Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - April 22, 2021


Ep 408 ｜ Is 'Redeeming Love' Problematic？ ｜ Q&A


Episode Stats

Length

34 minutes

Words per Minute

174.78067

Word Count

5,950

Sentence Count

333

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today we are going to have another Q&A episode. If you
00:00:18.460 guys love this podcast, it would mean a whole lot to me if you would leave a five-star review
00:00:23.520 on Apple Podcasts. You can say just briefly why you like the podcast or you don't have
00:00:29.240 to say anything. You can just say hi. But that would mean a lot to me. Subscribe on YouTube
00:00:33.720 if you don't already. I really appreciate you guys. I have the best audience in the world,
00:00:40.000 the smartest and most thoughtful audience in the world, and I just really do love doing
00:00:45.180 this podcast with and for you guys. So thank you so much for all of your support and making
00:00:49.880 it possible for me to do this and to talk about these crazy issues. Today I'm going to answer
00:00:54.480 some of the questions that you guys sent me on Instagram. One of the questions that I
00:00:58.800 have gotten repeatedly is what I think about Francine Rivers' Redeeming Love. Apparently
00:01:03.940 that's turning into a movie. All right, so I've got quite the answer on this. I loved Redeeming
00:01:11.900 Love in high school. I mean, who didn't? It was new-ish. I don't know when it came out,
00:01:16.600 but it was new-ish when I was in high school. I read it multiple times, so many times. I could
00:01:23.180 probably recite the book to you. I read a lot of Francine Rivers in high school. She's an
00:01:28.240 incredible writer. The Mark of the Lion series, that trilogy, amazing. I mean, I don't know very
00:01:34.000 many other Christian fiction writers that can suck you into their books in the same way, if not more so
00:01:40.940 than secular writers. I love to read, and I really loved to read in high school. I'm so thankful that I
00:01:49.260 was born when I was, and that we didn't have all the social media and all these apps on our phones,
00:01:54.420 because I really would spend my spare time almost every night reading a book. Now, a lot of times
00:02:01.240 they were trashy books. I think Twilight came out. The first Twilight came out when I was a freshman
00:02:07.100 in high school, I think. And so we were all caught up in that. We read all kinds of those teen fiction
00:02:14.640 books, my friends, and me. And I'm really glad that we read. I think it helped me become a better,
00:02:20.300 a good writer. I think it just helped my creativity, my imagination, my ability to be able to communicate
00:02:26.320 well. I truly think that the hours that I dedicated to reading in high school have paid off incredibly,
00:02:34.520 honestly, for the rest of my life since then. I think reading fiction is incredibly important for
00:02:40.480 young people. I don't think that we have to be pushing all of these complex theological books
00:02:45.660 down their throats, although that can be important. I truly think reading fun fiction is so important.
00:02:51.320 Now, do I wish that I had read better books when I was in high school? Yes, I probably could have
00:02:58.140 focused on some classics rather than some of the cheesy and trashy teen books that I was reading
00:03:05.080 at the time. It would have been more edifying, but I'm still thankful. I am thankful for the fiction
00:03:09.800 that I read and for exercising my mind in that way. I think that the fact that kids are spending or
00:03:16.060 teenagers are spending probably the majority of their free time now on TikTok and on Instagram and
00:03:23.100 on different social media apps, those things just atrophy your brain. They don't make you smarter.
00:03:28.680 They have a degenerative effect. And so I know that when I'm sucked into social media,
00:03:34.220 that I feel like I can't think as clearly, like it's an addiction. Like you feel like you have to
00:03:39.920 open up your phone when you're doing something that's not occupying your mind enough, or you feel
00:03:44.580 like you have to be like stimulated by two different kinds of technology. Like if you're watching a show
00:03:49.880 that's not completely keeping your attention, you feel like you have to be on your computer or your
00:03:53.340 phone too. And I think kids feel that probably times 10. And so if you have a teenager, if you are
00:04:01.500 a teenager, try to resist spending all of your time on social media. If you're a parent, and I know I'm
00:04:09.480 not a parent of teenagers, but I've been a teenager before. If you still can exercise that authority over
00:04:15.920 your kid by saying, look, I'm going to take your phone at nine every night. That's just going to be how
00:04:20.580 it is. And when you get out of the house, you can do whatever you want to with your phone.
