Sexual Sanity In An Age of Total Confusion

Individual Topics — Steve Gregg

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Sexual Sanity In An Age of Total Confusion

Individual TopicsSteve Gregg

In "Sexual Sanity In An Age of Total Confusion," Steve Gregg addresses the prevalence of sexual confusion in modern society and the shift towards celebrating diverse sexual identities and behaviors. He questions the idea of gender as distinct from biological sex and is critical of the movement towards same-sex marriage, arguing that it represents a fundamental redefining of a long-established concept that has served as a cornerstone of civilization. The speaker urges Christians to stand on the rock of truth and follow Jesus, regardless of societal pressures and persecution, to preserve the sanctity of sexual intimacy within the context of marriage.

Transcript

Now, the subject that I was asked to speak about here today is something like sexual purity in a time of sexual confusion or something like that. I forget the exact title. But I got the impression that I'm being asked to speak about the difference between what the Bible teaches and what we're being told all the time from every other source in our culture at this present time, which includes virtually every imaginable variant of normal sexual behavior, and is seeking not only to identify it by names, but to celebrate it as something that everybody should be very happy to see a great opening up of the culture to, you know, people who have a different way of feeling about sex and about identity and gender.

And so frankly, I think most of us, even people who are not Christians, I can't see how they cannot be getting sick of this subject, because it's shoved down our throats in the news, in the movies, and the TV shows, virtually everywhere. This particular new agenda is being presented to us as normative, and we're being asked, almost demanded, to celebrate it and say, you know, why shouldn't people do things that were always considered previously to be perverted, corrupt, mentally ill, things like that. Those are the classifications for behaviors that we're now told to celebrate.

Now, it may be that those classifications are outmoded. Maybe those classifications came about in a time when people were less enlightened, before we had as much information as we now have. This is, I think, probably what most non-Christians assume.

I don't know what, I'm not speaking for most non-Christians. I'm a Christian, but I think that most people, Christian or non-Christian, if they are beginning to have some sympathy, let's say, for the alternative identities, gender identities and so forth, and lifestyles, that they are probably thinking, well, you know, we live in a scientific age. The Bible's kind of old-fashioned.

For a long time, Western civilization was just kind of stuck in this, you know, quagmire of biblical thinking, which is now so outdated and so, you know, so 18th century that, you know, in our modern scientific age, we certainly have to change our thoughts about many things. And it is true that we do change our thoughts about many things. There was a time when people thought the world was flat, and it has been scientifically demonstrated that that is not so.

There are still some flat-earth people. The ones who are, are, you know, probably the same ones who are the King James only. Some people who really get kind of stuck in an old way of thinking, and they see everything as a conspiracy to undermine, you know, the sanity of society in past generations.

And that is the right way to look at some issues. The ones that are actually, where science has actually directed us in a new direction. Of course, we have to be careful about what we say science is saying, because science is one thing, and a scientist is another thing.

It's just like saying theology is one thing, and theologians are another thing. Theology is the study and knowledge of God. A theologian is someone who has opinions about theology.

A scientist is somebody who has an opinion about science. Science is truly truth. In fact, the word science in Greek means knowledge.

It is simply knowledge. And in modern times, science is identified with basically experimentation and discovery and confirmation of theories and proofs and so forth through evidence. This is how, what modern science is about.

And that particular science has not supported the new moves in the way of gender theory. In fact, what we call gender theory today, or critical gender theory, arose back not too very long ago with a man named John Money, who was a psychiatrist, psychologist, who experimented with kids and sexual identity and tried to find out if maybe someone could be considered to be a different gender than they seem to have been born. John Money was from New Zealand, a psychologist, actually, a sexologist, and he became very famous, very celebrated.

He won many awards, academic awards, for his research on sexual identity and biology. He lived from 1921 to 2006, and he is the originator of what we call modern gender theory. He, until his time, the word gender referred to a grammatical feature.

In many languages like Latin and Greek and German, every noun has a gender. It's masculine or feminine. Sometimes some of these languages have a neuter gender, and the gender has nothing to do with sex.

It's just a grammatical expression that determines which kind of, which form of pronouns you're going to use in association with certain words. And if you've studied any foreign language that has gender, you know how difficult it is for English-speaking people to learn, you know, which words are considered masculine, which are feminine, which are neuter, because it's not obvious. For example, the German word for girl, Mädchen, is a neuter word.

Now, it's not suggesting that girls are neuters. It's just saying, in grammar, that particular word is a neuter word. So you've got gender, until the time of John Money, actually, was simply a grammatical term.

It didn't refer to biology at all. But he's the one who introduced the idea that a person might be biologically of one sex, but of a different gender. His ideas, of course, didn't have any science behind them.

How could you prove such a thing? Because gender, as it's been defined by John Money, and ever since then by those who are involved in the radical critical gender theory, gender is simply a subjective thing. Now, biology is not subjective. Sex is not subjective, except in extremely rare rather deformed kind of cases.

Every baby is instantly recognizable as male or female. Not only in the human species, but every sexual species, every mammalian species. You know, so it's not really a subjective thing.

If you have certain kinds of features of your DNA, you're a male. If you have different features in your DNA, you're a female. And that DNA is in every cell of your body.

You can't change your sex unless you change every cell, because your natural cells, you know, whether you have a Y chromosome or not, really, is what it comes down to. It determines whether you're a male or female from birth, or even from before birth, in the womb, from conception. So, sex is an objective scientific phenomenon.

Also, with most animals, and with humans certainly, there are anatomical differences between male and female. In fact, that's the way you know what your baby is instantly. You don't necessarily have to get a DNA sample of your baby to know if it's a boy or girl, because there are anatomical features that obviously distinguish it.

And this has always been true. There's never been any confusion about this in the whole human race, until John Money. John Money decided, well, sex is one thing, gender is another thing.

Now, what's he mean by that? Well, gender is a psychological state. Well, scientists can't look at a psychological state. A psychological state is what somebody feels, or what they say they feel, or what they imagine, or what they think.

That's what's going on inside somewhere. You can't do a brain scan and decide if a person is, you know, transgender. It's not a brain thing.

It's a psychological thing. It's a, it's a, it's something that the mind produces, or in some cases that is imposed on the mind from other sources. But the point is that what you feel about your sex is considered to be what your gender is.

So if you were born a male, and you kind of feel like a female, or vice versa, then the assumption is you are misgendered, that the doctors assigned you the wrong gender. That's, that's the term that is. The gender that is, the sex that is assigned to you at birth by the doctor.

Listen, doctors don't assign sex. They just recognize sex. Sex is assigned, apparently, by God, or if there's no God, by something farther back than conception.

Because as soon as there's conception, there is scientific, biological sex present. No one is assigning that, except nature or God. Certainly, factors much more authoritative than any doctor, and certainly any gender theorist.

