Well, between wanting to preach my Shepherd's Conference message here in Grace Life along with a few unexpected schedule changes, it's been a couple of months already since I last preached a sermon from the series that I began at the beginning of the year which I entitled, Confronting the Culture. I began that series by responding to our culture's full-scale assault against the very concept of truth. Truth has been reimagined as something...nothing more than personal preference, purely subjective expression of one's own values. And we confronted that lie with the teaching of Scripture showing that truth is objective, that it corresponds to reality. That it is rooted in the character and being of God Himself so that you don't get God without the truth. That it is expressed in the revelation of God in Scripture. And that it is absolutely fundamental to all rational thought, especially to our understanding both of reality and morality. We saw that the result of such a categorical rejection of truth altogether is our society's descent into absurdity and chaos. And the evidence for that is literally ever present. But the absurdity and chaos resulting from the rejection of truth is no better illustrated than by our culture's embrace of the transgender ideology. And because of that, and because of the havoc that transgenderism is wreaking in the lives of so many, I wanted to spend time in Grace Life bringing the Word of God to bear on the question of human sexuality. I've mentioned that if we're going to be faithfully salt and light in this culture which is decaying and in darkness, we need to be equipped to bring the perverse thinking of our society into captivity to Christ. The secular religion of the contemporary Western world is expressive individualism. And the chief devotional task of expressive individualism is the unmitigated venting of every desire and inclination that we might feel in our hearts. Over and against that, If we are to be salt and light, we must be equipped to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ over every aspect of life. And because our culture so conflates identity with sexuality, we must proclaim the biblical doctrine of sexuality. And because our culture conflates sexuality with identity, teaching that if we ever act out of accord with our basest sexual desires and impulses, we're somehow not being true to our authentic self. I recognize that the biblical doctrine of sexuality must begin with the biblical doctrine of mankind's identity at its most fundamental level. And so we went back to the beginning, taking Genesis 1, 27 as something of a launching point. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. The very first, most foundational thing to say about man is that he is created. God created man. And this is the baseline of our identity, that we are not God, that we are creatures of the one true and living God. And that means that we are accountable to God as our creator, subject to the identity that he has given us, subject to the law of his mouth as the rule of our lives. If the culture's goal is ultimately to free man from his accountability to our creator and the totalizing claims of the law of God so that we can be left alone to sin in peace, well then they must attack the notion that we are creatures at all. If man is an evolved animal then my authentic self is whatever my basest inclinations and desires tell me I am and I should be free to express myself in those ways. But if I'm a creature accountable to my creator then I must order my life according to his word. And so we preach the second sermon vindicating the doctrine of six day creation. And then we spoke about what is the next most fundamental concept concerning man's identity, namely that man is the image of God. That's the second thing that Scripture says about man in Genesis 127. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. And so we preached a third sermon, considering the Bible's teaching on the significance of man as the image of God. And we found that being created in the image of God means that we are like God in very important ways, though not God, and that we represent God in the world in a way that is unique among the other creatures. Men and women are designed by God to make his character visible, living in a way that tells the truth about God to the rest of creation. That is why we are here. That is who we are. If we are image bearers, then we are not free to forge our own identity. We receive our identity from the one whose image we bear, the one who we represent in the world. Our identity is derived not from our own sense of self, but from God's revelation of who he has made us to be. This morning, we come to the third phrase of Genesis 1, 27, to hear the next most fundamental concept concerning man's identity, and that is our gender. Our gender, our maleness and femaleness. Listen to the verse one more time. God created man in His own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. The very next thing that is said about mankind after we're told that we are image bearers of Almighty God is that we bear his image together in the beautiful distinctiveness of being male and female. Our gender, our maleness or femaleness, is deeply connected to our identity as image-bearing creatures. It runs to the heart of who we are, of who God says we are, and it speaks much as to precisely how we will glorify God by representing him to the world as his image-bearers. Just as the persons of the Trinity are united in their singular essence, but distinct in their personal properties as Father, Son, and Spirit, so also men and women are united in their humanity, in their singular nature, but distinct in