In this sermon, the speaker highlights how modern society has become so accustomed to artificial things that we have lost the ability to appreciate the simple pleasures and realities of life. He uses the example of drinking water, suggesting that many people cannot appreciate it because they have grown up consuming artificial drinks like Coca-Cola and Kool-Aid. The speaker also shares an anecdote about a family with young children who were able to ask profound questions, highlighting how the bar has been lowered in society. He further emphasizes this point by describing a conference in Zambia where teenagers were passionately debating theological concepts, contrasting it with the obsession with fantasy and sensory overload in modern culture. The speaker concludes by mentioning how this lack of appreciation extends to sexual desires, where men become more lustful and lose the ability to appreciate simple physical touch.

Any questions? Who's going to be the first? This question is for Brother Paul Washer. I agree with everything that you said tonight, but I was wondering, like, how would you line up 1 Corinthians chapter 5 with what you said tonight? How would you fit that into your theology? What aspect of that chapter? Just about how it talks about handing that man over to Satan. OK, one of the things that we have to see is... Well, let me put it this way. The way we're doing church today leads to and produces in abundance carnal loss church members. First of all, our gospel is watered down. Secondly, church membership is not taken seriously. Third, church discipline is not practiced in most churches. And so godliness runs rampant. True Christians are not corrected as they should be. And the church is filled with carnal men who are not put out. Now, what happens there in 1 Corinthians 5 is not a contradiction in any way. It is a normal process. God keeps and disciplines his children. Sometimes he intervenes directly. We see that in him convicting his children by the power of the Holy Spirit of their sin. Him convicting his children through Matthew 18. Brothers coming to another brother and saying that you err. But also, God will use discipline, church discipline, in the life of a genuine believer who has gone astray. God uses means in order to keep his people. Just recently, I received a letter from one of my friends in Zambia. Who they were rejoicing because a woman who was put out of their fellowship. In April, I believe it was, has recently come back weeping and confessed before the whole church her sin and asked for forgiveness. And there was a revival literally broke out. So what we need to see is true Christians, do they sin? Yes. Can they fall into, let's say, what's commonly called carnality? Yes. Can they backslide? Yes. Can they stay there through the full course of their life? Absolutely not. God is going to discipline them through the many means that I have shared. Well, OK, yeah. OK, this question is for Vody, and I was just wondering if your daughter brought home a man who fit all three of those qualities that you said, but you did not feel at this time he could be a spiritual leader to her, that he was growing towards that. But at this time, he was not going to be able to be a spiritual leader to her. What would you say to her? First of all, I'd be very upset that she was the one who brought the man home. But secondly, secondly, if a young man had a conversation about this earlier of the men who I know who are committed to what I call a biblical model of courtship of the ones who I know who have walked through that process and have actually seen their daughters married off, most of them ended up discipling those young men because there are very few families who are actually producing young men today or young women, for that matter. Most families are just not doing it. So boys are not being discipled. They're not growing up to be, you know, examples of biblical manhood. They haven't seen examples of biblical manhood. And so some of them come with this raw material and they're good guys and there's great potential there. And so my approach would probably be if he had that there, and I believe that this was a good suitor for my daughter, but not quite ready yet, is that I'd ask him to submit himself to a period of discipleship. This is for Votie also. I teach middle school and I see daily what you're talking about. And as a woman who is in the school system, what could be a way I could approach this in my classroom as not only a teacher, but as a Christian to approach this? Because you are right on, because I see it daily with my kids. And I was just wondering some advice on what I could do. Yeah. Boy, can you can you become a curriculum writer? One of the. Yeah, that's that's that's one of the biggest problems is the curriculum that exists. You know, another thing is if you can point these young men to appropriate male role models as as as frequently as possible and raise the bar and treat them like young men and expect them to act like young men, teach them things like etiquette. They don't know, you know, they don't know how to treat young women, do things like that, you know, set that tone in that classroom. And expect them to live up to that and encourage that and and reward that and everything else. This question is for Votie as well. You say you're against Western dating. And I was just wondering, when you met your wife, how did you go along with getting to know her and like realizing that she was the one? Well, I met her January 21st, 1989. I proposed to her six weeks later. And we got married June 30th, 1989. So the process took six months. So we didn't have a, you know, a long relationship like