Take your Bibles and turn to Colossians chapter 3. Colossians chapter 3. We've got a lot of territory that I want to cover today. So we're going to jump in and get to going. Before my stint with the COVID, we started a two-part series called Deconstructing Deconstructionism. And then, thank the Lord, Matt was find to preach for me the first week of my COVID. Then last week, Nathan, of course, was here. It's good to have Nathan Winters with us and privileged to hear him preach. And so today we're coming back to this. So if you either were not here or whatever, and you didn't get part one of this, you may want to go and find it in our archives, on the sermon archives, so you can get part one after part two. Although we will do a little review of what we already talked about. We're going to go through it though like at 90 miles an hour. Colossians chapter 3. Next week we'll be back in the book of Romans. I thank the Lord so much for the privilege of teaching God's Word. And just preach God's Word to you week after week. A little bit different to do a topical study. So as we go through this, we're not trying to expound a specific scripture. We're dealing with a subject. We'll come to some scriptures, but we're going to be talking about a lot of things today, so you're going to have to keep your thinking caps on with me. If you've had COVID, you're probably under the COVID cloud as well. So, you know, try to hang with me and we'll get Lord willing some really important things understood this morning that we need to be aware of. He says here, you have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here, in Christ, in the body, in the church, there is not Greek and Jew, There's not circumcised and uncircumcised. There's not barbarian, there's not Scythian, there's not slave or free. But Christ is all and in all. Paul says something very similar in the book of Galatians in chapter 3. Here he's obviously talking about the church, that within the church, the church is a diverse group of people. We are united in Christ. We are united by Christ. We share in His body and in His blood. And we are made one. It is not, the body of Christ is not for one ethnic group. It's not for one economic strata. It's not for men or it's not for women. It's for all. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. And that's all. And I wanted to use those verses again to just frame our conversation as we think about the deconstruction project and some of the things that are being alleged of white evangelical Christianity in America. So this is a topical study on how the deconstruction project, and I'm going to explain exactly to you what the deconstruction project is. It is cultural Marxism. What is cultural Marxism? I'll give you an understanding of that this morning. It is a sheep in wolf's clothing in the church today. And Paul told the Ephesian elders, I read that this morning in my own private time with the Lord, in Acts chapter 20, Paul told the church, be on your guard. And he's talking to the elders at the church, be on your guard. For there will come into your midst from outside, and then from within you there will grow up some who will be sheep, or be wolves in sheep's clothing. I think I put that wrong, though, didn't I? I just caught that. OK. I'll blame it on COVID. Where are we going? OK, we already did study number one. We got the lay of the land. We understand the issues. Today, we talk about the deconstruction project, critical theory, white supremacy. We got conversant with the terms. We talk about the narrative. I want you to understand that term because we're going to talk about it again. We hear it all the time in the news, don't we? People talk about the narrative, the narrative, the narrative. What's the narrative? It is a crafted story. It is the overarching big story that is being crafted to shepherd us along. It's the narrative. The lived experience We hear this a lot. We all have our own lived experience. It is your personal framework through which you view the world. It is your story. So there's the big story, and then there's your personal story. Come back to that. Now, when we're getting conversant with this, when we talk about these issues, there are things like white supremacy, American exceptionalism, nationalism, and racism is being alleged. that the United States of America is racist in a way that is both structural and systemic. It's important you understand that. This message, this is the narrative. This is the narrative. America is structurally, that means the very structure of the nation was built racism and it has systemically permeated the entire thing. That's the allegation. Now you'll also see then in this, you hear these issues in the news, you hear about BLM, you hear about critical race theory, you hear about defund the police, although that one's kind of not getting so much news anymore because that's not working so well. The main accusations against the Christian Church, there's three of them, racial discrimination, toxic masculinity, sexual identity politics. In Sunday School over the next three weeks, we're going to talk about those three things individually. We'll talk about racial discrimination, we'll talk about the race issue, we'll talk about toxic masculinity, and then we'll talk about sexual identity politics and why this is being used. And all of this is under the rubric or under the big umbrella of the social justice movement in