Sunday 02 • 17 • 19

Attention now to God's Word. We're going to be reading from Acts chapter eight, verses 26 through 40. You can find that in your bulletin and I think I am reading the passage for this morning. So if you'll turn your attention to God's Word.

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, "Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." This is a desert place. And he rose and went. And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, "Go over and join this chariot." So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" And he said, "How can I unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

Now the passage of Scripture he was reading was this: "Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation, justice was denied him. And who can describe his generation? For his life was taken away from the earth."

And the eunuch said to Philip, "About whom, I ask you, does this prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture, he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "See, here is water. What prevents me from being baptized?" And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down to the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through, he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. — Acts 8:26-40

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you bow your heads with me as we pray?

Father, we pray that as we open Your Word, You would open our hearts. I pray, Father, the words of my mouth, the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in Your sight. Lord, You are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. It's in the name of Jesus that we pray all of these things. Amen.

So this summer, for Father's Day, my family gave me a hunting knife kit. I was on sabbatical this summer, so I had some time to do this. I spent a lot of time carving the handle and shaping it, and then I had to put the thing together, polish it. And when it was finally done, this is a great present. I spent a lot of time doing this, and then I stuck it in a drawer because I don't hunt. And the only time I've been hunting, we did shoot a squirrel and we ate it and it was nasty and I'm never doing that again. So it's a beautiful knife. It's got this horn handle and you can't have it. Okay? But I'm not going to use it because I don't hunt.

Now, as we round out this series on gender in the gospel, as we look at this passage, I want to say this to you: the reason we've done this whole series is not some kind of intellectual exercise in gender theory in the Bible. It's not for you to stick it in a drawer. It's for you to use it. We've gone through this study over these last seven weeks talking about gender and the gospel. It's been really hard, but we've done so because we want to help equip this congregation to live with faithfulness in this cultural moment with this cultural issue. And it's really important that we don't just put this aside in a drawer somewhere, but that we use what we've learned.

And so today, we're looking at Acts chapter eight. Acts chapter eight is one of my favorite passages in the New Testament, and it's a great story about a conversion. But for our purposes, it is a great case study of how we interact, how we think about what it means to engage the gospel opportunity of the gender revolution.

So here's where I'm going today, my three points. We're going to talk about today's eunuchs, the good news for eunuchs, and finally, today's Philips.

Today's Eunuchs

So in this passage, Philip, who's one of the early leaders of the early church, is directed by the Holy Spirit to go and come alongside this man as he's traveling on a stretch of desert road. He comes alongside this man who's described here as the Ethiopian eunuch. And I want to think with you briefly. What do we know about this man?

First, we know he's a man of incredible influence and incredible wealth. And I direct you to this for a couple of reasons. Look, he's in charge of the queen's treasury for the country of Ethiopia in Africa.

This is a man who had lots of resources at his disposal and was entrusted with a lot of authority in his position. And we know he had a lot of resources personally for a couple reasons in this passage. One is this is a time he's doing international travel at a time when people just didn't do that. People didn't go take vacations, and they certainly didn't go take trips to other countries. This man is also traveling in a chariot, and I want you to picture in your mind not the chariots from like Gladiator or Ben Hur. This isn't the one person in a chariot behind a horse. This is more akin to a wagon. You could see that he is being driven. He actually orders the chariot to stop in this passage, and he's reading as he's going along. So this is a man who has the means to travel. He's being driven by someone else, and he's reading, it says here in verse thirty and thirty one, from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

Now, for us, we're like, okay, he's reading a book. What, you know, that's great. No. No. No. You don't understand. A community, an entire town might have enough money in their synagogue to have the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Nobody had this. People didn't have scrolls of the Old Testament around their house. They didn't have books. They didn't have parchment. This is uber wealthy that he's got this. So we know he's a man of great affluence and a man of great influence.

But look what else we see from this. We also know that he's a spiritual seeker. This man is traveling along the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. That's Southeast. He's leaving Jerusalem going back toward Ethiopia and he's reading from the Isaiah scroll. Now, I just want you to think about this. Judaism by no means was the national religion of Ethiopia. This is not an annexed part of the Jewish state or anything like that. That was not their religion. He's studying. He's some kind of a scholar who's studying the scrolls that belong to another religion. And he's what might be called a god fearer among the Jews. That is he's studying the Jewish scriptures, the Ethiopian eunuch is studying the Jewish scriptures in order to understand something about God and think about where he's coming from.