that. Unfortunately, she didn't have a father in her life. So what we did was we had a family. There was a friend of mine, actually a teammate of mine who had a wonderful Christian family. And we spent as much time with them as we could during that period to get as much help as we could. But, you know, neither of us had a father in our home. Last two generations, both sides of our family, 25 marriages, 22 divorces. I have 23 first cousins, only five of them, only five of my 23 first cousins had a father in their home. And he actually died before they were all grown and out of the house. So we didn't have that luxury. So we just we just found what we could and got help where we could. Let me say something about that. I had a was teaching on courtship a while back. And some guy goes, well, did you did you do all this stuff when you met your wife? And I said, and if I didn't, does it make it not true? That was one point, but the other point was something you've got to understand. Fifteen, 16 years ago, when I met my wife, no one even heard of the things we're talking about now. You have to realize that the church has struggled through almost a century and a half of liberalism. And it has so affected the church. When I first discovered some of the things that Brother Votie has put forth here tonight. I literally was devastated. It was like a man waking up, realizing that everything, even though I had been preaching for a few years, everything in my life was wrong. And what I want you guys to see, especially you guys, because really the wife is going to go in the path that the man leads her. And I want you to know something. Some of you are probably taking notes, thinking I need to tweak a few things in my life. No, you need to absolutely destroy from A to Z everything you have ever learned about anything and start all over again. The tabla rasa of the famous philosopher, a blank slate. That's how radical it is. This question is for Brother Washer, I was just wondering how we see God's love for us through him doing everything for his own glory. OK, this is a very important question. There's a great emphasis today because of Dr. Piper and others, although it's been since since the beginning of time that God does everything that he does for his own glory. We have a real problem with that. It's amazing we don't have problems with contemporary Christian music that says God does everything for us, but we do have problems with God doing everything for himself. And we wonder how does that represent a loving God? Well, first of all, we need to look at reality before we get emotional. First of all, God is really God. And God is the most the most worthy being of of all above the creation he's created. Now, Edwards, Jonathan Edwards and most of the Puritan writers say this, even men who act must act with a motive. If they do not act with a motive, they are considered unreasonable or insane men. And so God must have a motive for what he does as needing to have a motive or that he should have a motive. He should choose the highest motive. The the highest motive is God. That's the reality, he is God, he is the most worthy, if he's going to do anything for anyone, it should be for himself. He is his own highest motive. But now, how does God doing everything for himself demonstrate love to his creation? Well, let me let me say it this way. The if I were to stand outside and when you were going out the door, hand you a stick of Wrigley Spearmint gum and you held it to your, you know, your chest and said, oh, my, I can't believe it. This is absolutely wonderful. And you run and you tell everybody in the university, you call the media, alert the newspaper, and then 30 years later, you have a picture of me over the mantle in your fireplace. And when your grandchildren say, what's the picture? That's Brother Paul. Thirty years ago, he gave me a piece of Wrigley Spearmint gum. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You need some serious counseling. All right. But but if you're dying, if you're dying and in the hospital and you need a heart transplant and there is none. And I come and I give my life away to you. Then when you rise up off that table, it does make sense for you to weep with joy over me. It does make sense for you to alert the media and it may even make sense for 30 years later. You tell your grandchildren the only reason you're here is because there was a man named Paul Washer. And so the size of the gift or the quality of the gift oftentimes does demonstrate the measure of love now. If God wanted to demonstrate the greatest gift possible to his creation, if he wanted to demonstrate the greatest love possible, he would give them the greatest gift. The greatest gift God could ever give to his creation is for him to take center stage and do everything so that the fullness of his glory might be revealed to them to the same degree, the greatest act of judgment God could ever pour out on a people would be to hide himself. You see, one of the things that we've got to realize is that. Everything that we're shooting for is not it's not heaven, it's not streets of gold, it's God. Everything, everything created is finite. All right, finite gets boring, it's finite, it comes to an end, you can put your arms around it sooner or later or mark it off with chalk and eventually make your self around, make your way around the full circumference of its existence. But the reason why heaven is an eternal thing and yet every if we could say such a thing, day of glory is that much greater is because you're going to be tracking down the infinite goodness, beauty and glory of God and every day will be a greater delight because you'll know