Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Out of the Question podcast. We are bombarded on all sides with marketing, political rhetoric, and media personalities, all designed to get us to change the way we think and thus alter our actions accordingly. Matthew 7, 15 tells us, beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Does this pertain to us today? Do we have people who proclaim to speak for God, telling us the way things are supposed to be, but are in fact contradicting the scripture? Are we being sold a bill of goods that includes promises to fix things or reverse our downward slide as a society? Are we being given a false idea of what the future holds for us? I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially when well-known pastors change their positions, demonstrating a disloyalty to God's word, and when candidates who years ago seemed as though they thought one thing, but now sing a different tune. So Charles, exactly what does it mean for us today to recognize wolves who disguise themselves as sheep, and how do they manage to fool us into thinking that they're on our side? Well, of course, the first reason we get fooled is because they look like sheep and not like wolves. And that's one of the keys to helping us discern and be aware of the challenges we face. I think that especially in recent evangelical and overall Christian church history in these United States, we have plenty of examples of individuals who appeared to be one thing, but turned out to be quite another. I think that scripture teaches us that people are known by their fruits, by their fruits you shall know them, and I think that's a key thing that we have to observe and pay attention to. It's fine if someone is confessionally orthodox, they subscribe to the Westminster Confession, they believe in biblical inerrancy or whatever it may be. What are they doing when nobody's looking? Who are they endorsing for political candidates? How are they interacting with this social issue? There are a whole host of things that can give us an idea about whether someone is the real deal, is authentic or not. Let me just say one more thing about this, that we tend to define, as I just did intentionally, what we're going to be looking for in terms of, is this person, is this pastor, is this individual really what they say they are? Are they a wolf in sheep's clothing? We tend to define that by certain top level political or social issues. You know, what is their stand on abortion? What is their stand on same sex marriage and these kinds of things? But there are a whole host of other things that are just as important and significant that are an important key. as to whether this person is worth following, are they standing on the scriptures and God's law word in terms of all areas of life, or are they something else when it comes to, maybe okay, big ticket issue A and B, but when it comes to the smaller ticket C and D, that's where they go down the wrong path. So another way I could have framed the question is, why do good people go bad? But then I realized, well, if we're going to what the scripture says, there's no one good, no, not one, obviously, other than Jesus Christ. But it seems to us that people who say the right things and maybe in political spheres voted the right way, that we say, well, that's a good guy. We should get behind this person. But then years later, through maybe a lot of things that happened behind the scenes that we'll never know about, suddenly these people are speaking very differently. And for those who wholeheartedly went and said, oh, that's my guy. He's on our side. They're actually somewhat crippled because Now they don't even trust their own ability to discern is this a good guy or a bad guy so you talked about fruit right will know them by their fruit and. What came to mind was the passage in Leviticus 19.23, which at first glance might not have anything to do with this, people might think. But what it says is, when you come into the land and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then you shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised. Three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you. It shall not be eaten of. And I thought, wow, you can plant a fruit tree. and it starts sprouting, but it's got three years before you can even eat it. And so then you have all this time to discern, is this good fruit, bad fruit, et cetera. And so I wonder is the fact that we have so much instantaneous media, a new person gets on the scene, suddenly that's all you're hearing about, that we don't give ourselves time to really judge the fruit. Yeah, in many cases like that, the new person on the scene, in whatever venue it may be, actually may have a long history behind them that we don't know anything about simply because we'd never heard of them before the media decided to put them out there. I remember many years ago reading, as I'm sure you're familiar with, the rise of the late Billy Graham. You know, he was an obscure evangelist and mostly here in the South, but he had a circuit of places, but it was, uh, the guy who was at, I forgot which one of the New York times or one of those big newspapers or look time magazine. I forgot who it was. You know, he sent a, once he heard about Billy Graham, he sent a note to, uh, one of his editors and said, huff Graham. In other words, promote him. I want this guy out front. And that's what launched his career. And so especially with media personalities or people that come to us by means of mass media, we would do well to do research and do something and find something about that person. You know, here in the southern United States, and I'm sure there in California, too, you have all kinds of people who have churches and religious TV programs, and you look into the backgrounds of some of these people, and they aren't very pleasant backgrounds. But look, let's put that to one side for a moment, and let's talk about people who are apparently real bona fide solid people, then they start to kind of go off the rails a little bit. I'm sure there are groups of individuals who target we'll just say