I said, he's leaving Jerusalem going back toward Ethiopia. Why would he have gone to Jerusalem? Well, he's going to Jerusalem for the reason that everybody goes to Jerusalem at that time which is to worship in the temple, to make a sacrifice. He had gone to the center place of the Hebrew religion to go and worship the living God. So, he's affluent, he's influential, and he's a man who is a god fearer. He's a spiritual seeker but most germane to our series right now that we've been doing on gender in the gospel is this: his physical condition. He was a eunuch.

Understanding Eunuchs

Now I know that's not a word that we use very often, so I want to make sure that you understand exactly what I mean by this. A eunuch was often a court official who had been castrated, oftentimes forcibly so, as a captive from another land, and was castrated so that that person could serve in the imperial court, in the royal court, and be around the women of the royal court without people worrying that he's going to get into funny business with any of them. Like, nobody's now worried about him messing with Queen Candace because he's a eunuch.

In Matthew 19, it's interesting. Jesus talks about eunuchs and he distinguishes three types of eunuchs. This is what he says:

There are eunuchs who have been so from birth. There are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. — Matthew 19

Now, what he's describing there in the third category is metaphorical. Those who have declared themselves eunuchs metaphorically speaking for the kingdom of heaven. So, somebody who has renounced marriage, who's renounced having children, who is celibate for the sake of the kingdom of heaven for ministry. But the other two categories fit very neatly into what was the first century view of how they used their language to describe eunuchs. So, they call them eunuchs of the sun or eunuchs of men.

So, eunuch of the sun is someone who is been a eunuch since the first day they ever saw the sun. That's what that means literally. Means from birth, right? There's some kind of condition that they've had from childbirth, probably what we would call today intersex that renders them a eunuch. But the eunuch of men is someone who has been made a eunuch by someone's decision. Either that person's or someone else's and we don't know what category this man fit into this Ethiopian eunuch.

Now, you may wince. You may be like, not very PC of you, pastor, to use the word eunuch in a context of a series where we've been talking about transgender or gender dysphoric.

That may sound like nails on the chalkboard to you—why are you doing that? And as I was studying for this series, it's funny, I planned this passage out a while ago, but it was just this week that I discovered that it's actually the Christian transgender community points to this passage and this man as their hero, as their biblical forefather. They look at this passage and say, see, this is okay with God. And I'm gonna have some words in a little while. I'm gonna disagree with parts of that, and I'm gonna explain what I mean. But it is true that this nameless Ethiopian official is a triple outsider to faith in God. He is gender variant. He's a foreigner, and he's an ethnic minority. And this person is the first non-Jewish convert in the book of Acts. This is a big story.

But we can be sure—this is what we know from this passage—we can be sure that this man was turned away from the temple and left Jerusalem disappointed on his quest. He'd gone there to worship. This man was turned away as he confronted Jerusalem Judaism.

No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord. — Deuteronomy 23

He wasn't allowed into the temple. He would have been turned away. Now, why? Why wouldn't they let him in? Well, if you were here for our Leviticus series, you know exactly why. Because the laws surrounding the worship of God in the Old Testament were not just rules, but they were like performance art. They told a bigger story about who God is and what God's character is.

The Levitical laws regarding who could come in and who couldn't come in told a story. When it says no one who's been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the temple of the Lord, it reveals there's something about that which renders a person not whole—w-h-o-l-e, whole, not a whole person. And the law here shows us: this is what God is like. God is the definition of wholeness and thriving, and this is what he wants for people—for them to be whole people and thriving. So this law is not just arbitrary. It's meant to show us something about God.

The Man's Loss

Can you put yourself in the place of this man? Because while this man has lots of things that in that culture and in this culture we would say are highly desirable, there's something deficient. He's a man of great affluence, great influence, great learning, and yet in the very core of his life, there is a dysphoria. There is something off. Biblical writers and commentators say it's this: it's like someone chose for you the aloneness of your life.

In our culture, think about this man. He's never going to be married. He's never going to be able to have a family. He's never going to have children. In our culture, when a couple—and we've had a number in our church, a number of couples who've struggled, been unable to have kids—in our culture, that is sad. That's sort of the dream unfulfilled for a couple. And that's a really hard thing for couples to work through, and I would never want to make light of that. But it is absolutely worlds apart from what it meant in that day.

