CONFERENCE - Keep Your Kids with Jared Longshore
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
29
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Toxicity
6
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Hate speech
67
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Summary
The key to keeping your kids is to keep them by faith, not by doubt, and then you're a wet blanket upon their lives until they spy out when they're 17 or 18. If you want to keep your kids by faith you have to trust God for what he's promised you about them. You can't trust the world if you don't trust God.
Transcript
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In less than a year, our podcast has gone from an average of 10,000 downloads a month
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to 50,000 downloads. What made the difference? You leaving us a five-star review. The more
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positive reviews, the more the algorithm picks us up, and more people are confronted by the law
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and gospel of Jesus Christ. Help us press forward the crown rights of King Jesus by leaving us a
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five-star review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks. My particular assignment has been
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keep your kids, the message on keeping your kids. And I want to situate that within the broader
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structure of our civilization that we are all too aware of and then a call for us as the sayings of
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God to actually do what God has required of us in our homes by keeping our kids. And that's going
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to start with, to knowing what the home is, knowing what kids are.
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it's not hard for us to see that you can do that in the wrong way.
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So you can lose your kids and hand them over to the world
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But you can also try to keep your kids by a lack of faith.
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You need to keep your kids by doubt, and then you suffocate them.
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and you're ripping them until they spying out when they're 17 or 18.
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If you're saying something like, as long as you're under my roof, you'll obey my rules,
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then that 17 or 18-year-old son says, okay, well, then I'll be under your roof anyway.
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so i'm going to start at the outset by saying the key the central thing that we must remember
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something we must do the cops keeping our kids is we must keep our kids by faith
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so keep your kids by faith now what's involved in that uh is uh there's a lot involved in that
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this whole message to talk about what that really
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that's not really it that's not it and then if you go to the evangelical church and find that
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same kind of sentiment about faith a faith of course is to trust god and to trust god you have
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to trust him for what he's promised you you can't trust god for what he has not promised you
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okay there's certain things that he hasn't promised us and we're not to we're not to
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fabricate faith and those things that would be presumption but there are other things that he
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has promised us and we need to know what those things are and i'm going to tell you a fraud that
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And you have to trust him for what he's promised you about your children.
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Okay, with that said, let's first talk about the world.
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And kind of a Sons of Issachar moment, understanding the times, what's going on in the world.
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I like to illustrate this by talking about four men in a coffee shop.
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Now, I've said this a few times at different places.
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So I'm going to try to judge by head nodding how many of you have heard me say this before
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and how many of you have not heard me say this before.
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It's like about 35% of you have heard me say this, maybe.
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So for you to be a refresher, those of you who haven't,
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I think this is very important when it comes to understating the times in which we live.
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Four men in a coffee shop, and we'll say that those four men are Christian man,
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In American society, it started with Christian man and rational man.
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and there was a blue chair beside them and they both were
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agreed upon the fact that that indeed was a blue chair
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kindness to his weak and ascertaining through human reason
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I don't need all the God mumbo jumbo stuff
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looked at a post-modern man like he was out to lunch
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But it was okay because he wasn't putting a gun
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So there was still some peace within the coffee shop.
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But over the last few years, a fourth man has walked in,
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the double doors started swinging back and forth.
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The barista ducks down behind the bar of the coffee bar there,
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and you'll all confess it to be a purple elephant,
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But by that time, pagan man just slaps them in the face, knocks them down to the ground.
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Postpartum man says, well, that's okay because to somebody somewhere that was an act of love.
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Rational man is inching his way closer and closer to Christian man right now.
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And that's a silver lining in the mess that we're in.
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He's starting to realize that he has to hang his observations on something more than human reason.
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But when a society is given over to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done, as we have experienced now for many years, Romans 1, as we're experiencing that kind of thing, you realize you need a based mind.
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You need to have your thinking based in something that is true.
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So for a while, replace a child with the blue chair.
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He knows what God has made them to be, and he knows the promises that he's made to them.
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Now, Rational Man fed off of that Christian consensus for a long time.
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Now, they neglected God, but they tried to hold on.
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We still kind of know who these children are and what they're up to and where they come from in a sense.
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But all of that was feeding off of the Christian consensus.
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But now the Christians, having neglected our duty to proclaim to the world and disciple the nations
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and teach people about the nature of reality, we've neglected that responsibility.
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And now what's happened is we're past postmodern man.
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Pagan man is going to come in and he's going to tell you what your kids are, namely not yours.
