You can take your Bibles and turn to Colossians 3. The gear oil's a little thick this morning. I don't know about you, but boy, it is a little chilly. Get going. Went by where Keith Stevens lived, building his house there by the stinking springs in Auburn. It was cold there this morning. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. About Grover. Yeah. There was a young couple. Did anybody meet the young couple that was with him? They moved here from, I think, North Carolina or something. And they lived in Cheyenne. Well, when he was coming over here, they decided to tag along. And they were at camp. And they stayed in the tents of Swift Creek. Bless their hearts. So they found out what winter camping's all about. Okay. So, Colossians chapter three, let's just open in a word of prayer. Lord, thank you for the time we can be together today. I pray that you'd bless as we study your word together as we talk and and just think on this issue in front of us and I pray that you bless in this service in this time as we Pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Okay, notice with me what Paul tells us in Colossians chapter 3, beginning in verse 10. He says, you have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here, There is neither, there is not a Greek or a Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free. But Christ is all and in all. Obviously, Paul is there speaking about the reality that in Christ, we are one. Yes, we are born with inherent distinctions. Men and women, different races, but we are all equal before God. And in Christ, we are all one. And all these distinctions are meaningless. within Christ. So he talks about circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian. You may remember we talked about the word barbarian just briefly. And that's just what they call an onomatopoeia, which is a device in language. It's the word barbaros in the Greek language. And it just kind of gives it the concept of somebody who babbles. And so it's, in their mind, anybody who didn't speak the Greek language is a barbarian. because they don't speak Greek. And so there was kind of a cultural snobbery there in the ancient world around the Greek language. Scythians were nomadic people who live up in the Caucasians and Central Asia. They really become what we think of today as the Cossacks. of Ukraine and southern Russia. And they were nomadic people. They were very warlike. People hated them. People were afraid of the Scythians. They were tremendous archers and horsemen. And in the ancient world, they were looked down on. People hated them. And yet, Paul says, in Christ, we are one with them. And so he is confronting some of the divisions that would crop up, obviously, in the church. Now, what I wanted to do today was a few weeks ago, before I got sick and then we had Nathan, I started a two-part study that I wanted to do at the start of the year. And it's no longer the start of the year. It feels like we're halfway into it. But I wanted to do a two-part study on this subject of what we call deconstruction. and the deconstruction project. And so I did the first part, and I'm going to finish that study today. But what I wanted to do was in Sunday school, just do a little bit of review, because not only were some of you not here in the first study, also it's been so long ago you probably forgot what we talked about. And so if there's something you want to bring up, this will be a little more interactive than it was the first time. But I want to think about the subject of what's called the deconstruction project. And we're going to talk, like I said, in the worship service, we're going into the next step of this. But this is a topical study in how the deconstruction project is cultural Marxism. And you say, what is cultural Marxism? We're going to define that more deeply in the worship service and explain what cultural Marxism is and how it's different from classical Marxism. Marxism was founded by what guy? Karl Marx. OK, we'll talk about him a little bit in the worship service too. So I'm not going to take a lot of time with Karl Marx. But Karl Marx was a philosopher. who lived in the 1800s. His theories become the basis for what happens in the Russian Revolution with Lenin and all those people and the Bolsheviks. But it's his theories along with a guy named Engels. Marx writes a couple of books. One is Das Kapital and another is The Communist Manifesto. He was raised in, I guess you would have to say, a very nominally Christian Lutheran home. He was German. He lived in the German state, but his ethnicity was Jewish. But his parents converted from Judaism into the Lutheran church, not for any reason of faith, simply because he wanted to keep his job as a teacher. And so Marx's parents become Christian just out of convenience, not out of conviction. Marx goes through Christian education as a child. You can read his early writings where he talks about the blood of Christ and salvation and all this stuff. And then once he gets to college age he repudiates everything he was taught. And obviously he was only nominally taught those things and it was never practiced in his home. Although his parents were Jewish, They were not practicing Jews religiously. They were secular Jews, like most Jewish people today. But we'll talk about what cultural Marxism is. And then I want to talk about what this deconstruction project is, that is really becoming influential in evangelical circles today, and what it's all about. and why it is dangerous and why we need to watch it. We read Colossians chapter 3, so we're not going to go back into that. Now here's what we did the last time we did this. I told you in our first study we would just get kind of the lay of the land. And then now in this second part in the worship service today, we'll actually be talking about the deconstruction project itself and what it is. So today is a lot of review. What I wanted to begin with again is getting conversant