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0:20 Before you had accomplished anything, before your personality was shown, and before you established any semblance of success, you were made. 0:28 Somebody else decided your shape, they decided your sex, they decided your frame, your hair color, your eye color, everything about you. 0:36 You didn't vote on it, you didn't get to put in your two cents during the design process. 0:40 You just received it. 0:41 Now that's either the most humiliating fact about being human, or it's the most stable thing that you've got to stand on. 0:49 The entire modern argument over sexuality and gender is really an argument about which one of those it is. 0:55 So, guys, welcome to day three of Hell's Hydra. 0:58 So this week we're going over the top five things, these worldviews, these huge philosophies that Satan is using to dominate and to see people in modernity. 1:06 On day one, we talked about fundamentalist Islam. 1:09 Yesterday, on day two, we talked about socialism and communism. 1:12 And today we're talking about LGBTQ plus activism. 1:16 So let's go back to the beginning of this episode and also back to the beginning of the Bible. 1:19 Genesis 127 sums up our focus for today in one line. 1:23 So God created man in his own image. 1:25 In the image of God, he created him. 1:27 Male and female, he created them. 1:30 So God didn't create some human template that people could later customize. 1:35 He created them male and female on purpose, and they would have the Imago Dei, which was the image of God. 1:40 And that distinction isn't some sort of cosmic accident of biology, right? 1:45 That culture is now free to edit in some way. 1:48 It's part of what it means to reflect God in the first place. 1:52 Then when we get to Genesis 2, it slows down and shows you why distinction matters relationally, not just biologically. 1:58 God forms man from the dust of the earth and breathes the ruach of life into his nostrils. 2:03 And then he says something that you would not expect to hear in a perfect world that he created. 2:08 It is not good that the man should be alone. 2:11 So they're in this perfect garden. 2:13 There's no sin, there's no death, there's no scarcity, and yet God says, No, this is not good. 2:20 This man is incomplete on his own. 2:22 So God decided to build a woman out of the flesh from the man's own side, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. 2:28 And you know, Adam's response is really the first love poem in human history. 2:32 And then the text gives us a pretty simple mandate. 2:35 A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 2:41 So one man, one woman, a union built into the architecture of creation before sin ever entered into the cosmos. 2:47 This is not some sort of cultural artifact of ancient Israel. 2:51 It's actually the blueprint for what human beings are for. 2:54 And then the incredible Apostle Paul picks up the thread of all this at the beginning of his letter to the church in Rome. 2:59 So he's in the process of diagnosing something deeper than any single behavior. 3:03 So he says, humanity, knowing God, did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, and exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator. 3:14 That's Romans 1, 21 and 25. 3:16 And that's the actual root, guys. 3:19 It's not a particular desire, but a swapped allegiance. 3:23 So man essentially decided he'd rather worship what's being made as opposed to the one that made it, including worshiping his own desires as the final authority on who he is. 3:33 And Paul says that God's response to that exchange is to just give people over to their own desires. 3:39 So we pick this up in Romans 1, verse 26 and 27. 3:42 For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due 3:57 penalty for their error. 3:59 So desires that dishonor the created design laid out back in Genesis. 4:03 And no, that's not Paul picking a single sin to obsess over out of the multitudes of other sins. 4:08 It's Paul showing us that disordered desires are what it looks like when a society has already made a deep, dark trade. 4:16 Creator for creature. 4:19 Right? 4:20 But when we look at our sick and depraved culture, we get the opposite premise. 4:24 We are told that we are not made by God, but that we are made by ourselves. 4:29 We are told that our identity is not received, but that it is something we construct. 4:33 We are told that the body is just raw material and the self is whatever you decide to call it today. 4:40 And look, you're going to run into this everywhere. 4:42 You might run into this with coworkers at your job, you might run into this with your kids' friends, you may even run into it within your own household. 4:49 Essentially, you are guaranteed to run into people that have built their whole sense of self on the premise we just described. 4:56 And look, man, your job is not to win the argument at the coffee shop or over drinks or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. 5:01 Your job is to actually know in your gut why the Christian claim is better news, not just a set of stricter rules. 5:09 You see, the Genesis claim that you were made male and female on purpose by a good and loving God means your body isn't an accident. 5:17 It's not something just to be altered or you know renegotiated. 5:20 It means you don't have to build an identity from nothing all by yourself. 5:25 Really, I mean, all you're left with is being under this tremendous amount of cultural pressure and with the whole burden of self-invention on your shoulders. 5:34 I mean, you're already given in an identity here, and yet you're you're causing yourself all this other consternation. 5:41 And let me just be clear about something. 5:43 It is not loving to tell someone that is mentally ill or that is same-sex attracted or that believes they were born into the wrong body that they are right. 5:52 That they should behave based only on their emotions and impulses. 5:56 You're not loving them by confirming their delusion when you know it's contrary to the truth. 6:02 As Christians, we we must stand on the morality of God and on the authority of Scripture. 6:06 Like we may not always like what it says, but we must do what it says. 6:11 The most loving thing that we could do for somebody that's in the LGBTQ plus world is to tell them that God loves them, that he created them on purpose for a specific purpose, and that they need to repent of their life of sin, follow Christ, and try to find God's purpose for their life as quickly as possible.