00:04:24.860 But my house, my rules, this is what's going to go down. I would encourage you to do that. I'm not
00:04:29.700 saying that your kid won't pitch a fit because I probably would have pitched a fit too when I was
00:04:32.860 in high school. But I think that it's absolutely worth it. The parents that I do talk to that have
00:04:37.760 kids that are teenagers who are very strict about phone and internet usage. I mean, their kids are just
00:04:44.200 better. Their kids are better. Their kids are smarter. Like they're more disciplined. They're kinder.
00:04:49.980 They're smarter than the kids who are spending all of their time being sucked into technology. That's
00:04:55.940 just the truth. It atrophies your brain, all of these social media apps. It makes you dumber. It
00:05:02.940 does. It makes you a worse communicator. It makes you less thoughtful. It makes you less creative. And
00:05:08.620 if you want to stand out in this world that I understand is like attacking merit and is attacking
00:05:14.900 all of the things that lead to excellence and that amount to success, I promise you,
00:05:22.800 you will still stand out if you are a good communicator, if you're a good writer, if you've
00:05:27.600 got good grammar, if you can send good emails, if you can write a good article. Because, okay,
00:05:33.540 so I'm 29 years old. And if you are 15 or 16 years old, like my age is going to be your boss and people
00:05:44.920 older than us, you know, 10 years older than us who are still millennials, they will be your boss.
00:05:50.400 I guarantee you, we still care about that stuff. I very much care about if someone is reaching out to
00:05:57.120 me and asking, hey, do you need an assistant or like, do you need someone to work for you? If you
00:06:02.320 cannot write, if you cannot communicate, if you cannot hold a conversation and look me in the eye and
00:06:08.000 talk to me, then I'm not interested. And so I guarantee you that my generation and the older
00:06:16.060 generation who will be employing the current teenagers when they're older still care about your
00:06:22.700 ability to communicate, you don't learn that online. Like the kids that I, that like, will comment on
00:06:29.940 my stuff being like, oh, clumps of cells, we should be able to abort them or socialism is great. Like
00:06:36.800 their argumentation skills, their grammar of some of these teenagers are hardly ever respond to them. But
00:06:44.940 one, they're some of the most vicious and just callous people on the internet that I've seen. And gosh, I'm so
00:06:51.440 thankful also that we didn't care about politics when I was in high school. I didn't know about any
00:06:55.300 of this stuff. And I think that was very healthy. But they care about all these issues. They get their
00:07:00.040 information from Snapchat and from all of these propaganda websites like Teen Vogue and, you know,
00:07:07.760 their other friends who think that they know anything about the economy or moral issues. And their
00:07:13.980 reasoning skills when it comes to trying to defend their politics are so bad, are so Neanderthal-like
00:07:23.080 that it's really frightening that there is a push by Democrats to try to lower the voting age to 16.
