Broadcasting from the west side of Big Brother City in the heart of Gridlock County, where preaching with impact is like plowing pavement. As people continue to place their hope in unsatisfying things, this is the Frederick Faith Debate. Sponsored by Putman Plumbing and Heating, how can we make you smile? On the show this week, Jonathan Schweitzer, senior pastor of Crossroads Valley Church. We're also joined by Imran Raz Razvi and his wonderful wife, Tammy Razvi. They are the founders of Conquered by Love Ministries. You can check them out online at conqueredbylove.org. We've been talking about parenting principles and the importance of feeling wanted, secure, approved, capable, and needed. That's why Jonathan and I get along so well, because he always makes me feel so wanted, secure, approved, capable, and needed. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't know I was capable of making you feel capable and needed. Well, at least I want you to make me feel that way. I'm feeling more secure about all that now. All right, well, I approve. That was good. I felt like we did that well. That was off the cuff. We should have recorded that on video. We've been doing this show for 11 years, we're finally capable. So we talked about the beginning of the show last week about the words that are used, and you know, I want to take credit for the parts that aren't mine. You do? You didn't ask me about the broadcasting from the west side of Big Brother City. But I asked you... That's all me. Nobody gave me that one. Yeah, yeah, in Gridlock County. Gridlock County, that's me. I was just thinking this, you know, this morning as you were opening up the show that The Big Brother part, that was good a couple years ago, but I think you need to upgrade that reality. What's a better word? I don't know. Like Snowden, the fact that everybody knows everybody's business, that's not just Big Brother, that's like the Naked Society. I don't know what you want to call it. I'm not calling it the Naked Society, I'm sorry. That'd be a completely different show. We have done three shows with this panel together, and we've touched on most of the things I was hoping that we would touch on, but it's also sparked some things that we wanted to make sure we fleshed out a little bit more this week. And there's one main thing I thought we'd spend a little more time talking about that we spent almost no time talking about. And we were under the illusion that October was Adoption Awareness Month. Maybe that led you astray. Apparently, in some parts of the universe, that might be true, but not here. In this part of the universe, November is Adoption Awareness Month, which actually, as it turns out, today is November 1st. So welcome to it. Happy November, everybody. So we are now entering Adoption Awareness Month. Thanksgiving's right around the corner. And we just had Halloween. You know, we ate lots of sugar-laden candies, which is how we demonstrate love to our children. That's what I learned in the first show. The first show we did together, Raz said, if you want to love your children, give them lots and lots of sugar-laden candy. Maybe the polar opposite of that perhaps. You should see his face right now. He's trying to figure out when he said that. i wanna uh... we were talking about i ask the question whether it was last week i ask the question about what do you do about parents who don't want to put in the hard work up front to make sure you have a well-adjusted emotionally healthy child uh... and you also don't appear to even want to deal with the ramifications of not having uh... well-adjusted healthy uh... emotionally child is abdicate the responsibility they're not interested in being a parent maybe they want to disappear from the scene completely or they're there but they've checked And I asked if you've had, you know, any experience with that. And it sounds like you have a personal experience with something along those lines. So, Tammy, why don't you share that? Well, I just wanted to share that adults also have those same five emotional needs that we were talking about with children. And sometimes there's something missing in the relationship. And we tend, as husband and wife, to kind of point out all the problems in the parenting strategy and that maybe pull us apart from each other. This is the problem, right? as opposed to looking to see where the strains are, or where could I minister to my spouse? Maybe some of their reactions is they have an emotional need that's not being met. Sounds like the love dare from Fireproof, the movie. It does. Well, you know, when I was a kid and my mom had first become a Christian, and she was going to church by herself, and my pastor at that point I said, you know, I see a bunch of ladies out there in the audience by themselves, and your husbands aren't there. Why don't you just stay home from church next Sunday and spend some time with your husband? Blasphemy! Exactly. And so, the next Sunday, she thought, well, okay, I'll try it. And so, she'd been asking him to go to church every Sunday, asking him to go, asking him to go. And he's like, no, no, no. And then, that next Sunday, She stayed home, cooked a big breakfast, sat and visited with him, just encouraged him on things that had happened in the week. And he's like, why aren't you going to church? She's like, oh, the pastor told me to stay home and spend time with you. He's like, I got to go see this church where this pastor told you to stay. Reverse psychology. Reverse psychology. Is that what that was? But what had happened was she just ministered to him and encouraged him and some things from the week and just spent some time. We're just building that relationship. And now he was open to those discussions as to what things were interesting her. And they ended up going to church. And he had been saved as a kid, but just hadn't had discipleship and began now again walking with the Lord. And they had a testimony of just a beautiful relationship where they were then