I think it's calm and collected. This is calm and colleague day. It must be pal and collectory. Anything you say, some one frog and pum coming up, son. You scum of hair please, hurry up.
SPEAKER_05Happy pancake day. Pancake day indeed. Happy Fat Tuesday. It's pancake day.
SPEAKER_07It's a fake pancake day. That's it. I love I love translating it from the French. Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday.
SPEAKER_06Happy Fat Tuesday, everybody.
SPEAKER_05Does uh does pancake day translate into I mean do other cultures do the pancake thing really? In Australia we do. Yeah. Yeah. Does uh do the Americans know what pancake day is? I'm sure. Don't you? Every day's a pancake day in America.
SPEAKER_07Bill Lovell. Do you have pancake day? Pancakes for breakfast all the time. You guys, you guys are crazy. Like pancakes and bacon and waffles and maple syrup. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_05When we went to New York and I had pancakes with bacon like every morning. Well it was good.
SPEAKER_07Every day is Fat Tuesday in America. Totally. What's Bill said? Bill has commented. What on earth is this? Trove Tuesday, yes. Okay, yes. Bill has corrected us. Pancake Day. Yeah, pancake day. Although I do I no, I do feel a slight twinge when I go into the supermarket and it says International Pancake Day. And I just think I I wonder if they're gonna tell us that uh it's now 46 days from International Chocolate Egg Day. Yep. That would be Easter. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Bill Lovell says, I'm having pancakes right now.
SPEAKER_05Ah, see, that's what I say. It's the the American thing to have for breakfast. Enjoy grits. Grits! Not that I still don't really know what it is. Yeah, but get me some grids.
SPEAKER_07I was in the south for like two and a half days before I started saying yarl. Yal. It was amazing.
SPEAKER_05We've got a friend who moved to Texas and she sits sounds like that now. But she's from um uh Ramsbottom. So you can kind of imagine how that works for the kind of southern yarl.
SPEAKER_07Hey Yah, mount some grids. Ramsbottom. Yeah. Um but it is it is Shrove Tuesday, um, from the old English shrive, meaning to be penitent, right? Uh because here's something interesting. So Lent begins tomorrow with Ash Wednesday, and we'll think about that in a second. But I think it's very interesting culturally how from that idea of Lent and a penitential fast leading up to Easter, you have two different responses. One of them is to have fat Tuesday! Woo! It's Mardi Gras, it's carnivale, and you know, it's a massive blowout. Yep. And then the other response is to be shriven and to be penitent, and to enter to make sure that you have repented enough so that you can enter into forty days of penitence, so that then you might be ready for the cross. Yeah, yeah. And and yeah, it just shows how kind of human religion leads to you either get rebels or robots, don't you? You know, and and the the one response is Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, let's let's have all the pancakes. And the other is let us be even more holy to prepare ourselves for the season of holiness so that we might just be ready to hear the good news of Jesus dying for us. And I it it just makes me think, like in the Old Testament, there was a sort of a penitential season in the Old Testament, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Yeah. So the Feast of Unleavened Bread is um scouring your house for any traces of yeast, because yeast meant if you want your bread to rise on the on the night of Passover, you you're basically saying, I want to bed down in Egypt. I'm not really with this whole, you know, escape route from Egypt. I kind of I I want to bed down, I want to feast in Egypt. And so having yeast is always a sign of being too comfortable with the old life and not wanting to be part of God's, you know, great exodus. Um, and so you would have a week in the Old Testament called the Feast of Unleavened Bread, where you would scour your house for yeast, but also you would examine yourself, you know, what what is it about me that loves Egypt a little bit too much? But interestingly, that week happens before Passover or after Passover? Uh after. After Passover. Yeah. So once you've celebrated the fact that you are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, you've been set free, you're part of God's new people, hooray. Then you do the self-examination. And actually Paul picks that up in in 1 Corinthians 5, and he says, Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed, therefore let us partake of the feast, the feast of unleavened bread, with the you know, without the yeast of malice, right? And so again in the New Testament, it's basically saying, sure, do some self-examination, but it's in the light of the fact that Christ has already been sacrificed for you. Yeah. Whereas these days we tend to if you get to the end of the penitential feast, then you get the sacrifice.
SPEAKER_05So like where has that even come from? Like where is the where does I mean, I don't really know where Lent comes from. I mean you get the 40 days thing, you can kind of see where that's come from. But like who like when do people start saying, Let's do this in advance? Like, where's that grown out of?
SPEAKER_07Well part of it was um so you want to get baptized on Easter Day, right? Okay, that would that that was kind of a thing. The the best day on which to celebrate your new birth and life and entrance into the church would be Easter, right? Okay, yeah, I can see the and so like anyone who was joining the church, they were like a catechumen, and they they would they would be catechised, they would be told, you know, catechism, come on. It's not often you hear the word catechumen. Catecumen in an egg cucumber or something. Catecu the vegetable section. You could become a cate cucumber. Cattle cucumber. Um death, cattle cucumber. Um and uh Bill's Bill's commenting on a totally different video stream. So I've need to stop it, Bill. Stop. Come on over to the Speak Life video, Bill. Join us here, Bill. Join us, join us on the Speak Life video. But um uh oh, he's he's just uh given everybody a wonderful uh pancakes uh video. So come come and drop that into the Speak Life video comment stream, Bill, and then everyone can enjoy it. It's gonna make me hungry for pancakes. It probably is. Oh man. So anyway, cate cucumbumbers. I mean catechumbers. So you would come in and uh you would be um catechised, which is a question and answer way of teaching the faith.