America. Some of it's outside the church, some of it's within the church, some of it's in various segments of the church, to greater and lesser degrees. What does it mean to deconstruct? So when we're talking about the deconstruction project, we are talking about something that happens in people's lives. This is kind of a term that's out there, and I've got to do this one really quick, but you need to understand the concept. As people, as individuals, we construct our life around a set of truths that we hold to be true. This kind of gives us a mental framework for which to understand reality. When something happens that challenges our suppositions or undermines our trust, we come into a mental storm. In that mental spiritual storm, the very framework of our life is threatened with collapse and people deconstruct. That's kind of the psychological concept of deconstruction. When do people deconstruct? Times of turmoil, times of transition. When people are deconstructing, two things are in their mind, doubt and guilt. Everything I thought I could trust is all of a sudden called into question. Who or what can I trust? what is right and what is wrong. Those are the issues the person is facing and going through. So what is the Deconstruction Project? It is an attempt on the part of cultural elite to frame a narrative in our nation in a way that will cause Christian young people to deconstruct their faith and embrace instead cultural Marxism. This is a specific targeted attempt. The purpose, the goal is to undermine the faith of your children so that they will abandon everything you've taught them and embrace in its place a completely different way of viewing the world. Cultural Marxism. And you say, what in the world is cultural Marxism? Here's what cultural Marxism is. Cultural Marxism is a 20th century development in Marxist thought that came to view Western culture as a key source of human oppression. So cultural Marxism is nothing more than the application of Marxist theory, not to economics, but to culture. We'll go deeper in that a little later in our conversation here. We've got to understand these concepts, though. Because if we don't get them, we are so susceptible to the lies that are floating around out there. Now, we're going to talk about some bugaboos. These are guys you may not care if you knew. You may not even care to know them. But let me say this, they know you. I'm not saying they know you personally, but they had you in mind. This guy was voted at the turn of the century as the most influential thinker of the last millennium. He was raised in Germany. His parents were Jewish by birth, so he's a Jew. But his parents converted into Lutheranism so daddy wouldn't lose a job. But by no means were they Christian by conviction. He goes through actually Lutheran, nominally very liberal Lutheran education. And then becomes a rank apostate who hates God. If you read his writings, he does not believe there is no God. He refers to God often in his writings, but he vehemently hates Him. He writes several books, Das Kapital, Communist Manifesto. He believes his big thing is a thing called dialectic materialism. Dialectic materialism, let's break that down, because there again, it's a concept you're like, eh, this is all stuff for philosophy, why do I need to know this? Here's what dialectic materialism is. Think of the word materialism. Materialism is basically a belief that comes out of Darwinian thought. That means there is no supernatural realm, there is only what is material. But, Darwin believed that the natural progression of the material world was evolving, it was getting better, it was moving up. So dialectic materialism says there's nothing but what is material, there's no God, and he purports this, even though in his writings he talks about God, he still wants to say there is no God, there's no supernatural, everything is material, But that materialism is progressing towards a utopian state. It's called dialectic materialism. That's what he kind of teaches. And I don't want to talk a lot about him, but of course his concept is he breaks everything down into the world. You think of the words bourgeois. Is that how you say it in the French? And the proletariat, and the oppressed, and the oppressor. And it's all about economic theory. It's latched on to by some guys who become the Bolsheviks who end up all killing each other in a Russian revolution. And Russia becomes kind of the seedbed where these theories are in essence tried. I recently read a book about central Russia during the early stages of the revolution as the Bolsheviks come in Oh, my goodness. I mean, think about this. These people live in a region along the Caspian Sea where they are affluent. It's a multi-ethnic area, and within months, they go to killing each other, breaking up into ethnic groups, trying to control who's going to be the commissar, and just all the nutsness of the Russian Revolution. But this is how bad it gets. in these towns. Think about if this happened to you. Change of season. How many of you put your winter clothes away? Not in Star Valley, I guess. You put your winter clothes away, you box them up. They nationalized your winter clothing. So they come by, here's your boxes of winter clothing. It doesn't go in your garage, it goes to the headquarters. And when winter rolls around, you go to try to get your winter clothes back. You don't get your winter clothes, you get whoever's winter