Now the fact that children sometimes grow up thinking they are different than they really are, it shouldn't surprise anybody. Not every little boy has a phase where he thinks he's a girl, or wants to be a girl. Not every little girl has a phase where she wants to be a boy, or thinks she's a boy.

But most kids go through phases where they think they're something. Superman, or you know, a nurse, or you know, you know, a soldier. Something they're not.

I mean, children pretend to be things, and sometimes they even imagine themselves to be things. And they grow up, and they get in touch with reality. And reality is a very immovable and stubborn phenomenon.

Because if you think you're Superman when you're three years old, reality is going to catch up with you, and you're soon going to find out that's not reality. That's not truth. And if you think you're a girl, but you've got a boy's DNA and a boy's anatomy, well, then you're equally mistaken.

There are people in mental institutions who think they are Napoleon. Now, they're not. And we've got people now saying, I identify as a Korean.

You've seen that news story recently. That was not too long ago. A man who's not Korean, but who's a big fan of a Korean music star, decided that he's always felt like he's Korean.

And he's had all kinds of expensive surgeries to change his look, so he looks Korean. But he's not. And the Korean community is not eager to welcome him as a Korean, by the way.

They know he's not. You become a Korean, really, there's just one way to become a Korean. That's have Korean parents.

You become a certain sex by being born that way. There are people who either seriously or jokingly have said, there was a man in his 70s who he identifies himself as a 49-year-old, and he wanted that changed on his birth certificate. I don't think they did it.

I think this was in England, as I recall. But frankly, if he said, if he didn't say, I identify as a younger man, but I identify as a woman, they probably would have accommodated him. Because it hasn't gone as far in that direction yet as it is going.

Now, whenever people say, well, this looks like a slippery slope here. You start allowing same-sex marriage, well, that kind of breaks the ceiling on what the limits are, what is marriage. Can't you eventually then have people married to their own daughter or married to their own son or married to their dog or married to their television? I mean, really, if you're not going to have a definition of marriage that is traditional and in all the dictionaries and in every book in English literature, if we're going to just throw that definition out, what are we going to replace it with? You know, the dictionaries have not yet found a substitute for the traditional view of marriage.

This whole move of people affirming their feelings about their sexuality instead of reality, which is biological, about their sexuality, has led to not the replacement of certain words with other words, but just the abolition of certain words. Marriage doesn't have a positive definition anymore. Now, some people say, well, you know, same-sex couples who feel in love with each other, shouldn't they have the same rights everybody has? Shouldn't they be able to be married? Well, giving them the right to be married is a different thing than a right to live together and even have what we used to call civil unions back in a very short window of time when gay marriage was first suggested.

People were still resisting it. So they said, well, let's have civil unions. Don't call it marriage because marriage is something already.

Marriage is something else. Marriage has a definition. We don't need to change that.

Let's just give them all the privileges that married people have, but don't call it marriage. They weren't satisfied. They said, no, we want to call this marriage.

And as soon as they did, there suddenly was no definition of marriage anymore. They wanted that term, but in taking it, they abolished the term from the dictionary. Because once marriage is not what it always was, it is not anything in particular yet.

They might settle on something once all the people who want to have sex with whatever objects they want have been included. We can say, OK, now let's find a big umbrella word and call that marriage. But they haven't yet, so they're just destroying the English language at this point, one of the most important words.

You know, when people have told me, what will it hurt you if this gay person marries this gay person? How does that hurt you? It doesn't affect your marriage, does it? It does. It redefines what I have, because what I have is called marriage. It's got meaning.

It's a unique circumstance that has always meant something. Now it doesn't mean that anymore. To say I'm married doesn't mean anything anymore because marriage doesn't mean anything anymore.

Yeah, it does hurt me. But the reason I oppose same sex marriage was not because I felt it would hurt me. It's because I, you know, that's that's all they can imagine.

Why should you oppose this if it's not going to hurt you directly? Well, I think I want to say to them, that's apparently how you assess things. You only care about how things affect you personally because you're a narcissist. I'm not a narcissist.

I'm not only worried about how I personally would be affected. It may be that I will personally be minimally or or just unnoticeably offended, but or affected. But I'm concerned about my children, my grandchildren.

I'm concerned about society, civilization. I'm concerned about the loss of concepts that hold societies together for thousands of years and which are causing us to dissolve into random chaos because we didn't just lose words. When you lose words, you lose concepts.

And so the gay marriage thing was not really a desire for equal rights. They already had all the rights that married people have, except to call it marriage. By insisting on the right to change the definition of marriage, they asked for special rights that nobody has.

I don't have the right to change the definition of marriage, at least throughout the past six thousand years. I couldn't change the dictionary. Say, listen, from now on, marriage is what I want to call it.

No, marriage already had a definition, no group of people, no race, no, no religion, no ethnicity or no sexual orientation. No one had the right to change the definition of something that already exists and is defined. If you want to create a new phenomenon and give it a name that fits that phenomenon, fine.

I mean, I may not agree with the phenomenon. I may not agree with the behavior, but that's up to you. This is a free country.

You can do that and call it something. But you can't change the definition of English words that we all use and make us change because you want us to. That's asking for a special right that no other demographic group has.

Nobody else has ever been able to change the definition of marriage. So they weren't asking for equal rights. They're asking for rights that nobody else has, and they continue in many ways to do that.

You know, you may have heard this. It was recently on some of the news. The San Francisco Gay Men's Choir posted a video.

I think it was on their YouTube site or it might have been on their Facebook page. It's not there now. They took it down.

But it was singing a song, a very catchy tune, as a matter of fact. But if you listen to the words, it's a little disturbing, and that's why they took it down. And I'm suspicious that they took it down because it was disturbing because gay agenda people, the people who organize gay rights parades, don't usually withdraw from their behavior because it offends someone.

And I'm really suspicious about what their real reason was for taking it down. My suspicion is it's down because it was too explicit as to what they're really up to. Here's the song.

It's called, I think it's called, We're Coming For Your Children. You think we're sinful. You fight against our rights.

You say we all lead lives you can't respect. But you're just frightened. You think that we'll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked.

It's funny. Just this once, you're correct. We'll convert your children.

Happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly. And you will barely notice it. You can keep them from disco.

Warn about San Francisco. Make them wear pleated pants, we don't care. Convert your children.

We'll make them tolerant and fair. Just like you worried they'll change their group of friends. You won't approve of where they go at night to protest.

Oh, and you'll be disgusted when they start finding things online that you've kept far from their sight. Like information. Guess what? You'll still be all right.

We'll convert your children. Yes, we will. Reaching one and all.

There's really no escaping it. Because even grandma lies through all. And the world's getting kinder.

Gen Z's gayer than Grindr. Learn to love, learn to vogue, face your fate. We'll convert your children.

Someone's got to teach them not to hate. We're coming for them. Your children will care about fairness and justice for others.

Your children will work to convert all the sisters and brothers. Then soon we're almost certain your kids will start converting you. The gay agenda is coming home.

The gay agenda is here. But you don't have to worry. Grandma's standing by our side.