ministering together to our family. And so that was a blessing. sometimes stepping back and looking at your spouse instead of saying, this is what's wrong with you. You're not going to church. You're not meeting the children's needs. You're doing this wrong in the parenting. Sometimes stepping back saying, what can I do to encourage you and point out the things that I see that are good, and I can meet some of those needs for you. So I'm tempted, Troy, and I'm going to submit to you on this. I'm tempted to want to ask these questions that deal with the gospel and how we present, how we approach the world. Do we approach them from the context of their sin or do we approach them from the context of these emotional needs that would help them to feel that God understands them and what they need and wants to show his love to them? Which one comes first? But I'm not sure that we have time to do that because we wanted to get into some other things. So what is your sentence? Well, if we can table that for now, just so we don't false advertise, I started by saying we're going to make sure we talked a little bit about adoption. So let's talk about that for a little bit. And if we have some time, we'll make sure we have some time. And actually adoption gets into the whole thing. Ending this panel discussion on gospel strategies and on the gospel message, you know, that strikes me as attractive anyway. So yeah, that's a good place to end. It's like a good tie. So adoption. Adoption is the perfect picture of the gospel message, isn't it? I mean, we are all adopted into God's family. Reconciliation. And so, you know, if you look at a perfect adoptive family, that's God and His children. And so we've got a beautiful picture of it. You know that there are 7 million children in the world today who need families. Today, who need families. 7 million? Where do you get that number from? 7 million children. Various organizations that deal with orphans all around the world, and you take their numbers and you add them together. 7 million. Why should I even bother trying to help them? I mean, there's just too many. Well, I'll tell you what. If 12% of the Christians in the world adopted, there wouldn't be a single child who needed a family. So 12% of the Christians need to adopt one child each. Yep. Then there will be no... And so that's actually a combined statue of like a two-parent family adopting a child. Only 12%. That's a doable number. And in scripture it tells us that we're all called to care for orphans. care for the orphans and widows. Every Christian's called to do that. So what does that look like? That looks like 12% of us are bringing home children by adoption. Clearly we can't all bring them home. There aren't enough children that need families. So if 12% of us bring home children by adoption, what's the rest of the 88% doing? Supporting those children ahead of time or walking with the adoptive families through this challenge of having a child who's been through trauma in their home? Do you think, if you've ever considered adoption, do you think if you had eight brothers and sisters in Christ walking with you? through that adoption, do you think you could bring home that older child and give them a family? And not to be too practical and pragmatic about it, you know, it almost feels dingy to bring up this reality, but imagine if those 7 million people, you know, young people, are brought into Christian homes. 12% of Christians would bring home 7 million children. You're ministering the gospel into 7 million lives in their formative years. I mean, you could be expanding the kingdom by leaps and bounds because Jonathan taught me, you know, we were talking last week about where these phrases come from at the beginning of the show. You know, Jonathan has said something that's been formative for me once when I was going through an issue with a family member, and he kind of stopped me in the middle. These guys have really pulled out the best of us toward one another. Feel the love. Yeah, how about that? Yeah, yeah. And Jonathan stopped me in the middle of me seeking advice from him on something, and he said, well, let me stop you and ask you something. Does this person you're trying to minister to, do you have a voice of authority? in their life. And I said, what do you mean? When you speak to them, do they receive it as though you have authority in their life, meaning they respect what you have to say, that you have a relationship with them where your opinion matters to them. Otherwise, you're just hot air. But if you have a relationship and they're like, you know what? Like if Jonathan came to me, and we joke around on the show all the time, but if he came to me off the air and said, hey, by the way, I just got to let you know something, you might not realize this, but when you do this or that, it's really offensive and you need to stop. I'd be like, wow, okay, well, Jonathan is pretty perceptive, and I trust where he's coming from, and that's going to speak to me. Whereas if some knucklehead off the street said that to me, I might give it a half a second of notice, but I'd probably dismiss it pretty readily, like, who are you? You don't even know me. Right. Who are you? I mean, maybe I need to be more careful how I project, but that's not really who I am because you don't know me. And so we would have authority as Christians in the lives of these seven million people because we would be raising them. That's absolutely correct. And if you look back at the history of Christianity, how did the Christianity explode in the first century? Because Christians would take in all the downtrodden, all the outcasts, all the people that were left on the side of the road. That's how America exploded for crying out loud. Read the Statue of Liberty. Right. So that's how Christianity exploded. Suddenly we're talking about immigration, and we're talking about it in a way that is really at the heart of it, isn't it? It is. If you bring somebody into your family, you