SPEAKER_05Yep.
SPEAKER_07Um and it and and you would prepare yourself for your baptism. So to begin with, it was all those who are about to be baptized. So it's like baptism prep. It's baptism prep, right. But then the whole church said, Well, well, you know, why why don't we all do it? And why don't we all in solidarity with those who are about to renounce evil and embrace Christ? Why don't we all kind of do that? And it sort of grew from there. And then you get people like Simeon the stylite who would literally Oh he's he's great. Stylish. Stylite, because like you you know that a stylus, like if you've got a gallery. He's like a long thin thing, a stylus, right? And he was a stylite because he put himself up on a stylus. He stood up on the top of the thing, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Like a pillar, a column. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Right. And he went up there and he didn't come down for like forty-six years, something like that. Right. You're just waiting for some to bring a ladder. Well, he was considered like the wisest man in Syria. And everyone everyone would come and listen to the wisdom because if he's able to do that, imagine the wisdom that would drop from his mouth.
SPEAKER_05I was just thinking what else would have to drop off of there. Like if he was 46 years. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah. 46 Syrian summers, 46 Syrian winters, and he survived on flatbread and yogurt for No, that's not gonna be good. I think it's 46 years. I'll have to have a look. Um Eric Neil says, Cheers from Caltown, Texas. There you go. I want my wife to say that. Kitine, Kitine, Texas, something like that. Um Northern Irish people too. You're very welcome. Rapidly switching off. Biddy Mutter says hello, hello, Biddy. As does Roger Marshall. So Hello. So so anyway, Simeon the Stylight. Syrian the stylight. So before he proved his great holiness, um and before he spawned a whole bunch of other stylites, right? Other people in his wake then decided to do this thing. He was like the most famous man in Syria. So everyone else wanted to be a stylight and they went up and still did the same thing. But they would they would do things like um literally hold out from all food during Lent. Now you do have feast days during Lent.
SPEAKER_05So like the Sundays are Sundays, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Sundays are your feast day and the there's like St. Patrick's Day, does that fall in? Probably falls in Lent this year. Um so there would be feast days where you could kind of break it up, but that was that was what all the cool kids were doing back in the day.
SPEAKER_05And we, you know, with the WWJD bracelet of its day.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like and he would he would wrap palm fronds around himself just to just until like a a girdle? Is it would that be a girdle? Uh maybe. What do you what do you call what do you call things that hold your gut in?
SPEAKER_05I suppose a girdle. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07He would sort of do that until it cut into his flesh and became part of his flesh and all this this kind of Where was you getting the palm fronds?
SPEAKER_05I mean, there must have been a team working with him. Yeah, there probably was. There's probably a whole industry. There are so many questions I have about this. None of them are really related to his holiness.
SPEAKER_07But I think, yeah. So I'm I'm all for preparing yourself for Easter and I'm all for that kind of thing. But it it does go to show that um the human heart tends to go in these two different directions. Whether it's it's Mardi Gras, let's blow out and let's let's go for the fat thing, or let's like fast to an unhealthy degree. What's your opinion?
SPEAKER_05So this is still on the Easter thing, but we've not talked about this. So what do you think about Good Friday like services? Because so so I wouldn't say I'm massively bothered, but it partly winds me up a little bit. So sometimes we do Good Friday and you have a Good Friday service almost as if Sunday has not happened. Right. As if you were back, you know, back in 33 AD or 30 AD, whatever.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And almost like you don't know Sunday's coming.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um I don't know how I what I make of that. Because basically you just have this very depressing Friday service. And I'm a bit like I know Sunday's coming. Sunday's coming! Fridays are coming.
SPEAKER_06But Sunday's coming.
SPEAKER_05But like, we're in a different position to, you know, the disciples on the Saturday and the Friday afternoon, whatnot. I don't know. I just find it a bit of a strange case.