Can't afford an MOU. Always needs a bit more pride. Convert your children.

Then we'll turn to you. Giving up the fear inside is freeing like you never knew. Go and take San Francisco.

Go and turn up that disco. You'll forget if you were ever upset. We'll convert your children.

There's no gay agenda. What are you, some kind of a conspiracy theory? There's no agenda. But there is.

There's very much an agenda. I mean, why else would schools have drag queens reading children's stories to preschoolers? I mean, I'm not saying I hate drag queens. I'm not a hater.

I don't hate anybody. I don't hate transgenders. I don't hate gays.

I'm just wondering, what is it that we're supposed to be gaining here? How is this supposed to be helping our children? Well, of course what they would be saying is, well, we're helping children become more tolerant. Yeah, but not of us. Tolerant of things that, you know, we're already tolerant of.

I mean, in a sense. How could our society ever become more tolerant than it is now of every alternative gender expression and sexual identity? I mean, this is the most tolerant culture you could imagine. In fact, it celebrates it.

Every movie has got, you know, one of their good guys is overtly and actively on screen, gay, you know. And there's so many of this. I'm not saying that gays are worse than other people.

But I'm saying it is definitely an attempt to normalize this for people. Now, people say, well, why shouldn't it be normalized? It's normal for those people. Well, do you know what's normal for lots of people isn't normal? Like I said, someone who thinks he's Napoleon but isn't, he's not thinking normally.

He's welcome to live with that delusion if you want. So that's not really what's true. You know, in the Bible, in Daniel 5, King Nebuchadnezzar was stricken with madness.

And he had a disease that now the psychiatric profession calls philanthropy, which is where a man thinks he's a cow. Yeah, there actually is a known malady. A man thinks he's a cow.

And Nebuchadnezzar had that for seven years. He ate grass like a cow. He was out, you know, under the dew at night.

And, like, guess what? He acted like a cow. But he wasn't a cow. He was insane.

You know, if you are not what you think you are, and you really think you are what you're not, that is arguably a form of what many people call mental illness. Now, I don't prefer the term mental illness. I think there's other categories the Bible would give to this stuff.

But the truth is that even in America, in the American Psychiatric Association and in the DSM, which is the book, the diagnostic book that psychiatry uses to identify disorders. It's called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM, it referred to homosexuality as a mental illness way up into the 60s.

That's like yesterday. I mean, even though everyone knew that a significant portion of people either were identified as homosexuals or else they practiced bisexuality or something like that. There's always been people who've done those kinds of things.

It was never considered to be normative sexual behavior well into the 60s. Let me just read this from an article online called When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder. The author says, first published in 1968, the DSM-2, the second edition of the American Classification of Mental Disorders.

They listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In this, the DSM followed in a long tradition of medicine and psychiatry, which in the 19th century appropriated homosexuality from the church and in an elan of enlightenment, promoted it from sin to mental disorder. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality was a mental disorder.

And it says in the vote, 5,800 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM and 3,800 to retain it. So approximately 10,000 votes were cast. It was about 60-40 in favor of removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders.

So there are still 40% of psychiatrists, and these are not Christians. They were as much scientific as the other guys, but there's no scientific evidence for saying that something is a disorder or not unless it's making you malfunction. If a person is not functioning well, then they call that a disorder.

But if someone can function well, and certainly most homosexuals function just as well as heterosexuals do, they think, well, maybe we shouldn't call it a disorder anymore, which is not surprising. This move was championed. I once listened many years ago to a public radio special on a weekend about this very thing.

The man in the American Psychiatric Association who actually pushed for this removal was a gay guy and a gay activist. And he, over a period of years, was able to get most of the Psychiatric Association not to think of that as a disorder. This article says the American Psychiatric Association then compromised removing homosexuality from the DSM, but replacing it in effect with sexual orientation disturbance for people, quote, in conflict with their sexual orientation.

Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM. Now that's in America, but meanwhile the World Health Organization, the WHO, only removed homosexuality from its ICD classification with the publication of the ICD-10 in 1992. Now what this is saying is that psychiatrists the world over recognized homosexual behavior as a disorder, as something not normal.

And gradually they changed, but not because of scientific evidence. Can you imagine an experiment that could be conducted scientifically to decide whether someone who has sexual drive, let's say in an abnormal direction, whether that's a mental illness or not? That's simply a matter of opinion. A mental illness really, as one psychiatrist said, is just one man's opinion of another man's behavior.

That's how they diagnose mental illness. And if somebody says, well, this guy's sleeping with men, I don't think that's that weird. Well then, okay, put a mark down for it's not a mental illness.

Someone else says, yeah, I think that's really weird. You don't decide truth by majority vote. You decide truth by reality.

But how do you know whether certain sexual behaviors are aligned with reality or not? Well, of course, that requires a moral compass. That requires that somebody have a gauge of what's right and wrong sexually. Now, what I'm sharing here is for Christians because I'm assuming the Bible is true and that's what Christians assume, non-Christians do not.

So non-Christians don't have to go with me on this. I'm concerned about teaching disciples of Jesus how to think like Jesus taught. Now, let's read something Jesus said and you'll wonder, maybe initially, how it relates to our topic but it relates definitely and directly to our topic.

In Matthew chapter 7, verse 24, these are the closing paragraphs of the Sermon on the Mount. And Jesus said, Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

But everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them, will be likened to a foolish man who built his house on sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, and it fell, and great was its fall. Now, everybody's life is like a house under construction.

Every choice you make, every habit you form, every opinion you adopt is building your character one way or another. And you're building either on rock or on sand. Now, Jesus said, The ones who hear these sayings of mine, that is, Jesus' sayings, and do them, that man is building his house on the rock.

The man who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them is building his house on sand, and the end is disaster. And our society, if we could maybe generalize it nationally, is a society that once did more or less seek to build its house on the rock. You know, the Bible and its teaching were pretty much accepted as normative by the majority of decent Americans and our founders.

So the building was built initially, intended to be built on the rock. Now, it never was perfectly built there. But now the Bible has been rejected by the society, and this is not a new thing.

There have been societies rejecting the Bible for centuries. It's just a new thing for our society to join the ranks of those who do. And now you're not following what Jesus said, and you're still building.

You're building a society, but it's on sand. And when the storms come, it collapses. Now, this is something Christians must affirm, because, frankly, Jesus said it, and Christians are those who follow Jesus.

And he said, If you hear these sayings of mine and don't do them, you're a fool. If you hear these sayings of mine and do do them, well, you're wise. Following what Jesus said, following what the Word of God in general says, is where wisdom lies.

Solomon said, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Now, the reason I'm here is because we've got two choices these days, and that is to stay stubbornly with what God has always said and what people who know God and believe in God have always understood, or to decide, Well, maybe it's time to move on. Time to move on from what God said and maybe someone else out there is as smart as he is and he'll come up with an alternative.

