Hey, good morning. We're going to get rolling here in our adult Bible study. There's a handout available up here if you don't have it. This is lesson seven in this series on the righteousness of God. We've been working around the edges of this concept of renewing the mind. I want to really focus on that today. I have a whole lot to say, and I managed not to probably get most of it on this piece of paper. But we'll get to it at a high level, and if we need to, we'll do some follow-up to this in another lesson. The Apostle Paul, told us in Romans chapter 1 that lost humanity has senseless thinking, as he described it, a darkened understanding, a darkened heart, and a reprobate mind. It's a bleak picture, as I've said many times. And this salvation that is the power, you know, the power of God unto salvation, this gospel message, has to address that issue. And nobody becomes a Christian without having a darkened mind, a reprobate mind, a darkened heart, we all come into it that way. Even if we were raised in a Christian nation or a Christian home, we have a lot more of the culture in us than we'd ever like to admit. And all you have to do is start studying some history and look at how people thought about things, the general cultural outlook among common people 100 years ago to see that things have changed a lot in 100 years. And we take in a lot of this stuff, and the apostle says, people have this darkened understanding, this reprobate mind, but what does that do? What affects everything we do? It affects how we do science. It affects how we report the news. It affects how we think about political issues. It affects everything. It affects how we think we ought to raise children, whether we can tell boys from girls, whether we think men can have babies, all kinds of stuff come out of how we think. And so Paul talks about, and we spent a lot of time on it last time in Romans 8, that you can orient your thinking, that is set your mind, on the things of the Spirit of God and experience life and peace. Or you can orient your mind on the things of the flesh. And he's talking about Christians, not even putting aside how someone outside of Christ would think. They can only have their mind oriented one way. They can dress it up and make it look good But it's always oriented toward the flesh and and he he gets there and he talks about this mindset Then he pulls together 12 chapters, and I'm intentionally just skipping a 9 through 11 It's important stuff, but he deals there with national Israel and does not really add new to this matter of how one becomes a Christian and how one grows. But he does address why a national Israel largely had rejected Jesus. So in Romans 12, he starts off with two things he says. I'm going to really focus on one of them, but I want to mention both. Because they go together this transformation so that we can exhibit the righteousness of God in our life Has to what when he tries to boil it all down to the elevator speech when you've got Half a minute to say what your position is. This is Paul therefore Therefore in Romans 12 1 means read the first 11 chapters. That's the therefore everything he had to say in one word Therefore he's drawing his conclusion brothers and sisters. This is to Christians No one else is going to do this in view of the mercies of God God saved you you had zero to do with it. You did nothing to get it. Keep it prove it any of that nonsense that people like to think about. However, God has this odd idea that fear is not the great motivator, although fear will motivate people. It's the mercy of God that's the great motivator to do good, to turn to God, to respond to God favorably. So it's by the mercies of God. Up to here, it's all been about the mercies of God that not only got us saved, but freed us from sin's dominion so that we could yield our members to be servants of righteousness. So in view of, he says, thinking about the mercies of God that he spent the prior chapters Explaining I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice This is an odd thing because sacrifices always die. It's the nature of it. No one ever has a Sacrifice thinking in Old Testament terms and then they take it home and it remains the family pet. It doesn't work that way and But here it does, you're a living sacrifice. He said, and it started in chapter six, because you're not under sin, you can yield your members, your arms, your legs. That's just a metaphor for your whole person can now be yielded to be a servant or slave of righteousness. He said that, and this is capturing that idea. A living sacrifice, but why call it a sacrifice? Why use that word? Why not just say, now that you're not under sin, be a good boy, be a good girl. Do what's right. Why a sacrifice? Yeah, it represents the total commitment. It's the whole person, okay? So this isn't a check-off list where you can have a list. We've talked about that before where you've prayed and went to church and things like that. I've kind of checked off the list. It's really the whole person. It's your whole life. It's everything, Sunday and all the days in between. But also there's