No Reason to Hide?

The following program is recorded content created by Truth Network. And now, here's your host, Steve Noble. Steve, welcome back. Steve, you're finally maturing. That's nice to see. I mean, we've been praying for you.

You're 36 years at Moody Church, and I thought once this guy matures, he's gonna be pretty good. Yeah, you know, and the good thing about old age is it doesn't last very long. So that's the thing that we always have to remember.

That's exactly right. Well, thank you for taking the time. I know you're busy and you've been at it well for decades.

But anyway, I want to accomplish two things here today with our time together. I'd love to talk about the new book, No Reason to Hide, Standing for Christ in a Collapsing Culture, which I mentioned to you earlier with the 167 high school students that I teach every week right now. That's kind of the epicenter of what you're talking about in the book. It's kind of the epicenter of why I believe the Lord has called me to do that and why I'll do that as long as he gives me breath.

But you've been around the block a few times. You were preaching at the Moody Church for 36 years. You've been speaking into the culture. You talked about that yesterday at a breakout session for pastors engaging. The political realm at what level is correct? What's biblical?

How do you do that? But what led you to write this book, Dr. Lutzer? Because you've written a lot of books, but why this one in particular? What I decided to do is to look at all the pressure points that the church is facing today and then asking myself the question, how do we help Christians think through our response to a collapsing culture?

For example, I deal with issues. By the way, in the first chapter, Steve, I make the point that evil never retreats on its own. It only retreats when it is confronted by a more powerful force. And that, of course, is the gospel.

It's the church. But then I deal with issues such as how America is being Sovietized, how today you don't get a job because of your ability. You get it rather whether or not you have allowed enthusiasm for the prevailing narratives. One of the longest chapters is on why things like diversity, equity and inclusion actually work against us.

Yes. The whole point of critical race theory and so forth is it keeps tearing apart what Jesus died to bring together. And the intention is not to bring about reconciliation. It is intention, intention to foment all of the issues that we face and to continue the conflict. Now, one of the most important chapters in this book, No Reason to Hide, has to do with propaganda. Can we talk about that for a moment?

Please do. Yes. The purpose of propaganda is to so shape people's view of reality that even when confronted with a mountain of evidence, they will not change their minds. And I go into detail how this is done today, helping people to identify propaganda, also how to respond to it.

But you almost develop an alternate universe. And as Hitler and his cronies knew, you have to bypass reason and bypass facts. And you need two emotions. One is fear and the other emotion is anger. You always need an enemy that you have to vilify in order to crystallize people and change their view of reality. Then what I do in the book, and I know we don't have time here to do it, is I show six ways that words are used today with the intention of bringing about that kind of a leftist agenda and the world.

Let me give you one example. This actually is number two. Our universities have speech codes.

I quote one university that says, you know, that a forbidden word is a word like freshman and, you know, all of these other words and victim. And it goes on and on. And then it says, if there's a barbershop in your area, don't say that he takes in walk-ins because you might offend those who can't walk.

They're in wheelchairs. Now, Steve, everybody take a deep breath. Ask yourself what's going on. The intention is not to elevate the debate. The intention is to silence the debate.

Kids self-censor themselves. They don't know. Can you go into a restaurant? Is it still OK to ask for a menu?

Can you have a manicure? Nobody knows. Even a straightforward sentence, you might end up saying something that is inappropriate. So the best thing is to become silent. So we have a whole propaganda machine intended to promote a narrative. You know, Hitler made the statement with with the right use of propaganda, you can make heaven appear like hell and hell appear like heaven. And that is being done today through the media.

Yeah. And ultimately, it's all spiritual. So I tell people often on the radio show and in the classroom, I say, listen, if you really want to understand what's going on with the culture from a biblical perspective, you actually can do that in a fairly short period of time.

Just read Romans Chapter one. That pretty much encapsulates for me from my perspective, having dealt with this stuff for as long as I have now. That kind of encapsulates the whole thing. And most people aren't aware of it because even the unbeliever, they don't want to say they're religious. They don't want to say they have anything to do with the Bible. Yet they're all created in the image of God, whether they like it or not.

And so there's an operating system there. And not only that, but what we're doing in our society is we're expanding the view of God so that we have a God who is just as inclusive and just as tolerant as we are. The Atlantic, because you're into culture, you may know this, had an article a couple of months ago entitled Nearer My God to Me. And what it was doing is showing how America's conception of God is changing, as if that's the basis of authority. We know that people can think whatever they like about God that doesn't make it right. But that, again, is the deception that what I think truth is individual in this book, no reason to hide.