SPEAKER_07Can you not for one day? One day. Enter into the passion of the Christ. Come on. That's so so my high church friends would say that. So like because I I remember then you should enter into the You should just you should enter you you should enter into the story as it happens. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And and even up to Holy Saturday, like Holy Saturday in in a lot of churches is a very somber affair, and right up to sort of midnight, and you hold a kind of a midnight service in the darkness. Christ is cold and dead in the tomb. And you enter into that, and then it's fireworks on Sunday morning. Sure. But they they would sort of say the whole reason why we have liturgical calendars is because we are embodied creatures and we need to we need to kind of enter into the story and and and enter into these patterns and not smoosh it all together like it's all in one. And what's interesting to me is is that um it does seem to be true that we are liturgical creatures because I don't think we can do without it. Even if we even if nobody knows that it's Shrove Tuesday, the top three uh Twitter trending topics are Pancakes! Pancake Day! Pancakes Um Yeah, we we even if we do without the church's liturgical calendar, we kind of have to invent our own and go through and is it pageantry, yes, is it going through the motions? I guess you could call it that, but we seem to be creatures who need to go through motions because we are embodied and and so like we we did a a mission to uh a town in Cheshire called Sambach. And uh there was lots of things that we sort of did as churches together to reach out to the town, but there was nothing more powerful than actually a passion play that they held on the Friday in the town. So on on Good Friday they had this passion play. And so you you have like these, you know, the twelve disciples dressed up, you know, in first century garb in front of like uh a chip shop. Ford Monday. Yeah, and for yeah, all the cars are driving past. But but then actually Christ was strung up on a cross like right there in the town square. Yeah. And it really was powerful. Um and it really did bring home the the fact that these are events that that apply to now. You know, it's it's not just a two thousand-year-old thing. But with with these passion plays, what happens is Christ dies and there's no resurrection scene. Yeah. Because you've got to wait for Sunday. Sure. And and and my my reaction is is similar to yours to that, because I I do want, you know, I do want people to not to walk away thinking. Oh yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_05That's kind of my thing. Like, you know, so if you come on Friday and you're like, oh well, I hear something might happen on Sunday, yeah. I'll come back. Yeah. And you forget, or you you die, you know, I don't know, like b between Friday and Sunday. Yes you know. I just I just I always thought it was just really odd. You know, it seems strange that we're kind of almost pretending like we don't know what's coming. Yeah. You know, like and we've all got to be really somber about the whole thing.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. But when you read a story to your children and there's a sad bit, you sort of enter into the sad bit.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but I tend to finish the story. Yes.
SPEAKER_07Come back in a couple of days. And we'll see what happens to yeah, Snow White. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05I th well she went down into went down into death, didn't she? Went down into death. Raised to life.
SPEAKER_07Oh, we just we just watched Beauty and the Beast with uh with Ruby and uh it was brilliant because we then played her. Stockholm syndrome, right there. Dan Yeah, right. Yeah, falling in love with her captain. Yeah, yeah. We should have had at least a twelve-step program, you know, some counseling to sort out all sorts of complicated feelings for her captain. But no, no, she just jumps in, you know. Anyway, but we we watched this with uh with Ruby, and then we watched uh a terrific uh video made by Dan Rackham, who's now uh working here with us. Of our very own one of our very own at Speak Life talking about the gospel themes in Beauty and the Beast. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We'll but we'll put that link in the in the uh comments later. Um so Fat Tuesday today, tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. And before we talk about Ash Wednesday, I I thought it was just um interesting. It always comes up and and um the these things are evergreen, unfortunately, that there are celebrity deaths um happening and celebrity deaths in the news and and Keith Flint of The Prodigy uh he died, was it yesterday, or certainly I was like, It was reported yesterday. I mean I think it was yesterday, yeah. Or the night before. And I think Luke Perry of Beverly Hills 90210 fame, um, he died yesterday. And it just sort of reminded me again about how modern uh grieving is quite different to uh traditional grieving. You know, modern grieving is is it's about celebrities we don't really know. And what we're grieving the loss of is their ideas and their media. And what we're missing is their ideas and their media. But we're not really missing them because we never had them. They were not, you know, a part of our lives, genuinely. But we still have the feelings of grief, and then we don't really know how to express them, so we just write R.I.P. on Twitter and hit send and and that that is the liturgy of of grief. But we don't we don't really understand how to grieve anymore because I because I think we have such a uh a disembodied culture and and because death is kind of out of sight and out of mind for us, you know. So actually there there haven't been very many people close to me who have died. I think like you know, and I'm forty now. And you know, my my my parents are still alive, Emma's parents are still alive, and it's it is the case that for a lot of people, um, their parents are still alive well into their sixties or seventies.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, obvious exceptions, but that is very much life expectancy these days, isn't it?
SPEAKER_07Yeah. And then when people do die, they die away from the family home, in hospices. We have funerals for them, we don't open the caskets, we have a memorial service for them, and then the body gets shipped off for the cremation, and probably only like five people are there at the cremation. Just just very close to the five. You don't really see it, do you? You don't really see it.
SPEAKER_05I could probably count on well, I can count on one hand the number of dead bodies I've seen.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Two I've seen.