Christian ministry, or some Christian social cause for cynical purposes because they think they can get something out of it. Usually it's money. But there are others who are going at this for honorable reasons, at least initially, and then somewhere they go off the rails, as I said. One example that I was thinking about when we decided to talk about this topic, and this man, we've mentioned his name before, was the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer. Now, I'm mentioning him because you can see in his early ministry and the work and the writings he produced that led to the founding of the Labrie Fellowship in Switzerland, and you contrast that with his writings and his focus later in his ministry toward the latter part of his life, and there's a significant difference. And I've even heard evangelical and reformed teachers and leaders who were very excited about what they perceived to be Schaeffer's sort of going in a more broad direction as opposed to a fundamentalist and solidly biblical direction, sort of what we would equate with modern wokeness today. And then lamenting the fact that toward the latter part of his life, he was writing books, The Christian Manifesto, The Great Evangelical Disaster, that were much more doctrinal and saying, you know, the church is losing its grip because you're giving up this issue of biblical inerrancy and absolute truth. So I guess the point is, if somebody is around long enough, just like in any part of human life, they're going to adapt and change over time. if any of our listeners can remember when they were 18 and they're a lot older than that now, their ideas and their attitudes are very different now than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago. Right. And you would hope it would be. You look back, I know sometimes I joke with people and I say, look back on things I thought six months ago. And I'm like, wow, I really thought that. So going back years, decades, et cetera, we would hope we would grow. But by the same token, we have to grow in the right direction. We, you know, like a plant grows towards the sun. Well, in a very real sense, we must grow towards the son of God and adapt to the mind of Christ and have to give up some of our own thoughts and preferences. But as I was thinking about this, you know, like, okay, so how do you spot a wolf in sheep's clothing? Sounds good because as you pointed out, He's dressed as a sheep, so you have to have a standard. And I thought it's interesting if you go back to some of the parables that Jesus told, he actually was telling us how to do this. And I was thinking of the parable of the sower and the seed. Now, the sower isn't us, we're not the seed, we're the ground. Would you agree with that? That in that parable, when we're looking at where we fit into that parable, we're the ground, correct? Yes, yep. Okay, which means that other people are the ground too. So you have to look at the ground. So there's nothing wrong with the sower. There's nothing wrong with the seed. It's what happens when that seed either takes root or does not. And I think it's interesting that there are four different kinds of ground. Three of them are identifications that help us to see, if we really think about it, how to judge things. So if you see somebody who is very concerned, for example, about how they look, about what status they have, about whether or not people accept them, trying to be accepted by a group that by its very nature is antithetical to what they stand for, then you see people who are being choked out by the cares of the world. And in a lot of cases, money and advancing their career has a lot to do with their compromise. So it doesn't mean that they were always compromised, but don't you think it means that they've allowed something to take precedence over something else? Oh, yes, absolutely. This is a constant struggle in terms of our individual pursuit of sanctification and growth and holiness and conformity to God's standards of righteousness. And I suppose that there are some callings and stations in life that are more susceptible to what you just described than others. Certainly in pastoral ministry, there are these challenges that every pastor faces. If they take their calling and ministry seriously, then this is something they have to be constantly on guard about. I came across a quaint little phrase or statement where a pastor was greeting people as they were leaving the church, and this woman walked up and said, Pastor, that was the greatest sermon you've ever preached. And he said, thank you. The devil just told me the same thing. So that's an example of how you've got to be on your guard. I mean, everybody likes to know that people like what they've done or what they've said. But for some of us in certain vocations, we have to be very careful. All of us have to be to some extent. I think, too, that in terms of recognizing the wolves, I think people need to invest time and understanding and having a clear understanding. I'll call it situational awareness. that we have always lived in a world that is in constant battle between the wiles of the devil and the power of God's law word. And we can look back even in ancient history. Well, this is the example of ancient Rome. The political intrigues among the upper classes of Rome in the areas of politics and government people stabbing each other in the back, conspiracies, people getting poisoned, all kinds of things. In other words, there are people out there who this is that they do. They spend their time trying to come up with ways where they can advance their own agenda. And maybe in their own minds, it looks good. And I've been involved in, air quotes, church politics for over 30 years as a denominational pastor in two or three different denominations now. And I see this across the board, and I don't care if you're Pentecostal, Reformed, Arminians, Calvinistic, in every area where people get together and form associations, you have these problems. And we see them in families too, sadly. So people need to realize that there's a reason why before someone is put in a position of authority, they need to be