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he's going to tell you what your kids are because we've neglected actually what God has revealed
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about our children. And we've neglected what God has revealed about the home. So if this is the
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household in the war for the cosmos, we have to start with the nature of the household. What is
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it? And the nature of the family, what is it? So all of that is somewhat of a preamble and an
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introduction to where we're going. Let's talk a minute about this dissolving American family.
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The clearest place we see it is in Obergefell.
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So raise your hand if you're very familiar with Obergefell,
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and you say, I could basically give you what Obergefell is.
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Okay, so Obergefell is a Supreme Court decision
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that alleged that a man has the right to marry another man.
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So in our land, this decision has actually come down,
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and there are all sorts of consequences from it.
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and they worship the creature rather than the creator.
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The fruit of that kind of creature worship is homosexual practice.
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And we are so far down the line in our own society of worshiping the creature rather
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than the creator that not only is it culturally acceptable for men to exchange the natural
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use of the woman and be debased with one another, but we have actually enshrined that kind of
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So we have been worshiping the creature for a very long time.
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And what Obergefell said is that that homosexual marriage, which is not a real thing, we'll
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get to that in a minute, but that alleged marriage between those two men deserves all
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of the rights and responsibilities of your real marriages, of your marriage.
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And we quickly discovered how that's absolutely going to destroy parenting, parental rights,
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and the very nature of what children are and to whom they belong.
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Pavan v. Smith was a case after Obergefell.
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It came out of Arkansas, and there were two women that were in a lesbian relationship
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Now, you naturally ask, how does that kind of thing happen?
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Well, artificial reproductive technologies.
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and one of the women in this lesbian relationship
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she said, I want to be listed as a parent of this child
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which as far as it goes was perfectly reasonable.
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But then she said, I want my lesbian partner
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to be listed as a parent on this birth certificate as well?
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What would you do if you were there at the hospital?
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What would you do if you were the civil authorities in Arkansas?
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Does this lesbian partner who has no biological relationship to the child
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get to be listed as a parent of this child?
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And of course, these ladies pressed the matter all the way to the Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court case, Pavan v. Smith, responded to Arkansas and said this.
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You have to grant every right and responsibility of heterosexual marriage to this kind of transgressive marriage, this union.
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And you, Arkansas, in your own code, if this were a man and a woman who were bound in marriage,
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and this woman had become pregnant by artificial reproductive technologies,
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Your own code says that you would have given the husband the parental rights,
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even though he had no biological connection to the child.
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So, Pavan V. Smith said, you have to do it for this woman.
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I'm going to tell you, that means we have entirely lost what it means to actually be married.
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and to understand that children are an essential unit to this particular union of man and woman.
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So it's interesting to think about what you would do in the case of the heterosexual couple.
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If you had that peculiar situation arise, would you indeed say that the father is granted parental rights
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over this child with whom he has no biological connection?
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And I would tell you the answer is yes, he is the father of that child.
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That Arkansas actually had the code right because he was in wedlock with that child's mother.
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He was the head of the woman, and thus he had parental authority, parental responsibility.
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But that doesn't work in the case with the two lesbian ladies because there is no genuine wedlock between them.
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so what we're discovering in our own society i have a legal friend of mine who said legally
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speaking you need to understand that your children don't belong to you anymore
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now the law is going to have to work itself out because we have a great tradition and
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that would support that your children legally speaking very much do belong to you
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but as soon as you destroy wedlock which we have destroyed
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as soon as you turn your back on nature the very natural order of things how then do you know who
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goes with who how do you make those kinds of decisions if this particular woman in a lesbian
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relationship who has no genuine wedlock relationship with the pregnant woman and who has no biological
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relationship to the child you're just beginning to assign these things flippantly and I'm going
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to tell you that is absolutely destructive to children. Now, what are we supposed to do about
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it? The Christian church has to recover the very nature of wedlock, and I would point you to two
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texts to underscore what marriage actually is. The first is Malachi chapter 2, and the second
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is Matthew chapter 19 and verse 6. So in Malachi chapter 2, God is telling the men of Judah that
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they're going to be cut off out of the tabernacles of Jacob. So remember the context. This is a
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post-exilic prophet. The people of God have come back from exile. There they are. And what happened
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is the men of Judah began to forsake their wives and go after the daughters of a strange God. So
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they were going after non-covenant women. They were entering into marriage with these non-covenant
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women. And God said to them, if you do this kind of thing, I'm going to cut off you from the
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tabernacles of Jacob. You're going to be cut off from the worshiping community as you go after
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these women that are not of the worshiping community. They're strange women who worship a
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strange God and you're forsaking your own wives. And when God was rebuking them in that manner,
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He said in verse 14 of Malachi chapter two, the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife
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of thy youth against whom thou hast dealt treacherously. Yet is she thy companion and the
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wife of thy covenant, the wife of thy covenant. So I'm going to point to Malachi two verse 14
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is biblical support for this notion that genuine marriage between a man and a woman is covenant
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marriage. Now covenant marriage is not a particular type of marriage. You know how you have like
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particular types of diets. You're like, I like the keto diet and I like this kind of diet.
