for two weeks in the worship service, laid the foundation. And in the last three weeks, we've been looking at the main accusations that it has leveled at the Christian church in America. We've just been looking at them one by one. We talked about racism, the race issue. Last week, we talked about what today is called toxic masculinity. So we went through that. And today we're looking at the three accusations, which basically is, of those who are not heterosexual. And so we're dealing with that. I guess of the three accusations, I'm not saying that the church should ever be hateful or nasty or naughty in how it confronts things. But of the three accusations, this is definitely one that the church has stood against, is this whole movement. And we're gonna look at this movement a little bit today. Of course, it's in the headlines all the time. And in some ways, Obviously, this is kind of an icky subject to discuss and to look at. But it is a subject we need to understand. And there are things in this subject that is very important that we get a grip on so that we can communicate clearly with people when we are asked about this issue. You have conversation with people today. This is the kind of thing that's going to come up. And as a Christian, we need to have a defense. Now, I wanted to start in 2 Peter and in chapter two. And Peter obviously is talking about false teaching that would arise within the church. And these would be teachers who would appear and claim to be Christian. That's not the case so much with the people we're talking about today, but I still think that some of what's said in this text gives kind of a framework to kind of what we're talking about this issue. And so he says in 2 Peter 2, false prophets will arise among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly, bring in destructive heresies. Notice that, destructive. They will even deny the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. Many will follow their sensuality. Because of them, the way of truth will be blasphemed. He then goes on, he talks, he uses illustrations from the Old Testament, of times and incidents when these kind of things happen. So he talks about Sodom and Gomorrah. He talks about the angels who sinned, referring to Genesis chapter six. We could think of Balaam. Remember the guy who got spoken to by the donkey? And he couldn't curse Israel. God wouldn't let him do it. So what did he do? He told Balak, he gave him some advice. He said, just send a bunch of pretty women into the camp and debauch the people, degrade them, and it brings destruction on them through this false teacher, Balaam, who lays a trap for God's people with sensuality and sexuality. And then it says in verse 19 of these, let's start in verse 17. These teachers, these beliefs, these are waterless springs. They are mists that are driven by a storm. For them, the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved. For speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh Those who are barely escaping from those who live in error, they promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. And so, I wanted to just use those verses to kind of frame our conversation a little bit this morning as we think about this. I also, as I've been going through these, I've shown you various resources that I think are helpful on the various subjects. So last week, I showed you some books. from Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. If you want to read more about this, now, these books are a little bit dated, which things in this subject are changing about as quickly as things change in the internet. I mean, it's just changing so rapidly all the time, so things get dated really quickly. But there was a book written very recently by Amy Shire, I think is her name, called Irreversible Damage. I don't know if you've seen that book. but it's on the trans movement. I have not read the book. I've read reviews, and I've read portions of it. And it looks like an excellent read. And it's just talking about the whole movement. Now, these are three books that were written by a guy named Ryan Anderson. Ryan is a great guy. He works for the Heritage Foundation. Probably most of you know what the Heritage Foundation is. He's a researcher for them. We brought him to Wyoming to speak to the Wyoming Pastors Network a few years back on this subject. He did a tremendous job. He was just a great speaker. He's not an evangelical Christian. He's a Roman Catholic. But he has many good things to say on this subject. The first book that shows the progression of events that he was a part of writing, it's a book called What is Marriage? This book is available in the foyer if you would like to read it. This is not a book on how to have a good marriage. That's not what this book is. This book was written when the whole thing was raging about what is marriage. And so he doesn't even go at it completely from scripture. He goes at it sociologically and in every other way, and he explains what marriage is. And it's a, you know, there again, this is like some of the books I talked about last week. You know, this is a book that, you know, it's not gonna keep you up at night. It's probably gonna