SPEAKER_05Actually, that are managely dead. Three, I think. Yeah. I think I've seen my three grandparents. Yeah. Um and so my my grandmother my my granddad died. Um so I I got to hospital like ten minutes after he died. So I was the first one there, and he died ten minutes before. Um and it's it's a very strange thing though, like I mean there there was something quite um you know, I was in the room with him because I said, Oh, what can I see him? And I went in, and it was very much the sense of like, well he wasn't really there, you know. Like it was just a body now. Um but i it I was just it just struck me though, like I I talk about it being like a almost like a comedy, like because my dad was coming and it was his dad. And um and I just thought like I can't let my dad see him like this, you know, he's there with his eyes open, and you try and close the eyes. In the films they just do that. Yeah. Doesn't work, doesn't do that. And then like at one point I leant on the side of the bed, oh like that, you know. Right. And the um you know the sides that go up and down on the bed. Wow. Yeah, and it just collapsed, and so I just end up falling on my granddad's like but it kind of it kind of really humanized the whole situation. We can't burning it was just like, my goodness, this is like a sitcom playing out here, you know. You're waiting for the nurse to walk in as I'm trying to like get him in the right position or whatever, and I'm like, oh I'm just you know but uh yeah, I mean people don't really I guess a lot of people don't even see yeah. Some people I I I suppose like my kids wouldn't have gone and seen you know the dead body of great granddad or no or whatever, you know.
SPEAKER_07Um Yeah. And do kids come to funerals anymore? Not so much.
SPEAKER_05Well yeah, and that's interesting. A lot of people I know have kind of said, like, oh the kids aren't coming. And I always we our kids have come to the funerals, but I mean obviously they've not been open caskets and things, but I don't know, you're kind of like, well, they're part of the family, so you kind of think, well, why wouldn't they? But people are very kind of nervous of that.
SPEAKER_07We don't want to see death, and it's it is out of sight, out of mind, and yet, like on TV, like all the top Netflix shows are about serial killers and like every detective series, you've got to go to the morgue, and you've gotta you've gotta see like pictures of buzzsaws opening up people because it it's almost pornographic. Like we don't have the real thing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and then we're gonna have curiosity cracking open the chest cavity to whatever on like it's it's silent witness, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, well any scandy noir kind of program. Um we've got this really odd view of death. It's not it's not in our popular cul consciousness. When grandad dies, we we don't bring him home and put him on the dining room table and have you know, dinner. Nobody does that. But but yeah, we don't yeah, we don't we don't really see dead people, we don't really see death and therefore it's all this virtual thing. And so and still we grieve, and still we want to grieve, and we want to mourn, but it seems like it seems like we mourn celebrities and we we we we mourn the virtual people out there in the ether. Um because we don't have that close, intimate knowledge of death within us. And you know, I've I've said this before, I was on a train at the end of twenty eighteen. Two women in their twenties talking to each other, and uh one one woman says, Oh, it's been such a crummy year and and her friend says, Oh, why babes? Is it what's what what's happened? She says, Oh, you know, just with all the deaths, you know, first it was David Bowie and then it was Alan Rickman. And she said, Babes, that was twenty sixteen. And she said, Yeah, but I'm sure more people have died this year too. And her entire year had been shaped by the death of, you know, David Bowie and uh and Alan Rickman from two years previously. And then when she was told that those names are not applicable to this year, she's like, Oh yeah, but I'll just I'll, you know, I'll just swap in some other names and and I'll just feel sad in this virtual way. Um so I don't know. It made it it does make me think like here's a lovely verse. A lovely verse. So Ecclesiastes. Um I think this this should be such a such a verse for us, Ecclesiastes 7. Um It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man. The living should take this to heart. Like Yeah, we s we spend our time doing everything else. You know, we we Netflix binge when we should be going to funerals and we should be facing, you know, death in the in the reality of it. Um and that's that's why I think it's interesting that tomorrow is uh Ash Wednesday. Yep. And so certainly if you're from a more traditional background, perhaps you're an Anglican or something, you you might go to a service in which they will press the the ash of usually it's the palm crosses that were burnt from last year, they put ash on your forehead and they'll make the sign of the cross over you, and as they do that, they will say, Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Like, wow, that is embodied. You know, that's like because like if if Luke Perry dies, there's a there's a part of me that's thinking, Oh, I'm not too far different from him in age, and maybe maybe I'm confronting my mortality and that in a very um distant kind of way. But when someone actually just presses, you know, ash onto your forehead and says, That's you, that is remember that you are dust into dust you shall return. I think we then get a far healthier view of our mortality and and that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_05You think people are just distracted by it's just so much rubbish, like like you social media and all these other things that just people don't confront reality at all. Right. Regardl I mean not not even just death, but you know, the reality of everyday life. Um, I'm always surprised at how little people seem to have thought about the big questions of life. Right. You know, and I always just kind of assumed, well everybody is is kind of mulling these things over somewhere, aren't they? You know. Um and no they're not, apparently. It doesn't seem they are. Like, and people literally have never given thought to some of these ideas and you know, um like w why am I even here? What's the purpose of things and you know what about death and you know, what does that all mean? If if this is it, you know, if this really is just it, yeah. Wha why bother, you know?