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I'm not commending covenant marriage to you as a particular type of marriage. I'm presenting
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covenant marriage to you as the thing itself. Any real marriage is covenant marriage. That's simply
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what it is. What do we mean by the term? Well, God says he was witnessed between
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He's actually the one who joined them together,
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Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
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To walk into a coffee shop and to say that that blue chair is really a purple elephant
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is to undo the very nature of reality or attempt to do so.
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To say that a man can marry a man and that it's a genuine marriage,
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it's a real thing, it's a real covenant marriage, is to do the exact same thing.
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You are trying to undo the very nature of reality, what God himself has constituted.
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He constituted the blue chair to be a blue chair.
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He has constituted this man and this woman to be one new thing.
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And anyone that's trying to say that this other homosexual union is the same kind of thing as this,
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that it's a genuine marriage, they are simply lying about the very nature of reality.
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And you can't do that and not begin to lie about the nature of children.
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if you do it in marriage you're going to do it with children but here's the tough part
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i'm convinced that the evangelical church in america
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doesn't really know what marriage is so we can't just point the finger and say you naughty people
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outside there look what you've done you they did that because we neglected our duty we neglected
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our duty to teach what marriage is, to teach what the family is, and then to embody it,
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to actually put flesh upon it. What do I mean by that? Well, Matthew 19.6 says that God himself
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is the one who joins man and woman together. And have you thought about what that really means?
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It's not a contract, but it's a covenant. What do I mean by that? We're here in Texas,
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so this might be fitting. Tractors, I think tractors would be around. You got, yeah, okay,
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Bill and John are two men, and they're going to make a business deal.
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Bill's going to sell John 100 tractors for X amount of money.
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The next day, Bill's tractor manufacturing plant burns down to the ground.
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And John gets gifted the 100 tractors that he needed by a rich uncle who gets out of the farming business.
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Neither of them have any need for this contract.
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Can those men come together the next day and shake hands,
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they both look at it and go, you know, this just isn't working out for me.
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It's a really bad situation for that to happen three days in.
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But nevertheless, three days in, can Jack and Jill come together,
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shake hands, call it off, no harm, no foul, no sin?
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Why in the world do I know that that's different than the contract?
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And the answer is because you understand covenant marriage instinctively.
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What that means is God himself actually bonded them together and created one new thing.
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So if you have Jack Thompson and Jill Williams that are soon to get married,
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Before the ceremony, you have Jack Thompson and Jill Williams.
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And after the ceremony, you have this one new thing that God himself created
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indeed at the end of the ceremony the traditional way that the minister
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announces that this union has indeed occurred is he says i present to you for
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and if you've been infected by our modern sensibilities if you've been
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infected by the various waves of feminism you would step back and say oh
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i mean i feel bad for this guy he messed up the liturgy he did not
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pay attention to his notes? And the answer is, no, he didn't forget anything. That's actually
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the way it's pronounced. I'm sure it's the way it was pronounced for the majority of you
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in this very room who have gotten married. I now present to you for the first time,
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Mr. and Mrs. Jack Thompson. Why? Because they are one new thing. God himself has created them,
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and there's a head of the Thompsons, and there's a body of the Thompsons. This is why all the talk
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about patriarchy and headship, some of the young guys can get this really confused. They think it's
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like, oh, I'm a boss. Like I get to be a boss now. And you're like, well, are there, can you take
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the boss employee relationship and map that on in ways to the marriage? Well, yes, of course you
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can, but then you're actually, you know, you know how much more you need to say, right? About the
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reason that the Bible talks about headship is because it's an organic entity. We are the body
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of Christ. We're not just the servants of Christ. We are the body of Christ. The woman is not just
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the servant who should submit to her husband in all things, by all means, that's true, but she's
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the body. She is his body. Okay, so I've really teach at New St. Andrews College, and I've messed
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up my students before, so I'll draw a stick figure on the board. I'll say, when I got married
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to my wife, God created this one new thing, a head and a body, and then draw a circle around
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my little stick figure tummy. I said, so when a baby comes, whose body is the baby in?