something else. Think about from a Jewish reader when he sees sacrifice. What's he thinking about? He's thinking about those animals that went to the temple and died. That was their worship. That was part of their worship. He says, a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. You couldn't take just any sacrifice to the temple. Jesus becomes the Passover lamb. John announces that in the first chapter of his gospel. He is set aside at the triumphal entry as the Jewish folks would be setting aside a sheep, was male and a certain age and without a blemish at all. And Jesus is set aside to be the Passover lamb that Friday, April 3, 33 AD. You couldn't take the lamb that you knew was on its last leg, going to die in a couple of days anyway, might as well take him to the temple and use him. I don't want to use the good one, I pay good money for that. We'll take the sick lamb. You couldn't do that. And neither is God interested in a poor sacrifice, right? They would understand this in the language of Leviticus, a sacrifice holy and pleasing to God. How can we be holy and pleasing to God? Well, that was the whole thing. We're identified with Christ, who's holy, but we also have this ability now. He has said over and over to now serve righteousness. We can actually be that. You see the point? Your life becomes your worship. We think of worship as the songs we sing, that's true. Your life becomes your worship. What you do between Sundays is your worship. If you want to think of yourself as one who worships God, you have to ask the question, what do I do between Sundays? There's no other way. It's your whole life presented as something pleasing to God. This is your true worship. See? He just says it. That's true worship. You don't do that, no worship. You can live like the devil all week. and sing like an angel on Sunday, and you have not worshipped God. about how sacrifices, when they were given, they were gone, they were given to God, they were usually destroyed, you can't get them back. You'd be like, okay, I'm gonna bring it in, drop it off, and then pick it up and take it home with me. That word of sacrifice to them is also pointing out that once you make that decision, it's intended to be given. You're giving your life to God through Jesus, and it's intended that once you do that, you can't just suddenly turn around and be like, you know, I'm God today, like what you're saying, God today, I can't. It's it's an unacceptable sacrifice doesn't mean you're not a Christian But it means in this sanctification process that you you know, you're sort of offering leftovers God ever after I've after I've done everything I want to do if I have something left over it's yours and Not a way to do it. And he calls this the true worship. And then the part I really wanted to focus on, do not be conformed to this age. I'm just going to replace this word age with culture. I think it'll help us understand this in a practical way. Because this isn't, you know, I get to do a Zoom conference every Saturday morning. that has people all over the world. We have someone in Australia, someone in Sweden, couple people in the Philippines, one guy in the Middle East, even a person in Beaumont, places like that, and then me in Chapel Hill, Texas. You know, and we talked about this culture thing yesterday. Their culture isn't the same. You know what the people in the Philippines, a pastor that's 20 years older than me says? He says, my biggest concern is us being influenced by the American culture. Think about that. Right? Because we are. He says, you know, looking at it from someone outside the United States, good, bad, or otherwise, we're leading the culture. And we are. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I just got to interject. There was an Iranian woman, Christian, who moved here from Iran and started living here. And you've heard this, as I've said it before, but she called it a satanic world of life. It is. And the problem, in part, is we really like it. And the other problem is some of it's really, really subtle. So we'll talk a little about that. But if you had a renewed mind like Paul's thinking about, you would see what she sees, right? You would look around and say, oh my goodness, what are we thinking? Well, and the thing is, in a lot of Islamic countries, like Iran, some of the things that are just basic morality that are actually in agreement with the scriptures, because it's another Abrahamic religion, despite some issues there, they're serious about it. This, you know, men can have babies stuff. They're like, really? No. They're really serious about it. And it kind of puts us to shame in some way, but. There's a lot to be said when countries where Christians are being persecuted, those countries are praying for us. Yeah. You know, we pray for them. Oh, we're sorry that you're being persecuted and all this type of stuff and prosecuted and put to death. But then they're going, it's like, We feel sorry about your faith, your path that you're taking here in America. We're praying for you. That says a lot. We think in terms of America sending out missionaries to the