible lists that are evil, and, you know, there's violent cultures and all that. But you see, like a sodom and gomorrah. Why is it the sexual perversion? You see romans one, it's. It's the sexual perversion. It's that thing that devolves. And I heard somebody say one time, historically, when empires are kind of at the end of their rope, that they're, they've gone through everything else, that it is the basics. It's sex and gender and things like that that they start questioning. And so why is that? I've got some theories on it. I mean, there's Bible on it. Obviously, in first corinthians six, it we do the sin is sin thing. And there are ways in which that's true. There's ways in which that's not true, that not all sin is equal. I mean, you can look in the law, in Leviticus, some sins get you stoned to death. Some sins you got to go sacrifice a turtledove, and you're in the clear. Both of those will separate you from God. Both of them unrepented, will send you to hell. But they are seen differently in God's eyes. Well, in the same sense in Romans one, where he keeps talking about the de evolution of man down towards this animalistic impulse, that the sexuality is kind of further down the line. And as I mentioned, first corinthians 618, he says, flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body. But the sexually immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own, for you have been bought with a price, therefore, glorify God in your body. So there are those differences. There's some more to why sexuality, but I'll put it to you guys, why do you think that is the one that Satan. I mean, obviously we've got a society that you can say, well, there's more violence, there's more crime, there's more anger, there's more disrespect. I mean, there's more sin of every kind. But the one that just really goes so far, the examples that will just brought up things like that sexuality is always out front. Again, Sodom and Gomorrah. That is kind of the marker of people who have fully turned their back on God. Why?
[00:08:25] Speaker C: Yeah, that's very, very interesting discussion. I would say there's a couple of reasons. First off, it is a biological thing for us to want to procreate and to have sex. So he's using what God naturally put inside of us. Because, look, not all of us are drawn toward drugs, toward drinking, toward things like that that have really pervaded in society. That's been horrible. Right, but you can avoid alcohol, you can avoid drugs, you can avoid things like that unless you were created as a eunuch, which Jesus does. Talk about Matthew 19, that some are just kind of born that way, what we would call asexual, and they're not really interested in it.
Unless that's the case, and it's a very small percentage, you are going to desire sex. So he's taking something that everybody desires and he's perverting it. But why? That doesn't necessarily the answer to the question other than obviously it is something that everybody's going to struggle with. But to me, I think this speaks to the amazingness of sex. And this is where the church really goes wrong, is we always kind of take the scare tactic approach, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Instead of realizing, why did God create it in the first place? And it's the beautiful union of a man and a woman coming together. And as you look at Satan, he is always trying to break down the family. Well, sex is a key part of the family because that's what helps bring about a family. That's what draws a mother and a father together. And it's this beautiful union that they have where they're intimate with one another in every other way. Right. And they're sexually intimate. And then out of that comes a child out of their intimacy and their union. And as we've talked about before, I think there's kind of the triune aspect to mimic a little bit of the trinity. And so Satan has always been trying to destroy the family. He got Eve to turn on Adam, and then Adam blames Eve. He's got child sacrifice going all the way back. Now we're seeing abortion. We're seeing the ways that Satan has always attacked the family. And I think sex is very much at the core of that, whether we want to admit that or not, it is a beautiful thing that's intended to be the closest connector that we have, one of the closest things, I think, to the intimacy and that we'll experience in heaven of just knowing one another fully naked and unashamed, as we see in Genesis 225. That's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And so when he can take naked and unashamed, and we see it where they're naked and ashamed. In chapter three, Genesis three, Satan's done his work, now shame's entered in. And that's what draws us away from God all the more. One of the most shameful things you can do is create sexual sin. It is go out in sin in a sexual way. You don't want to tell people about it unless that shame starts to become where you can get everybody shameful and everybody participating. And that's what's discussed in Romans one. So that's kind of my reasoning for it. Will, what are you thought? What are your thoughts?
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a really good answer.
Just to add to it, I would go to Romans one as well. And as you look at kind of the progression of Romans one, and there's a word that is used kind of over and over again that, you know, communicates the idea of exchanging something. They take this instead of this. They swap it out, essentially. You see it in verse 20, verse 23, Romans one, they change the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made, like, corruptible man.
Verse 25, they exchange the truth of God for the lie. So they're swapping out the truth of God for something that is a lie. And then verse 26, which is where you kind of. It seems as though, as Paul was presenting this downward spiral, you might say, of what starts with a suppression of truth all the way back. And I think it's verse 19, you know, they suppress the truth, and then it devolves into not glorifying God, not being thankful, worshipping idols. It seems as though the kind of the pinnacle or the lowest point, you might say, not the pinnacle, but the lowest point is the sexual sin. This degeneracy. The sexual degeneracy. Cause again, you see it in verse 26. Even their women exchange the natural use for what is against nature. They take what God naturally gave them. And, Joe, this is exactly your point, what you just brought up. And they exchange it for something that is against nature. They swap it out for something that is just in complete rebellion to God. And so to me, the reason Satan pushes it so much is because.
And you might look at it and say, well, this is kind of conjecture. There are obviously people that have. That can and have turned back from a lifestyle of sexual sin, homosexuality, transgenderism, you know, just sexual rebellion. Like, you can come back and repent from that. I personally would argue once you go down that path, it's a whole lot harder to turn your rebellion around as opposed to maybe some of these other things. It's almost as if once somebody enters into that stage of rebellion again, that's. That's. That's a higher stage of rebellion. Once somebody enters into that, it's almost not impossible, but it is very difficult to turn back around completely and follow God and repent of that. And so that would be to me another maybe answer as to why does Satan push that so hard is because once you enter into that, quote, unquote, stratosphere of sin and stratosphere of rebellion, man, you are rebelling on another level. And so it's very difficult to come back from that because you see in verse 26, again, for this reason, God gave them up to vile passions. That's what they want to go after. God essentially says, you know, have at it, that that's what you desire. And so that would be something that I would add to it, as well. Joe, you have a thought?