more of him. So by God taking center stage and doing everything he does so that the fullness of his glory is revealed to you, that's the greatest gift he can give you. Yeah. Yes, this is a question for Vody. What if while you're in college, you meet the woman that God intends for you, but you feel that you need that education in order to be able to provide for her and your family? How much education do you need to go mow lawns so you can put food on the table or to go work at a fast food restaurant so you can put food on the table? You suck it up and do whatever you have to do to provide for her. We have a misconception that marriage is only for the upper class, you know, that marriage is only for people with a 401k and two cars in the garage. That's not what marriage is about. That's not what providing is about. A man who provides for his family is a man who will do whatever it takes to provide for his family. That's that's almost classism. You know, marriage is for people who have a certain status and a certain class of provision. No, no, it's not. It's not. It's for people who are committed, absolutely committed to this biblical, multigenerational vision and rejoice at the gift that God gives them and does whatever they have to do in order to bring about that provision. So just be careful not to put these Americanized, you know, because if we carry that to its logical conclusion, then we say, you know, the person in the third world country, you know, who doesn't make a lot of money, well, they've actually messed up because they should have actually instead gone ahead and left the country and got a degree and got it. You see, that's not what marriage is about. That's that's not what marriage is about. Next. This question is for both of you. How should a young man go about seeking a wife? So, come on, come on, you know, there's a here's an interesting phrase, there's an interesting phrase, OK? And a lot of the phrases that we have in our culture, we don't even we don't even recognize, you know, that that they have an origin. But the idea of winning a woman's hand in marriage, you all heard that phrase. From whom does one win a woman's hand in marriage from the woman? No, from her father. That is from that's why in the wedding ceremony, again, a lot of stuff we think just came out, it comes out of nowhere, that the father walks the bride down the aisle and she does what puts her hand into the hand of the man who's going to marry her. He has won her hand in marriage. So the way you do that is, you know, first of all, you have to work on you meeting the biblical qualifications. You understand that when a man finds a wife, he finds a good thing. It's a gift from the Lord. You want God to bestow this on you and you want to do everything that you can to be ready and worthy of that when it when it happens. So that's the first thing that you do if you if you're going to seek that is you meet those qualifications yourself. The second thing that you need to do is you need to understand if a wife is a suitable helper, then you have to understand who it is that God's called you to be so that you know what it takes for you to be completed. OK, and then thirdly. You open your eyes because God's going to build you one, just like he did for Adam, he built it, you know, he built him one. Adam didn't go and God built him one and he had to just be aware and be alert so that he could see what God had built for him. And so you look and you be aware and be alert. But again, if you have those first two things in place, you know what you're looking for. If you don't, it's just random and you're in trouble. There's a few things I think that very important to point out, you know, when. When a young man or a young girl at a certain age starts to recognize that there are people of the opposite sex out there and they're awakened to that, now that gets earlier, supposedly every generation. And that's not right. I mean, my job right now is to protect my boys so that the only thing they're thinking about is fighting dragons and building forts. But there will come a time really. Except my six year old, I really pray for him because the other day at church, because I talked to him about preparing to be a man and the other day at church, he said, Dad, do you know how you told me that one day I was going to meet a woman and I need to prepare? I said, yeah. He goes, I met her. I go, really? He goes, yeah. And I said, well, you need to get a little older. And he said, well, how old? And I said, well, you know, I'm speechless at this point. So I'm like, I'm like, well, you need to drive a car. He said, oh, really? So he he goes back and he comes back about five minutes later and he goes, Dad, you know those little cars at Wal-Mart that they sell? I said, yeah. He goes, could we buy one of those so I could practice? But when when love is awakened or when when this maturity is awakened and you start recognizing the opposite sex, I believe that's from God when guarded in the in the proper context. Now, here's here's the foolishness of our culture. They think when that comes alive, that that's the that's the green button to start doing that. And that's why you have these little girls and boys when they're 10 and 11 and 13, 14 and 15 that are dating. That's pathetic. What that is, when that goes off in that little boy's heart that, hey, girls don't have cooties. Then you say, son. That is not God's call for you to participate, that's God's call for you to now to prepare, you're going to spend the next several years of your life no longer walking with boys your own age, you're going to spend the next several years of your life walking with men. And preparing, you