Deconstruction PM

00:02 Good evening. It's good to be in the house of the Lord tonight and see each one here. 00:08 On this subject this evening, I must admit that I would probably not have necessarily landed on this subject were it not for the fact that the Sunday Evening Committee asked and requested an evening on this. And I think rightly so. 00:28 It is an issue that we face as churches and as a culture, whether we know it or not. How many of you are familiar with the term "deconstruction" or "deconstructionism"? Okay. Numbers of you are. That's good. 00:46 I hope the rest of you are familiar with that term by the end of the evening. It is a very important subject here this evening on the subject of deconstruction. Okay. If you want to turn in your copies of the Scriptures to 2 Corinthians chapter 10, I'm going to have as our theme verse tonight, 01:07 and Brother Justin, if at the end of the service you would be prepared to lead us in number 790 in the Purple Book. 790. But 2 Corinthians 10:3, "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, 01:27 but mighty in God, for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ." This is the description of spiritual warfare in the New Testament. 01:49 This is how we do spiritual warfare. It talks about the weapons. It talks about the strongholds. 01:55 And how we overcome those strongholds is to cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself, that is, comes does not come under the authority of Christ, but tries to rule over the authority of Christ and the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity and to the obedience of Christ. 02:17 So when it comes to the subject of deconstruction or Christian deconstruction, we need to understand a little bit about what deconstruction is as a movement. And so I have some PowerPoint slides here tonight. I hope will help us focus and concentrate a little bit. What is deconstruction? 02:36 Deconstruction basically is an attempt or a philosophy that attempts to strip away all the cultural assumptions, structures, and formation or formalism. All the assumptions, structures, and formalism. 02:53 It was developed by a man by the name of Jacques Derrida as a way to interpret literary texts. So it has its roots in literature and then has made its tentacles kind of go out through all the different disciplines of education. 03:11 So it's an attempt to strip away authority and strip away the past understandings and hierarchicalism. And it really is a woke kind of thing, philosophy. 03:28 And it can be a little bit of insight from an article that I read or a quote that I found. Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings. 03:47 So the text is irreconcilably contradicting itself rather than being a unified logical whole. A preeminent American deconstructionist has explained in an essay entitled "Stephen's Rock and Criticism as Cure," "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of the text, 04:08 but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. 04:13 Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air." And so it looks to a text, to primarily a text in the beginning or to a discipline and saying that the seeds of its own destruction are within the text or within the knowledge, within the database of knowledge. 04:34 And all you have to do is point out those inconsistencies to try to nullify any sense of authority or truth. Derrida, who is this Jacques Derrida who coined this term, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary opposites. 04:57 What is a binary opposite? It's two things that are opposite each other. They think in black and white, masculine, feminine, cause and effect, conscious, unconscious, presence, absence, speech, writing or speech or writing. And Derrida suggests those opposites are, 05:18 get this, hierarchies in miniature containing one term that Western culture views as positive and superior and another term considered negative or inferior. So conscious, unconscious, black, white. 05:38 We tend to assign value to those, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the boundary between binary opposites and to do so in such a way that hierarchy implied by the opposites is thrown into question. 05:55 So the idea behind deconstruction is to throw everything into question that you have ever thought or believed or known or thought to be true. The next step, it is the next step in postmodernism. 06:11 Postmodernism is the idea in a nutshell that there is no such thing as 06:18 absolute truth. In fact, it used to be when I was a young person that it was your truth and my truth. That's what they were getting at. Whatever is true for you and is true for me, that's what we go with. But today there is no truth in people's minds at all. 06:34 So whatever your truth is and my truth is really doesn't matter because it's all going to be deconstructed. Because at the end of the day, there is no truth. There is no meaning. There is no purpose. And there is no objective reality. So deconstruction says there is no consistencies. 06:53 Values are relative and no absolute meaning. The postmodern attempt to find meaning of moral concepts through analyzing texts and the language used with modern concepts. But there is no truth, only interpretation. 