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And they say, oh, yours. I was like, you're right. And I said, if you leave this place
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and say Dr. Longshore said that men could get pregnant, I will deny it. I will deny it.
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But do you see, stick with it for a minute, do you see? My wife, her name's Heather.
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When she's pregnant, whose body is the baby in?
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That kind of thinking is underscoring something called wedlock.
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That's the legal, civil way that we talk about this thing.
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God has actually bonded this new entity that did not exist before.
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And as Christ loves his body, so men are to love their bodies.
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So marriage is more than the product of the will of the parties involved.
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This is where we need to see the nature of things.
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To deny reality is to try to undo what God in heaven has done.
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For you to say, I'm just going to forsake my wife and go after these strange women,
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is to try to undo what God himself has done.
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Are the children a part of the one new thing that God has now created called the Thompsons?
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That's why you call the little kids by the last name Thompson.
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They're Thompsons because they're part of that covenant family.
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A covenant marriage results in covenant children.
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A covenant marriage results in a covenant household.
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It's this one new thing, and thus there's this last name.
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Now, when Jack and Jill get married, does Jack lose his jackness, and does Jill lose her jillness?
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Jack doesn't lose his jackness. Jill doesn't lose her jillness.
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But there is one new thing now that didn't exist before.
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And when the little child's born and you call him Bobby Thompson,
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Of course he does. Why do you give him a first name?
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but is bobby genuinely a thompson like really a top a part of this thing called the thompsons
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absolutely he is so when the department of children and families comes knocking on your
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door very soon to tell you that your children don't belong to you anymore what are you going
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to say what arguments do you employ now some of you say i got a 12 gauge mossberg over there that
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says they're my kids cleaned it cleaned it last weekend now if that's you i say god bless you and
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may your tribe increase i'm from florida i live in moscow idaho now idaho's pretty pretty pretty
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good too but florida keeps a country just like texas so i'm 12 gauge mossberg would be the first
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instinct but then what what arguments do you employ okay what arguments do you employ
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do you do the paternity test like the afternoon talk talk show who's the dad come back after the
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break we'll tell you who the dad is we have we have the we have the results would you argue a
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natural biological now I'm not actually I don't think this is a bad idea but I want to use it to
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contrast something would you argue the natural biological don't you see he has my eyes don't
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you see he looks like me don't you see get the get the paternity test and I'll show you the blood
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relation between me and the child. All of that's good and fine. But take the blue chair idea,
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take the Thompson idea, take God himself constituting one new thing, and look at the DCF
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agent in the face and say, have you lost your mind? God himself created one new thing, however
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many years ago. It's called the Thompsons. God himself constituted it. And for you to come in
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and tried to claim that these children are not covenantally mine,
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that they are not a part of this one new entity,
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this thing is to try to undo what the God of heaven has done.
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You're trying to pretend that God was not witness between me
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You're trying to undo this thing just like you're trying to undo
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the very nature of the blue chair in the coffee shop itself.
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They actually belong to him, and he's the one who grants them to us.
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So here, I'd say the same kind of thing happens with adoption.
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Once an adoption has genuinely happened, that child is covenantally a part of the Thompsons.
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You're going to get the last name Thompson to signal that you indeed are a part of this one new thing.
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And you have the protections that those that are naturally born, biologically so, have as well.
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You are a part of this one new entity that God himself has created.
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If you believe this is the way God has wired up the world, and you should believe it's right there in Matthew, it's right there in Malachi.
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If God has seen fit to actually create families via covenant marriage, real things that are more than just the product of the will of the parties involved, why has he done so?
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Maybe one more point to highlight that marriage is more than the product of the will of the parties involved.
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Christians have reduced marriage to just that.
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and by virtue of their voluntary decisions alone, they're now married.
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But then Joe and Bob went to that same sanctuary
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and the minister announced the exact same words.
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And we've already reduced marriage to being simply the product
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And, well, Joe and Bob seem to mean it, so isn't that a thing?
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Because God himself is the one who creates covenant marriage, covenant homes, covenant children.
