Transcript: Episode 0043

“A Young Man’s Life”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:00 – 00:00:13:	...

00:00:13 – 00:00:20:	Are you ready?

00:00:20 – 00:00:41:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:47:	And I'm still, whoa. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the plight of

00:00:47 – 00:00:52:	young men in principally the United States, but really, I think everywhere in the Western

00:00:52 – 00:00:59:	world, particularly young men who are unmarried. Some of what we say will have to do with married

00:00:59 – 00:01:04:	men. Principally, this will be addressed to basically like guys, you know, 12 to 15 up

00:01:04 – 00:01:09:	to, you know, 40, and secondarily to their fathers, the fathers of both sons and daughters

00:01:09 – 00:01:15:	who are facing some of the circumstances we're going to describe as a warning to fathers,

00:01:15 – 00:01:19:	you know, listen with children. We're not going to be, you know, graphic or inappropriate

00:01:19 – 00:01:24:	with anything today. I don't think, but obviously the, the subjects you would expect are going

00:01:24 – 00:01:28:	to come up probably at some length. So you may want to screen this before listening to

00:01:28 – 00:01:31:	it with younger children.

00:01:31 – 00:01:37:	As we mentioned last week, we were also in the middle of an arc dealing with politics.

00:01:37 – 00:01:41:	As we mentioned last week, we'll probably break some of those up just because of the

00:01:41 – 00:01:45:	time commitment and, you know, we're recording on a Tuesday yesterday was Labor Day. So this

00:01:45 – 00:01:50:	is one that didn't take as much prep because we know a lot of this off top of our heads.

00:01:50 – 00:01:57:	This is however an episode that's a continuation of seven episodes that we've done in the recent

00:01:57 – 00:02:03:	past. So I'm going to refer to back to them specifically because today as we're speaking,

00:02:03 – 00:02:07:	you know, principally to young men, there's a lot of groundwork that we've laid on kind

00:02:07 – 00:02:13:	of more theory and this one we're going to try to make as practical and hopefully encouraging

00:02:13 – 00:02:16:	as possible.

00:02:16 – 00:02:20:	That encouragement obviously is going to take the form, you know, as Christians that ultimately

00:02:20 – 00:02:25:	you have to trust in God to deliver on his promises and to deliver the good things because

00:02:25 – 00:02:30:	I think we should all have the sense that you can do everything right, do everything by

00:02:30 – 00:02:36:	the book and things may still may not pan out. And it's very difficult, particularly

00:02:36 – 00:02:41:	for a young man to see the state of the world and perhaps the state of his own dating life

00:02:41 – 00:02:48:	and think, I just can't handle this anymore. And we don't want guys who are facing those

00:02:48 – 00:02:56:	circumstances to listen to Job's wife's advice when she said curse God and die. That's not

00:02:56 – 00:03:02:	the Christian response, obviously, we're going to encourage trust and confidence and God's

00:03:02 – 00:03:06:	promises. But we're also here living and there's stuff for us to do. There's stuff for you

00:03:06 – 00:03:11:	as young men to do. The groundwork, as I said, is laid in seven recent episodes. I'm just

00:03:11 – 00:03:15:	going to name them to give you a pointer back to if this is one you happen to be listening

00:03:15 – 00:03:20:	to first, they address different aspects of some of the things that we're just going to

00:03:20 – 00:03:25:	assume are already part of your knowledge in this episode. The first of those is episode

00:03:25 – 00:03:30:	22 on women, scripture and ontology. And then the next episode 23 on feminism, that's where

00:03:30 – 00:03:35:	we specifically deal with the question of what is a woman? What is a girl? How are they

00:03:35 – 00:03:41:	different than men? Why are the two sexes fundamentally different? And that's the episode

00:03:41 – 00:03:46:	two part series where we don't a great deal with headship and the importance of headship. So

00:03:47 – 00:03:52:	that's obviously going to be implicit in this conversation, both for young men who are looking

00:03:52 – 00:03:58:	to become heads of your own households, and also for fathers who have sons and daughters who

00:03:58 – 00:04:05:	are going out into the world and facing this great unknown, horrifying unknown, man made

00:04:05 – 00:04:11:	horrors beyond comprehension as we look at the state of the relations of men and women today.

00:04:12 – 00:04:17:	Episode 26 on the fear of the Lord, that goes back to as I said, you know, we're trusting in

00:04:17 – 00:04:25:	in God's promises. And ultimately, if we fear God, as he commands us to, we can't be afraid of

00:04:25 – 00:04:30:	anything else. So that's one small element of this, but it's a really important one. And I'll

00:04:30 – 00:04:35:	spoil the ending of this episode, we're going to end with Jesus speech in the Sermon on the

00:04:35 – 00:04:40:	Mount, where he talks about the birds of the air and the beast of the field trusting and receiving

00:04:40 – 00:04:47:	his promises and his gifts without anything. They don't know they just God takes care of them. And

00:04:47 – 00:04:53:	God promises that if he takes care of, you know, birds and animals and insects, he's also going to

00:04:53 – 00:04:57:	take care of you because he died for you on the cross. So I hope that will be the arc of this whole

00:04:57 – 00:05:04:	episode as we go through these things. In episode 27, the listener feedback episode, the first one

00:05:04 – 00:05:09:	that we've done, we'll probably do another one here pretty soon. We talked some about celibacy

00:05:09 – 00:05:13:	versus chastity. That's going to be a discussion that we're going to rehash here again, because it's

00:05:13 – 00:05:19:	been blowing up on the internet recently again. And it's one of the most fundamental aspects of

00:05:19 – 00:05:24:	the struggle of a young man who's full of testosterone. He's surrounded by girls who are

00:05:24 – 00:05:31:	half naked, because their fathers are fools and need to be beaten. And the difference between

00:05:31 – 00:05:36:	chastity and celibacy is a vital one, because a lot of pastors are spreading a lot of absolute

00:05:36 – 00:05:42:	garbage that is binding men's consciences and fashions that are ultimately disastrous. So we'll

00:05:42 – 00:05:49:	get into that. Also, I want to mention just briefly an episode 27 for listener feedback. It's

00:05:49 – 00:05:54:	the only episode where we've ever mentioned that we have a donation link on the website. As we

00:05:54 – 00:06:01:	mentioned in episode nine, PaywallingGod, we never started this thing to get a dime. The only reason

00:06:01 – 00:06:06:	we initially created the donation page was that people kept asking for it. And so if someone wants

00:06:06 – 00:06:11:	to support what we're doing, we're not going to say no. Frankly, that would be insulting. But we've

00:06:11 – 00:06:16:	never made it a point at what we're doing. Recently, we've had a couple very sizable

00:06:16 – 00:06:21:	donations, and I wanted to acknowledge those men. That was tremendously generous of you. And I also

00:06:21 – 00:06:28:	want to acknowledge the fact that when Corey and I set out to do Stone Choir, it was with the hope

00:06:28 – 00:06:33:	that we would build an archive library of episodes that would tackle some of these tough

00:06:33 – 00:06:38:	subjects, just sit there on the internet, and hopefully some people would find it in enough

00:06:38 – 00:06:43:	time that we wouldn't lose hope that it was ever going to be discovered. We never really expected

00:06:43 – 00:06:50:	to take off. It has in terms of numbers and in terms of support. And the reason I'm mentioning the

00:06:50 – 00:06:56:	money, despite the fact that that's, A, it's not the point and B, I don't, if someone wants to call

00:06:56 – 00:07:03:	us grifters, whatever, I'm not comfortable talking about it. But I want to acknowledge that men

00:07:03 – 00:07:11:	have given. And I want to acknowledge the fact that it goes to a broader subject that is another

00:07:11 – 00:07:17:	topic in which we'll talk about in a little bit. When we act in the world, when we act in each

00:07:17 – 00:07:22:	other's lives, we are God's hands in other people's lives. The thing that you do for your neighbor is

00:07:22 – 00:07:29:	you acting on behalf of God, for God or for your neighbor. Those are the good works which he promised

00:07:29 – 00:07:38:	he prepared before and for us. And so when someone gives us a gift, small or large, in a sense,

00:07:38 – 00:07:44:	in a very real sense, I don't mean hypothetically, that's literally true. Not only is that person

00:07:44 – 00:07:51:	doing something, but God is doing something through them for us. If anyone happened to read my

00:07:51 – 00:07:55:	docs, there were some complete nonsense in there about my finances. I haven't had a paycheck in

00:07:55 – 00:08:02:	10 years. And I am now effectively probably unemployable by virtue of having started this podcast

00:08:02 – 00:08:08:	along with Corey, who is also more or less unemployable, because we're disreputable neo-nazi

00:08:08 – 00:08:14:	podcasters according to the people who hate God. I'm not complaining. I signed up for this and

00:08:14 – 00:08:18:	we've said in a lot of episodes. That's fine. We're going to do this. We're going to obey God. And I

00:08:18 – 00:08:26:	trust in God. But when people start sending gifts to us, I can't ignore the fact that that is God

00:08:26 – 00:08:34:	saying, do more of this. And to be clear, this is not about money. We get Corey and I between the

00:08:34 – 00:08:39:	two of us, we probably get between six and 12 messages every single week from people who discovered

00:08:39 – 00:08:46:	the podcast recently, they're reaching out to say, thank you for what you're doing. It's in

00:08:46 – 00:08:51:	specifically saying, I'm going back to church, I'm reading my Bible more, maybe I'm going to church

00:08:51 – 00:08:56:	for the first time, or I left my church where no one cared about God, and I found a church where

00:08:56 – 00:09:02:	they actually preached the whole counsel of God. We get those messages all the time as a direct

00:09:02 – 00:09:06:	result of the things that we have said on this podcast. If that's all that we ever got, that

00:09:06 – 00:09:13:	would be more than enough reason for us to continue to do it. If additionally, God also says, we're

00:09:13 – 00:09:18:	going to cover some of your bills through you through listeners. I want to acknowledge the fact

00:09:18 – 00:09:22:	that I'm grateful to God, and I'm grateful to you for doing that. And if it goes away tomorrow,

00:09:22 – 00:09:28:	that's fine. That's not the reason. We will put a link this time in the show notes to the donation

00:09:28 – 00:09:32:	page, not to solicit. But because about a month ago, I was mentioning to Corey, I happened to

00:09:32 – 00:09:38:	look at it again, and it only had like three categories of monthly donations, and a couple of

00:09:38 – 00:09:42:	were just absurdly large. And I said, that's stupid, no one should ever give that much money.

00:09:43 – 00:09:48:	And so he went back through and took that as a challenge to basically turn it into kind of a

00:09:48 – 00:09:55:	Bible Easter egg. If you've seen recently the ADL list of racist numbers between 1 and 100,

00:09:55 – 00:10:01:	basically Corey turned it into kind of a mini Bible study where the donation tiers, most of them

00:10:01 – 00:10:06:	are completely absurd, but they're Bible references. So that's more free entertainment if

00:10:06 – 00:10:10:	you're a listener, and you want to be entertained additionally for free, like I said in the pay

00:10:10 – 00:10:16:	walling episode. Everything we do is completely free because we're doing this because we think

00:10:16 – 00:10:22:	God compels us, and we would never charge for something that we think God wants us to do. That

00:10:22 – 00:10:27:	would be going completely opposite directions. So I mentioned the donation pages because it's

00:10:27 – 00:10:31:	kind of entertaining. And if you want to test your Bible knowledge, I think you'll have fun

00:10:31 – 00:10:36:	with some, just trying to figure out what those numbers have to do with what Bible verses. Corey

00:10:36 – 00:10:40:	has tremendous knowledge of scripture a lot more than me. And it's just fun and entertaining. So

00:10:40 – 00:10:46:	that'll be there. Since I mentioned, I also want to reiterate something I said in the listener

00:10:46 – 00:10:51:	episode, which is, please don't give us money. If ever in the future, you are going to be offended

00:10:51 – 00:10:57:	by something that we say, if we come after one of things that you were devoted to, and we call it

00:10:57 – 00:11:01:	an idol, and we say we're going to smash it, which is one of the things that we're here to do. I

00:11:01 – 00:11:05:	don't want to give offense. And then for someone to feel like all those guys, they were fraud,

00:11:05 – 00:11:11:	and they ripped me off, please don't give money if you're going to be offended if we trash you. We

00:11:11 – 00:11:15:	don't mean to trash you. We're trying to focus on what's true and what's false. If we think that

00:11:15 – 00:11:19:	something's false that you happen to like, we're going to give it the same treatment that we've

00:11:19 – 00:11:24:	given all the other things you like. So if in the future, you would be horribly offended, if we

00:11:24 – 00:11:30:	said something that you found disparaging, please don't give us any money, because I don't want

00:11:31 – 00:11:39:	you to feel like we ripped you off. I never would have felt that way. Next episode in the arc that

00:11:39 – 00:11:45:	I mentioned, 28, Sweat the Small Stuff. That's one where we talk a little bit about things that we

00:11:45 – 00:11:52:	can do in our churches and communities to kind of rebuild a Christian society, because we are so

00:11:52 – 00:11:58:	far gone. We're so many generations of now away from anything that could remotely look like a

00:11:58 – 00:12:03:	Christian society that we got to start somewhere. And so in that episode, we talked a little bit

00:12:03 – 00:12:09:	about things like job boards in your congregation. Not only should you be worshiping with those

00:12:09 – 00:12:13:	folks every week, but you should be trying to hire them, or you should be working for them. You

00:12:13 – 00:12:19:	should have commerce with your brothers in Christ, preferentially. That's something that has always

00:12:19 – 00:12:24:	been the case, and they should continue to be so. So that also, we'll talk about today specifically,

00:12:24 – 00:12:30:	that also includes finding a maid. Not necessarily go to church to find a girl at church, because you

00:12:30 – 00:12:35:	may not find them, especially in a lot of conservative congregations. Sometimes it's all old

00:12:35 – 00:12:40:	people, but you know what? Those old people have daughters and granddaughters. Maybe asking them

00:12:40 – 00:12:46:	is going to help. So we'll talk about that in this episode. In 29 episode on the generational divide,

00:12:46 – 00:12:51:	we specifically talk about the fact that young guys are today in a position where a lot of guys

00:12:51 – 00:12:57:	are age and older, are probably going to give you incredibly stupid advice, because things have

00:12:57 – 00:13:05:	changed so much even in 5, 10, 15, let alone 30 or 40 years, that when some boomer says pull yourself

00:13:05 – 00:13:11:	up by your brute straps, we talked about how idiotic that is on its face. It's the literal opposite of

00:13:11 – 00:13:17:	what the original intent of that expression was. You as a young man, if you're listening to us,

00:13:17 – 00:13:22:	you're in a position where you have to weigh all these things that all these old guys are telling

00:13:22 – 00:13:26:	you, and some of it will be true. Most of it's going to be garbage, and it's all going to sound the

00:13:26 – 00:13:30:	same to you, and you're not going to have any frame of reference. So that's an episode we talk

00:13:30 – 00:13:36:	a little bit about how sometimes respecting your elders is limited to loving them and

00:13:37 – 00:13:43:	according to dignity, but disregarding some of their completely retarded advice in a loving way.

00:13:43 – 00:13:48:	Don't pick fights, but if they're saying something idiotic, don't listen, because it's your life that

00:13:48 – 00:13:53:	you'll screw up if you follow the wrong path. And the same applies to us. I'm in my mid-40s,

00:13:53 – 00:13:59:	Corey's in his mid-30s. We're older guys to some of you. There are things that we don't know. We

00:13:59 – 00:14:05:	mentioned in one of the episodes, we talked to a lot of guys in their early 20s and late teens,

00:14:05 – 00:14:11:	and we would say stupid things if we weren't talking to guys your age, because it's stuff I

00:14:11 – 00:14:15:	would never imagine. I can never imagine how bad it is for you. And the last I was talking,

00:14:15 – 00:14:19:	you guys were telling me. So we're going to talk a little bit today about some of those things,

00:14:19 – 00:14:26:	but we also referenced in that episode what to do when you're getting mixed advice from people.