see, you've been told about adolescence, adolescence is very convenient. You see, nowadays, no one ever wants to be called a boy. Adolescence gives you the opportunity to be a boy and yet participate in man things that you never prepared for. My little boy, my goal is that when he's 16, 17, he's he could he could do more than most of you and definitely more than his father at that age, that he would be a man. Another thing very important about preparation, I really want to encourage you young guys. A companion of fools is what most of you are. And you were companions of fools in your youth group, youth groups are totally unbiblical the way they're done now, you understand why I preach in a lot of churches once, but they're unbiblical because they do exactly what Scripture says not to do. They put a bunch of young fools together. Young men are not supposed to walk with young men, young men are supposed to walk with old men. To learn what it's like to be a man, if you do it the other way, you never grow up. And so we can't just say we're going to do a few things to try to start us off, we got to revamp our entire system of doing things. I mean, really. Paul, you kind of alluded to this just a little bit over here, but I'd love to hear from you and Vodi on this, but my question is, I'm married, got married at 27, but a lot of the guys I'm helping, I work with the college ministry and I help guys out and they're thinking about marriage. And I've heard, Paul, I think you shared this before and Brother Ricky here at Harden, I really believe this, that the 16 of your day or the 13 or 14 of your day, Paul, you or maybe your grandparents or our grandparents is like the 22 of our day, our culture, because we've been affected so much in terms of maturity and preparedness and things like that. And so in some senses, some of these guys are going to be prepared. But a lot of the guys on our campus and even me at that age, I don't feel like I was. So you hit on when God awakens it, obviously he's in control of that. But how should that affect these guys in this room that are in their 18, 19, 20 that maybe aren't there in their maturity? You know, maybe they're moving towards what you're sharing tonight, Vodi. How would you guys hit on that in terms of the timing of preparedness? Well, I can tell you what happened to me, but I was married when it happened. I came across a family. Of of homeschoolers, I'm Southern, I was Southern Baptist all my life and. And Southern Baptist, for the most part, think they're the biggest thing going and they don't realize they're nothing more than a spiritual ghetto. But outside of the Southern Baptist Convention, I started meeting families, homeschoolers and stuff like that. Let me give you an example. I went to this family, a family of 10 children. The youngest one was probably four. And after the meal, which I literally couldn't eat, just watching the four year old act like a man afterwards, they set chairs out and there was all these questions that the children had already prepared to ask. And this four year old is asking me questions that I couldn't have asked when I was probably 18. And I started to realize and hold on, somebody somewhere has lowered the bar so tremendously that we're acting like a bunch of primates, but there are some people out there who they're like from Mars or something. It is a completely different world. Now, a lot of people will look at those type of people and just scoff at them like there's some bumpkins from, you know, a century past. When that little boy is is using Latin phrases and talking about the glory of God, though, you maybe need to just shut your mouth and listen for a while. And I started realizing, first of all, I'm wrong. I'm a man of unclean lips and I dwell among the people of unclean lips, and there are other people out there outside of my world, though, that have such a Christian family that I can't even call anything I do Christian compared to them. And so I went and I started learning. I found men, I mean, because here's the thing, guys, let's face it. Most of you try to go look for a mentor. You're not going to find anybody. So I went on I went on the Internet and I don't agree with everything in every place I read, but I went to places like Vision Forum. And I just started learning. Not from theorists, but men who had 10 children who just walk with God. So that's what I would encourage you to do. I would encourage you to get in these places like Vision Forum and other things and just learn about manhood. And if you had to take a year, if you had to drop out of college for a year just to do nothing but work enough to feed yourself and then dedicate 10 hours a day to discovering what it means to be a man. You do the world a favor. And so, you see, that was the other thing that I was going to say. That question, I think. Illustrates part of our problem when it comes to marriage, we go, well, you know, we've got these young men and they're not mature enough for marriage, well, they're also not mature enough for college, but we send them to that. Why? Because we worship the God of education and not the God of the Bible. We get our young men ready for what we value. And I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that if the Marines can take a sullen, snot nosed, 18 year old kid and turn him into a heel charging, order obeying, adapting, improvising and overcoming United States Marine in 13 weeks without this, then I don't need all that long to get a guy up to speed. That's the thing. This question is for Votie, what would you say to college students that have a godly view of marriage and don't see it as they should put education and that