put you to sleep at night because it's difficult reading, but it is excellent reading. And so if you wanna read it, I think there's some of them still available. Then when SCOTUS, when the Supreme Court, you know, brought in homosexual marriage, he wrote a book called Truth Overruled. I think this book is in the foyer, too. And it's an excellent explanation of all the implication of Obergefell and the ruling that happened there when marriage was overturned. The third book he wrote, because, you know, you think about the last decade, there's been this huge progression where we went from, you know, homosexual marriage to now the issue, the defining issue is trans, the trans movement, and gender fluidity. And he wrote a book, Ryan Anderson wrote a book called When Harry Became Sally, and it's also an excellent read. The things he does in here is not only does he explain the implications culturally for some of what's happening in the trans movement, He explains the dysphoria itself. Without going very deep into this, you know, it's, it's hard for most of us to in any way identify with what's going on in someone's head. If you're a man, and you all of a sudden decide, I'm going to swim for the ladies swim team at university at, you know, Penn State. And I'm going to win the national champion as a woman. It's like, what's going on inside there? Most of us can't even identify in any way with what's going on in that head. He explains the dysphoria. Now, it's important to recognize something about the trans movement. There are two types of individuals that are a part of the trans movement. There are people. who have a recognized what we call, what you can call dysphoria. It's recognizable and it's discernible. We're not saying, nobody would say it was used to until American Psychological Association changed their mind on this. We talked about that last week. Used to, everybody recognized there's something wrong with that. That's why it's called a dysphoria. When a man wants to be a woman or a woman wants to be a man. We recognize there's something not wired right. There has always, through human history, there is a recognizable dysphoria that has happened to people that way. It's addressable. It is overcomable by the blood of Christ. As Christians, we are the only solution to this stuff. But it is discernible and it's recognizable. And there is a legitimate number of people who, for whatever reason, have a propensity to that sin. You know, we should never kind of gloat and say, you know, I'm better than someone else because I don't have that desire. Well, you have your sinful urges. I have my sinful urges. We struggle with our sins. And some people, This is a legitimate struggle that they got going on in their head. It needs to be addressed. It needs to be helped. Now, of course, culture is radicalizing this in a way that you can't even address it. You cannot even address it. And it's being celebrated. So you have a person with a legitimate dysphoria. The other thing that's happening today is all of a sudden the trans movement has become the cool thing. So you have tons and tons, and this is very important we understand this, because of the narrative, we talked about narrative, because of what's going on, you have young people all across America who in no way are truly have, in no way do they truly have the dysphoria of the trans individual. but they're hearing this, they're going through struggles, maybe they just broke up with a boyfriend, and they're just struggling, and they just are enamored with this, and they think that this would be the cat's meow, it would get them attention, and it's the cool thing to do. You have huge amounts of people. That's what, I think it's Amy Shire, addresses in Irreversible Damage. because what you have is you have all these copycats and then you have school counselors and medical people who are bringing on these young people irreversible damage physically and by no means and they're doing it behind parents' back and it is child abuse at the worst. I mean, what is going on here in the, it's experimentation like we can't believe, like we, is unknown. So we need to understand that. Also within this movement, the LGBTQ movement, it's important we recognize something too. There are radical promoters of this agenda who are utilizing it and using it for their own ends. And they are using people as pawns. They are evil to the core. There are also many, many people who, in times of vulnerability, were sucked up into this vortex. And they've fallen into sin. And they're just immersed in this life. They recognize it brings them no freedom. They recognize it brings them no ultimate joy, but they're just a part of the movement now. They're swept along in it. There's two types of individuals that way. And those two types of people, I would submit, as Christians, we deal with in very different ways in how we approach that and address the individual. Now, we talked about narrative. What is, let's see how many of you can remember, what is narrative? When we say the narrative, what are we talking about? What was that? Somebody said. The story, the big story. Okay, it's the big story. The lived experience is my story, how my life is