00:14:27 – 00:14:33:	And last one, talking about living with past mistakes in episode 30 against the Clockwork

00:14:33 – 00:14:39:	universe. We talked about some of the damage that's done by sexual promiscuity, particularly

00:14:39 – 00:14:43:	against girls. So those are all subjects that we're not going to get into today because they're

00:14:43 – 00:14:48:	dealt with previously. Today, we're going to try to give some concrete specific advice. Again,

00:14:48 – 00:14:53:	we're older guys. I'm divorced, Corey's single. If you think that makes us retarded and not worth

00:14:53 – 00:15:00:	listening to, okay, I'm not going to argue with you. We have made mistakes. If we tell you things,

00:15:00 – 00:15:05:	they're going to cause you to repeat our mistakes. That would be malicious and foolhardy. Guys who

00:15:05 – 00:15:10:	screw things up can also give you at least some narrow advice about, here's how not to make the

00:15:10 – 00:15:17:	same mistakes that I did. Neither Russ or Fathers. So I am really uncomfortable with the notion of

00:15:17 – 00:15:23:	giving any fatherly advice. So as I mentioned, the secondary audience for this episode is Fathers.

00:15:23 – 00:15:28:	I'm not going to give you father to father advice because I have not. I'm not a dad. I have no skin

00:15:28 – 00:15:34:	in the game in terms of making mistakes and screwing up kids. What I can do is tell you what

00:15:34 – 00:15:39:	some of these younger guys are facing, and then you as a father of a son or a daughter will have

00:15:39 – 00:15:45:	to figure out amongst yourselves, how do I prevent my children from going down a path that's going

00:15:45 – 00:15:51:	to fall into some of these traps or cause some of these problems for others? So we're going to try

00:15:51 – 00:15:58:	to stay in our line. That's important to me. We're not know it all despite the way we sometimes

00:15:58 – 00:16:03:	come across. We try to stick to what we know and what we can speak to faithfully. There'll be a

00:16:03 – 00:16:08:	lot of scripture in this, and it's also just giving me a lot of straight advice. But I hope that

00:16:08 – 00:16:12:	this episode, which I've got 15 minutes into an introduction, I hope the young guys who are

00:16:12 – 00:16:18:	listening will come away from this, having a little bit more confidence and having some idea of

00:16:19 – 00:16:23:	what they can avoid and what they should try to do, but ultimately knowing that we have to trust

00:16:23 – 00:16:27:	in God for all this stuff. Because you don't know if you're going to wake up tomorrow, forget

00:16:27 – 00:16:30:	whether you're going to find a wife. You don't know if the son's going to come up tomorrow. You

00:16:30 – 00:16:35:	don't know if your heart's going to beat tomorrow. You trust in God to deliver on his promises,

00:16:35 – 00:16:41:	and he'll take care of the rest. And so for all the advice that you'll ever get from anyone,

00:16:41 – 00:16:44:	that is why you have to have your confidence. And having confidence rooted in God

00:16:45 – 00:16:50:	makes it possible to engage boldly in the world without feeling like you have to get everything

00:16:50 – 00:16:54:	just right. Because if the onus is always on you to get everything just right, you know that's

00:16:54 – 00:17:00:	hopeless. That's a well that no one can dig himself out of. If you trust in God and know that

00:17:00 – 00:17:06:	obeying him will be fruitful, that's half the battle. And the rest of it is prayer and doing

00:17:06 – 00:17:12:	the time and putting in the work and waiting for God to deliver. And in the meantime, living your

00:17:12 – 00:17:19:	life as a man. So to start off the episode proper, we should probably go over some of the

00:17:20 – 00:17:26:	reasons that young men in particular have it so hard today, why there are so many problems

00:17:26 – 00:17:35:	for young men specifically. And part of this is we'll start with the dating market, as it were,

00:17:36 – 00:17:44:	with the marriage market. Given the current set of incentives and the way that our society is

00:17:44 – 00:17:51:	structured, it is structured against most men. Yes, there is that top percentage to

00:17:52 – 00:17:59:	kind of abuse the terms, but they're the men who are very successful in the current market.

00:18:01 – 00:18:05:	And that is a tiny percentage of men. And the reason for that is very simple.

00:18:06 – 00:18:17:	Women want to have, to some degree, security and to some degree, stability. But there is another

00:18:17 – 00:18:25:	aspect to their nature, we went over this somewhat in previous episodes. But if the opportunity is

00:18:25 – 00:18:33:	there, women are going to go after some of these higher status men. And the reason they'll do that

00:18:33 – 00:18:40:	under the current circumstances is because our society and particularly our government has been

00:18:40 – 00:18:47:	designed in order to encourage that, because the goal is to delay or to destroy family formation,

00:18:47 – 00:18:54:	we live under an evil government. We've covered that previously and proved that point in so far as

00:18:54 – 00:19:02:	we're concerned. But traditionally, it is the father and then the husband who provides that

00:19:02 – 00:19:09:	stable environment for a woman where she is safe and can raise a family. That is the natural order

00:19:09 – 00:19:15:	of things. That is how things are supposed to go. Well, today the government has stepped into a

00:19:15 – 00:19:24:	certain degree to act as the husband for single women. And so the necessity of forming that

00:19:24 – 00:19:31:	family bond, of maintaining a family bond, first with regard to the father being the most natural

00:19:31 – 00:19:37:	family bond, because he's your father, if you're his daughter, and then with your husband, with whom

00:19:37 – 00:19:44:	you will form your own family, the government has stepped into a certain degree and said, no, if you

00:19:44 – 00:19:52:	are living alone, that's fine. We have all of these social services, we have these various programs of

00:19:52 – 00:19:58:	which you can take advantage, etc., etc. This creates a perverse set of incentives and that is

00:19:58 – 00:20:06:	deliberate. Because on the one hand, it maintains women as part of the working class. So it is

00:20:07 – 00:20:12:	beneficial in terms of capitalism, in terms of the market, you have more workers, you can drive

00:20:12 – 00:20:17:	down wages, etc. But more importantly, and this is obviously Satan's overarching goal,

00:20:18 – 00:20:25:	it makes it incredibly difficult to form families. Because women, when they are younger and more

00:20:25 – 00:20:30:	vulnerable, and more easily misled, and that's obviously just true. Yes, men, when they're

00:20:30 – 00:20:38:	younger, are also more easily misled, but women are more easily misled than men. That's in scripture,

00:20:38 – 00:20:45:	that's just the way God made men and women. But women, when they are young and easily misled,

00:20:46 – 00:20:52:	they can be told by the culture, by the state, no, you should take advantage of your youth,

00:20:52 – 00:20:58:	and you should do these things that you really shouldn't do. But the problem is, by the time

00:20:58 – 00:21:03:	they realize the error they have made, well, they're now in their mid-30s, or their 40s.

00:21:05 – 00:21:10:	Women have a biological clock that men really do not. Yes, men have one to a certain degree. If you

00:21:10 – 00:21:15:	have your first child when you're 60, you're going to have a lot of problems that you would

00:21:15 – 00:21:21:	not have if you had had your first child when you were 30. So for men, yes, you can marry later,

00:21:21 – 00:21:28:	you can have children later. You shouldn't do it too late. But for women, that's not an option.

00:21:28 – 00:21:32:	Because women have a fertility window. There's only a set number of years,

00:21:32 – 00:21:37:	15, 20 years, depending on the woman, wherein you can actually have children.

00:21:38 – 00:21:45:	All Satan has to do is get women to squander that period, and he's won. Because that destroys

00:21:45 – 00:21:50:	family formation, it destroys the next generation, and as we've covered in previous episodes,

00:21:50 – 00:21:57:	that is primarily how Christendom propagates. It propagates from father to son, from father to

00:21:57 – 00:22:02:	daughter, from father to his children, because he is the head of the household,

00:22:02 – 00:22:04:	he is the head of his children, he's the head of his wife as well,

00:22:05 – 00:22:13:	and he instills in them the Christian faith. Christianity is not primarily a matter

00:22:13 – 00:22:18:	of going out and proselytizing and bringing in new converts. Yes, that's part of it, and at

00:22:18 – 00:22:23:	certain points in history that has been a more important part of it. But that was not God's

00:22:23 – 00:22:29:	design. God's original design was that Adam would teach his sons and daughters,

00:22:29 – 00:22:33:	and then his sons and daughters would teach their sons and daughters in perpetuity,

00:22:34 – 00:22:39:	and that is how it was in Christendom, once Christianity returned to Europe,

00:22:40 – 00:22:43:	for a thousand years, for more than a thousand years.

00:22:45 – 00:22:50:	It is only today that that has fallen away, because we're quite frankly just having fewer

00:22:50 – 00:22:56:	children, and these are the reasons that's happening. But now to speak directly to fathers,

00:22:56 – 00:23:02:	now we're not going to give, as we said, specific parenting advice, although I'm

00:23:02 – 00:23:06:	a little more comfortable giving some, I've done a fair amount of work in psychology.

00:23:07 – 00:23:11:	I know some will think that that's probably the antithesis of knowing how to deal with children,

00:23:11 – 00:23:16:	but it depends on what you read and which conclusions you draw. But to give some

00:23:16 – 00:23:21:	actual concrete advice for fathers, this is the same advice we've been giving all along,

00:23:21 – 00:23:28:	do not send your daughters to college. Period. That's a blanket recommendation,

00:23:29 – 00:23:36:	and the reason not to do that is very simple. The odds are that she is going to do extremely

00:23:36 – 00:23:44:	unwise things while she is away from your roof. And this is not a matter of trusting your daughter

00:23:44 – 00:23:51:	or not trusting your daughter. This is a matter of being a father, realizing that God has given

00:23:51 – 00:23:58:	you a position of headship. It is your duty to oversee what she does. You cannot do that

00:23:58 – 00:24:03:	when she's away at college. And so what is she when she's away at college? She's headless.

00:24:05 – 00:24:11:	Headless things do not make good decisions. That is simply the nature of reality.

00:24:12 – 00:24:18:	And so a verse should come to mind. Leviticus, do not profane your daughter by making her a

00:24:18 – 00:24:23:	prostitute, lest the land fall into prostitution and the land become full of depravity.

00:24:24 – 00:24:29:	When you send your daughter away to college, and I do mean emphasis on away because it is

00:24:29 – 00:24:34:	particularly a problem when you send her away to college, a residential college. There's a

00:24:34 – 00:24:38:	difference if she takes a few classes at a community college, comes home at night, lives under your

00:24:38 – 00:24:45:	roof. But if you send her away to a residential college, you are effectively telling her go be

00:24:45 – 00:24:53:	a prostitute. Now she may not. You may win the odds. But don't play those odds. God did not call

00:24:53 – 00:24:58:	you to roll the dice when it comes to your children. You are called to be a father and a head. You are

00:24:58 – 00:25:04:	called to raise them correctly. And this is part of the reason that young men are having such a

00:25:04 – 00:25:12:	hard time finding marriageable women. Because once a woman has gone to college and been promiscuous,

00:25:13 – 00:25:19:	in many cases she is no longer fit to be a wife. Because as we went over in previous episodes,

00:25:19 – 00:25:25:	there are very real consequences to that behavior. And becoming a Christian again,

00:25:25 – 00:25:29:	if you apostatized while you were in college and you come back to Christ, becoming a Christian again

00:25:29 – 00:25:36:	does not remove those temporal consequences. It removes the eternal consequences. So you don't

00:25:36 – 00:25:43:	necessarily go to hell because you were a whore in undergrad. But there are very real consequences.

00:25:43 – 00:25:48:	You won't be able to pair bond as well, if at all. You will have children that will have genetic

00:25:48 – 00:25:53:	issues that they would not otherwise have had, etc. etc. There are many problems attendant that.

00:25:53 – 00:25:59:	And so we recognize these are the problems that young men are facing. Because they're

00:25:59 – 00:26:06:	facing a marriage market in which there are many women who are simply not marriageable anymore.

00:26:07 – 00:26:11:	And so one of the recommendations that we would make for the young men out there,

00:26:12 – 00:26:17:	don't look for women at college. That's not going to be a good place to find them.

00:26:18 – 00:26:22:	Look for a woman who has a good enough relationship with her father

00:26:22 – 00:26:27:	that she didn't go to college. That her father knew to recommend to her that that was not a wise

00:26:27 – 00:26:33:	decision, really ever, but particularly under present circumstances. There are many places

00:26:33 – 00:26:40:	where you can find women who are marriage material. They still exist. You may be to speak

00:26:40 – 00:26:45:	directly to the young men. You may be discouraged because of what you've seen of the world. And

00:26:45 – 00:26:49:	to some degree that's rational. The world has a lot of problems right now.

00:26:51 – 00:26:55:	And women, you need to understand the nature of women. Women are going to reflect the society

00:26:55 – 00:27:03:	more directly than men are. Because that is how God made women. Women start to become like and

00:27:03 – 00:27:09:	to reflect their head. And a woman who is not living under her father's roof or her husband's

00:27:09 – 00:27:15:	roof is going to reflect her head. And her head is going to be the state. She is going to reflect

00:27:16 – 00:27:19:	the current state of society. And that is what we see today.

00:27:21 – 00:27:26:	And I'm sure that there are a lot of guys listening right now, particularly fathers who are thinking,

00:27:26 – 00:27:30:	well, I know about a good Christian college where that's not going to happen. BS,

00:27:31 – 00:27:35:	it's a matter of degrees. And this is part of the reason why I said at the beginning,

00:27:36 – 00:27:41:	your knowledge of college is utterly worthless. It's completely worthless. You think you know

00:27:41 – 00:27:46:	something about college, you know nothing. You are completely ignorant. And anything that you

00:27:46 – 00:27:52:	would ever say to a man 15, 20 years younger than you is garbage. Don't even think about doing it

00:27:52 – 00:27:58:	because you're wrong. The degree of depravity in these places, I don't know the frequency with

00:27:58 – 00:28:02:	which it's doubling. It's certainly more than every five years. But the notion that someone who

00:28:02 – 00:28:09:	is in college 25, 30 years ago has a clue what's going on today is it's wicked. I'm telling you

00:28:09 – 00:28:14:	right now, don't tell anyone, oh no, it's going to be fine. And I include the Christian colleges,

00:28:14 – 00:28:19:	isn't that? Three things will happen if you send girls off to college. They will become whores,

00:28:19 – 00:28:24:	they will become witches, and they will apostatize. I know that sounds completely overblown and over

00:28:24 – 00:28:28:	the top. I'm sure some of you are just laughing at me right now. By degrees, all those things will

00:28:28 – 00:28:34:	happen. Because as Corey said, girls need a head. We talked about I think in the Feminism episode

00:28:34 – 00:28:41:	about the fact that the marriage ceremony where the father gives his daughter's hand to the groom.

00:28:43 – 00:28:46:	Not only is it a transfer of title, it's a transfer of headship.

00:28:47 – 00:28:53:	It is saying the father who was the head of this girl is now making this man her head.

00:28:54 – 00:29:00:	She has to have a head. When you send her away, she doesn't have a head. I don't want to abuse the

00:29:00 – 00:29:07:	term literally, but this is more than a metaphor here. This is a functional spiritual real thing,

00:29:07 – 00:29:12:	and there's no work around. And there is no in loco parentis when you have a Christian college.