07:10 Now, deconstruction was originally applied to literature and now has been applied to philosophy and religion and law and psychology and architecture and anthropology and theology and feminism and political theory and LGBTQ studies, history, and film. 07:32 So just about every discipline or database of knowledge is being deconstruction being applied to it. So it is the next step in postmodernism, which was no objective truth, no truth at all. And so looking at all those disciplines and saying really what you thought was true isn't. 07:54 And we're going to help you understand, go through a process of understanding why it isn't true and why you really can't trust anything. What you think you know, you really don't know. And there are no absolutes. 08:09 It has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought. So that opposite binary thing where you've got truth and untruth. You've got two opposites. One that generally the public tends to think of as higher than the other. 08:30 That's a traditional mode of thinking. And so we're going to dismantle that in our thought process. Now, what is religious deconstructionism? 08:41 Religious deconstructionism is used of anything, everything from evaluating or changing one's view of eschatology to completely abandoning the faith. So the term deconstructionism or Christian deconstructionism is a broad term. 09:00 It's used in 09:03 a broad way, all the way from if you have changed your view of eschatology, which is we would say a fairly minor thing when it comes to historic Christianity, the view of eschatology. If you change that, then people would say, "Oh, I've deconstructed. And I've reconstructed with another view." I'm going to address that in a little bit. 09:24 Probably is not helpful terminology. That goes all the way to the other side of the pendulum where people are completely abandoning the faith as the end result of deconstructionism. 09:39 Deconstructionism is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without requiring Scripture as a standard. 09:49 This is taken from a book by Barnett and Childers called "The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It's Destructive, and How to Respond." Both of them were in a process of deconstructing their faith to varying degrees. And no, that was another interview that I listened to. 10:11 Childers was interviewing a former rock band member who had deconstructed and gone out into progressive Christianity and then was reconstructed back into the faith. And so they have a lot of personal experience with this. But that basically is their definition. 10:30 The postmodern process of rethinking your faith without requiring Scripture as a standard. That should make our antennas go up as a very dangerous proposition. 10:42 So the biblical text is what they deconstruct because it started out as a textual deconstruction looking at literary deconstruction. So the Bible, our faith, is based on a literary book. It's based on a book, a piece of writing. And so the idea is to identify the inconsistencies of the Bible, 11:04 not so for the fact that you could resolve inconsistencies, but that you can show that there are no consistencies. So you never get done deconstructing. Once you go down that road and start down the road, there is no end to it because there's no consistency in the biblical text anyway. 11:23 So there's never an end of finding the inconsistencies in this mentality. And so the idea is to abolish authority structures. And the Scriptures are our authority structure. It is our authority, the authority of our faith and practice and as disciples of Christ. 11:43 So this is a quote here. "So why have Christians adopted the term deconstruction from a philosophy based on the principles of philosophical naturalism?" I think we can make a connection from something theologian Kevin Van Houser has written about Derrida, Jacques Derrida. 12:02 "The motive behind Derrida's strategy of undoing," it's deconstruction, "stems from his alarm over illegitimate appeals to authority and exercises of power." So that should ring some bells to you about CRT, critical race theory, 12:21 and the whole thing of power and authority and powerlessness and victimhood and all of that. "The belief that one has reached the single correct meaning or God or truth provides a wonderful excuse for damning those with whom one disagrees as either fools or heretics. 12:44 Neither priests who supposedly speak for God nor philosophers who supposedly speak for reason should be trusted. 12:54 This logocentric claim to speak from a privileged perspective, reason or the Word of God, is a bluff that must be called or better deconstructed." So they are looking at the biblical text and saying that biblical 13:13 text is an authority structure that must go. It must be eliminated. How are we going to eliminate it through this process of deconstruction? And by the way, the only reason that we believe these things is so that preachers or priests or philosophers, 13:32 people who have reached a certain level of influence and leadership or in scholarship, can no longer say that they have arrived at the meaning of truth because they haven't. And if they say they have, it's only their way of damning either you to hell or to insignificance. 