panned out. The narrative is the big story that people are shaping all the time. And we've talked about this, how the narrative, there again, it's not truth, it's the narrative. And we use this word all the time now. And so they're always shaping the narrative. Now, what they sought to do, and this goes all the way back a decade or so ago with the marriage debate, was the LGBTQ movement, there's some slick marketers in these things, just like there was in the pro-choice movement, in the language they chose. And what the LGBTQ movement sought to do to mainstream this lifestyle and to utilize it as a tool for social change was they sought to market it as a civil rights issue. Every time you see this issue coming up in city councils and county level governance, There's a phrase wanting to be added into civil rights protections. So you cannot discriminate based on what? Someone's race, someone's gender, all those things, and now all of a sudden, upon their sexual orientation. And so they very brilliantly, framed this whole subject as a civil rights issue. By doing so, if you stand against it, you are no better than what? A racist. You're a bigot. And they have marketed this in the narrative to the general culture and most people have bought it. Now it's in the psyche of our nation. If you stand against this movement, you're just as bad as a KKK white supremacist. That's why this was attached, this issue is now attached into the deconstruction project. So, you know, we talked about the narrative. What you gotta do is you gotta control the narrative. So to control the narrative, you gotta get a hold of certain institutions. What would those institutions be? Things like the press, You know, just think about all the different institutions in a society that frame the narrative. So these individuals understood what you gotta do is you gotta embed yourself into power structures so that you can control the narrative. And they've brilliantly done that. And then you can craft the narrative and over time you can do what to it? You can corrupt it. And you can make it say whatever you want it to say. And over time, people buy into it and believe it. Now, we're going to go back to our bugaboos, because I want us to understand this movement for a few minutes this morning, kind of where this came from. So we talked about this guy. Talk to me about Karl Marx. What were the main tenets of what he was teaching? See if you learned anything over the last weeks. Okay, changed by violence. Yeah, he was willing to go to violence. He's willing to go to blows. Gramsci, not so much. He wants to do it slowly. What's the big thing that he's about? He views all of history through the lens of two categories of people. What is that? The oppressed and the oppressor. power structure, it's all about power, it's oppression. And so in classical Marxism, it's about economics. Remember, look at when he lived, and he's living at a time when you're starting to see huge advances in the Industrial Revolution. And he's in Europe, and he sees what's going on in the world, and there were huge abuses of large numbers of working men, women, and children. And he sees this horrible stuff, and he's repulsed by it, and he's trying to come up with a theory as a god-hater to replace capitalism. And so some of his theory comes out of the time in which he lives, obviously, and is heavily marked by that. And so this is classical Marxism, and it's about economics. And he wants to overthrow the capitalistic system and replace it with the communistic system. Of course, Lenin and All those guys latch on to it. We have the Soviet and all the things come down the pike with that. Antonio Gramsci. Okay, Marx is classical. Gramsci is what kind of Marxism? Do you remember? Different adjective in front of Marxism. Not classic, he is about cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism. He's in prison for a big part of his life. He dies as a young man. And while he is in prison in Italy, he was imprisoned for rebellion and sedition. While he's in there, he writes these books, the prison notebooks, which then are latched onto by American radicals later. During his life, they were little-known books. It's after he dies that these things come to huge prominence. But he's looking at the society, he says, okay, if Marx was right, then why did not England do what Russia did? Why didn't France do that? There was huge communist movements at the same time. And you have huge unrest in the rest of Europe, but only Russia does that. Everybody else works reforms and works through many of the problems and stays with Republican democracies. And so what he believes is, what he comes up with this idea is economics happens downstream of culture. And if you wanna change the economic structure, you can never do it until you first change the culture. So you gotta start here. And then he's the guy who says the only way to change the culture of Western civilization is to destroy Christianity. Comes right out, says that, I'm after the church, and I'm after Jesus Christ. I'm going to bring Christianity down. And the only way you can bring in the Marxist revolution and the economic system is to de-Christianize the West. The third