Welcome to Bible Believers Fellowship and the ministry of bbfohio.com. I'm Pastor Greg and I welcome you to our study in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 13 as we consider the question, how shall we sorrow? Some folks think they're real spiritual claim that since we have eternal life, we shouldn't sorrow in times of death and loss of a loved one. That is not a biblical teaching as we will see in this study. You can find the conclusion of this two-part study at bbfohio.com as we begin with the current events update and then our study in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 13 titled, How Shall We Sorrow? This is part one of two. Tonight it's current events update. Hold your questions, comments to the end, of course. Number one, sodomites purchasing children. They find a way around. They don't do it blatantly outright. That's what's happening. And that includes pedophiles, of which many sodomites are pedophiles. The world wants to lie to you and tell you that sodomites are just normal and they love people just like heterosexuals love people and all that. Everybody who tells you that is a liar, but they are basically telling you God is a liar. Do you understand that? Everyone who's telling you that the gay world is just love is saying that God is a liar. Because in Romans 1, he says that their affections for one another are vile affections. And at no point in the scripture is it ever called love. And you'll find throughout history, among sodomites, is pederistry is what they call it, pederisty, pederistry, pederisty, I always get that word, but it means that young men are in relationships, in quotes, with old men. And then those old men were once young men in relationships with old men when they were young men. And it's all a form of pedophilia. And that's throughout human history. You'll find that with the sodomites. I'm going to play this clip where she explains and actually she's going to play a recorded phone call between a man acting like he's a gay man wanting to buy a baby. He tells her flat out that one of the couple, gay couple, has been on what they call the sexual predator list. So keep that in mind as you're listening to this. Surrogacy centers are providing their services to those who are on the sex offender registry, effectively allowing pedophiles to purchase children through them. Before I go on, I want to share with you a whistleblower release of a phone call in which two gay men say they're trying to get a child, or make a child, or buy a child, however you wish to put this, through this surrogacy process, and they imply that one of them is on the sex offender registry, and you can hear the response in which that's not a problem. So let's go ahead and listen to that before we go on. It's only like a minute and a half long, it's not long. Anyway, so I got a couple, did they tell you I have a couple questions for you? Yeah, yeah, I heard your voice now. Oh, okay, cool. So excellent. So I talked to Matt, or my husband, sorry. And he's looking to go forward. We found a clinic locally. We were supposed to go and see their clinic and meet with the team there Friday. From my understanding, they do not do anything outside their own local donor base. for eggs, so that's probably something at the very least we're probably going to go outside for. One of the things you had mentioned is, what was it? Establishing parents during a pregnancy. Could you expand on that? What exactly are pre-birth processes, I think is what you said. Yeah, it's called a pre-birth order. So most states a pre-birth order is done. There are a small handful of states that do post-birth orders. So, basically, if your surrogate's midway through the pregnancy, it varies a little bit by your attorney. Different attorneys like to do it at different times. But around midway through the pregnancy, you guys will essentially sue her for custody of the child she's carrying. So it sounds crazy and So to cut it off there, the man said that his husband has been on the sexual predator list. And they're purchasing a child to be born through surrogacy. And they said that's fine. They will sell babies to pedophiles. And that's going on all over the world. As I tell people, the longer we go on, the more we go on that we understand why God's gonna come back and kill them all. And as we said over and over, what these current events updates over and over and over and over and over have we've shown, they want the children. The state of Washington, has passed a bill, and their reprobate governor is set to sign it, which will allow children to basically run away from home, and when they get to the places where they take care of runaways, they won't contact the parents and tell them where they are. They'll hide them so that they can get puberty blockers, trans surgeries, abortions, all that. The state is taking away parental rights. And that'll happen everywhere the Marxist Democrats run things. Every place this wicked, satanic, Democrat, Marxist party runs things, they're going to do this. And the days of saying, well, there's some good Democrats, just like they were good Nazis. And I don't care who it is. You tell them your pastor said so. They're wicked if they belong to the Democrat Party and vote for Democrats and or, of course, progressive Republicans like the Mitch McConnells and the Paul Ryans and the Mitt Romneys and the punks like that. Those are people who belong to a political party. It's not the actual agenda of that Republican Party. The Republican Party platform is actually not bad. So that's why I won't call the party satanic. There are people like Mitt Romney who are satanic. But the whole party isn't given over to that agenda. The Democrat Party, go read their party platform. It's a satanic political cult. And they're taking away parental authority over their own children so that their children can run off and get abortions and kill babies or have their genitals mutilated or have chemical castrations taking place. It's just absolutely sickening. And they lie to win support. This is one of the things you're dealing with when you talk to your friends and neighbors who belong to that political cult. This is an example. The Senate Democrats up in the state of Washington, this is one guy named Mark Lias. I