Well, as I said, we're studying the canons. We've set aside our study of the canons at the door to look at some of the stuff that we're dealing with as a denomination in regards to homosexuality. So I think we'll just go ahead and have a word of prayer, and then we'll get right to work. Hey, Bill. Good morning. That's right. Father, thank you so much for your mercies to us this morning. We thank you again for this wonderful weather and the opportunity to see the sun shining We're thankful chiefly for the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us. We're thankful to set aside the Lord's Day to direct our attentions to his wonders and his grace. We're thankful that we can have this Sunday school hour to deal with issues and topics that we might not deal with in a sermon. And just pray that you bless our time together. Give us a wise, charitable, discerning heart as we ask for the glory of Jesus. Amen. Much of what I wanted to accomplish last week was to show you why this is a significant issue in the PCA. We learned a bit about the ministry of Revoice and the Side B Christianity that they promote. If I say anything this morning or you have any questions, please just stop me and ask. We learned last week that the first Revoice conference was held at a prominent PCA church in St. Louis. And the pastor of that church, Dr. Greg Johnson, is a major supporter of Revoice. Additionally, he's actively advocating now that the PCA should recruit Side B gay Christians for ministry. Now, just by way of definition, you'll remember we learned Side A gay Christianity basically believe same-sex attracted is how God created them. It's how he made them. The Side A folks tend to give lip service to the Bible, but that's really about all it is. In the end, they believe that love between a man and a wife and the love that exists between a man and a man are equally blessed and to be extolled before God. Over against that, there's side B, gay Christianity. The side B folks say they hold to a typical biblical view of marriage and human sexuality. And they do believe that their same-sex attraction is the result of the fall. And when you first hear these folks talk, that all sounds pretty good on the surface. But when they say it's a result of the fall, They typically, and again there's a range of views, but they typically put their distorted sexuality in the same category as say a disabled or a blind person. And what side A and what side B have in common is that they believe their sexual orientation is a legitimate descriptor of their personhood. Side A says by Says that same-sex attraction is just a part of who I am Side B says my same-sex attraction is a part of who I am as a person born in a broken creation No, please Absolutely Absolutely the terms have been floated around for about a I'm thinking almost a dozen years they were... I can't think of the initial group. It's one of the groups that's morphed a couple times and became Revoice. But they initially started using this language about themselves. So if I went to somebody in the RCA who is more or less... Almost certainly they would know. They are definitely not going to shy away from it. Again, this is how God made me is to be celebrated. So then side B, they say same-sex attraction and those desires are simply the manifestation of how the fall deforms all people. And so long as they don't act on those attractions and desires, and they live celibate lives, it's okay. And so long as their celibacy is maintained, this is the argument that Greg Johnson is making, that shouldn't preclude a person from ministry. So again, we learned a couple amendments were put forward to state if anyone identifies by their sin, whether that's a homosexuality or really any sin, it disqualifies them from vocational ministry. The overtures, as you know, eventually failed. And so this remains an issue in the PCA. Now, I have a couple tweets I printed out on that sheet. These are from Art Pereira. They're from basically the latter part of 2020. Art was a youth director at a really large PCA church in New Jersey. And you can see a couple of the tweets there, and I find them incredibly troubling. He writes tweets, I guess is the way you say it. I spent years cowering to a homophobic church culture that taught me my life was only valuable if it molded to heteronormative standards that frankly don't even reflect scripture. But I'm done, and I won't let it happen to the queer kids in my care. A couple other quotes. Months back a family in my church found that I'm gay in a pretty awkward way. Their son said some pretty homophobic things in front of me while we were out to lunch and I said, uh, hey man, you know I'm gay, right? There was backlash from the family. They reached out to my pastor while I was away to complain about it. A gay man as the youth leader? My pastor insisted on handling it himself and told them that he considered me central to God's work at Hope Church. Now, a couple of months back, Art left the PCA, and he's now on full-time staff at Revoice. Not surprising. But I want to highlight, this is not a made-up problem, nor is it a single-person problem in the PCA. I believe the