school then adds to this, and these guys were important, we talked about them, is the Frankfurt School. Now these are the guys, they start out in Frankfurt in Germany. Most of the people in that picture I told you are Jewish. They're in Germany in the 1930s. Hitler comes to power, they see the handwriting on the wall. not a good place to be if you're a Jew. They come to America and the Frankfurt School lands at Columbia University in New York City. These are the guys, these are the people, guys and girls, women, who come up with critical theory and work out all the different aspects of critical theory. Like I told you, what are we talking about today? CRT. That's in the news all the time. CRT stands for what? Critical race theory. Take the R out. It's the same theory. It's only applied to race. Just a sideline you need to understand. If they get CRT out of Loudoun County Public Schools, They got CRT out, but those people that are there still believe in CT. We are stupid if we fool ourselves and think that just because you bring in a mandate that says CRT cannot be taught in schools, that critical theory was done away with. I mean, that is absurdly naive to think. We just, as Christians, sadly, many times we buy into their strategy. They go along, okay, we won't teach CRT. And they come in through a backdoor with continuing their agenda till the next generation just misses it and they get it back. We shouldn't be so naive. Critical theory. So, The goal is to de-Christianize the West. How do you do it? How are you going to destroy Christianity in the West when everybody is nominally at least Christian? Everybody is Judeo-Christian. Think about this. When Dunkirk is going on and Churchill is evacuating about 400,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk while Hitler is trying to wipe them out. They go to the BBC with a message to the nation. And it's two words. The words were, even if. And everybody in the nation knew what he was referencing. Churchill goes to the nation and says, even if. And everybody, they weren't all born again Christians, but they were all Christianized. And they all knew that was a reference to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. When they go before King Nebuchadnezzar, and they say, throw us in. We're not going to bend. We're not going to bow. If God delivers us, praise him. But even if he doesn't, so be it, even if. He says to the nation, even if. And everybody knew what he meant. If you went on the radio today and said, even if, everybody would say, what's wrong with that idiot? Nobody would know. That shows how de-Christianized we have become. So not everybody was individually a born again Christian, but the nations of the West knew the scriptures. They knew the stories. This was just a part of the air people breathe. So how do you get that out of them? What does critical theory say? Tell me. How do you do it? What was that? Okay, but what's the method? Education. Remember this, it is exactly what the theory says. It is relentlessly nitpick. Be critical. If you want to tear down an institution, if you want to tear down masculinity and male headship, then get on the news and in the narrative every man who hit his wife. And make sure you make everybody know he was a member of First Baptist Church. You control the narrative, and you endlessly pick and criticize every flaw in the institution you want to destroy. It is the relentless barrage of negativity. That's what they do. And they hit on this. OK, if you want to tear something down, this is how you do it. Endlessly criticize. So it's critical theory. The reason I wanted to go back into that, as we're talking about this subject, is because these guys in this picture understood something. In order to de-Christianize the West, you had to overthrow the schools, And the writings target these things. The schools, the families, marriage, the seminaries, the pastor training colleges. You got to get that. They target them. And then three men in this picture specifically take it one step further. And they say this. If you want to win this battle and you wanna dechristianize the culture, you gotta duplicate what Balaam did to Israel. You have to degrade its sexual morality. You have to go after this issue. And if you can degrade people and have them live little better than animals. It will so erode the Christian culture that it will crumble. So three guys, you won't remember these guys, Gorgie Lukacs, Eric Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. Herbert Marcuse, if any of them, is probably the guy you've heard of, if you've heard of any of them. Because he kind of is mainlined a little bit. But I'm going to read you some things about what these guys did and taught. Because as I read this, you're going to see 2021 or 2022 current affairs. Because what these guys are doing Back in the 1950s, the perfect America, they're doing this in academia and they're laying these seed beds. We have inherited. So Lukacs in 1919, this guy gets himself appointed as the People's Commissar for Education and Culture in the Bolshevik regime in Hungary. He's able to embed himself there. He's only there for a couple months, and he's just experimenting. He's