clothes they want to give you. Because your clothing, it went so far that your clothing was nationalized. Think of the absurdity of that. It went so far that if you had an apple tree in your backyard, That apple tree was now owned by the state. You could not go pick an apple on your own tree. Every apple was picked and then dispensed as they decided. It went that far. Can you imagine going through that transition? That's nuts. Karl Marx. It's all about economic theory, okay? Economic theory. Here's the next bugaboo that you don't know anything about. He kind of even looks like a geek, doesn't he? He had a bad hair day. He writes a book called the Prison Notebooks. He's put in prison in Italy. His books are not translated into English until about 1959. and they quickly become some of the most influential things in American academia. Prison notebooks. Now here's what Antonio Gramsci does. While in prison, he's asking a question. If Karl Marx was right, then why has that Russian Revolution not worked And why has it not spread into Western Europe? And he's stumped, and he can't answer that. Finally, as he's thinking about this, he comes to understand something. Let me just read a little bit here of what I got in front of me. Gramsci turns his mind to the question that haunted classical Marxism. Why hadn't Marx's predictions worked out in practice? Why, for instance, hadn't the Russian Revolution of 1917 replicated itself in the other Western European nations? Marx was from Germany. The answer, Gramsci believed, lay in the persistence of capitalist ideas embedded in the institutions of civil society. Number one, the family. Number two, the church. All the consensus-creating elements of society he came to understand formed the basis. The problem then was that the culture of Western society was blocking the revolution. And so he writes in the prison notebooks, he says the state is only an outer ditch, behind it is a powerful system of fortresses. And he says those fortresses are inseparable from the Christian heritage on which the West is built. So he comes to understand something. Culture is not downstream from economics. Economics is downstream from culture. And here's the significance of what he does. If you don't get much out of this, get this. The significance of this inversion of classical Marxism is profound. What it means is this. If you want to change the economic structure of a society, you must first change the cultural institutions that socialize people into believing and behaving in a certain way. And the only way to do that, Gramsci rightly understood, is to destroy the Judeo-Christian values on which it stands. So Gramsci in his writing says this, unless and until Western culture is de-Christianized, Western society will never be de-capitalized. Then he says this, This is what he writes in the prison notebooks. Socialism is the religion that must kill Christianity. So his program is simple. Subvert society by changing its culture and change the culture by infiltrating institutions. So Gramsci believed in an ideological subversion instead of a violent revolution. This is the difference. The question then is, how do you do that? How do you dechristianize the West? The next one. Here's another set of bugaboos. All these guys had bad hair days, and even the women did too. It's called the Frankfurt School. At the Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, there was what was called the Institute of Social Research. Do not take what I just say in any way to be anti-semitic. I am in no way anti-semitic, but it's just a reality. Every one of the people in that picture, almost, are Jews. So in 1937, they're in Frankfurt, Germany. Wow, that's not a good place to be, if you're a Jew. So they all pick up and move. You know where they land? Columbia University in New York City. Now, these are the guys, in fact, some of these guys were personal friends of Antonio Gramsci. And they take Antonio Gramsci's teachings and they say, OK, we're going to do an ideological subversion of the West by infiltrating the institutions. And we are going to change the way the West thinks. And these guys, I mean, this is their job. They sit around and scheme how to do that. It's not nice to think that people are sitting around scheming how to change you. But these guys are. And they ask this question, how do you do it? How do you do that? Now, in the news recently, we've all heard of critical race theory. What is that? I want you to take the word race out of it. Critical race theory is critical theory applied to the issue of race. Now, what is critical theory? It's real easy. It's criticizing. These guys understand something. The way you undermine an institution is by gaining control of the institutions that have a public loud voice and then you craft the narrative in a way that you continually and incessantly criticize what you want to destroy. So critical theory is nothing but being critical. It is the incessant barrage of critique. This is exactly what we have going on in our country. Now here's where we jump into what we're talking about today. I wanted you to understand those three things because they lay the foundation for what we're talking about. We're talking about classical Marxism, which is economic oppression. We talk about cultural Marxism, which is classical Marxism applied to culture, which is American Christianity is the oppressor. And it's holding down, and it's specifically