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Malachi chapter 2, verse 15, he's arguing with the sons of Judah again,
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what's he talking about with, as he's appealing to these men of Judah who are going after strange
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women, he's saying, did not he make one Adam and Eve? He made one Eve for the one Adam. Okay. So
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polygamy seems to be in view here as well. He didn't make Adam. Of course he didn't make Adam
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and Steve. He made Adam and Eve. He didn't make Adam, Eve and Jenny and Susan. He didn't do that
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either. Did not he make one. Okay. And really think about it. I mean, step back. God can create it
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however he wants to, God, in the creation of Adam and giving him one helper who is a helper suitable
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to him, God's telling us so many glorious things about the very structure of the world and the
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structure of marriage itself. So God says, and did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the
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spirit, which I think is basically a language of saying he could have done, he could have created
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more. He wasn't, he wasn't limited by, by his power. In wherefore one, why did he make
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one? Then he says that he might seek a godly seed, that he might seek a godly seed. Now
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step back and say, who expected that? Really? Are you telling me he made one Eve
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He told him to be fruitful, exercise dominion, fill the earth.
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But all of that was to be a godly kind of thing.
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And that's why he structured the family as he did.
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doesn't he just want well-behaved seed nope
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um can we fill the earth be fruitful multiply and have dominion
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can we accomplish the cultural mandate the dominion mandate that was given to
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is the very structure of the family designed to make christians
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So this is one thing I would do with unbelievers who say they want to get married.
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Do unbelievers have the right to get married?
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But can they fulfill the actual purpose of the institution?
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because the purpose of the institution itself is godly seed godly seed
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you know i love this uh i read this in an old puritan he said look look we have children to
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build the kingdom of god i was like whoa can you imagine that does that come for some of you like
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16 17 18 year olds 19 year olds 20 year olds you start parents are starting to think about this
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That didn't come up in my seminary in the church growth strategy class.
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Now, we hear these promises to our children all throughout Scripture.
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That means you can only trust God for what he has actually promised you.
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He hasn't promised you that you'll have the ability to walk on your hands
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and, you know, push yourself up to the moon and kick it with your left foot.
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He hasn't promised you that, so you shouldn't be trusting him for that.
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But he has made promises to you concerning your children.
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And the first is already indicated in Malachi 2, verse 15.
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He's given us this one heart, one way to fear the Lord for you and for the good of your children.
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You can go to the Lord, say, Father, we know that you have given us one heart and one way to fear you,
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not only for our good, but for the good of our children, and we're asking you to do that.
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We're not asking you to do any more than what you promised.
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And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the Lord.
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My spirit that is upon you and my words that I have put in your mouth
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shall not depart out of your mouth or out of the mouth of your offspring
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or out of the mouth of your children's offspring, says the Lord,
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will not depart out of the mouths of your children.
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Pavan V. Smith that I told you about is ridiculous.
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Because God has told us something, and we believe God for it.
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Are you meaning to tell me that you, Pastor Longshore,
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believe that the word of God is not going to depart from the mouths of your children?
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Lose your mind because you're not trusting God.
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You can lose it by actually losing your temper with your children.
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You can lose your mind by not losing your temper with them,
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but internally you're just a wreck because, oh my goodness,
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I am convinced that this little child is a seed of the serpent.
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He must be a seed of the flesh alone, a serpent seed,
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And that doesn't mean I'm not going to talk to him about it.
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Apply all the means that God has given us for the discipline and discipleship and nurture of this child.
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You don't use the means, it's not going to work.
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But you have to use the means by faith, which is an entirely different thing than using the means not by faith.
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Faith that the word's not going to depart from his mouth.
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But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
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on those who fear him and his righteousness to children's children,
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to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.
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So has God promised his righteousness to your children?
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For as the new heavens and the new earth that I make
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The children of your servants shall dwell secure.
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their offspring shall be established before you.
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Notice the promise, the children of your servants.
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the children of your servants shall dwell secure.
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Their offspring shall be established before you.
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Are the children going to be established before the Lord?
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Legally speaking, your children don't even belong to you anymore.
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But that's the case because we forsook the truth that they genuinely belong to us as covenant children
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far before the manifestation of the wickedness that we see in the world.
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We lost something about the nature of marriage before Obergefell.
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We lost something about the nature of parenting, the nature of the parent-child relationship before Pavan v. Smith.
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And so the way we're going to solve this is by actually recovering what God has done.
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you say, you know, if things are getting squirrely in your marriage,
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and you could stand up as a man and you could say something like,
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things are really bad, but I made a vow, and I'm going to keep my vow.
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If you did that, you'd be doing something very manly, very worthy of commendation.
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Here's a man that says, I'm going to keep the word that I made and fulfill my vow.
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But here's the thing, I want you to say more, and you need to say more.