00:29:12 – 00:29:17:	Because I'll tell you what, the people who are teaching in those places have themselves all

00:29:17 – 00:29:21:	gone to colleges that are being corrupted. All the things you hear people complaining about

00:29:21 – 00:29:29:	politically, socioeconomically, sociopolitically, any way you want to cut it, the institutions for

00:29:29 – 00:29:34:	learning are diseased. Frankly, the very fact that there would be a co-ed college is by itself an

00:29:34 – 00:29:40:	indication that you're dealing with a wicked place. You would never, ever in a million years,

00:29:40 – 00:29:44:	throw a bunch of horny teenage boys and girls in one place and think, oh, they're fine. I

00:29:44 – 00:29:50:	catechize them. They'll turn out just fine. That's insane. That is being the worst possible father.

00:29:51 – 00:29:59:	So, again, we're saying stuff that seems extreme and it seems absurd. I'll put my credibility

00:29:59 – 00:30:04:	on the line. We're not going far enough. We're not going to describe the things that we know

00:30:04 – 00:30:08:	are going on because we'd have to put an explicit warning on this thing. And some of you would

00:30:08 – 00:30:14:	probably just turn it off and never listen again. The stories about what happens are unconscionable.

00:30:15 – 00:30:22:	They're worse than anything that we have until you go back to the dawn of recorded history

00:30:22 – 00:30:30:	and talking about Greek and Roman-level pagan practices that today are cultural. They're normal.

00:30:30 – 00:30:39:	They're things that go on. And witchcraft, same deal. I went, girls, the notion of spiritual but

00:30:39 – 00:30:46:	not religious, that is basically the expression of how girls view religion. A girl without a head

00:30:46 – 00:30:51:	saying, you are going to be Christian. She may hang on for a time. I'm not saying that they're not

00:30:51 – 00:30:55:	capable of having faith or maintaining faith. I'm saying that their faith will be put to the test

00:30:55 – 00:31:04:	in a way that men can't understand. We don't have the social necessity to get our bearings from other

00:31:04 – 00:31:09:	people. That's not the case with girls. They fundamentally get their bearings from what the

00:31:09 – 00:31:15:	group is doing. And so when the group is influenced by any degree by something negative,

00:31:15 – 00:31:20:	it's naturally going to nudge a girl much more than a guy. Now, obviously, we all know the guys

00:31:20 – 00:31:27:	can fall into peer pressure, but it's much more of a binary decision. Guys say, do something stupid

00:31:27 – 00:31:31:	and other guys say, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I'll take that dare. Or they just

00:31:31 – 00:31:37:	say, no, I want no part of this scene. Guys can make that sort of a decision and walk away from a

00:31:37 – 00:31:41:	group or just tell the group, I want nothing to do with this. If you guys are going to do this,

00:31:41 – 00:31:49:	I'm going to bounce. Girls virtually never had that kind of fortitude. And it's endemic to their

00:31:49 – 00:31:53:	nature. It's not a question of weak character. I'm not trying to suggest if you have a really

00:31:53 – 00:31:58:	tough girl, she's going to be fine. We're fundamentally different. The sexes are different

00:31:58 – 00:32:03:	that the couple episodes we did on women is specifically dealing with the fact that we're

00:32:03 – 00:32:10:	not the same stuff. And so the problems that girls will face are in some ways fundamentally

00:32:10 – 00:32:15:	different from the problems that men will face. And for the young guys, as Corey said, who are

00:32:15 – 00:32:22:	looking for marriageable material, forget whether she's attractive or whatever degree of intelligence

00:32:22 – 00:32:28:	you find appealing. Something that we mentioned before that blew up online a few years ago

00:32:28 – 00:32:34:	was a controversy around debt free virgins without tattoos. Debt free means she doesn't have a

00:32:34 – 00:32:40:	negative dowry. If you send her off to college, you're almost certainly putting her in debt.

00:32:40 – 00:32:45:	That debt is functionally a negative dowry. You're saying to her husband, he's going,

00:32:45 – 00:32:50:	her future husband, you're going to have to pay off this five or six figure debt before you can

00:32:50 – 00:32:55:	even break even on taking my daughter out from under my wing. And guys do that without a second

00:32:55 – 00:33:01:	thought. That's evil. That's completely evil. A negative dowry is the most maniacal thing imaginable.

00:33:01 – 00:33:07:	Apart from the rest, forget the sexual promiscuity or any of the rest. Just saddling her with debt

00:33:08 – 00:33:14:	so that she can go learn something that's probably useless in most cases. I mean, when you look at

00:33:14 – 00:33:20:	the degrees that girls are completing relative to men, it's mostly blow off garbage. It's just

00:33:21 – 00:33:26:	stuff that shouldn't even be higher education. It's a joke. And yet, they are just getting

00:33:26 – 00:33:33:	saddled with debt that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, is going to completely disrupt future

00:33:33 – 00:33:40:	family formation in any guy with any sense. This is the advice to young men. Think long and hard

00:33:40 – 00:33:47:	about even dating a girl who has much college debt. If it's 5,000, 10,000, that's one thing.

00:33:47 – 00:33:53:	It's usually not. It's usually closer to six figures. So you should write them off. I'll say

00:33:53 – 00:33:57:	flat out and I think Corey agrees. You should write a girl off if she's six figures in debt

00:33:57 – 00:34:03:	without hesitation. Because Corey said she has an idiot father. She has clearly no judgment.

00:34:03 – 00:34:08:	And she has a boat anchor around her neck. And you want to attach that to your future family? No.

00:34:09 – 00:34:13:	You have a choice as a young man. You're trying to filter and winnow things down.

00:34:13 – 00:34:18:	That's an easy place to start. Virgins, we talked about that in past episodes. It's

00:34:18 – 00:34:22:	virtually a lost cause. And frankly, one of the things that goes into

00:34:24 – 00:34:30:	a young man trying to find a girl who has been sexually chased is she's going to have to be

00:34:30 – 00:34:35:	younger in a lot of cases. So we'll talk in a little bit about talking to fathers instead of

00:34:35 – 00:34:43:	talking to daughters to meet their daughters. And we referenced the episode around job boards

00:34:43 – 00:34:48:	at church. I think we're going to need to see arranged marriages come back for a while.

00:34:49 – 00:34:55:	Now, on the subject of younger marriages and disparate marriages, guys who are knowledgeable

00:34:55 – 00:35:01:	about particularly American history will know that in the 16, 17, 1800s, I think marriages were

00:35:01 – 00:35:07:	typically like 22, 23, 24 range, depending on the culture and whatever. Those were fundamentally

00:35:07 – 00:35:11:	Christian cultures where the girls were living under their parents' roof. So you cannot compare

00:35:11 – 00:35:17:	it to today because the single number of age is not communicating the same thing in 2023

00:35:17 – 00:35:25:	that it communicated in 1723. It's just not. The 16-year-old girl, the 18-year-old girl,

00:35:25 – 00:35:31:	the 23-year-old girl, that is the march of time where they have been under continuous influence

00:35:31 – 00:35:36:	from a wicked society, encouraging them to give up their virginity and then to go further and

00:35:36 – 00:35:46:	further and further in frequency, depravity, and profligacy of their sexual misconduct. And

00:35:47 – 00:35:52:	they'll do it because it's fun and everyone else is doing it. And again, they want to fit in.

00:35:52 – 00:35:55:	Who wants to be a prude? Who wants to be the girl who's on the outs with the group?

00:35:56 – 00:36:02:	And even in a Christian college, this stuff still happens. Maybe parents still hear about it,

00:36:02 – 00:36:07:	but I promise you I've heard about it. I've heard names of children, of pastors, doing this stuff.

00:36:09 – 00:36:13:	It's not the point. The point is you can't just trust, but you baptize the kid and cataclysm

00:36:13 – 00:36:17:	that they're not going to misbehave when they get away from you.

00:36:17 – 00:36:25:	So what do we do? Simple thing. Don't send her to college. Don't sell her with debt.

00:36:25 – 00:36:30:	Don't give her into an environment where she's likely to engage in sexual promiscuity.

00:36:31 – 00:36:37:	And for young men, one of the things that they said, Corey and I talk a lot to younger guys in

00:36:37 – 00:36:46:	18, 22, 23 range all the time. And most of them are trying not to despair about this stuff.

00:36:47 – 00:36:52:	They have a stiff upper lip and they're trying to do the right things. And they are trying to

00:36:52 – 00:36:57:	trust in God. And one of the reasons that we're doing this episode is to encourage that and also

00:36:57 – 00:37:01:	to encourage the guys who are not, they're just not seeing it. They're not seeing any hope.

00:37:02 – 00:37:08:	For fathers with daughters, these guys exist. And if you have a 16, 17, 18 year old daughter

00:37:08 – 00:37:12:	who is looking at going off to college, not only don't send her off to college,

00:37:13 – 00:37:18:	but at least have open in your mind the prospect that maybe you should be a participant,

00:37:18 – 00:37:25:	not completely. I'm not saying, we're not suggesting I'm going to hand a man to a girl and say,

00:37:25 – 00:37:32:	here you go. This is a 100% arranged marriage. We're saying that matchmaking, historically,

00:37:32 – 00:37:38:	was a family function. It was a parental function. It wasn't a social thing where you just send these

00:37:38 – 00:37:46:	headless kids off when they're at their maximum sexual energy and desire and minimum ability to

00:37:46 – 00:37:51:	comprehend or appreciate future consequences for their actions, where they don't have impulse

00:37:51 – 00:37:56:	control to the degree that they will when they're 10 years older. You don't send them off and then

00:37:56 – 00:38:03:	expect everything to work out, hunky dory. So fathers, if you're listening, at least consider

00:38:05 – 00:38:09:	working somehow. And again, we don't know how that's going to manifest. Just we want people to

00:38:09 – 00:38:14:	begin thinking about just like job boards and churches, you should be thinking about finding

00:38:15 – 00:38:21:	pairs for your sons and daughters. The ideal best case for some sort of

00:38:22 – 00:38:28:	arranged marriage sounds so formal. It's really more about introduction and encouragement.

00:38:29 – 00:38:36:	When every child has two choices, there are basically four permutations. Either you have

00:38:36 – 00:38:44:	good parents and you obey them or you rebel or you have bad parents and you obey them in being bad

00:38:44 – 00:38:50:	or you rebel and act good. So there are two good outcomes and there are two bad outcomes

00:38:50 – 00:38:54:	and they're reversed depending on the quality of parent you have. If you're a good parent,

00:38:55 – 00:38:59:	you want to encourage good behavior in your sons and daughters. And some of that's going to be

00:39:00 – 00:39:04:	supporting them, not just sending them loose, not just saying, yeah, good luck, get out of here.

00:39:04 – 00:39:09:	I've put up with you for 18 years. I'm going to pay off some of your debt for college and then

00:39:09 – 00:39:14:	I'm going to go buy a boat and focus on spending more time on vacation. That's what the boomers

00:39:14 – 00:39:19:	did to a lot of people. That's the model that we've inherited. And part of the generations

00:39:19 – 00:39:23:	episode is talking about the fact that there are no good models for this stuff. So when Cory and

00:39:23 – 00:39:28:	I talk about things like even mentioning arranged marriages and not sending kids off, especially

00:39:28 – 00:39:32:	sending girls, I don't think anyone should go to college. I think no more than 15% of the male

00:39:32 – 00:39:37:	population should ever set foot in college and today I think should drop to zero for probably a

00:39:37 – 00:39:42:	generation, at least until those places no longer exist and we've started from scratch.

00:39:43 – 00:39:50:	Either way, there's no model for what we're encouraging because the world is so evil and so

00:39:50 – 00:39:54:	far gone that of course you're not going to find a model for this stuff. So it's going to sound

00:39:54 – 00:39:59:	crazy and weird and crazy and weird. Everyone thinks, well, that's impractical. That can't

00:39:59 – 00:40:05:	possibly work. Well, it worked for centuries. It worked for most of human history. It didn't

00:40:05 – 00:40:10:	stop working. We stopped doing it and that's the distinction here. It's not that these things that

00:40:10 – 00:40:17:	we used to do quit working and we somehow evolved into a more erudite society. It's we just quit

00:40:17 – 00:40:23:	trying. We quit caring. Parents quit caring. They started setting their kids free and now we're

00:40:23 – 00:40:28:	living in the ashes of those poor decisions. Trying to sweep up these ashes and build something

00:40:28 – 00:40:33:	again is going to involve at least for maybe a generation or two doing some stuff that we haven't

00:40:33 – 00:40:38:	done in a long time. And so I'm very encouraged that I know there's some young men who are listening

00:40:38 – 00:40:44:	to this who specifically talked to fathers and said, I'd like to date your daughter or do you

00:40:44 – 00:40:53:	have any daughters? It sounds like such an antiquated kind of... There's no TV example for it unless

00:40:53 – 00:41:00:	you go back to the 1800s like a cowboy story or something. It sounds absurd because the models

00:41:00 – 00:41:05:	were taken away from us, but it's an entirely salutary thing. It's not the only possible option,

00:41:05 – 00:41:10:	but in a world on fire, it's potentially an option that should certainly be explored.

00:41:12 – 00:41:17:	In a very real sense, many of these problems are a form of antinomianism.

00:41:17 – 00:41:25:	And I mean that in a specific way. What we are in essence doing is ignoring nature. We're saying,

00:41:25 – 00:41:31:	well, we're Christian. And so these problems that are inherent in human nature are no longer

00:41:31 – 00:41:39:	a problem for us because we're Christian. And that's not true. It's not true in the sense of

00:41:39 – 00:41:44:	nature as God intended it. And so when you become a Christian, you still have to eat and drink.

00:41:45 – 00:41:50:	You still get thirsty. You still get tired. You are still a creature. You are still an animal, in

00:41:50 – 00:41:58:	fact. And so these demands of your physical nature are not removed by faith. That would be

00:41:58 – 00:42:04:	insane. That is to say, that would be to say that faith destroys ontology, that it destroys

00:42:04 – 00:42:10:	nature. It doesn't do that. If your theology destroys ontology, your theology is wrong.

00:42:11 – 00:42:18:	But then there's also the other sense where people are rejecting the fact that we live

00:42:18 – 00:42:23:	in a fallen world. They're saying, if you become Christian, then it doesn't matter that you live

00:42:23 – 00:42:28:	in a fallen world. No, it still matters very much because there are still temptations. There are

00:42:28 – 00:42:33:	still problems. You will still encounter these things in your daily life because you live in a

00:42:33 – 00:42:40:	fallen world and you are still fallen. And so, yes, your daughter may be a very good person.

00:42:41 – 00:42:48:	She may be able to recite the entire Catechism. She knows chunks of scripture by heart.

00:42:49 – 00:42:53:	She attends church every Sunday. She sings in the choir, all of these things.

00:42:54 – 00:43:01:	If you ignore the nature of women, you ignore the nature of girls, you ignore the fallen nature

00:43:01 – 00:43:07:	of humanity, and you send her off to a place where she is going to be surrounded by temptations and

00:43:07 – 00:43:15:	pressures, odds are she'll eventually crack. And you are responsible for that. And as well mentioned,

00:43:15 – 00:43:21:	one of the first things that you can notice about a supposed Christian college, if it's co-ed,

00:43:21 – 00:43:27:	it's not Christian. Period. That's the end of it. It may be Christian in many other ways. It may

00:43:27 – 00:43:32:	have a chapel. It may have required attendance. All these things that you see at Christian colleges,

00:43:32 – 00:43:38:	and for the record I went to one for one semester, but I did attend one. Just because it is Christian

00:43:38 – 00:43:45:	in name does not mean that it is Christian in practice. If it's co-ed, it has already proven to

00:43:45 – 00:43:52:	you that it rejects the fallen nature of man and seeks simply to ignore it. And by doing so creates

00:43:52 – 00:43:58:	immense occasion for temptation. And what does Scripture say about creating the occasion for

00:43:58 – 00:44:08:	temptation? Temptation must come, but woe to those by whom it comes. Do not be the one upon whom

00:44:09 – 00:44:18:	Christ upon whom the word of God is pronouncing woe. And speaking of woe, he said that women who go

00:44:18 – 00:44:26:	away to college become whores, witches, and apostates. I want to focus on that for a second,

00:44:26 – 00:44:30:	because some, as he mentioned, may think that that's an extreme position,

00:44:30 – 00:44:34:	may think that that's unreasonable, they think, of course they aren't going to do that. Well,

00:44:34 – 00:44:42:	here's the problem. If they become whores, they necessarily, in our society as it stands today,

00:44:42 – 00:44:48:	become the other two. And why is that? The answer is abortion. Now, I have a

00:44:49 – 00:44:53:	short podcast episode of my own podcast that did about abortion. I'll link that in the show notes,

00:44:53 – 00:44:57:	because it goes over this in more depth. But to go over it briefly here,

00:44:59 – 00:45:07:	you cannot have a society in which you have rampant promiscuity if pregnancy is still a very

00:45:07 – 00:45:14:	real, let's call it a risk, with every sexual encounter, which, in the state of nature,

00:45:15 – 00:45:21:	without what we have today, various devices and chemicals and such, that's just the way it is

00:45:21 – 00:45:30:	for women. Every sexual encounter risks pregnancy. That is, in fact, part of what keeps women chaste.