their genders. And this cannot be missed. gender and in particular the gender binary is fundamental to the biblical doctrine of man. What it means to be an image bearer is to be either male or female and therefore any attempt to change male into female or any attempt to find space between male and female is a fundamental attack on the authority of God and on one's own humanity. You see, transgenderism is an attack on oneself. It is a suicidal attempt at self-exaltation. It is the creature's attempt to escape from the accountability of being a creature. but which in the process ends up being an attempt to uncreate oneself. If what it means to be a creature is to be created male or female as God has done then to undo that is to undo creation. It's to undo one's own creation which is to say it is to undo one's own humanity. Now it can't be done, of course. We are irrevocably human. But for that reason, we are irrevocably male or female. And so to say, I will create male and female in my image, or I will be neither male nor female, and therefore I will undermine my very humanity itself, is an act of capital rebellion. And the chaos of that worldview, as I said, is wreaking havoc all over our culture. The transgender delusion is what seems to be the peak of the absurdity that you must embrace after you deny truth altogether. That men can be women and women can be men if they feel like it. And we all know it's not true. All of us. It's one of those, the emperor has no clothes kinds of issues, right? No one inside or outside the church really believes that a man can become a woman. But it's like this mass delusion where everyone agrees to play pretend. Because one, if they pretend like there's no standard by which transgenderism is wrong, they can pretend there's no standard by which their sin is wrong. And two, because they know if they don't play along, they'll be ridiculed and accosted and canceled. And so our society tolerates the utterly absurd in order to protect this delusion. And it started in the public discourse in earnest not long after the Obergefell decision that legalized so-called homosexual marriage. In 2015, Glamour Magazine gave their Woman of the Year Award to none other than Bruce Jenner, who had by then begun calling himself Caitlyn Jenner. The Woman of the Year Award went to someone who wasn't a woman at all. Richard Levine, a man who dresses as a woman and calls himself Rachel, was appointed by Joe Biden to be the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health for the Department of Health and Human Services. He is celebrated as the first female four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps. But of course, he's not female at all. And as a result of those spurious honors, USA Today named Levine one of their Women of the Year for 2022. William Thomas was a three-year swimmer on the men's team at the University of Pennsylvania. And during those first three years, he was ranked 462nd in the world in men's NCAA swimming competition. Before the 21-22 season, William began identifying as a woman and calling himself Leah. He was allowed to switch to the women's swim team at Penn, and he won the NCAA championship in the 500-meter freestyle, besting the young women he was competing against by more than a full second. He finished college ranking number one in the world in NCAA women's swimming. Madison Kenyon is an actual female college track athlete who's recently spoken out about the effect the transgender delusion has had on women's athletics. She says, we're supposed to smile and cheer and clap and pretend that we're all very happy about this, that we don't object to seeing our years of effort and lifelong dreams go up in so much smoke, and that we don't mind denying reality as long as it pleases the woke crowd and keeps our schools safe from a lawsuit. Quite rare to find an actually educated person in college these days. And so Madison deserves special honors. Boyd Burton is a mixed martial arts fighter who identifies as a woman and calls himself Fallon Fox. And in 2014, while in competition, he fractured the skull of an actual woman who he was fighting against. And you think about that, why would any woman compete in a mixed martial arts bout with someone who remains physiologically male? It's one thing to pretend and be politically correct when it doesn't cost you a fractured skull. But given the foreseeability of that kind of danger, why would any thinking woman go through with it? And the answer is the same reason any female athlete goes through with competing against a biologically male opponent. The fear of being called a transphobe and a bigot. The fear of being canceled and shamed into oblivion for refusing to play pretend. It used to be that pressuring a woman to subject herself to being battered by a mentally ill man was called abuse. Now, apparently, it's called feminism. And that's the most stupefying thing of it all. This is all done in the name of liberating women from oppression. And in reality, you couldn't design a system more oppressive to women. Let men into women's sports, where they are at an unfair disadvantage. Let men into women's locker rooms and bathrooms, where their privacy is invaded. let men into women's prisons, including sex offenders who are now identifying as women where criminals now can go and prey on women who have no other way to protect themselves behind bars. It is absolute lunacy. For all the talk about wanting to smash the patriarchy, the woman of the year is a man. The best female college swimmer in the country is a man. The best female MMA fighter is a man. The first four-star admiral in the public health service is a man. The greatest female