13:53 And so we got to get rid of it. And so that's the point of the religious deconstruction. So now that's been a little bit confusing so far, I'm sure. But let me just read a little bit more. 14:07 "Over the decades since Derrida introduced his philosophy of deconstruction, the term has worked its way into the common vernacular where it has now come to generally mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought." We had already quoted that. 14:24 In other words, deconstruction has become a kind of shorthand term that in addition to critically questioning traditional ways of thinking, also implies a refusal to recognize as authorities those who see themselves or are perceived to see themselves. 14:43 Boy, you see how shaky that gets? Those who see themselves or are perceived to see themselves as ones who claim to speak from a privileged perspective about what truth is. 14:58 So even for a Christian to say, "I believe that God created the universe," is speaking from a position of power to try to influence people with absolute truth, to establish a God who demands worship and allegiance. And that's got to go. 15:17 It's got to go under Christian deconstructionism. 15:20 In the Christian world, "this translates to critically questioning traditional modes of Christian belief and often refusing to recognize as authorities those perceived as occupying privileged Christian institutional positions who supposedly speak for God." Now, 15:39 you say, "What does that have to do with me?" Well, we'll find out in a little bit. Because a lot of this is going around in academic circles. It has been for a long time. 15:50 So if you're going to go off to college or university, you're going to have to know that deconstructionism is the name of the game in a higher education, a secular higher education. The other thing is we also have to know that this stuff is all over the internet. 16:12 And it is all over podcasts. It is all over social media. And it is in your face. It is there. It is accessible. 16:22 And it is a danger to anyone who goes looking in that direction because it is insidious. And in fact, my second subtitle there was the demonic ploy to turn people away from the faith. 16:43 So let's look at some Scriptures here that talk about against falling away. Matthew 24:10, "Jesus answered and said unto them, 'Take heed that no man deceive you. And many false prophets shall rise and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound,'" the word iniquity means lawlessness, 17:05 no standards, no moral absolutes. Lawlessness is not just about disobeying the police. It's about a mentality that has no authority. It is a mentality that has no authority. "Because iniquity will abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, 17:26 the same shall be saved." So I'm convinced that this deconstruction movement is one of the tools of the enemy to bring about the great falling away. Now, is God in charge of that? Well, God is sovereign overall. And so He has allowed the enemy to come up with this and to promote it for the purpose, 17:46 I believe, of purifying His church, purifying His church and separating the sheep from the goats because, well, we'll talk about that a little bit later. 17:54 Hebrews 3:13, "Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God." This is what is at stake when you start down the road of deconstructionism. The end of the road is departing from the living God. 18:13 2 Peter 3:17, "Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness." 2 Peter 2:21, 18:29 "For it had been better for them had they not known the way of righteousness than after they have known it to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them." So there's a special curse about falling away from what we've known. 2 Timothy 4:3-4, "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, 18:50 but after their own lusts shall they heap them to themselves teachers having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth and be turned unto fables. 19:02 Now, the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times, some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons." Deconstructionism, while there may be certain aspects that are less dangerous than others, and I'll cover that. 19:23 But deconstructionism is 19:28 a doctrine of demons. It is. It's a doctrine of devils. "More Scriptures having damnation because they have cast off their first faith." That's where casting off the faith leads. And 2 Thessalonians 2, "The coming of the lawless one." There's that lawlessness again, 19:48 lawlessness, no authority, no truth, no absolute truth, no truth at all, no authority structures or authority figures. 