world, and we've done that. I've met missionaries from the world come into the United States. You know what they say is our chief sin? One word, materialism. That's it. I can buy everything I want here. Got the money to do it. Got the options to do it, including the church I want to go to. I'll make sure that that person never says anything I don't want to hear from the pulpit. And when they do, I'll just go and put me somewhere else. It's in us. So this renewed mind is a big deal. We want to cleanse the cultural stuff that doesn't honor God. It's not every aspect of it. Especially if you grew up with some parents who were trying to raise you according to scriptural principles, you've got some good stuff, but everybody comes into the relationship with Christ. with some things that need to be jettisoned. And that's what he's telling us. He says, don't be conformed to this age. Well, how do you not conform to the culture? You've got to think different. You don't start off good and then get conformed to the culture. You start off with a cultural mindset, and you've now got to be renewed in your mind from that. It's how you think, but with an orientation to the things of God. That's what it means. to your mind, and to be renewed is a word only used twice in scripture. Paul uses it in Ephesians and here, and it's not even used in the Greek literature, and it's a very unique word, but we think it's this idea of a total reconstruction, right? So I like fixing antique cars. If the interior looks pretty good, maybe you paint it and it looks like a new car. God's not painting us. The interior is bad. The exterior's bad. The motor doesn't run. The tires were put on 30 years ago and they're flat and they're not, you know. At the end of the day, it's a total restoration of everything in the mind, how we think. And that's what he's talking about. So I want to look at this, and I made some notes here. The Ephesians four passage is really important. I'm not going to read it because it's just, I'll give you a lot of references. We can't go through all of them, but note number one, Paul's central exhortation. Because we're no longer under the dominion of sin, we can yield ourselves to righteousness, but that only happens in conjunction with this renewing the mind. Don't think of it like two separate things. I need to yield to righteousness, be a living sacrifice, and I need to renew the mind, like I might do one and not the other. It's important. These things go together. There's lots of people who know lots of scripture. Solomon's an example of that. And even King David, in parts of his life, did some atrocious things. Knowing the truth will not guarantee that you live it out. So it's both the yielding to righteousness and this renewed mind. And I'll add, renewing the mind is not merely knowing facts. That's going to be important. So we're going to look at that. Our minds are not renewed just by having new information or knowing behavioral standards. Don't get drunk. Don't covet. Don't cheat on your wife. Those are all good things. They're in the Bible. And if you do them, Jesus is going to deal with you, even as a Christian. There are going to be consequences in your life for being an idiot. There always are. God lets us reap where we've sown, right? But you can know behavioral standards, and it doesn't mean you have a renewed mind. Renewed mind begins with the content Romans 1-11, I think. We talked about this before. Paul talks about the predicament, understanding lost humanity, understanding this reality. I'm always getting folks telling me, I'm just shocked what I heard. Why? Did you read Romans 1? Why are you shocked at what you heard on TV? Why are you shocked at, you know, California, you know, having, you know, trying to have a law that can make it illegal for their parents not to affirm their child's chosen gender as minors. Why are you shocked? God told you how they think. And then when we see that work its way out, we're shocked, and we shouldn't be. We need a healthy realization that that stuff in Romans 1 and through Romans 3, that's real stuff. Apart from Christ, we really are under sin. We think like it, talk like it, and act like it, and it comes out. And so this content in Romans 1-11 is important, but I have a statement here I want you to think about. One of them is obvious, everyone would agree. We ought to be a student of the Word of God. The Word of God is going to, think of how Paul calls it in 1 Corinthians 2, the mind of Christ. This is going to help change how we think if we accept it as reality, accept it as truth. But I also wrote, be a student of the culture. Why would that matter? Why as a Christian should I be a student of the culture? Was Paul, can you think of an example of the apostle being a student of the culture? Uh-huh in what way Absolutely The Oropagus or the Mars Hill? Yeah. He knew exactly how to speak to those people. He knew it because he knew the Jewish worldview was different. For one, they were monotheist. He doesn't have to tell them, you know what, there's one God, not 12 gods. But in Acts 17, he goes to the Greeks and he has to say, you