[00:13:27] Speaker C: Yeah. Satan hates humanity, and we have to realize that he hates us. He is trying to destroy us. And sexual sin is one of the fastest ways. You look at all the STD's and the way the sexual sin has just destroyed people, and it leads to abortion and it leads to all sorts of other stuff, you know, with the fornication.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Suicide attempt rate, you know, for transgender people. I mean, right? It's not helping them. Like you said, it's about destruction.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: It. To use an analogy, it metaphorically kills a lot of birds in 1 st. If you're Satan and you're trying to take down the family, you're trying to tempt people, you're trying to turn people against God, sure, you could tempt them with, you know, vices and materialism and things like that that, you know, are. Are a problem, as well. Or you could target sexual sin that just destroys so many different aspects of people's lives. Their kids, their. Their marriage. Um, you know, whatever it is, it's so much more. And this is. To Jack's point, it's always kind of bothered me about, well, you know, all sin is sin in the eyes of God. You know, we can't say that one sin is worse than another to Jack's point. In one sense, you know, you can't say that because, you know me. A perpetual liar is in just as, you know, I am guilty before God just as much as the perpetual adulterer, the perpetual fornicator, the perpetual homosexual. At the same time, the consequences of sexual sin, homosexuality, these things in Romans one, you can clearly see the consequences are so much more devastating. So much more devastating. It's not to say that me being a perpetual liar is not, but there are levels to this. There are different levels of consequences. And so that's something that I think has to be brought up in this discussion of, sure, the rebellion against God. Am I guilty in the sight of God? That might be the same, but the consequences are so much worse. And what you see here again, why sexuality probably being the big degenerate thing that Satan pushes is because the consequences are so devastating, the results are so widespread, as we've seen in our society for the last 30 years.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: Now, I think you make an interesting point about the repentance. And obviously there in first corinthians six where he has the verse of such. Were some of you there in five and six when he's talking about the sexual sin there and everything that they've been through and some of them have come out of it. It's 611 I was referencing there. You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God. We think of everything individually and individuals that applies. But I think generationally it has to happen, too, where culturally we haven't hit rock bottom. You had the free love thing. You had abortion, you had no fault divorce. You had all of the things that were introduced.
We'll get into the slippery slope a minute in a minute because I think it actually goes way further back than people realize.
You've got all of those things. And culturally, it hasn't been that bad. The consequences weren't enough. The AIDS crisis in the eighties, that wasn't enough to wake people up and go, we got to stop just everything that we've come to. In fact, coming out of the AIDS crisis, the movement got even stronger going into the nineties and the two thousands and then leading to where we are today. But I think you've got that transgender suicide rate. You've got a lot of people coming out and telling their story of, I got hormone treatment. I got the surgery. This didn't make me happier. It ruined my life.
I'm this thing now that honestly can't really be recovered to what I once was destroyed my life destroyed, my body destroyed, what I was given. Don't do this. Don't, you know, telling other people, don't do it. And those people get silenced being, you know, called hateful and self hating and, like, they're not allowed to talk, and you're starting to see that. And I think we are approaching at some point the prodigal and the pigsty, the looking and going, wow, this was awful. And I don't. I'm not saying that. I'm not guaranteeing a national repentance. I'm saying the people.
It's weird when you talk about people as victims of sin because they chose it. And so there is that. But they. The sin that they had to choose from is so much worse. They are victims of societal collapse. They're victims of three generations leading to where they are today. And they became transgender, and it ruined their life. And they're victims of that option being put before them and waking up and realizing this is terrible. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see, again not a mass repentance, not the nation mourning and sackcloth and ashes, but formerly transgender people going, wow, I need answers. I need God. I need something.
And we should be ready for that. I mean, you might have some very strange looking people coming into church, but, man, what a great day that would be if they do start hitting that pigsty moment.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Here's a question I have for you guys, though, on that note, is, I think what makes this issue so different from, you know, other sins that you could point to is how society. How american media society, how it presents these things to the person who does not buy into it. So, transgenders and homosexuality, for instance, it presents it as. You are the person in sin if you don't approve of it, you are the person who's wrong. You are the person who's unloving if you don't condone it. To me, that's very different. I mean, anybody can look at somebody who is a raging alcoholic and say, yeah, that. That's not healthy. You don't need to do that. Somebody who drinks and drives, somebody who. Who, you know, cheats their way to the top when it comes to money, you know, somebody who gets really, really wealthy, really powerful, but they cheated people along the way. Just not a good. Kind of a sleazy person. Anybody can look at that and say, yeah, that's. That's not good. You know, you shouldn't do that. Shouldn't cheat on your wife, like, vices, all these things.
The difference to me with. With this LGBTQ movement, homosexuality, is that society and the media is trying to push this mentality of not being able to do that. Like you can do with alcoholism, like you can do with greed and cheating people or cheating on your taxes, whatever. They're trying to push this mentality of, no, you're the one who's wrong for saying that's wrong.
I mean, again, they're trying to do that a little bit with other things, as well. But to me, this is the most blatant of it, where you can still look at somebody who is a perpetual adulterer, a serial adulterer, somebody who just consistently cheats on their spouse. We can still look at that and say, wrong. Even pornography, I think, still has a pretty, you know, most people acknowledge kind of deep down, yeah, no, that's, that's very, very wrong. Society is trying to condition all of us to look at somebody who changes or tries to change their gender or two men who are sleeping together. They're trying to condition us to say, man, I'm the one who's messed up if I don't accept that. So that would be kind of not a rebuttal to what you said, Jack. But, like, I think society is working very, very hard to make sure that we don't have the mass repentance of that because they're trying to condition kind of pardon my, you know, the same, the same people, you know, the people who are looking at this going, what on earth? They're trying to convince all of us to think that we're the ones who are wrong for looking at that and disapproving of it. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, there's a difference, but with, with other vices and other sins here that society is trying to push.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: There's a really good article I shared, I think it was by Joe Rigney. Um, and I was about the butker speech, and he said the, the most important thing he did was assume the center. And that is to basically say, of course I'm right. Of course this is good and proper, you know, to have families. The pride month is bad, things like that. And that puts the burden of proof on you to disagree. And like you're saying they're assuming the center of loving people is great, and therefore loving people means giving them whatever surgery and hormones they want. And loving people means never saying no, never saying you're wrong, letting them live whatever lifestyle. Yeah. Never questioning them, all that. And so this is why it's so important for christians to assume the center and just say, this is bad, this is evil, this is destroying you. So many christians don't want to do that. They have bought into that playing field and they've given up the center to say, you're right, it is loving. And so we apologize for while we do have to disagree with you, and I'm not saying I hate you, and I'm not, don't, don't accept their playing field. Bring it onto your own playing field to say, this is good and proper.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: That's such a great point. Yeah, Joe.
[00:21:25] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I was just going to say the reason why I'm with you, Jack. I think there will be people coming back is you are the guinea pigs in this. Those who are transitioning in the hormone treatments, everything else. This is relatively new. And you could say, well, it's been happening for a long time. Not on mass scale, not. Not in this way. I mean, yeah, those were experimental surgeries a long time ago. Now they're doing it on like, five year olds. So they're doing this more and more and more and more. Meaning you're the guinea pig. We don't know what this looks like in 30 years en masse. We don't know what this looks like in ten years in mass. So this is why I think the. The suicide rate is so high. And they always talk about, well, no, that's just the bullying. No, I think it's a genuine mental health emergency. And the fact that you're confused, it is a confusion. There's. Gender dysphoria is a thing for a reason, and it's taking what is concrete and it's making it abstract. And I think that's really difficult for people to kind of grasp, is we need the concrete things, especially from childhood. We need the concrete things to say, this is a mom, this is a dad as a man, a woman, right? This is where you are in society. Like, this is how the world works, kind of. We need concrete things and they're making everything abstract. When that's the case, your mind is craving concrete, so you will try to find it in something. I think they will come back around to it later and realize, that wasn't it. I'm having all of these issues, but to your point, well, we have to get society away from that. So how do we do that? How do we get society away from pushing all this before we get to the slippery slope?