SPEAKER_07Um Blaise Pascal, who's you know famous for his triangle, Pascal's triangle, yeah, and uh famous for his wager. Yes. Um but one of the things he did, he he wrote a whole bunch of thoughts and he just numbered them and he wrote them down in a book. Like if he was during Twitter, yeah, like he would just tweet them out. Because they're all kind of 140 characters, 280 characters. But um one of one of the big themes in his thoughts um is that diversions we are and what it what he w what he was noticing was that um the royalty had to invent diversions because um they had gotten themselves above subsistence levels, so they didn't have to worry about where their next meal was coming from. And therefore they were thinking about their mortality um uh a lot. And so what they needed to do, they needed to go hunting. Like, why do you need to go hunting? It's ridiculous. It's a di it's a diversion. Uh and he said he said something like man's um unhappiness can all be traced back to the fact that uh we cannot sit quietly with ourselves in a room. Sure, yeah, yeah, you know, and what he thought was like thoughts of your mortality are gonna rush in, and so you've got to invent hunting or Netflix, or you know, just to just to cope with your mortality.
SPEAKER_05That comes through in um you know 21 Pilots, you know, that those guys, Tyler Joseph, they're Christians, but yeah, so he he took he talks about he's got a song called Car Radio, and it's about when his car radio was stolen, but how then he's just left alone with his thoughts, and so he's got nothing else to you know, then the the he can't hide from himself at that point and everything starts crashing in. Yeah, and so he has to you know he's like gotta get something to fill this gap. Yeah, but actually that's what that's what it is, really. That's that's something that's talking of something deeper than you know, yeah. What most people are often thinking about. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Um so maybe you could take a few minutes tomorrow and go into a church and remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Uh you will learn wisdom, according to Ecclesiastes 7. Better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting. Yeah. Um Yeah. So do you have a lovely verse on this?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so the one that always strikes me is from Hebrews chapter 2. Um if I can find Hebrews, here it is. Hebrews chapter 2, verse 14, and the verses kind of following that. Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery. And I think it's just a powerful verse, isn't it? This I remember preaching on this verse in the youth group when we went through Hebrews and you know, just saying, like I think it is the reality that we people do fear death, you know. Um but actually what Jesus has done means that we don't need to fear death. Um Although, so even though I say I think it's the reality that people do fear death, I think like we've just been saying, people don't fear death in the sense that they're just not thinking about it. Like there are so many distractions. Yeah. Um and because we don't live in a society where on the whole your life can just be taken away from you like that with by a sickness or whatever. I mean it does happen, but I mean generally we've got a good health care and we've got enough food and we're not trying to subsist generally. Um actually we don't think about these things.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. But even the things that we dice distract ourselves with, it's because there's a fear of death that's sort of banging the drum underneath. Oh yeah, yeah. And we're not gonna ask the tune up there, even if we're not aware that it's not.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, even if we're not aware that that's what it is, but yeah, heaven forbid we should have to stop and think about it for a second and realise it's coming. Right. You know? Right. If Sunday's coming, you know, death is coming. Yeah. And uh that's why we need Sunday, you know.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. Exactly. And you know, if people want to check out Father John Bear, he's an Orthodox theologian. And if you go to YouTube and sort of uh look for Bear B-E-H-R and Death, so look for John Bear and Death. Uh there's some fantastic talks he's got where he he sort of says, you know, the the biggest challenge for us preaching the gospel today is people don't see death anymore. And that A means that we don't consider it our own mortality, and B, it means we don't understand Christ, who reveals the glory of God in his death. Um, very profound stuff. So John Bear on death, but maybe we'll put some uh links in the comments. Well, it's been uh quite a moody start to things, Paul. I think we might need a moody theme. What do you think?
SPEAKER_05I think so.
SPEAKER_07Livecast.
unknownLivecast.
SPEAKER_05Well, there we go.
SPEAKER_07And now for something completely different. Yes, last night uh we uh had a look at um we're in a series of thorny questions uh looking at problems with the Bible. Yeah. Last week we saw that the Bible is huge.
SPEAKER_08Yep.
SPEAKER_05We looked at what was the five things, five problems we thought people had with the Bible. So what was it? There's um unscientific, it's judgmental, um, it's homophobic, it's pro-slavery, and uh the other one. Forgotten the other one. Yeah. Yeah. Clearly it wasn't that big a problem. Yeah, we covered.
SPEAKER_07We don't have problems with the Bible, just so you know. Other people do, and how do you respond? Um so we were encouraging people to have a look at this huge text. Where do you begin? Well, we said, why don't you begin with the gospels? And then you might think, well, can I trust them? How do we know this is actually I've got the Bible in my hand. In hand. How do I know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote exactly what I've got here? Surely it's just been changed down the years. Has it? Has it though? Well, let's have a look at a clip from last night's video, and then we'll get to answering five questions that commonly come up on whether you can trust the Bible that's in our hands today.
SPEAKER_05People imagine that the transmission of the Bible is like a game of Chinese whispers. You know Chinese whispers. Apparently, Chinese whispers were once called shiny whistlers, then before that, tiny whiskers, because well, think about it. People think the Bible came down to us like Chinese whispers.
SPEAKER_02I heard skinners say the teachers will crack any minute.