00:45:30 – 00:45:35:	It's that thing in the back of their mind telling them, if you do this dumb thing,

00:45:35 – 00:45:42:	there may be very real consequences that you cannot hide. Historically, that has helped to

00:45:42 – 00:45:45:	keep women chaste. That has helped to keep marriages stable. That has helped to keep

00:45:45 – 00:45:53:	society stable. But now we have prophylactics and we have so-called birth control. The problem is

00:45:55 – 00:45:59:	hormonal birth control, which is the one that women primarily use. Yes, it has a lot of

00:45:59 – 00:46:04:	negative environmental consequences and such, but that aside,

00:46:05 – 00:46:13:	hormonal birth control is abortifacient because it works in several ways. The first way it works is

00:46:13 – 00:46:19:	by attempting to regulate the woman's cycle so that she will not be fertile except during a

00:46:19 – 00:46:25:	certain window so she can manage things and not get pregnant. The second is that it makes

00:46:26 – 00:46:33:	her vagina and her internal anatomy inhospitable to spurn, so less likely for fertilization to

00:46:33 – 00:46:39:	take place. But the third method, and this one is the most morally objectionable, the others are

00:46:40 – 00:46:45:	problematic in their own way to a lesser degree. The third method is that it makes the lining of

00:46:45 – 00:46:53:	the uterus inhospitable to the implantation of the zygote. Now, for those who are far removed

00:46:53 – 00:47:01:	from biology, the zygote is just the fertilized embryo. That's a human life, according to

00:47:01 – 00:47:05:	Christian theology, which is to say it is a human life because it is according to God.

00:47:06 – 00:47:13:	And so if you change the chemistry or the hormones the way the uterine lining reacts

00:47:13 – 00:47:21:	with the zygote and cause implantation to fail, you've just caused an abortion. That's murder.

00:47:22 – 00:47:28:	And so women who are on birth control and having sex are guilty of murder,

00:47:29 – 00:47:34:	and so are the men who are having sex with them incidentally. And so there's your problem.

00:47:35 – 00:47:41:	If the women go off to college and become whores, they are almost certainly going

00:47:41 – 00:47:47:	to be on birth control. Well, now they're also murderous, which is to say witches,

00:47:47 – 00:47:53:	which is to say apostates. So that is not actually an extreme thing to say. That is just

00:47:53 – 00:47:57:	exactly what happens if you actually follow through the logic of what is being done.

00:47:58 – 00:48:04:	And Satan knows this. Satan knows exactly what he's doing. Your daughters may not know it,

00:48:04 – 00:48:08:	and they probably don't, because their health class probably did not cover that very simple

00:48:08 – 00:48:13:	biology I just went over in the space of five minutes. But this is something people don't know.

00:48:13 – 00:48:22:	I actually just yesterday asked chat GPT, the AI chat platform, just to see if it had been

00:48:22 – 00:48:27:	trained on this question. I asked it a handful of questions, a series of questions about abortion.

00:48:27 – 00:48:34:	Eventually I was able to get it to admit that hormonal birth control is abortifacient. But

00:48:34 – 00:48:39:	initially it gave false answers. It had been trained to lie, because of course it is a tool

00:48:40 – 00:48:45:	of the current ruling class of the order of our society. And so on these sorts of questions,

00:48:45 – 00:48:50:	it's trained to lie to you. Well, that's what your daughters are hearing in school. It's what

00:48:50 – 00:48:56:	your sons are hearing in school. If you ask most young people, they will not know that birth

00:48:56 – 00:49:03:	control is abortifacient. They will not know that it is murder to use it. At least murder to use it

00:49:03 – 00:49:12:	while you're sexually active. And so that is what they get introduced into. And so they become

00:49:12 – 00:49:15:	complicit in these heinous sins before they even know what they're doing.

00:49:18 – 00:49:24:	And the advice that's coming from doctors is not only false, but one of the worst things that's

00:49:24 – 00:49:29:	happening on the secondary effects of the pill is that doctors are encouraging usually mothers,

00:49:29 – 00:49:35:	because it's not the husband or the father who's taking his daughter for a gynecological check-up

00:49:35 – 00:49:40:	after she's had her first period. The gyno will say, oh, you need to get on birth control. It'll

00:49:40 – 00:49:46:	help regulate your flow. You're going to have much more comfortable periods. It's going to just make

00:49:46 – 00:49:51:	your life a whole lot better. So from the age of 12 or 13 or maybe even younger, many, many,

00:49:51 – 00:49:56:	many girls are being put on these drugs that alter your body in some ways permanently,

00:49:56 – 00:50:01:	because it effectively tricks the young girl's body into thinking she's been pregnant.

00:50:01 – 00:50:06:	And so you go on the pill when you're 13 and you don't go off the pill until you're 33.

00:50:06 – 00:50:11:	Guess what? Not only has your fertility plummeted via virtue of your age, but it's also been

00:50:11 – 00:50:20:	decimated by your body's hormones being tricked into a condition that results in provable harm.

00:50:21 – 00:50:26:	And so again, since we're trying to focus primarily on advice to young men, young men,

00:50:27 – 00:50:32:	one of the things that you should look for, I'm not going to say it's an absolute no, but

00:50:34 – 00:50:40:	best case, you would have a wife who had never been on birth control. As I said,

00:50:40 – 00:50:44:	like so many doctors are saying that now, that's like, it may be close to finding a unicorn.

00:50:45 – 00:50:51:	If she's an adult, like if she's 18, if she's a young adult, she shouldn't be,

00:50:51 – 00:50:57:	like, because Corey said that then goes not only to the false promises that they're making

00:50:57 – 00:51:02:	about your period, but they go to the direct promises of, oh, you can fornicate and not get

00:51:02 – 00:51:09:	pregnant. Additionally, there's harm to a girl having been on the pill. Some of that harm is

00:51:09 – 00:51:15:	mitigated over time. So it's not a death sentence. It's better for a virgin to have been on the pill

00:51:15 – 00:51:20:	and come off it after a few years than frankly, someone who's not a virgin who is never on the

00:51:20 – 00:51:26:	pill who's been promiscuous before you meet her. In a perfect world, you would find both.

00:51:26 – 00:51:32:	100 years ago, it would have been almost a given. So again, we're dealing with a circumstance where,

00:51:32 – 00:51:38:	as Corey was saying, like the deck is getting stacked against young men on virtually every

00:51:38 – 00:51:43:	count here, and we're not trying to set up some impossible goal where there's only one girl in

00:51:43 – 00:51:49:	10,000 that can possibly meet all these criteria. Most of these are not going to be hard and fast

00:51:49 – 00:51:54:	rules, but you, as a young man, should know that the longer and the more severely any of these

00:51:54 – 00:52:01:	things go on, the less suitable a wife she's going to be beyond any control of herself,

00:52:01 – 00:52:05:	beyond any question about being forgiven by Jesus. This is not, as we said in a couple of

00:52:06 – 00:52:10:	other episodes, as Corey said earlier, has nothing to do with forgiveness. This damage,

00:52:10 – 00:52:17:	this temporal consequences for sin is real, and much of it is immutable. It's like if you're a

00:52:17 – 00:52:24:	smoker for 20 years, and you smoke 10 packs a day, and then you quit, your lungs will slowly heal,

00:52:24 – 00:52:29:	but they'll never go completely back to normal. So yes, after 20 years, is it better to quit smoking

00:52:30 – 00:52:35:	than to continue smoking? Absolutely. Is it better for your lungs if you never smoked at all?

00:52:35 – 00:52:44:	Obviously. So we're talking about just being aware, first of all. Again, I don't want to give

00:52:44 – 00:52:49:	impossible circumstances, because by the time we get done describing all these things, there may be

00:52:50 – 00:52:56:	one girl in 50,000 that meets them all, and that's not, that would cause despair. We absolutely do

00:52:56 – 00:53:02:	not want young guys to despair. What we want is for you to have the best opportunity to find girls

00:53:02 – 00:53:07:	who are the most likely to be good wives, and we'll get into here in a minute in some of the

00:53:07 – 00:53:14:	scriptural descriptions of what a good wife is like, but there's stuff that scripture doesn't

00:53:14 – 00:53:20:	talk about because it didn't exist, because it was so horrifically evil that it took technology.

00:53:20 – 00:53:25:	Basically, it took demons putting this crap in the hands of humans before some of these modern

00:53:25 – 00:53:29:	things took off. So you as a young man need to, you know, and you as fathers who are listening,

00:53:30 – 00:53:35:	keep your daughters away from this crap, all of it. Don't put them in debt. Don't let them be put

00:53:35 – 00:53:40:	on the pill. And this is one of those things where just like daughters can now have abortions

00:53:40 – 00:53:45:	without their, without parental consent, stuff like the pill is happening too. In fact, I don't

00:53:45 – 00:53:50:	know what the state of, I believe that the pill was just taken off the prescription. I mean,

00:53:50 – 00:53:56:	it will be possible to buy it if it's not already in stores over the counter. That's a nightmare

00:53:56 – 00:54:01:	for all these reasons. Like it's, it's the reason that it went over the counter despite all the

00:54:01 – 00:54:09:	serious health risks is that the health risks are the point, the causing abortions, the destroying

00:54:09 – 00:54:16:	the future fertility, the messing up pair bonding, which is another critical part. A girl who has a

00:54:16 – 00:54:22:	natural cycle has fundamentally different taste in men than a girl who's on the pill. Most people

00:54:22 – 00:54:27:	don't know that. Most girls don't know that your tasting guys changes when you go off the pill.

00:54:28 – 00:54:32:	You will be repelled by some of the very things you find attractive, depending on whether or not

00:54:32 – 00:54:38:	you're on the pill. When you're on the pill and your body thinks you're pregnant, you're more

00:54:38 – 00:54:44:	attracted to nurturing, you're less attracted to brash, and there's a lot more to it. But basically,

00:54:45 – 00:54:51:	it sort of narrows down and weakens the range of men that you find appealing. And this is a vicious

00:54:51 – 00:54:57:	feedback cycle where men are then conditioned by their wives or their girlfriends on the pill

00:54:58 – 00:55:04:	to be weaker than they maybe naturally would be. And then when, you know, 10 years into your marriage,

00:55:04 – 00:55:08:	you finally decide, okay, you know, we're getting into our mid 30s, maybe it's time to have our first

00:55:08 – 00:55:13:	kid. She goes off the pill. And two months later, she's going to divorce you because she finds you

00:55:13 – 00:55:19:	repellent. This actually happens. It is a, it's a horrific risk. It's real. We may find some, some

00:55:19 – 00:55:24:	links and show notes for this. Take my word for it or not. This stuff actually happens. These,

00:55:24 – 00:55:31:	these chemicals fundamentally alter human beings. And so when it's your wife, who's pregnant, and

00:55:31 – 00:55:35:	all these things are happening naturally, it's a blessing from God, it's fine. You're there,

00:55:35 – 00:55:40:	you're nurturing, you're taking care of her. And if she's in a really weird mood, and you've got to

00:55:40 – 00:55:45:	just manage that gently, that is the blessing of a husband and wife living a life together.

00:55:45 – 00:55:49:	It's completely different when it's been chemically altered and you introduce

00:55:50 – 00:55:54:	not being in marriage and all these other things that just, they tear apart the very thing that

00:55:54 – 00:56:01:	God was trying to form. And so for fathers, don't let it happen for sons. Be aware of it. Again,

00:56:01 – 00:56:05:	we're not saying right off any girl. If you can find a girl that's never been on the pill that

00:56:05 – 00:56:11:	isn't in debt, doesn't have any tattoos. The reason tattoos come up is there's a very strong

00:56:11 – 00:56:16:	element of self-loathing in a lot of this. For a girl, there's a lot of self-loathing

00:56:16 – 00:56:22:	in acting out sexually. And it's, again, it's a vicious cycle where she does something that she

00:56:22 – 00:56:29:	knows she didn't, shouldn't do. She then regrets it. And to justify having done in the first place

00:56:29 – 00:56:36:	and to try to, try to assuage the guilt, she'll go do more to sort of double down and say, well,

00:56:36 – 00:56:40:	I can't have been wrong if I keep doing even more of it. And it sounds stupid, but that's a

00:56:40 – 00:56:45:	sort of rationalization that goes on in people. That's not particular to girls, but when it particularly

00:56:45 – 00:56:54:	comes to sexual activity outside of marriage, it's very common in tattoos and drugs and binge

00:56:54 – 00:57:00:	drinking. All these things are self-destructive. So something like tattoos are a good landmark.

00:57:00 – 00:57:04:	Again, we're not making an absolute moral pronouncement, although I do think it's,

00:57:04 – 00:57:08:	I think it's sinful, but principally because it's born of self-loathing.

00:57:09 – 00:57:14:	You see pictures of so many pretty young girls today. They're, they have perfect beautiful skin,

00:57:14 – 00:57:19:	they're incredibly attractive, and they're covered in doodles. They have these permanent,

00:57:19 – 00:57:24:	idiotic tattoos, not even art. They've just been, they've used their bodies like graffiti.

00:57:25 – 00:57:31:	And it's just, it shows that they're headless. It shows that they have bad fathers. It shows,

00:57:31 – 00:57:35:	or no fathers at all. It shows they have no good relationship with their father,

00:57:35 – 00:57:39:	and that they hate themselves to some degree. And that sort of self-loathing,

00:57:41 – 00:57:46:	again, it's a vicious, mutually reinforcing cycle where the more you do things that hurt

00:57:46 – 00:57:51:	yourself, the more you want to hurt yourself for punishing yourself for having done the thing in

00:57:51 – 00:57:56:	the first place. And it's why we see so much self-destruction in the world today. And then,

00:57:57 – 00:58:04:	you know, maybe they sober up when they're in their 30, 35, 40, and they say, well, where are all the

00:58:04 – 00:58:09:	good men? Well, all the good men are looking for a girl who hasn't been destroying herself for 25 years.

00:58:10 – 00:58:15:	Before we move on to the, the scripture, and then I guess finish up the episode with maybe some

00:58:15 – 00:58:20:	practical recommendations. And yes, I do recognize that I started to give a practical recommendation

00:58:20 – 00:58:25:	a little while ago and did not complete that. That is because we're going to do that at the

00:58:25 – 00:58:32:	end of the episode. But there's a blunt point, and I do mean blunt point that I wish to make here.