kind of things before marriage, but yet their parents have a more worldly view of marriage and do feel as if they should wait till a certain time to do those things. Honor your father and your mother. That's what I was going to ask about, like what you think the balance is between that honor, your father and your mother. Thank you. This question is for Votie. Do you think it's OK to be hesitant toward a marriage that is not centered around God or how would you attack that situation? OK, come back, come again, come again, to be headed, say again, I said, do you feel it's OK to be hesitant toward a marriage or engagement that is not centered around God and it's not centered around God? You asked me earlier. OK, OK. The idea of people who are they don't have this thing centered around God, but they're headed in that direction. The easy answer to that is no. I mean, that that's not OK for anything in our life, everything in our life. God is that God is the center of everything that we are. And so we that's the starting point. It's the foundation for everything that we are and everything that we do. And when we have people in that situation, I think we owe it to them, especially if they're close to us. We owe it to them to as. Lovingly, gently, but honestly, as possible to communicate them the peril of what they're about to experience when marriages dissolve, it's devastating, it's devastating to the individuals, it's devastating to their children, it's devastating to the society, it's absolutely devastating. And so I think we need to look at that devastation and stop closing our mouths and closing our eyes and begin to speak the truth and love into people's lives when that begins to happen, because they're I mean, literally, there are few things in this world more devastating than people who flippantly, you know, get into marriage relationships and have those dissolve. So, no, no, that's not OK. Back here, guys, this is for both of you. I have a group of of college students over at Murray State that I work with and disciple, and I was struck the other day. I asked him a question. How many of you guys throughout your life have ever read a book from cover to cover on your own volition? In other words, it wasn't assigned to you or you had to do it. You just picked it up to read it. And not one guy in the group had done that. And I was just love to get y'all's take on and you mentioned education earlier about when you go into class, do you is it just the minimal get by or is it but how important in pursuing God, becoming ready for marriage, learning to evangelize and be a worker in the kingdom? How important is reading? Because this generation, I know there's exceptions, but it seems like there's less and less reading. Yeah, that people are doing picking up books to read. Yeah. And and and and our senses are dulled because of it. There's a huge difference between a reading culture and a TV watching culture, for example. And we live in a TV watching culture and our senses have been dulled and we don't think as well. We don't think as clearly. I think it's incredibly important. You know, I have reading goals myself. And it's interesting. My reading goal for a while has been at least read at least a book a week. You know, that's been my reading goal. And sometimes, you know, there are things that are it's going to take me longer to wade through some of the big stuff like that. But what I noticed and I just realized this a couple of weeks ago, my my son, my my two older children, the 17 year old, the 14 year old, they read at least a book a week. My daughter to. Two books a week. Just because they saw that pattern of. Of doing that, you know, and this is beyond the schoolwork that they do and all this other stuff, but they also don't watch television. You know, they're allowed four hours a week that is carefully chosen if they so choose. Most weeks on the weekend, they don't even choose to do that, you know, and watch certain videos and stuff like that that we would even allow. They'd rather be in books. And because of that, one of the things and again, as a homeschool dad, this is something that that I've learned and I'm sure Paul has had this experience as well. One of the things that all homeschool parents learn very early on is we weren't well educated. I was not well educated. My 17 year old daughter is much better educated today than I was when I got out of college. Hands down. No questions asked. It's not close. And part of it is I wasn't a reader. It wasn't until after seminary days that I became just a voracious reader. And I've seen the difference that it's made in my life from a person who could go to school and make good grades and Dean's List and all this other stuff, who was absolutely not an educated person, just had a good memory, you know, whatever. But huge difference between that guy that everybody said was smart and the guy who learned how to be a reader later on. My son is in a curriculum right now from Veritas Press and he's he just turned six and he was reading last week about Cotton Mather preaching the word of God to the Buccaneers in the new world. I wouldn't even have known what any of that was all about when I was 14, you know, so again, there's a whole world out there that it's really out there. The thing you really don't understand, there are people really doing this stuff and it's changing their lives. Let me give you an example. Votie was there this year. Last year I was there and I've been there for the last two years. There's a big conference in Zambia and Lusaka, Zambia and Africa. You know, those backward natives running around leopard skins in Africa. You go there. And the reason I say that is