19:59 "He is the lawless one is according to the working of Satan with all powers, signs and lying wonders with all unrighteous deception among those who perish because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this reason, God will send them strong delusion that they should believe the lie." 2 Thessalonians 2:15, 20:20 "Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions." That is the apostolic teaching which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle. The end result of the road of deconstructionism is falling away from God. The false church produces this and celebrates this. 20:41 But even the truth Himself experienced it. 20:45 See, Jesus experienced a certain aspect of deconstructionism. In John 6, when He had fed them and He had taught them and His teaching got difficult, and then they deconstructed what He was saying. Said, "We don't like that. 21:06 And in fact, we reject Him as a source of authority on this matter." And they went away from the Lord. And then, of course, He asked the question, "Will you also go away?" He said to the 12. And they said, "Where could we go? You have the words of eternal life." So they looked at the authority of Christ. He had the words of eternal life. 21:27 There was no place else to go to get them. Deconstruction will say, "There are no words of eternal life." So you can go anywhere you want to try to prove that. And that's what they do. Deconstruction is ultimately about people who abandon the faith, some as deceived believers and others as false Christians. 21:49 There are people out there who have claimed to be Christian and who have never been born again, who have never been saved, have never come under the authority of Christ. And their deconstruction is just as dangerous as a Christian's deconstruction. But it is the result is the same. 22:09 It cuts both ways for Christian and unbeliever. I believe that there has never been a time when there has been so much support for abandoning the faith on an intellectual level because you have social media again celebrating people that deconstruct. 22:30 There are websites. There are social media out there. It's trendy. You can find many who celebrate it. And you can find them on your computer and on your phone. You don't even have to go to the library and rent a book or loan a book on deconstruction. You can find it all the way through your own personal devices. 22:50 And some things even called exvangelicals. Has anybody heard that term, exvangelicals? Those are evangelicals that are no longer evangelicals. They used to believe the Bible. Now they don't. They used to believe in salvation by grace through faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ at the cross, the resurrection, and the blood of Christ. Now they don't. 23:11 Why? Because they deconstructed. They moved away from God. And so they're no longer evangelicals. And they have moved many of them into a form of progressive Christianity, progressive Christianity. Leon should probably give us a definition of that. 23:25 But it is the old liberalism of the early 20th century repackaged to make the faith something other than the biblical faith of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, what we believe and teach. It is broad. 23:47 It is an attempt to be broad-minded, to emphasize social justice, emphasize LGBTQ inclusiveness. And it's just a broad approach to the Christian faith. It is not biblically centered. 24:07 It is not Christ-centered unless it is centered around Christ as an example. So we want to use Him as an example, but not as a Savior from sin. If you want to find out if somebody is a progressive Christian, ask them what they believe about sin. And that will tell you the story. Do you believe that sin is a problem? 24:28 Is it a problem with God that will take us away from Him eternally? And a progressive Christian will not accept that. Is that right, brother Leon? Leon taught on some of this last week at Sandy Ridge. Okay, moving along here, 24:47 four kinds of deconstruction. The first kind is dismantling harmful ways, but not historical orthodox Christian beliefs. Now, dismantling harmful ways, this is a little bit tricky. This looks different for different groups. 25:07 If you were to dismantle a harmful culture, if you were a prosperity gospel proponent differently than if you were a Southern Baptist or conservative Baptist proponent. 25:22 And what it basically is, is an attempt to cut through the system of Christianity to get to the heart of Christianity. Not all bad, not all wrong, but I would rather call it something other than deconstruction. And I'm not alone in that. 25:42 I got a lot of these ideas from Barnett and Childers. It is evaluating cultural Christianity and the cultural baggage that comes along with the culture of evangelicalism. 25:58 So even such things as one thing that causes people to deconstruct is this whole thing of the merger of God and country. And so the Republican Party is God's party. A lot of people are not buying into that idea. I don't buy into that idea. And so, 26:19 but because so many have, they deconstruct to kind of try to cut through the junk and get to the gospel. Let me just explain it like this. 26:31 Every move of God develops a culture around it, a culture that is based on that move of God. Anabaptism, same thing. A lot of people are deconstructing from Anabaptism because Anabaptism, over the last 500 years, has developed a culture. 26:53 That culture is wide and broad and varied, but it has some similar dynamic. And so many young people and other people will try to cut through that and say, "Let's get down to the heart of the gospel. Let's find the gospel in this culture." And so they call this deconstruction. 27:13 Childers and Barnett prefer to call that type of thing reformation or reforming our faith because deconstruction really has some negative connotations because it's a road. And once you start on the road, we've already talked about where the road ends. 27:31 We don't want to just say because a person is trying to find the gospel in a Mennonite church that they're deconstructing. They are trying to figure out what is cultural and what is biblical. And we have to admit that some of the things that we do as Mennonites are cultural. 