vetted. They need to be measured against the standard of God's word. by those who are mature in their faith, and I'm talking especially in the church, but it applies to every other area of Christian society. You know, the family, of course, is the main focus for that. Every young man who grows up in a family has the potential to become a husband and father, but whether or not they will be quote, unquote, good husband or father, there's a lot that goes into qualifying whether that be the case. And I'll stay with that analogy and just conclude by saying you may have a man, husband, father, brother, uncle, any of these roles who really genuinely wants to pursue a godly lifestyle, but it's a constant battle and struggle to have that victory over the temptations that might lead them to become a wolf in sheep's clothing. So the other soil, there's two others actually that were bad soil, but this one in particular is the one that gets sown and it just grows completely quickly. It's like, wow, up it shoots and stuff like that. And everybody around it probably went, oh, praise the Lord. Look at the change in that person. But because there isn't training, in the whole counsel of God, because people absorb this idea that once you're saved, life gets easy, congratulations, you've made it on the boat sort of thing, that they don't bother to study, they don't bother to look at things, the subtle points where the world, the flesh and the devil are challenging God's word. And so you have a lot of people who seem like, wow, they get it. Now we have another soldier on our side. And then down the road, they wither because it gets a little hot outside. They have no root in itself the way the scripture describes it. And I think that happens a lot with celebrities. I'm sure you can think of all those celebrities. Oh, wow, he's a Christian, she's a Christian. And I don't know why these people are so happy about it because they don't know these people particularly, and they just hear word of mouth. And then when that person does something is antithetical to scripture completely, then they're like, oh, what happened? So you actually get people thinking you can be saved and then lose your salvation, which then compromises the promise of the work of the Holy Spirit. Paul, in speaking, I believe it's in Acts 20, where he warns the elders of the church at Ephesus to be on guard, because he was leaving, he was heading to Rome, And he wanted to make sure that they knew their responsibilities to guard the flock. And I think he uses this very terminology, you know, ravenous wolves will come in and if possible, paraphrasing, you know, take over the church, lead everybody astray. And, you know, if that was a problem in his time, it's as much or more so even in ours. And I think one key area that we focus on in that And that's in the case of the context of the church, but the church is only one of three major institutions that God established, and all of them are answerable to the law word of God. What is it that these ravenous wolves are going to be doing? They're going to be attempting to subvert the sheep away from the truth. and whether they are recently planted seed that sprout too fast, or they've been around a long time, where I think it tends to be a little more difficult to anticipate. But if you've been in this kind of situation, you have in terms of various ministries that you've been involved in, there's that person that comes in, whether it be the church or, say, a pro-life ministry or something like that, and uh... they get all jacked up and excited in their their they blaze like a comet and within a short amount of time they're burned down god The toughest one for me in those three different kinds of soil is the one where it says, and the seed goes on the ground and immediately the birds come and eat it up. That one is like, okay, so are we likely to think that those people, we would never look at them as wolves in sheep's clothing because they show their true stripes, their true colors immediately. But I don't know, do you think there's more to it than that? It's certainly possible, but I'm just reviewing here that part of the parable. I'm looking at Mark 4.18, and others are the ones sown among the thorns, and the thorns hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires of other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. In terms of what would be the equivalent of the birds who come swoop down and eat it up, That could be compared to any number of things, but especially I think in our technocratic age, our hyper materialistic age, people especially face that temptation to where they're more concerned about something other than their souls than they are about, they're more concerned for their pocketbooks and getting the latest technology. Well, as you were talking, I was thinking, well, maybe it's that people read their Bible, but then everything around them is saying, that's not true. That's not true. That's not true. So that would be more like, you know, the birds coming and eating them up, the seed up even before it could take root. And so again, we might be subject to things that aren't true because we have not been exposed to anything other than the propaganda surrounding it. And recently I've done a couple of interviews and I get comments from people who say, wow, thank you for sharing that. I never knew of that. I didn't know this was going on. And it makes me think that when truth, if you were to read the Bible and say, okay, this is what the word of God says, what do I think in terms of what everybody else thinks? if we don't say, huh, I need to compare this because it looks like the world is saying something different, but no, I better go with what everybody says. And so, you know, that seed gets taken up and it doesn't even have a chance to germinate. And so in that sense, if we don't question everything that we're supposed to know is true, but maybe when we look a little bit closer, it's not true, that we can be subject to not having the kind of ground that will make this seed flourish. Because if we're going to fulfill the idea of making disciples of the