the three groups we're talking about, sexual identity, toxic masculinity, white men dominating women, and the issue of race. These are the issues. And then the Frankfurt School in Critical Theory, which is the way that you accomplish this, isn't with AR-15s in the street, because that's just a bloodbath. What you do is you incessantly undermine the legitimacy of an organization or an institution by just bringing up all the flaws in it. and then just hammering them home, just continually hammering that message. So here's where we go. The Deconstruction Project is a conscious attempt, this isn't accidental, it is a conscious attempt to delegitimize and undermine the church in America utilizing critical theory. So who is this and what is this? Okay, here's the three accusations again. Number one is racial discrimination. We hear this incessantly. Number two, toxic masculinity, male headship, and then number three is sexual identity politics. Its main tools are through books, and the framing of the cultural narrative. I'm going to mention to you, here's five very influential books. Thankfully, none of them have been used for a Bible study at Emanuel Bible Church. None of them will be. None on my watch. You may have read some of them, I don't know. These are very influential books and yet they're not read, I mean it's not like you go to CBD and you see these books in CBD. And CBD is not cannabis oil. CBD is cushion book distributors. Better qualify that. But these books are being read by church leaders and pastors all across America and are forming many of the views on these issues. Here's five of them. Number one, Jesus and John Wayne. Now, you can tell by the title of that it's probably not a flattering book. Jesus and John Wayne. The main argument of that book is that white evangelicalism is characterized by patriarchic, toxic masculinity that is authoritarian, nationalistic, and anti-gay. It is Islamophobic and indifferent to the plight of black people. That's her premise, Jesus and John Wayne. Number two, the making of biblical womanhood. In this book, she argues that the teaching of female, let's go the other way, of male headship in the church and in the home, is a construct that is read onto the Bible, but is not in the Bible. That's her argument, the making of biblical womanhood. The Color of Compromise. This book traces how racism and evangelical Christianity are intertwined. Taking America Back for God. Taking America Back for God is a horrible book that says you are a Christian white nationalist who is a white supremacist by virtue of your whiteness. Then there's another book that's really interesting. It's called Worldview Theory, Whiteness and the Future of the Evangelical Faith. In this book, the researcher tries to prove that Christian worldview teaching is not about Christianity, but is only about whiteness. And it's all about a white worldview. It's not about a biblical worldview. So she tears apart things like summit ministries and other things trying to say these aren't about building a biblical worldview, they're only about undergirding and building up the power structure of white male evangelicalism. Those are five very influential books in America today. Its goal is to replace Christianity with utopian Darwinian evolution. The narrative. Now these guys understand something. We talked about the narrative. The narrative is the big picture. It's the story they want you to get. These guys understand something. Three things that need to happen for this to happen. Number one, you have to be in control of the narrative. Whoever controls the narrative can then do what? Craft it. Understand the narrative is not just about telling you the truth of what's going on. The narrative is about telling you a crafted story they want you to believe. Control, craft, and then what can you do? You can corrupt it. You can make it be whatever you want it to be. You say, why would people do that stuff? OK, now here's the other thing you need to understand. The new emperor of the narrative wars is big tech. They are controlling the narrative. Hands down. You know it. I know it. Just go to your newsfeed. Look at your newsfeed. Look at what's there. Why is it there? Who put it there? It knows you better than you know you. Big tech is demonstrably where this war is being fought right now for the narrative. I listened to some stuff this week on what's going on here and the crafting of public opinion and how easy it is to sway it by big tech through news feeds and through what they want you to see. It's scary. To me, it's scary stuff. The religion of socialism. Remember, Antonio Gramsci said, this is religion. This is religion. And we're going to replace Christianity with socialism. Here's their religion. Three points. This comes out of a book by a guy named Rod Dreher. It's called, Live Not by Lies. Rod Dreher's book, Live Not by Lies, he builds on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who lived through the Gulag archipelago and went to the concentration camps, eventually comes to America. Tremendous thinker and understood the times. And basically what Alexander Solzhenitsyn told his people was don't go along with the lie. Live not by lies. Live by the truth. It's all you can do in this system because it was all about a lie. You live by the truth. But the religion of socialism holds these three things to be sacred. Number one, the central fact of human existence is