now have authority. What America has done is given up that authority, so when immigrations come now, well, you can keep your own language, you can keep your own traditions, you can keep your own everything else, and so it's no longer having authority over these people, and that's why our culture is breaking down. They're shacking up with us. I'm going to avoid digging into that too much, just because there's a lot there. But the point is that there's an authority that comes when we choose to invite people into our family genuinely. Correct. And whether we invite them or somebody else does. Now, adoption really is a uniquely Christian thing. It's a Christian theme. It's throughout the Bible. That's what God has done for us. Most other religions don't actually adopt. They will out of necessity. If there's a couple that's not able to have children, then they may adopt. But in most other cultures and religions, it's not really something that is a central theme. And that is a big claim that I'm going to pay attention to as to whether or not adoption is something that's common out there or not. Because I'm a Christian, I want to think, yeah, that's one way that we're better than others. But I really want to search that out. Do Muslims have a history of adoption? Do Buddhists have a history of adoption? They have a history of caring for orphans. and widows, and that's part of their culture. I know that the Jewish community has the background of the whole Boaz and Esther, you know, and so the kinsman-redeemer idea. And I want to jump in just as a gentle, good-natured, but serious-minded rebuke of that spirit that a lot of Christians have. Right. You know, of, oh, this is another example of how we're better. Exactly. That completely misses the gospel. Yeah. The gospel is, we're not better. We're saved. You know, and we're being increasingly sanctified because of that salvation, but we're still sinful, we're still egocentric, we're still... Yes, we're not better, Christ is better. I totally fall under the egocentric thing all the time. Yeah, so we are definitely not better, Christ is better. And that's really where our strength lies. And we as Christians follow that theme of adoption, as Christ adopted us into His family, and we have been in the forefront. In fact, more Christians adopt than any other group of people in the world. Okay? Right now, about five percent of Christians adopt. That's pretty large. There's no other group that even comes close to that. We needed to be 17%, but it's only 5%. No, we need to be 12%. We said if 12% were to drop, we'd get the 7 million gone. Right. but what what what we have but that's all the children that need families so right now i'm saying we have five percent are already doing it but like twelve percent more would do it just total so we don't need seven percent more of the christians and that's it to the that's also it's actually less of that the senate and the amazing statistic four million the main statistic is that twenty five percent of christians have thought about adoption they've actually considered it they've tabled it for one reason or another and only five acted on it so if we get half of the people that have actually thought about it to actually do it, instead of one out of five, it would be completely different. And when we're not doing this, it's opening it up for a lot of other people to adopt. There's a lot of other family situations that adopt. There's single parents that adopt. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but that gives up that authority structure of a Christ-centered family and where there's a head of household and there's a family that is a mother and a father that I think is the ideal setting of what Christ So Troy, these guys are just like you and Dina, right? You know, when it comes time to have a great discussion, you guys are like cutting each other off. And so Tammy's over here, for those of you that can't see it, you know, like reaching her hand over. Hey, give me that mic. I got something to say here, too. Real quick, Jonathan, how many children do you have now? I have five. How many do you have in your family all together? We have 12 so far. So they actually took care of you and I, too, and a couple other families. So I'm going to give Tammy a chance. We have five birth children and seven adopted children. So we have the same number of birth children that Jonathan has. Yeah, but you're seven times better than him, apparently, because you have seven adopted children. Again, this isn't about being better. It's about being full of love. And I tell you what, each one of them is a blessing, and we've been blessed. It's a lot of work to bring home a child by adoption, and so we're not encouraging people to just, well, let's just do it to save the children. We want people to go into it with their eyes open. And that's what we were talking about before, is it's not that just 12% have to step up. 100% of Christians need to step up and follow that process. God calls us to care for orphans, because if we come as a community around these children and the families that are the ones bringing them home, then it's doable. But absolutely, these children come from hard places. These children come from backgrounds which are really, really challenging. Every child that gets to the place of needing to be adopted has been through some sort of trauma, even if it's day one at the hospital. So does it cost a lot of money? I mean, I don't have a lot of money to be able to adopt kids. I live pretty simply by choice, not trying to, as a pastor, require a huge salary. Could I afford it? The answer to is it expensive is yes and no. So there it depends on what type of adoption you're doing. Adoptions that are done from overseas, there's a lot of children all over the world that need families and those are typically very expensive. However, Over and over again, we've watched God provide the money when a family says, yes, I'll do this. Lord, I can't afford it. Would you find the