Jeopardy champion is a man. What's the message these feminists are trying to send? That men are better than women even at being women? It sure seems like transgenderism ensures the patriarchy always wins in the end. In fact, that observation has led one social commentator to say, hard truth, the trans movement is the patriarchy, just in makeup and heels. Why does our culture tolerate such manifest absurdity? Well I've given several reasons already but it's certainly partly owing to how seamlessly transgenderism fits with the secular worldview of our times, an anti-biblical worldview, a worldview that Karl Truman calls, I've mentioned it already, expressive individualism. And expressive individualism is the idea, again, that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires. To the extent you don't do that, you are repressed and oppressed. And so liberation and freedom comes inventing all of those things, expressing yourself. The Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes is famous for the dictum, I think, therefore I am. Well, expressive individualism is captured by the motto, I feel, therefore I am. I am what I feel I am. And in order for me to be my authentic self, I must give expression to that feeling. Any contradiction of my psychological beliefs about myself, even as non-aggressive as you just refusing to affirm my feelings, disturbs my sense of inner well-being. And because I am my feelings, you see, your lack of affirmation is a threat to my very identity. It is violence against my personhood. That's Western culture over the last 15 years. It's why words are now spoken of as being weaponized. Because everything is a weapon if I am under attack when my feelings aren't affirmed. It's why we need trigger warnings and safe spaces where we can avoid hearing anything we might not like to hear, safe from microaggressions and hate speech. See how seamlessly transgenderism coheres with that culture of expressive individualism. If your feelings are your identity, then any contradiction of those feelings is a threat to your personhood. then even the facts of your name, of the pronouns you use, even the physiology of your body itself must be changed to suit your inner sense of self. And if you don't affirm me in making those changes, you hate me. Any lack of wholehearted affirmation is therefore the same as wanting me to die. And so you see where all the rhetoric comes from, expressive individualism. A homosexual activist group that calls itself the Human Rights Campaign defines gender as, quote, one's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither, how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. Nancy Piercy, who's written a great book on this and other watershed cultural issues of our day, it's called Love Thy Body. She comments on this and says, we do not discover our gender identity as though it were an objective fact. Instead, we declare our identity. We speak ourselves into existence. And she's exactly right, that's the ideology. We declare ourselves to be in the place of God, creating male and female in our own image by speaking, let there be, and it was so. But not only does transgender ideology benefit from expressive individualism, it also shares a fundamental affinity with the old heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a second century Greek philosophical school that taught, among other things, a radical dualism, that the spiritual is inherently good, and the material is inherently evil. The Greek phrase soma sema was a popular Gnostic motto. It translates to the body, a tomb. The Gnostics taught that the body was a prison which incarcerated the true self of the spirit and they longed for death when the spirit could be liberated from its material prison. Transgenderism is a species of that kind of thinking. The fundamental premise of transgender ideology is that our real self is found within us. Again, I am what I feel I am inside. The external material reality of my body is only accidental to the real me. In fact, in a BBC documentary on transgenderism in children, a trans activist is quoted as saying, it doesn't matter what living meat skeleton you've been born in, it's what you feel that defines you. You see, my identity, my authentic self is my internal feelings. The physical body is just a meat skeleton. that my inner self possesses as an instrument. My body is not me in any meaningful sense. And if my physical body is imprisoning my immaterial authentic self, then I should feel perfectly free to alter my body even through crippling hormones and mutilating surgeries in order to make it match my feelings. Conflict between the body and the mind? The mind always wins. That's led one commentator to say that the foundational ontological assumption undergirding transgender ideology is a low view of the body. And as we'll see both this Sunday and next, that is entirely antithetical to the biblical worldview, which has an exceptionally high view of the spiritual and physical, of the soul and the body. And of course, the transgender worldview is not only helped by expressive individualism and shades of Gnosticism, it's also of itself inherently contradictory, as all failed worldviews must be. It is an internally incoherent system of thought. As much as the fundamental onological assumption of transgender ideology is a low view of the body, there is an awful lot of importance placed upon the body, isn't there? On the one hand, the body is so lowly regarded that the real self is fundamentally separate from the material body. And yet on the other, the body is so important that it must be subjected to radical, invasive, expensive, and dangerous hormone treatments and surgeries