nations, we have to make sure that God's word is falling on good ground. Yeah, the verse 20 of Mark chapter four, but those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit. So the idea there is not partially accept it, mostly accept it. I mean, it's an all or nothing scenario. You know, not that any of us in terms of growing in grace and understanding, you know, have all knowledge and are perfect from the get go. But the idea is that we have crossed this boundary where we recognize there's the word of Satan and there's the word of God. There's the word of man and there's the word of Christ. And you can't have both. And insofar as you attempt to mix one or the other, you're not going to be successful and your master, whether it be Almighty God or the devil, is not going to be happy with you. And so you're going to be living in this state of, I don't know if the phrase is cognitive dissonance, but the key thing here is from the biblical standpoint, it's the fruit bearing and that it says 30-fold and 60-fold and even 100-fold. So that's another example of where we can see and whether we're dealing with sheep or wolves, wolves in sheep's clothing, is what are the fruit that's being produced? What is it that's coming from that ministry or that teaching? You know, am I reading the Bible open? Like, you know, we've criticized rightly so over the years, the dispensationalists who have the Bible open and the latest newspaper headlines. Well, what about having the Bible open and your college psychology book open next to it? What's interpreting what? Why do you need that book to understand the absolute truth of God? Because in these examples, it comes to us dressed up in modern talk. And I said this to my congregation just the other day. When you say something like God's law word applies to every area of life, and God claims sovereign authority over every aspect of life, married life, education, I mean, there's nothing you can't name that God doesn't say, this is my area, all of that belongs to me, and you should be walking according to my word in that area. And say, well, wait a minute, that's sort of extreme, isn't it? You know, are you really going to go down? And I say, well, you're already walking in an extreme because you accept the, you know, the false alternative to that as the absolute truth. you're walking according to that standard, which from the biblical standard, you're extreme because you're not obeying the true word of God, you're obeying the word of Satan. Right. And so I got to thinking, hmm, should we be concerned that sometimes we've put on the wolf's costume, we're wolves among sheep. In other words, that we're pushing what we think gives us the most advantage. Because you can extract verses from scripture and say, see, this supports my case, but it doesn't support the case if you take a look at that verse in light of other verses. So it's not just that we have to be on the lookout for these wolves who might come after us. We've got to make sure that we don't fall into the category of wolf that's deceiving the sheep. I'm just turning to that passage in Acts chapter 20, where Paul is speaking to the elders from the church at Ephesus. Because I want to get this wording down that he tells them. He says, I know that none of you among whom I've gone proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again. Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure, fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, according to the ESV translation, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be alert. Remembering refers to his own ministry." That's another key area in terms of identifying wolves in sheep's clothing, is what are the things that they speak? Are they twisted things and twisted within the context of what God's law word tells us? And again, we want to jump right away and say, well, no, no, no, he's not twisted anything because he's against abortion, he's pro-life, he's against same-sex marriage. Okay, what about everything else? What about in terms of education? What about in terms of politics? What about in terms of science and medicine and all these other things? Because God doesn't draw a line and say, OK, this side is mine, and on the other side, it's whatever you want to take up. I don't have any interest in that. That's not the God of Holy Scripture. That may be the God of the wolves in sheep's clothing, but it's not what Paul was exhorting the Ephesian elders to do. And it's not what Jesus was talking about in the parable of the sower. Let me ask you this, Andrea. In that parable, what is it that says that the sower sows? Well, it's the word of God. The sower sows the word. That's right. And so anyone in any walk of life who is not, in a manner of speaking, sowing the word, that's a dead giveaway that you better be careful in following that person or that ministry. That's why I love looking at the parables in terms of how timeless they are, because there's also the parable of the wheat and the weeds or the wheat and the tares. At first, you can't tell the difference. The Lord tells his followers, no, no, no, we're in the parable. No, don't go pick up and try to get rid of all the weeds prematurely because in the process you might be pulling up wheat as well. So we shouldn't be surprised that in every era, Paul's era was certainly talking about people will come in and sow weeds, tears among the wheat, that this is a reality. And I think in our day, maybe less so now with the COVID stuff and vaccines and whatnot, but people used to be like, wait a minute, our country wouldn't hurt us. What we hear on the news is true. I know because I heard it or I read it. And so we have to be on guard that we, number one, aren't sewing tears in our own lives, teaching our children, and then they challenge us and say, but what about this? And you go, well, yeah, I know. The Bible says that, but it's not really what it means for us today. So we have to be more concerned, I think, initially, that we not be guilty of being a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yeah. To go back to what Paul was saying to the Ephesian elders, that's one