This is why I'm so frustrated at churches for giving up our position on this. We could have been the ones to really push the culture, sexually speaking, in terms of, this is what's good, this is what's proper, this is what's right in the eyes of God. Romans one very much applies. Like, we don't want to do these things. And we could have done that real.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Quick because we had the dominant hold on american society for the longest time.
[00:23:15] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: The church did like christians did, and they gave it up.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: We had the truth and we had. And we had a hold on society like we had it and we gave it up and we allowed all of this to come in. And that's, to me, the most devastating aspect of this is that the church went silent when we needed them the most. The church acted like we didn't have any clue what sex was. And it's like, boy, I've never heard of this sermon on sex. That's a problem. If you'd never heard a Bible class or a sermon on. I mean, I I've taught Song of Solomon, national school preaching. The guy that's in the class, I've never read this book. You've been in the church for years. I've never read this book. Like, that's a problem that we don't know anything having to do with Song of Solomon, anything surrounding sexual theology. So no wonder why the world took the mantle and said, yeah, here, we'll do it this way. And we're losing kids in droves. Is using the word sex in church is enough to get you, like, blacklisted in a lot of different places? If you use the word pornography, every guy's face goes beet red. Like, this is a problem because we will not talk about it. It would not have been that much of a problem if we've just had these conversations and if we had assumed that we have the truth in. The truth is actually really good. It's not. Just don't do this, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. Scare tactics. It's. This is what God wants in beautiful, healthy sexuality. No, it's not just for procreation, though. That's clearly a part of it. We honor and love kids, but no, this is something that you see in Song of Psalm is intended to be enjoyed and intended to be just this beautiful union between a man and a wife. That's a great, great thing. And instead of teaching that, we went silent. And so the world, it loves a vacuum, to be honest with you. Loves a vacuum. You see this with, like, masculinity because the church wants to speak on masculinity now. The world comes in and goes, this is what's manly. Joe Rogan is what's manly. Weightlifters, what's manly. Big trucks are what's manly. Like when there's a vacuum, something will fill it. When there's a vacuum. On teaching, kids are a great thing, the world comes in and looks to fill it and goes, well, they're just a nuisance. When we create that or when we leave a vacuum, the world will fill it in some way. And sex is like the top of the list of ways that they came in and filled it in their own way. No wonder why we've lost so many to sexual sin. We just won't talk about it.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: That's what I was gonna say. The drum that I beat pretty often is regarding young people. Not only do we not talk about it in the church, we're not talking about it in our homes either, most of the time. You have any idea how many young people that. That I've heard say, yeah, no, my parents didn't. Didn't teach me about sex. I heard it from my friends. Learned, you know, kind of picked up bits and pieces, whatever. Learned it from thoughtful, you know? Yeah, exactly. It's one thing for the church to do a terrible job of. It's another thing entirely for the parents of the children to do a terrible job informing their children about the beauty of sex and God's, you know, creation for sex. But those two things go hand in glove. The way the church handles it is often to me the way that parents at home are going to handle it. If parents are coming to church and kind of the mentality is taboo, don't bring it up. You know, it's, you know, not really. Not really for, for young people's ears. It's going to be the same thing at home. And so when you have generation after generation after generation of young people growing up in the church who view it as, you know, kind of a taboo thing, and my parents really won't talk about it to me, my, the church that I'm at, or three times a week, they don't real. They kind of act like it doesn't exist. It's no, again, a drum I beat before. It's no wonder they are going other places to get their answers on sexuality, to get their answers because of how the world presents it as well. The world presents this fun. The world presents it as. This is what every young, good looking teenager is doing. This is what all the, you know, this. This is, you know, what makes life enjoyable. This is what makes life great. That's what the world presents. What is the church and what do parents, because of the way the church does it, what do they present? Pretty much nothing. Pretty much nothing at all. Or if they do, it's. It's for kids or it's for, you know, it. Nothing. Nothing enjoyable about it. And so kids growing up in the church, not worldly kids, kids growing up in the church, get such a warped and twisted view about sex, and we wonder why there's so much sexual confusion, so much sexual degeneracy.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: Well, and there's some, oddly enough, some of the ways I have heard christians talk about it is kind of the taboo joking, what Paul might call coarse jesting, you know, of, but it's it's kind of, heh heh. You know, we're not supposed to talk about this. Like, if we actually did talk about it, well, we wouldn't do that kind of thing. And we show it the reverence and respect. The other thing about being truthful and shedding light on this is when you shed the light of truth on the degeneracy, on what's going on out there.
If you ask people, you know, you on a gay, on a tv show, they introduce the gay character and, oh, they're funny. Oh, they're different. They're quirky. They just dress really nice, or they just, whatever. It's great. Okay, but what. What does that mean that he's gay? It doesn't mean that he dresses nice. Doesn't mean that he talks with a list. What does it mean? It means he does a certain thing in the bedroom that, when you think about it, repulses people, even just the general populace, who has no problem with this stuff. When they think about it for half a second, it's like, yeah, no, that's a. That's not great. You know, that's. That's different. Well, the same thing, and this is where I think we are getting close to hitting rock bottom, is with transgenderism. They've overplayed their hands so badly as long as they could, like, get you to, like, look over here and not think about what it really is when they say to be gay. Okay, but transgenderism is so visible. It's just so off putting. It's so when you see the, the male swimmer towering over the, the female athletes, and when you see, you know, a dude, you know, with a full beard, but he's wearing a dress and all this stuff, and it's like, this is unnatural. There. You cannot emperor's new clothes this and go, oh, man, with that.
[00:28:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: I mean, like, your brain and you see the cognitive dissonance in people of, like, I'm supposed to call Bruce Jenner beautiful, but I mean, like, come on. Hello, my eyes do work. And so, like I say, I think they're overplaying their hand where people are really seeing it. But again, to your point about what the church didn't do a good enough job is this was called sodomy for a reason. And you think about what that involves. It is something that is incredibly off putting, incredibly gross. It's something that you just understand naturally that this is unnatural. There's a reason God called it unnatural. But when it's the goofy character on your favorite tv show, well, that's a lot easier to get your mind around and be okay with. And so you've got to say the truth on these things of what sexuality is for and what's good about it, but also the degeneracy and where man has taken it and all of the ways that it can be perverted. And so, yeah, I mean, it's not. The light of truth does a lot of good. Having said that, let's. Let's get to the slippery slope part of it, because we talk about, like, that going back, and now the cat is all the way out of the bag. And we were talking about the slippery slope 15 years ago. And it's funny, people always say the slippery slope fallacy. It's not a logical fallacy. It is not. It's a logical fallacy to say, well, because this is happening, I know what's going to happen. But to say, hey, this could lead to that. That, hey, love is love rhetoric can lead to all kinds of other bad stuff. It can bring children in like they're trying to do. It can all the stuff or born this way, and I can't help it, and I can't. That I am just basically a slave to my impulses. And you start extrapolating what can be done with that logic. Well, we weren't wrong. I mean, 1520 years ago when we were saying, guess where the slippery slopes going to go? We weren't wrong. Well, everybody can see the slippery slope 1520 years ago when they really started pushing it. You can go back again to the nineties where every tv show had the funny homosexual character and you had the Ellen thing and all of that that came out. And so we can see the slippery slope to there. You've got to keep going backwards. So let's talk a little bit about the slippery slope. And obviously, as we're nearing the bottom of it, it's not okay to do half measures. It's not okay to go ten years back up the slippery slope, 15 years back up. So let's talk about getting off the slippery slope, I guess, real quick, Joe.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Then you can go. I think one of my favorite parts of think deeper is when Jack spills knowledge about fallacies. That's kind of his thing, Bailey. I know he did. And, like, that's just one of my favorite parts, is, like, he's dropping knowledge about ballast.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: We're getting educated.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: You got to know your logic, man.