27:54 Some of the things we do as Mennonites are biblical. The problem is when people go through to try to reform their faith, they do so in a vacuum, independently trying to figure out what's cultural and what's biblical. And then they end up either throwing out the whole thing or just independently without conversation, 28:16 without advice from, as Brother Daryl said this evening, from historic Christianity and others older and wiser than I might be at the time. And because they do that independently, they make some rash decisions and some reactionary moves. 28:36 Deconstructionism can be very reactionary. Reforming your faith can be very reactionary. We don't want to react. We want to act biblically under the authority of God's Word. That's the difference. Okay, another kind of deconstruction is constructive dismantling. 28:57 Here again, I prefer the term reformation, constructive dismantling. This is the difference between evaluating or the difference between evaluating your faith with Scripture, piece by piece, versus deconstructing. Now, there are people that have crises of faith. Francis Schaefer, 29:17 a great man of God of a previous generation or two ago, had a crisis of faith. 29:23 And that crisis led him to a new biblical understanding of truth 29:35 and based on the Word of God and applied to various educational disciplines. And he helped a lot of people who were themselves experiencing crisis. But that is different than just down out and out deconstructing where I'm trying to get rid of the faith. This is I'm trying to find answers to deepen my faith and my trust. 29:58 Scripture must be our authority. And church history is a reference point. I don't think I can say that clear enough, that church history is a reference point when it comes to trying to work through our questions and our struggles about our faith. 30:20 For one thing, 30:22 many of the doctrines that we hold to have thousands of years of history behind them and brilliant thinkers and church leaders that helped articulate those things and develop those creeds 30:41 and those understandings of Scripture and those applications of Scripture, those doctrinal affirmations, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Council of Chalcedon, and different councils. 30:56 And for us to come back and say, "Well, we're going to reinvestigate all this," is really rather prideful because it's saying that we know more in the 21st century than they did in the third century. 31:08 Well, we may know more of some stuff, but not of theological debate and understanding. We may be more confused even than what they were. So constructive dismantling, both those terms, I would prefer to use the term reforming one's faith. 31:30 Then there are dismantling doctrines based on new experiences. People have different experiences. "Well, I experienced this and I experienced this." And that brings into question my whole belief system about this doctrine. Or I've been reading or I've had conversations with people, 31:52 interacting and connecting with diverse influences. And we have no greater opportunity to do that than what we have today on the internet, to interact with people of diverse influences. And we have to be so extremely cautious when we do that. 32:13 And so how do you do that without just withdrawing into a hibernation mode? And so it takes maturity. It takes mentoring. It takes mentorship. It takes accountability. It takes humility to reevaluate. 32:36 And then finally, the last of the four kinds of Christian deconstruction is dismantling Christianity completely, dismantling it completely. Joshua Harris would be one of the most famous of this kind of deconstructionist. Joshua Harris wrote the book I Kiss: Dating Goodbye, which back 30, 32:56 40 years ago, even 20 years ago, was kind of the standard for Anabaptist and evangelical dating and courtship. And that caused quite a splash and a whole culture developed around that movement. And today, Joshua Harris, he wrote some books. He wrote some great books. 33:16 He wrote a great book that I used in my class on biblical foundations at EBI. I can't use it anymore because of where he ended up. It's a shame. 33:26 But anyway, if I can quote it fairly near to what he said it, "I am no longer in any sense of the Word a Christian." He completely deconstructed. So why do people deconstruct? One reason is because people have been hurt by the church. 33:47 Now, when we talk about church hurt, there are legitimate church hurts that have come because people have been abused. And there are illegitimate claims of church hurt that come because people were being held accountable. Sometimes when you hear about church hurt, 34:07 just put a question mark there, not a period, but a question mark. I'll give you an example. 34:13 Some time ago, somebody reported it was my daughter-in-law reported about an instance out in John MacArthur's church where they had excommunicated a woman for not listening to the church when the church said she needed to go back to her husband. 