know what, are some superstitious folks." He quotes some of their poets. He knows their poets from ancient days, and there is a reason for that, and a whole back story that I don't have time for. But I saw all these idols on the way into the park here, and you've even got one that says, to the unknown God, and you've got a God for everything, right? You've got a God for chocolate cake, and a God for Blue Bell ice cream, and then you've got a God that you don't even know the name of this God, except legend says this God saved your bacon a few centuries ago and removed a plague. they knew about this culturally. He says, you know that God that removed that plague a few centuries ago? And y'all said, we don't know who this God is. I'm here to tell you his name. Right? And begins talking about it. But he deals with it. He knows the culture. Our issue when I talk about knowing the culture, we see the symptoms. We see some of the things that we're like, that's just not right. But how did they get here? How did we go from the way Americans thought in 1650 to the way they thought in 1950 and now fast forward 70 years, which has radically changed in that 70 years. How did that happen? And how do they think now? It's not just that they do these things that seem odd and all the confusion about gender and so forth. it seems right to them. In fact, we're the ones that are wrong. How did that happen? What's the underpinning foundations of how they think? That's what I'm talking about being a student of the culture. If I understand better how they got where they are, I'm gonna have better discernment. Because a lot of Christians are getting swept up into this stuff. No discernment at all. That's part of it. The other thing is can I have a dialogue with people that might be profitable for them? Can I have a dialogue with a culture that I don't understand? Paul thinks you can't. He made sure to know the culture before he got there. Presumably he had to speak some of the language to do it, right? But he knew it. So I'll say a little more about that in a moment. But how can we be a good student of the culture? You think of some ideas about how that might happen? Not just to see the symptoms. That's easy. Oh, that's wrong. The Bible says don't do that. Okay? If you go dialogue with that person, they're going to say, I don't believe the Bible, and I'm right. I am morally right, and you're wrong. Where do we go from there? How might I be a good student of the culture? One thing's obvious. I can't hide my head in a hole, the proverbial ostrich approach. Frankly, evangelical churches have done that for a long time and done it well. How about actually reading, just with a critical and discerning eye, some of the stuff that's out there, but with a view to really analyzing it from a biblical standpoint. If I say to myself, I'm not quite sure where to start on that, well then I know where I need to start. I need to go back and make sure I understand, and I'll mention some more about this in a minute, but kind of the, what are the biblical foundations for a biblical worldview? And I've got some listed down here on my notes, but I'll tell you in a minute. But if you keep up with some of this stuff, I'll give you an example. There was an article, and I think it was on maybe Fox, but I found it. I don't know how I came across it, but I found it yesterday. Someone who's a scientist with, you know, a piece of paper from an institution of higher learning wrote an article, a journal article, a peer review journal article in a major news source to say all the California fires are caused by climate change and it's all our fault because we drive cars and not Teslas, right? And so it's all our fault. But what he said was, after publishing it, he says, I'm not retracting what I said. But the public really needs to know that you cannot publish in any leading scientific journal and say that the cause of the fires or the weather are anything other than climate change solely caused by the human footprint. If you suggest any other possible effect, they will not publish. If you cannot publish, you cannot get grants. If you cannot get grants, you do not eat. It's that simple. I thought scientists just were noble searchers of truth. Well, what did Romans 1 say about humanity apart from Christ? See, we have this idea somehow, and you certainly hear it from the culture, scientists are above reproach. They don't have a darkened understanding and a reprobate mind. No, they do. They do. And if Satan has an agenda and he's going to try to change the way we think, he's certainly going to control information. He says, that sounds like communism. We call it socialism, it sounds more palatable. It's like calling a bread pudding a cream brulee, so it sounds like something you actually want. But it's still communism, right? But this isn't new, and this is also true of anything in a scientific journal about Darwinism. I could tell you story after story of real people with real doctorates from the leading institutions in the world who said something that in just an offhand way suggested that Darwinism may not all together be right. And they lost their jobs. One guy lost his job. He was the head of the journal, of a leading journal, because he let a journal article slip through with one sentence that said, maybe there's a designer. lost his job. So I'm just telling you, things like this, we need to know. We need to know something about our culture and have some discernment on this. And I've added here, how might knowing history be important? I'm by no means a historian and only in recent years have taken to seriously studying it, but it occurs to me that a substantial part of the Bible is a history book. 