I will give you this. The generation, which was called Generation X, was identified by a sociologist who wrote a book about it called The Dumbest Generation. And it's not meant as an insult.

It's meant because they're not educated well. It's not that they don't have good brains. Everyone has good brains.

But if you don't educate your brains well, you come up with dumb ideas. And we now have gone beyond the dumbest generation to the most clueless generation. They don't know what race is.

They don't know what racism is. Everyone knew that until, you know, like yesterday. They don't know what gender they are in many cases.

Or if they do know which one they are, they don't know what anyone else's are. They're not sure what the pronouns are until they're told that apply. They don't know right from wrong.

They don't... It's the clueless generation. And nothing is left in that degeneration society from clueless to, I guess, totalitarian takeover. Because when people don't think or don't know what reality is, somebody who knows what they're doing says, I'll come in and I'll take care of this because you guys are a mess.

You're in total disarray. Now, Jesus said, if you don't follow his words, you're building on sand. And that's because, as it says in Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 8, it says, The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.

And this is not just Old Testament. Peter quotes this very verse in 1 Peter 1, 24 and 25. He quotes it.

The flower fades, the grass withers, but the word of God stands forever, never goes away. Jesus himself said this in Mark 13, 31. He said, Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Now, if you want to gamble on him being wrong about that, you're gambling against, frankly, evidence. There have been so many attempts by the world and enemies of Christianity to overthrow Christianity, overthrow Christ, overthrow his words, overthrow the Bible. And they've failed every time.

Sure, they make a few converts to atheism or whatever, but basically, the Bible comes out, the evidence comes out and proves out God's word still stands. In 2,000 years, there's never been any book other than the Bible that has been sought to be abolished by the most powerful forces, political and religious forces. The Catholic Church tried to burn all the Bibles at one time.

There were emperors who tried to burn all the Bibles. The communists tried to abolish the Bibles. There are just powerful, powerful movements and people have tried to abolish the Bible and it's as strong as it ever was.

It's just not as popular. But it hasn't always been popular in the past either. The Bible has always said things that aren't popular.

We have to decide, am I going to make my choice to be popular? And this is especially important for young people because it was not as unpopular to believe the Bible when I was young. In fact, there was a revival going on and there were a lot of people my age who were finding God and finding the Bible and believing it and it didn't seem unpopular at all. That was in the 70s.

Now, this is the 21st century and if you're going to stand for the Bible against the shifts in culture, you're going to be probably ridiculed, called a hater, maybe left out of certain groups that you'd like to be in. But guess what? You can do that. I took a stand for Jesus when I was young and that did exclude me from certain groups.

I was never invited to parties. I was never allowed to be with the cool people. That might have been because I wasn't a cool person, not because I was a Christian, but there might have been a connection with those two things.

We're reading their books. We're not reading anything written by the people who killed them. The truth is that those who stand for the truth, they live on because they're on a rock.

They survive. What they believe survives. And it's a very hard thing in a society where everyone says you're an idiot, you're a hater, you're just backward.

You think the Bible's true and you say, yeah, I actually do. I actually do and I still believe in God. I still follow Jesus.

If you take that position, there'll be persecution, but that's okay. You're not the first. Believe me.

This is what a person has to decide when they decide to follow Jesus. When Daniel was taken into Babylon, he was just a teenager and you can bet that Babylon had all the most corrupt things going on that America has going on. Babylon was totally pagan.

They were totally sexually corrupt. They worshipped idols. They were corrupt in every way.

They were full of debauchery. But Daniel, it says in Daniel chapter 1 that Daniel had set it in his heart to not be defiled by these Babylonian cultural things. Now, he was a Jew.

He was taken captive from Israel and taken into Babylon. He spent the rest of his life in this pagan land and he didn't have a lot of friends who saw it his way. He had Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego initially but they apparently got appointed to work somewhere else and half the time we read of Daniel, he doesn't seem to have any friends around except pagan friends.

But he stood uncompromised. He knew it's better to have God's favor than man's because man's favor lasts only a little bit. By the way, if you can keep people happy with you all the time, you've worked a miracle because no matter how much you compromise, you're not going to keep everybody happy.

You're not going to please everybody but you might as well please God because when you die and even before you die but especially when you die, He's the one who's His being happy with you is what's going to matter to you nothing else. And you know what your friends, if they happen to survive longer than you're going to think, they're going to think oh, poor so-and-so we miss him. Let's party on, you know, and you'll be out of mind minutes later, minutes after your funeral.

People say, well, let's go out and party, you know, let's go surfing, let's go do something else and then you're gone from mind as well as the world. I mean, seeking the approval of those people isn't worth anything because once you have it you don't have anything that's of value. What's their approval mean? This is how we have to understand it.

We don't have to go along. We need to stand on the rock when you say, what did God say? What did Jesus say? God's word stands forever. The opinions of my friends, they change.

They'll change with whatever the culture says. But the fact that the culture changes so much and some of you are too young to even realize how much it changes. I mean, I'm an old guy but I'm still living in one person's lifetime, my own, and the whole world has turned upside down in a great number of significant ways.

Not in my 68 years of life but in the last 30 years. And, you know, the change is happening so rapidly we need to say, we're like caught up in a rushing river and we're looking for something to grab onto or else we just say, let's go with it. Now, those who say, let's just go with it, that river is going to carry, that river of culture is going to take you down over the waterfall eventually.

No one's going to survive that. You're not getting out of this world alive but if you're caught up in a rushing river and you can grab a branch or a rock and say, this isn't moving, I'm going to stay here while everyone else goes over the falls. Well, then you're a lucky person.

You're fortunate to find something that doesn't move. Most people don't have something like that. The rock doesn't move.

God's word doesn't move. It will stand forever and that's what we need to know as we begin to ask, what does the word of God say about human sexuality? Well, might as well go to Jesus first. You can go to earlier parts of the Bible to find some of the answers but Jesus even quotes some of those earlier parts but Jesus is the most important person.

His opinion really matters more than any other person who's ever written or spoken. Jesus was asked once about divorce. Now, that's not what we're talking about here but divorce obviously is related, at least the ethics and morality of divorce is related to the meaning of marriage because divorce is simply the answer to the unmarrying of a couple that were married.

So, how do you unmarry someone if they're married? Well, it depends. What is marriage? What is unmarrying? Well, Jesus said, well, they came to Jesus and said, is it lawful to divorce your wife for just any cause? And Jesus said this in, this is Matthew 19, 4, He answered and said to them, Have you not read that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. Now, there he's quoted from Genesis when God created marriage.

He, God made this pronouncement, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and they'll become one flesh. That's Genesis 2, 24. Jesus quotes it.

Paul quotes it also later on. But, Jesus, haven't you read that? What, don't you even know what marriage is? Don't you remember what God did? He made a male, he made a female, he said these two are supposed to come together and become one flesh? And then Jesus said, what God has made one flesh, don't you put asunder, don't break it apart. And that's his teaching on divorce.

