Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange Podcast. This is a unique program where we have conversations about worldview all through the lens of one ism and twoism.
I'm your host, Joshua Gilo. I was going to say this is another edition of the Director's bag, but it's not. This is. This is the Truth Exchange podcast. We are back, Mary baby. We are back.
Mischief. Our old mischief. Well, hopefully not our old mischief, but it's been a long time and you've done a lot of work on. From Eastern mysticism and spirituality and yoga.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Coming into schools. And you.
You've taken a break, thank goodness, from that.
And now you've gotten yourself into trouble with. On transgenderism.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Children's books, gender pronouns and names and so on. And how should Christians be informed today? Is this something that's going away? This is Pride Month, and I know, like in Revoice, a number of years ago, the last time I attended before, they have given me the official boot and won't allow me in their doors, the question was, what do we do with the tea?
Because.
And this is what the next thing they said was. They are a part of our community, whether we like it or not.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Which community?
[00:01:28] Speaker B: The lgbt.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: And so we need to embrace them, we need to encourage them. They are part of.
Of the body.
And so. So we need to treat them and be respectful and engage with them. So that's where Reavoice was at in 2023. Yeah, I'm not sure where they are now. It'd be curious. I'd be curious to go back and follow up. But, you know, and in terms of today's current administration, I had seen somewhere recently that the administration says we're not celebrating Pride Month Title IX instead.
So.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Are we done?
Can we roll up our sleeves and not be worried about this. This issue?
Have we recognized the utter folly of the trans movement, or is it still pretty here and it's still kind of something that we have to deal with?
[00:02:30] Speaker A: It's going to be here for a while, Joshua. It is going to be here for a while. And it's really interesting because you were talking about the message from the Revoice crew, and there were a couple of words that you used. We need to love them, we need to embrace them, we need to respect them, we need to engage them.
And I would say absolutely, yes, we need to do all of those things. We need to love them, respect them, engage with them, and embrace them as image bearers made male and female according to God's definition of Love, which is truthful.
And so it's really interesting because we talk about the language changes that are required of us, you know, according to trans ideology, which. And we think in terms of pronouns and names, but honestly, look at how language is being used even in defining what respect and love and embracing a person is. Those too have been redefined. Right?
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Right.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: And I've talked about this before, so I'm always fearful about sounding like a broken record, but Scripture is really clear and Christ was really clear about the commandments that he gave us. Right. He said, you're respect the or to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And then you love your neighbor as yourself. And that means that as Christians, our love is submitted to who God is and his authority.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Right. So in trans ideology, and it kind of sounds to me you're more familiar with the revoice message, but with this sort of revoice side A, side B, thinking about things, love is love.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Is what a person says it is. Love is right person feel good.
And there's no submission to that outside authority. And this is where truth exchange immediately becomes relevant to the conversation. Right.
We love as people who understand that there is a creator God who has designed everything and laid it out for us. And it's when we follow his design and his commands that we love well and things can go well and people can prosper and flourish when we love only according to the demands of a created thing.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: So.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: So a gender confused person or a parent who believes that their child is, you know, a daughter trapped in a boy's body, we're worshiping and submitting to created things rather than the Creator, and things go drastically wrong.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Right?
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So that being said, you asked, is this going away?
And I would say no, the current administration is doing some really laudable things in an attempt to protect, for instance, female athletes from being forced to compete against boys. Which is not just unjust and unfair, but it's dangerous. It's dangerous in contact sports, it's dangerous as far as personal privacy is concerned.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: These are still happening though.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: It's still happening. Yeah, it's still happening.
And then the administration also has gone back to old Title 9 definitions, the original intent of Title IX, and done away with the changes. The, the Biden administration that wanted to include gender identity and has demanded that schools teach truth about biological sex and reality. But we still have a whole lot of teachers and a whole lot of states and a whole lot of kids who are indoctrinated and they're just, they're, they're still believing it. They're still believing the lies.
So until we can answer in truth, until we can reach these people who have believed lies and shared truth with them, this is something that is not going to go away as an issue for Christians.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Okay, so a couple of things. Theologically, has anything shifted that our listeners could benefit?
And what I mean by that is there, is there, is there any advancement or change in the way that you think that we can engage people who have bought into this lie, whether it be somebody who is confused about their sex to those who are straight, heteronormative, quote unquote, who are becoming champions. Right.
For the trans community.
Is there anything that shifted that we should be aware of? And here's something I'm thinking specifically because I think I heard you in passing before we jumped on about name usage.