power. Power. That's why they sort into classes, oppressed and oppressor, bourgeois and proletariat, however you want to do this. It's always divisive and it's always separated. And it's all about power and power structure. And you hear this word hegemony, which refers to power. The hegemonic use of power. Now, here's the other thing that is central to their belief. There is no such thing as objective truth. There's only power. You and I believe in an objective truth, God's Word, handed to us by God, written down for us to build our lives on. They completely reject that. It's all about the narrative and crafting it in a way that causes them to move people in a way that gives them more power. There's no objective truth. Understand that. That's why this is clearly aligned with post-modernistic thinking. The third one is this. Identity politics sorts people into the oppressed and the oppressor. And you just see this on every hand today in our culture. Division, dissension, separation. So we got ten minutes to solve it. Then we're done. Those are concepts I hope you latch on to and you understand. This is the war that's going on out there in America today. It's all about the narrative. It's all about lived experience. It's all about crafting and controlling and corrupting in order to undermine and destroy what we believe. Because they understand that they can never change America until they do what? Destroy what? The Church. The Church. The Church of Jesus Christ is the only thing that is standing in their way. Now, here's the takeaway. Don't build your life on your lived experience. Build it on the transcendent truth of God's Word. You and I must, if we're going to survive this, and I'm not saying like get through it, I'm talking about survive it in our faith. We must be people of the book, of God's word. This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth. You shall meditate in it day and night, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. When we have time alone, when we have time in our cars, when we have time where we have opportunity to think, We must make conscious decisions to think God's thoughts after Him, and to frame our thinking in the Word of God, to quote His Word. You wake up in the middle of the night, go to the Word. We must think God's Word. We must build our life, not on our experience, But on God's word, when we build our life on our experience, then we are susceptible to all these lies. I gave you the story, you know, a woman, she's been married to a guy who's a control freak. And he just, I mean, he's just managing every part of her life and he's an idiot. And he's a deacon in the church. And things start going south in her life. And she's starting to deconstruct, because she all of a sudden finds out stuff about him she didn't know was going on, that she's been looking at internet porn. And she can't believe, here's my husband, who talks about Christ all the time, and he's a good Christian man, and he taught our kids, and we did this, and we did that, and now I find out this! And she's deconstructing. And she picks up Jesus and John Wayne. Because some other woman who went through the same thing is just like, I've got to give you this book that I read. And it just really helped me. It helped me get in touch with my inner self. And I found out that the reason your husband is so abusive and so controlling is because his church taught him to be a toxic male and taught him headship. And all that's not in the Bible. And she is so susceptible and vulnerable because of the hurt that she is experiencing. And she drinks poison and deconstructs. When the storms of life come, and they will come, if your life is not built on the Word of God, it will falter. You must build your life. So when that happens to you, I hope that don't happen to you, but some other thing happens to you and you all of a sudden are in a situation where you're like, I don't know what's up and I don't know what's down. That you turn to the North Star of God's Word and you can orient your life and you cling to Christ. The takeaway is this. Build your life on God's Word, not your newsfeed. That's the only way you're going to get through it. I'm not talking about America surviving it. Who knows what's going to happen to America? Listen, if America crumbles, Christ is still building His Church. The Kingdom is not going to go away. So build your life on God's Word. We need to live the truth, and this is the tough one. We need to teach it. And we need to teach it to those outside these doors. OK, here's a second one. Here's a second takeaway, and then we're done. I got that one done in six minutes, so I got four for the next one. OK, let's talk about race. Fight your own private war with discrimination and division of every form. Go to war with that. We as Christians, as the church, need to take the moral high ground as individuals and fight this war. We need to fight the war with discrimination and division of every form. When we see that, we as Christians need to stomp on it. And the weapons of our warfare need to be kindness, love, mercy. So what did Jesus say? You've heard it said, love your friends and hate your enemies. You've heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I say to you, what did Jesus say? Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who persecute you. For then you will prove yourself to be children of your Father who is in heaven. We need to fight this war. Just before Christmas, Ty and Grace Ann had gone to Laramie to see Grace Ann's folks down there and spend a few days with them. And it was kind of cold, and we were just starting to get snow. And the road was getting slick out there at our place. And about 10 o'clock at night, I jumped in the truck, and I was going to run over to Ty and Grace's to make sure the fire was lit and everything was good in the house. And on that Simplot Road, about that time of night, there was not much traffic. And he was slick. And I go around the corner on my way to get over there, and just as I turn the corner, here's this delivery truck off in the ditch. How that guy did not turn it over, I have no idea. I mean, he was like perched. He'd blown out his axles. I mean, he went around the corner on a slick road going. He told me, he said, well, what do you call it, speed limit was 40 miles an hour. I don't go around that corner 40 miles an hour when it is good, but he went around there, man, he was in. How he didn't roll in, no idea. So I see that he's in there, so I pull over, jump out, go to make sure he's okay. He opens the door on his truck and immediately I saw he was a colored man. And he jumped out and I was like, you OK? Yeah, yeah. I just, you must get snow in this country, he said. I knew he wasn't from here. And he told me, he's like, yeah, I'm up here. I'm from Houston. And he's just a delivery truck driver, and he was picking up something at Simplot, a pallet, and he was going to take it to Chicago. And then from there, He was going to hop a flight and get to Rhode Island for Christmas to see his girlfriend. So here's a guy, he's going from Houston to Simplot Mine to Chicago. I was like, man, you are on the road, dude. But we started talking. I was like, come on, let's go. There's no cell phone coverage here. So I jumped in the truck. He jumped in the truck with me and said, we'll run back to the house. We'll call a tow truck. There was no way I was going to pull him out. He was in there. And we run back to the house. And I have to admit, here's a guy I don't know from Adam. He's from Houston. And I don't know him. I'm like, I wonder what's in that duffel bag he has with him. It's all going through my head. And I'm like, no, this is an opportunity God has given to me to show kindness and help another man. And just because I don't know where he's from and who he is, don't matter. I'm not saying, if my wife had gone to light the fire, I wouldn't have wanted to do it. Kids, be careful around strangers. We get back to the house, we call the tow truck, we get off the phone, and he's like, man, I was praying that God would send an angel. And I said to him, you know, dude, I ain't no angel, but I am a cowboy. He didn't have a clue what that was, because he said, well, I'm from Texas, I like the Dallas Cowboys. But I said to him, I said, so do you know the Lord? And he got kind of uncomfortable. He said, I believe in God. And we couldn't go anywhere else. But here's the deal. God gave me a chance to fight a private war with my fear and to make a difference in someone else's life. And when God gives us that chance, The Church of Jesus Christ needs to make the most of every opportunity. We need to be careful. But God gives you a chance. We need to fight that war and to do it with kindness and compassion. God hasn't called us to solve the big issue out there. and we can get discouraged, and we can get despondent about what's going on in America. All we can do is do what we can do, and do what's right. That's what God's calling us to do. We're going to talk about race, we're going to talk about toxic masculinity, and we're going to talk about gender politics in Sunday school. three consecutive weeks. We need to understand those issues, we need to understand how to respond to them. We also need to be thinking about, are we embracing in this community, specifically seeking to embrace as much diversity as we can? You know, we're not an inner city church. We're not. But there's still a lot of diversity here. Some of it's economic. Are we going after people who aren't just like us? Or do we only go like people that's like us? And we need to be willing, as Christians, to take it out there and get in the trenches and fight the war. I'm done. Let's close. Lord, your word is living and active. It is sharper than a two-edged sword. It pierces. It discerns. It teaches. Your word is truth. There are dark days in which we live. We thank you that you have hung your north star in the sky, that we can look to, we can orient our lives, we can make sense of what's going on around us, and we can build our lives in this church on the truth. Thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Would you stand as we sing our closing song together? The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases His mercies never come to an end They are new every morning, new every morning Great is thy faithfulness, O Lord Great is thy faithfulness The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases His mercies never come to an end They are new every morning, new every morning Great is Thy faithfulness, O Lord Great is thy faithfulness Great is thy faithfulness so great is thy faithful Heavenly Father Lord, we do pray that you would help us to go out to search out people to love them the way that you love them or that we would represent you and that lives may be changed Jesus we pray that in Jesus' name.