You don't know it.
[00:31:12] Speaker C: You're.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: You're a sucker. You're going to pull a slight of hand, and it just works on people, unfortunately.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: Yeah, unfortunately it does. No, the, getting back to what you're saying here, you look all the way back to 50. People don't realize, I think I've spoken on this on the podcast before. Playboy was 1953.
Like, you look back, especially in Germany, people don't realize in the sexual degeneracy, going back to Germany, they were doing a lot of the trans stuff back then. And that's, yeah, a big part of kind of that culture. And why, when Hitler came in Germany was obviously, he turned it into a powerhouse, but he turned it from sexual degeneracy into that. Obviously, we don't want that to happen nowadays, so we have to be very careful as to what this looks like. But the reason they had gone so far downhill historically, world war one kind of wiped them out. But then all the sexual degeneracy at that time was very, very disgusting. Germany was not a very clean place. So it takes a figure that comes in that says, hey, we're not going to put up with any of these things. And that's how they ended up with Hitler. And people just went along with it. Is initially he was against all of the perverts, and you got a lot of the families that are like, absolutely, this is great. And then he turned into what he is, you know, one of the worst guys ever.
But that's the scary part of the slippery slope is like, you know, you're going to have a savior that rises up, quote unquote, if you're not grounded in Christ. And this is why the church has to come into this. But you get into the fifties, people are coming back from work. Baby boomers, right? They're having a lot of kids. They're not talking about any of these things. And so what do you have? You have a sexual revolution in the sixties, and so in the fifties, you have playboy, the sexual revolution in the sixties, free love, flower power, all this stuff. Um, seventies kind of continues. More of that, where you look at like, seventies, um, Times Square. You know, some of the movies kind of depict that seventies Times Square, where like, every other place is basically a, either a strip club or for prostitutes or things like that. Then the eighties come in and everything kind of gets revamped. But then you start MTV, and you start with Madonna and she's on MTV, and you start with, you know, and obviously the AIDS crisis was around that time, so it starts to come more into public consciousness of, hey, this isn't good, but where does this start? Go back to the forties, fifties. These guys that are just looking at porn. Well, what's the big deal? They're just pretty women. They're just, whatever it may be, what's the big deal here? Sexual sin has a way of getting its hooks in, and then who are you to stand up and tell anybody about anything, sexually speaking, when you've lost the moral high ground, when you have given into that? So the slippery slope starts with a guy giving into sexual impulse. How in the world is he going to stand strong from a pulpit? Or how is he going to stand strong from a, from a fatherhood perspective, when maybe he's cheating on his wife, maybe he's looking at porn or he's looking at these Playboy magazines or whatever it may be. So to me, that's very much where it starts. I don't know, Jack, if that's where you had it going, but yeah, I look at that as like it started innocent, quote unquote, where it's just these dirty pictures versus where we are now, where it's every type of taboo pornography and disgustingness and where we are now. But it started on the, you know, going all the way back to that. Obviously it's not innocent, but so much less. And then it's just evolved from there because men lost the moral high ground. They allowed, you know, they allowed their sexual desires to really rule what they wanted. And women start then kind of coming up, and feminism comes up a lot more, which is to go back to twenties, but feminism came up a lot more because women wanted to be liberated. And then they realized, hey, we can turn sex into what we want it to be. And so it very much starts with men failing to lead, in my opinion, from the beginning.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Very quickly, I would just say, I don't understand why we are surprised by the fact that when you specifically as a man, let kind of give up your self control in one area, why do you think all of a sudden, if you get to another area, oh, it's going to ramp back up again, you know, like, I'm going to let my self control go by, you know, staring at Playboy magazine or, you know, looking at, you know, maybe harmless, you know, soft porn. You might say, I'm going to let my self control go there, but, man, as soon as it crosses the line, my self control is going to ramp back up again. That's ridiculous. That's not how, that's not how it works. And, you know, you consider the way typically, not typically, I should say. But a lot of times, Joe, you can probably speak better to this. Pornography addiction goes, is it starts out, you know, a lot softer. It starts out, you know, again, bikini pictures or whatever, you keep going. If you keep letting your self control go and keep giving that up, what could it eventually turn into? You want more and you want more and you want more. More novelty. You want more new things. And so, you know, very rarely does somebody start off with soft porn and then stay there for the next 30 years. Why? It's because you have let your self control completely go. You know, you look at this in any other aspect of your life. That's why, Joe, for you and I, when we talk about, when we're on the godly young men podcast, self discipline, self control is such a big, you know, sticking point for us. It's because it's like, you know, even for something like exercise and eating well, it's because if you let your self control go there, but then all of a sudden, you're going to be really self control and self disciplined about, you know, what you look at online or your Bible study habits. That's ridiculous. You have to as a man, and this is to your point, Joe, that back in the fifties, we kind of let it go to some extent by looking at playboy, by accepting some of the more, quote unquote harmless things. Well, then why on earth are we surprised that this is what it's led to? Again, the slippery slope thing of we're going to give up our self control here. It doesn't just, you can't just flick it on and off like a switch. If you get in the habit of not being self controlled, sexually speaking, looking at things, you're going to spiral into wanting to look at other things and wanting to do other things. And to me, again, that's just it. Self control and self discipline is like a muscle. You don't exercise it, guess what's going to happen? It's going to get weaker and weaker and weaker. And so that's all I would say here, is that's not a surprise at all. When you look at something like that as innocent or harmless or, you know, I'll stop after this. Good luck. That's usually not the way it goes.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: Well, maybe not every guy was looking at Playboy, but how many fathers allow their daughters to just go nuts for, for Elvis shaking his hips? Like, we look at that, we kind of go, wow, look at that. You know, all the way back then, it's like, yeah, but maybe we should have called that out, too. And I know it kind of was, and people were real upset about it, but how many? How many women were going to the concerts and just falling all over themselves for Elvis. A lot of fathers just kind of allowed this stuff, and this is what starts breaking into the culture. So it sounds like, why are you guys bunch of buddy duddies? Like, no, sex is amazing, or, we're not fuddy duddies in the least. Like, sex is incredible in its proper context. All the sexualized culture, Hollywood in the fifties is really coming around, obviously, Vegas with that's. That's very much when Frank Sinatra and such and into the fifties and sixties and such. So that starts to get big. And then with the sixties and the rise of music and you got the Beatles and the beach boys and things like that, all of these things start coming more into it. And there's a sexual tension that takes place around those times. So even if a guy's not looking at porn, there's a lot of fathers that allowed their kids to get into things that more than ever before. And I wonder if there's a part of this being absent fathers from the war, if there's a part of this being. You know, maybe they felt bad about some of them. Maybe they had shame and trauma over what they done. I don't know fully why they allowed their kids to get away with what they did. All we know is this very much gave rise to the sexual revolution in the sixties. And I think it still starts with, even if the guy didn't give up the moral high ground, he failed to lead his family in a positive sexual way. Or sexual theology, I should say. Jack, what are your thoughts?