34:32 They were separated. Church said, "You need to go back." She didn't listen and said, "I don't have to listen to the church that excommunicated her." Well, that hit the internet. And so it was reported to me because I hadn't heard about it yet. And then I said, "Well, wait just a minute. Don't look at what the reports are. 34:49 You have to understand what the process was and what the spirit was behind this person." There's a whole lot more that goes on in that disfellowshipping. But that woman could ride out into the sunset and said, "I've been hurt by the church." And maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. 35:10 But people do experience church hurt. But that is not a reason to deconstruct your faith. A lot could be said about this. By the way, abuse, I found a good definition of abuse. Abuse is an abusive situation where things are hidden that shouldn't be. 35:32 Sin is hidden. Abuse is hidden, those kinds of things. There's also a high degree of control and narcissism in abusive church situations and subversive power plays or attempts to control. Those are all part of an environment that is toxic in church. 35:51 Another reason people deconstruct is because of poor teaching and bad theology. Or they're led to believe things that the Bible doesn't actually teach. 36:02 Sometimes the Bible implies things, and we kind of take those implications and build on those and maybe build too strong of a tower, too high of a tower rather than saying, "Let's see what the Bible really says. 36:21 What does the Bible say versus what is an application that is a good application for a Christian?" It may be there's ignorance. It may be that these things have led to poor choices. But poor teaching and bad theology is one reason why people deconstruct, a desire to sin just flat out. 36:41 If you want to desire, if you have a desire to sin, you're going to find a way to do it and to justify it. And so people will desire to escape authority and use intellectual arguments when there are really moral problems that are the issue. 37:00 So we find out that a lot of times people will cloak their moral desire to sin under intellectual arguments. And it's a smokescreen. Another thing would be popularity or credibility with popular thought. Somebody has referred to this as being streetwise, street popular. 37:22 If you want to be trendy, deconstruct. If you don't want to be seen as out of step, people deconstruct. It's fashionable to question everything. And it's fashionable to attempt to reconcile my experiences with Scripture, 37:41 try to mix those experiences and interpret Scripture from my experience rather than interpreting my experience from Scripture. Big difference. And all the while trying to make myself come up with a religion that makes me feel comfortable and makes God nicer and softer. Another reason is lack of accountability, 38:04 lack of accountability for their pride, pride which thinks independently, lack of accountability, lack of appreciation for historical doctrine. Letter F, misguided expectations. Sometimes people burn out in their attempt to serve God, 38:22 and they look for other excuses to give up, expecting perfection from others, expecting an end to problems. And just flat out immaturity at times is a cause for deconstruction, a lack of discernment, lack of discernment when interacting with others, and a lack of discernment when interacting with other beliefs. 38:43 What's really going on here? What is the real issue? They lack that discernment to be able to make those distinctions. And then last but not least, in fact, maybe the most important, doctrines of demons. Demonic deception is involved with deconstruction, 39:04 deconstructing, demonic deception. And don't underestimate the power of the demonic world and Satan himself to trick you and deceive you if you separate yourself from the authority of Scripture and from the authority of the local church. 39:24 Boy, I told the church some time ago that this is not the time to debate and to question historic Christian doctrines and to separate yourself from biblically gospel-focused churches. You will be a sitting duck for deception. 39:45 Satan is actively trying to destroy, whether we know it or not, Satan and whether they know it or not, Satan uses people to entice people to deconstruct. So I'm going to wrap this up and then ask if there's any questions. What can we do? Number one, develop a robust theology. 40:07 Some people may have wondered, "Well, why did we go through the confession of faith? We know all of this stuff already. Why do we have to be reminded?" Hey, we need a robust theology, one that is biblically understandable, saturated with the Word of God, and known and understood by all ages. 40:29 That means that we have to say it over and over and over and over and over again, robust theology, because today people are questioning everything. Absolutely everything is subject to question and a theology that can withstand scrutiny. 40:50 We need that intensely, 40:55 immensely. Number two, work to increase biblical literacy. I want to ask you, parents, how much are you teaching your children to know Scripture? How much are you teaching them? 41:10 Now, the second part of that question is, parents, how much do you know yourself about Scripture? And we should be students of the Word of God. We should be memorizing. We should be studying. We should be reading. We should be reading the Scripture. We should be personalizing the Scripture, applying the Scripture. 