00:07:28.820 Now, I'm not saying that all teenagers are dumb or that none of them can reason. But as someone who has
00:07:38.140 been 16 myself, I can say that the ego paired with the ignorance is not a good, paired and now matched
00:07:48.640 with what seems to be an increased atrophy of the mind and an increased inability to be able to write
00:07:57.240 and communicate and reason well, it's not a good combination for being able to vote. I will just
00:08:02.880 say that. Remember, your frontal lobe does not develop until you're 25. And so even though you're
00:08:08.340 16 and just like I did, you think that you know everything or you think that you know a lot or you
00:08:14.340 have a really good understanding, the fact of the matter is your brain isn't developed to the point
00:08:18.620 of being able to understand consequences yet. And I guarantee you all the time that's spent on social
00:08:25.220 media by teenagers, I know I sound like a baby boomer, rather than doing things that are actually
00:08:30.160 intellectually simulating, is just going to hurt you in the long run. And you can do something about
00:08:36.240 it right now. You can put your phone down, and you can start reading books, and you can start listening
00:08:42.000 to things that are edifying. And it'll be hard at first, like it'll be hard when you decide, okay,
00:08:49.020 instead of scrolling through my phone for two hours before I go to sleep every night, I'm going to read,
00:08:53.600 that's going to be difficult. It's going to be like when you haven't worked out in a long time,
00:08:57.560 and you decide to exercise, it's really difficult. You don't want to do it. Like it'd be so much
00:09:02.740 easier for you to just sit there and to do nothing. Because those muscles haven't been
00:09:07.200 exercised. Your brain is a muscle. It's going to be very difficult for your mind to pay attention,
00:09:12.500 to stay focused, to remember what you've read. It's going to take a while for that muscle to be
00:09:17.920 built, but it can be. Like do not waste the mind that God gave you. And I'm saying that to myself as
00:09:23.540 well, because guess what? I get way too sucked into social media. And I spend more time on scrolling
00:09:30.960 on social media than I should, and I should be reading as well. So what was even the question?
00:09:36.740 The question was about redeeming love. Okay, so it went off on a tangent. I'm going to talk about
00:09:41.020 redeeming love. So redeeming love, while I think it is so important for you to read, and while I think
00:09:48.180 that I'm very thankful for reading what I did, and while I'm very thankful for Francine Rivers and her
00:09:56.220 incredible ability to write, I also see now how books like redeeming love functioned as a form of soft
00:10:06.240 pornography and like emotional pornography for teenage Christian girls, because you get so wrapped up in it,
00:10:14.800 and you start to think, oh, I need my Michael Hosea. Like I need my husband or my boyfriend to love me
00:10:22.280 like this. And you certainly aren't getting that probably out of your high school relationships.
00:10:26.800 And you might not get it right away from your husband that you meet when you're 24 or whenever it
00:10:31.520 is either, because it's a fictional character. And also, I mean, it has depictions, not hardcore
00:10:38.300 depictions or explicit depictions, but depictions and allusions to sex that I think actually stirs
00:10:44.760 up desires in like 15-year-old kids that don't need to be stirred up yet, because if you're a
00:10:51.540 Christian, you know that you're not going to satisfy them. I actually think that it counters
00:10:56.200 any kind of responsibility that we're trying to teach teenagers in how to guard their bodies as
00:11:03.440 temples of the Holy Spirit if they're Christians when we are feeding them the kind of stuff that's
00:11:08.240 coming from redeeming love. Yes, I understand. It's supposed to be a depiction of Christ and His love
00:11:13.100 for the church. And it's supposed to be actually a depiction of the book of Hosea, how redeeming love
00:11:20.020 pursues even after mistake after mistake and betrayal after betrayal. And I think that's a
00:11:24.780 beautiful picture to paint. I really do. But the romanticizing and the sexualizing of relationships
00:11:34.940 that doesn't actually meet reality, I'm not sure is very healthy. I do think that it can be very
00:11:41.560 emotionally trying for people, especially for girls or for women who want to be in a relationship,
00:11:47.940 but they're not. This just creates a longing for something and this idea that they need something to
00:11:55.720 be satisfied or need something to be complete that God might not have in store for them, or at least
00:12:01.240 right then. Like, if you think about, okay, a 15-year-old kid who wants to have sex because
00:12:08.560 they're hormonal, who wants to get married, who wants to have a boyfriend, and you as a parent or
00:12:13.380 you as a pastor are trying to teach them to live in a way that is glorifying to the Lord, to treat
00:12:20.500 their bodies as the temple that it is, and to make sure that they are investing their time and energy and
00:12:27.040 the right people and the right things, and that they are patiently waiting for whenever, if ever,
00:12:36.560 God calls them to be married. Are you going to feed them books like Redeeming Love that makes it
00:12:43.420 very difficult to not dwell on that kind of thing, which may be a long way off? I think books like
00:12:50.320 Redeeming Love make it very difficult for teenage girls and very difficult for people waiting in
00:12:55.640 singleness to continue that way in a way that glorifies God. And I can now see that looking
00:13:01.740 back. But again, when I was 15 and 16, how could I have possibly known that? I couldn't, and I don't
00:13:06.840 even think my parents really knew either. It's a Christian fiction book. What could possibly be wrong
00:13:11.520 with it? Because it does, you know, it lays out a good picture. But if you think about what is actually
00:13:18.020 best for girls and for women in the waiting, is it a form of what I think is like emotional porn?