And a number of years ago, there was a big kind of movement where leaders in various Christian circles encouraged Christians to use fake pronouns for the sake of being loving. And I think truth exchange always kind of taken. No, that's, that's the ninth commandment. That's a law.
Right.
And I know for me, whenever I've, I've spoken at churches and this issue has come up, I've, I've said, you don't lie about their pronoun, but if a boy named Sue, Right. Comes up to you and said, hi, my name is Sue.
How do you do?
I'm like, okay, that's how you introduce yourself to me. I can use your name Sue.
And I'm not. Because that's how I was introduced.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: I think, though, if I knew, if I knew Tim and he changed his name to Timona or, or something like.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: That, or Tilly, as one does.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: As one does.
I would say no. Your name's Tim. Yeah. I've always known you as Tim. That's what your parents. I'm going to honor your parents. They named you Tim.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: And it's not like, you know, you're doing, you're doing this because you've, you've bought into a lie of the devil and demons.
I'm not going to call you that. But again, if someone, Sue, a boy named sue walks up to me and says, hey, my name's Sue. I'll call you sue today.
Are you comfortable with that? Should our listeners be comfortable with that?
[00:09:18] Speaker A: You know, I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for the name issue. Right. Like, people go by nicknames and a lot of Instances. And I've had this happen in our home where a kid comes over from school. And I know because my. My children have told me that this child identifies as transgender. If the child is introduced to me with a name and I don't have any background for what their name was prior, I will use that.
And. And when you have that person right in front of you, you don't have to use he and her. It's you. Yeah, Right.
So it's. Welcome in. Do you know where the bathroom is? Have you had a drink of water? Do you want to have a snack? We're so glad you're here.
Really welcoming and not drawing back. And it can. I mean, it can be an awkward thing when you've got a girl in your home who speaks to you and she has a male voice because she's been using testosterone. I mean, that is a place where I think that sometimes Christians feel tempted, kind of like, step back because it's a little awkward. And I do think we have to push past those things and still be kind, still embrace.
But the language is not really an issue.
I do have a friend who was very, very thankful because she has a daughter who is trans identified or was trans identified. Thankfully, she is no longer. But at the. At the apex of her trans identification, she went to someone outside of their family. She was no longer living at the home. She had broken the relationship with her parents off, and she had someone that she really respected, and she went to this person and said, I identify as a male now, and so I need you to start using this. This name and pronouns for me. I'm. I go by he, him.
And the person she was speaking to was really kind to her about it, but just said, oh, sweetie, I never use he or she when I'm talking to you.
You're trying to control my language when I'm talking to other people. And that's actually not something that people respect each other.
They don't do that to each other. And so let's change the topic. You know, he just didn't give it any credence.
And she needed this person. She wanted what this person had to offer her, you know, because of the type of relationship that they had. I'm not wanting to reveal any personal information, but she just kind of let it stand, and she couldn't call it hate. She couldn't call it bigotry. He wasn't being hateful or bigoted towards her.
And it just. It was just a relationship of truth that stood. And her parents were so thankful for that. So I think that there are all kinds of places where we can be very kind and still at the same time, like, not. Not go along with the narrative. And I want to touch on something, because you asked if anything had changed, and I think a big thing that's changed is that for so long, we were told that some social transition and pronoun hospitality. So using he instead of she and vice versa, doing all of these things would help prevent suicide risk or attempts at suicide would help with mental health.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: And that is one thing that's changed. And. And I've said this before, and I. I think we're seeing it play out here where what we are told in scripture will bear out in creational.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: And what we're finding is through the cast review that was done in the uk now the HHS review that was done so Health and Human Services did a review of transgender medicine and affirmation here in the US and what we're finding is that social transition does not help improve the mental health outcomes of kids who are gender confused. What helps the mental health outcomes of kids who are gender confused is speaking to them about truth, affirming the truth of their embodied reality.
A lot of kids who are treated with what they call watchful waiting. So in other words, not affirming them in their confusion, not affirming them in their chosen identity, a lot of these kids, up to 85, 90% of them, grow out of their gender confusion when they're treated with the truth, which means that they come to a place where they're comfortable in their physical body, they understand themselves as a whole being, and they no longer feel that dysphoria and that desire to harm their body or change their body to match their internal perceptions.
Whereas kids who are affirmed in their confusion. So kids who are treated with pronoun hospitality, they do go into medicalization, where they end up sterilized. They end up with ongoing health issues. They end up mutilated in some instances.
