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

Harmful content

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Relatable, I answer some of your questions about teen life and technology. I talk about how important it is to spend time with your kids, and the benefits of spending your time on social media.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 0.93
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 0.92
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 0.59
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? 0.82
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 0.99
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, 0.85
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.90
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.