00:13:24.840 I don't know. I don't know about that. That seems to encourage impatience. So maybe when you're
00:13:33.080 married, but even so, I think it paints an unrealistic depiction in some ways of like what relationships
00:13:39.320 can look like. And so I just think that we have to be careful. Again, loved the book, loved the book
00:13:45.680 so much when I was growing up, but I definitely see how it can cause damage. I mean, is it better than
00:13:52.660 scrolling on TikTok and Snapchat? Yeah. But is it the most edifying thing that you could read as a
00:14:00.160 teenager? No, I don't think so. All right. Next question. Separation of church and state. What
00:14:07.980 does this mean? Should we agree with it? Okay. So separation of church and state, you're not going
00:14:13.860 to find that specific term anywhere in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence. Of course,
00:14:19.440 we do have the First Amendment that guards against state establishment of religion. And of course,
00:14:26.780 it covers all kinds of religious liberty issues. There's a reason why that's in the First Amendment.
00:14:30.780 I had some inane review that said like, oh, I care about religious liberty because I care about
00:14:38.120 protecting my cis hetero Christian privilege or whatever. Religious liberty goes for people of
00:14:47.720 all religions. And it has nothing to do with privilege. It has something to do with rights.
00:14:52.900 That's one problem I see so much with young people is not knowing the difference between a privilege and
00:14:57.180 a right and thinking that it's just based on like your interest group's desire to be protected in some
00:15:03.780 way that all of a sudden becomes a right. Well, it's not a right. Like we have our constitutional rights
00:15:08.500 that are not given to us by the government, but they're recognized by the government. We believe
00:15:12.020 fundamentally that they're given to us by a creator. That's why we believe that they cannot be
00:15:17.000 arbitrarily taken away by the government as the Declaration of Independence clearly states. Now, the
00:15:22.600 separation of church and state, it was in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, and it was from Thomas
00:15:30.980 Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists. And this principle of the separation of church and state is supposed
00:15:36.980 to protect the state from a takeover or dominance or undue influence, too much burden by a particular
00:15:46.900 religion or by the church on the state. At the same time, it is also, and this is what most people
00:15:53.940 who talk about, oh, separation of church and state when it comes to, for example, moral or abortion law,
00:16:00.220 they don't care at all if the church is actually separated or if the church is protected from the
00:16:06.200 state. Like they are totally fine with, for example, Governor Cuomo telling bowling alleys, hey,
00:16:11.800 you can stay open or bike shops that you can stay open, but hey, churches, you have to stay closed.
00:16:16.640 They don't actually care about protecting the church from the state. They only care about religious
00:16:21.520 people having any kind of influence on the law. And they view that as an important separation of
00:16:26.980 church and state. They don't really want it to go the other direction. And so most of the time when
00:16:31.400 people say, but separation of church and state, you can kind of push back on them and realize that what
00:16:36.240 they really mean by that is that they don't think that Christians should have any influence in the
00:16:39.960 public sphere. Like they don't think that we should be able to influence law in any way.