I quote an educator who says this, that the purpose of reading a text is not to find one meaning, but multiple meanings because you bring your own meaning to the text. So all objective truth is gone. And what you have is my subjective. Right. Well, it's ultimately autonomy. Yeah. Autonomy is what created the problem in the garden.

It's been what's created the problem ever since. And we just see there's nothing new under the sun. I'm going to go with Solomon on that one. We'll continue to talk about that. No reason to hide with Dr. Erwin Lutzer. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show.

We'll be right back. Are we going to play Name That Tune with Dr. Erwin Lutzer? Do you recognize it? You'll recognize it here in a second. You'll know the voice. Oh, yeah. Johnny Cash. Of course. Steve, does that music show up randomly?

Oh, no, I picked that music very specifically. Welcome back. It's Steve Noble. The Steve Noble Show is sitting here with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, who was in the pulpit at Moody Church for 36 years. If we have time, we'll talk about that. We're talking about his brand new book, which is a must read. I just got a handle on it myself, so I'll get this read soon. This is only the second time in my 13 years of doing radio, Dr. Lutzer, that I've talked to an author about the book without having read the book. So please forgive me because normally I would be very well-informed. You can be forgiven.

Just fill out the right form. Exactly. So I'll make sure I take care of that.

No reason to hide standing for Christ in a collapsing culture. I wanted to ask you another question, but I think you wanted to back up and follow. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead and ask me.

I was going to ask you because you're a couple of years older than I am. And a lot of times people are like, hey, it's never been this bad. Things are spinning out of control much more rapidly.

We haven't seen this kind of degradation, cultural degradation ever in the history of the world. So I was going to ask you your perspective on that. I will comment on that. And I want to go directly to a chapter in my book that will help us. It has to do with transgenderism. And what I do in that chapter is help parents think through what to say to a child who comes home and says, you know, I think I'm trans.

But I want to back up a little bit. I think that the culture has changed so rapidly in the last 10, 15 years. And I have a longer perspective than you do that it is just unbelievable. Now, in George Orwell, 1984, you may remember that Winston is taken into a room and he's taught that two plus two is equal to five. Sometimes it's equal to three.

Sometimes it's equal to both. I've often thought about that passage. Did they honestly think that, you know, you know, Orwell or Winston was going to come to the conclusion that you can believe that? No, they wanted him to be comfortable to live with lies. I think that everybody knows that men can't have babies, too, or that a woman can father a child.

Everybody knows that. But they want us to be able to live with that lie, to feel comfortable with living with that lie. And so but more specifically, in answer to your question, Steve, I have to say that the culture has just collapsed around us more quickly than we could have ever thought.

For example, there's a school in Missouri that has filed a lawsuit against the federal government because now that, you know, trans people are supposed to have the same rights. The question is, you send your daughter to a Christian school or to a university and her roommate assigned to her was born Burt, but now he's Bertha because he says he's a girl. So how does that make you feel, Steve? Yeah, uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable. But that's where we are at. It is insanity. But we're living in a day and age when absurdity no longer is an argument against anything. And again, I think it was Orwell who said that there are some ideas that are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

And while I'm on the topic, Booker T. Washington had the wisdom to say this. Evil never becomes good. And, you know, that which is bad never becomes good, even if the majority believes it to be so. So what we have to tell our young people is the majority now may believe ABCD, but that doesn't make it so. There is still some objective truth regarding issues of sexuality, regarding issues that have to do with children and all, and we need to stand for it.

So I want to thank you, by the way, for mentioning this book, because I believe very deeply it will help Christians to think through the issues. No reason to hide. See, the average Christian says, I want to be silent.

That's right. I want to run under the bushes because I'm afraid of social media. And that's the other thing. When I was growing up and all my years almost at Moody Church until the last 20 years, we didn't have cell phones. We didn't have social media. And I say to parents that the cell phone in your teenager's hand will do more to inform his or her worldview than an hour of church and an hour of Bible study.

That's exactly right. And what we need to do is to understand, even in Christian homes, parents no longer raise their children. The culture does. Well, that's the that's the warning bell that I'm ringing all the time now. We had a fundraiser last week for my ministry and I was talking to parents about it. And we've had some of those challenges in our own home, Dr. Lutzer. I'm like, listen, you guys got to understand you can be a Gold Star Christian family, Sunday school, big church service, Sunday night.