PCA actually has a very limited window to deal with this. And how the PCA deals with this will determine if she remains faithful or not. I don't think it's more complicated than that. My hope and prayer is that we will. But only time will tell. So it's a real problem. As I said last week, I think it will be helpful to sort of reflect on how we got where we are culturally. That is how we arrived at a place where a sin pattern that the Bible repeatedly described as an abomination and against nature is actually being promoted in what had been historically conservative churches. A great many cultural commentators acknowledge we're in the midst of a sexual revolution. But I think sometimes we miss the force of the word revolution. A revolution is an overthrow, even a violent overthrow, of the present order. In this case, the sexual revolution is the overthrow of God's moral order for human sexuality. Theo Hobson, a really smart Anglican, describes a moral revolution in this way. A moral revolution is not when what was condemned is now accepted. A moral revolution only takes place when that which had been condemned is now celebrated, and when those who will not celebrate it are condemned. That's what we're in the middle of. And what's being celebrated are things that God hates, and what's being condemned is what God ordained in regard to human sexuality. And, of course, those who promote the things of God, they're also going to be in the category of those things that are condemned culturally. Well, about a decade back, when the Young Restless Reform Movement was making waves, Carl Truman wrote something that was prophetic, and I love the way he gets at things so pointedly. He wrote, the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade. You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple years, it'll not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you can spout, how many arthouse movies you can find the Redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice. Maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist. He's pretty much spot on, wasn't he? And what I want to do this morning is consider some of the cultural shifts and cultural tactics that have gotten us to this place and how those have impacted the church. Now something we learned in those lectures by Dr. Truman a few months back is that none of this just fell onto the scene. The building blocks of the sexual revolution are found in the intellectual and philosophical ideas as well as the strong secular worldview that began unfolding all the way back in the early 18th century. But I want to look at some of the moral changes that have taken place in the last 80 years or so that have contributed to the broader sexual revolution. And the reason I think this is important is because some of these cultural shifts and cultural tactics were either embraced by or embarrassed or ignored by the church. Let me mention one, the issue of birth control. And the reason I chose to start here is because it's sometimes overlooked in understanding how the sexual revolution advanced. It's an issue that Protestants take for granted as ideaphora, that is, a matter of sort of indeferent freedom. Birth control is just morally neutral. But here's the thing. Prior to 1930, the entire Christian church condemned birth control because they had a high view of the worth and dignity of children. Again, that was universally true until about 1930. It may be of some interest to you that the term birth control was coined in 1914 by a young public health nurse. Anybody want to guess her name? Margaret Sanger. And yes, Sanger wanted to use birth control to implement her theory of eugenics. She was mostly concerned with controlling the births of people who didn't look like her, which is the same reason she promoted abortion, right? But the result of the basic cultural acceptance of birth control was to do something that was unknown in human history. It was to drive a fairly sharp wedge between sex and procreation. And that was a significant cultural shift and one a great many in the evangelical church rather blindly followed. They bought into arguments of that day that the population was going to explode and within 10, 15, 20 years people were going to be starving, even in America, because of the lack of food. This was promoted by scholars like Thomas Mathis. Now those views are known to be nonsense today, but in the early 20th century that was tantamount to a Christian saying, oh, we really need to follow the science. And the science said, stop having so many babies. And this was a technology that accomplished that. And while only liberal Protestant denominations actually at that time promoted fewer children, in 1930 at a conference of Anglican bishops called the Lambeth Conference, they gathered together and basically decided to remove all stigmas from using birth control and to make some pretty unequivocal statements that it certainly wasn't sin. And that very quickly made its way to the USA. And there were a lot of moral issues at that time that the evangelical world was dealing with. Some of them were manufactured issues they didn't really need to deal