00:16:45.420 And that's not what the separation of church and state means. The separation of church and state is
00:16:50.280 not the separation of God in law. Like there's a reason at the Capitol, there's a depiction of Moses
00:16:55.840 because he is the original human lawgiver, because even though this is not, we don't have an established
00:17:03.460 religion in this country. It was based on the belief that a creator, again, gave us inalienable
00:17:10.780 rights, unalienable rights, among them being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And because
00:17:16.460 they were given to us by a creator, and because that creator, as Romans 13 says, is above any human
00:17:22.320 institution, those human institutions, which are supposed to be in submission to the creator when it
00:17:27.460 comes to the protection of our rights, cannot take those rights away because they weren't theirs to
00:17:33.500 give and they're not theirs to arbitrarily take away either. And in our Bill of Rights, the founders lay
00:17:39.420 out what they believe those rights to be, what they believe those fundamental rights to be, the first
00:17:45.940 being religious liberty, free speech, all of the five freedoms that are protected in the First Amendment
00:17:51.500 they see as primary, to preserving a republic, to try to push back on the encroaching totalitarian
00:17:59.060 control, which is always inevitable when governments get bigger, to maintain a republic that is for the
00:18:07.180 people, of the people, by the people, a self-governing republic. We need those rights, especially those
00:18:14.260 in the First Amendment. Now, our laws are absolutely based on the idea of God, and even based on a lot
00:18:26.460 of Judeo-Christian principles. And so this idea of due process, of having to have due process of law
00:18:34.580 before you're convicted of something, that is something that comes out of God's processes that
00:18:40.680 he lays out in his law giving to Israel. Any law against murder was first found in the laws for
00:18:47.920 Israel. Any laws against theft are first found in the laws for Israel. Did I say against Israel earlier?
00:18:54.280 I meant for Israel. And so every law, every single law has a worldview that's attached to it. When people
00:19:03.960 say that your Christianity should not affect policy, that your faith should not affect laws, what they're
00:19:10.480 really saying is that I only want my worldview and my perspective to affect the law. I just don't want
00:19:16.380 yours to. There is no law that exists in a vacuum. People say that you can't legislate morality.
00:19:22.640 Every law speaks to morality, whether you're talking about a parking violation or whether you're talking
00:19:29.040 about abortion. They all have morality attached to it. They all have attached to it a should and a
00:19:35.340 should not that is based on a moral worldview. There is no such thing as a neutral law. There's
00:19:41.800 no such thing as a neutral worldview. The people who say, oh, America should be secular. Our law should
00:19:46.260 be secular. Secularism is a worldview. Secularism is not neutral, as we've said so many times on this
00:19:52.700 podcast. People who say, oh, public school, like it's better because it's just secular. It allows kids
00:19:58.800 to think for themselves. You've got to be joking yourself. Like secularism has its own dogmas.
00:20:03.560 It has its own principles. It has its own rules. It has its own definitions. And right now,
00:20:09.120 secularism asserts that a man can be a woman, a woman can be a man, that life inside the womb is
00:20:14.260 just a clump of cells, that you can do whatever you want to sexually and you'll be healthy and happy.
00:20:19.620 It has all of these rules and all of these parameters or lack of parameters and definitions
00:20:25.100 that are contrary to, for example, the Christian worldview and some other kinds of worldviews.
00:20:30.120 And so all of that exists in the entire world are competing worldviews. And so that means we have
00:20:37.160 to decide and make a decision which worldview a particular law is going to speak to and is going
00:20:43.040 to be based on. Is it going to be the Christian worldview or sometimes the Judeo-Christian worldview?
00:20:50.820 Is it going to be the secular worldview or another worldview?