And so the science has changed. Some of that narrative has changed to actually back up what Scripture already tells.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: Which is that when you love, you rejoice in the truth.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse kisses of an enemy. Right. So that is something that people can point.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: That's important for our listeners because I remember a number of years ago when. When you and I first had this conversation on the podcast, I remember there was pretty significant pushback on some of the stats that you were giving. And. And even our listeners who are not aware, Mary has also written a little booklet that Truth Exchange offers on transgenderism in children.
And we had, again, people would push back on some of those numbers. And it sounds like the science is finally affirming or beginning to affirm what Scripture has said all along.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the scientific reviews are. And now I want to be clear about something, because our listeners may go and look at some of the medical organizations and the American Medical Organization, so the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric association, the American Psychological association, they are putting up huge resistance to changing some of these affirmative care models and these suggestions.
But what has happened over the last year and a half is that the science that was, quote, unquote, undergirding these recommendations has been reviewed, reviewed, and found to be really, really faulty. And so I think that there are two names of two organizations that our listeners need to be aware of. The first is the Trevor Project, and the second is something called the wpath, which is the World Professional association for Transgender Health.
And the Trevor Project touts itself as a suicide prevention group.
What they actually are is a transgender advocacy.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: And they had done a survey or a study a number of years ago where. And it's based on this survey or study that they did. They called it a study. It was actually a survey where they had these huge, just like, terrifying numbers relating to suicide and suicide attempts and suicidal ideation.
And that study is very, very faulty. But it is off of that study that a lot of these other groups then started to make reference to. I mean, you'll hear even that there's a trans genocide, because with our words, we're doing violence because we're causing people to commit suicide. And that's just not the case. Thankfully, suicide rates, they're. They're very low still within this population. They're higher than the regular population, but they're still very, very low.
And then the World Professional association of Transgender Health, there's something that dropped last year called the WPATH Files.
It was done by Michael Shellenberger's group where whistleblowers came out from inside this organization. And this is like the organization that people all over the world pointed to to say, wpath says that we need to affirm. WPATH says we need to socially transition. WPATH says that transitioning a child as early as possible is the very best thing to do. And what they found is that the medical reasoning and the medical experts inside of wpath, a lot of them were advocates, not experts.
Many of them were not actually medical doctors. And even the medical doctors were having discussions about things that were really quite hurt. Horrific. For instance, how do you take a person with multiple personalities and convince all of them that the one personality that's gender confused needs to have affirmation. Affirmation surgery? You know, like those kinds of conversations were happening internally.
So the reputation and the scientific reasoning of WPATH has taken a huge hit. They are not an organization that can be trusted.
And so a lot of what you see in the medical organizations has been informed by wpath. It was sort of like a circular squad of influence. And so I want our listeners to understand, like, they need to look at things like the cast review, like the Health and Human Services report, where actual studies and reviews of the data was done.
And that's where I'm getting that information from.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Okay, is there, in terms of, in the church, do you have a sense or of how much trans culture has permeated into the church? And is it, is it, is it child based in terms of numbers or adults? Does that make sense? Yeah, because when I, I stuff, I see, I see less adults that, that are coming out as, oh, I'm trans. I'm seeing more and more kid and like from videos. And then I'm seeing, you know, it's like, oh, I'm trans, I'm trans, I'm trans. And it's less and less. Right. You know, adult or, or young people, say between 20s, 20s and 30s. Anything beyond 30. I'm not seeing that big of a crowd that are claiming the trans, but I'm seeing like this huge flux. And it's almost just because it's the popular thing to do. Right. You don't have. I don't really have a gen. I don't. I'm non binary. Right. Or I'm weird. That was the big thing with Revoice in 2023 was a lot of people that were at one time identifying as gay or homosexual or bisexual or no longer, they're just throwing that out that the non binary is the catch all or the queer is the catch all, rather.
And so that was the popular thing to do. And you and I have had this conversation before. It just seems like, well, everyone's doing it, so I might as well be too, because I don't fit into these 1950s categories of what sex is.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I know that just recently I had, I had done a talk for a wonderful group called Clergy United. They're based in Southern Illinois. And so I had gone to look at some of these statistics for that particular talk most recently.
And one of the things that I saw Is that for our generation Gen X compared to Gen Z. So our kids, generation gen Z is 15% more likely to identify somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum than my generation is. And I think there is part of what you're talking about, Joshua, where it's sort of like, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you make yourself cool? How do you make yourself stand out? And right now, identifying as some part of that spectrum is the cool thing to do. It is following along with the crowd.