For a couple or for an individual to be without family, to be without descendants, without children, to be childless was devastating beyond devastation. This is because in the first century, how you introduce yourself—and this is still true in the Middle East—how you introduce yourself has nothing to do with the way we do it in our culture. When you introduce yourself to someone, they ask you, "Hey, what do you do?" and you talk about your job. Your value and worth is bound up in what you do. In that culture, it's bound up in who you are. Who is your family? They would describe people like this: "Jeff, son of James." That's how I would have been defined. I'm defined by who I'm related to.

And so in that culture to say, "I have no descendants. I have no hope of that. I have been castrated"—that was saying, you are nothing. You have nothing. You have no identity. You may have a high place in the court, but that's all you have. This is this man's gender dysphoria.

In our culture, that word gender dysphoria has been used to describe another kind of suffering—like those who say, "I am in distress with my body the way it is." We talked about this several weeks ago. Feeling out of place, feeling like I'm inhabiting the wrong body, feeling like there's something wrong with me, feeling like I'm not the gender that's on my birth certificate. There's something that needs to be changed about me.

The Hidden Cost of the Gender Revolution

This is what's being described. This is all the news right now talking about this moment of gender dysphoria. What you're going to hear about is all about celebrating when someone comes to inhabit or identify with who they are really on the inside. Those are the stories that get highlighted.

Here's the story that doesn't get highlighted. Did you know that among the American public, the attempted suicide rate is five percent? That's a high figure. But for those who identify as transgender or gender dysphoric, it's forty-one percent attempted suicide rate. That tells a terrible story. That tells a story of intense suffering and intense distress—a person who is very much at odds with how they are. And as I said a couple weeks ago, there's also a high prevalence of other psychological disturbances in that person's life. Comorbidity is what's called. This is a big area of suffering and a big area of struggle.

Now we are just on the leading edge right now in this cultural moment of the gender revolution. Just like the sexual revolution of the nineteen sixties, which said, "Hey, we're free from all the mores of the Bible, embrace our sexuality, we're free"—there was an underside to that story. There were people's lives who were deeply scarred, and that story was sort of swept under the rug. And the same thing is going to be true of the gender revolution.

There will be those who change their bodies through hormones, who over time come to a place of, "I wish I had never done that." There will be refugees from the gender revolution. There will be people who have surgically altered themselves with very expensive and very damaging surgeries from which they cannot return. It's not reversible.

So here's the question: Are we going to have a lot of eunuchs from this? But here's the real question for us—will our community, will you sitting in these chairs, will we as a people be ready to come and run alongside the chariot? Will we be ready as a Christian community to embrace and enfold the refugees of the gender revolution?

And look, this sermon today is for the middle schoolers and high schoolers that are here today, because nobody's going to care what a bald, slightly overweight pastor thinks about any of this. But you—you are in middle school right now, you are in high school right now, maybe you are in college right now—you're on the front lines. You're going to have people at your lunch table, people you're in gym class with, people that you are in school with every day who are talking about this. This is a live topic. This is a big deal. And here's the question: Will you have anything to say to them?

The Good News for the Eunuchs

Well, the good news, as we saw in this passage, is there is great news for those who are the eunuchs. Look at this passage with me. The Ethiopian eunuch starts on the road home. He's on his way back home. He's reading from the book of Isaiah, probably for some consolation for the disappointment he's felt by being rejected from the temple. And he picks up the Isaiah scroll and this passage from Isaiah chapter 53, verses seven and eight. Listen as he reads:

He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, like a sheep before its shears is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment, he was taken away. As for his generation, as for his descendants, who can count? — Isaiah 53:7-8

What's fascinating about that? I'm sure as the Ethiopian eunuch reads this passage, it's like, "Wait, here's someone like me who has no descendants. Here's someone like me who's cut off, who is a dry tree, who has no hope, who is a nobody." This is what he reads in this passage.

And if he read that, he probably read the verses before this, that went like this:

He was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought him peace, and with his stripes we're healed. — Isaiah 53:5

Can you imagine this man driving in his chariot going down this road, and his heart skips a beat? Here's another person like me who has no descendants, who experiences the same kind of crushing in his life. Who is this person?

And this is what Philip encounters. He runs alongside the chariot. He hears this man reading. He says, "Do you have any idea who you're reading about?" And he begins to talk to him about Jesus.

I want you to think about this. Think about Jesus in the context of this passage. "As for his descendants, who can count?" See, Jesus fits that definition of eunuch from Matthew 19.