00:58:33 – 00:58:39:	As a man, one of the things that you are doing in a marriage, at least one of the things that you

00:58:39 – 00:58:48:	should be doing in a marriage, is you are buying a womb. And the reason I word it that way is

00:58:48 – 00:58:57:	because yes, marriage is a transfer of title in a sense. It is the father transferring title to

00:58:57 – 00:59:05:	the daughter to the husband. But in addition, I say you're buying a womb because that is the only

00:59:05 – 00:59:12:	way you can build a family. You cannot have children if your wife is infertile. Of course,

00:59:12 – 00:59:17:	you can't have children if you're infertile either. And so for those of you who need to hear it, lay

00:59:17 – 00:59:26:	off the marijuana. But as was mentioned earlier, there is a fertility window for women. If she

00:59:26 – 00:59:33:	is outside that window, if she is aged out of being fertile, you cannot build a family with her

00:59:33 – 00:59:38:	because she cannot have children. Unless, of course, God happens to bless her in her old age,

00:59:38 – 00:59:44:	but chances are you're not going to be Sarah having children at that late stage in life.

00:59:45 – 00:59:52:	And so for the men out there, as a simple short practical recommendation before we get to the

59:52 – 01:00:01
other ones later on, marry younger. That has been historically normal. It varies in time and place,

01:00:01 – 01:00:09:	as was mentioned earlier, but it is entirely fine to marry younger. Your goal, assuming you are a

01:00:09 – 01:00:16:	good, upstanding Christian man, your goal is to build a family with this woman. If she needs to be

01:00:16 – 01:00:22:	10 years younger than you to do that, so be it. And before we continue, I want to make one thing

01:00:22 – 01:00:29:	clear. Again, we've used language like buying a womb and transfer of title. And those are specific,

01:00:29 – 01:00:33:	mechanical things about what's going on. I don't want anyone, particularly young guys,

01:00:33 – 01:00:38:	who are trying to figure this stuff out. And you hear a lot of strident, crazy talk on the internet.

01:00:38 – 01:00:43:	None of this is intended to dehumanize the girl that you want to marry. This is a person,

01:00:43 – 01:00:47:	is a human being that you're going to spend every day of the rest of your life with.

01:00:47 – 01:00:53:	She better be a good person. She better be kind and gentle and loving and someone you want to be

01:00:53 – 01:00:59:	around. That's a human being. That's not a womb with legs. That's not something that you've just

01:00:59 – 01:01:08:	gotten a title to. That's not property. That becomes a part of your own body. So the specific reason

01:01:08 – 01:01:13:	that Corey and I will narrowly speak in those terms, A, it runs completely countered everything

01:01:13 – 01:01:19:	everyone else is saying, but it is in fact true. But that doesn't mean that it's the whole picture.

01:01:19 – 01:01:23:	We don't think it's a whole picture. It's not even remotely the whole picture, but it's a necessary

01:01:23 – 01:01:31:	part of it. As Corey said, if the purpose of marriage is to procreate, which incidentally is

01:01:31 – 01:01:41:	what God said in Genesis 9, to Noah, Adam and Noah got the same message, and then it's reinforced

01:01:41 – 01:01:48:	again in the New Testament, procreation is one of the gifts that God gives us. That's a man and a

01:01:48 – 01:01:55:	woman becoming one flesh. The problems come in socially because the one flesh thing is a lot

01:01:55 – 01:02:02:	of fun, and all these technological so-called advancements let us have the fun without having

01:02:02 – 01:02:07:	the rest of our lives part of it, which God intended and which God builds into it. So

01:02:08 – 01:02:13:	if you're a young guy and there's a lot of people on the Internet say a lot of really baddy, weird

01:02:13 – 01:02:18:	stuff, and frankly, one of the reasons we want to do hope, we hope will be an encouraging episode to

01:02:18 – 01:02:23:	you, is because one of the things I see a lot of young guys struggling with, particularly when

01:02:23 – 01:02:29:	they're starting to figure out just how bad things are, is they become completely blackpilled

01:02:29 – 01:02:35:	and completely hateful towards the state of girls, to the point that they attribute that directly

01:02:35 – 01:02:42:	to just hating girls. And there's a whole subculture that sees that basically as a personality,

01:02:42 – 01:02:47:	that's somehow hating and dehumanizing girls and calling them horrible names,

01:02:47 – 01:02:56:	is how they express their existence as guys. We don't think that, and we condemn those who do

01:02:56 – 01:03:01:	because it's destructive. It's every bit as destructive to these girls as all the other

01:03:01 – 01:03:06:	things that are going on that in some cases may, frankly, merit some of the name-calling.

01:03:06 – 01:03:12:	It is a man's job to rise above the state of the world and to try to do things that are right,

01:03:12 – 01:03:19:	even when things are messed up. And the wisdom involved is figuring out what can I live with,

01:03:19 – 01:03:25:	where do I draw the line, and how do I conduct myself in a godly manner, in one that's going to,

01:03:25 – 01:03:30:	as Corey said, build a family. That's the point. You're not just loving one person. It's not just,

01:03:30 – 01:03:35:	oh, she's cute, and I want to get with her. You're going to spend the rest of your life with her

01:03:36 – 01:03:41:	because she's a person. She's a charming, attractive person that you want to have with

01:03:41 – 01:03:49:	you. And by your side, for all the attraction and all the flame early on, this is a companion who's

01:03:49 – 01:03:55:	going to be with you the rest of your life. And it's something that goes into mate choice up front,

01:03:55 – 01:04:01:	but then it pays dividends for the rest of your life. And as we get into some of the other

01:04:01 – 01:04:06:	practical stuff, I just want to mention that a lot of this is downstream from a girl's relationship

01:04:06 – 01:04:13:	with her father. The advice that I give to young guys, to mirror what Corey said, don't be shy about

01:04:13 – 01:04:21:	her being younger if you're avoiding some of these pitfalls. Not that it's necessarily the only

01:04:21 – 01:04:27:	correct solution, but if the only way you can find a girl who hasn't had sex with 20 guys or 10,

01:04:29 – 01:04:33:	wherever you want to draw the line, ideally, it should be zero. Her relationship with her

01:04:33 – 01:04:39:	father is going to be reflective of the relationship she will have with you. And that's

01:04:39 – 01:04:44:	something else you're buying. We talk about a mechanical transactional thing. The relationship

01:04:44 – 01:04:49:	that she has with her dad is going to mirror the relationship that she has with you. She's

01:04:49 – 01:04:55:	rebellious if she loathes headship, if she has it all figured out on her own, she's never going to be a

01:04:55 – 01:05:02:	good wife ever by any measure. She's never going to be a good wife because her dad screwed her up.

01:05:02 – 01:05:09:	You can't fix that. You can try, but you're going to fail because the only model she's ever had

01:05:09 – 01:05:17:	has been the sort of model that's going to finally tear you apart. No. Before no-fault

01:05:17 – 01:05:21:	divorce and some of these other things, maybe you could bear it out and maybe you could bring

01:05:21 – 01:05:26:	her around. But today, when you have literally no recourse for someone who decides that she wants to

01:05:26 – 01:05:31:	be a harpy or some other terrible thing, you're just out of luck. You're going to lose half your

01:05:31 – 01:05:37:	stuff and she's going to go on and you may be stuck paying her for the rest of your life for

01:05:37 – 01:05:44:	a bad relationship. That's not a reason not to get married, but it's very much a reason

01:05:44 – 01:05:51:	to focus on finding a good girl going into it. So being kind, being loving, being wholesome,

01:05:51 – 01:05:57:	just generic stuff, pretty, frankly not too hot. The hottest girl in the world that you've ever

01:05:57 – 01:06:04:	seen has had attention from so many guys that she's going to be mad. She's going to have become

01:06:04 – 01:06:09:	completely insane because no one can possibly cope with having that much positive attention.

01:06:09 – 01:06:15:	Find a girl who's pretty that you like. Maybe find a girl who's neglected that most guys don't see

01:06:15 – 01:06:21:	something in her that you see. That girl is going to love you a great deal more. One of the

01:06:21 – 01:06:25:	remarkable things about a girl loving you is that when she looks at you with that sort of love,

01:06:25 – 01:06:30:	her face transforms and she literally becomes more beautiful when she looks at you. Maybe no one

01:06:30 – 01:06:38:	else ever sees it, but you see it all the time. That is a very real thing. It's one of the things

01:06:38 – 01:06:42:	that I think guys, like I said, we talked to a lot of young guys. I don't think they're being

01:06:42 – 01:06:48:	super picky about it. I only want the hottest girl, but you want her to be attractive. It's

01:06:48 – 01:06:55:	crucial. You have to be attracted to the girl and beauty is a big part of that, but inner beauty

01:06:55 – 01:07:01:	is a real thing too because she's a human being. She's a person and so this transactional stuff,

01:07:01 – 01:07:07:	it's very specific and narrow. It's not remotely the whole context of your relationship or your

01:07:07 – 01:07:12:	marriage. That is two people becoming one in spending your lives together.

01:07:13 – 01:07:18:	To emphasize what was said about the nature of women, I'm reminded of

01:07:20 – 01:07:26:	something I said in episode 22 when we were also talking about women. That was our episode

01:07:26 – 01:07:33:	on women more properly. I pointed out and I think this is worth just reiterating here

01:07:33 – 01:07:36:	instead of just telling you to go back and listen to that episode.

01:07:36 – 01:07:44:	I pointed out that in the garden, Adam walked with God. Adam knew God face to face. Adam

01:07:45 – 01:07:50:	talked with God and yet God still said it is not good for man to be alone.

01:07:51 – 01:07:58:	Woman is the greatest blessing next to, of course, salvation as I also mentioned in the

01:07:58 – 01:08:02:	previous episode, but of course, Adam did not need salvation at that point.

01:08:03 – 01:08:10:	Woman is the greatest gift God has ever made for man and that is true for every man

01:08:11 – 01:08:18:	with regard to his wife and it is important to keep sight of that, not to lose sight of that.

01:08:20 – 01:08:24:	Even if we mentioned the problems we have today and yes, we're in a fallen world

01:08:24 – 01:08:32:	and woman has a rebellious streak, that's part of her curse and really it's a curse that falls on

01:08:32 – 01:08:38:	the man, but that's a separate topic for another time. Even though we live in a fallen world,

01:08:38 – 01:08:43:	she is still one of the greatest blessings God can give you and Scripture is very clear on that

01:08:43 – 01:08:50:	and I think that leads in nicely to talking about Scripture and so to start off, I would

01:08:51 – 01:09:00:	begin with Proverbs. Perhaps Proverbs 18 to start, he who finds a wife finds a good thing

01:09:00 – 01:09:06:	and obtains favor from the Lord, but perhaps even more than that verse Proverbs 19,

01:09:07 – 01:09:13:	house and wealth are inherited from fathers, but a prudent wife is from the Lord.

01:09:14 – 01:09:21:	Scripture is very clear that a good wife is a gift from God. Yes, there are of course things that

01:09:21 – 01:09:26:	society can do to improve your odds of finding a wife, there are things fathers can do to raise

01:09:26 – 01:09:35:	daughters to be good wives, etc. However, ultimately that blessing is from God, as are all blessings.

01:09:35 – 01:09:41:	God uses human beings and the creation as his tools to deliver blessings to you,

01:09:42 – 01:09:48:	but ultimately those blessings are from God and Scripture here, very clear, a good wife,

01:09:49 – 01:09:59:	is a great blessing from God. Of course, we can also turn to Ecclesiastes and this emphasizes,

01:09:59 – 01:10:02:	and really we were echoing this point, but it emphasizes the point we were making about

01:10:04 – 01:10:10:	how you should go through life if God gives you a wife and so Ecclesiastes 9,

01:10:10 – 01:10:16:	enjoy life with the wife whom you love all the days of your life that he has given you under the sun,

01:10:16 – 01:10:21:	because that is your portion in life and is your toil at which you toil under the sun.

01:10:23 – 01:10:28:	I think as we look at the scriptural admonitions for what a good little wife looks like,

01:10:28 – 01:10:34:	it's basic and it's obvious, but I think maybe we don't necessarily test ourselves, particularly

01:10:34 – 01:10:39:	before marriage, you know, when there's a young man or young woman just trying to figure out

01:10:40 – 01:10:46:	who do I want. These passages are not just about, okay, once I'm married, this is how I ought to

01:10:46 – 01:10:55:	behave. Some of these things are qualitative about the person themselves. Can you as a girl,

01:10:55 – 01:11:02:	can you as a young man live up to these things? Have you lived yourself your life in such a

01:11:02 – 01:11:08:	wooden fashion that you can deliver on these expectations from God? And if you're on a path

01:11:08 – 01:11:13:	where you are perhaps disrupting some of the things that make it possible for you to deliver

01:11:13 – 01:11:19:	on what God expects, amend your ways now, because it's not just about cleaning up your act once

01:11:19 – 01:11:28:	you get married. That's frankly one of the biggest tropes today that girls live wild. They do

01:11:29 – 01:11:35:	unspeakable things with insane numbers of men, and then they decide to settle down,

01:11:35 – 01:11:40:	and then they decide to be the good girl. And so effectively, the one man who's actually willing

01:11:40 – 01:11:48:	to give her a chance is settling for the leftovers of 50 guys who came before. And

01:11:49 – 01:11:54:	she feels it, even if he doesn't know it, and if he ever finds out he's destroyed by it,

01:11:54 – 01:12:01:	either directly destroyed by the realization in his own disgust, and then the situation of

01:12:02 – 01:12:08:	being in a marriage with a woman who has done these things, or he destroys himself as a man by

01:12:08 – 01:12:13:	effectively accepting that sort of behavior and saying, oh, well, I guess I love you anyway,

01:12:13 – 01:12:20:	and that's what I've got. There's no fixing those situations. And that's one of the reasons that

01:12:21 – 01:12:25:	God speaks to this directly. In 1 Corinthians 6, he says,

01:12:26 – 01:12:31:	the body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

01:12:31 – 01:12:36:	And God raised the Lord, and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your

01:12:36 – 01:12:41:	bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a

01:12:41 – 01:12:47:	prostitute? Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?

01:12:47 – 01:12:52:	For it is written, the two become one flesh, but he who is joined to the Lord becomes one

01:12:52 – 01:12:59:	spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits outside of the body,

01:12:59 – 01:13:04:	but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body

01:13:04 – 01:13:09:	is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own for your

01:13:09 – 01:13:19:	bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. Now, the unforgivable sin of blasphemy against the

01:13:19 – 01:13:25:	Holy Spirit is one that's fundamentally about choosing to drive out the Holy Spirit. And

01:13:27 – 01:13:33:	I think that this passage goes directly to one of the paths that can lead to that. If your body

01:13:33 – 01:13:38:	is a temple for the Holy Spirit, which is true, there's no if about it, if you're a Christian.

01:13:39 – 01:13:45:	And you continuously sin in ways that you know or sin and you do them anyway, because you want

01:13:46 – 01:13:52:	the upsides and you don't fear the downsides. Either you think God wasn't serious, or you'll

01:13:52 – 01:13:58:	make up for that next Sunday, or you're just not going to think about it. Eventually you will drive

01:13:58 – 01:14:03:	out the Holy Spirit. If you make your body a temple for fornication, that is what it will become.

01:14:04 – 01:14:11:	And God in numerous places says that he gives people over to their lusts. If you want to say,

01:14:11 – 01:14:17:	I don't want God, I want this other thing instead, something that was created by God as a gift within

01:14:17 – 01:14:22:	the boundaries that he established. If we say, no, I'm going to steal that for myself, I'm going to

01:14:22 – 01:14:30:	do what I want with it, use it the way I want it. You're in danger in your soul. And as Corey said

01:14:30 – 01:14:34:	earlier, a lot of this is about antinomianism, because people think, you know, I don't want

01:14:34 – 01:14:38:	to judge people, I'm just going to let that slide. I can do a little bit and it's fine.