think you have to pronounce his name, Lias. And he was explaining on his website that the legislation was to protect trans youth seeking life-saving care. this is Orwell, this is the Orwellian stuff. What he means is that they claim, even though it's false, they claim that whenever we stop children from getting their puberty blockers, chemical castrations and mutilations, that it makes them suicidal. So blocking a child from getting those abuses to their own body is denying them life-saving care. And they would even refer to abortion that way, same way. You're killing a baby, but what they say is, well, if we don't let that child just go get an abortion, that young person, that teenager, if we don't let them go get an abortion, then they'll go to some back alley and use a coat hanger, which is pure mythology. That happened a handful of times out of how many tens of millions of women who got pregnant before 1973 and, yeah, may have wanted an abortion. But since they couldn't get one, then they either kept the baby or gave it up for adoption. And then there were a handful of cases where women, usually they were also intravenous drug users and that type of person who would be found dead in a back alley. and then they lie and totally misrepresent the reality. That's number one. Number two, you probably heard Tucker Carlson is out at what we should call faux news instead of Fox News. The reports, you know, when it first happens, ignore most of what you hear, no matter what it is, whether it's a shooting, someone gets fired or whatever. The news media is a joke. You got to wait until there's actual some evidence for you to see what's going on. There are all kinds of stories about why Tucker was out at Fox News. But it's come out that it was Rupert. It wasn't his children. They were claiming it was his children that wanted him out. Well, they might have, but Rupert's the one who got him out of Fox News, and he's a, now Rupert isn't officially a Roman Catholic, but he is a good servant of the Vatican. And this is a story just not too long ago, is he gave $10 million, $10 million to build a church, Catholic church. One of the more entertaining images of the past week was Rupert Murdoch and Cardinal Roger Mahoney standing together in hardhats at the site of the proposed new L.A. Roman Catholic Cathedral. The occasion was to announce a donation of $10 million by the Murdoch family trust towards building it. St. Rupert, yeah. Evidently that's what he thinks he's going to He probably believes that the jokes are based on the Bible, that he gets there to be Saint Peter, and Saint Peter will look at a book and see how much money he gave to the Vatican. This is what got Tucker ousted. Now this lasts about five minutes, but I want you to listen to this. It might be time to start to reassess the terms we use to describe what we're watching. So when I started at Heritage, the presumption was, and this is a very Anglo-American assumption, that the debates we're having are kind of rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed upon outcomes. Right, so like we all want the country to be more prosperous and free and people to be less oppressed or whatever and so we're gonna argue about tax rates and I think higher tax gets us there. I'm a Keynesian and you disagree, you're an Austrian or whatever. But the objective is the same. And so we write our papers and they write their papers and may the best papers win. I don't think that's what we're watching now at all. I don't think we're watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome. I think that's completely wrong. And I've come to this conclusion, and I should say at the outset, I'm an Episcopalian, so don't take any theological advice from me, because I don't have any. I grew up in the shallowest faith tradition that's ever been invented. It's not even a Christian religion at this point, I say with shame. But I'm just saying this as an observer of what's going on. There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don't account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, I have an idea. Let's castrate the next generation. Let's sexually mutilate children. I'm sorry, that's not a political debate. What? It has nothing to do with politics. What's the outcome we're desiring here? An androgynous population? Is that really what we are? Are we arguing for that? I don't think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome. But the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that. Well, what is that? Well, it's irrational. If you say, well, you know, I think abortion is always bad. Well, I think sometimes it's necessary. That's a debate I'm familiar with. But if you're telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you're arguing for child sacrifice, obviously. It's not about like, oh, a teen girl gets pregnant, and what do we do about that? And victims of rape. I get it. Of course, I understand that. And I have compassion for everyone involved. But when the Treasury Secretary stands up and says, you know what you can do to help the economy get an abortion? Well, that's like an Aztec principle, actually. There's not a society in history that didn't practice human sacrifice. Not one. I checked. Even the Scandinavians, I'm ashamed to say, it wasn't just the Mesoamericans, it was everybody. So that's what that is. What's the point of child sacrifice? Well, there's no policy goal entwined with that. No, that's a theological phenomenon. And that's kind of the point I'm making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, hey, let's tear it down. What you're watching is not a political movement, it's evil. So if you want to assess, and I'll put it in non, and I'll stop with this, I'll put it in non, I'll put it in non-political, or rather non-political, specific theological terms and just say, if you want to know what's evil and what's good, what are the characteristics of those? And by the way, you know, I think the Athenians would have agreed with this. This is not necessarily just a Christian notion. This is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce? Well, I mean, good is characterized by order. calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It's true. It is. And evil is characterized by their opposites. Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you're really advocating for is evil. That's just true. I'm not calling for religious war. Far from it. I'm merely calling for an acknowledgment of what we're watching, which is not what, and I'm not, certainly not backing the Republican party. I mean, I'm not making a partisan point at all. I'm just noting what's super obvious. Those of us who are in our mid-50s are caught in the past in the way that we think about this. One side's like, no, no, I've got this idea, and we've got this idea, and let's have a debate about our ideas. They don't want a debate. Those ideas won't produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us. It's just so obvious. It's completely obvious. And I think two things. One, we should say that and stop engaging in these totally fraudulent debates where we are using the terms that we used in 1991 when I started at Heritage as if maybe, you know, I could just win the debate if I marshaled more facts. I've tried. That doesn't work. And two, maybe we should all take just like 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I'm serious. Like, why not? And I'm saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist. I'm literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian, the Samaritans of our time. I'm coming to you from the most humble and lowly theological position you can. I'm literally an Episcopalian, OK? And even I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future. And I hope you will. That's what's getting him in trouble. is that he's just calling it what it is, doesn't matter what political party's involved, and he's pointing out, and he has on his show numerous, many times I've watched it. That's the only show I'd watch, and I never watched it. I watched it on an alternative source on the internet. I didn't give them my ratings or anything, because Fox News, I believe, has been a waste of time for years now. Now the one good reason to watch it is gone. So I'm not saying there's nobody else on there that's decent or whatever, but I think it's just like YouTube and Facebook. If everybody just let it die, this country would be a whole lot better off. Meanwhile, sodomite racist Don Lemon was fired by CNN. And he's a sodomite. He's got a male partner for life. Well, it'll probably last two years. But he's a racist. He's a black man who hates white people. We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men. Let's play it again. We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men. Now he goes on to specify basically white conservatives and white Christians. He deserved to be, but don't demonize anybody. Before we jump in there, I'm just surprised that no one asked this question, but we often remind you that the phrase cleanliness is next to godliness is not a Bible verse, but it is Bible. The entire Old Testament system was based on cleanliness. next to godliness. If you weren't clean, you couldn't get next to God. The only way to be close to God and go into the temple and have your sacrifice offered was to be clean. And if you were unclean, you had to stay outside the camp, sometimes for up to seven days. So I just want to clarify that. I mean, we talk about cleanliness next to godliness. Some people say, well, the Bible says. Well, it doesn't say those words. But the whole Old Testament system was based on that. And you and I are only able to have fellowship with God the Father because God the Son, Jesus, has made us clean. So we approach God. by the blood of Jesus being made clean by the blood of the Lamb. So 1 Thessalonians 4.13, last week we reviewed the foundational truth that the dead saints are with the Lord. How many of you know someone or more than one Christian who has died? Everybody? Everybody? Okay, I just wanna make sure everybody knows somebody. You know somebody who's dead and in heaven, right? You don't have a hand to raise, so just not. Isn't it a wonderful thing to know that they are with the Lord? Every time you think of that person or those people, you should think of them, and then thank the Lord. Every time, thank Him. This week, we discuss our emotional response when they depart. Some of you know my grandma, Doris, who was a faithful viewer of these studies online for years, even before COVID, she'd watch. And she went to be with the Lord at the end of the month of March. And as she was dying, and I visited her a few days before she passed away, and then upon hearing of her death, I teared up. I didn't have a breakdown or anything like that, which is, in some cases, fitting. But I did cry a little and got the lump in my throat and thanked the Lord because I knew she was with Him. And she's with Him right now. And I've got other loved ones that I know who have gone before. And one good reason for this study we're gonna have tonight is because if the Lord tarries, somebody you love is gonna die. And you need to know how you should sorrow. Because for one thing, some of the more spiritual people among us will try to tell you not to sorrow. I was at a funeral years ago where some lady was crying over a loved one who had died and gone to heaven. And someone else came along and said, basically almost chewed him out. Why are you acting like that? Why are you crying like that? We shouldn't be weeping. We should be happy and we should be joyful. They're with the Lord now. And I said the same thing, I said, listen, sorrow is still normal for when someone dies, it's still death and she's gonna miss her in the meantime before she sees her in heaven. And even Jesus, as we'll see in our study, he wept over a dead person. So why shouldn't you and I have that same emotional response? It is, now the psychobabble will come in and they'll tell you, you go through these, you know, stages and all that, and not everybody's the same, so just stop with that. Not everybody mourns the same. Not everybody's blood pressure is 120 over 80, did you know that? Not everybody's normal temperature is 98.6, did you know that? A lot of stuff we've been taught, garbage, hogwash, and psychobabble is just that. Trying to fit everybody in the same little box. So, let's start by reading the verse. All right, if you're there, read it with me. But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. Amen?