Those who have given up, who embraced being a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom. He's embraced this fruitless life. He has no descendants. He takes no wife. He puts aside having a family. Why? So that he could be a eunuch for the eunuchs. He becomes one who is fruitless for those who are fruitless. One whose life is barren for those whose lives are barren. This is what Jesus embraces.

And then as we read on, he is one who's crushed, whose wounds at the cross are what buys this eunuch life again with him. This is what we see. This is what the gospel offers. And if the Ethiopian eunuch had just read on further two chapters over to Isaiah chapter 56, this is what he would have read.

Let the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely separate me from his people, and let not the eunuch say, behold, I'm a dry tree. For behold, thus says the Lord, to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast to my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that will never be cut off. — Isaiah 56

See, God says that this eunuch, whose life was like the desert's landscape he's traveling through—it's empty and barren. The promise to him that's fulfilled in Jesus is this: this is a place of fruitfulness. God will enter into the desert of your life and create an oasis. God will enter into your fruitlessness and make you full and flourishing.

Remember the question: who can speak of his descendants in regard to Jesus? On the one hand, Jesus made himself a eunuch. He put off any kind of wife or having children. Of his descendants, who can number? Yeah, they're none. But on the other hand, they're countless.

See, this is what's offered to this eunuch and to all eunuchs, to all who are transgender, to all who are gender dysphoric. This is what's offered: the gospel that Jesus promises to come and make you whole, to make a person complete, to bring a wholeness into your life that you've never known before. This is the good news we have to offer people. But here's the question: will we?

The Challenge to the Church

Where are today's Philips? Here's Philip, early disciple of Jesus running alongside the chariot. He goes, he's willing to take the risk to enter into this man's life. Will the church of Jesus Christ be ready for the refugees of the gender revolution? Will you be ready?

See, here's what I see happening too often. God calls us to a life on the straight and narrow. This life is a hard one in terms of being faithful to Jesus. And as the church is trying to stay on the straight and narrow, this is what I see happening: the church ends up veering off onto one of the other sides of the road, into one of the shoulders of the road, and one of the ditches on either side of the road. Here are the two we fall into because it's hard to stay straight and narrow.

First is a fortress mentality. Many reformed Christians—that's our church. Many reformed Christians who love the Bible have a remnant theology. Like, hey, we're the bastion of Christian truth. We need to be firm on the truth. And being firm on the truth, that's really good. I love the truth. But it's characterized by a sense that the world's going to hell in a handbasket. We better build some walls and pull up the drawbridge. We better be really careful, which ends up being, to be honest, a live and let live indifference. A fortress mentality among those who are so concerned with being right that we just don't even care. We really don't care. We forget that the church of Jesus Christ is never called to play defense. We are always in an offense posture.

The New Testament never holds out a remnant theology of like, you're the only ones. No. It always holds out this huge optimism: the gates of hell will never stand against the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have the Great Commission. We're always called to be going out, not retreating. Remnant theology has no place with the church of Jesus Christ. And what I see is that truth without love is just a lack of courage, and there's a deep lack of courage in lots and lots of my own denomination. We got to be really careful.

Second, the other side of the road—if that's one of the gutters, that's one of the ditches you can fall into. On the other side of the road is this one: a Christianity that fits into the coexist bumper sticker. Many progressive Christians, and I'm going to use that term the way our culture is using that—many progressive Christians rightly want to hold out this huge heart of affirmation and love. And man, that's great. The gospel is about affirmation and love. Who can be against that?

But in doing so, it's so easy to flush central truths of the gospel, and particularly the power of the gospel for transformation. It's easy to flush that down the drain. And here's the thing: the gospel, the hope of the gospel is that it's not just acceptance, it's power for transformation. It's power for change—not just to accept everybody, but to change anybody. Isn't that the gospel? I mean, the gospel without the power for transformation is just a hug, and it doesn't do people good.

So look, truth without love lacks courage. Love without truth offers a gospel with no power in it. See, where are the modern day Philips? I mean, who are they? I pray it's this room. I pray it's us. I pray it's you. I pray it's you who are in middle school right now. You who are in high school right now. I pray it's you. But here's what you're gonna need. You're gonna need these two things, and you have to have both of them. You have to have truth and love together.

Truth and Love

What do I mean by that? Let me break that down. What truth? We have to keep affirming these things.