Because marriage is something that God has joined, men should not be permitted to break it up. Okay, that's the teaching about divorce. But if we don't go into the divorce part, but into the, just stick with the marriage part.

What is marriage then? It's when a man leaves his family and a woman leaves her family and they form a new family as a couple. And the purpose of them doing so, initially, is, frankly, to start, to perpetuate the race to another generation. You see, the story of the creation of marriage in Genesis 2 tells us that God made a man and then he said, it's not good for a man to be alone.

Now, we might say, yeah, I don't like being alone either. I can see why God didn't want a man to be alone. But I don't know if we'd get it.

God, if he just thought man was lonely and that needed to be, he could give him another man to be his friend. Or a good dog, frankly, in some cases, is just as good as another friend. Depends on what you're looking for.

But God didn't just make another man say, now you're not alone. He made a woman. And that woman remedied the not alone in a different way than another man would.

Namely, that the woman and the man were so constructed to fit together like a key in a lock as one mechanism. And to be the foundation of the family that would produce the next generation. And the first command God gave Adam and Eve is be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

It's obvious that God made marriage to perpetuate the human race. Now, there are some forms of sex that can do that. And there are some forms that cannot.

And you'd think that any kind that simply cannot and is not designed to would be certainly questionable as a norm for marriage. Now, there are two purposes God made marriage for. The Bible makes it very plain.

He said, the two become one flesh. But that's true in two senses. A man and a woman become one flesh when they get married in that, first of all, they join as one organism in purpose.

They don't share. They're not two people going different ways with different agendas. They become one organism with one agenda.

Their family is a unit. And they're like one person from now on. And Paul likens it to a head and a body.

When he says that we are the body of Christ and Christ is our head, he says he's like the husband and the body is like the wife. It's all one organism. One flesh.

Now, the other part of being one flesh is sexual union. Now, sexual union in many cases, normally, ideally, produces a new, a baby or two eventually. Maybe many.

And a baby is one new flesh. Comes from the two, one new flesh, one new person. But, even if there's no babies that come, there's still a union into one flesh that is sexual that Paul acknowledges in 1 Corinthians 6 when he's telling the Corinthians to avoid prostitution because he says, you know, because a man who sleeps with a prostitute, he becomes one flesh with her.

So, now, obviously, he's not saying that person actually marries her because very few men do marry prostitutes. But, he's saying just the sexual act is a joining of it. The reason that sex outside of marriage is wrong is because it's a joining together.

It's a life joining activity that, for the couple, is not intended to be life joining. You see, the marriage vow is the stated intention. I want to join my life.

I want our lives to be inseparably joined. And, in that union, it's safe for us to give each other, ourselves to each other intimately in every way. Because, once they have the sexual relationship, that's a joining act.

But, the couple who's not married and so, they don't have a joining intention. So, it's being taken out of its place. And, I just want to make this very clear because, especially young people often don't understand this.

Certainly, the world doesn't understand this. Christianity does not see sex as a dirty thing. If Christians seem to criticize a lot of different sexual activities, it's not because we think sex is a dirty thing.

It's the opposite. The Bible teaches that sex is a very sacred thing to be preserved for a very sacred circumstance. You don't take out your fine china and feed the dog with it because it's reserved for something for special occasions.

It's a special thing. It's especially valuable. God made sex as an especially valuable way to be a picture of union.

Not just between a man and a woman but between Christ and the Church, Paul said. When Paul quotes Genesis 2.24, For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two sheep and one flesh, Paul says, this is a great mystery but it speaks of Christ and the Church, he says in Ephesians 5. So God made marriage not just for procreation but also to reflect Christ and the Church. Now there's other psychological benefits of marriage of course.

Loneliness is nice not to be lonely. Nice to have a partner. Although frankly marriage doesn't always resolve that.

Sometimes certain kinds of marriages are more lonely than singleness. Many married people are more lonely than they were when they were single. So I mean, if we say God made marriage to resolve loneliness, well that wasn't a very good plan.

If he made it partly to populate the race, well that worked well. In fact, it's awfully hard for a couple to avoid populating the next generation. They have to try very, very hard with many high tech modern interventions to prevent the natural thing from happening.

Because sex naturally is designed and very powerfully to create babies. It doesn't mean there's no use for sex when babies are not being created. But it certainly is hard to divorce the idea of sex from the idea of creating a new generation of children.

It's hard to make it not happen. You have to do surgical things or chemical things or, you know, mechanical things that are just, you know, to my mind, ruins the whole deal. It certainly misses the point.

The idea is that God, of course, he wants couples to enjoy themselves. God made certain parts of the sexual apparatus in male and female strictly for pleasure. I mean, there are certain glands and certain, you know, nerves and so forth that God put in to make sure that sex is pleasant.

But he also made it, and I think more importantly, because far more important than my particular pleasure is whether the human race goes on. The main purpose is to make sure that the human race goes on. But there are certain forms of sexual activity that in no way are consonant with the idea of making another generation.

And that would be when, say, people have sex with someone of the same sex or with some other I don't even want to suggest it. There are other things that people have sex with that certainly have no possibility of creating babies. It might have the possibility of, you know, simulating the sexual activity of sexual pleasure that ordinary sex would.

But see, that's the problem. When a society has given up on God's plan and God has made something that's partly for pleasure and partly for production, it's partly for pleasure and partly for practical value, they want to divorce the practical because, children are inconvenient. Some of you know this.

Your life is much less convenient once you have children to take care of. Trust me, it's worth it. But, for God, it's inconvenient.

A lot of people don't want the inconvenience but they want the pleasure. So, sex to them is only about pleasure. And therefore, they say, why shouldn't anybody, if a person would have more pleasure with another person of the same sex, who can fault them? Well, if it's all about pleasure, no one, I suppose, could fault them unless God forbade that pleasure.

But God doesn't forbid pleasure. God created pleasure. God is the one who invented the idea of pleasure.

The devil didn't invent pleasure. He uses pleasure as bait to draw people into sinful behavior. He can't create pleasure.

God created that. Pleasure is God's idea. Sex is God's idea.

When God said, I'm going to make man a partner, he made a sex partner. And he could have made sex unpleasant or not, or neutral, so there was no pleasure in it. But, God's nice.

He wants people to do certain things for good reasons, like populating the race, and he made it something they would enjoy doing. It's sort of like eating. Eating serves a purpose, too.

It's also pleasurable, thankfully. We would have to eat to survive whether we liked it or not, whether it was pleasurable or not. God's very kind.

He made eating pleasurable. Unfortunately, though, as with other things, it's our tendency to take the pleasure of eating and divorce it from the nutritional benefits of eating. That's why we eat so much junk food.

We don't imagine for a moment that we're going to be gaining anything nutritionally from it. We just like the pleasure. And I'm not saying it's a sin to eat something that isn't nutritious.