[00:38:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's.
It's that thing about when what one generation tolerates, the next one celebrates, or whatever the phrase is. And, yeah, I mean, it is something that starts small and to Will's point, maybe that one guy, his desires, the things he's looking at degenerate over time, but it's still only going to go so far. You know, a lot of those guys didn't turn into transgender people. That one takes 70 years to cook, and here we are. And so this is one of those with the boomer generation, and there's the generation war thing, and we criticize each other back and forth. You can't deny. And this is one of those things that it's kind of a Caleb and Joshua thing. We need boomers who go, you know what? My generation did crash this. My generation did mess this whole thing up. Let me help you guys see where we went wrong. Let me tell you, you don't have to say that you were part of it. You know, it's not a generational. The blame is on everybody. But you can look at, this is where abortion got passed. This is where, you know, the Woodstock, the hippie culture, the free fall divorce. Yeah, no fault divorce. All those things got passed under, you know, as those people came into adulthood. And some of that blame goes on the generation before them. There were supreme court justices that oversaw a lot of this stuff, and we have to be honest and look and go, man, this degeneration happened in all of this.
And so when you see 30% of Gen Z or LGBTQ, they go, kids these days like, that doesn't happen without the degeneration that starts in the fifties. But when we talk about setting this slippery slope, I'm glad you brought up Genesis earlier. You brought up Adam and Eve and Satan and how he attacked the family and all that, because that's really important in all this. One of the things Satan hates life. He tries to kill children. In Exodus, he tried to kill children. And when Jesus was born, he tried to kill children. Molech. The sacrifice that killed children. Abortion, they kill children. It's one of the biggest things.
What was basically one of the first and only commands given Adam and Eve, be fruitful and multiply.
And that was what Satan was trying to get them not to do. You see, when they come off of the ark, it was, again, be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. Go and scatter and essentially take dominion again, because you guys are supposed to go fill this earth. They go everywhere and make things work out. And you look at the birth replacement rates. We're below replacement rate in most of the developed countries in the world. Satan's winning. I mean, that is a result of all this. And so when we talk about setting the slippery slope back, here's one we haven't talked about. When people decided, you know, what? Two or three kids is what we need. Two or three kids is enough to, you know, what was it? A boy for you and a girl for me or a boy for you? Me and a girl for you, and thank the Lord we're through. Or there's some cute little rhyme about it's like, thanks, way to go. This was part of it. And if you can't see how that that related and created this world of LGBTQ, you know, a quarter of youth today got that. You need to think through these things. You need to think through how Satan manipulates the family. Falling apart. The family doesn't matter, because when kids are a big focus of your life, responsibility is a big part of it. Responsible people don't get to go explore their sexuality like this. One of the biggest causes of transgenderism is too much time on your hands and the porn addiction, all these things. Like, you don't have responsibility to be better for your family, to raise them, to. To be the best you can be, to be a father and a mother and all of these things. And so when we went to having, you know, what was it? 2.3 children per. Per household or whatever, that was the start of it. And people would say, no, no, it's not. There's no. There's not a sin. And so that doesn't. It opens the door to rethinking the family. It opens the door to contraception and to abortion and all of these things. Well, we don't want kids. We want to put kids off. We and you. They're inextricably linked.
[00:42:06] Speaker C: Brian, here's another key piece. No fault divorce. You're right, with the kids. And I think the no fault divorce and what that does is it creates a ton of attachment issues where people will find. And we see, because I worked with this a lot, you know, transgender, obviously, with porn addiction and a lot of the sexual stuff and sexual trauma and abuse and transgenderism and such.
So many of those, and I would venture to say probably 100%, that sounds crazy, but 100% have attachment issues with their parents. Why so many of them grew up in a one parent household. Where's dad? I don't know. Like, and we see this specifically with homosexuality. Is the homosexuals most of the time, for a boy, it's an aloof father and an overbearing mother.
Yeah, it's an aloof father and overbearing mother.
Almost across the board, you say, well, that's not always the case.
Maybe not always, but a lot of the time it is. So why does that make a difference? Because when a father gives up his role as a leader and when a mother is feeling like she's got to step up as a leader because the dad's not, and then she usurps him and she doesn't respect him and. And kind of keep the domain is the way where she's supposed to be, and then when you throw in no fault divorce and you have people growing up without one parent or the other, this is why marriage matters, a key part of marriage.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: Why did they want no fault divorce? Because I want to be happy. Why do people do these things? Because I want to be happy. And that goes back to my point about the kids. You know, why not have these? Well, you're thinking about individually, you're thinking about my generation, my time on earth. This is how I want to spend it. You're not thinking of yourself as a cog in a bigger machine than yourself.
[00:43:37] Speaker C: Generationally.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Yeah, generationally that my parents had me, and I'm. So it's no wonder you have people today like, I'm the end of this bloodline. I don't want to have kids. I don't want to pass this on. I don't want to perpetuate that. It's also no wonder people just decided again with all that time on their hands and no purpose for sexuality. No, having children is not the only purpose as you've been talking about, Joe, it's a great thing for married couples to bond together. But when the purpose is, well, if it makes me happy, well, we've all got small kids. It throws a wrench in a lot of the things you want to do with your time in a blessed way, in a way that changes you, in a way that grows you. And so when american couples started thinking about, well, what do I want to do? What do I want my family to look like again? That is the smallest little crack that it takes to get us to here, Jeff.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: But think about how that perpetuates as well. When you have kids that grow up in a household where they see their parents or one parent or two sets of parents or whatever, every decision they make essentially operates under what do I want to do? What makes me happy? Think about how that perpetuates in the sense that if kids grow up in that environment, what are they going to do when they turn 19, 2025, 30, 35 years old, the exact same thing they're going to operate under? Well, what, what do I want to do? Because that's what I saw my parents, that's how I saw. That's what I saw as the basis for all of my parents decisions growing up, my parents divorced, you know, married whoever they wanted to. You know, I grew up in a split household. I was kind of, kind of every man for himself. So when I, when it's. When it's my turn to kind of live on my own, maybe get married, have kids, I'm going to do the exact same thing. That's how it perpetuates generation after generation is because, again, the basis for everybody's decision making is what do I want to do? What's going to make me happy? What is going to make my life the most enjoyable? And so a kid, if from the time a kid can think, you know, 5678 years old. If that's all they see for their entire childhood, why are we surprised when that's how they turn out as an adult as well? Then they have kids. Guess what? It just continues. It just continues until somebody willing to break the cycle to say, this life is not all about me and what I want to do well, in that.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Listen to parents and latchkey kids, which overcorrected to helicopter parents and gentle parents and I mean, like, all of these societal things we've gone over in the last 80 years, all star. I mean, like, you just see this cascade of effects.