01:14:41 – 01:14:47:	You're going in one direction or the other. And I want to mention just briefly here,

01:14:47 – 01:14:52:	targeting back to what we discussed in the Listener Feedback episode about chastity versus

01:14:53 – 01:15:00:	celibacy. If you're a young man and you wonder, maybe I'm just celibate,

01:15:01 – 01:15:06:	celibate means that if a completely naked beautiful girl walks up to you and she has a

01:15:06 – 01:15:14:	big smile and she asks you some question, if your response, your sole response is to be annoyed with

01:15:14 – 01:15:20:	her for behaving in such a way and you send her away. And when she walks away, you don't even

01:15:20 – 01:15:25:	glance up to check her out, then you're celibate. That's pretty much the threshold for celibacy,

01:15:25 – 01:15:33:	that I don't care, I don't want anything to do with sex, period. Everyone else is trying to be

01:15:33 – 01:15:44:	chaste. This passage is talking about chastity. Someone who is celibate doesn't need to flee

01:15:44 – 01:15:49:	sexual immorality because they're not capable of sexual immorality. If you're celibate,

01:15:50 – 01:15:55:	there's none of it for you. It's a gift from God that's so incredibly rare as we said in

01:15:55 – 01:16:02:	episode 22. You don't know anybody. It's not you. It's conceivable. It's a gift from God that exists

01:16:02 – 01:16:09:	in some cases, but it's so rare that you shouldn't take it seriously as a thing. And the reason that's

01:16:09 – 01:16:19:	important is that for everyone else, chastity is a duty. It's a duty to God to preserve the bounds

01:16:19 – 01:16:28:	of this gift within the scope for which God gave it. When you remove sex from the boundaries of

01:16:28 – 01:16:36:	marriage, you are unchaste. That's what it means. Chastity has to do with refraining from that,

01:16:36 – 01:16:42:	which is outside what's given to you. Young men particularly struggle with chastity because,

01:16:42 – 01:16:47:	as I said earlier, you're surrounded by girls who are sexually promiscuous, who

01:16:48 – 01:16:53:	visually display their sexual availability by dressing in ways that would have gotten people

01:16:53 – 01:16:59:	arrested even 20 years ago. Today, it's basically just normal. That's a nightmare for any young man

01:16:59 – 01:17:06:	who's full of testosterone, which incidentally leads directly to sexual desire. The hormone is

01:17:06 – 01:17:12:	there for that purpose, as Corey said earlier in one of the On Women episodes. One of the metabolites

01:17:12 – 01:17:18:	for girls drinking alcohol is testosterone. They get hornier when they drink. It doesn't

01:17:18 – 01:17:27:	happen that way with guys. We are naturally sexually amped up by virtue of being men,

01:17:27 – 01:17:33:	and chastity is confining that to your wife. If you don't have a wife, then you just try as best

01:17:33 – 01:17:37:	you can to turn it off. You don't put yourself in situations where you're going to be tempted,

01:17:37 – 01:17:43:	and if there is temptation, you flee from it. As many passages in scripture say, you do what Joseph

01:17:43 – 01:17:49:	did with Potiphar's wife. He tried to seduce her. She fled. It was a sure thing. I'm sure she was

01:17:49 – 01:17:55:	beautiful. She was wealthy. She was ready to go, and Joseph fled because it was wicked, and he was

01:17:55 – 01:18:03:	faithful to God. That's chastity. Incidentally, it wasn't celibacy. Joseph wasn't celibate. He was

01:18:03 – 01:18:07:	obeying God by fleeing temptation because he was tempted. There would not have been temptation

01:18:07 – 01:18:14:	if he were celibate. Don't let pastors try to box you into a corner where they say,

01:18:14 – 01:18:20:	oh, right now you're blessed with a gift of singleness. That's not a gift. That is a temporary

01:18:20 – 01:18:26:	condition, and you pray to God to send you a godly wife, as he has promised he intends for all men.

01:18:27 – 01:18:33:	When that day arrives, then chastity is set aside, and you love your wife. You love only her,

01:18:33 – 01:18:42:	and you love her completely, and she loves you. It's an if-then situation. It's not me,

01:18:43 – 01:18:49:	and then maybe later I'll turn it on. That's not the case. Be chased when you're young.

01:18:49 – 01:18:55:	Be chased when you're unmarried, and when you're married, stop being chased, as God says, except

01:18:55 – 01:19:00:	for a time by mutual agreement. Otherwise, you need to continue to maintain that one flesh union,

01:19:00 – 01:19:07:	because it is absolutely a part of maintaining your marriage. A marriage is maintained. It's not

01:19:08 – 01:19:13:	a flag that gets set on you, like something gets put on your driver's license, an endorsement.

01:19:14 – 01:19:19:	A marriage is sustained by the activity within the marriage, the conduct you have with each other,

01:19:19 – 01:19:25:	the way you treat each other, and part of that is the opposite of chastity. The gift is given to

01:19:25 – 01:19:32:	you by God, and you're expected to use it, and if one part of you or the other ceases to the

01:19:32 – 01:19:38:	marriage will wither, it will absolutely be harmed by your failure to love your spouse as you were

01:19:38 – 01:19:45:	intended to. Scripture is very clear on that point. Neither the wife nor the husband is entitled

01:19:45 – 01:19:52:	to withhold sex from the other. Extremely clear that that is not something that you are permitted

01:19:52 – 01:19:59:	to do, except, of course, by agreement for a period of time for reasons of self-control or prayer.

01:20:00 – 01:20:08:	But I think this is a good point to emphasize something that is going to come up in the mind of

01:20:08 – 01:20:14:	some of the particularly younger male listeners, and that is the problem of pornography. Now,

01:20:14 – 01:20:20:	I wrote a short piece on that. I'll link it in the show notes, but I want to hit on some of the

01:20:21 – 01:20:24:	but I want to hit on some of the points of that here.

01:20:26 – 01:20:31:	You shouldn't fall into despair if you have that habitual sin.

01:20:32 – 01:20:38:	So long as you regret having fallen into that sin again and wish to do better,

01:20:38 – 01:20:43:	because if you regret that sin and wish to do better, that's repentance.

01:20:44 – 01:20:51:	Just because you fall into a habitual sin does not mean that you have given yourself over to a

01:20:51 – 01:20:57:	reprobate mind or you've fallen away or any of these other things. Don't give in to despair.

01:20:57 – 01:21:02:	That is what Satan wants you to do. Satan is that little voice telling you,

01:21:03 – 01:21:08:	well, you gave in again. You'll never kick this habit. You may as well just not care.

01:21:09 – 01:21:16:	If you give in completely, that is when it becomes the problem of driving out the Holy Spirit.

01:21:18 – 01:21:23:	If you fall into these, particularly this kind of habitual sin as a young man,

01:21:25 – 01:21:29:	try to do better. Look for ways that you can suppress the temptation,

01:21:30 – 01:21:36:	but as long as you have that repentance, you have that regret, you have that desire to turn away

01:21:36 – 01:21:43:	from the sin and back toward God. That is the mark of a Christian. That is the work of the law

01:21:43 – 01:21:48:	turning you away from your sin and back to God. That is things functioning

01:21:48 – 01:21:52:	not exactly as they should, because obviously ideally you wouldn't fall into the sin,

01:21:52 – 01:21:58:	but it is things in light of your fallen nature and having fallen into that sin functioning as

01:21:58 – 01:22:04:	best they can. And so I do recommend for all the young men and for other listeners as well

01:22:04 – 01:22:09:	to go and read that piece. I think that I make a number of important points in that piece about

01:22:09 – 01:22:16:	the reality of this particular topic given current circumstances in our culture at large.

01:22:18 – 01:22:25:	I think one important thing to address here is that this is fundamentally a question of

01:22:25 – 01:22:32:	desires that are properly ordered versus desires that are disordered. It is absolutely properly

01:22:32 – 01:22:38:	ordered for you to desire to see a woman naked. What is disordered is that you're not to desire

01:22:38 – 01:22:47:	that of all women, you're to desire that of your wife and no one else. So it's a filter where on

01:22:47 – 01:22:52:	one side you want everything about your wife and you should want nothing of other women,

01:22:52 – 01:22:57:	and if you don't have a wife it should mean that you want nothing of any of them sexually.

01:22:57 – 01:23:03:	So when someone is tempted by sexual desire by someone who's not his wife,

01:23:05 – 01:23:11:	as you struggle with that, know that you're struggling with a properly ordered desire that's

01:23:11 – 01:23:16:	misplaced because you're looking at someone that's not your wife. You shouldn't be looking,

01:23:16 – 01:23:23:	you shouldn't be looking at a screen or a magazine or some figmentary representation

01:23:23 – 01:23:27:	of a human being that's disembodied, that's no longer human, it's just an image.

01:23:28 – 01:23:31:	That's one of the other destructive things about

01:23:32 – 01:23:38:	viewing other people remotely like that, and it's an incredibly surreal and virtually

01:23:38 – 01:23:44:	impossible thing that we face today, really entirely on the internet, but also even just

01:23:44 – 01:23:49:	with magazines and with television and really with the invention of the photograph or at least

01:23:49 – 01:23:57:	with the invention of easily reproduced drawings, because 200 years ago if you saw a beautiful girl

01:23:57 – 01:24:01:	the only way you're going to see her was with your own eyes. I'm not talking about sexual

01:24:01 – 01:24:06:	desire, not talking about seeing anyone naked or anything remotely like that, literally just

01:24:06 – 01:24:13:	seeing a pretty girl's face in almost all of human history was going to be pretty rare,

01:24:13 – 01:24:18:	like it's going to be a neighbor, it's going to be someone in your closer extended family,

01:24:18 – 01:24:23:	it's going to be someone in your tribe or clan, someone nearby, or perhaps you travel and you see

01:24:23 – 01:24:31:	a pretty girl somewhere else. Short of actually getting in with 30 feet of someone and seeing

01:24:31 – 01:24:36:	her with your own eyes or him with your own eyes for your girl, men and women are equally

01:24:37 – 01:24:42:	sexual when it comes to the visual, it's nonsense that there's a huge disparity,

01:24:42 – 01:24:48:	men are much more visual, but girls absolutely have the same sort of responses,

01:24:48 – 01:24:53:	just somewhat in different circumstances, so girls absolutely lust after guys when they look at them

01:24:53 – 01:25:01:	too, but it's much more about fantasy for them. The thing that we struggle with today, and I think

01:25:01 – 01:25:08:	the really bizarre dehumanizing aspect of images of people, regardless of anything else, regardless

01:25:08 – 01:25:13:	of sexual chastity, just the idea that you would see someone phenomenally beautiful because you're

01:25:13 – 01:25:20:	able to find a picture of them, it was impossible for almost all human history, which means that

01:25:20 – 01:25:26:	for us, for everyone on earth today, our beauty standards are completely bonkers,

01:25:27 – 01:25:33:	because 200 years ago, the best looking person in your town, maybe they're only average man or

01:25:33 – 01:25:37:	woman, maybe they're exceptionally pretty, if it was from a really good looking family,

01:25:38 – 01:25:44:	maybe there was an outlier, but it's so rare that the idea that you have to have the incredibly

01:25:44 – 01:25:50:	beautiful man or woman would never occur to anyone, because that person, when Helen of Troy,

01:25:50 – 01:25:56:	the face that launched a thousand ships, there was a joke on Twitter a few months ago that Helen

01:25:56 – 01:26:01:	of Troy was mid, I think she wasn't really all that attractive, she probably was, but was she

01:26:01 – 01:26:08:	the most beautiful person on the planet? Whatever. Today, we all see people more beautiful than

01:26:08 – 01:26:13:	anything that would have potentially existed in antiquity, not necessarily because the people

01:26:13 – 01:26:21:	are actually that beautiful, but because lighting and makeup and digital alteration fabricate

01:26:21 – 01:26:28:	fake versions of human beings, after starting with a human being who's so rare in terms of

01:26:28 – 01:26:35:	their relative beauty, and physical beauty is not only subjective, it's also objective.

01:26:35 – 01:26:40:	I think we talked about in a previous episode, the factors of symmetry and actually the

01:26:42 – 01:26:48:	golden ratio itself in the proportions of a face and a body go directly to the beauty of a person.

01:26:48 – 01:26:56:	You can mathematically demonstrate how close someone's visual appearance is to an ideal

01:26:56 – 01:27:00:	mathematical form, and the closer it is to that, the more attractive they are.

01:27:01 – 01:27:06:	All these alterations make someone who's, hey, they're not your neighbor, they're someone remote.

01:27:06 – 01:27:11:	In most cases, particularly with porn, they're probably the victims of sex trafficking,

01:27:11 – 01:27:14:	so you're participating in multiple levels of evil at that point.

01:27:15 – 01:27:21:	But then you're looking at people far away who have been altered in ways that make them no

01:27:21 – 01:27:29:	longer human. They're a doppelganger representation of, frankly, in most cases today, a pretty

01:27:29 – 01:27:37:	disgusting version of beauty that we've been taught by media who controls the media to say,

01:27:37 – 01:27:43:	oh yeah, that's great. We see so many young girls now getting lip filler. It's revolting.

01:27:43 – 01:27:51:	It turns them into goblins, beautiful faces, turned into hideous, inhuman things that are

01:27:51 – 01:27:57:	suddenly on the wrong side of the uncanny valley because so-called doctors are butchering their

01:27:57 – 01:28:04:	faces to chase these artificial ideas of beauty that no one of their own accord would reach.

01:28:05 – 01:28:11:	So even just looking at these sorts of things fundamentally distorts our view of the people

01:28:11 – 01:28:18:	we actually see around us. If you spend all your time watching movies or TV or something until

01:28:18 – 01:28:24:	recently, it was always going to be some of the hottest people. Today, they're abnormally unattractive,

01:28:24 – 01:28:32:	which is itself another form of assault. But these unnatural experiences, including porn,

01:28:32 – 01:28:38:	including seeing intimate things that you should only ever see, much of it should never be seen

01:28:39 – 01:28:44:	because so many things that are done are unnatural. They're disordered and evil.

01:28:45 – 01:28:51:	But even just absolutely normal, appropriate sexual activity, you should only see that if

01:28:51 – 01:28:59:	you're seeing it in first person with your wife. And divorcing any aspect of any of this from

01:28:59 – 01:29:05:	the reality of one man and one woman brought together by God makes it all worse. But it

01:29:05 – 01:29:13:	makes it worse in ways that can often become inescapable. We talked about the pill destroying

01:29:13 – 01:29:20:	girls' bodies, destroying their ability to be attracted to a man or to gestate correctly.

01:29:20 – 01:29:27:	Porn absolutely destroys a man's ability to function sexually. It's a very, very common

01:29:27 – 01:29:32:	complaint among girls today that guys who have become habituated and addicted to

01:29:33 – 01:29:40:	viewing pornography can no longer function sexually. In some cases, it may take a while

01:29:40 – 01:29:44:	to go away. In some cases, it may never go away because you're functionally burning out a part

01:29:44 – 01:29:50:	of your brain that was never supposed to be burned out in the first place. When you have a naturally

01:29:50 – 01:29:57:	properly ordered marriage with a woman or a man, you don't burn out. You have all things in moderation

01:29:57 – 01:30:04:	and you enjoy them fruitfully and with each other and there's no burnout. You can't unless

01:30:04 – 01:30:09:	she's cooking way too much good food and you get fat. But she has an incentive not to make you fat

01:30:09 – 01:30:16:	because she doesn't want to look at you being fat. So there's always a mutually reinforcing

01:30:16 – 01:30:22:	aspect to an actual real relationship and it completely vanishes when you're looking at an

01:30:22 – 01:30:28:	image of someone who's not even real. I want to read the verse that I mentioned earlier because

01:30:28 – 01:30:33:	I think it's important to read the actual words of scripture, not just mention them so that those

01:30:33 – 01:30:41:	who know what I'm referencing know the verse. But I mentioned having a wife and the wife not

01:30:41 – 01:30:45:	withholding from her husband, the husband not withholding from his wife and that is of course

01:30:45 – 01:30:52:	First Corinthians. But because of the temptation to sexual immorality each man should have his

01:30:52 – 01:30:57:	own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights

01:30:57 – 01:31:03:	and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body,

01:31:03 – 01:31:07:	but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body,

01:31:07 – 01:31:14:	but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time

01:31:14 – 01:31:19:	that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again

01:31:19 – 01:31:22:	so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

01:31:24 – 01:31:29:	And so scripture's incredibly clear that sex is part of marriage and it's not a part of marriage

01:31:29 – 01:31:35:	that is optional. As we've mentioned before it is in fact the definition of marriage because

01:31:35 – 01:31:43:	marriage has to be consummated. I would also like to emphasize something that Woe said previously

01:31:43 – 01:31:52:	about singleness in particular. For those pastors and teachers out there or others,

01:31:52 – 01:31:57:	anyone in a position of authority or really even if you aren't in a position of authority,

01:31:57 – 01:32:02:	if you've just put this out there, if you've repeated this lie, if you have said that singleness

01:32:02 – 01:32:10:	is a blessing, you need to publicly recant that because that is false.