with some of these terms. You know, as I've gone through my life, as you've gone through your life, different terms kind of crop up that are just used in the mainstream. And sometimes we hear those terms, and we're like, where did that come from? What does it mean? And it's just used all the time. The big term that's used all the time now, isn't it, is the word the narrative. The narrative. What does that mean? What are we talking about? You'll see why this is important later in the study. But the narrative with a formulation in the culture of the big story is so important to how public policy and people are moved and swayed and shepherded into certain practices and certain beliefs. And so there's tons of discussion all the time about the narrative. So the narrative When you think of the word, the narrative, we're talking about the big story. The other thing that's really important in some of this that we're talking about with the deconstruction project and what deconstruction itself is, is this concept that now is talked about a lot. It's called, you know, it's this word, this catchphrase, lived experience. The lived experience. Now, that's my story. So the narrative is the big story, When we're talking about lived experience, we're talking about my story, the way things unfolded in my life, and how my lived experience shapes the way I view the world. And this is true, that lived experience is very powerful in how people look at the world. Like I said a couple weeks ago, you know, raised the way I was raised, looking through the lens of my life. When I think of this issue that we're going to talk about later with racism, it's a non-issue in my life. I'm not saying it's not important to me. It's just not something that I ever personally had to deal much with. I knew colored people growing up and we got along fine and just, it was a non-issue. I just, it's incomprehensible. Other people's lived experience has been completely different than mine. And when they look at the world, they're looking through the lens of what their experience has been. And so they are really forming Their worldview, their concept of truth and the narrative, it's all framed through our lived experience. I think you can step away from the race issue. You can step into any subject you want to talk about. The way life has unfolded for you, the way it's happened to me, heavily influences the way we look at the world. That's one important thing we've got to think about as we go deeper in this. Now, when we're also talking about this actual deconstruction project, there are certain things that are tagged into this that you just can't get away from. These are going to be the recurring themes that are coming up. It's the idea of white supremacy, American exceptionalism, nationalism, racism, that is both structural and systemic. Now, when you think of the words structural and systemic, what they're talking about with those two words is there's an accusation being raised in our culture that racism is so pervasive that it is systemic. Now, if you go into the doctor's office with an infection and they run tests on you and they say you have a systemic infection, what are they telling you? It's not just located in one spot and easy to treat. It is system wide. It is spread everywhere. It's systemic in your body. Structural would be that the very structure of our nation as Americans, is built around the concept of white supremacy. Now, when I think about white supremacy, when I first heard these terms in my life going way back, I think of things like the Aryan Nation. I think of things like the KKK. I think of Nazism. They're saying because this is a systemic problem that is structural in our culture, your and I's very whiteness, our very whiteness demands that we now are racist and are white supremacists to some degree, even when we don't know. That is the accusation. It's important you tuck that one away in your thinking. So then, you know, in the big picture out there today, there's Black Lives Matter. There's critical race theory, CRT. That was big time in the news back around the election cycle in what part of the country? Virginia, right? In Loudoun County. and all the ruckus over CRT that was being taught in the schools. What is CRT? We've talked about it before. And we'll talk about it some today in the worship service, but not extensively. What we're gonna do though is talk about a theory that predates CRT and is actually much more pernicious. pervasive and that is if you take the word race out of that and you just say critical theory and critical theory hasn't gone anywhere okay it's here and what is it it is important we understand what critical theory is and you got defund the police and those kind of those kind of movements now In this project that we're going to talk about today, the deconstruction project, the three main accusations that are being leveled at the evangelical church, some by practicing evangelicals, and some by those outside the evangelical movement. So some of this is coming from within, and some of it's coming from without. It started from without. And then some that are within the movement of evangelicalism have latched onto this and have made it their new baby and their new cause. The three accusations are that evangelicalism is basically just white supremacist American nationalism. And that its whole basis and its whole fundamental purpose for being in America is just to prop up the system. It's all about power. But the three main accusations are that American Christianity, evangelical movement, is systemically and structurally racist. Secondly, This whole concept of toxic masculinity and patriarchy, that that is a construct. It is, you know, it's being alleged that American Christianity has just been white men dominating women. The third one now is then all the sexual identity politics as well. That's a part of this. that American evangelicalism has been repressive of people's sexual identity and