But we also, in this generation, as Gen X and millennials, as the educators, as the adults in the room, we do bear some responsibility, because these kids are also being told at the age of kindergarten and public schools that they could be trapped in the wrong body. They're being read books like Red, which is about a crayon that's blue, and it has the. He has the wrong wrapper on his body. And so just taking off his wrapper is how easy it is for him to. To be his true self.
You and I have gone over some of the other books neither. And It Feels Good to Be Yourself, or It Feels Good to Be Yourself tells little kids that mommy and daddy kind of make like a wild guess to know whether they're a boy or a girl. And sometimes they're right or wrong. But it, it take. It's up to the little kid to correct the parents and the. And the doctors in the room and tell them who they really are on the inside. And so that breaks down for kids and for teenagers, a couple of things. It breaks down their ability to critically think about what their body even speaks to them as a reality or as a truth.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: It breaks down their ability to look around the world and to look at other people and to know anything about them. And it causes them to need, like, this weird outside gnostic, like, spoken authority to know anything about the world so they can't critically think for themselves.
It. It interrupts a child's understanding of, like, the development of their body.
You know, puberty is an upsetting thing.
It's not fun to go through, but it does concretize for you that this is a part of who you are as male or female. Right?
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: When you're told that you could go through the wrong puberty, then puberty becomes this horrifying process where, like, something's being done to you that's really wrong.
Right. It just interrupts the witness of all of. Of creation. And so I think there's room for some sympathy there for those younger generations.
As far as that one statistic I just know anecdotally, Joshua, I don't go anywhere anymore and talk to anyone about what I do and not have three or four different families approach me quietly to say, oh, yeah, our, our daughter is now living as a man and we haven't spoken to her for three years. Or our, our adult child got involved with someone in a deep relationship and. And now their partner identifies as trans and we've lost both of them. Or I am a pastor in XYZ denomination and our daughter identifies as trans. And at first we felt so ashamed and isolated, but as soon as we started talking about what was going on with us, we. We found six other pastors in our region who are dealing with the same thing. It's. It's everywhere. It is everywhere.
And so it is something that the church needs to be equipped to deal with. We need to equip parents to just say no and to not buy into the, like, the lie of, would you rather have a live trans son or a dead daughter? I mean, this is. It's just a violent, awful lie that has been used on parents for too long.
We need to be telling our covenant children the truth about creation, the truth about their embodied beings made in the image of a holy God. We need to preemptively let them know how dangerous this ideology is so they're not tempted by it when it comes across their screens or into their friend groups. Yeah, we need to be. We need to have a whole hearted, full understanding of what it means to be male and female made in the image of a holy God. That does allow us to embrace and train up d transitioners when they come.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: Into our churches with, you know, mutilated bodies, harmed bodies, but are. Are seeking to live out their lives as male and female before this holy God that they've encountered because they've run headlong into, you know, the reality of their created beings when they tried to live a lie. There are so many ways that we need to be equipped to deal with this within the church.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: So let's start some equipping here. I. I live. I live in the New Zion, the New Jerusalem in the South.
And so I'm somewhat having.
Having lived in former Sodom of California, you know, I think my parenting.
My parenting was quite intense when I was in California, but now that I live in the New Jerusalem in the South, I would say that in a lot of ways, I'm in a bubble that I don't have to really worry about lgbtq.
I don't have to resist as much and we don't watch a lot of television and.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: So. But when we do watch television, it's either on a Friday or a Saturday. Friday night is our movie night. And so we do what any homeschool family does that doesn't have cable. We stream stuff.
And streaming has become quite.
We're almost at the point where like, do we stream anymore? Because, for instance, yeah, RuPaul commercials are always on and you're like, man, I just want to watch Bluey.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Right?
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Or yeah, I'm gonna mad at me about watching Bluey. But, you know, but you know, I mean, like, it's like they have to show a drag queen during a kid program.
Yes, they do, because they truly hate.
They hate God, they hate creation, and, and I do take my children every week. Every Tuesday night is library night. And libraries are just the pits nowadays. I mean, everything from the rebranding of storytelling so that it's radically feminist.
It usurps any kind of moral code that old stories had ingrained in them. I love what G.K. chesterton says that fairy tales don't let children know that dragons exist.
Children already know that.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: They already know that what a fairy.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Tale does do is that it lets them know that the dragon can be killed.