SPEAKER_04Skimmers said the teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
SPEAKER_01We'll show him, especially for that purple monkey dishwasher remark.
SPEAKER_05But the analogy with the Bible doesn't really hold. The Bible is like a game of Chinese whispers where the kids write down the message, and then at the end they compare the written messages with a dozen other lines of transmission to try to piece together the original wording. The only way you can have a worst-party game is by playing leapfrog with a unicorn. Okay, well, maybe don't think about that one. But the Bible isn't like Chinese whispers, and it's not like a puzzle with pieces missing. We don't have pieces missing from the Bible. It's more like we have a puzzle with extra pieces. Lots of them actually. But these extra pieces are like purple monkey dishwasher. In the vast majority of the cases, we know that they're extra. They don't fit.
SPEAKER_03There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_05That's a big number.
SPEAKER_00A large number, it's a big number, a big, big number, very big number, bigger number than that. Big, big, leg number, a huge number, a very significant number.
SPEAKER_05There might be hundreds of thousands of variants, but really that number is a function of how many manuscripts we have. If there was only one manuscript, there'd be no variations. Would that be a good thing? In the vast majority of cases, the kind of variants we have are spelling and word order variations that are untranslatable in English. Edmund to his credit admits this.
SPEAKER_03Most of these differences that I'm talking about don't matter for a thing.
SPEAKER_05In fact, New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace says only one percent of the variants are both meaningful and viable as contenders for what was originally.
SPEAKER_06That's it.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah. Yes, it will be. Fantastic. The whole ten minutes. Yeah, look at those eyebrows. Those comedy eyebrows. That's it. Hey, not quite as good as Justin Briley's eyebrows, though. No, that was amazing, Justin Briley's ones. He said everything just in the eyebrows. Amazing. Um So I thought I could uh fire some questions at you. Here's here's some questions that I often have. When I try to implore people, go on, just pick up the Bible and read it, and they say, Oh, I don't think I can trust what's in here. Um let's see if you're ready. So uh I will play the skeptic and I will say um I I can't trust this. It's just translations of translations of translations of translations, isn't it? No. That's how it's done, people.
SPEAKER_05That's how it's done. Absolutely. So question two. No, uh so we were talking about this, weren't we, saying that um we do have all these thousands and thousands of documents that we go back to. So it's not like when someone knocks together the new version of the NIV, you know, the 2000 and whatever it is now, 11, 1, what was the most important? Yeah, it was the 2011 11. Um it's not like they just kind of went back to the 1980s.
SPEAKER_07Which you can't, because it's unimprovable. That's a nearly infallible version. That's what I mean, isn't it?
SPEAKER_05Um so So of course they go back to the the manuscripts, the kind of the early copies and use those. And we've got, you know, what is it, thousands and thousands, almost 24,000 manuscripts themselves. About six thousand Greek ones. Yeah, and copies. And it's not just like there is one like here's the one thing. Yes. Here's the one copy of this particular thing. You've got multiple copies that you can then compare. Yep. And as kind of Greek understanding has grown, they've been able to kind of say, well, you know, actually this this is gonna be a slightly more accurate translation. So you're not just translating a translation. I think people think it's a bit like the have you seen the Fresh Prince of Bel Air video? The the Google No, have you seen the Google Translate what version? Ah right. So they took the lyrics of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air songs, put it through like one language in Google Translate and sung it again. Yes. And it was kind of interesting, you know, like a few interesting changes. And then they're like, and here it is, put through every single language on Google Translate. Um just but it's like I've got environmental problems in my territory, you know. You know, and my mum said, I have nothing, you know, like literally like the original. And you see, I think that's what people think the Bible is like that. Someone translated it, you know, into another language and someone went, Oh look, you've put it into French, and we're gonna use the French version to make it into English. Yes. And that's just not how it works.
SPEAKER_07But we actually go back to the early manuscripts.
SPEAKER_05Go back to the early manuscripts and work from there.
SPEAKER_07So okay. So question number two then. Uh it's just Chinese whispers, innit? Um, well, uh tiny whiskers. Tiny whiskers. Shiny whispers. Shiny Rislits.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, people think again it's just been changed over time, like Chinese whispers, when you play the game and someone says something in someone's ear and it goes around the room, and then at the end you say, Well, what was the original thing? and it turns out it's nothing like it. People think that's how the Bible is. Um, but of course, because we have so many copies at different stages, and you can date when those copies are from based on whether they're written on papyrus or kind of parchment and different things. Different handwriting, yes, capitals, all capitalized and or not capitalised and things like that. Ansials or yeah, indeed, indeed. Catlocks, you know. Yes, yeah, it's really shouting. Yeah, my angry. So you can go back and you can see um where changes have occurred, if they have. And it's not also in Chinese whispers, you just have one stream of transmission, don't you? One person passes it to the next, and so on. Whereas actually what you have is in the in the New Testament documents is you have a kind of a copy of a a kind of early manuscript, and then people make copies off of that, so there are multiple copies. So you can compare maybe the four copies made off of one and say, Well, there are some differences here, yeah, but it you know, looks like these three are all the same on this bit, but this guy's made a different you know, an arrow. Well, which one's probably right? Yep. And you can just keep doing that and and see how the act how accurate it is. And as we saw in the video, with people like Emman, even he is saying most of them don't even matter. Don't matter for a thing. Don't matter for a thing. And the don't matter for a thing.