because my first time there was a conference of about 800 Africans, I hear these young people, about 12 of them sitting around a table. All right. They're in an argument so passionate that I'm thinking of myself, I got to go over there and see what they're arguing about, who's the best soccer team, you know, what's going on? You know what they were arguing? Now, these were teenagers. They were arguing one against the other regarding super lapsarianism versus infralapsarianism in the decrees of God based on the writings of Jonathan Edwards. So much for the backward Africans. Yeah. All right, let me give you another example. Several years ago and I studied at the university, I took logic, philosophy, many other things. A friend of mine from British Columbia sent me a book called Logic by Isaac Watts. And I picked it up, you know, I know logic. Picked it up, I read through the first chapter and I went, whoa. So I read it again, went through the first chapter of the third time, I said, OK, I see where it's coming from, this is more this is more stuff than I've ever had master's level. I closed the cover and on the fly of the book. Was a picture. Of a schoolmaster and he was drilling, it looked like second graders. And I did a little research on the book, the book was written for grade school children in the colonial period. So, yes, we've really lost something, and one of the things that you have to see is this, we've almost been trained like a bunch of rats. Yes. I want you to think about something for a moment. How many of you can appreciate a drink of water? Most of you don't. Because you've had all your life, Coca-Cola's and Kool-Aid's, so you've had so much artificial stuff, you can't appreciate reality, what God has given. Now. A friend of mine who's big into video and does a lot of stuff with preaching, you know, culture, and he showed me the 40 second trailer on the latest Spider-Man movie. He said, now I want you to see something. It was so fast, so exciting, so bombarding of my senses that I realized a child trained on that could never walk through the woods and appreciate God's creation. We are filled up with the fantasy to such a degree, our senses are bombarding that we can no longer appreciate reality. Same thing happens in sexual desires, men become more and more lustful and can no longer appreciate the simple touch of a woman's hand on theirs. We're just becoming brutes. And I think that we must read, we must, but for me, the most important thing is to read old, old books so that I can get outside of my culture. The greatest things that have ever happened to me was one, when I started traveling abroad. Two, when I began reading old books and three, especially again, when I met some of the people I've met in my life that were so far beyond anything I dreamed in Christianity that I realized I didn't even know what I was doing. And it shocked me out of my little world. Yeah. And that's what reading does. And we saw that it's interesting because those two things came together for my son and I, my son, my 14 year old son, and I went this year to the same place. And again, some of the same things about what these people are reading and learning and being taught, what these pastors are preaching that, you know, people over here in this part of the world look down on because they're over in backwards Africa, you know. And most missionaries from this country don't even, wouldn't even qualify to be church planters with this group of people that we're talking about that we go and minister with. And I watched the impact on, you know, my son at 14 years old visiting his 11th country and then having on top of it, this experience of seeing the way these people live as opposed to the culture that he's been so exposed to. And you just can't put a can't put a price on it. Guys, I'm talking, you know, kind of we've been kind of talking in your face. But here's something I want you to realize for my children, I'm never going to be. Everything I could have been if I had been raised according to scripture, but I'm going to climb halfway up that mountain, at least with my children on my back. And when they take off to run their race, they maybe make it to the top. I want you young men to think of yourselves. You know, you always hear this thing. You need to think of yourself as a world changer. Most people should not think of themselves as a world changer because what they would change the world into would be really bad. That's like Conrad Mbewe, one of the things he always he's he's probably the one of the greatest preachers alive today is from Lusaka Zambia, and he's called the African Spurgeon. He sometimes he's almost like. Paul, the greatest thing you could do for the church here in Africa is don't let any Americans come here. OK, and so but I'm telling you guys, if you will invest your lives into, I'm going to discover what it's to be a man, a man before God in the image of Christ, and then I'm going to take that and change the world. One other thing and then I'll be quiet for the discipleship guys here. Listen to this. Someone gets converted and you know what your main priority is. You want to teach them how to witness and disciple someone else. It's all superficial and artificial. You've got to begin at the beginning, you teach them to be a man. All we're doing is teaching, we're teaching them to take four spiritual laws and then a few books on discipleship and replicated into the lives of others. That's not it. You get some guys around you teach them to be men, teach them to be husbands, teach them to be fathers. That's what you want to do because that's what they're going to be. My greatest goal in my life, if someone