with, like prohibition. So they just sort of adopted a no harm, no foul view of birth control. By the time the birth control pill was released in 1960, the evangelical world saw birth control as something morally neutral. not even to think about. But it's hard to underestimate just how much this contributed to the sexual revolution, as Dr. Moeller helpfully writes. And by the way, I'll put some of these quotes and references on the sheet, so if you want to look them up and find the articles and papers and books and whatever, you have those resources. As Al Moeller writes, ultimately, the availability of birth control in a reliable form, particularly in the form of the pill, unleashed a sexual revolution. So long as sex was predictably related to the potential of pregnancy, a huge biological check on sex outside of marriage functioned as a barrier to sexual immorality. Once that barrier was removed, sex and children became effectively separated and sex became redefined as an activity that did not have any necessary relation to the gift of children. It's impossible to exaggerate the importance of the separation of sex and babies from the moral equation. Everybody tracking with him? And me? There's a lot that could be said here, but basically, the church put up little to no resistance when the culture separated sex from procreation. And that was a major win for the sexual revolution. It was a way of mitigating a natural, God-appointed consequence of sex. When Christians gave this up, they gave up one of the primary purposes of God-ordained marriage. I bet if you've heard 50 sermons on marriage, maybe one of them emphasizes procreation. We emphasize, it's about relationship, about compatibility, about being in that close nurturing care one for another. It is that. But one of the primary purposes of marriage was procreation. I understand I have blind spots now, and if I could look back at me a hundred years in the future and look back, I'll say, what was I thinking? I have no doubt that that's the case. But as the evangelicals kind of embrace this, I find myself looking back and saying, you know, the first recorded commandment in the Bibles had babies. That's the first one. Maybe, maybe there should have been some pause there when we were artificially deciding, But birth control is one issue. But there are many others that fueled the sexual revolution. In the 70s, 80s, you see things like no-fault divorce, and something that would have been unfathomable prior to 1969. But that moved marriage from being a covenant to being a contract. And no-fault divorce basically meant it was a contract of mutual happiness. Again, one of the purposes for which God gave us the gift of marriage was to curb sexual immorality. It was to be the place where godly sexuality was expressed and enjoyed. But if marriage ends up becoming almost exclusively about relational happiness and satisfaction, even at the expense of the family, then finding sexual satisfaction outside of marriage necessarily becomes the norm. and the revolution keeps marching forward. Another component was abortion, a way to deal with unwanted pregnancies. Abortion, as many of you probably know, is the most common surgical procedure done on American women. About 40% of those who have abortions now do so because they say they're not financially prepared and 36% simply say it's bad timing. It's not part of their plan. That's three quarters of them. Again, in many instances, abortion is a form of birth control, a drastic and diabolical way to set aside the consequences of sexual activity. And mostly, at least three quarters of the time, it happens because it's inconvenient. Yet another and sometimes overlooked way the sexual revolution advanced is antibiotics. Historically, one of the checks on rampant sexual debauchery has been disease. But birth control, abortion, medical advances, and other technology that's made things like pornography as close as your phone have all contributed to help the revolution march forward. Carl Truman works this out in a helpful way. The way this occurred is fairly simple to discern. First, there was the promiscuous behavior. Then there was a technology to facilitate it, in the form of contraception, antibiotics, antibiotics. And this technology enabled the sexually promiscuous to avoid the natural consequence of their actions, unwanted pregnancies, disease. So those rationales that justified the behavior became more plausible. And arguments against became less so. And therefore, the behavior itself became more acceptable. Again, everybody sort of following along here? Questions at this point? Well, among other things is They were talking about the greatest inventions of the 20th century. You know what he said? Yeah. Yeah, again, it really. And he further went on to say how it changed everything exactly what you said. Yeah, yeah. We can finally sin without those pesky consequences in the temporal realm, right? I mean, that's what it is. Another thing that contributed was the rise of this expert, an expert class... Dr. Ruth was one of them. Talking about an expert class of academics who wanted to shatter sexual morality that had characterized