But if you have suddenly divorced in your mind the idea of eating from nutrition and it's only about pleasure, then you've crossed a strange line into something that's not going to be very healthy and it's perverted, frankly. You know, you see some of these people on TV that are 600-pound life or something like that and they can't even get out of bed. They can't even get through the door of their room anymore.

Someone has to bring them food and they're still eating all this non-nutritious food because, I guess, they still find pleasure in it. But it's destroying them. They're dying and they're repulsive.

That's not what God made people for. He made people to eat and enjoy their food but he made the food to nourish and to try to enjoy without nourishment and never seek nourishment would be very dangerous. Same thing with sex.

These are biological processes that God said these are necessary things and I'm going to make them pleasurable just to make sure people don't neglect them. And he didn't have to do that but he did. So God created the pleasures of sex and the ability to have pleasure in sex but he didn't intend for it to be divorced from its main purpose.

And what was the main purpose? The main purpose was marriage. In the Bible there's a word fornication. That's the English translation in Greek it's the word pornea.

Pornea means fornication. Now some of you people might say if I asked you what does fornication mean you might say it means sex before merit. Premarital sex.

And you'd be partly right because premarital sex is pornea but it's not all there is to pornea. The word pornea is used in the Bible for every kind of sexual activity that is not within biblical marriage. So it's certainly sex before marriage is not within biblical marriage so that's pornea.

But in Jude the activities of the sodomites in Sodom are referred to as pornea. So that homosexual sex is referred to as fornication in the Bible. A man who is in an incestuous relationship in the Church of Corinth in 1 Corinthians 5 is said to be committing fornication.

In other words fornication can mean premarital sex it can mean homosexual sex it can mean incestuous sex it is used also for adultery. Adultery is certainly outside the bonds of biblical marriage. There's a sin called bestiality that the Bible talks about that we don't want to think much about that would be included.

Pedophilia would be fornication. Anyway, anytime you're involved in a sexual relationship that is outside of a biblically defined marriage you're involved in what's called fornication. When people say well can a homosexual be saved? Of course.

If you mean by a homosexual a person who is attracted to the opposite sex instead of attracted to I mean attracted to the same sex instead of the opposite sex. I'm a heterosexual that means my attraction is to the opposite sex a homosexual is attracted to the same sex. But that doesn't tell you about whether I go to heaven or not.

Heterosexuals and homosexuals can be saved but fornicators can't. The Bible says fornicators will not inherit the kingdom of God. So if I'm a straight guy and I was and am all my life and I was single I was not permitted to be sexually active because if I were that would be fornication.

If I were a gay guy and my attraction was not to women but to men I still would not be allowed to have sex because it's outside of biblical marriage. It's fornication. There's lots of things that are fornication it's not just one thing.

Fornication is just whatever isn't sacred sexual relation in a sacred marriage. Now that is no doubt why many in the homosexual community wanted to call their relationship marriage because then it wouldn't be fornication. The problem is you can't just call anything you want to marriage.

There are people there's a woman in England who got licensed to be married to a dolphin. That's not marriage. The courthouse might say it's marriage but it's not.

The courthouse doesn't know what marriage is. Modern western civilization doesn't know what marriage is. A marriage license from them in many cases is not hardly worth the paper it's written on because it's a contract that the government acknowledges but then they'll tear it up as soon as one person wants out for no reason at all.

But some person just get tired of it and they can tear it up and they'll give them a divorce. The state has no competence to decide what marriage is. God is the one who made marriage and he's the one who said it is and Jesus said didn't you know when he made it he made male and female so that kind of limits things and he means male and female humans not you know mixed species and he said and he wants a man to take a wife and to become one flesh which includes of course the potential of having a family starting a family and having children.

That's what sex was designed for and that's what marriage was designed for. Now you might say what if I'm in a marriage and we don't have any kids or what if we're two old deaf kids? My wife and I are two old deaf kids we got married after we were both two old deaf kids well I'm not but women get there earlier than men do. The point is we got married even though we knew that we wouldn't have kids we already had seven but you know from other places but the truth is marriage doesn't have to produce children but what God regards as normative sex is an activity that takes place in marriage which is designed for children it may be that because of health situations or age or something else you know there's not going to be any children produced by it but it's at least the same activity that was designed for children and which would welcome children if they were available but when you just say well we just want to have sex with whatever and with whoever well then what you've done is you've just lost sight of even what marriage is and by the way marriage has always been the foundation stone of solid civilizations once marriages break up once there's more kids from unwed parents than others the society is in bad shape and this is not a slight on black people it's just a demographic statistic because of many of the political decisions of the last 50 years many black families are single parent families that especially in you know the inner city communities of blacks men will get a woman pregnant and he'll move on the woman has a baby and she's raising this single kid now a kid who's raised without a dad in the home statistically is way way up in the risk statistics for committing crimes joining gangs because a gang becomes a sort of a replacement for the missing father going to prison using drugs getting shot or shooting oneself those are the things that kids who have a woman in a one parent home just statistically most of the people in prison don't have dads there are a few exceptions but not many and this has been a a terrible attack on the black community these political policies because they discourage marriage they basically say it's okay don't marry the woman you get pregnant she will the government will just pay for everything for her and you can go off make some more women pregnant that's basically the policies of our government right now and that has destroyed the black families and anyone who has compassion on black children or on black people in general should realize the great danger to black people is not the police the great danger to black people is fatherlessness is the breakdown of marriage and the breakdown of the family when a society loses marriage it loses stability God knew what he was doing if we think we're smarter than God and I think most people think they are then we're the stupid ones and we will find out to our hurt but we don't have to I mean you and I might suffer from the society departing from God in these matters but we don't have to perpetrate it we don't have to make it happen in our own families we can still raise our children to know what's true and what is true is that God thinks sexuality is an important thing not gender identity gender identity is a psychological thing now you know when somebody thinks they're something they're not there's two ways you can go there's on the internet you can find pictures of the cat woman have you seen her? she had all these cosmetic surgeries to look like a cat I guess she thinks she's a cat well it's a very sad thing she's mentally ill I mean peep or something something has gone wrong because she isn't any more a cat than I am or you are she thinks she is it's a mental derangement and there are people who have other similar ones but you know when you find someone like that if you take her to a counselor the counselor will be a fool to say listen I'm going to try to help you to live as a cat because that's what you identify as so I'm going to try to normalize your life as a cat and we'll probably get you spayed but the thing because we don't want any more kittens but the point is that if you're going to be a cat and identify as a cat then you know why not you know why not just suggest in fact let's do some more surgeries let's put a tail on you and some fur because after all that will normalize your cat identity more well no one does that not yet maybe some maybe they will eventually but they'll do that if you're equally mistaken about what sex you are what gender you are your gender if we're going to use it as a sexual term instead of a grammatical term is tied directly to your sex now I realize that's not what people say now it's not what people say but people can say what they want to they've said all kinds of strange things over the years and most of them they've backed down on what God says never he backs he doesn't back down because he's never wrong what God says is never found wrong God made them male and female and he didn't make it hard to know which they were it may be true that some little boys have what they call gender dysphoria or little girls do but you want to know something a huge percentage of those who do if they are allowed to they outgrow that and there's recently some cases in the news of young boys who I think when they're prepubescent they thought they were girls they had surgery to become girls and also some cases of girls who became boys surgically and all that and then when they were like 14 like when they get into puberty they realized wait I'm not a girl I'm a boy what do I do that for you know and of course now that person has got some undoing to do if they want to be normal right now and if they want to feel normal but a lot of people are saying well a three year old I read this today some experts saying three years old is not too young to decide to change genders what do three year olds know what do five year olds know what does a 12 year old even know when you think about it I mean let's face it there are some people here under 12 and you know some things but you're not allowed to get married at your age why because that's a life decision that you're not mature enough to make a child under 18 years old is not legally allowed to get a tattoo but now at age five some parents are beginning to transition their kids to a transsexual identity this is not something that is for the children this is not for the parents these are using their children it's frankly it's child abuse it's a form of child abuse because they're taking advantage of the vulnerability of the children they don't know what they are yet and they're getting a little confused if you know what a parent could do if I had a child my daughter thought she was a boy i'd say listen a boy has these features a girl has these features you have a girl's features these are what god made you you may sometimes feel like a boy maybe you envy boys.