in order to be conformed to that inner sense of self. Karl Truman puts it this way, the body, quote, is both irrelevant to identity, such that it is no ultimate guide to who we are, And it is also vital to identity in that it may, if desired, be modified to fit the inner sense. And more than that, it's so vital that if taxpayers don't pay for these surgeries of all these people who desire to transition genders, well then they will have no choice, they are told, but to kill themselves from the unbearable dysphoria. The body both doesn't matter, it's no marker to identity, and it's supremely important such that the country has to pay for the alteration of my body. It's internally inconsistent. Another contradiction is that they claim that gender is an artificial social construct such that it could be totally fluid. But then they rely upon rigid stereotypes to say that people can be trapped in the wrong body. Look, if you're a girl who likes to play with guns and trucks and you like blue instead of pink, well, that means that you're really a boy. Wait, why? Gender is so fluid that it can't be indicated by chromosomes and DNA and anatomy, but it's so rigid that it can be predicted by shared hobbies and interests. That makes no sense. I mean, there's no such thing as a boy because we're all on this fluid spectrum, but if you like trucks, you must be a boy. Still further, on the one hand, transgender ideology promotes an expressive individualism that results in a radical subjectivism, right? People must be free to do whatever they want according to their deeply held beliefs and feelings. On the other hand, if you don't call someone by their pretend name and their pretend pronouns, if you don't confess with your mouth that trans women are women and believe in your heart that men can be birthing persons too, you're a transphobic bigot who shouldn't be allowed to work in the public square or even be in the presence of polite company. Everyone is free to be whomever they wish except when they disagree with me. What's our response to the madness? It can only be to declare the word of God to all those who rebel against it, to all those who are trapped in this cult as victims, willing victims, yes, but duped by cult leaders on the national stage who browbeat people into submission, even to their own self-harm. The only response to the deception and the lies of the culture is to proclaim the truth. And to equip us for that, the scriptures teach us at least five truths about gender that we must learn and live by as we seek to live in faithful obedience to the Lordship of Jesus in the present moment. And we'll begin working through those five truths for the rest of our time together this morning. And what we don't get to today, we will take up next week, Lord willing. And that first truth is that gender is granted by our creator. Or you could say bestowed by our creator. Gender is granted by our creator. And we see that in that anchor verse, Genesis 127. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. He created them, male and female. As we said before, the first thing that Scripture says about man is that we're created, that we're not God. The second thing, that we're image bearers, fundamentally representing him and not ourselves in the world. And third, the third thing that we get is that God has created man to represent him as his image bearers in this distinctive way as men and as women. That's radically opposed to the transgender ideology, which claims that gender is a social construct spoken into existence by the sovereignty of each individual. We need to hear it, understand it, and proclaim it to others. We are not self-creators. It is absurd to think that we've created ourselves. We are not self-creators. We do not self-identify as anything. We do not self-identify. We do not declare our identity. We receive our identity from a God who identifies us according to His sovereign prerogative, which He retains over us as the one who has created us. You want to identify yourself? Fine, first you have to create yourself. But so long as you don't create yourself, right, a logical impossibility, you receive your identity from the one who has created you. And Paul tells the Athenians this on Mars Hill. In Acts 17, 24, he says, this God is the God who made the world and all things in it, right? The earth is Yahweh's and all it contains, Psalm 24, 1, the world and all those who dwell in it. And since he is creator, he is, Acts 17, Lord of heaven and earth. Creator, Lord, you can't separate those two. Our God is in the heavens, he does whatever he pleases, Psalm 115, three. And so, Acts 17, 25, he gives to all people life and breath and all things. All things are bestowed upon us by our creator, who by virtue of his being creator is owner of all that he has created. And so the point is man does not create himself. You're not self creators and therefore you're not self identifiers. You are not free to forge your own identity. God has created you male or female in his image and therefore you are what God says you are and you must conduct yourself in the way that God says you must. You may not rebel against the created order of God by identifying as a different gender. There's only one who gets to say, I am who I am, and that is the self-existent triune creator, not the self-identifying transgender creature. You remember that passage at the end of 1 Corinthians 6, one we'll get to next week as well, but Paul is telling the Corinthian Christians that because Christ has purchased them by his own blood, that they are not their own, that they belong to him. He says, do you not know that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body. You