And so, but that's gone. And, and now that it's Pride Month, we were just there and I, I completely was not.
I've forgotten that we had entered into the Twilight Zone of June and they were Pride books. And so I did what any good Southerner does. I slip those books to fall between the bookshelves and so they're lost.
And. But anyways, what other things should parents do?
Should we go become somewhat monastic, hide and boycott everything?
Or is there a better way to engage with some of these things from young little children to teen? I find it easier to talk to my teens about some of this stuff when they see a RuPaul commercial.
Say my four year old and my six year old, and obviously my six month old can't, can't comprehend anything. But you know, I'm. You know what I'm saying?
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't think everyone's gonna like my answer, but we're supposed to be in the world, not of the world. Right. And so being in the world means that we do encounter these things. And I'm not saying that, you know, you take and rub your kids faces in it, obviously. And I think, you know, I reference back to something that you talked about, Joshua, a long time ago, which was that when you were working in banking, the way that you learned what counterfeits looked like was by studying the real thing. You talked about how you guys would take real bills and that you would study those. You would feel the weight of them. You would touch them. You would look at them in the light. You knew what they smelled like. Like you knew them so well that when a counterfeit came across your counter as a bank teller, you knew what you were dealing with. You could recognize it right up front. So speaking to our kids about the word, speaking to our kids about creation, telling them the truth from the very youngest age. And we've talked about this before. I'm a gardener. Lael, your sweet wife is a gardener. And we did this together when, when Isaac and Lily were little, having them down in the yard. Look at the pumpkin flower. See the. The female flower has the little pumpkin at the end. And then there are flowers over here that pollinate that flower. And those are the male flowers. Like it. You can see it all around you. That way when RuPaul shows up on the screen, even your 4 and your 6 year old are going to have a sense that there is something wrong. Right?
There is something wrong with this person that they're seeing. And you can point out very quickly, like, this poor man, he's believed a lie. He's believed a lie and he thinks that he can behave as a female when God created him beautifully as a man. And it can be as simple as that. You know, how, how sad that that is the truth.
Let them know when you see those books rather than pushing them through the cracks. I mean, do that. But first, first show them to your kids and show them, look, isn't this incredible? Look, this is not true. Like, talk to them about the fact that this, this book that they're holding that they're looking at, that their friends might love is actually telling. L compare it to the truth so that they understand. Just equip them well. And then I would take it even a little further.
So let's see, you've got a kiddo who's six and then you've got kiddos who are preteens. And I think at like the preteen age, I know with my Lily, even at 8 and 9, it wasn't just, oh, gosh, this is wrong and it's not true, but it was also, that's really going to hurt that person.
So like if that girl takes testosterone, yeah, it's going to make her voice deep. But did you know when her voice is getting deep? That's also because bad things are happening to her female body.
It like, they need to understand, just like the egg commercial that we had when we were kids, like, this is your brain. And then like, it got cracked open and it was frying in the frying pan. This is your brain on drugs. In other words, drugs. It don't just stay away from them. Here's why.
Trans ideology, don't just stay away from it, but understand that it's dangerous. Like, living a lie makes you crazy, it makes you unstable. Living a lie and taking drugs, you know that even if a doctor gives them to you that are the wrong thing for your female or male body, it harms you. It does permanent damage to you. Like, use those examples. I think that we need to equip our kids. And then I think we also need to challenge our kids that when they do run across someone who identifies as trans, not to recoil in horror, especially if it's one of their peers, but to explain kindly why they're not going to go along with the narrative.
And that's going to cost them something.
You know, that is going to cost them something. My daughter knows what it is like to be called a transphobe.
My daughter is knows what it's like to be told that she's a hater because she does not fall into that cheerleading crowd.
However, she also operates with such love for some of her confused friends that the hater and the transphobe labels, they fall off. They fall off because they're not true. And her friend group can see that.
And I think that that's really important too. We need to train our kids that it's not either, ooh, get away, that's gross, or, yeah, that's awesome.
There is speaking the truth in love, but it has to be truthful, right? For a long time, we said be loving, so shut up, right? And we thought that that was what we needed to do.
I had a conversation with a number of d transitioners in January, and I asked each of them, I think it was six of them that I got to talk to, who I just said, hey, when you were identifying as trans, did you ever have one friend who said to you that they were concerned about what you were doing?