all the gender issues that go along with that. These are the three main accusations. So what we're going to do going forward in Sunday School for the next few weeks is next week we're going to talk about the race issue. The next week we'll talk about toxic masculinity. And then the third week, we'll talk about the sexual identity issue. So in Sunday school, over three weeks, we'll deal with these three issues and try to look at not only what is being accused and why it's being accused of the church, but also what does the Bible say about it? And how are we to answer this accusation? We're to be ready, says in Peter, to give to every man an answer. And these are hot-button topics that are going on in our culture, aren't they? I mean, the sexual identity, the gender issue is huge right now, isn't it? I mean, what's going on with the Penn State swimmer guy? I can't call him a girl. He's a guy. I mean, this is a huge issue in how it's affecting women's sports in America. And what's going to be the end result of all these things? But this is all under the big umbrella of the social justice movement. And you hear that term sometimes. You know, most Christian colleges, most Christian seminaries have degrees or classes, degree programs offered in social justice now. And some of them are very good and some of them are not so good. It really is going to come down to the basic worldview of those who are teaching. And if it's a biblical class that's teaching, you know, so Christian social justice, if it's done rightly, obviously, there's a lot of good things to be learned. So what does it mean to deconstruct? Let's talk generally again. We talked about this last week. You know, why is there this term, the deconstruction project? You know, construction means to what? If you construct something, you're doing what? Building it. In America, after the Civil War, we had what in the South? The Reconstruction Movement. Now we're talking, isn't it amazing? We're talking about what? Deconstructing. The deconstruction. Now what does it mean to deconstruct? And there again, this is a catchphrase that's used But we need to get conversant with it because we hear these things. So we need to understand what people are talking about so we don't just misrepresent what they're saying. Basically, the concept of deconstruction goes like this. As people, all of us, we construct our life around what we hold to be true. And these truths that we hold to be truths become the basis for the mental framework of our life. It's like the framing of a home. And it really frames the way we view the world and the way we think, the way we act. All of that comes through the way we have constructed reality. to what we have been taught and what we've experienced. And then something happens in life that shakes the foundation of that structure. And someone's life implodes or deconstructs. Sometimes a person kind of willingly deconstructs. They just work through a process where they dismantle a set of beliefs they once held was true. Sometimes it happens almost instantaneously when some tragedy happens and everything somebody thought was true, they all of a sudden say, I don't know what's true at all. So we're talking generically, we're talking generally, and we'd have to say that in a church or in our lives, people that are in our life, there are people around us that are working through these processes all the time. And this is where I want to think broadly before, you know, the worship service this morning when we go specifically to the issue of the deconstruction project, is we need to understand what's going on with deconstruction. The deconstruction project is a specific attempt on the part of cultural elite to cause Christian young people to deconstruct what they've been taught. They are deconstructing a set of truths. And that would be all around race, around masculinity, and around sexual identity. It's a targeted movement. Here we're just talking about the big concept. So people deconstruct. I would say every one of us, to some degree, has had to go through times when everything that you thought was true was all of a sudden, in your mind, called to question. And you're trying to figure it out. I used the illustration a couple weeks ago. Someone's raised in Mormonism. And they go to church every Sunday, and people are getting up around them, and they are testifying that Joseph Smith is God's prophet. I have this testimony. And they believe this, and they sincerely believe it. And they're raised in a loving home. They're surrounded by people who care for them. And their whole world is built on this structure. And it's the reality. And then something happens and begins to pull a pin out of that. And that whole substructure or superstructure of their life begins to fall. And they're like, what in the world do I believe? They feel like they've been lied to. feel like, and so people work through these things all the time. Now, when do people deconstruct? Times of turmoil and times of transition. When our life is on cruise control and we're looking at the scenery and everything is good, We just take all those beliefs for granted. And there's nothing to challenge it. And then all of a sudden, a deer steps on the road, and you hit the brakes, and you've got to take control of the wheel, and you've got to now drive. And when that happens in a person's life, when all of a sudden there's a transition or a time of turmoil, that is when people are vulnerable. in a good way and a bad way. So when people are going through times, and that's, by the way, why kids are raised in a Christian home and in a Christian environment, and they're just on cruise control. It's just going along. It's like they're on automatic pilot. And then all of a sudden, they go to college, and they're confronted by stuff And it's a time of turmoil and transition in their life. And that's when these things happen. So they go through all this time. And you think everything's