Maybe you're a tomboy. There's girls who are tomboys. It doesn't make you a boy.

You'll outgrow this. And in almost every case, frankly, they do. I was looking for a statistic here I have on my computer.

I looked it up. I don't know if I can find it real quickly here. It was the number of, oh, here, desistants.

Do you know the word desistants? It's a psychological term for people who were, when they're young, they were transgendered. But then when they got older, they didn't want to be that unnatural gender. They wanted to go back.

And that's a phenomenon called desistants. For decades, studies of transgender kids have shown that a substantial majority, anywhere from 65 to 94% of kids who've transitioned biologically, as they've taken the hormones, sometimes they've had the surgery, these are not just kids who kind of think they're the other sex. These are kids who've actually gone and transitioned to another sex.

Of them, between 65 and 94% eventually ceased to identify as transgender. And you know when they did? Usually when they got into puberty. Maybe if they got a little older.

Usually it's before they're 20. As little children, they thought, I think I'm a boy. I think I'm a girl.

And they're really the opposite. So the parents kind of humored them. The parents abused them, not physically beating them up, but by letting doctors physically destroy them.

And then the kid gets to puberty when they normally begin to have sexual feelings. Oh, wait, I was wrong. I never was.

I wasn't that at all. And they want to transition back. Now imagine that.

If you had a kid and you even thought, well, this kid really would be a lot happier if I helped him transition. But what if he's one of the 94% who do that who wish they didn't? Okay, so like 6% who don't regret it. Why do we make laws to accommodate the 6% instead of the 94%? It's like when they make laws to accommodate the gays and they say, well, you know, we've got to be sensitive to their feelings.

I hope I am. I have great compassion for gays. I really do.

I honestly do. I've never hated gays. I feel very sorry for someone who's in a sexual dysphoric struggle or any other kind of psychological struggle.

But the thing is, there's only like 3% of the population that are gay. And there's like .6% who identify as transgender. And we're going to change all the bathroom rules.

We're going to change all the language rules, pronoun rules. We're going to change everything for people who are confused and they make up less about half of 1%. One person in 500 has this problem and the other 499 have to change their whole world.

So those ones don't feel uncomfortable. Guess what? You'll never make a world where no one feels uncomfortable. Feeling uncomfortable is not the worst thing that can happen.

It's not a pleasant thing. But if we're going to try to change everybody's life for the small minority of people who feel uncomfortable in certain situations, why couldn't somebody maybe work on helping them to adjust to the world they live in instead of making 499 people adjust to the confused world that the one lives in? I mean, this is not the way sanity governs. This is the way people who are not standing on the rock but on sand function.

And it's, frankly, it's the way they look when the storms have already started coming and the sands are shifting and their building is about to fall. Now, I don't want to go on and on. There's so many, you know, a preacher can preach about this kind of stuff endlessly because there's so many stories in the news and all that stuff.

But I just want to say that, especially for the young here, but also for older people who maybe aren't that biblically grounded and don't know very much about how to think about these things, say, well, you know, I've got a gay daughter. I've got a gay niece. You know, she's getting married to her partner and maybe I should go and celebrate their wedding.

After all, I don't want to be old-fashioned. Well, when sanity becomes old-fashioned, the old-fashioned are the only ones who are sane. And the truth is, we're all under pressure to not only accept.

Frankly, I don't know any Christians who don't accept. Have you met any Christians who hate gays? Maybe 30, 40 years ago, you might have met Christians who hate gays. I don't think in 30 years, I don't think I've met a Christian that hates gays or doesn't tolerate them.

They say, oh, you need to be tolerant of us. Yeah, I think we're pretty tolerant of you. I've never tried to stop you from doing what you do.

I've never punished you for it. I've never cursed you. I've never hated you.

I mean, I'm tolerant. Can you be tolerant of my Christian beliefs? Let's see if tolerance can go two ways here. If everyone would tolerate each other, that's fine because as Christians, we cannot be intolerant of non-Christians going wrong.

We have to evangelize them. Paul said, who am I to judge those who are outside the church? God judges them. But we have to judge those who are inside the church.

If we have people who are Christians calling themselves Christian and they're living in an immoral lifestyle, then that has to be addressed. We can't give up the Christian faith just because we tolerate people who are outside the faith living like what they are, heathens. But they need to tolerate us too.

And they won't. They won't. I mean, Christianity, we can say, hey, you should tolerate us, but we're spitting into the wind because the world has never been tolerant of Christ or of Christianity.

Paul said, all who would live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. And if you didn't sign up for that, then you didn't sign up for Christianity yet. You might have thought, I'm a Christian now because I want to go to heaven.

That's not the same thing as signing up to be a follower of Jesus. Wanting to go to heaven, who doesn't? Who doesn't want to go to heaven? Everyone in the world wants to go to heaven. The question is, are you a Christian? And what is a Christian? It's someone who says, Jesus is the King.

Jesus is the Lord. It is no longer I that matter. It's Christ that matters.

I will die for him if necessary because that's what heroes do for their kings. He is my king. I will take scorn.

I will allow people to mock. I will allow them to hate. I'll allow them to imprison me if it comes to that.

I certainly will be far from the first Christian to be imprisoned or even martyred for the faith. If I'm not ready for that, I'm not ready to be what the Bible calls a Christian. And I realize that a lot of kids who are raised in Christian families are kind of like, by default, they think of themselves as Christian.

I was raised in the church. I was. I was raised in a Christian family.

I was raised in the church. I went forward at an altar call. Didn't know what I was doing at age four.

I did it again at age 10. I think I maybe knew what I was doing then, but not so much. I didn't know everything about it.