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, Esther, Genesis, history, right? Full of history. Why? Because people revise it. We call it the 1619 Project right now, but this isn't new. People revise history. If we learn our history, even just to go back and read what people were writing and thinking during the time of World War I, we can see the evolution of thinking, and it helps us see how and where it begins to depart from a Judeo-Christian heritage that came before it. It helps me discern in a way when I can see the movement and how it's changing. I hope that makes some sense. So I have a section on discernment. I want to read something from Hebrews chapter 5 on discernment. Part of a renewed mind is learning to discern. And I want to talk about how you learn to discern. Taking in the Word of God is part of it, but not the whole thing. I have a garage full of tools. I have tools no one else needs because a bunch of them only work on Corvairs made between 1960 and 1964. But I have other tools. In fact, I have a tool for near everything. On car working. I just do. Does that make me a mechanic? Does that make me a skilled mechanic? I have tools? No. It's like saying I've got 12 Bibles at home. Do you have a Corvair? Do you have tools? I better be right because no one else can work on it. But you know, you can have Bibles and you know what you can do? You can wear a gym outfit and you can go to the gym and walk through it and chit chat with some people and walk out and you can do it five days a week and you won't get in shape. You won't lose weight. That's like thinking if I walk through the church, you know, once in a while, make sure God's still alive, you know, I'm going to have a renewed mind. You're not. My tools don't make me a mechanic. I've got to use them. Our tools as Christians, it's the Word of God enabled by the ministry of the Spirit. And that's what Hebrews 5 says. Look in verse 12 of Hebrews 5. It says, although by this time you ought to be teachers, doesn't mean that every person that he's speaking to needs to, you know, lead the adult Bible study. But you ought to have reached a point where you can speak to a person who's new in the faith and teach them about the Word of God. Just in a conversation, they ask you some basic questions. You ought to be able to teach them. But he says, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God's revelation again. It's not really, I think, that they actually had literally forgotten, but a renewed mind was never knowing the truth. It was knowing the truth and seeing its implications to my daily walk, and then actually doing it. See, because you can know a whole lot. In a nutshell, he says, you need milk and not solid food. It's almost like you need to go down back to the basics so you can then think about how it applies to your life. And then there's the sentence I wanted you to see. Now, everyone who lives on milk, we all have to start there in our Christian walk. It's not just knowing stuff, though. It's seeing how it applies to the decisions I make, how I analyze the information coming in through the media, the TV, the books, I read all of it. He said, everyone who lives on milk lives on milk your whole life. Okay? Inexperienced with the message about righteousness. This title of this series is The Righteousness of God. The goal of the transformation process is to exhibit the righteousness of God. Sometimes, in this case, the scriptures are referred to the message of righteousness. He says you're inexperienced. Why? You own all the tools, but you really haven't changed a tire yet. You haven't done your own break job yet. The fact that you have every special tool for doing that hardly makes you knowledgeable. Inexperienced. What are you, in an unusual word. It's not that they don't have the Word of God. They're inexperienced in applying it. But then he adds, because he's a baby or an infant, but solid food. I wish they would just say a T-bone steak or something. You know, for Texas people, we get our own translation. But a porterhouse is for the mature, for those whose senses have been trained. That word trained, we get a word gymnasium. That was my example earlier of, you know, walking through the gym doesn't get you in shape. But it does cost you a lot. So they've been trained. to distinguish between good and evil. So this isn't something that you just learn it and you know it. You're taking in the Word of God, but you're applying it to life. It's the tools that you're applying to life. How else am I going to