00:20:54.400 And so it is actually impossible to separate some kind of belief system from our laws. The people
00:21:03.440 who are saying that abortion just has to do, or abortion laws are just an example of the failure
00:21:12.380 to separate church and state. Well, I say that the law that says, or the lack of a law protecting
00:21:18.900 babies inside the womb might also be considered by that definition of failure of separating
00:21:24.800 church and state, the church of progressivism, the religion of progressivism, the religion of
00:21:32.400 secularism, which says that life inside the womb doesn't matter. That's a much more arbitrary,
00:21:38.260 imaginary standard than the one that says, yeah, I don't believe that any human being at any stage
00:21:42.740 of life, innocent human being at any stage of life should be murdered. And so again, nothing
00:21:48.480 is neutral. Everything in the entire universe, as C.S. Lewis said, is claimed or counterclaimed
00:21:53.500 by Satan. And so when someone says like, don't push your Christian worldview or don't push your
00:22:01.560 Christian perspective, they're okay with pushing their progressive perspective, which again is based
00:22:06.500 on their own dogmas and their own form of religion, even if they don't call it a religion. Atheism,
00:22:10.860 again, is not neutral, obviously. I mean, it accounted for hundreds of millions of deaths
00:22:16.780 in the 20th century via socialism and communism. So it's obviously not neutral. If it were, it wouldn't
00:22:22.960 have to be forced on the populace. It would just kind of be naturally accepted. It has its own rules.
00:22:32.080 And so what they mean by when they try to use separation of church and state as an excuse to
00:22:36.920 shut you up or as a way to say you can't care about that or you can't enact an abortion law,
00:22:42.620 whatever it is, is they're just trying to say, look, I want my worldview and my belief system and
00:22:48.720 my value system to dominate yours and yours shouldn't. Look, you should be trying to influence
00:22:55.100 the spheres in which you occupy with your Christian worldview just as much as anyone who is a secular
00:23:02.900 progressive is trying to influence the spheres they occupy with their worldview. And I think that
00:23:07.180 we can take a look at the public education system, at some churches right now, at academia,
00:23:14.620 at the mainstream media, big tech, major corporations, and we can see just how serious secular
00:23:22.180 progressives are about advancing their cause and advancing their belief system at the expense of
00:23:28.000 all other belief systems and being as evangelistic and as domineering as possible about their belief
00:23:34.620 systems. They don't believe in separating belief systems and their own moral values from the rest of
00:23:41.540 their life. But Christians have somehow been convinced that you have to? No. Everyone has a competing
00:23:48.740 worldview. Every institution, every law has a competing worldview. That's why free speech is so
00:23:54.480 important because you have to go into the arena of ideas and you have to see which ideas are better,
00:24:00.900 which ideas went out. Unfortunately, progressivism doesn't believe in doing that. It believes in
00:24:05.960 domination. It doesn't believe in any kind of discussion or debate. It believes in shutting down
00:24:11.460 the other side and trying to dominate so much that any dissent is either shamed into silence or destroyed.
00:24:18.960 And that's part of why it's so dangerous. I say that progressivism is a good complement
00:24:25.980 to conservatism in any society, but it doesn't do a good job of governing. It doesn't do a good job
00:24:33.260 of leading. When it dominates, it destroys. Progressivism can push the status quo in a way
00:24:39.320 that's healthy, but if you let it take over, all it knows how to do is push. All it knows how to do
00:24:45.240 is take down what already exists. It doesn't know how to build. That's just not in its nature. It
00:24:53.040 doesn't know how to replace. It doesn't know how to actually give solutions. It only points out
00:24:59.240 problems, which is why I say it can be useful. It can be good as a complement to conservatism, but
00:25:04.420 when it's alone, when it acts alone, and again, when it dominates society, all it does is deteriorate.