As you get older, you find out more. Wait a minute. What is this Christianity? Did I ever make a decision to be a Christian or not? I guess I decided to be a Christian as I understood it, which was a very childish and juvenile, you know, watered down way of understanding.

When I began to read what Jesus said, and he says, if you don't do the words I say, you're going to fall. You'll be on the rock if you hear my words and do them. Then I suddenly realized Jesus was, he wasn't just a pacifier to keep me, you know, to comfort me after a bad dream in the night.

He's not someone there just to make me feel okay at the time of death. Like, oh, I'm going to heaven now. Jesus came to be the king.

And there's two ways we can go with reference to Jesus. He's not going to change what he is, by the way. He is the king.

And with reference to a king, there's two ways you can be. You can be submitted to the king or you can be in rebellion against the king. There's no other ways.

We're the ones who have to change, not him. He doesn't have to accommodate us. He doesn't have to accommodate society.

He doesn't even have to apologize for being different because he was here first. He created it. He's not changing his views.

The question is, will we? Will we let the world change our views? Will we let ourselves become numb and fall into slumber? Because, hey, you know, I mean, I know it used to seem kind of shocking to think of. Now, no one of these young people ever lived at this time. But like 20 years ago, the idea of two people who are of the same sex getting married was shocking to everybody.

At least if you go back 30 years, probably 20, essentially everybody would be shocked at the idea. Now what? Eh, of course. I expect to see in a movie a gay couple who are married.

I expect to hear, I was at a funeral yesterday. It appears to me that there might have been a gay couple that had a part in the funeral. They weren't denounced as such.

A couple of guys holding hands and stuff and, you know, had the same last name. So I assume maybe they were a married gay couple. You know, we're not out there trying to, you know, attack gay people.

But God and his ways are under attack. And we're not even trying to be ruthless in our defense. We're just trying to say, listen, we're going to follow Jesus.

I don't care how unpopular it is to you. I don't care if anyone, if none go with me, still I'll follow because there's no turning back for me. Being a Christian means I'm going to let Jesus decide.

Now I didn't spend any time, well, I didn't spend very much time today arguing, you know, what the Bible actually says about sexuality. I did mention it. I don't need to go into all the verses against homosexuality or against bestiality or against, you know, prostitution things.

There's lots of verses against those things. We know they're there. Everybody who's been even on the fringes of the Christian community or church, they know that the Bible says things about sexuality that go against what the norms are of our present culture.

What we need to know more is that what the present culture thinks shouldn't have the slightest impact on what we think. They're the ones working in the dark. The Bible says, God, your word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path.

I'm not in the dark. I understand what's going on. I can see where they're going.

I can understand and analyze what they're doing. They can't do that to me because they don't know me. They don't, they're in the dark.

It's like a sane man can analyze a crazy man, but a crazy man can't analyze a sane man, you know. C.S. Lewis gave that illustration in one of his books, God in the Dark. But that's how it is.

When you're in the light, you've got the word of God, you know the truth, you stand with the truth, and you'll never be sorry that you did. Will you suffer for it? Probably. Will you die for it? Maybe.

And you would not be the first. You wouldn't even be in the first 10,000 or 100,000. I don't think you'd even be in the first million of people to die for Jesus.

There's already been probably that many who died martyrs. And so the question is, are you going to be among them? Now, I'm not calling you to be a martyr because I don't know that that's what's going to be demanded of you. But if you're not willing to be a martyr, you're not going to be willing to stand up under what we're up against here.

We, a lot of Christians, are still a little bit in denial. They think, well, this is still America, you know, good old America, the best place in the world to be born and raised. Freedom, religious freedom, freedom of speech.

Yeah, people are getting a little weird out there and the fringes, but we still have our freedom. Yeah, I mean, maybe you're not paying attention. We don't.

We are not America anymore. I mean, we still have that name, but we're not a society based on constitutional rights anymore, the Bill of Rights and so forth. They're hanging in there a little, and there's a good number of people trying to still defend those.

But the culture is like a tidal wave coming against that fortress. And, you know, the Bill of Rights, it's not the Bible. It's not guaranteed to stand, no matter what.

It's true and it's good, but since it's not the Bible, it can be, it's a wall that can be washed away. And, you know, there's many societies that have never had the rights we've enjoyed. We have to realize this is an ideological, but more importantly, a spiritual war between the forces of Satan, who's the master of lies, and God.

And, you know, if you say, well, what am I supposed to say to my friends who are, you know, kind of all in to this new gender theory stuff? Well, the first thing I want to know, are you interested in following Christ? If you're interested in following Christ, I have a lot I can say to you. If you're not interested in following Christ, there's probably not very much I can say because we're not standing on the same foundation. If you're not on the rock, if you are on the rock, I can tell you what Jesus said.

If you're not interested in that rock, I'm wasting my breath because even if I could convince you of a saner gender theory than what you're holding, you got other problems. Your whole life is a problem. If you're in rebellion against God, this is just one symptom.

You're going to have problems with every other area of truth because truth is unpopular. Like Dennis Prager likes to say, truth is not a left-wing value. The current political climate doesn't care what the truth is.

And you can tell because whenever you debate, let's say, critical race theory or critical gender theory or any of these new ideas, the people who are on like the side of sanity have all the facts, all the statistics, everything supports sanity. The other side doesn't even try to bring facts. I mean, I don't think I've ever talked to somebody on the left who's supporting one of these new agendas who has any facts.

They appeal to emotion. You know, think of those poor people who've been oppressed for so long and we really need to almost make reparations to them by letting them run the country. Well, I don't know that that's, I don't think there's any evidence in favor of that being a good idea.

It doesn't matter. They don't care about evidence. They know how they feel and that's how they're going.

A society that goes by its feelings doesn't have a rock to stand on because feelings don't stay the same. They move. Rocks don't move.

Truth doesn't move. You have to make a decision. I'm going to stand with truth or not.

If not, there's no predicting where my thoughts or opinions will be five years from now because if I'm moving with the culture, it's moving fast in the direction of insanity and I guess I can go with them. If I don't want to, I can stand on what God said because God's not going to change his mind because it's true. Truth doesn't change.

And by the way, a friend of mine likes to say when he's talking to people about gender and stuff, he says, you know, friends don't lie to their friends, you know. If my friend is a guy and he thinks he's a girl, I'm not going to lie to him. I'm not going to tell him he's a girl because he's not.

Now, I might keep my mouth shut in certain situations when I think it doesn't make much sense to say anything, but I'm not going to affirm what they affirm if it's not true. You don't lie to your friends. If you love people, you don't lie to them.

They might want to be lied to. They might want you to affirm their lies. You would be much more popular if you lie to them, but you don't love them if you lie to them.

If you let them live in a delusion and you affirm that delusion, you're not their friend. You don't love them. You love yourself.

You're protecting yourself. And so these are some of the thoughts I had about how a Christian can retain a pure biblical sexuality in the face of a society that's gone every which way in the wrong way at that late.