01:32:11 – 01:32:18:	Celebrity is a blessing. Now is it conceivable that God could use singleness as a blessing for

01:32:18 – 01:32:28:	a season? Absolutely. But blessing by and large is something that is in accord with God's ordering

01:32:28 – 01:32:37:	things and singleness is not as this verse makes clear. Each man should have his own wife. Each woman

01:32:37 – 01:32:42:	should have her own husband. That is the natural order of things. That is what God intends.

01:32:42 – 01:32:49:	He made them man and woman. We have many verses about that starting with Genesis 2.

01:32:49 – 01:32:53:	Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall

01:32:53 – 01:33:00:	become one flesh. This runs throughout Scripture. And so singleness when you describe it in terms

01:33:00 – 01:33:04:	of being some sort of great blessing, you are lying about God in his word and you are doing

01:33:04 – 01:33:11:	very real harm, particularly to the young men and women who are single and very much do not wish to

01:33:11 – 01:33:19:	be so. And so if you hold to that position, I certainly hope that God does something that will

01:33:19 – 01:33:24:	make it so that you are no longer able to teach that false doctrine up to it, including striking

01:33:24 – 01:33:29:	you mute and having your teeth right out of your head. Because there should be very real

01:33:29 – 01:33:36:	consequences for false teachers who teach these sorts of evil things. And personally I am sick

01:33:36 – 01:33:43:	of hearing that one. Not personally as in in reference to me, but personally sick of hearing it

01:33:43 – 01:33:48:	with regard to other young men, because these are young men who have very real problems,

01:33:48 – 01:33:56:	who are facing a world that is stacked against them. And then they have teachers and those in

01:33:56 – 01:34:01:	positions of authority and worse pastors in many cases saying these incredibly wicked and harmful

01:34:01 – 01:34:09:	things. Apparently some pastors, teachers and others should think long and hard about the

01:34:09 – 01:34:16:	stricter judgment. One of the last passages I wanted to get into is from 1 Peter 3.

01:34:16 – 01:34:23:	Likewise, wives, be subject to your husbands so that even if some do not obey the word, they may

01:34:23 – 01:34:28:	be one without a word by the conduct of their wives. When they see you respectful and pure

01:34:28 – 01:34:33:	conduct, do not let your adorning be external, the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold

01:34:33 – 01:34:38:	jewelry or the clothing you wear, but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with

01:34:38 – 01:34:43:	the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

01:34:43 – 01:34:47:	For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves

01:34:47 – 01:34:53:	by submitting to their own husbands is Sarah Obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord,

01:34:53 – 01:34:57:	and you are her children if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.

01:34:57 – 01:35:02:	Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the

01:35:02 – 01:35:07:	woman as the weaker vessel since they are heirs with you of the grace of life so that your prayers

01:35:07 – 01:35:13:	may not be hindered. I think this is another small example of something that this is not a

01:35:13 – 01:35:19:	passage that's just for okay once you're married, but for a young man, if you're looking for girls,

01:35:21 – 01:35:25:	I don't think that we necessarily need to treat this as never adorning yourself

01:35:25 – 01:35:29:	in any sort of fine clothing because there are many examples in scripture where

01:35:29 – 01:35:33:	that is a godly and upright thing. You know, the discussions of marriage,

01:35:33 – 01:35:40:	feast, wedding, feast, and other sorts of celebrations, adorning in beautiful fashion

01:35:40 – 01:35:47:	is not idolatrous. It can be a celebration. However, it's very common again because of the

01:35:47 – 01:35:56:	depraved culture in which we live for particularly girls to be, to see a fashion as identity,

01:35:56 – 01:36:02:	you know, just as guys, you young guys especially have the problem of when you fall into complete

01:36:02 – 01:36:08:	irony or wisecracking or blackpilling or complaining or whatever.

01:36:09 – 01:36:15:	Emotional responses to things are not a personality. A personality is more than just

01:36:17 – 01:36:21:	a reactive knee-jerk response to, you know, some social input.

01:36:22 – 01:36:29:	Girls need to be the sort of human beings who do not see their clothing as their personality

01:36:30 – 01:36:38:	on top of not being giving the exhibition of promiscuous sexual behavior. You know,

01:36:38 – 01:36:44:	she should be dressed in a chased way, but you also don't want a girl who's caked in makeup and is

01:36:44 – 01:36:53:	always, always dressed to the nines because that sort of person is, she's going down a path where

01:36:53 – 01:36:58:	look at me, look at me is more important than who she is inwardly.

01:36:59 – 01:37:05:	And, you know, makeup is a, as a small example, but I would put makeup up there almost on the

01:37:05 – 01:37:13:	same level as, as the pill. You know, I have, I know guys who when they early on when they met

01:37:13 – 01:37:19:	their wives are like, I don't, I don't want to see you in makeup. An attractive girl doesn't

01:37:19 – 01:37:26:	need or use a bunch of that crap. It's, it's another one of those memes that was frankly

01:37:26 – 01:37:32:	introduced into, well, it's been around for a long time, obviously, they're examples from antiquity of,

01:37:33 – 01:37:39:	of makeup being used, but it's notable that they were almost always used in profane fashions

01:37:40 – 01:37:46:	or just as, as idolatrous fashion, you know, either directly as part of some ceremony,

01:37:46 – 01:37:52:	of some ceremonial evil, or just as a part of a culture that was itself just kind of ambiently

01:37:52 – 01:37:59:	evil. It's not like a girl who's ever worn makeup is out of the cards, but hey, you want to see

01:37:59 – 01:38:05:	what she looks like without makeup because makeup can completely transform a face and you may think

01:38:05 – 01:38:10:	you're looking at one person. And when you see her without makeup, she's a completely different

01:38:10 – 01:38:15:	person. Maybe you find one attractive and you find the other one completely unattractive and

01:38:17 – 01:38:21:	you should know which is which before you marry her because that's, you have every right to know

01:38:21 – 01:38:26:	whom you're marrying. So it's a small thing, but it's one of those things that, you know,

01:38:27 – 01:38:32:	ideally, it really shouldn't even exist. And, you know, we, there's talk of natural beauty and

01:38:32 – 01:38:39:	it's a real thing. Someone who, someone who's living a chaste and wholesome life, who's happy,

01:38:40 – 01:38:46:	who's at peace with God, is genuinely more attractive. In someone who has to resort to this

01:38:46 – 01:38:53:	sort of trickery, usually is, again, they're usually engaging in some degree of self-loathing.

01:38:54 – 01:39:01:	It's certainly deceitful and it's often, you know, maybe it's just low self-esteem. It's not at all

01:39:01 – 01:39:09:	irredeemable. Sometimes it tends toward self-hatred and that's usually when you see not only

01:39:10 – 01:39:15:	egregious amounts of makeup, but also tons of piercings, tattoos, like all these things that are

01:39:16 – 01:39:23:	physically altering the appearance of a girl away from what God made. God made one thing and then

01:39:23 – 01:39:29:	they go in a completely different direction. That's not a good sign. A girl or a man should

01:39:29 – 01:39:35:	become more himself in God and as he lives his life or her life, we should become more of what

01:39:35 – 01:39:40:	God wants and not less. And when we flee from the bodies that he gave us and the faces that he gave

01:39:40 – 01:39:46:	us, you know, if you want to improve your body, men lift weights. I can tell you in particular,

01:39:46 – 01:39:50:	if you're young men, start lifting now. The younger, the better. Like, you know, there's,

01:39:50 – 01:39:56:	there's a minimal age beneath which it may not be good for you related to growth plates, but

01:39:56 – 01:40:02:	by the time you're 15, 16, you absolutely should be doing a lot of vigorous physical exercise

01:40:02 – 01:40:07:	because I can tell you as an older guy, the muscle that you gain when you're 15, 20, you keep very

01:40:07 – 01:40:13:	easily the rest of your life. Muscle you gain when you're in your 30s, you got to work or it goes away.

01:40:13 – 01:40:20:	It's not free anymore. It's remarkable. I used to, I was a paper boy. I pedaled six days a week,

01:40:20 – 01:40:26:	90 minutes a day up and down some pretty serious hills. My thighs are really strong and they've

01:40:26 – 01:40:31:	stayed strong despite not doing anything particular with them. That muscle I basically just got for

01:40:31 – 01:40:37:	free as a kid accidentally. Do the work now, put in the work now, and you will have a much easier

01:40:37 – 01:40:43:	life when you're older because strength is good. Strength is something that God commends. It makes

01:40:43 – 01:40:48:	your life easier, makes you more attractive, makes you more confident. And for young men,

01:40:49 – 01:40:54:	I think that's a big part of this is that finding confidence when you necessarily don't have a lot

01:40:54 – 01:41:00:	of reasons for it, especially when you're young, is one of the hardest hurdles to feel like you have

01:41:00 – 01:41:07:	something worth sharing with a girl. There's a fundamental difference between the way girls

01:41:07 – 01:41:15:	viewmate selection and guys. Guys want to be worth a girl wanting them. And girls today are

01:41:15 – 01:41:22:	effectively the choosers. And that's, it affects everything in our lives. And when, when may selection

01:41:22 – 01:41:27:	is running properly, you know, when the community, when parents are involved, and the inputs when

01:41:27 – 01:41:31:	the young man, the young woman are chased and they're doing the right things or trying to,

01:41:33 – 01:41:37:	that reinforcement of wholesomeness just takes off in its grade.

01:41:39 – 01:41:44:	Unfortunately, today we're living in a world where everything seems to be set against us.

01:41:44 – 01:41:50:	But one thing that you can do as a young man is just build something, build yourself into something,

01:41:50 – 01:41:58:	and trust in God to deliver in his time a girl who will like who you are, who will love who you

01:41:58 – 01:42:04:	are. Because that's what you need. It's what you know you need. I think that the biggest hurdle

01:42:04 – 01:42:12:	for guys dealing with being alone is that there's an inherently ironic tension between

01:42:15 – 01:42:20:	the thing that you want as a young man more than anything else is to, to have a girl, to have

01:42:20 – 01:42:27:	someone to love and to be the man that she wants, that she wants, period. The problem with that,

01:42:27 – 01:42:34:	and the reason I used irony correctly, I hope here is that if she can smell, if she can instinctually

01:42:34 – 01:42:40:	detect that the thing that you want more than anything is to have a girl or for, especially for

01:42:40 – 01:42:46:	it to be her, that's inherently repellent. It's completely insane. It's completely backwards.

01:42:46 – 01:42:51:	But the very thing that's the most important to you, if you let it come across as anything remotely

01:42:51 – 01:42:58:	like desperation, it becomes repulsive. And so while it's a properly ordered desire for you to

01:42:58 – 01:43:06:	want a girl to want a wife, it is counterproductive if that becomes a conscious aspect of how you

01:43:06 – 01:43:12:	conduct yourself. You can shape yourself into a man that you want to be, that you want, you know,

01:43:12 – 01:43:17:	is God pleasing and will please a wife at some point. But if everything that you do is focused

01:43:17 – 01:43:24:	entirely on, I hope she likes me, I hope she sees this, she might see it, but I promise you she will

01:43:24 – 01:43:28:	not like it. And it's cruel and it's completely backwards. It's, it's one of the most insane

01:43:28 – 01:43:35:	things about human existence, but it's an immutable law. And it's a tough thing for guys to get over.

01:43:35 – 01:43:42:	But the simple rule is have some confidence, even if it's, even if it's hallucinatory for a time,

01:43:43 – 01:43:50:	and relax, be happy and confident in who you are, even if you're just a goofball, I don't go over

01:43:50 – 01:43:55:	the board with being goofy, but be confident in who you are, and that itself becomes appealing.

01:43:55 – 01:44:01:	And if you can just set aside that the intense desire to not be alone, that is how you actually

01:44:01 – 01:44:11:	satisfy that desire. I was tempted to add Proverbs 31, because of course it fits here. But one,

01:44:11 – 01:44:16:	we've already moved into the end of this episode and describing some of the ways, some of the

01:44:16 – 01:44:22:	practical things for young men to do, young men in particular to do, to aid in finding a wife and

01:44:22 – 01:44:30:	just really living life. But I think instead I'll recommend, go listen to episode 22, that includes

01:44:30 – 01:44:39:	reading Proverbs 31 in that episode. But we already went over some of the major issues here. Avoid

01:44:39 – 01:44:46:	pornography, develop an actual personality. That should go without saying, but really it does need

01:44:46 – 01:44:52:	to be repeated. You need to have an actual personality, not just things that you hate.

01:44:52 – 01:44:56:	Don't make that your personality that will make everyone want to avoid you.

01:44:57 – 01:45:03:	But on a purely practical note, not just lifting weights, do some exercise, and I'm going to remind

01:45:03 – 01:45:09:	everyone, don't forget cardio. You actually do need your cardiovascular system, or you're not going to

01:45:09 – 01:45:16:	have a particularly good go of things. Get a hobby. It almost doesn't matter what the hobby is.

01:45:17 – 01:45:23:	I am going to recommend you not get obsessed with Star Wars or Star Trek, probably not the best hobby.

01:45:24 – 01:45:31:	Men who do that tend to start building weird shrines. But whatever the hobby happens to be,

01:45:31 – 01:45:38:	if it's painting miniatures, fine, do that. Great. Maybe also transform what you learn from the hobby

01:45:38 – 01:45:43:	into something practical as well. Maybe take up a little bit of woodworking along with it,

01:45:43 – 01:45:49:	because you've already learned the painting part. But it's important for men to have a hobby. You

01:45:50 – 01:45:55:	need some sort of outlet, something into which you can pour some energy and time.

01:45:56 – 01:46:01:	And it helps along with women as well, because then you will have something to discuss. I'm

01:46:01 – 01:46:07:	not saying talk to her about the details of every miniature that you have in your collection.

01:46:08 – 01:46:12:	Some women will enjoy that. Some won't. You have to be able to gauge that for yourself.

01:46:13 – 01:46:19:	But it makes you more interesting if you have things in your life that do not involve her,

01:46:20 – 01:46:25:	that don't involve any women, because they're things in your life that you're doing because

01:46:25 – 01:46:35:	you want to do them. That is attractive to women. But insofar as the practical advice goes,

01:46:36 – 01:46:41:	one of the things that I continually recommend, and I think it is one of the best and easiest

01:46:42 – 01:46:48:	things you can do simply to feel a little better, is go for a walk every day.

01:46:49 – 01:46:56:	Just go for a short walk every single day, 20, 30 minute walk. If you have a dog, great. If you

01:46:56 – 01:47:00:	don't have a dog, fine. Go walk by yourself, walk with a neighbor, whatever it happens to be.