[00:45:49] Speaker C: But when you talk about, you know, what makes me happy, consider the cultural shift that we've had as it's continued to shift and shift and shift.
People in the eighties, you know, people that grew up in the eighties, baby boomers, Gen X. I would never think of becoming gay. I'd never think of this transgender. Yeah, it wasn't available to you. It wasn't available. What made you happy was penthouse magazines, right? What people. What made people happy in the nineties was AOL and chat rooms and things like that. And then they would get more into that world. What makes people happy nowadays is chasing transgenders and things like that. So people act like they're holier than them when they say, well, you know, I didn't do that. I would never. It's like, it wasn't available to you. It wasn't in the culture, the zeitgeist. It was not the cool thing to do, the acceptable thing to do. The reason we have so many kids doing it nowadays is they're struggling with the same things people struggle with back then, which is a lot of questions, who they are, identity issues, things like that. But back then, they just latch on to identity surrounding their favorite band or surrounding whatever it is identity was. They were still trying to figure it out. But you can see, like, eighties people, I'm sorry to call out the eighties, but everybody who lived through the eighties thinks the eighties was the greatest decade ever. And every movie like Top Gun, they think is just fantastic and it's just not. But that is their identity. Well, kids still. They are still struggling with identity today, but what are they latching onto? Everything in our culture is a recreation. If you listen to all modern music, it's a recreation of a past air. It sounds like the seventies Dua Lipa, which I don't listen to her, but, you know, her song will come on or whatever. It's like. Isn't this a seventies song? You. Oh, wait. No, that's today or it's an eighties song where they're using the same snare drums, they're using the same beats as what was taking place. We don't have an identity nowadays, so why would we not run into what makes us happy? And nowadays, cultures develop to the point where, of course, that's going to be the LGBTQ movement because they're so vocal about it and parents aren't providing an alternative. The church isn't providing an alternative option. The best option as to what will make you happy, what actual identity in Christ means. It's a great phrase that we use, but nobody knows what it means. So, yes, we're all searching for identity, but the culture has very much pushed that as the identity, whereas back then, that wasn't the case. So this is the devolution we're seeing. It's the same problem.
[00:47:53] Speaker A: Well, part of this is the perpetual you thing. I mean, you think about how many billions of dollars are spent on hair dye, on facelifts, on Botox, on things like that, of I don't want to. I don't want to get old. I don't want. I mean, I was at Pete Townsend. I hope I die before I get old. You know, the my generation song. And, like, that is what this generation grew up on. Free bird. I'm free as a bird, nobody can hold me down kind of stuff. You know, you can't tell me what to do. I'm not going to grow up. I'm just going to keep that youthful rebel spirit. And that leads to kids who do that. That leads to kids who do that. And so this is not us criticizing. Oh, man. It's, you know, the. The boomers in Gen X are all the problems. No, millennials stink. Gen X. Gen Z stink. Like, all these generations have all of these problems, but it is this cascade where the problems get worse and the snowball grows. And to that, I would say what christians need to do and what pulpits need to do.
Read deuteronomy six and work through the book of judges. Deuteronomy six says, do this. Open the word of God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Put these words on your heart. Teach them to your children diligently. I mean, that means work really hard at teaching your kids God's way of doing things. You go to the book of judges immediately. Well, we can leave those idolatrous people. I mean, we conquered a lot of them, so we can probably just move into the land and be okay. What happens by the end of the book of judges, they are Sodom and Gomorrah.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: Everybody what was right in their own eyes.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: Everybody did what was right in their own eyes, and they have a literal recreation of Sodom and Gomorrah of, hey, that. That guy that's with you, send him out here so we can sleep with him.
There's Sodom and Gomorrah. And that first generation that just said, well, we'll leave these idols around. They weren't going to do that. It doesn't work that way. You just see the entire book of judges spiral to where you've got child sacrifice, to where you've got the idols, where you've got all the sins of the people around them. Even their heroes, like Samson, are people that are moral delinquents. I mean, you've got that world that gets to the point of everything's bad. Everyone did what's right in their own eyes. Nobody had any accountability. And so the point I'm getting at here is, for christians, you can't just kind of put a foot in each world. You can't go, well, we're going to be kind of pro family. We're not going to preach that, like, marriage is good or having kids is good. I mean, let's just let everyone do what they want. Everybody, everybody does what's right in their own eyes. There's no king. I mean, like, I can't tell you what to do.
Yeah, we can't bind it well. What happens from that 70 years down the road?
You have to go hard in the other direction. And deuteronomy six it. You have to say, this is what God says. This is what God's word teaches. Be fruitful, multiply matters. Families matter. Taking responsibility matters. Husbands, wives matter. Divorce is not an option. All of the things that we're supposed to be doing as christians, you have to go hard in the other direction, or you will slide down the slippery slope.
[00:50:28] Speaker C: And let me just say this as well, because that's such a great point. Speaking to the parents here, you will be weird, and you will be ostracized for going hard in the other direction where we really want. Part of the slippery slope where we've really gone wrong is parents want their kids to be cool. So, iPhone. Well, my kids got to have the newest iPhone. Okay, great. You just opened the world of porn. Newest computer, right? Or, like, that was. That was all the rage for a time. Now it's more iPhones or iPads, and then, well, I don't want my kid to be out of the loop prom. I don't want my kid to be out of loop. We might as well just let them have Instagram, Snapchat and who knows, Kik and the other apps. Prom. I don't want my kid to miss out on these things. Well, public school. I mean, all his buddies are at public school. Yeah, you're going to have to say no to some of these things and actually get some guts and go against the grain. You've got to be the salmon swimming upstream. And I know that's popular and I know that stinks, but that's the way we're going to reclaim the culture is if we're swimming with the culture, where do you. Why would you expect. You're not going to drop off the waterfall. That's where the water is headed.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: I know I brought this up in the public school episode, but it's such a self interested thing because parents are wanting to, in a way, live vicariously through their kids again, because high school was their glory days. They were popular. Whatever. It's like, man, I really want my kid to be popular, too, because that reflects great on me as a parent. I want my kid to be talented athletically. I want my kid to be the homecoming queen. I want my kid to be, you know, have. Have their iPhone so they can text all their friends, all these things. Like, it is so strange to me that, that. And again, this is a generalization, but I have seen this with so many parents. That is their motivation. They live vicariously through their kids in such a way of.