41:30 We should immerse ourselves with Scripture because Scripture is the object of the deconstructionist hatred, and Scripture is our authority to keep us from abandoning the faith. Well, just follow Jesus. Well, Jesus has given us Scripture. You want to follow Jesus? 41:49 Follow Scripture because they are inseparable. Number three, care for people in their struggles. This is one that I think is very important. If we hear someone that's struggling in their faith, a lot of times we will just kind of write them off and say, "Well, they were taught different. 42:08 They should know better." I guess we're just nothing we can do. I think a lot of times before people deconstruct, they're sending signals. They're sending messages that there's a faith problem, and they're asking for people to walk with them and care for them and help them to understand. And I think we, 42:29 as a church, have the obligation to do that when people are wrestling. The difference between deconstructing and reforming is attitude. The deconstructor functions from a platform of rebellion. 42:45 The reformer functions from a platform of struggle and uncertainty. So care for people in their struggles. Practice 2 Corinthians 10:4-6, which we read at the beginning. This is true spiritual warfare. 43:04 Bring every thought into captivity of the obedience of Christ, casting down every imagination and every stronghold, every high thing and every thought that exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 43:22 And then the other 43:26 part of that verse is, and having a readiness to revenge all disobedience. Now, I don't think that means for us here tonight that we're going to hit people hard if they don't get this right. 43:38 What it means is we're going to expose the issues and hit those issues and those false doctrines hard because that's where spiritual warfare takes place right there with the arguments, the high things, the lack of submission to the authority of Christ, the doubts, 43:56 the confusion that is sown by the enemy. And then finally, bring everything under the authority of Christ. I close with this before I take any questions. 44:11 This isn't original with me, but if you have someone that says they're deconstructing, first of all, ask them, "What do you mean by that? What does that mean?" And try to find out where they are on those four points because that'll make a big difference as to how you work with them and where you start with them. 44:30 But let's say that you have somebody that is really completely deconstructed, and you could ask them if you found out that there was a God, and this God that you discovered and found out about had something to say that was different than what you believe, 44:53 would you go with God or would you go with your belief? And that's the way you can tell if it's an intellectual issue or an authority issue. 45:05 If you found a God that there really was a God and he had something different to say than what you think, would you go with your thoughts and your opinions or with the Word of that God? And a lot of people will say, "Doesn't matter what that God would say. I'm doing it my own way." That means it's an authority issue. 45:28 And so, yeah, a lot of things that could be said. 45:32 Be careful when you study this stuff because many have been the person that has started to study something sinister and been entrapped by it and sucked into it. But if you are struggling, let people know that you're struggling so we can walk with you, 45:53 work with you, share with you, pray with you, bring you to a place where you can say, "I'm going to follow God even if I don't understand." Okay, any questions this evening that Leon can answer for you? 46:12 No, I just pick on you a little bit, Leon, because I appreciate your insight in some of these things. 46:20 Comment I might make to kind of reinforce what you say about having questions. 46:28 I heard in instance, a person said, "Well, 46:35 I just have a lot of questions." And there was a lot of effort put to trying to bring clarity. Questions, but it still didn't matter. And suddenly they had kind of their own revelation from God. 46:56 So I think maybe a good question to ask when someone says, "I have a lot of questions," are you seeking a definitive answer? Are you open to the answer? Because I think deconstructions, they're not really looking for an answer. 47:14 They just want to question it and have that door open because it disarms usually other Christians. 47:24 And a lot of that approach loves debate, loves the debate for the debate's sake. And I have debated some people in the past about some things that I finally said, I finally had to say, "You know what? We're not going to talk about this anymore because I'm not changing my mind, and you're obviously not changing your mind. 47:43 So we're not going to talk about it anymore." Because 47:49 I had a situation like that many years ago out in Oregon where no matter what you said, the debate was still the same, always comes around, comes around, comes around. Anyone else? Okay, Justin, would you lead us in 7:90? 48:06 And then let's use that as our prayer tonight. Put an Amen on the end of it, and that'll be our prayer.