SPEAKER_07We've got to auto-tune him now and set him to Aerosmith. Um so what about if people say question number three from a sceptic? It's it's like a puzzle with lots of pieces missing, Paul, isn't it? Isn't it?
SPEAKER_05Well, no, it's not like a p puzzle with pieces missing, because actually we have it's like a puzzle having extra pieces. Right. Because we've got more pieces really than um just what we have written down in front of us, because we have so many copies. So again, we can see extra bits or the bits that have changed and stuff, but also you've got your um other other kind of documents outside of the Bible, which also quote and use stuff, don't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So early early church fathers and stuff quote scripture. So again, you can compare those things. Um so again, it's not like we're sitting there going, well, we don't really know. It's it's more than attest more than well attested, basically.
SPEAKER_07Yes, yeah, exactly. So it's it's like a thousand piece puzzle, and you've got a thousand and fifty pieces. And yes, most of the pieces that don't fit don't fit for a very obvious reason. They are yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, pretty obvious that they shouldn't be in their purple monkey dishwasher.
SPEAKER_07Um Okay, what if what if a friend of yours says, ah, but the Bible's been changed. The Bible's been changed.
SPEAKER_05Hmm. Uh well, I think we can see from the copying thing, the Chinese whispers, it's very similar to the Chinese whispers thing, isn't it?
SPEAKER_07That um But it's been deliberately like the church has conspiratorially kind of yeah.
SPEAKER_05Well, I think you just want to say, well, okay, well when when? Yeah when was it changed? And ask people to kind of point you to specifically what it is that they think uh was changed, and then you can again compare it to compare it to the oldest kind of documents we have.
SPEAKER_07This is what Muslims often say, isn't it? You know, the Bible's been changed. You know, I so I I I'll often say, look to to a Muslim, look, here's a copy of the Injil, he's the Injil of John or something, and and the Quran even says that the Injil is good to read, why don't you read what the Quran tells you to read, the Injil? And very often they'll say, Well, but the Bible's been changed. Um and then the question is, when was the Bible changed? Was it changed before the Quran was written, or after the Quran was written? If it was changed before the Quran was written, what's the Bi what's the Quran doing, like urging you to read a corrupted book? If the if the Bible was changed after the Quran, well, let's get in the train and let's go to the British Library and let's see Codex Saniaticus and you know his here's uh a full Bible from like 325 AD, three centuries before the Quran. Um and it's you know it's in Greek, but it's the same as you've got here.
SPEAKER_05Identical, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07So whenever anyone says the Bible's been changed, just ask them when. Um but also you can ask them how, because the the church just had no power um until at least three twelve when Constantine converts. But you know, the the church for the first three centuries is not has no um means by which they can kind of control the narrative and get out in front of the story and and shut down these sources. Like they're they're uh they're a total persecuted minority. So how how are they gonna you know change the Bible like that? Um and then here's like if someone's been reading a bit of Dan Brown or something, they might ask you the question that the church has excluded other gospels. What do you say of that?
SPEAKER_05Well, yeah, I mean again, I it's I think when when you look at things like I mean, Thomas is an obvious one, isn't it? That these things you can tell again from the dating of them that they're not written, they're nowhere near the the the same level of um kind of reliability and historicity as the four gospels we have written far after, and even the Gospel of Thomas doesn't doesn't uh structurally look anything like uh it doesn't resemble the Gospels at all in a literary style. It's just a collection of sayings um of Jesus um dated well after a lot of things that don't really make sense um and fit together, same with you know Judas as well, again just much dated much later. So no one in any serious uh uh capacity would question these things. I mean they like to throw them in the media every now and again. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Um and we should always remember here here is how the Gospel of Thomas ends. Uh here here is the the 141st saying um in the Gospel of Thomas. They're all just sayings, so it's it's nothing like gospel events as in the the four canonical gospels. But Simon Peter said to them, Let Mary go away for us from us, for women are not worthy of life. Jesus said, Look, I will draw her in so as to make her male, so that she too may become a living male spirit, similar to you. And then he says the Jesus' final line to us all in the Gospel of Thomas Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. The end. So that's the And what's fascinating is like Dan Brown often holds up, like, especially the Gospel of Thomas and the Gnostic Gospels, as you know, that the church was, you know, always subjugating women, and the Gnostic Gospels were liberating for women. Like, yeah, you gotta you've actually become a man. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, so those are those are some uh questions that people have. And do check out the the whole video because we basically go through uh Bart Ehrman's uh book, Misquoting Jesus, um, where he makes his strongest case for not trusting the book that we have in our hands today. And like you you hear his strongest case and you're like, Oh, I had no idea the Bible was so reliable. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's it's it's almost laughable, isn't it, that that that that is the most devastating case you could make. It's literally quibbling over. I mean, he there was I think in the video he mentioned three occurrences in particular he pulled out uh maybe four. Um and again you just look at them and go, it makes literally no difference to anything. No. And every Bible, you know, if you go home and you've got your NIV or whatever you've got, you'll probably find that all those verses he mentions underneath has a footnote saying either earliest manuscripts don't have this in, or it says maybe it says this instead of this. Yeah. You know, there's no great conspiracy here. Yeah. You know, they're not trying to hide the truth. They are the lizard people. Them, them, you know, you know, so it's it's uh stran it's hard to understand how you get a best selling book out of that.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's not strange. Well, yeah, people want to people want it not to be true. They want it not to be true. So they'll they'll doesn't it come out uh that Lutheran satire thing about when people say like Jesus is just based on like Horace or these other characters, you know. Yes. Um and but actually when you look back in history you see there's literally no evidence for any of these things. And you know, it's amazing how people who demand evidence for everything will then base their belief system on no evidence whatsoever.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Yeah. Because it suits them. Right. Yeah. So As Jonathan Haidt said, if we want it to be true, we ask the question, can I believe it? If we don't want it to be true, we ask the question, must I believe it?