analyze what I'm hearing? God says, I know reality. I want you to have the very mind of Christ. is I take in the word of God and actually use it. James says, be a doer, not a hearer only. That's how you become mature. And that's how you renew the mind. And so it's solid food. Does that question or comment, thought about that? Does that make sense? Well, I know people that they're happy to use wildfire insurance. Yeah, and you have to ask the question, how does someone get there? I would argue that no one ever really starts there. they can get in that place. And Paul calls that death. He says, the wages of sin, talking to Christians, this is what would apply to non-Christians, but he's talking to Christians in Romans 6, verse 23, wages of sin is death. The whole idea of feeling disconnected from God and no intimacy no fellowship I don't feel like my prayers are being answered, but I'm cool with it You know heaven isn't gonna be sitting on a cloud playing a flute sitting Indian style and some incense candles burning These weird ideas weird. This is what I'm gonna show you in a second in Hebrews, but we're being trained for something We're his workmanship. What's the goal? Why is it He wants to shape us into holiness? We've got a long future ahead of us, and we've got something to do. And this whole thing about the Kingdom and all that, that's important. So we're going to talk about that. We need training in righteousness. Let me show you something from 2 Timothy. I'll just allude to 2 Timothy, you know this. That's the verse that says that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable. Right? All Scripture. And of course it's at a time when the Old Testament is still their primary Scripture, but there's new things being written. It's evident that the Apostle Peter and Paul understood they were writing Scripture. But 2 Timothy 3.16, he says, All Scripture is God-breathed, or inspired by God, profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting, I don't like any of those things. Well, I'm okay with the teaching, but the rebuking and correcting, I'll have none of that. Think about that. Good Bible teaching and preaching at times should rebuke and correct us. That's just a fact. Rebuke is your wrong. Correction is here's how you could do it right. But he goes on and says, and this is the part I want you to see, and for training, righteousness." There it is again. Didn't he just call it the message of righteousness in Hebrews 5? We don't know for sure who wrote Hebrews, but we're talking about the same thing. We're in a training program as Christians. This isn't, like you said, Monica, Monique, sorry. No, no, I corrected it. Every time I learn something new, though, like a name, something's going. It's just full. That's all there is to it. But like the idea of just kind of my path to heaven, no, it's more than that. You're being trained for the kingdom. You're gonna stand before Christ and give him the account, and then you're being trained for this kingdom, training in righteousness. And then Hebrews 12, that I'm just gonna touch on at a high level, but I want you to see something there. Keep in mind, and if you have an old translation like a King James, it uses a word that's gonna be a little misleading here. It will use this word chastisement. I don't know exactly what that means, but it sounds really bad Okay, it sounds like the you know at the dentist when that drills running that's chastisement that weird sound it makes in your head But but the translation when I just read in 2nd Timothy 316 training and righteousness that word training It's the word that in the King James here is chastisement In Ephesians, when it says to raise your children in the nurture, in admonition of the Lord, that nurture, chastisement. That's a big difference. There's a big gulf between nurture. Sitting down, eating a bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce on it, and chastisement at the dentist, or talking to the people at the Internal Revenue Service after you get a letter. That's chastisement. It's a big difference. And so when I look at this, your new translations will say discipline. But take that to be the full range. It could be negative. It could be time out. It could be taking the Board of Education to the seat of learning. But discipline can be positive. where you're just explaining to your child why we don't speak a certain way or do a certain thing. It's not because they've even done it. That's discipline. It's molding. It's teaching. It's shaping. It's training in righteousness. Paul says to these people, and he's not chastising them in Hebrews, they are under persecution by non-believing Jews. They've had their stuff stolen. They have lost their job at the mill. Their kids are being bullied at school. All this stuff is happening in a very real sense. And he says, you know, one of your problems, you forgot a single verse in the Proverbs, This is Hebrews 12, 5. You've forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons. Solomon says things in the book of Proverbs and he speaks to a son. You can just read it. He says, my son, do this, don't