asked me on an airplane like I shared last night, if someone says, what do you do for a living? I go, if they say, what do you do? I go, I'm a husband. And they look at me like, what else do you do? I'm a father. Well, but what else do you do? I do whatever I can to keep those other two things going. That's what I do, that's who I am. And so that you know this. Notice, I said husband before I said father, because the kindest thing I can do to my three little children, my two boys and my little girl who was recently born and is the most beautiful girl in the world. The greatest thing I can do for them is to love their mother. Because if they see me loving their mother, they're they're going to be the most secure children in the world because they're going to say dad's not going anywhere. For both of you, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this real quick, just many of the students here engaged in just sharing the gospel evangelism with people in their dorm, athletic team, fraternity, sorority, and probably the majority of the people that they're having conversations with would claim, oh, I'm a Christian, you know, I did that thing, you know, Paul, like you were saying earlier. But just coming off of your talk and first, John and Vody, I'd love to hear your thoughts, maybe a personal example of when you've had a friend or someone close to you that claims to be a Christian, but when you examine their life, you're pretty convinced that they're lost. What does a conversation like that look like? How do you approach that conversation? Maybe just an example would maybe help some of these students, maybe in some personal evangelism as time goes on. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. You know, when I when I was converted. That was what that was the big. I grew up in in the projects and drug infested, gang infested, South Central Los Angeles, California, I was raised by a single teenage Buddhist mother. I never heard the gospel till I got to college. Buddhism was the only spirituality that I knew. And so. Yeah, I was converted my freshman year in college. From that background and perspective. And began to share the gospel. The best I could. With everybody that I knew, especially the people in my family, and I was amazed at how many people in my family. Said the same thing. It just it boggled my mind, my my grandmother, my grandmother had seven kids from five different men. Swore up and down, she was a Christian, you know, you know, my my my paternal grandmother and grandfather. OK, that that was my mother's mother that the one I just my paternal grandmother and grandfather, my father's mother and father. They had three children between them, live next door to each other, were never married a day in their life. Swore up and down, they knew the good Lord. You know, so. I have to admit early on, I didn't do real well with that. I just. I didn't do real well with that, you know, because I was disgusted, I was absolutely disgusted and people ask me all the time, well, how did your mother, a young black woman in South Central L.A., the Buddhism thing, how did that? Here's what happened. My mother was raised in that family. With those people who claimed to know Christ and took her to church, was molested by a member of our family who was a deacon in the church, OK? And this Buddhist community that she ran into in L.A. as a young woman was the first group of people that she ever met who actually lived like they said they believed. That's why my mother was Buddhist. That's why that's why she left Christianity, OK, because of that. But what's interesting is my mother is now a born again, blood washed, Jesus loving and following Christian. Because she saw something happen to her baby boy that was unlike the counterfeit that she had seen before. I realized when that happened that me kind of pounding on people was a big deal. It wasn't nearly as effective, especially with people who were that close as me following up the change that God was bringing about in my life and talking from a biblical perspective about why that was happening and what it was. So it was really, in essence, not talking about the gospel as, you know, here's some propositions that you need to believe because they've heard all those propositions that they need to believe. But talking about the gospel from the perspective of like we heard today from Paul, no, no, no. Talk about the sanctification that is going on, the new creature that I am in Christ, this evidence of the work of God in my life and what I talk about, that aspect of Christianity, because that's what they don't know. That's what they don't get. What people get is here's some propositions. You know, if you believe this and you believe this and you want this rather than that, you say this, go to the magic part of the room, say the magic words and you're in. Not only are you in, but somebody will guarantee you they'll sign your Bible. You know, but when you start talking to people about real sanctification and you present the gospel in a holistic form and from a holistic perspective, they cannot then go back and say, oh, yeah, I got that. Because you're also talking about the sanctifying work that is taking place, the salvation that is happening in you, the evidence that is being born in you. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that we make is people have a misunderstanding about justification and sanctification and glorification and what we do instead of explaining to them the gospel in that wider spectrum. Like we heard tonight, we try to argue with them about what their minds have already been polluted towards in this false idea of what justification is.