Western civilization and really a great bit of world history. People like Alfred Kinsey. I don't know if you've ever heard of Kinsey. They were praised for their discoveries in human sexuality. And it didn't matter that the guy was a pervert and a fraud, right? I mean, his scientific method wouldn't work for a ninth grader. But it didn't matter. It said what people wanted to hear. So they followed the science. And his research became the basis of sex ed in public schools. And it's still the basis of sex ed in public schools, by the way. Here's the thing. Sexual desire is a powerful part of the human condition. That's God's design, and it is a good gift. But it's fallen man's desire to pervert and twist that good gift. And it wasn't just academics. It became the committed pursuit of the media and Hollywood to throw off the shackles of sexual norms and morals. I would encourage you to read the writing of a woman named Sue Ellen Browder. She's an author from Well, she's from a small town in Iowa, and she was growing up in the 50s and 60s. She was drawn to the big city and ended up spending some 20 years writing for Cosmopolitan magazine in the 70s and 80s. I was introduced to her, by the way, on a podcast with Carl Truman, and I since got her book. She's got another one coming out, but I got the book that she wrote about five years ago. It's very interesting. She explains how it was the policy of Cosmopolitan magazine to make up stories. And this was the policy. It wasn't tolerated. It was the policy to make up stories about women who were living lives of promiscuous sex and absolutely loving it. And again, most of the stories were just pure fabrications. And here's an interesting tidbit. When the authors made up these stories, they were to intentionally put these women in cities like Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Grand Rapids, not in New York or Chicago. It was a way to say, hey man, these Cosmo gals aren't just in New York. They're all over living it up. Of course, it was a lie. That was a lie. They didn't exist. And she tells us very candidly in her book and quotes memos about how they're to elaborately concoct these stories. And virtually every aspect of media and entertainment has embraced, as a core dogma, the advancement of libertine sexual freedom, free from the morality of the bourgeoisie. So in 1960, you had the Andy Griffith Show. By 2000, you had Sex and the City. Forty years. And today you have the glamorization of every kind of perversion that fallen man can conceive. And the only thing you can do that's culturally unforgivable is to point it out. Tragically, but not surprisingly, the sexual revolution had a profound impact on the evangelical world. Dr. David Ayers is an academically trained sociologist and professor at Grove City College. He's done extensive research on how the culture's view of sex has infiltrated the church. He's got a book that's going to be released this June entitled, After the Revolution, and I can almost guarantee you it'll be a tragic but worthwhile read. But he's put together a lot of statistics to demonstrate the degree to which evangelicals have jettisoned historic biblical sexual ethics. According to Dr. Iyer's research and that of the Institute for Family Studies, it suggested about 65% of evangelical Protestants who are unmarried have engaged in sexual intercourse. That's in that first table. If you look at the ages on that, it's pretty stunning. In the second table, I provided is essentially telling us that premarital sex isn't something that happens once. It's a lifestyle pattern for a great many evangelicals. Here's other tables that I didn't publish because they're shocking. He was. He was. He wrote a book about three years ago on marriage. That's where a lot of this research was done. Part of me finds those statistics shocking, part of me doesn't. I'm hesitant to say this because it's somewhat salacious, but I think it was almost 60% By the way, notice the disparity between girls and boys. It's almost non-existent, which is not exactly what I would have thought. But one of the things he talks about is about 60% of these young evangelical girls are regularly engaging in oral and anal sex so they won't get pregnant and hopefully won't get a disease. It's really shocking, to say the least. You might be thinking, what's all this got to do with the homosexual movement? Well, first off, the homosexual movement couldn't have happened outside of the broader sexual revolution. It couldn't have just happened. And here's the point I want you to understand. The church's embrace of homosexuality couldn't have happened unless it had already begun to embrace the sexual revolution. You tracking with me? Here's the plain tragic truth. Homosexuality is increasingly embraced by professing evangelicals, particularly younger evangelicals, because they've already embraced a lot of the cultural sexual morality. I often get this question. Why are the younger people so less concerned about homosexuality? It's not because they've seen reruns of Will and Grace. because they're engaged in sexual immorality. And they don't want to talk outside. They don't want