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Not only I'm going to keep my vow, because you see,
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old Bob and Jim who came down and exchanged fake marital vows,
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What you say is, the God of heaven, the trying God,
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Who am I and who are you to ever think that this bond,
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that I would try to undo what God himself has bound together?
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You think I'm going to play around with the knot that God tied?
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Do you think I'm going to play around by trying to sever head and body?
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He's going to be the one who nurtures this one new thing that he has created.
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So in your home with your wife and with your children, it's all by faith.
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It's saying, God, these are the children that you gave.
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I'm here with them asking for you to bless them.
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Now, a question comes, seeing what covenant marriage is between man and woman.
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I'm going to push here for like, I have like 20 minutes left.
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and ask yourself, does God have a marriage?
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For thy maker is thine husband, the Lord of hosts is his name, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the God of the whole earth, shall he be called.
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And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
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And this can often go wrong in evangelical circles when we individualize this concept.
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And so each person begins to think of him or herself as married to the Lord.
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And then your modern evangelical songs speak that way.
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And we sing songs about like, I am married and I'm so grateful I'm married.
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And all the men are like, nope, I'm not singing it.
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And you step back and ask the question, okay, I've been brought in.
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I'm a part of that bride and I have a household.
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I have a bride of my own and I have children in the household.
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Are they promised to be a part of this bride of Christ as well?
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He set his love upon us as he set his love upon them.
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This one new entity that exists now between man and woman horizontally,
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God himself has a bride and he's not going to forsake her either.
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Can I trust God's promises that not only things will be well for my children,
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but actually God is going to set his saving love upon them,
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has set his saving love upon them in this remarkable way?
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I would say that is right at the heart of what we need to recover in order to see family strengthened,
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in order to keep our children, in order to see the fruitfulness and the dominion that we want to see in the world as it disintegrates around us.
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It starts right there by heads of households saying, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
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And for wives saying, these are the children that you gave us, Lord, and we're trusting you for your blessing upon them.
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I'm going to give you a few texts as I close out here.
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As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
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Ask yourself, you know, that's like our favorite evangelical verse.
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It's definitely pasted on top of the doorway when we go out.
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Now, hopefully you're like, well, yeah, he better because we're good Christians in America.
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Can he say, as for me, you know, don't they, don't, Joshua, aren't you being a little heavy-handed?
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Like, did you check with every single member of your household before you made such a declaration?
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See, he's not going beyond God's promises when he makes that declaration.
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He's actually receiving God's promise and speaking according to the promise.
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And I will establish my covenant between me and thee,
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for an everlasting covenant to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.
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Now, if Abraham were here, we'd ask him some questions.
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And did he swear an oath to you to be God to your children?
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And so we're trusting God for what he has actually revealed.
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And if you're in the Reformed community long enough,
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you hear people talk about Job sacrificing for his children.
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It's a beautiful picture of a father serving as this priest in his home.
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You mean you can offer sacrifices for more than just yourself?
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So when we gather to worship the Lord as living and holy sacrifices, we do so not only as individuals, but also as households.
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And the head of those households are offering up their lives saying, Lord, bless those who are under my care, just as Job did in his day.
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Then there's Acts 16, Paul and Silas to the Philippian jailer.
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This is one of my favorite texts that underscored this particular principle
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about the way that the household works and the way that we keep our children.
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The Philippian jailer, of course, is a Gentile.
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Philippian jailer is going to kill himself because he thinks I'm dead anyway.
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And Paul and Silas look at this man and they say,
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evangelical Christian my whole life. I went to the last Billy Graham crusade, did Tampa Bay,
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Raymond James stadium. All right. I mean, I've been in the every head bowed, every eye closed
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situation before. And can you imagine being there? Like the preachers going in and he's like,
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we've come to the moment of decision, every head bowed, every eye closed. He gives you Jesus
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Christ up the middle, lived, died, rose again, ascended into heaven, returning to one day you
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trust in him and you'll be saved. And then he says, okay, raise your hand. You trust in him
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and you'll be saved and your house. I see that hand and all of the generations that it represents
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say what in the world? We don't talk that way. We don't think that way. Why? Well, we've lost
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the very nature of what covenant marriage is. And we've lost the very nature of what children are.
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And we have to recover the way the Bible talks about the family
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and the promises God has made to us and to them.
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I'll leave you with one final text from Isaiah 65, verse 23.
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They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble,
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for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord
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You ask yourself, am I the seed of the blessed of the Lord,
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my child of God, am I the seed of the blessed Lord?
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That's exactly what God has said through the prophet Isaiah.