way to fund this if you want this child to be my family? And we have watched over and over. We have one of those testimonies ourselves where we were working on an adoption that was not going to cost anything. And we are waiting for a match. And God picked up a little girl that needed a family and put her right in our lap and said, this is supposed to be your daughter. And we said, all right, Lord. Well, we feel that you're saying that to us. We are excited about that daughter. We can't afford it. We can't afford to do this as an international adoption. And without us making a request to any person, simply to God, that money for her adoption was provided for us in a way we couldn't have expected. And we've watched that story over and over again. So, yes, it can be expensive if it's done overseas. If you're called to be adopting and you have a heart for it and you don't know specifically the country outside of the United States to adopt from, it's possible to adopt within the United States for free. Zero cost. That's, and I can tell you exactly how to do that. There's there today in just in the United States, there's 120,000 children in foster care waiting for families today. If somebody feels like you're speaking to their heart right now, if they were to contact you via your website, you could help them figure out how to do this on the most affordable way possible. Absolutely. And they still have to feed and clothe the child, there's some expense, but the adoption process would be... The adoption costs, we can talk about how to do that with adoption costs without any cost. There's children that need families... Conqueredbylove.org. Conqueredbylove.org is the website. For the purposes of adoption, there's a group called Special Needs Children, which means that they're harder to place, they don't find families for them as often. That's children who are over six years old, or siblings, two children, maybe a two-year-old and a five-year-old, or any child of an ethnic minority are harder to place children. They don't always find families for them. And some of these kids age out of foster care and have no one for their adult life to have a relationship with. as a family. So these kids that are in that category, most states will cover all of the adoption costs and the legal fees for those children to be able to find a home. So yes, as you just said a minute ago, you have to pay to raise these children, but the cost for the adoption can be free. Because you guys have big families by today's standards. And I know somebody has 19 children. You guys have a small family by that standard. But I used to be, I've been in the radio business for a long time. I used to be on the programming side where I was coaching and developing talent for on the air and that sort of thing. And I noticed something over the years that it became a truism for me. In a talk, a spoken word format like what we're doing now in talk radio, There are a lot of people that are able to pull off a half-hour show like this, and even an hour-long show, but you ask them to do a second hour, and they struggle to do that second hour. There's something, there's this hurdle, like this sound barrier almost, to try to get past. Doing the first hour, they hit a wall, and doing that second hour is hard. But once they can successfully do a second hour, they can do a third, fourth, they could do 24 hours. I'm wondering, is there a similar principle with children? Have you noticed that adding a second or a third child is hard, but once you got that many, you might as well have 20? You know what I mean? I feel like I've noticed that. For me, that was somewhere between three and four. Yeah, in some respects, things are easier simply because you've started to put into place some ways to have life flow. You move from a main-demand defense to a zone defense. Once you're in a zone defense, you're recognizing the need to train them, you know. That's a Bill Cosby line, I believe. Is it? I think so. It is. I think it is, as a matter of fact, yeah. So, however it is, there's still those individual emotional needs. And these children that are adopting, as I was just saying, it's important to go into it with your eyes open because you are bringing home children who have very high emotional needs. And that's why we need every Christian brother and sister to come alongside somebody and walk with them. How can we support these families? They're going to go through a two- or three-year period of letting this child develop that foundation that we talked about last week. and that's important that they have that opportunity to do that with some support. So one of the things that I often counsel people is there's a lot of parents that will go into an adoption with the purposes of saving a child. and they have no idea that the only there's a martyr thing right and there's a lot of the bringing in uh... a cancer to the family where it affects everybody else in the whole families as well as i was totally wondering about that how would i get children fall apart because they they are thinking they're gonna save this child they're not thinking about all the challenges and the in the time they have to spend and the time they have to take away from there the birth of the children already in the family to devote to the new child And until they understand that, it becomes a conflict and a big problem. So, it can tear a family apart, and one of the things we teach is, exactly the three years, you have to put aside three, just like you had a new baby. Now, we've had parents and families that have adopted, okay? The adopted and older child has a lot of challenges, and that very same week, they get a call from the church, say, hey, Betty Sue had a baby. Can you bring dinner for these three days? Hello, we just had a baby. Yes, our baby was seven years old, but it's a baby. And in fact, it's much harder to raise a seven-year-old baby than it is to raise an infant baby, a zero-year-old baby. And I don't mean to make this equivalent