see, the primary application there is that Christians are God's people by redemption. And that creates ethical obligations for how we conduct ourselves. But what these passages that I've just been quoting, Acts 17 and so on, what they teach us is that all people, while not necessarily God's people by redemption, are God's people or God's, we could say this way, God's possession by creation. And so it may be said of them just as well, you are not your own. Therefore, glorify God in your body. There is a very real sense in which God, by virtue of having created you, points to your body and says, my body, my choice. And so gender is not determined by the feelings, self-perceptions, or preferences of the creature. Gender is granted by the sovereign prerogative of our creator. The second truth, intimately related to that, is that gender is grounded in biology. Gender is grounded in biology, and we see that again in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. Back to 127, male and female, he created them. Again, our gender is integral to our identity as image bearers, and the observation to make here is that God made the binary. God made the binary. There are only two genders here. God created mankind, male and female, one or the other. It does not say God created man in his image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female and agender and genderqueer and genderfluid and pangender and two-spirit, he created them. No, there are only two. This is God's design from the beginning. Mankind is either male or female. And then you turn to chapter two in the book of Genesis and whereas chapter one was a more zoomed out cosmic account of the creation of man, you see in chapter two the more zoomed in covenantal relational account of God's creation of man. Verse seven, then Yahweh God, right, the I am who I am, the name Yahweh, I am, The Yahweh God, the covenant keeping God of Israel formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. And then, verses eight and 15, God places man in the garden to cultivate and keep it. Verses 16 and 17, he gives the man the command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He threatens death for disobedience. He implicitly promises life for obedience. But by then, it's plain that mankind in that early stage is just the man, Adam. Eve hasn't been created yet. In verse 18, God says it's not good for the man to be alone. And so he declares he's going to make a helper suitable for him but that none of the animals that God had made and brought to Adam were suitable. And so in verse 21 Yahweh God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept and then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place and Yahweh God fashioned into a woman. the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. And so God created mankind and he created mankind male and female. He called the male Adam, the man, and he then formed the female Eve out of Adam's body and Adam called her woman. And so manhood is inextricably linked to maleness and womanhood is inextricably linked to femaleness. Gender is inextricably rooted or grounded in biology. And we can go further. What was woman then from the beginning? Genesis 2.18, a helper suitable to Adam. Neged, corresponding to him, complementary to him. The woman was sufficiently like the man in such a way that she was suitable for him in a way that none of the animals were. She was human, just as he was, but she was not identical to him. There was correspondence, there was complementarity, but there was not identity. There was likeness. but not sameness. There was unity, but there was also diversity. And in particular, for what task was the woman suitable for the man to help him? Well, for the commission given to them in chapter one, verse 28. Immediately after we're told in 127, male and female, he created them, we read of God's charge to all mankind. God blessed them and he said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. God created man, male and female, and then commanded them to reproduce, to create a family. to create more people like themselves. God didn't decide that he would form every man from the dust of the ground and every woman from the rib of that other man. He designed the first man and woman to come together and reproduce into other men and women. God brings all of the animals of creation to Adam and none of them is a helper suitable to aid Adam in the fulfillment of this divine mandate. The only creature suitable for man is woman because only the union between man and woman alike in their humanity but distinct in their gender could result in the fruitfulness that God had commanded of them. And that means that the complementarity of man's and woman's bodies are absolutely essential to their identity as man and woman. Gender is fundamentally grounded in biology because maleness and femaleness are designed by God with an eye to reproduction. And in that task of fruitful multiplication, the man's and the woman's bodies are perfectly suited to those distinctive roles. The man gives and the woman receives. The man provides the seed and the woman nurtures that life in her womb until it's time to give birth at which time she continues to nurture that life by giving nutrients from her own body in feeding. What it means to be woman from the beginning is to be one whose body in principle can suitably help a man to walk in obedience to God's command to be fruitful and multiply until the earth. Can't be denied. The moment we're told God made male and female, we read of God's command to be fruitful and multiply. The moment the woman is discovered to be a suitable helper for the man in the way the animals are