01:47:01 – 01:47:07:	It gets you outside. It gets you a little cardio. It gets you some exercise. You will feel better

01:47:07 – 01:47:13:	if you do this. It absolutely works. All of the research shows this is a good thing for you.

01:47:14 – 01:47:19:	Anyone to whom you talk who has picked up this hobby will tell you this helps.

01:47:20 – 01:47:25:	And sometimes it is the simple things in life that help. God created a beautiful world

01:47:25 – 01:47:30:	and it's outside your window. Don't spend all your time inside, particularly in a dark room.

01:47:30 – 01:47:34:	Go outside, get some sunlight, go for a walk, get a little cardio. You will feel better.

01:47:35 – 01:47:41:	And in the same vein of very simple advice, drink some water. You're probably dehydrated,

01:47:41 – 01:47:45:	particularly if you've picked up the bad habit of drinking energy drinks.

01:47:46 – 01:47:51:	Hydration actually matters. Again, this is back to you're still a creature. You're still an animal.

01:47:51 – 01:47:55:	There are things you have to do to take care of yourself. These are some of the basics.

01:47:55 – 01:48:01:	These are things that your father, the authority figures in your life should have taught you,

01:48:01 – 01:48:07:	should have helped you with these things. Maybe some of them did great. Maybe they didn't,

01:48:07 – 01:48:11:	which is more and more likely these days. You need to do it yourself.

01:48:12 – 01:48:19:	There's a wealth of resources for these things. You can improve your life and improve yourself,

01:48:20 – 01:48:25:	which will not only make you feel better, but will improve your odds of finding a wife,

01:48:25 – 01:48:30:	if that is what you were attempting to do. And I mentioned earlier that I would give

01:48:30 – 01:48:37:	some practical advice on the actual finding a wife part, in addition to the don't look at college,

01:48:37 – 01:48:42:	because that's probably not a good plan. And so for the fathers who were thinking, I sent my

01:48:42 – 01:48:46:	daughter off to college to find a husband. No, you didn't. And it's a bad plan if you did.

01:48:48 – 01:48:53:	But for the young men out there, if you're looking for a wife, go to the grocery store.

01:48:54 – 01:48:59:	Some of the cashiers are probably single. Go to a coffee shop. Some of the baristas are probably

01:48:59 – 01:49:08:	single. There are women all over the place. You don't have to go to a bar or a club or college

01:49:08 – 01:49:14:	or any of these places you're told you can find women there. Go to a bookstore. Go there and read

01:49:14 – 01:49:21:	for a while. See the women who walk in and out. There are plenty of places you can find women.

01:49:22 – 01:49:27:	And this leads into some of the most important advice for some of the young men in the audience.

01:49:28 – 01:49:35:	You need to be comfortable with rejection. Now I know that social anxiety is rampant in the

01:49:35 – 01:49:39:	zoomer generation and younger. And quite frankly, millennials are pretty bad about it as well. Try

01:49:39 – 01:49:44:	ringing the doorbell for a millennial. Good luck getting someone to actually answer.

01:49:46 – 01:49:53:	But you need to get over it. That's the long and the short of it. It's blunt, but it's true.

01:49:53 – 01:50:00:	Practice. Go up to a woman. Ask for a number. If she says no, okay, that's one woman out of there

01:50:00 – 01:50:07:	are 300 million people in this country. So about half are women. Some 40% of that, probably about the

01:50:07 – 01:50:13:	age range for you. Okay, so one out of tens of millions of potential women told you no. That's

01:50:13 – 01:50:16:	not the end of the world. Get over it. Try again.

01:50:17 – 01:50:28:	That's how you do things. And you know what's great about it? If you take it the right way, when

01:50:28 – 01:50:31:	you're rejected, and you will be rejected, it doesn't matter if you're the most attractive

01:50:31 – 01:50:36:	man on the planet and have millions of dollars. Some women still won't like you.

01:50:37 – 01:50:43:	If you're rejected and you take it the right way, it gets easier to approach women in the future.

01:50:44 – 01:50:49:	And so each time you do that, it's easier. You are building up that confidence that you need.

01:50:49 – 01:50:53:	And yes, you can build confidence off of being rejected because you are getting more comfortable

01:50:53 – 01:51:01:	with yourself. And that shows women are more likely to respond positively when you are comfortable

01:51:01 – 01:51:08:	with yourself. And that takes practice because you probably didn't develop that growing up

01:51:09 – 01:51:14:	and you need to develop it now. In the common thread in both of those things you just mentioned,

01:51:14 – 01:51:22:	you know, approaching girls cold and going for a walk is that involves relaxation.

01:51:23 – 01:51:29:	It is where that may sound. But if you are relaxed in doing things like walking, it relaxes you

01:51:29 – 01:51:34:	being in nature. Actually, it changes your blood pressure. It changes everything about your body

01:51:34 – 01:51:43:	even 30 minutes a day. When you are more relaxed, it's not off putting. If you're a ball of tension,

01:51:43 – 01:51:49:	if you seem wound up and you seem like someone who's on the verge of something,

01:51:49 – 01:51:54:	when you speak to someone that comes through. Even if it's deep down inside you, if that's

01:51:54 – 01:52:00:	your internal state, girls especially can sniff that sort of thing out because they have more

01:52:00 – 01:52:06:	finely tuned social senses than men. You have two groups of people, a bunch of men and a bunch of

01:52:06 – 01:52:12:	women. The women are always going to do a better job at teasing out the hidden reefs. The things

01:52:12 – 01:52:18:	that are hidden, the motivations, whatever is going on, they're going to tend to do a better job

01:52:18 – 01:52:24:	because for them it's not rational. They're not thinking things through. They're intuiting

01:52:24 – 01:52:32:	those things. They're figuring it out just by raw instinct. When you're relaxed, especially if you

01:52:32 – 01:52:39:	go up to a girl and try to strike up a conversation, the hard thing is not caring if she cares.

01:52:41 – 01:52:46:	You see a girl, you want to talk to her. The fact that you talk to her is driven by the fact that

01:52:46 – 01:52:53:	you want to talk to her. Yet it can't come across that you want to talk to her. It's stupid and

01:52:53 – 01:52:59:	insane. The worst thing you can do is make her think you're wound up like, I got to talk to her.

01:52:59 – 01:53:06:	I hope she likes me. That's completely repellent. If you are relaxed to the point that she's like,

01:53:06 – 01:53:11:	I wonder if he even cares, even when you approached her, that is when she's going to find you more

01:53:11 – 01:53:19:	interesting. Again, it's counterintuitive. It's a pain in the butt, but it's how we're wired.

01:53:19 – 01:53:25:	God gave us resilience. Men are the tough ones when it comes to this stuff.

01:53:27 – 01:53:30:	Recently, it's a tragic trope that's come about as

01:53:31 – 01:53:36:	sex reassignment surgery. These especially girls who are trying to live as men

01:53:38 – 01:53:42:	freak out. They think, oh, it's easy mode because the whole culture tells them,

01:53:43 – 01:53:49:	oh, it's so much easier being a guy. Now they suddenly look like a guy enough to pass,

01:53:49 – 01:53:55:	and you know what happens? They become completely invisible. Some of them are actually driven to

01:53:55 – 01:54:02:	suicide, not even just by the fact that they're engaging in what we all know is destructive,

01:54:02 – 01:54:08:	but specifically the female to male. To suddenly realize how hard it is to be a man and to know

01:54:08 – 01:54:17:	you've effectively taken a one-way trip is overwhelming. The aloneness that a man naturally

01:54:17 – 01:54:24:	faces in the world is inconceivable to girls. They have no idea how hard it is to be us,

01:54:25 – 01:54:30:	and we just take it in stride because it's all we know. Again, back to not blackpilling or being

01:54:30 – 01:54:36:	a whiner or blaming them, you have to be resilient, even in the face of impossible odds.

01:54:37 – 01:54:42:	That sort of strength and relaxation, even when it seems like everything is burning and everything

01:54:42 – 01:54:48:	is lost or hopeless or whatever, when you can still be a happy warrior when you face

01:54:49 – 01:54:55:	impossible odds, suddenly you become charming by that degree. Suddenly you become someone that

01:54:55 – 01:55:04:	men want to be and women want to be with. That's really kind of just generically the advice,

01:55:04 – 01:55:08:	and it's particularly hard for young guys because you don't know who you are yet. You're still

01:55:08 – 01:55:15:	figuring that out, and so when we say things like don't let irony or sarcasm or something

01:55:15 – 01:55:21:	become your personality, it's precisely because if that's all you do, it's what you will become,

01:55:21 – 01:55:26:	and it's just not interesting. The nice thing about having hobbies and interests that have

01:55:27 – 01:55:34:	some general appeal is that another thing that girls in particular find very appealing is when

01:55:34 – 01:55:39:	a man has passion for something. Even if she's not interested in it, just the fact that you can be

01:55:39 – 01:55:45:	interested in something to a point is attractive. Now, if it becomes an obsession and it's your

01:55:45 – 01:55:50:	entire personality, then that's repulsive, and there's a lot of these things where it's like

01:55:50 – 01:55:56:	it's great up to a point, and then beyond that point, it becomes disgusting and repulsive.

01:55:57 – 01:56:01:	The reason that's a recurring theme is that that's really just how this stuff works,

01:56:01 – 01:56:07:	and nobody told me as a young man. I had to figure this crap out myself the hard way multiple times,

01:56:07 – 01:56:16:	and I made a lot of stupid and evil mistakes along the way, so romantically you look at my life and

01:56:16 – 01:56:23:	say, that's a complete failure. Fine. I'm done with that crap, and that's not me blackpilling,

01:56:23 – 01:56:28:	it's me realizing that having painted myself into a corner where I've personally screwed things up,

01:56:28 – 01:56:34:	and at my age, this is now what I focus on. I focus on trying to help other men and trying to

01:56:35 – 01:56:43:	help build a future for your children and for the world that I was born into and will leave

01:56:43 – 01:56:49:	nothing behind. That is my blessing from God. All the things that I've screwed up, all the mistakes

01:56:49 – 01:56:56:	that I've made along all these lines have given me the ability to do stuff that most guys can do.

01:56:56 – 01:57:01:	I think one of the reasons that a lot of guys appreciate the work that we do is that, frankly,

01:57:01 – 01:57:07:	Corey and I are able to say stuff publicly that most men still can't say, because they'll get

01:57:07 – 01:57:11:	docks and destroyed, and if you have a family or you want to have a family and you want to take

01:57:11 – 01:57:15:	care of your wife and kids, you probably can't say a lot of this stuff, especially some of the

01:57:15 – 01:57:21:	recent episodes we've done. We can say it, and it's particularly because of the fact that

01:57:22 – 01:57:28:	it's not the blessing of singleness, it's just, okay, this is where we are, here's what we're

01:57:28 – 01:57:35:	doing with it. I would never hold myself up as a model for anything. I want anyone to emulate me,

01:57:35 – 01:57:40:	but I would hope that as we try to share some of these lessons, some of which we've learned

01:57:40 – 01:57:45:	ourselves, and some of which are general knowledge that are in places like the manosphere that has

01:57:45 – 01:57:52:	a lot of terrible toxic stuff, I mean, it has just, once you realize how girls work, you go in one

01:57:52 – 01:57:57:	or two directions, and most guys go in the direction that most of that world pushes them,

01:57:57 – 01:58:04:	which is just rampant fornication, particularly if you have a low regard for girls. If you think

01:58:05 – 01:58:09:	they're all whores, I can't believe they're like this, I'm just going to have fun,

01:58:09 – 01:58:15:	I'm going to exploit those weaknesses and those mistakes. That's evil, but it's easy, and frankly,

01:58:15 – 01:58:19:	it's what most of the world that knows about this stuff says. There are not many Christians that

01:58:19 – 01:58:26:	both know it and have some aptitude for it who will also say, here's how this actually applies

01:58:27 – 01:58:33:	for Christians, because it does, because the exploitation of weaknesses in human nature

01:58:33 – 01:58:41:	that are used by evil men are the very things that shape all of our lives in one way or another.

01:58:41 – 01:58:45:	If you have a weakness or a proclivity, either you're going to keep it in check

01:58:45 – 01:58:50:	or it's going to run away with you, and that's why anchoring the stuff in scripture is important,

01:58:50 – 01:58:54:	is that above all else, we need to know that we are not our own, but we are bought with a price.

01:58:55 – 01:59:01:	God paid for us on the cross, and God gives us the Holy Spirit, living within us,

01:59:01 – 01:59:06:	and so that should preclude, when we focus on it, all these other mistakes. The sinful human

01:59:06 – 01:59:13:	flesh that's still here even in the sanctified man or woman has those desires, and God wants them

01:59:13 – 01:59:21:	to be fulfilled in a godly way. As we close out, trusting in those promises needs to be paramount,

01:59:21 – 01:59:28:	and then living a daily life of both repentance from our sinful inclinations and

01:59:29 – 01:59:35:	bettering ourselves in a godly fashion to make ourselves the sort of man that God wants us to

01:59:35 – 01:59:41:	be. God has a lot to say about a lot of these things. When we do those, we then have to trust

01:59:41 – 01:59:48:	that God will deliver on his promises and his time, and that's the ultimate source of relaxation.

01:59:48 – 01:59:53:	We can't be worked up about it and afraid that we're going to fail and God's not going to deliver.

01:59:54 – 02:00:00:	You do your part and trust God, and God will deliver on his promises. I don't know when.

02:00:01 – 02:00:07:	Not everyone will necessarily ever get a girlfriend and a wife, which is obviously the goal.

02:00:08 – 02:00:15:	Goal is not a girlfriend. The goal is a godly, faithful wife. Find someone for whom you can be

02:00:15 – 02:00:22:	a head, make yourself her head, and be a good head to be a faithful head, being the kind of head

02:00:22 – 02:00:30:	that she looks up to and admires and needs and trusts and turns to, because that is your role

02:00:30 – 02:00:35:	as a man, to be the sort of man who has his bearings, even when things are on fire and things

02:00:35 – 02:00:40:	are scary and they're weird and no one knows what's going on. If you can be relaxed and still say,

02:00:41 – 02:00:45:	I love you. I'm going to take care of you. I have this. There's nothing to worry about.

02:00:45 – 02:00:51:	That is the essence of marriage, where there's a sacrifice as God modeled,

02:00:51 – 02:00:56:	as Christ modeled for the church that doesn't involve you dying. You can sacrifice simply being

02:00:58 – 02:01:05:	the one who bears under the weight of all these pressures without cracking. You can do that by

02:01:05 – 02:01:10:	your own strength. It can only come from strength in faith in God and in the promises he's given us.

02:01:12 – 02:01:16:	And so I think we'll end with a reading from Matthew 6, The Words of Christ.

02:01:17 – 02:01:22:	I'm a little tempted to include a link in the show notes to a chicken stream as

02:01:22 – 02:01:28:	an object lesson, possibly in 4K, but we'll see if I include that or not. But Matthew 6,

02:01:29 – 02:01:35:	Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink,

02:01:35 – 02:01:41:	nor about your body what you will put on, is not life more than food and the body more than clothing.

02:01:42 – 02:01:48:	Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly

02:01:48 – 02:01:54:	Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious

02:01:54 – 02:01:59:	can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing?

02:01:59 – 02:02:05:	Consider the lilies of the field how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you,

02:02:05 – 02:02:12:	even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so close the grass of the

02:02:12 – 02:02:18:	field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you,

02:02:18 – 02:02:25:	O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious saying, What shall we eat or what shall we drink

02:02:25 – 02:02:30:	or what shall we wear? For the heathens seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father

02:02:30 – 02:02:36:	knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,

02:02:36 – 02:02:41:	and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow,

02:02:41 – 02:02:46:	for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.