Come back for youth group, come back on Wednesday night or whatever. Kindergarten through 12th grade, that's twenty four hundred hours. But they go to school, that's sixteen thousand hours, another sixteen thousand hours easily with the device. And you've got thirty two thousand hours of mostly godless input that our kids starting in kindergarten are being trained.

They've got an operating system that's being built into them by the culture. It's all happening under the water. So it's like a iceberg. And you don't see it until they go away and then they're comfortable bringing it out. And you know what?

Many Christians are secularized, right? They don't know it. They don't know it because they you know, the old story about two little fish swimming along and they meet a big fish and he says, boys, how's the water?

And then the one fish asked the other later, what in the world is water? Because culture is the very thing in which we swim. And so we are unaware of it. And so it's time for Christians to ask, where do we draw the line and what can we accept in the culture? And what can't we accept in the culture? And that's why I've written the book No Reason to Hide to help us to think through those kinds of issues, even racial issues. People don't realize that the Bible has the answer.

And so we buy into all of the cultural streams and then we wonder why it is we're not making any progress. So Christians need to stand out there. We need to emphasize the cross. We need to be involved politically.

Yes, but always redemptively because it's redemption. That's paramount. Another thing is I have to emphasize politics is important. That's right. I have Christians who say, well, you know, it's not very important. Well, I've never endorsed a political candidate or a political party, but try to convince the people in Nazi Germany or North Korea. Politics isn't important.

That's right. It's not all important. The gospel is. But at the same time, we cannot ignore what is happening around. And I think in America, politics is probably the biggest kid on the block.

It's the biggest player on the block. But take the Lord and his sovereign hand out of it. But politics in a country like ours drives so many aspects of life. For me to not be engaged with politics at some level as a Christian, to not vote, to me, that's just a violation of neighbor love. I know that politics in the American context context is affecting 340 million of my neighbors.

And if I just sit there and do nothing, say nothing, don't get involved at any level, then aren't I just the guy walking by the person on the side of the street that the Samaritan stops for, but everybody else blows them off? The whole culture is suffering. So we have to speak truth.

And you know what? We don't have to agree with everything in a political party in order to support it. We have to look at both of them and simply say which one aligns best with biblical values. And, you know, in my book, I discuss Christian nationalism, which is and as far as that's concerned, white supremacy, which is really woke supremacy. You know that, you know, white supremacy is woke supremacy. But one of the things that we have to recognize is that there's a difference between Christian nationalism and patriotism. That's right.

So today, if you honor the flag, you're probably a white supremacist, obviously, obviously. And so what we need to do is to have Christians who say we're not bowing to all this. Yeah. Amen.

I'm totally in agreement with you, Dr. Erwin Lutzer. No reason to hide. OK. When I read it, when I read the whole book, can I have you back on? Oh, I'd be glad to. All right. I got you on tape now.

So I'll use that against you. God bless you. Thank you. We'll be right back, everybody.

We'll be right back. OK, now you're making me talk on live radio, which makes my whole intro sound terrible. So what's your name?

What is it? We're going to blame Anthony for this really rough start to this particular segment of the Steve Noble show, because I don't have a red flashing light that says live now. So people will just if I'm in on location, people would just literally walk up to me and start talking. And I'm like, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking, but I'm not talking to you personally. And so what are you talking to me for?

But I need a flashing sign. I guess we're here with Tim. Is it Sigler or Sigler? Sigler.

Tim Sigler. Bring this up a little bit. And you're the provost here at Shepherds Theological Seminary. That's true. Which I steal one of your rooms three times a week when I'm teaching here at the church. Wonderful.

I'm up there on your floor. So tell us about the seminary, because Shepherds has been around for several years. I know a bunch of guys at BJU. I know a bunch of guys up at Southeastern where I got my master's degree. And it seems that like all the very godly, wise Christian academics I know, know about Shepherds. Hey, I'm glad to hear that more and more people are learning about Shepherds Seminary.

We will be celebrating our 20th anniversary next year, 2023. That's wild. It is wild. I've been here four and a half years serving as provost and dean.

It's such a pleasure to see what God's doing. Yeah. And so how did you end up here? Because you said earlier before we went on the air, you were at Moody.

Yes. Both of us share some Northwest suburban Chicago history. You were in Wheeling. I was. Which is cheaper than Arlington Heights.