00:25:12.940 And I think we've seen that plenty over the past 100 years. Okay, my next question that I am going
00:25:22.520 to answer is how to raise Jesus-loving kids. Now, I am a mother of small children, and so there are
00:25:39.360 people who know a lot more about this subject than I do. So I can only tell you what I know from my
00:25:46.080 vantage point in my life stage, and certainly not as someone who is pretending to be perfect or to
00:25:56.340 know everything. That is just not what I'm trying to do. But I do think I have the perspective of
00:26:02.020 someone who not only has little kids, and so I'm thinking about the future, and I'm thinking about
00:26:07.660 how to best and most kindly and most courageously raise them, but also as someone who just sees
00:26:17.180 culture and sees the news and sees at least some indications of how the future is going to roll out
00:26:24.340 and what the country is going to look like in a few years and how we need to be preparing
00:26:28.380 our kids for that. And I just think that one of the number one things that I've prayed for my kids
00:26:35.760 since I got pregnant the first time was that they would have wisdom. And the Bible is clear
00:26:40.600 that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And so I pray every day that they would be
00:26:47.080 instilled with a fear of the Lord that would make them wise, that they would have discernment,
00:26:52.020 that they would be able to distinguish the truth from a lie, good from evil, right from wrong,
00:26:57.640 because that's our big problem today, right? I mean, obviously, it's just the sin that has
00:27:04.280 always been here that we exchange the truth of God for a lie, as Romans 1 says. But it's so trendy
00:27:10.680 today to pretend like there is no absolute truth. Meanwhile, also asserting different kinds of
00:27:16.360 absolute truth. So you see the apparent contradictions in moral relativism and postmodernism,
00:27:22.700 we talk a lot about that in my book. But I want our kids to be kids that know the truth and to know
00:27:30.840 where the truth comes from. To know if they don't know anything else, to understand Genesis 1-1, that
00:27:36.660 God created the heavens and the earth. Therefore, He is the authority over all of it. He says what is and
00:27:41.900 what isn't, what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad. In a world that is thrown into
00:27:46.780 bouts of confusion into chaos constantly. And who doesn't know if up is down or down is up or left
00:27:55.020 and right, they hardly can tie their shoes in a proverbial sense. I want our kids to be kids who are
00:28:04.000 wise, who are knowledgeable. I don't want them to be the kids that are sucked into social media and
00:28:08.560 sucked into technology, whose minds have atrophied, whose moral compass is just busted to where they are
00:28:16.360 looking to the state or looking to other entities besides the God who made them to tell them who
00:28:24.280 they are and why they're here. I want our kids to be purposeful. I want them to know who is in charge
00:28:30.520 of the universe, who is in charge of them, why they are here, why they matter. I don't want them to
00:28:36.680 believe that they are just these purposeless clumps of material, the way that secular humanism tells them
00:28:43.540 they are and that they can do whatever they want to do without any consequences and that life is just
00:28:51.040 this nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. That's the last thing that I want for our kids. I want our kids to
00:28:56.780 be smart. I want our kids to be wise. I want them to be purposeful. I want them to be serious in the
00:29:01.880 things that need to be taken seriously. I want them to be lighthearted in the things that should be
00:29:07.280 lighthearted. I want them to have the right priorities. This is now what every parent of every generation
00:29:11.600 has ever wanted for their Christian kids, of course. But now more than ever, Christians are
00:29:18.620 light in the darkness. There's so much confusion. And some Christians are tripping over themselves to
00:29:24.420 add nuance to their theology so they'll be more acceptable to the world. I don't want that for
00:29:29.160 our kids. I don't want to lead our kids in nuance. I want to lead our kids in truth. And sometimes the
00:29:37.140 truth does have nuance, but sometimes it doesn't. So when you pursue nuance, you end up abandoning
00:29:42.540 truth. When you pursue truth, sometimes you have nuance, sometimes you don't. But I don't want to
00:29:46.620 teach our kids that everything is gray and that everything is up for debate. Some things very much
00:29:52.480 are, some things aren't. Another thing, right now as I'm recording this, we're reading Tactics by
00:29:58.080 Greg Kokel in our Women's Book Club. And I have always been someone who likes, I'm totally fine
00:30:05.320 with confrontation. Like I like debates. I like discussion. I like arguing. My parents will tell
00:30:10.080 you that. That's been the case since I was literally a baby. I've had an opinion about what I want to wear,
00:30:16.060 where I want to go, what I want to do, what I want to say. I have always tried to persuade people.