They feel better about themselves when their kids are popular at school, when their kids are at prom, when their kids are the star of the football team or whatever it is. And so, Joe, I love that point of, like parents, you're going to have to get to the point where you are comfortable with being weird as a parent or being looked at as weird as a parent. And you are going to have to get very comfortable with your children being looked at as weird by some of the otherworldly kids. In fact, by a lot of the otherworldly kids. Most christian and christian kids are very comfortable with that. And christian kids. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Well, to get to the slippery slope thing, to relate it to that, if you went to 1950 and just showed somebody a ten minute video of here's what's on tv in 2024, I mean, they probably throw up. I mean, like this stuff I was watching NBA, NHL, there's playoff games on sports. You know, I had that on with my kids and just the commercials coming on, it's like, all right, turning it off. We can't do that. Like, this is awful. Of the drag stuff and the sexualized stuff and the horror stuff and everything that's going on. Really disgusting stuff. If you showed somebody that stuff back then, they would be like, whoa, what on earth happened to this place?
And yet it's kind of as we've. We. That phrase we use of boiling the frog in the water slowly, you turn the heat up a little bit. A little bit. And so it's so normalized that christians think, okay, the window has moved this far. And we used to be, you know, 10ft to this side of the window. Now the window has moved 100ft. We're still 10ft to this side of it. No, if we planted our feet where we were way back in the day, where sexually we had truth a lot more, we would look so weird, so far off that. Again, the thing about, like, apologizing every time we criticize lgbt people, I've got friends who are, you know, we love these people. We don't want to think that we hate them. And christians have been so mean to these people, for sure.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: We're just so sorry for the way the church is treated.
[00:53:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:48] Speaker A: You know, like, apologize, apologize. No, this is just straight up say it's wrong. Say, yeah, the Westboro Baptist, God hates you. Well, we're not going to come out and say that. We are going to say, yeah, this is really bad. This is wrong. God calls this degenerate, and God offers you a better way that the gospel in Christ is that you don't have to live this way because it's going to kill you and it's not good for you and it's miserable. And just say that, well, well, this.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: Is where I do believe postmodernism has influenced the church more than we're willing to admit. The idea of relative truth kind of, you know, can't really. Can't really find hard line ground on anything because, well, different people's experiences and we really need to hear dialogue and, you know, what's their. What do they have to say? What's their perspective? And it's like if the church would just take hard line stances and again, not apologetic, I'm going to kind of lean your way. But, you know, I still want to hold to my truth over here. No, as you said, jack, plant your feet. This is what we believe. This is what God's word says. And so we're not going to compromise. We're not going to apologize. We're not going to try to beg you to come to our church because, you know, we think we'll really like it. This is what God's word says. And yes, we're going to, we're going to love you by sharing the gospel with you, but we're not going to love you by condoning your behavior or making, making you feel like you are coming to us and doing us a favor by coming to visit our congregation. That's not it at all. And yet that is the approach that so many congregations across the United States are taking of. Again, just try to apologize them in the door. Just try to get them to like us as much as possible so that maybe they'll do us the favor of coming to visit our congregation and maybe they'll really, really like it. Why are we surprised that any of these things are taking place when that's the approach for any single issue? That's why churches aren't taking hardline stances on, forget homosexuality. They're not taking hardline stances on how parents are supposed to be raising their kids. When is the last time, this is so box of mine. When is the last time you heard a sermon about parenting that gave specifics on what you need to do with your kids? When is the last time you heard, I mean, obviously all three of us go to the same congregation, so maybe we've heard it from each other. But for those of us who are listening, first of all, when's the last time you heard a parenting sermon? But then secondly, when is the last time you heard a parenting sermon where the preacher said, this is what you need to do with your kids? Specifically, you need to spend this much time with them in scripture. You need to do this at night with your kids. You need to not allow your kids to do this? We don't do that. Why? Because that's, that's too hard line of a stance that, that's going to drive some people away. And so this, I can't get over this. We have to plant our feet in the ground. We have to take hard line stances, but not just on homosexuality, on our view of the family. As Jack and as both of you guys have been saying this whole time, until we are willing as churches to do that, we have no hope, in my opinion, of ever climbing back out of the slippery slope until we start being willing to take these hardline sands and saying, do this with your kids. Don't allow your kids to do this. Don't allow your kid to have an iPhone at age seven, like, is it a sin? Forget if it's a sin. We shouldn't be doing it. These are the conversations to go back to our rejecting brain free Christianity episode. These are the hard line stances we have to start taking. Otherwise, to Jack's point, it's just a half measure. That's all it is. And it's never going to accomplish anything.
[00:56:48] Speaker A: Just briefly, Joe, before we, we get off of this point. It's really sad to see churches that accepted the tolerance thing and it's like, look around you, that's over. That was a joke. That was a trick play that they.
[00:57:00] Speaker C: Ran foot in the door.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Yeah. That they did for about 20 years to say, we got to tolerate, we got to talk. They're not preaching tolerance anymore. They don't tolerate you. They don't want mutual tolerance. They're saying, we won. And these churches who are going, well, you know, tolerance, we got a, you know, different perspectives and different, no, they tricked you. Figure it out.
[00:57:20] Speaker C: That's such a good point. That's such a good point. Yeah, I, I was about to take us in a kind of hopeful point because to your point, Willie, it's, it seems very hopeless unless, unless things start turning around.
[00:57:31] Speaker B: But it doesn't have to be, though. That's the thing. It, sure. And we, we man this podcast, we kind of ask a lot of church leaders, but it's because you're in a high authority. You're, you're in a very privileged, not the right word, but like, you're, you're in a place of authority for a reason. There are, it's the Spider man quote, right? Great power comes great responsibility. It's a lot to ask, but there is a lot weighing on you. Like, to Joe's point. Yes, it's, it's, it's kind of difficult to say where's the hope in it? But it can be done if church leaders are willing to do these things. The, the reason why it seems hopeless is because a lot of people are looking at church leaders going, yeah, there's no way they're ever going to do that. Well, that's why it's hopeless.