of the things he's exhorting them. Guard your own life, be careful, so that you will be able to recognize the difference between the weeds or the tares and the wheat. You know, I think it might be helpful to consider. Not everybody starts out with the idea, well, for my career, I'm going to be, I'm going to become a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's like the, the person who becomes sadly an alcoholic. They don't just get up one day and say, I'm going to start drinking uncontrollably and become an alcoholic. No, it starts in a very incremental way to where they sort of reach that point. And in the case of an individual who becomes a wolf in sheep's clothing, well, Given the benefit of the doubt, they don't start out that way. But what is it that leads them down that path to where the rest of us, the leaders of family, church, and civil government, need to be careful and recognize what it is? Well, this deceitfulness of riches is one of the things Jesus referred to in that parable. I read a statistic just the other day. that according to, I believe it was opensecrets.org, where you can go and you can see contributions made to various and all political campaigns, presidential campaigns, gubernatorial campaigns. And they go back a number of years, right up to the present moment. I believe that was the source, but it was referring to a political lobby with huge influence in Washington, DC. That lobby is the Israeli lobby. And it said that not one U.S. senator had not taken money from IPAC. Not one. And so this is an area, whether it be that lobby or any other, where this is what corrupts people. You know, it's the deceitfulness of riches and the allure of power. I think one of the reasons that Cal Seton and specifically R.J. Rush Jr. was so concerned about the area of education is because when people would turn over their children, now this is Christian families turn over their children to a statist educational system that was leading them astray. Go back to what the scripture says that Jesus said that if you lead a little one astray, it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and thrown into the sea. Now, a millstone for those of us who don't see one every day was a pretty big stone. And if it was tied around your neck, you were going to sink to the bottom. And the whole modern messianic character of American education, which is a title of Rush Dooney's book, is a giant millstone designed, whether it's in social studies, whether it's in literature, whether it's in even math and science, to lead people away from the truth of Scripture. And initially it wasn't so obvious, but then when it became obvious that you can't pray in the school, and if a child brings in a Bible and wants to say what Jesus did for him, in his life that that is censored. You see, we're at a stage now, Charles, where the wolf doesn't care if you know he's a wolf or not. The prevailing opinion is we have so weakened any opposition. Except, you know what, they forget, and this is the hope we have as believers, that as long as God is on our side, we are in the majority. but God's not going to force people to read his word faithfully if in fact they want to read it to serve their own purposes. And so we have to realize that a lot of the things we don't like today has to do with the fact of the ground by which the word of God is received. And are we other than that good ground that receives it and then multiplies in terms of good production. I think one reason that we face this challenge, perhaps in a more direct way than earlier generations, has been the breakdown of the family as the central focus of God in the world, and as the place where every individual is taught law, government, religion, That's the focal point. All of those things have been outsourced to other places. One of the problems with that is a lack of accountability. If you're in a communal situation where everybody around can see what you're doing, or at least there are one or two people that you are answerable to, it's a little bit harder for somebody to transition from becoming a sheep to a wolf. in the context in which we're talking about. This constant pull toward becoming something other than what God wants us to be, it doesn't matter what area of life we're talking about. And so having that structure of accountability whether it's somebody involved in politics or civil government, the leadership of a church, the leadership of a family, a Christian school, whatever it may be, there needs to be this constant checking and making sure. I mean, not to where, you know, nobody has a private life anymore, but it's interesting that that's one of the things that's now falling by the wayside is that none of us have a private life anymore because we have You know, big tech companies and government that wants to know every, every move we make, you know, and you know, it, it comes back to something that we've said from the very beginning is that there are certain things according to God's created order that are simply unavoidable. And one of them is obeying a master. You will serve someone. It'll either be God or Satan. I mean, that's the, the distilling it down to the basic element. and you'll be accountable to someone. There's someone who will know what you do all the time. Now we know that someone is God Almighty, the God of the Bible, but the state wants to take that place. So instead of, you know, we've talked about school and education, instead of the family being the place where a person becomes accountable, and say children are given direct supervision by parents and other siblings, well it becomes the school, the government school, where the teacher, who is an agent of the government actually, can keep an eye on things and craft that person into something that the government approved curriculum wants that person to be. And I'd go so far as to say that some people say, okay, we'll get them out of schools. We'll either put them in a Christian school or homeschool, but they still do not guard the hen house. And by that, I mean, Yes, it's overwhelming. If you're responsible for your child's education, you may