Number one: God declares our identity. That's something we receive from him. It's not a journey inward of self-discovery. It's not, "Hey, I am what I want to be." It's God declares who I am. The great statement we've gone over in this series is Imago Dei—made in God's image. There is no higher statement.

You know what's really post-Christian about the moment we live in? It's not like there's lots of pornography. It's not consumeristic. It's defining personhood apart from the image. It's defining personhood apart from the image—it's like, "Hey, you choose your own adventure about who you are." And when people, when we're there, we are lost. We're lost.

See, gender is real and binary and it's a gift. And we receive from God who he says we are. And we have to hold on to that. That's not—listen, let me just be really clear. That's not my truth. That's not CTK's truth. That's not Presbyterian truth. That's God's truth, and it is precious.

Second: God created gender, and it's good. It's good. God gives men and women distinct roles and tasks based on gender. He gives us specialties. He invites us into exercising those things. God cannot sin. So what he gives us is not bad. It's not oppressive. It's not destructive. It's not dangerous. It's not arbitrary. God is a God of truth and grace. What he gives is always good. And even when it's hard for us or we don't understand it or we don't like it, these still come from a holy, good God who loves people. Sexual difference, gender identity which emerges from it—that's a calling from God.

So we can't co-opt this passage from Acts chapter eight and just kind of rip it out of our Bibles and say, "See, Jesus is okay with transgender." No. No. This isn't a story just about acceptance. This is a story about so much more.

See, what we find here—this is a helpful case study for us. Scripture never presents eunuchs as a third sex or a third gender. Eunuchs in the Bible uniformly are always treated with the male pronouns and treated with verb endings that designate male. And I just want to say this: scripture resists diluting the sex-gender binary even in cases that don't fit neatly into it. Like it still affirms this.

And third: Jesus told the truth to sinners. Jesus dined with sinners, but he didn't sin with sinners. Jesus lived in the world. He didn't live like the world. This is the Jesus paradox. This is what he calls his followers to. It calls us to see exactly what Jesus did and what he didn't do.

Let's take it for example: Mark chapter one. Jesus comes and heals a leper. But think about what Jesus did with that leper. He didn't say, "Hey, God loves you and approves of you just as you are. You're fine." He didn't say leprosy was a social construct in the minds of an oppressive group. He didn't say, "Hey, law is gone. Grace is good." He didn't encourage the leper toward greater self-esteem. He didn't rebuke the faith community for upholding traditional taboos against leprosy or leprophobia. No.

He said, "This is a problem. There's a contagion. There's a disease that needs to be dealt with. I'm naming it, and I'm touching you." See, there's truth and there's love at the same time. Together. Truth and love.

So what does this look like? See, instead of reformed Christians who love the Bible saying, "Alright, we're going to protest these things. We're going to social media. We're going to be really anti-transgender, gender-dysphoric community"—no. No. That's really unhelpful. What if we took all that energy and we channeled it? We just channeled that into loving our neighbors, all of them.

The cisgender, the transgender, the gender dysphoric. See, if we don't love our mission field as a church, we will have nothing to say to it. We'll have nothing to say to it. Madeline Langel puts it this way. I love this. She says, draw people to Christ by showing them a light that is so lovely that they will want with all their hearts to know the source of it. There is no telling. There's no telling of the source of light without showing it. Those have to go together.

So here's some practicals. What does it mean to exercise love, to love our neighbors, all of them? What does it look like? Here's seven things real quick.

We listen carefully. Right now, we're in a moment of sound bite culture. And so if someone loves to put out identity markers, here's who I am. The problem is language is changing so fast that what somebody means by that needs to be a follow-up question. There may be several follow-up questions to that. Like if someone says, "Hey, I'm a blank," you should say, "What does that mean to you? I'm transgender. Tell me more about that. Hey, I have gender dysphoria. What's that like for you?" See, that's a conversation. That's not a sound bite. Our culture is all about sound bite, social media—it's radically unhelpful. You know what's countercultural in this moment? Asking questions. Having a conversation with someone.

Second, use whatever pronouns they use. Now people are gonna disagree with me about this, but Mark Yarhouse, he's written extensively on how the church embraces and cares for the transgender community. How do we speak the gospel. He says this: use whatever pronouns. The church members should address a man who thinks he's a woman by her chosen female name, and use feminine pronouns, and a woman who thinks she's a man by her chosen male name, and use masculine pronouns. Why would we do that? Out of respect. Because our desire is to build bridges, not walls. It's to build bridges.