in a way that would be offensive, but a lot of times we have a feature on The Morning Show with Bob Miller where every week on Tuesdays they bring in a pet of the week from Animal Control. And they oftentimes will give a warning like, hey, you know, Don't just get the Christmas puppy. Be prepared. Make sure you know what you're getting yourself into. Get prepared. Don't get taken away by your emotions. And then a week into it, you're like, holy cow. Because the puppy, you can bring it back to animal control, I guess. You can't do that with the child. I mean, well, maybe you can. I don't know what the rules are. But the reality is that some parents, even just with their own kids, get to the place where they haven't really thought through what it means to be a parent and get down the road and are stuck being a parent, not even an adoptive parent, just a regular parent. So anyways, yeah. Right. So we need to go in with your eyes open. So we talk about, okay, well go in with your eyes open. What does that mean? What am I going to expect? I'm going to expect that there's huge challenges, behavioral challenges. You want to sell them on the idea and then try to talk them out of it. No, I want to say there's a need and some of us are called to do it. Let me tell you what it looks like. It looks like I'm going to allow this child to be a baby. So how do I do that practically? You know, I brought home a 12-year-old. So if I have my newborn baby and I walk down the aisle in the grocery store and that newborn baby starts to scream because she's hungry, you know, we get lots of real nice looks. Oh, look at that cute baby. And everybody thinks that, oh, I ought to sit down and feed her or something. But if I take a 12-year-old and I walk down the aisle with that 12-year-old who's never had his needs met, and is an emotional mess, and he starts screaming, I'm hungry, I need something, I'm hungry, get me some food. We get lots of looks, too, but they're sort of different, you know? Bad parent, out of control. How could you have a 12-year-old that is so... Right, and that's the reality is, he's not acting his age, right? Absolutely he is. He's acting his emotional age. He has zero foundation, and so he's acting the age of an infant, emotionally. If we give him that foundation, then he can be able to act the age of a 12-year-old. So this is a total 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration scenario that these principles that you're talking, anybody could walk them out, especially if they're in Christ and so they're looking to Christ to get their own emotional needs met, but the reality is that when it comes to walking it out, That's where the difficulty is because there's pain and there's discouragement and there's confusion in the moment and learning to, you know, you need a good support structure. In the midst of all that, you've got to count the cost at every level if you're going to go into it. And that's where the other 88% of the Christians come in. They can support. Why not provide meals for families that have done this? Why not come in and clean the house for a little bit? Because they already have their hands full. That's where the rest of the families come in. And this does connect to how we wanted to end the show with talking about how this all relates to the gospel. And I was, you know, kind of joking, but not really. I mean, you want to talk people into, you know, make Christianity attractive, but then talk them out of it. Because they have to count the cost. Right. You know, that's the part that's missing in the gospel proclamation in today's American culture. You know, prosperity gospel, that sort of thing. There will be suffering. There's two sides to it. Right. Yeah. So, you know, you're the pastor in the room, so you've got less than two minutes. If you want to take 60 seconds and explain a gospel, give me the gospel presentation as it relates to what we've been talking about for four weeks in 60 seconds. Okay, well, I was going to ask the question, do you start with the love or do you start with the sin, right? Because the gospel doesn't make sense that we've been forgiven, that the wrath of God that was coming toward us was taken by Christ, that we've been reconciled by the blood of Jesus Christ, you know, into his family. Like, all those elements of the gospel only make sense if we were not reconciled, if his wrath was towards us, and we had a significant break in the relationship, and we were genuinely sinners that were headed for punishment. Well, then I'll answer the question. And so the question is, what comes first? The love, the forgiveness, or the sin? And I know it's going to be a popular answer. We start with love. For God so loved the world that He gave. God loves us, but He had to give His Son. Why? So that sin comes next. God loves you. He wants a relationship with you. He desires you to respond to His call on your life. Love first always. Always love first. And the greatest of these is love. Everything else will pass away. What will be remaining is love. God is love. Start with love. We get so wrong-headed on wanting to tell a bunch of sinners that they're lost and they're sinful. Yeah, okay, whatever. love them first, become attracted, be winsome, and then they want to hear what you have to say. He has some authority in their life. They want to respect what you have to say. And then they're going to hear when you say, you know what, that God who loves you, he needs you to turn from your sin. He needs you to repent. So love first. There's so many implications for that, that we can't get into right now. That's Jonathan Switzer, Senior Pastor at Crossroads Valley Church. Thank you to Imran and Tammy Razvi, founders of Conquered by Love Ministries. I'm Troy Skinner. Our sponsor is Putman Plumbing and Heating. How can we make you smile? And How to Read Proverbs is what I've been reading lately by Tremper Longman III. Another recommend. That's four in a row. Gotta love that. Till next week. God bless.