And one of the girls, Maya, I won't ever forget it. She was like, no, not once. She was like, I did not have a single friend who said something like that to me. Like, they all knew their line. They had to be cheerleading for me. They had saying that I was so brave and I was being so true to my internal self. Like, they all went along with it.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: And then she kind of left, and she was like, you know, I wonder what that would have been like to have one friend who. When I started to have doubts about what I was doing, I knew I could go to that one friend and say to them, like, hey, maybe I have made a mistake.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: There was another girl who talked about having all cheerleader friends. So in other words, none of these d. Transitioners ever had a friend brave enough to. To break the narrative, who loved them enough to do that?
And she said that even when she was getting ready to have her double mastectomy done as a teenager, she was 15 years old, she was going into surgery, and she was already thinking, oh, my gosh, I don't think I want to do this. Like, she was really scared.
But all her friends were there. They were cheerleading for her. They had had, like, a celebration that she was going to have the surgery done. And she knew she'd be letting them down if she didn't have her breasts removed. And so she went along with it. Right.
What if she had had one friend who she had even yelled at and broken relationship with, but she knew was out there who had said to her, I'm really scared for you.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: I don't. I. I don't think this is a good idea. And then was strong enough in their Christian love and their truthful love to. To let.
Let that break happen.
I'm thinking, I guess, of the prodigal father, like, letting his son go sty, but standing there waiting, straining at the horizon for when his son would come back. Like, what if we loved that way where the broken relationship was okay? Because we knew that we had acted in love, and then we waited for them to come back when they needed us. Yep.
[00:36:54] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: I think these are the things that we need to consider as Christians, and we need to equip our kids to do it. They need to be good friends, and right now, we're not equipping them to be good friends.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: And there's a lot of good resources out there that. Well, one that Truth Exchange has put out mostly through your. Your labor quote course. We have our friend Rosario Butterfields, who has a number of great resources out there. I think Harvest USA is still doing some fantastic work on that.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: And then Christopher Yuen.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: Christopher Yuan. Yes. Yeah. And. And he. Christopher deals a lot with holy sexuality because, of course, Christopher was saved out of living in a gay lifestyle. Right. He talks about holy sexuality, but he speaks, too, about the. The need throughout the LGBTQ spectrum to recognize who we are in Christ created male and female. And this is going to seem like a side tangent, but what Christopher talks about made me think of it. And, and we're in a study in Hebrews right now with the ladies at our church and we've just been working through the first chapter of Hebrews and I was hit. Joshua, the author of Hebrews, says that in these last days God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, and through whom he also created the world, Christ.
It was through Christ that we were created male and female. So when we find ourselves in Christ, male and female, there's so much beauty, so much joy, so much about us that is good. And in wanting to share Christ with our friends, our gender confused friends, our unbelieving friends, we're sharing the Creator who made us male and female, right?
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:38:49] Speaker A: So.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: And not only who made us, but he's also our redeemer. So it's that whole orbed the two beauty of the two of two ism.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: Which of two ism. Yeah. And he holds all things together, right? He, He.
By him all things operate and hold together. And so Scripture's so clear about that.
So, yes, Christopher Yuan is a. Is a wonderful resource also.
And I, I'm hopeful that we will be able at Truth Exchange soon to begin to put out more information for our readers and for our listeners about some of the ways that they can think about how to share this beautiful truth.
That's the thing that struck me when I spoke recently in Southern Illinois with Clergy United Joshua, is that I had teenage believers. You know, we're talking sophomores, juniors in high school, and I had some college age kids too, who came up after I spoke and wanted to talk to me about specific friends that they had.
They had been convicted by the fact that they had told lies in an attempt to love.
And they were recognizing that they had done damage in doing that and were asking in their particular situations. And every situation is a little bit different. Right. But how do I begin to undo the damage I've done? How do I begin to say to this friend who I've known since preschool as a girl and now identifies as a boy, and I've been using her boy name. How do I even begin to. To undo that damage that I've done, but willing to take risk. Right. Suddenly aware that maybe being socially ostracized or having a friend be mad at them is not the worst thing? Yeah, maybe the worst thing is lying and, and letting their friend pursue destruction without trying to throw themselves in the way.
I was so encouraged by the bravery of these kids, the desire that these kids had to go and try and speak to their friends in truth, in Christian love, in honesty.
And so I hope we can start putting some more resources out that will really help our readers and our listeners in tackling that with their kids and maybe even on their own.
[00:41:06] Speaker B: This concludes the episode of the Truth Exchange Podcast. This program is listener supported and only made possible through the contributions of friends like you.