That's right. And you were in Buffalo Grove. I graduated from Buffalo Grove, but lived in Arlington Heights.

Look at that. And I got tired of winter, so we moved down here. Well, yes, I served 18 years on the faculty of Moody Bible Institute and was very happy to let one of our professors, Doug Bookman from Shepherds Seminary here, come and speak in my classes each year, represent the seminary. I was learning more about Shepherds through Doug and then, well, here you are. Here I am.

I'm so glad to be here. So what's kind of the focus for Shepherds Theological Seminary? Because, you know, obviously, you know, you can get an MDiv. There's kind of this general language that most people in Christendom don't even know what we're talking about. But you will get seminaries that kind of focus on one way or another.

That's right. Shepherds Theological Seminary exists for equipping servant leaders for life and ministry. Our programs are open to men and women who want to serve the Lord, grow in their understanding of Scripture. But also, of course, we want to train those who will serve as shepherds for the church. So you mentioned the MDiv. That's the flagship degree of most seminaries. It's the Master of Divinity program, including biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, classes in biblical studies, theology, church history, pastoral ministry, administration, preaching, things like that. There's a lot in there.

The whole, yes. But the one thing I've noticed about Shepherds is it's not just contained here in Cary, North Carolina. Because several of your rooms are set up for what is obviously long distance learning and different campuses and different locations. Exactly. We offer live synchronous Zoom classes so that students are in the classroom virtually, at least with our professors. They can raise their hand. They can engage in classroom conversation.

It's really live face to face. And how many different locations do you do that at? So we have three teaching sites here in Cary, also in Laramie, Wyoming, and then in Bryan, Texas. And we're opening a fourth in Tampa Bay, Florida. OK, so Laramie and Bryan.

I was going to say, was this a somebody put the United States flag up on the wall, turn off the lights and throw some darts? Or how did you how did you end up in those two locations? Hey, you know, it just turns out with relationships, relationships with people that we know who are committed to our doctoral statement. That's what I love everybody to learn about. Look up Shepherds Seminary on our about tab and read our doctoral statement. I love this faculty and its commitment to scripture. All the things that many schools used to believe.

Guess what? We still believe and we celebrate God's authoritative word. Is there a quote unquote typical seminary student?

So I got my master's degree up at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yeah, I usually felt quite old. I usually felt quite stupid. However, I did meet people that were older than I was.

Yes. And I met a few that were dumber than I was. And it was much more diverse than I expected it. Yes, that's bound to happen. The average age of a student at Shepherds Theological Seminary happens to be 38 years old.

Wow. We have a number who are coming right out of undergrad and going into their graduate work in their early 20s. But we also have a number of second career people. We even have a rocket scientist who just finished his career at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and is now doing a master's degree here.

So I often tell people, if you want to move from success to significance, come to Shepherds Seminary and let's see what the Lord will do in your second half. Can people, do you guys ever, can people audit classes? Yes, they can. We have a number of classes coming up. Because you don't have to get an indiv.

That's right. In fact, here's a bargain basement price for people who might want to know. We have a number of classes that we call community classes. And we bring in experts who are not our normal faculty, but who are coming in to speak just on their area of expertise. Just coming up this December, we'll have Randall Price, who is an archaeologist and biblical scholar, who will be speaking about the Dead Sea Scrolls and biblical archaeology actually excavates in Qumran. I see him there when I'm in Israel. Wow, that's so cool.

It's amazing. We'll have others. We have coming up in January, Arnold Fruchtenbaum, a Messianic Jewish believer who's going to be speaking about his area of expertise, a lifelong study of Messianic prophecy.

And I just can't wait to feature some of these wonderful external experts in addition to our normal faculty. Yeah, that's the thing about it with my experience in seminary was I was a part time student. I ran my own business. I was doing radio, all this stuff. But then there was enough flexibility that I could work on my master's degree. Now, it took me about eight years for kids. But it exposed me to a level of teaching and wisdom and knowledge that this is not a knock on the on the local church.

Sure. It was not possible to absolutely obtain that in most circumstances, unless you happen to go to a church that's close to a seminary and some of those people are teaching Sunday school. But other than that, it does allow you to access a level of learning as a Christian that just typically is unavailable. That's right. And we actually have structured the majority of our degree program so that our courses with our main professors are located here at our main site and carry, but offered on weeknights.

So working individuals can complete their degree. And then what's the website? Shepherds.edu. Thanks for asking. That's a little too simple. Shepherds.edu.