to talk out of both sides of their face because for that generation, and this is probably a virtue, they see being authentic as a primary virtue. That's why so many in the church are backed off, particularly the young folks. Any questions or comments? I guess this isn't really a discussion grabber, is it? Well, I want to sort of walk through something. I've shared some of this information with you in bits and pieces in the past. I think it's helpful to understand that in the broader context of a sexual revolution, there was a very, very determined plan on how to create a climate where homosexuality would not only be tolerated, but would be embraced. Al Mohler tells a story. It was in, I think it was 1989. He had gone somewhere with a group of students, and they were listening to Jerry Falwell Sr. speak. And after the talk, the students kept making fun of Jerry Falwell, because he was talking about a gay agenda. And these students were like, there's no gay agenda. That's just conspiratorial. But actually, there was a pretty good gay agenda. And it functioned pretty successfully. In 1987, two academics from Harvard by the name of Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen brought together their two fields of study, psychiatry and public relations, to map out a strategy to bring the homosexual lifestyle into the mainstream. Their first work was a short paper, Overhauling of Straight America, and it offered a comprehensive strategy to radically change the perspective of the American people on the homosexual issue. The work was so embraced and considered to be such a positive advancement for the homosexual community that in 1989, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen were urged to join forces and expand their work into a book that was eventually dubbed The Gay Manifesto. Although he may not have always been right, Falwell was right about this. And the name of the book was After the Ball. How America will conquer its fear and hatred of gays in the 90s. Again, this is ancient history now for us, but it's helpful to see how things got here. The book became the playbook for the advancement of the homosexual agenda. The first thing the authors insisted upon was a re-imaging of the homosexual. It had to change from the way they were typically conceived of. The author said that homosexuals had to repackage themselves so that they would look like and seem like mainstream America. This might even surprise you a bit, but the book called for the homosexual community to capitalize on the AIDS crisis. Listen to a quote. This is from their book. As cynical as it may seem, AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish herself as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America's special protection and care. The book also said that part of the homosexual strategy was to talk about homosexuality as much and as often as you could. Get it in front of the people. Make it normal. Again, let's say this quote, open frank talk makes gayness seem less furtive, alien, and sinful. More above board, they asserted. Constant talk builds the impression that public opinion is at least divided on the subject and that a sizable block, the most modern up-to-date citizens, accept or even practice homosexuality. And it should be apparent that this was bought hook, line, and sinker by Hollywood. They did their best to depict homosexuals as the nice guys that live in the corner apartment, who are just born different. That was not the reality. And it's still not the reality. One of the ugly facts that you have to dig to find is the devastating impact of the homosexual lifestyle on people. Right. Because they bury it as far as they possibly can. But everything from health concerns to suicide, depression, it's inflated by an order of magnitude in that community. And it's not because they're not accepted at this point. At this point, they can't be more celebrated than they are. No. No. Again, that was the argument up until about 2000, but especially since Obergefell. Well, they've got so many rights, you know. But again, the information is not easy to obtain. One of the arguments said, at that point in history, what's set forth by the gay community is that they were born that way. So this is the advice they gave the community. This is very interesting to look at in retrospect. I'll tell you why in a minute. We argue that for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay, even though sexual orientation for most humans seems to be a product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence. Exactly right. Alas, to suggest in public that homosexuality might be chosen is to open the can of worms labeled moral choices and sin and give the religious intransigence a stick to beat us with. Straights must be taught that it's as natural for some persons to be homosexual as it is for others to be heterosexual. Wickedness and seduction have nothing to do with it. And what's so interesting about this, this is one of the quandaries in the LGBTQ community, is they don't know how to frame this. They've garnered so much acceptance at this point, it's not really an issue, but are you born this way, or is