not, we read chapter two verse 24, for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. Male and female, multiplication. Man and woman, marriage and one flesh union. What it means to be man and woman, what it means to be male and female is inextricably grounded in biology and irrevocably and immutably binary. And then, at the end of the sixth day, when God made man this way, He saw all that he had made and he pronounced it what? Very good. Very good. This is God's very good design. So much is it the case that gender is grounded in biology, the same terms for man and woman, ish and isha, and male and female, zakar and nekevah, are used of the animals as Noah prepares them to board the ark ahead of the flood. Genesis 619, and of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. What does God mean to keep them alive? Well, to preserve their existence by having male and female so that they can reproduce and fill the earth after the flood passes. which means male and female relate fundamentally to those biological functions that in principle, barring any physiological dysfunction, allows for reproduction. So what's the conclusion? Gender, maleness and femaleness, manhood and womanhood, is not a social construct grounded in the creature's mind. since the same terms are used of animals as well as humans. And since, of course, animals don't have gender identity distinct from their biology. It's plain that gender has a biological component firmly rooted in the physical body. Clear indication that according to scripture, God has designed each person's gender to correspond with his or her biological sex. inextricably grounded in biology irrevocably and immutably binary by God's very good design. It's possible that God could have made three or four or fifty seven genders but he didn't. Something about this gender binary in the creatures reflects the glory of the creator. And not only is this binary woven throughout all human relationships, man, woman, boy, girl, husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, king and queen, prince and princess. It's also affirmed by the Lord Jesus Christ himself. So often it's claimed that Jesus never said anything about LGBTQ issues. There's no word for that but nonsense, right? Matthew 19, the Pharisees come to test Jesus with questions about marriage and divorce. And Jesus answers their question by saying in Matthew 19, four, have you not read, parenthesis in Genesis two, where we've just been reading, that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. Haven't you ever read that? Jesus says this is the way that God has done it from the beginning. It is his design. Do you know what significance is in those words in the beginning? It's before the curse, right? Before sin has come and ravaged the creation and set everything into decay and corruption. This was good because God did it from the beginning when there was no curse. His design from the foundation of all of humanity, all of human civilization is grounded in this binary of the biological sexes, male and female, for the purpose of one flesh union with a view to having children. You say, now wait a minute, you said it a couple times, what about people who can't have children? If manhood and womanhood is so geared toward reproduction, are infertile couples less men or women because of their infertility? And the answer is, of course not. That's why I kept repeating that phrase in principle. In principle. See, being is not grounded in function. You're not what you are because you do something or don't do something else. Being gives rise to function. Right, ontology precedes function. But what something is doesn't depend on what it does. But because of the entrance of sin into the world, the creation is cursed and corrupted, and what do you have? You have dysfunction. Things don't always work the way that they're supposed to. But that corruption, that issues in the dysfunction, doesn't overturn God's design. Just because there is a deviation from the norm, it doesn't mean that the norm isn't normal or that nature isn't natural. There's a similar response you could give to the oft-raised objection in this conversation of intersex people. How can you say that there's this immutable gender binary when we know that there's such a thing as intersex people, those who have genetic or physical anomalies that result in both male and female genitalia or dysfunctional reproductive organs? But those with disorders of sexual development do not constitute a third gender. Also as a result of the fall, there are people who were born without two functioning legs, right? But it's still right to say that God made human beings as bipedal creatures. The physical anomalies are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's not as if you would say, well, humans are bipedal. No, there are humans without two legs, right? That's something that's incidental, that doesn't go to the nature of the design of the human being. In the same way, it's still right to say God made human beings as males or females. The existence of biological anomalies are the exceptions that prove the rule. And those who do have disorders of sexual development need to be loved. They need to be accepted and cared for, not used as political pawns to justify perversion. And so, no, it's not about what about these disorders or these dysfunctions, it's about what has God designed in principle. So far, we've seen that gender is granted by our creator and that it is grounded by our biology. The third truth about gender that we need to glean from the scriptures, the last one we'll get to this morning, is that gender is a gift of God's loving care. Gender is a gift of God's loving