good. And it's just because they were on cruise control. And they were just going along. And then all of a sudden, something happens that causes them to deal, to face, to have to ask questions. And it's in those times of turmoil and transition that people are very vulnerable. and they can be moved and swayed. And that's the kind of time when people deconstruct. And this obviously ushers in, you know, when somebody is working through a process of deconstruction, you see somebody you know and you know that, you know, the mental framework of their life has been shattered and they're trying to figure out life. And, you know, maybe they just went through a divorce. And they're struggling. There's two things that definitely are going on in their mind that you can help them with. One is doubt. One is guilt. One is doubt. One is guilt. When people are deconstructing, they're doubting everything. Who can I trust? What can I trust? And they have no idea. They're like, Everything I thought was true, I don't think it's true anymore. Or I don't know it's true. So who can I trust? What can I trust? And they're working through a time of doubt. The other thing is guilt. What is right and what is wrong? They're asking those kinds of questions. What is right? What is wrong? How do I know what is right? How do I know what is wrong? There again, it's important to note that the issues that we're talking about are all framed as a part of what's right and wrong. The people who are standing and beating the drum for sexual identity and gender politics, they are beating the drum that we, are immoral in what we have taught, and that they are right. It's a right and wrong issue. And so people are forced to say, what is right? What is wrong? These are issues that people struggle with. So why do people deconstruct? This came from, actually, the Gospel Coalition, an article I read quite a while ago. where he talked about deconstruction. And of course, this is a big thing in Christian circles right now, because basically, you know, Lifeway Studies and other things, the Gospel Coalition was talking about it in this very article, that in Christian circles today, in the church, churches just like ours, it's about 80% washout of kids. So kids are raised in a church and only statistically about 20% of them are carrying on the faith. So the church is losing about 80%. That's an 80% casualty rate. That's astounding. It actually, I watched an interview with some guys this week that were discussing this thing on a blog. leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention who were struggling with it in just a conversation among themselves. It was an intriguing conversation. But the one guy I was just talking about, it is unprecedented in church history to find a situation where the church had an 80% casualty rate in its homes. It's unprecedented. And these guys are like, we really don't know if it's survivable as American Christians. And he took it to the concept of D-Day. And he was talking about, think if you were sending soldiers into Omaha Beach. Omaha Beach was horrible. But it had about a 20% casualty rate. We got like an 80% casualty rate. Can you imagine? So it's flipped on its head. And that's physical casualties. We're talking spiritual casualties. So this is a big deal. So you can think through the last years of big name evangelical leaders who deconstructed. And I mentioned Joshua Harris. who was this kind of big, swinging star in evangelical homeschool movements. And he writes a book, you know, the I Kiss Dating Goodbye. And at 21 years of age, he's completely untrained and a pastor. You know, go figure this. I mean, he was totally set up. writes a national bestseller with no experience in life. I'm not saying that young people don't have experiences and don't have some wisdom that God gives them and have things to offer. But this kid was like shepherded into deconstruction because he's made a Christian celebrity. At a very young age, head's blowing up. He's thinking he's something he's not. The next thing you know now in the last couple of years, He kissed Jesus goodbye, makes public apologies to the sexual identity gay people, and leaves the ministry, no longer confesses Christ, just totally deconstructed. And I could mention other names, I won't even take the time. So why does it happen? How does it happen? What causes that? What causes this deconstruction? We're going to work from easiest to deal with, to the hardest to deal with, and then we'll close. The first one is some people deconstruct just because they have a desire to live in sin. And rather than saying, I want to go live in sin, what are they going to say? I just doubt everything you ever taught me. I don't know if any of that's true. But the real reason, if you could peel the onion and get into it, is they just want to live in sin. Classic example, gave it a couple weeks ago. Kid goes off to college and he calls you, your son calls you just before Christmas and says, I'm coming home, Mom and Dad, for Christmas and looking forward to seeing you. But just so you know, I'm not going to go to church with you because I don't believe any of that stuff anymore. And you're just like, what? And it says, oh, and by the way, do you mind if I bring my girlfriend with me? She's living with me. And do you mind if she stays with me? And you're like, well, that's kind of coincidental timing, that you're announcing you no longer believe in Christ, but you also have every inclination in your heart to live in sin. And really what it comes down to is none of us wants to deal with our sins, so it's just easier because we can't deal with that dissonance in our head. We just don't believe it anymore. We say, I don't believe it, I don't believe it, I don't believe it. None of that's true. It was all a lie, and you've just been telling me all this stuff, and it's really just because I want to live this way. So that's the easy one. Some people deconstruct for that reason, no