do that. He says, you forgot that one thing. What was that one thing they forgot? Solomon's words, my son, do not take the Lord's discipline. I want to read the word training. Do not take the Lord's training lightly. Lose heart when you're reproved by him. That's the negative side for the Lord's train. The Lord trains the one he loves God is training us Verse 7 endure suffering. That's their persecution. They're not being chastised for being bad. They were being persecuted He says endure the persecution as training Oh Oh, I don't want to be trained that way, Lord. I would never want to be trained by being uncomfortable. This is why it's important. If you haven't done it, sign up for the Voice of the Martyrs. You can go online and look at that if you've never heard of it. Get on their email thing and they'll send you an email once a week about people suffering around the world. The mainstream news won't tell you. If you read the government reports they'll tell you there's no Christian persecution in Egypt. If you talk to a missionary in Egypt like I did, he said, no I don't get persecuted, but I take a band of men with me all carrying automatic rifles. Think about it. Ok, because we need to know this stuff. People being suffering around the world and God uses that to train. And when we get marginalized here or persecuted or canceled for saying something that God said, we're also going to be trained by God in that moment. If you're without training, which all receive, that which all receive, every Christian is getting trained, whether they're cognizant of it or not. If you're without training, then you're an illegitimate child and not sons. The only way it's possible that you are not in God's training program is you're not actually a child of God at all. If you're a child of God, you're in His training program. We need to realize that. I'm being trained and for something. What's the goal? He talks about earthly fathers. Earthly fathers train us, verse 9, for their own benefit, but we respect them for training us. But verse 10, they disciplined us for a short time based on what seemed good to them. But He, God, does it, that is trains us, for our benefit. What is the benefit of His training of us? What is the goal of His training of us? So that we can share His holiness. training for righteousness of God. Peter would say, in what he would wrote, that we have everything we need for life and godliness, 2 Peter 1. In 1 Peter, he says in the prologue that we could be partakers of God's character, God's holiness. This is the deal, this is the training. So this renewed mind and yielding my body as a living sacrifice is a goal of being trained. The other thing I mentioned here, I'm going to talk about this quickly and just kind of overview number three, but we may have to deal with that another time, number three. We need to learn foundations. Don't think of the Scripture as just some commands to do some things and reframe some things. Those are there and they matter. Especially that command when Jesus says, I can take all of the Old Testament, everything about it that's holy and righteous and good, and boil it down to this. You go love people the way I loved you. That's what he said in John. He said, I'm going to give you an old command that's a new command now. Love people as I've demonstrated it for you. And so we should take that extremely seriously. It matters. But what about this matter of getting it, what is a biblical worldview, the mind of Christ? Like, how do we get at that? And I call them foundations. Maybe there's a better word. But what I mean is, here's some examples of foundations. The Bible says a great deal about the role of government. God ordains government, has a God purpose in doing it. If I could compare what God says the purpose of government is to what other people say, then I'm exercising discernment. I'm distinguishing a biblical view of government, which is designed primarily so righteousness can flourish, which Satan doesn't want. He doesn't want righteousness to flourish. And then there's a Marxist view of government, for example. where the state has rights, not the people. The state determines morality, right? Not the Bible. But I can look at them. God invented marriage. It's right there in Genesis. Right there in Genesis. God invented marriage. He gets to say what it is. It was his idea, and he patented it. Right? Does that make sense? Right? It's his patent. What about gender? He made them male and female. He made them different, and he has some things to say about that. These are foundational things in the Bible, and there's a lot of other ones. He says humans were made in the image of God. Nothing else was. That means something. It becomes a foundational principle of a biblical worldview throughout. what does it mean to be in the image of God? To have that dignity and worth that is intrinsic in our being in His image. The Church, it's a man's idea. We don't get together because, you know, a few of us said, you know what, we're going to make this thing called a church, and we're going to do this or that. Well, it's all Jesus' idea. He