care. And for this, I want to turn to a familiar passage, Psalm 139, and particularly verses 13 to 15. Psalm 139 and verse 13, David is praising God for his omniscience and his omnipresence in this psalm. God searches and knows him. Before a word is on his tongue, God knows it. He can't flee from God's presence, whether in heaven or in the grave, God is there. All his days are ordained by God. And then David praises God for his intricate craftsmanship in knitting him together, even in his mother's womb. Psalm 139, starting in verse 13, for you formed my inward parts. You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. The emphasis in this passage is on how intentionally, carefully, and purposefully God himself fashions each individual image bearer in their mother's womb. He's like a master artisan who skillfully weaves the body of the unborn child together to function as a cohesive whole. And if you stop to think about it and watch some of these videos that show you these animations of development and you see how small every baby is at six and seven weeks when the heart first starts to beat, where you start to see brain development, when you see the little fingers and the toes and you think about, it's just amazing. I mean, first there's nothing. And then there's something, right? First there are cells from two and they become totally distinct. What a marvelous work this is from the hand of our God every single moment of every day. There are babies born or conceived and nurtured in their mother's wombs. God has done this. Job 1011 says that God clothed me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews. right, fearfully and wonderfully made, skillfully wrought, each and every one of us with the wisdom of the omniscient God who knows every thought we think and word we speak, with the care of the loving God who hems us in behind and before and leads us by his right hand. He handcrafts our bodies as we grow in our mother's wombs. Can we imagine that a God so wise and so skillful and so full of love and care for His creatures could err even in one instance and fashion the wrong body so that a male soul could be trapped in a female body or vice versa? No, I say it is unthinkable given the data, given the facts of those verses. which means our gendered body is a gift of God's loving care to us, whereby he kindly and graciously reveals to us this vital aspect of our identity. Do you see? The body is God's gracious revelation of our gender. Our gender isn't declared by us based on invisible feelings. Our gender is revealed to us in the body that was skillfully wrought and wonderfully made by our loving creator. And if that is so, if our God has fashioned each and every one of us so carefully and purposefully, what must our response to that be? Look what it says in verse 14, I will give thanks to you. It must be to receive that identity as a gift from Him, rather than to argue with Him about it and call either His wisdom or His goodness into question. Isaiah 45.9 says, woe to the one who quarrels with his maker. An earthenware vessel among the vessels of the earth. Will the clay say to the potter, what are you doing? Or the thing you are making say, he has no hands. That's so similar to what Paul says in Romans 9.20, isn't it? Who are you, oh man, who answers back to God? The thing molded won't say to the molder, why did you make me like this, will it? Such vivid illustrations. The clay doesn't dispute with the potter over being made the wrong way. That would be an absurd exaltation of oneself outside the bounds of its proper domain. Now in the same way the creature doesn't dispute with the creator about being made in the wrong body. That would be an absurd exaltation of oneself outside the bounds of our proper domain. It would be our intruding drunk and stumbling into the throne room of the sovereign God and saying I'm here that's my seat. Acts 17 26 tells us that God determines the time and place of our birth, not us. He determines our ethnic background and the families we were born into. He determines even our physical features. We don't choose any of these things. We look around the country and the state and the city that we were born in and we look at the color of our skin and we look in the mirror and we see what we look like and we conclude, well, God has made me this way. This is who I am. And the proper response to God for all of that is to give him thanks as the giver of all good things. But now when it comes to our bodies as a whole, we wanna look at what God has made us to be and conclude that we can choose otherwise. He determines all these things, we just accept them. But this one we're gonna rise up and say, no, I make myself the gender I please. It comes down to a question of three things. Authority, knowledge, and trustworthiness. Who has the right to tell me what to do? Who knows what is best for me to do? And who loves me and knows what is best for me and wants what is best for me? Well, because God is our creator and we are His image bearers, He has the authority and we do not. Because God is all wise and perfect in wisdom, He knows what is best, whereas we must always confess our ignorance and finitude before the bar of His wisdom. And because God is perfectly trustworthy, compassionate, and gracious, and abounding in loving kindness, we can trust him to want what is best for us, even more than we can trust ourselves for that, we whose hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked. And though there's more to be said, we'll pick it up next week, it is the character of God to which we must direct our thoughts as a culmination. God is God and we are not. And so I say to my unbelieving