You've got to throw a couple of other things in there and some more backslashes. Straight up, Shepherds Theological Seminary at shepherds.edu. Tim, what's your favorite thing about being involved with the operations of a seminary? I love our faculty. Our faculty love our students and we're united around our doctrinal statement. It's a great group of people to be working with. So everybody's putting their shoulder to the same plow. It really is.

Isn't that cool? I love the unity we share, unity of purpose and direction. And the fact that we're a seminary for the local church, in the local church. Was that when God called Stephen Davey to start, well it was colonial at the time. That's right.

Was the seminary always kind of a part of his calling or did that kind of come in later? Well. And by the way, hold on, let me just interrupt you. By the way, I would tell everybody, whether you're listening in North Carolina or some other state, online, whatever, podcast. Stephen Davey, I think, is one of the best expository preachers and teachers in America. So if you've never heard Stephen Davey preach, you need to do that. Stephen with a P-H. Stephen Davey. So make sure you check that out.

Anyway, go ahead. D-A-V-E-Y, in fact. So you can learn more about him and his radio broadcasts. Wisdom for the heart. But he's on BBN and other places, too. Yes, yes.

He's amazing. So was that an original part of the vision God gave him? Well, what I hear, because, you know, I'm a newer part of the history of Shepherd Seminary. And from what I understand is that as the church was growing and growing and, you know, toward 4000 people, then they were having new staff needs and people would come from known institutions.

And then maybe as you get to know them, it's like, wait, what? We're not on page theologically with with things that we would expect people coming out of evangelical institutions to believe and promote. Well, maybe we should take some of our training in-house.

Yeah. And God had brought a number of people with the background of having been seminary and Bible college faculty members to the scene. And well, as time progressed, the Lord built his seminary here. How many students are there right now? We have just under 300. We're looking at 300 for the fall semester, which is funny because upstairs in the seminary, when you see pictures of graduating classes, you go all the way back. Yeah, it's like a dinner party. It's like a few people hanging out humble beginning and now over 300, which is just amazing.

Well, and I've been needing to rewrite the org chart here almost every three to six months. It's it's amazing to see the growth the Lord has been abiding, in fact. So we enjoy ATS accreditation, the gold standard and accreditation seminaries. Overall, ATS schools have been growing at six percent over the last five years.

Really? Evangelical seminaries among ATS schools have been growing at 20 percent. Wow. And by God's grace, to his glory, the seminary has seen 150 percent growth.

How about five years? So praise be to him. And as I was talking to Dr. Lutzer for the last half hour, the need for theological training and to equip not just pastors that are going to the pulpit, but missionaries, workplace missionaries, which should be all of us, is only increasing. So that's really encouraging to hear that news.

Absolutely. Hey, and we also have a number of opportunities for those who want to take one year and make a commitment. Consider our one year program. You can learn more about it online.

But what would it look like to take one year of your life and prepare for the rest of your life? Excellent. Forty two credit hour accredited master's degree in 12 months. And what's the website one more time? Shepherds dot edu. Shepherds dot edu. If you don't know how to spell shepherds, you probably don't know how to spell it.

And most people don't. So go look it up. I'm going to tell you what my dad always told me. Shepherds dot edu. Tim, thanks for stopping by. Really nice to spend your time with you. Thanks so much. We'll be right back with, well, somebody that's had an impact on my life. Mr. Scott Ray.

We'll be right back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show live from Shepherd's Church in Cary, North Carolina, down here for the ethics conference. And I know most people and that certainly happens with my students that I've been teaching for years. The ethics and most of you know, without going into this ad nauseam that I got my master's degree in ethics is kind of the epicenter of what I do in terms of here on the radio and teaching in the classroom. But most people hear ethics. They think morality. And there's a lot more to it than that.

But for all these years, eight years of teaching with a few hundred students that have taken through ethics. We've always used this book called Moral Choices by this guy named Scott Ray, who I was always hoping I would get to meet him one day. But now he's sitting five feet in front of me. So, Scott, it's a pleasure to meet you. Likewise. Welcome to the show. I'm glad that here you are.

And it's great to have you here. So when people do people ever ask you, like, what is ethics? I think a lot of people assume they know, but they're almost always wrong.

They are almost always wrong. And they confuse ethics and morality, which are two slightly different things. Morality is the content of right and wrong.