says in Matthew 16, here's what I'm going to do. My construction project, until I return, And he does it. And these are foundational things. And then what I look at is when I'm listening to the stuff that's coming through the pipeline, the media and the TV shows, how are they actually directly attacking the foundations? Right? How does the political platform directly attack the foundations of a biblical worldview that are laid out in the Scripture as early as the book of Genesis? What's the goal of what some of the stuff we're hearing? Another foundation I didn't mention was the family. That's a foundation in the scripture. It's throughout the whole Bible. Why do we have a leading politician who almost became the president of the country say that the government should be in charge of raising our children? Why is California deciding that your minors, minor children, can go and have surgeries without mom and dad's permission? Why are they taking over? Well, it's really simple. What did God do with the family? There's this great chapter in Deuteronomy chapter six. It has the Shema, but it also has this teaching about the parents talking to the children about God. If you want to keep parents from passing along Christian principles and the gospel and a work ethic and things that are scriptural, you can't get the parents out of the picture. How would I do that? Well, first thing I would do is I would want to make sure the children spend as little time with the parents as possible. And I would do it in subtle ways. I would have them at the public school as long as possible. I would keep taking up more and more of the year with it, more and more of the day with it. And then when they're not there, I would make sure they're out doing sporting events so that they're still not with the parents, not really. I mean, you're saying it can be subtle, and I'm not saying all this stuff's bad, but you have to start looking at it and saying, what's going on? And then, once we get far along enough, I can start saying what parents can and can't do. You ever had to go to the Supreme Court of the United States for someone to, you know, for the Amish to get the right to homeschool their children? We can look at the test scores and tell that the government's not exactly doing a great job of that. But I'm just saying there's a purpose and you need to think about it through the lens of foundational things like God creating and blessing the family as the core unit of civilization. And the family and the individuals have rights. And now we've got worldviews that say the opposite. I hope that's making some sense. I wish I could say more about it. We've covered some of this in the past. God says something about the design of men and women. Now, Christians have messed up sometimes, because we take stereotypes about men and women from our culture, and we try to put them into the scripture, and decide that that's right. Men fish and hunt, and women would take care of babies, and that kind of thing, and scripture doesn't quite say that. I've known some women that fish and hunt. I've known women that are, I guess you can't call them firemen, but it sounds a little weird saying firewomen, but I've known a bunch of them. We have these stereotypes that we think are scripture. That's not what I'm talking about. But the Bible does talk about a design intent for men and women. And that intent is our best purpose, and it is for our good, and ultimately for our joy. That we accept who God has made us, who we are. What's our culture saying right now? Follow the science if I'm talking about climate change, but I'm going to censor the science. So I really mean follow the narrative. But when I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about gender. You are who you feel. You are not who you feel. Your feelings are fickle. It's just a reality, our feelings go back and forth. Let's take children when they're 12, 13, 14, 15, the most confused time in their whole lives, grapple on to a feeling and say, that's who you are. Really? You're not who you feel, you are who God says you are. And that's why Paul started the book of Romans with, here's who you are in Christ. Genesis starts with, here's who you are as a human being. And there's the attack. This makes some sense and isn't just rambling. We have to renew our mind, but it has to go so much deeper than thinking about knowing the Ten Commandments and stuff like that. That's all good. If I'm going to be a student of the word and of the culture, I'm going to develop a worldview that allows me to analyze all the ideas I'm getting, the movies that are just, it's like a race to see how many characters can be homosexual on the same show, that are designed to change how we think, and it's subtle. But how will I analyze that and not just fall back and accept it? Because these foundations. I'm going to look at the scripture as total truth, that God is telling me total truth, not just something about how to do something right or wrong, but total truth for life. And God is telling me what reality is in a totality sense. I hope that makes sense. And now I can analyze it.