friend, perhaps one who is struggling with temptations related to transgenderism, or simply to one who is struggling with any sin whatsoever, dear sinner, lay down your arms. The rebellion you persist in against the God who created you is a battle you cannot win. And so I call you to turn away from your rebellious self-exaltation whereby you would put yourself in the place of God and instead to bow your knee in humble submission before Him, acknowledging Him to be the rightful sovereign and Lord of your life. And not only is God God, but he's a wise God. His thoughts are not your thoughts and his ways are not your ways. While you have devised and schemed and convinced yourself of the wisdom of your own worldview, which raises itself up against the knowledge of God as revealed in his word, hear the word of the Apostle Paul. God has made foolish the wisdom of this world. that the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God and whether you reject his thoughts on the matter of gender and sexuality or on any other matter that he reveals in his word I call you to turn away from that vain conceit whereby you would exalt yourself your own mind above the omniscient God and submit your mind to what he has revealed of himself and to confess in repentance and faith whatever my feelings Lord your way is wisest. And then, not only is God sovereign and wise, but he's also good. He's also trustworthy. He is the God whose pinnacle of self-revelation, God's expressive individualism, is the Lord Jesus Christ. It's God the Son, who says, come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. You who languish under the burden of your sin, Whether those of you trapped in the trans cult by death working ideologues that have ascended to power in this country or whether you're trapped under any other pattern of sins come to Christ for rest. There is sufficient grace stored up in him to conquer every rebel power that is at work with you. There's a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins that is sufficient to wash away all your guilty stains. So that whether you're a fornicator, as Paul says it in 1 Corinthians 6, or an idolater, or an adulterer, or an effeminate one, or a homosexual, a thief, a coveter, a drunkard, a reviler, or a swindler, so that if you come to this one, it may be spoken of you as it was of the believers of 1 Corinthians 6, such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified, declared righteous in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God. That gospel that washes and sanctifies and justifies remains free and offered to you. Because the blood and the righteousness of the Savior who died and rose again in the place of sinners remains worthy. It remains powerful before the Father to satisfy divine wrath and bring every redeemed one home to glory. And it is yours, dear sinner. It is yours for the taking if you will come to Christ in faith this morning. Turn away from your sins, from the vilest to the most respectable, and trust in Christ for your salvation. And fellow believers, take up the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith as you engage with this world on these issues. More to come next week, but for now, remember that gender is granted by our creator, grounded in our biology, and is a gift of God's loving care whereby he reveals our identity to us. Let's pray. Father, your design is so wise, your heart is so kind to your creatures to speak to us in this way, to give us living object lessons of our identity so that we might not have to search through the caverns of our own corrupt heart and feelings but that we might see in your own general revelation, your own natural expression of yourself in your creatures, we may see who we are to be and how we are to function. I pray, Lord, that you would protect these precious people against the lies of the enemy, lies which have, indeed, overtaken the most powerful offices in our country, which, especially in this area of our country, are so rampant and dominant. Lord, it seems you've given them over, but we pray while there is still time, while Christ yet patiently delays his return, we pray that you would grant repentance, that in wrath you would remember mercy, and that you would turn this place from its wicked way, and that you would grant revival, grant faith and repentance in the gospel. Lord, even through Grace Community Church, even through our faithful witness, even through our salt and light to a dying culture, give men and women courage, give them fortitude to stand against the lies of the devil as they are propagated through their employers, through their neighbors, through their teachers, through their professors. I pray that you would help us to be your mouthpiece in this dying culture. Not so that we can bring the kingdom and usher into the millennium, we can't do that. That belongs to the king alone. But so that we might be instead a faithful witness to the great good news of the transforming, washing, sanctifying, justifying gospel that we ourselves have tasted so exquisitely and rejoice in. We pray that you would make us a joyful people, help us to love those who are hurting, help us to love those among us who are coming out of this world or who need to come out of it. Help us to treat them with extra compassion and care as they work through the difficult labyrinth of discovering who they are again according to your word rather than their own ideas and ideologies. Pray that you would make us the church in this place. We pray in Jesus name, amen. For more information about the ministry of the Grace Life Pulpit, visit at www.thegracelifepulpit.com. Copyright by The Grace Life Pulpit. All rights reserved.