gender something that's fluid and changes? I remember having a conversation with Rosaria Butterfield when she was here. I was having lunch with her and she said when she was in the gay community, they really had quite low regard for the transgender community precisely because the gay community wanted to insist, we're born this way and it's unchangeable. And then you've got the transgender community coming along and saying, no, we're pretty much going to change. It's still an inconsistency, but now it's not one they have to deal with. Again, we're not talking about a group of people who had a harmless idea. This was a well-organized, well-orchestrated movement that's against the created order and the creator. Let me give you one last quote from the book, because this speaks sort of directly to their method of dealing with the church, which they did see as one of the greatest threats that had to be overcome. Use talk to muddy the moral waters. That is, to undercut the rationalizations that justify religious bigotry. and to jam some of its psychic rewards. This entails publicizing support by moderate churches and raising serious theological objections to conservative biblical teachings. It also means exposing the inconsistency and hatred underlying anti-gay doctrines. So they had a desire, a goal, a plan to infiltrate the doctrine of the Protestant Church. They knew they had to discredit the church if they were to be overwhelmingly successful. That was the only way. And they even had a strategy for that. Listen to how they described a sample ad. This was a sample ad that they needed to publish. For example, for several seconds, there should be an unctuous, beady-eyed Southern preacher shown pounding the pulpit in rage against those perverted, abominable creatures. While his tirade continues over the soundtrack, the picture switches to heart-rending photos of badly beaten persons or of gays who look decent, harmless, and likable. And then we cut back to the poisonous face of the preacher. The contrast speaks for itself. The effect is devastating. Quite a plan, huh? And as Jeff said, it's still the plan, and it's still being promoted, and now it's being promoted in conservative churches. You can go back to the PCUSA, the Anglican Church in America. They were already talking about ordaining gays in the 80s. Now it's everywhere. And now we have the power dynamic of cultural Marxism. They're a victim class. And one of the problems with the victim class is they've been oppressed. And in this case, I think I mentioned this last week, the oppressor Who's oppressed gay Christians? The church. We're the oppressors. Therefore, we need to sit down and shut up. We ought not to have a word. Because our culture has embraced a thing known as standpoint epistemology. I don't know if you're familiar with that term. Epistemology is a philosophical term that describes how we know what we know, right? And when we talk about standpoint epistemology, we're saying, I can only know something about something else if I know it from that standpoint. So the only way we can ever understand the gay community or minister to the gay community is to have that standpoint. Hence, the need for revoice. Any questions? It's funny Jeff mentioned Rosaria Butterfield. Six years ago, she was the darling of the evangelical community. You know what, I cannot tell you how... I've had ministers just blown away that we were able to get her to come and speak. Because she would typically speak at two, at the most, three events a year. Because she saw... I wrote a compelling letter, but she... She saw her primary task as being a godly wife and mother. And she'd written the book, and she wanted to address it, but she only spoke. And so churches have said, how did you guys ever get her to come? Now those same churches are saying, well, she's not quite got this side A, side B thing down quite right. It's interesting. And to be perfectly candid, she is an intellectual giant. And they're pygmies compared to her. I mean, I am. I mean, she really is a remarkable and gifted woman. But she's sort of fallen on the outside of this group, as has Christopher Wong, another guy. Different type of story. He's a Korean-American. He was raised, he had, you know, you're the expression of the Korean, what do they call them? Tiger Moms? I didn't want to say anything insensitive. Are you familiar with the term? Korean mothers who are like super hardcore, you're going to excel, you're going to be a world class violinist, you're going to be a chemist, you're going to be blah blah blah. I think they have an expression, Tiger Mom. Again, I don't say that in a despairing way. Well, he had grown up in that environment. And he had these desires, he ended up going off the rails of a really wild, drug-infested, sexually immoral life, and the Lord converted him. And he's written really wonderful material, very helpful stuff, and again, same sort of thing. He's now speaking out pretty vehemently against IB, because both he and Rosario are saying the same thing. How enslaving it is to tell a person you have an orientation that the gospel can't deliver you from. That's just part of who you