just experimenting. He knows he's going to be run out of town because he's going to take this way too far, but he wants to see what happens. He's an evil man. His goal is the annihilation of the old cultural values and the creation of the new. He's going to go after Judeo-Christian sexual ethics by trying to destroy the family and his tool is something brand new. Recognize something with me for a minute. For most of human history, wherever there were schools, there was no teaching that you would call sex education. There was biology, but there would be nothing that you would call a class in sex education. Not even at a university level. For most of human history, you know what? And somehow, human beings figured out how to get the next generation here. How did we manage to do that without classes on sex ed? But for most of human history, there was nothing That was left to two institutions. What were those two institutions? The church and what? The home. So he's gonna experiment. He institutes in the Hungarian schools, classwork on free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of the middle-class family code, how monogamy is obsolete and introduces homosexual thinking, he gets run out of Dodge. He knew he would. But he wants to see what's gonna happen. He's laying some groundwork. This other guy, Eric Fromm, is the guy who comes up with the theory or the teaching. He sees it as a tool. And hear this one, you'll hear this. in the news today, that sexual orientation is merely a social construct. There are no innate differences between men and women, and gender roles and sexuality are just socially determined. So it's just completely interchangeable. The only thing that's different about a man and a woman is their plumbing. That's it. That's Eric Fromm. Herbert Marcuse, of any of these men, is the most evil, and he has the most impact on America. He writes a book called Eros, which is a word for sensuality from the Greek language, sexuality, Eros and civilization. It's a heavy textbook, and it moves into universities and colleges in the 1960s. And the book, Eros and Civilization, becomes the intellectual justification for what we call the sexual revolution. So that's this guy. He's the guy who lays the intellectual basis and takes all these principles that these guys are using and says, now this is what we need to do. And he's like the general on the ground who is getting it instituted. He's getting people elected into public office. He's getting people put on school boards, on textbook committees, at a time when these things are so radical, no one would accept them. And they're moving us that way. He's also the guy that comes up with a new definition for tolerance. So that's Marcuse. And why did I want to show you those guys? Because I think what we need to understand is where we are today didn't just happen because this is a civil rights issue, and there are people that have been oppressed, and they're addressing that, and they want people to treat them fairly and equality. That's not why we are where we are. That's the narrative. Why we are where we are is because evil men took the bus's wheel and drove us here. They brought in destructive heresies. They did so very intentionally, and they did so with forethought and with a plan. And the goal of it is to bring us down, to destroy marriage and family, the church, so that it can all be replaced with a civil organization of classic Marxism. That's what this was all about. And all these people that's lives are destroyed or just cogs in the wheel who get thrown under the bus and they don't care about in any way. They're just pawns. Those people don't understand that. So what do we do? I guess before we look at three things real quickly, are there any questions on any of that? Or thoughts? I hope I didn't lose you on the intellectual side of that. I think a lot of farmers, and I spoke to you about it, people seem to forget the military goes hand in hand with culture. Because I used to write up homosexual reports and kick people out. Yeah. Right. Yeah, and there's no doubt that the military is a place that allows for social experimentation, because you can control and craft the policies in a way that allow you to do that. That's why Hitler did that. I mean, Hitler used the military. Before we look at three, I don't want to say solutions, but three things that we ought to do, can do, I think the only solution obviously is the Lord's favor to bring us as a nation to repentance and to destroy this. You know, we've got to just be faithful as individuals to stand against it. But, you know, two places we've got to watch in America today, big, big places is the schools. Is the schools. Praise the Lord, we've got many, many Christian people in our school system here. Praise the Lord for that. School systems, though, are being attacked. This is the big battle, is in those schools. University level, colleges, high schools, elementary schools, kindergartens. The other big place where kids are being targeted, besides all the standard ones that we think of, like internet and TV and, you know, the perversity and the commercials. The other big one is what? Where do kids go to get books? Libraries. I don't