doubt. We have to realize sin is very dangerous, and it is very deceptive. And it can grab any one of us. And we have to be careful. We have to guard our heart. And when we desire to live in sin, it's going to cause our faith to wane. Second one is coolness. I don't know how else to say this one, but just to say it like that, like, you know, kind of street credibility. You know, like it's cool to, you know, doubt. It's cool, kind of the cool thing. And sometimes people, you know, deconstruct because they have in their heart that desire. I think Rob Bell, you remember Rob Bell? Rod Bell. I mean, he was named by, I think, Time Magazine a few years back as the number one leading evangelical in America. And, you know, he just was this, you know, cool guy. Well, he was so cool, finally it was no longer cool to be Christian. And so he left. And I think really that's just kind of the desire to be accepted, to be cool, can cause people sometimes to deconstruct. Poor teaching in the church. Poor teaching in the church. The church needs to take responsibility for this. The church in many ways has done an abysmal job teaching the faith. And sometimes the church gets hung up on stupid stuff. And when the church gets hung up on stupid stuff, young people see through that. I used the illustration of this sermon. Somebody gave me a book. I'll use the illustration again just because I think it illustrates well. Hopefully not to bore you, but somebody gave me a book. I think it was written in 1919 by a country preacher in America. I can't remember what part of the country he's in, but he's just a country preacher and he wrote a book. And one of his chapters is a sermon that he preached to his church on why it is a sin to drive a car on Sunday. So this is 1919, cars are just a new thing, and everybody's starting to drive. And he gets up and he preaches a sermon that it is a sin to drive your car on Sunday. And he gives two reasons. One is, he says, if people start driving their cars on Sunday, they no longer have to go to their village church. They can go to the big town. And you're all going to leave me and go to the big exciting church in the big town. That was his first reason. Second reason was, He says, if people can drive on Sunday, instead of going to church, they're going to go sightseeing. They're going to take a what? We still call it this. He's out for a what? A Sunday drive. You're going to go take a Sunday drive. You're going to go to Yellowstone. And so he says, it is a sin for you to drive your car on Sunday for those two reasons. And it's a bunch of baloney. Right? It was poor teaching. Would both of those things, did both those things happen? Yes. He correctly diagnosed the human heart. But the answer is not to say it's a sin to drive. The answer is to deal with the heart behind it and what happened so many times in the church. And we're all guilty of this at times and have been guilty of it. We address the outer symptom instead of addressing the issue of the heart. And we teach poorly. And when we do that, we undermine the credibility of the faith. So the antidote to this one is good teaching. It's good teaching. The church needs to teach the scripture and needs to teach it properly as a guard against people Deconstructing then the other one. This is the harder one is real hurt. You know some people because their lived experience Causes them to think a certain way They are very susceptible when somebody comes along with a very poisonous message Classic example is the woman who is married to a man who is a control freak and abusive. And then somebody comes alongside, and she reads something written by someone who says, well, the reason your husband is that is because he's been taught it by his church, and it's toxic masculinity. Instead of saying, no, what that guy's doing is an aberration and a distortion of the scripture. But because her lived experience is she has experienced real hurt, it causes her to be susceptible to drink this poison from the world. And what the church has to do is come along and say, yeah, you have some real hurt. But the answer is not what you're being told. That's not the truth. Same with the race issue. Same with the race issue. You know, you can deal with that, okay? So the key is to help people as they deal with issues to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? It's to jettison the pain and the error, but to persevere in Christ. to kind of, like I said, eat the meat and spit out the bones. Because the church is made up of sinful, fallen people, the church has made mistakes. The church needs to own those mistakes and teach through them. But we also have to help people not to just jettison the truth, just because their lived experience is such that they then think it's all a fraud. Does that make sense? Okay, so that's deconstruction in general. In the worship service now, we're going to talk about deconstruction project, what it is, why it's important, why we need to understand it, and what's happening in the American church. Now, there again, we kind of live Western Wyoming, and you know, we're sometimes far removed from some of these things, but not so much anymore, because we all have internet, we all have A lot more dialogue with a lot more places, and these things are creeping in. You know, it's an important issue to understand. It definitely is the, there is a specific project to delegitimize American evangelicalism as an institution, and it's very similar to what happened in the Russian Revolution, when the Russian Orthodox Church was so heavily a part of the culture, they had to delegitimize that institution to get people to walk away from it. And that's what's going on in America today. Make no mistake about it. It is a concerted effort. And it's happening in front of our eyes. And we need to be aware and abreast. So that's where we are. We're going to close with that. You're dismissed. We've got about 12, 13 minutes, and then the worship service.