It's the substance of it. Ethics is how you get there. Right. It's the art slash science of determining morality. So, I mean, I don't have a problem if somebody used those terms interchangeably. As long as they understand, they refer to two slightly different things.

Yeah, yeah. I often tell my students, ethics is going to remind you of a four year old because I'm going to ask you why. They get so tired of me. And I think this is one of the dangers we face in Christian culture today is they all know the right answer to get.

So we train them to the test and they can answer the question, what position should you have on X, Y and Z? But how you got there, they almost know nothing. Well, I'm a lot more interested in that latter part. Right.

Actually. Yeah, it reminds me of an old British moral philosopher who used to say, my wife decided that ethics is the process by which we justify things that everybody knows are obviously wrong. Yes, that's, I'll probably steal that one from now on.

I'll try to remember to give you credit. Why did you, because you've been in the world of ethics for decades now. Why did you? Yeah, it's been about 30 years. Why did you decide to go down that road?

What kind of sparked that? Well, I started actually, I started an Old Testament and I read the Old Testament text carefully. And you can't read the law and the prophets too long without developing a pretty serious interest in ethics. Yeah. Because the prophets, they were all about, you know, caring for the poor and the marginalized and, you know, doing things right according to the law. And to put it in more contemporary terms, what I wanted to do was to take my theological training and to bring it to bear on the issues that people were reading about in the newspaper. Right.

And, you know, I told my dean years ago, I said, if you ever think about laying me off, just read the front page of the paper. That's exactly right. Well, you know, I call that kind of street level theology.

It's where Christianity runs headlong right into what's going on in the culture. Well, it started, you know, it started back in the late, probably late 1980s with all these wild new reproductive technologies that were coming on. Yeah. And, you know, I started thinking about this stuff and then my wife and I started this journey with infertility. And then it sort of, you know, ethics has followed me home. Yeah.

In ways that I didn't plan on at all. Right. So these are not academic conversations for me.

These are the stuff I've had over coffee and at the dinner table. Right. With my loved ones. Yep. With my regular life.

It is. And then the Bible speaking into that. You know, there's obviously multiple chapters in the book. There's multiple ethical topics we can pick up and run with. I want to ask just kind of two general questions and just run with it however you want, Scott. But number one, what do you think, what ethical area that might be emerging or is completely off the radar screen for most Christians that we should probably start to learn more about? And then the follow up question would be, which one do you think is at play right now, mostly in the culture 2022 that we had better get a handle on because it's radically changing life in America and around the globe?

Well, I think I guess I'd answer both of those the same. Yeah. And that's artificial intelligence and robotics. The idea that that somehow through artificial intelligence, we're going to we're going to be able to, you know, entirely mimic human intelligence. We forget that these are, you know, these things only do the things that they're programmed by a very smart, sophisticated team of people to do.

And they have limits. You know, we're not going to be friends with them. They're not going to comfort us.

You know, not going to provide counseling for us. You know, things like that. They're going to do largely the task that we program them to do. They're not going to take all our jobs.

So I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. But I think we need to think a lot harder about how we think about that. The stuff that that keeps me up at night and actually gets me up in the morning to go to work is, I think, still the the foundational fundamental ethical issue that's been in play for the last several hundred years. And that is, who's a member of the human community?

Who gets to who gets the designation of a person? Right. And we still haven't resolved that culture. I don't think we're any closer to that than we were in 1973 or even know that. No, and overturning Roe versus Wade this year didn't ultimately change that.

It didn't. Although I think that that has some educational value. Sure. But, you know, we'll see. It's also generating a bit of a backlash to that we're completely prepared for.

Oh, completely. Well, you know, it's kind of like, hey, you guys have been asking for this for years. And then the Supreme Court throws us the ball.

And the question is, what do you do with it? And that's one of the challenges. I'm glad you brought up A.I. I mean, our knowledge and our ability is far outpacing our ethic. And nobody's really thinking about the moral ethical implications of artificial intelligence. And you see it with like deep fake stuff where you don't even know you see something with Tom Cruise or whoever. And you're going, wow, I can't believe he said that.

Well, he didn't. That's right. And without an ethical framework, that stuff just becomes tools in the hands, I think, of the devil himself. Well, even think about the algorithms that self-driving cars use.

Oh, man. You know, there are all sorts of moral assumptions in that because, you know, if you're driving alone and you're about to have a collision with a car that's got three or four people in it, you're in serious trouble. That's right.