know if you followed the dust off in Gillette. What's going on in Gillette is unbelievable. The issue in Gillette, and the issue, I talked to Nathan Winters about this, we're going to work on a law to make it so you can't exploit kids in libraries? And he said, well, the problem is it's a county issue. So every county runs their own libraries. And so counties have to stay, you know, as a member of a county, sometimes go in the library and go peruse the kids section. And I haven't done it yet. There's trash in there. We need to take it up to the counter and say, what in the world is this in here for? And I don't have the time nor the stomach to read you about some of the books that are in the one in Gillette. I had an attorney in Nebraska send me excerpts, scanned pages of a book. that was being used with kids in their county and wanted me to look at it. Now, I opened the attachment. I don't know how, you know, I'm now 50-something, so I'm not a spring chick. But I started into that book, and I, as an adult man, felt so violated, I had to get out. I could not look at it. And this was something that was being used on, like, little kids. And the level of perversity was unbelievable to me. So libraries. OK, here's what we do. Charity and clarity. Just real quick, on that note, it's not just the books that show up on the cover. I accepted it as Jurassic Fiction books that I read along with the book. And we had some before. Stand up and say what you're saying because I just got this last week is nobody's hearing from each other so turn so everybody can hear what you're saying. They've learned this. Yeah. Yeah, so I think they've learned that if your title looks safe and the storyline looks safe, it'll slip by most parents. So it takes eternal vigilance. Okay, so just three things, charity and clarity. We need to pick up the broken pieces and then protection of the vulnerable. On charity and clarity, all I want to say there is this, you know, we need to be, We need to think about how we communicate because it is important how we communicate as well as what we communicate. So as Christians, as we talk with people, as we confront this, we need to do so with great clarity, but also with charity. I've told you this before, the best thing I did after in the last 10 years of my life was on three occasions I had the opportunity to take a class put on by ADF, Alliance Defending Freedom, on communication and doing interviews with the press and how the communication and the way you communicate is so important. And when you get into these issues, it's like a debate. And somebody's trying to get you off your talking points, and they want you to say something dumb. They want you to come out and say something nasty. And if we do that, we shoot ourselves in the foot, and we dishonor the Lord. And we have to be disciplined in our speech. So we communicate with charity and clarity. We have to pick up the people. People whose lives are devastated by this movement are people who are made in the image of God, and people that Christ would redeem. In 1 Corinthians chapter 6, He mentions a whole list of nasty sins. Homosexuality and all this stuff. And then he says to the church at Corinth, and such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord. Okay? So he mentions all these nasty sins and he says, in the church in Corinth, some of you sitting in those pews were these things. but you no longer are because now you are in Christ. And the church, I mean, think of the carnage we've seen in our life because of the sexual revolution. It's only the tip of the iceberg for what's coming in 20 years. I mean, the carnage. Okay, you got, just think of this one. You got a homosexual couples and they're supposedly married. It's a pseudo marriage and they have kids. They get saved, one of them gets saved, that's kind of easy to address. It's not easy for them, but they can dissolve that home, they can determine what to do, and hopefully, Lord willing, they can enter someday into a heterosexual marriage that honors God. But if you've got a trans person in your church, and they have mutilated their body, they were once a man, and now they are a mutilated woman, How do you go back on that? How do you help that person? What does that look like? How do you put those pieces back together? The issues that the church is gonna have to step into and address are unbelievable and puzzling and difficult, but we cannot leave it to the world. We cannot leave it to the American Psychological Association to pick up the pieces. The church has to step up and do it. And that looks ugly. That looks difficult. And that looks like getting outside of our comfort zone and having to deal with people that we don't understand, but people for whom Christ died. So we have to be willing. And then the last one is protect the vulnerable. before they ever can understand the ramifications of that. And so they get to be adults and they're going, what have I done? And so now they are trying to detransition and go back to the way they were as criminals. And it's totally against the narrative. And they're making it illegal in many places to counsel that person to help them. So it's just, They control the institution.