start outsourcing to different curriculum or different books that looked like, oh, okay. So I saw something today that was quite interesting. Somebody said, be careful what Christian material you give your children. And this was a Bible story book for kids and, you know, with the animations and so we have, Jesus going to be baptized by John. And the caption says, I'm here to wash away my sins. Now, is that what Jesus said when he was baptized? Did Jesus get baptized to wash away his sins? But you know what? It's a Bible story book. Grandma got it or I got it in the bookstore or whatever. If you are not looking at all things that your children are going to read and learn and vet their teachers, As a matter of fact, when I teach and I teach young people online, there is a video recording of what I've said and done. And I don't know if the parents watch it, but they could watch it and they should watch it. They should be sure that I'm not saying something that's going to lead their children astray and that I'm not a wolf in sheep's clothing. So it's not like, well, when can we ever relax? When will I have peace? I think it was Rush Juney says, when you die, you will have peace. There's a lot of peace in a graveyard. Nobody has a lot of conflict, but then again, they're not alive and doing what they were doing before they were dead. So the struggle is going to maintain itself. It's not like the war of the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent gets canceled because now we're going to homeschool. No, you've got to even be more diligent because you've got to rise above what maybe you thought as a kid that you were ever going to do. I've heard so many homeschool moms say, I wish I paid attention in school a little better knowing that I was going to teach my children. Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but your main requirement is to look at any textbook or any novel. So when my kids, who tended to read a lot, they read books that I wouldn't have the, I don't even have the time to read everything that they were reading, classics and whatnot, but they were required at the dinner table to tell us the story. And so as they told the story, I would ask questions. Well, okay, what kind of world and life view is that? So that, yes, I'm not trying to say don't homeschool your children until you can scan and read every single textbook, but you gotta stay on top of it because they're gonna have conclusions. And the conclusions come sometimes from wolves in sheep's clothing. Yeah, and if I can wrap up my, contribution to our discussion. I'd like to do that by quoting something Jesus said in Matthew 10, 16. There's a similar thing recorded in Luke 10, 3. He said, behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Now, what does he say after that? He says, and I'm going to intentionally misread it. Therefore, be open to what the wolves have to tell you. You might learn something. No, that's not what it says. It says, therefore, be wise as serpents. and harmless as doves, be as cunning as a snake and yet innocent as a dove." So I think in terms of where someone might go with what we have talked about today, that's absolutely perfect advice. Followers of Jesus as believers in God's law word, we are sent out as his people. here pictured as sheep in the midst of wolves, whether they've become wolves or whether they started out that way. And so we have to be wise, following what you said, be aware of what our children are reading, what they're being exposed to, and if it's homeschooling or something like that, but also harmless as doves, innocent as doves. In other words, not getting on the bandwagon with the people that we're trying to guard against. That's good advice. However, when we move it out of the realm of parents and children, and we talk about what we absorb as individuals, the scripture tells us to have nothing to do with the deeds of darkness, but expose them. Now, in order to expose them, sometimes you have to read and get involved with whatever is being depicted so you can understand it. Be wary of the fact if you continually go to sources that you know are contrary to what the word of God says, if you were to ask the person or persons directly, what do you think? And you know that they're atheistic or humanistic. Once you know that they're not a reliable source, identify that to yourself and others, but to keep going back and going back and going back as if, you know, you're going to learn more about how they hate God and as if that's useful. That's where you expose them, but I think a lot of times Christians stop there. Replace them. Be the alternative. So that instead of going to this network or this publication, and I'll go so far as to allude to people who people love, except if you go to their shows, they're foul-mouthed, they're blasphemous, they take God's name in vain. Do you really want to be digesting that? Or is it enough to say, okay, there's some information here that's useful, but we need to be the ones who are propagating the truth without the blasphemy, without the crudeness, et cetera, because then we become desensitized to it but we still think we're on the right side of history here because we know what's going on. Those people too have an agenda. Everybody has an agenda. The important thing is identify your own agenda first before you will then absorb whole cloth because you might be hearing wolves in sheep's clothing. Yes, and I think that's part of the, on the one hand, being shrewd and wise, but also being careful about your own purity and innocence. Right. So this topic has a lot of tentacles that people can consider, and I hope they do, but it would be an example of, in scripture, when you come across a passage that talks about wolves, take it seriously. It's not like, yeah, well, that was true then, but not now. The living word of God is timeless, and it will apply in all circumstances. Maybe it'll look a little different, but it will apply. Out of the Question podcast at gmail.com is how you reach us, and we look forward to talking with you next time. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit calcedon.edu.