I love this. Rosaria Butterfield, who has written a lot particularly about witness to the LGBTQ community, she says this: "I respect the rules of the LGBTQ community. I know those rules well because I helped make them. I remember the right names, so I don't confuse the children raised in LGBTQ homes. I know who's mama and who's mommy, and I teach my children to get it right too. I speak to my neighbors with respect." The same thing is true with pronouns—using the pronouns that somebody's identifying by because you want to build a bridge.

Number three, we pray to be safe friends to others. This is a great prayer request. Lord, make me a person to whom another person can just unburden themselves. They can talk about how hard things are. They can talk about what it's like to be them. They can share what things are like for them.

I love the story of Rosaria Butterfield again, who's sort of a lightning rod in the church community right now because she was a former lesbian who's become a Christian and now is a very well known speaker in the gender and sexuality debates that are going on in the church. Well, she tells a story about every time she goes to different colleges and speaks on campus, there's always a demonstration against her coming. And it's her practice to always ask, "Can I sit down with the person who's leading that demonstration against me?" She tells a story about going to one of these campuses and sitting down with a woman who is leading this radical demonstration, asking for her to be removed from campus. She sits down with this girl who's in the beginning stages of transitioning. And she says, "As we began to talk, I asked her, 'Hey, what's that like for you?'" And what she found is she asked question after question, and this is a girl who had been told instead of starting with changing your clothes, start with surgery. And she's like, "Wow, that's really hardcore. How do you feel about that?" And the girl fell apart emotionally. She started crying because Rosaria found out the girl's family had been pushing her, had rejected her because of this, and that she was alone, and she was about to do a lot of very expensive, very scary surgeries on her own with no support. And they had a long conversation and the girl ended up driving her to the airport after she was done with her speech and said, "I wish you were my mom." And I love that because it's a picture of becoming a safe person to someone, of being able to ask questions.

Number four, we're careful about our humor. And jokes that just aren't funny.

You may have fallen into patterns with your language, with things that you use for humor, that are just, to be honest, offensive to other people. And I think a heart of empathy that Christians have should be able to say, look, I know that every person feels alienation on some profound level inside because of the fall. All of us have a sense of alienation from self, from God, even from our bodies. So can you cut that stuff out of your vocabulary?

Number five, and this is a big one for CTK, we stopped protecting our kids. We stopped protecting our kids. Our kids don't need protection from the world. They need discipleship. They need discipleship. You can't keep them safe from the gender revolution. You can't keep your kids safe, but you can model truth and love. You can help them see lives transformed by the gospel because you're a part of those conversations and relationships.

See, you can't keep your safe. Your kids aren't safe, and they won't be. But you can raise up the next generation of young disciples who are equipped to love and speak truth. Man, that's the only safe to be. And that's the best place to be.

Number six, we move toward individuals, not groups or causes. I think this is an instructive passage for us from Acts chapter eight because here Philip goes toward an individual. He ministers to the Ethiopian eunuch. He doesn't show up at the eunuch parade downtown. Right? He doesn't show up at the transgender rally or the gender dysphoric cause. Right? He's not involved in an organization. He's involved with a person. And this is where, for us as Christians, moving toward people, this is what's instructive for us. God is not calling us for some kind of involvement with groups. It's individuals. It's people that you know.

And finally this, Jesus ate with sinners. Will we? Will we? You know, as I said before, there are going to be refugees from the gender revolution. People bruised and broken and altered by hormone therapy and surgery. And here's the question: you, Christian, your home, your free time, your family night, are they interruptible? Are they available? Are they for God to use? Are you so much about everything being safe, got to have our good boundaries, got to protect everything. Boundaries are good. But at the same time, look, if your life is not open to lost people around you, you are not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Because we can't say, "Here's the truth over here. Be warm and well fed," unless we're willing to open up our lives and our homes and our stuff and be willing to help those who need an escape route from what the world offers. Because what the world offers is a false gospel and it's death. We have the life. We have Jesus. And are our lives, are our homes, are our relationships open?

See, here's my prayer. May God raise up a new generation of Phillips out of this church, out of this room—these middle schoolers, these high schoolers, these college students ready for the eunuchs of today. I pray that CTK would be such a place of grace and truth, such a place of love, such a place of bold love that we tell people the truth and we offer people Jesus, and all of it for his glory. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.