[00:58:08] Speaker C: Well, and this is what I'd say to that point with the church leaders, but also with fathers. Stop giving up the moral high ground. Stop giving up the moral high ground. You have to battle porn. You have to battle adultery. You have to battle all the other things that people like that guy's struggling with. You have to get that out of your life and eradicate it as though it's the worst thing ever, because it is, you are not going to preach on things. I mean, you look at how much Catholicism has lost because of what the priests did, because they did not control themselves. It is horrific. It's horrendous. It's terrible what happened. No wonder why people don't trust them. They lost the moral high ground. How in the world are you going to. I'm supposed to come tell you about my sins when you're doing this to little kids? That's not okay. But how many preachers were on that Ashley Madison list when it was leaked? How many preachers are. Have been busted in sexual sin? Sexual scandals. Oh, wow. He was doing this. He was grooming young girls, like so many of them. When you see this with, especially the homeschool with Bill Gothard's and the Doug Phillips, where these scandals come out and everybody goes, well, everything's a far slug. It just didn't matter at all. No, they had good points, but they lost the moral high ground. And so everybody just said, nope, we're done with you. So it's church leaders. You have to eradicate it, and you also have to talk about it. And as fathers, you're gonna have a difficult time leading your kids. You're gonna have a difficult time holding grounds, holding steady ground and being on a foundation when your kids are struggling with sexual sin, if you yourself are struggling with sexual sin, if you can't get it together, how in the world are you going to lecture your daughter about, you know, she wants to go to prom and what are you going to do? Like, well, I don't know. I have my. My mistakes and whatnot, and so who cares? And I know that's not how every dad thinks, but if we're really going to check in internally, I think that's how a lot of us think is who am I to lecture anybody on it? Because deep down, we have the shameful thing that we don't want to talk about. So if we want to see change, we have to start with ourselves specifically as men, and eradicate it and take back that moral high ground that we have given up so willingly. But the other part of hope that I would say it's very interesting, this is what goes along with confusion. And Satan's overplaying his hand because the feminists hate. There's a lot of feminists that hate transgender because obviously becomes men. They're starting to do a lot more. A lot more. Infighting is where you get the JK. Rowling's going against the trans movement. So they're starting to do a lot more infighting. That's interesting. That's something to keep an eye on. Here's the other thing.
Sex and fornication is down across the board with Gen Z, so they're identifying as LGBTQ, 30% of them. So many of them aren't having sex, which tells you it is an identity thing, it's not a sexual thing. They don't understand what it means to be gay, bisexual, transgender, lesbian. If you're not actually doing it, if you're not performing the acts that go along with it, they're just classifying themselves as such. Sex is actually down across the board. And boyfriend, girlfriend, a lot of them don't even have boyfriends and girlfriends going into their twenties. Things are changing rapidly, and it's because of the confusion. They don't know what they want. This is where the truth of God's word comes in, just as a shining beacon of hope to these people. They don't know what they want, and they're confused as anybody, and they don't even know if they want to get married or have kids or whatever else. They just don't know. And so they're rejecting sex as a whole altogether.
This is, again, a huge open, a spot for us to fill a vacuum where we can come in and fill that as the church and provide hope where there has not previously been hope. The world is starting to open up the vacuum we created by not talking about it. They're starting to have a vacuum that we can fill. In my opinion, with the gospel, there's a lot of broken people. As we talked about. Transgenderism will run its course. The. The guinea pig approach of all of these hormone treatments and surgeries will run its course. What then? What do they turn to? Well, here we stand on God's word, saying, we're here for you. We love you. Come on back. As the prodigal, right? I think Jack's right. This. We're going to have a lot of prodigals coming back saying, that was a mistake. As long as we stand on God's word and stop coddling them to death and stop acting like it's fine, and we go, it's not okay. But we love you, and we're here for you as. As the congregation. When you come back, man, we're going to be here with whatever you need to help bring you back into the fold, bring you back into Christ, man. We have such an opportunity, and it may not be today, but I really do think in the next five to ten years, the church is going to be the beacon of hope that we all need it to be.
[01:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's God's goodness that gave us instruction on these things. And we're holding it back from people when we won't say it because we're afraid to hurt their feelings. And that, that's going all the way once again saying, the kids are good, marriage is good, we need to do these things. Somebody in your poll, your pews is going to get mad. We've, we've sure seen it. When you start talking about those things. Say it. Talk about this is the goodness of God towards you to give you instruction to not leave you. Everyone does what's right in their own eyes. I mean, when, when we're left that it's bad. And so we're real big on true masculinity, true femininity, the purpose of marriage, the purpose of children, like really drill down on those things because society needs them. And the other thing is we have to look it. You look the part. There's just, as I said, the visual disgusting, the off putting ness of everything that you're seeing, of a pride parade of men dressed as women, women dressed as men. It is off putting.
We can't be so gnostic to say, well, looks don't matter. You see it happen there. Good looks matter too. Of well kept families of, you know.
[01:03:17] Speaker C: Go to Salt Lake City.
[01:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah, chase godly. Yeah. I mean, the Mormons do what we can. Yeah, chase godly mothers, strong, godly fathers, well kept, obedient, happy, you know, cleaned up godly children.
Man, it stands out. It sticks out like a sore thumb. The darker it is out there, the more light shines. Do that. Show them that example. Show them that God gives a better way. Not this half hearted kind of 1ft in both camps thing. Will you have any final thoughts?
[01:03:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:03:45] Speaker B: Closing comments is this is a gauntlet that is being thrown down, that needs to be taken up by the fathers. If you're going to inspire change, if you're going to drive your families to this, it can't, as we've said before, it can't be led by, you know, the really well meaning mom, the really well meaning wife who really wants to, really want to homeschool, really wants to do all these things, but the dad just couldn't care less. This is a gauntlet that we, that we would, all three of us would ask the fathers to pick up because again, you'd say you're not getting it from your congregation as far as the, the leaders really pushing this stuff to some extent, that's out of your control. You can go meet with them, you can go talk to them or whatever. What is in your control if you're not a church leader but you are a father? Is your own home. Are you going to be willing to do your enemy, you know, take Deuteronomy six seriously? Are you going to be willing to. To do whatever? You know exactly what these guys just said. As far as expectations for your family, this is how we're going to present ourselves, is what we're going to do. Has to start with the fathers. And so that's what I would. That would be my closing challenge to anybody who's listening, specifically, who is a man. Take up this gauntlet in your own home and then turn your attention to what can we do at our local congregation to really kind of push this mentality as well.
[01:04:52] Speaker C: Last thing I'll say to close. Stop accepting mediocrity. Stop accepting, well, boys just gonna look at porn, you know, everybody fools around with their girlfriend, with the boyfriend, the slippery slope. This is how it starts, is accepting mediocrity and not holding. Not expecting more from our youth and expecting more from ourselves. Expect it. God expects it. And he demands it, actually. And he's a holy God that we're looking to serve and to glorify in every way. We can do that sexually, more than. Anyway, like, look for godly marriages. Pray for godly marriages. If you need help in your marriage, find somebody who can help. It's worth it. We have to win this next generation because we have such an opportunity now. We don't have the. We can't fumble this one the way we have in the past. This is. It's coming to your point. We have to take up the gauntlet. So, fellas, any last thoughts?
All right, we'll wrap there. Thank you for listening. We will talk to you again next week.