00:30:22.900 Um, and instead of trying to, because I think a lot of toddlers are that way and a lot of teenagers
00:30:29.660 are that way, instead of trying to tell our kids just to not argue and to just do as we say,
00:30:37.640 which I totally understand that we just have to do that. You have to assert your authority as
00:30:41.380 a parent, but I want to hone those skills in my kids. I want my kids to be able to reason. I want
00:30:47.300 them to be able to argue. I want them to be able to state their case. I want them to be able to persuade.
00:30:51.780 I want them to think. I want them to be critical thinkers. I want them, when the world tells them
00:30:57.060 that two plus two equals five, to be able to stand there and say, no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't.
00:31:02.720 I don't want them to fear cancellation. I don't want them to fear bullying. I don't want them to fear
00:31:07.080 being different. Um, I just think that we have such a responsibility and an awesome, wonderful
00:31:11.980 privilege right now to be able to train our child, um, to grow up, to be able to confront all of the
00:31:19.840 problems that the world throws at them and to be clear voices of what is actually good and right
00:31:26.080 and true. And I know a lot of people are scared to have kids right now. A lot of people are so scared
00:31:31.340 for their children and the world that they're going to grow up in. And I totally understand that. I
00:31:35.440 completely understand, but God doesn't do anything accidentally. He doesn't do anything arbitrarily.
00:31:41.020 You and I were not born when we were born on accident. He put us, exactly us, exactly where we
00:31:48.040 are on this tiny blip of eternity for a specific purpose for such a time as this. I was born on
00:31:54.500 February 18th, 1992, according to God's perfect purpose. You were born when you were born, according
00:32:01.220 to God's perfect purpose. That is true of your kids. That is true of your grandkids. He does not put
00:32:06.580 people in particular generations haphazardly. He puts them there for a reason. And so our responsibility
00:32:14.680 as parents is to be so thankful to God for His sovereignty, for His specificity in all of His
00:32:20.500 planning, for giving us the privilege and the opportunity to be able to shepherd this generation
00:32:25.740 by teaching them who made the world, who made them, what their purpose is, why they matter, and what truth
00:32:31.620 is, and to go forth in joy and confidence in all of that. And even if you're not a parent, if you're a
00:32:38.620 Sunday school teacher, if you are a teacher, if you're a mentor, if you're a counselor, you also
00:32:45.120 have this responsibility and privilege to shepherd the next generation in those things. And we should
00:32:49.900 be so grateful. We should be so grateful for that privilege. And we have every reason to be joyful
00:32:56.060 in that too, because again, God doesn't do anything accidentally or arbitrarily. He does everything with
00:33:01.960 purpose and with specificity. And according to His perfect purposes, that all things may work together
00:33:07.900 for the good of those who love Him, as Romans 8, 28 says, and for His glory. And so may we raise our
00:33:16.320 kids for the glory of God. And He has given us everything that we need, the Bible says, for life
00:33:23.520 and godliness. So we have everything that we need in Him to be able to raise our kids in the way they
00:33:29.900 should go. It's not a promise. God ultimately is in charge of their souls, in charge of their hearts.
00:33:36.820 Only God can soften a hard heart. Only God can do the saving. We just have to be in obedience to God,
00:33:45.520 the best parents, the most godly parents that we can be, and know that He ultimately is the captain
00:33:52.920 of their faith and entrust them to the God who loves them more than we do. All right,
00:33:59.480 that's all I've got for today. I'll see you guys back here soon.