are as a person. So you're stuck with it. That's a kind of slavery. And they both say we're so glad that that wasn't something that was being promoted to them. That they understood there really was power to change in the gospel. Christopher Wan. So another thing, fighting that sin. And let me say this, there are going to be some people who struggle with that sin and they'll struggle with it all their lives, and we ought to have compassion. for them, not disdain, compassion. I remember, I don't know if you guys remember, when Rosario was here, there was a young man who went up and asked the question. And he said, and you could tell he was sincere and really heartbroken, he said, I don't want these desires. And he said, will I ever be able to get rid of them? And she said, Possibly, but I can't promise you will, right? And here was the language used. Some people have harder crosses to bear than others. I don't know if you can remember that. I mean, she was very gentle with him. But she was just communicating what is biblical truth. And so yes, a person can have that. Any questions? Again, the labeling part goes back to where we are in a cultural moment. If I can show I have victim status, I have special power. It's a superpower. You know what's hard? There are victims. And we should have real sympathy if we're real victims. But victimhood doesn't necessarily equal victim in our culture. You talk about language. I've mentioned a few times the Facebook page I moderate, and I talked about this last week how for years, guys who talked about you need to find your identity in Christ, started coming out of the woodwork on those overtures saying, well, we don't know if we should use that language, identity in Christ, it's undefined, right? We should use biblical language. So I said, I responded to one of the brothers who said that, I said, I think you're absolutely right. From now on, we're not going to use gay, we're going to refer to people, no, sodomites. He reported me to the moderator, to which I said, I responded, I am one of the moderators. I'm sorry, that was probably prideful and wrong to say that. You know, so we want to use biblical, because you don't really want to use biblical language. In fact, you want to use language to soften the reality of the sin and you'll do anything to do so. Yeah. Gay actually had a word prior to 1990. Again, you know what, that was me being cheeky. You know what, here's the thing, I said this before, I will sometimes be cheeky. I get it, but at the end of the day, you can't confront sin with sin. But you can be, what I'm getting at is you're right. I think we need to be bold, courageous, we need to stand on biblical principles. If someone says, well, you know, I mean, you have to understand, there are a great many, mostly conservative evangelicals, who are saying, we probably shouldn't use the language of unnatural factions. And I'm like, that's biblical language. And so I think we have to stand up and say, well, we're absolutely going to use that. It's against the created order. It's a kind of idolatry. So of course we're going to use that language. What I mean by what I'm saying is, and I'm only speaking to my own heart. I have a tendency to be circuit. I can click mean and heartbeat. And so I have to watch my own heart. So I'm talking about me, not the way everybody. I think we need to start saying things. You know my hesitancy is here. There are some guys who are saying some things and they're saying them in a way that's not helpful, right? You know, they've almost adopted some of the language of, like, remember Fred Phelps? Do you remember that movement? God hates fags. It was a movement that was popular 20... Are you... Phelps. Fred Phelps was the father. I don't know if you guys... I can't think of the name of his church. I don't think it was Willow Creek. They would go and they would protest at soldiers' graves and carry flags that God hates. I hear people that are using that language, and I'm like, no, you don't get to address sin with the vitriol of sin. That's my concern. So, but absolutely we've got to stand, and men need to have fortitude, and women too. But interestingly enough, you know, I think of what happened in Virginia, right? And the whole political thing was women that stood up more than men. We don't want this, talk to our children, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Huh? What's that? Tiger mobs. Anyway, and I'm sorry, it's kind of gone far afield. Lisa, you're absolutely right. And I am a big advocate for courage, confrontation, building a barrier that says we will not take a step backwards. But I again, I know my own heart. It's the step forward, slap in the face. And so that's sinful. So I'm always on guard for my proclivity there. That's why I... Any other questions? We're running out of time. We better close. Father, we thank you. We bless you. We pray that this bit of history will be helpful to help us think through where we are, where our denomination is, where it's heading. We pray that you would bless us now as we gather together for worship, Our hearts would be united in a wonderful way with the Lord Jesus. In his name we pray.