And the algorithm makes a moral judgment based on those utilitarian concerns. In terms of like my teaching audience, high school age homeschoolers, most of them will say they're Christians. I always tell them first day of class. I'm not going to assume for one second that all of you are actually biblically born-again, spirit-filled believers. I don't know that.

I don't know you long enough. And just because you're growing up in church in a good Christian home doesn't mean you're a believer. But with high schoolers, especially today, like if you go back even 20 years, Scott, we say how big is the homosexual population in America? It's three or four percent.

You asked the generation today, ask Gen Z, 33, 34 percent of them identify with LGBTQIA+. It's all over the place. It's kind of a default. It's part of the woke movement, but it's also part of virtue signaling. I'm open-minded. I'm a compassionate person. I'm not judging anybody. But if you had a bunch of high school students in your classroom once a week, what would you really focus on? Because I want parents to hear this. We're talking mostly to parents and grandparents. Well, I think what we've missed in this is laying really good theological foundations for them.

Yeah. And because you take, for example, the whole human sexuality stuff, all that stuff. I go back to 1 Corinthians 6 and point out to them that Paul systematically develops this, where sexual immorality violates our relationship with all three members of the Trinity equally. You know, God the Father has raised the body.

You know, don't join a prostitute to Christ the Son and your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. And now let's spell out what it means to live that way. And I think the other thing I'd want to emphasize is that there's a difference, morally speaking, I think theologically, too, between our inclination and our actions and that, you know, I would want to disabuse them of the notion that we can live according to our desires, our wishes, you know, which if we all did that, chaos would reign supreme or we'd be on the Lord of the Flies. That's right. But I think to recognize that their inclinations are one thing, and I think it's the behavior that the scripture has the most to say about. Yeah. And I think it's okay for someone who is same-sex attracted and committed to being sexually chaste, that they're okay.

I think that person can faithfully follow Christ. Right. And so I think what's tricky today is that their sexual orientation has become identical with their identity. That's right. Well, it's become identity. And so that goes way back to Sigmund Freud. Oh, yeah. But I can't raise a criticism or an objection without it being a personal affront.

That's right. And that's, I think, that's not helping the level of our discourse in the broader culture today. No, and most Christian students that I have dealt with over the past, well, now 11 years, they're just afraid. They're afraid to go into the culture for the backlash. But they're also afraid of, like I had just one student, I took 33 students out to an abortion clinic last Saturday just to pray. And another student chose not to go and when he emailed me said, that just seems really judgmental to me.

Just to show up across the street and pray was, quote, unquote, judgmental. So I appreciate the heart there that it doesn't want to come across as an ogre to a lost culture. But they do, they just don't understand that to speak the truth and to show up and to do something like that is loving.

The culture tells them it's not loving, but it is. No, we've lost the ability to disagree well with people. That's for sure.

Well, I'll ask my students that. I said, do any of you have 100% agreement with all your friends? No. Then why are you friends?

That's right. If you disagree, you can't possibly be friends. Why don't you cancel them?

They just got to cancel them. And then now they're thinking and they're going, okay. So it's okay to, well, you guys don't know it because they're too young to agree to disagree. And we can still be neighbors. We can still be friends. We can still sit on the pew together and work through it. But it's heartbreaking to me, but it's also invigorating because that's why you and I do what we do. Right. And you've got to be having the time of your life working with the students. Oh, man. Well, it's fun. It's a blast once you get them going, but it's very deep.

I tell them this is going to be really uncomfortable. And back to your point a couple of minutes ago, we'll be out of time in a minute, is their theological foundations are not really strong at all. So in a 16 week semester, 18 week semester, the first six weeks are nothing but theology. So I'm like, I got to get you down the right theological road. You better get to it quickly. You got to have that foundation before we start talking about all these issues.

Otherwise you're just flailing about. But let me just say publicly, Scott, thank you for your decades of work. Thank you for that book. It had a huge impact on me.

It's having huge impacts on these students that I'm teaching and that I'll continue to teach. But thank you so much for your efforts. Appreciate it. Appreciate that a lot. You're very welcome.

So when you one day when you're in heaven and all these kids start showing up and introducing themselves, you'll know where they came from. Sweet. God bless you. Thank you so much for being on. I will. I'll be back in the studio tomorrow. Friends will be talking about politics. We got one of my friends that's running for the North Carolina State Senate. That's a big deal. So, God willing, I'll talk to you then. And like my dad always used to say, ever forward.