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Confirmation bias at its best. So there we go. So uh have a look at the full video and and I think it will I think actually going into Bart Ehrman's best case for making you doubt the Bible will strengthen your faith hugely. Because honestly, like you you probably imagine that the case against the Bible is far stronger than it is. Um just yeah, just have a look at what Bart Bart Ehrman says and uh and rejoice. Um great. Do we have time to talk about uh Sam Albrey at the end? I mean we have promised. We have promised life and death, pancakes and penitence, the Bible and sex. And we haven't we haven't done sex yet. Um let's do it. Let's let's talk about uh you you might have seen uh a video that we had recently. Um we put out uh an interview with Sam Albrey, who's got a a book, uh Seven Myths About Singleness, um, that has come out. It is now um released and uh and he talks about seven myths of singleness. He says uh myth number one, singleness is too hard, singleness requires a special calling, singleness means no to intimacy, singleness means no family, singleness hinders ministry, singleness wastes your sexuality, and singleness is easy. All of these are myths, and Sam Aubrey is uh is going to uh pop those bubbles one after the other in that book. And uh and I thought it would be good to have a look at uh the interview that we had with Sam Aubrey, uh which we released last week, but if you haven't caught it, um here's a few minutes from it, and uh and I think he speaks with a lot of wisdom about uh how the church can respond to the sexual revolution.
SPEAKER_01I was teaching on the biblical view of marriage yesterday, and and uh I was trying to say the reason this feels so counter-cultural today is because uh it's always been counter-cultural in every culture.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so it's not as if we've gone from oh well people thought the way the Bible thought, and now cultures changed, and so we're in this new era of panic. If if the Bible really is a voice from outside of human wisdom, we would expect it to have a level of discomfort for every single human culture. There's going to be certain things it will affirm and many significant things that it will critique and rub us up way on.
SPEAKER_06So the Egyptian and the Assyrian views of sex and marriage were totally different from the Old Testament, and vice versa, and the you know, the Greco-Roman views of sex and marriage were totally different from the New Testament, and vice versa. So the idea that we need to just get back to, you know, Bible times, well, there there weren't any sort of Bible times embedded in the culture. The cut you know, the Bible was always preaching something different.
SPEAKER_01And it just means when when people say today, well, you know, where we're at in culture, the Bible is unacceptable, so we kind of need to update the Bible somehow and catch it after where culture's at. I don't know, this was so radical, so bizarre, so unpalatable, and so glorious in the Greco-Roman Roman world. It's this is it's just normal.
SPEAKER_06Right, right. And and and yet Christians can be guilty of giving that message because we can be guilty of appearing to be saying, let's get back to the Garden of Eden, which I think was somewhere around 1956. Um and that that was the golden age, um, as opposed to if we actually got back to a New Testament vision of sex and sexuality, um, it would both challenge the culture and it would challenge the church, um, in the sorts of assumptions that we we kind of have. And I wonder whether that's a that's a kind of segue into your book, um, seven myths about singleness, and whether um having a having a kind of a countercultural vision of church that comes to us from the New Testament and not just from the 1950s and not just from the 1960s, that actually we'll we'll actually be challenged in different ways to the way that the world is challenged, but but actually maybe the church needs to repent. Um, and maybe we need to repent first uh when it comes to uh dealing with matters of sex and marriage and singleness, would you say?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, and and not least because when when people hark back to the so-called golden age of whenever it was, um you know, people often do imagine it was sometime in the 1950s, and you've got to think, well, maybe for white people the 1950s was quite an uh an easy time, but you start to look outside, you know, it's just you know, it's that was not a great period in Christian history on a whole front. So, yeah, I think you're right. The um it's a question of not trying to get to to some part of historical culture that we can somehow recapture and reproduce, but allowing the new testament to create in us a new culture, which is what Jesus ultimately was thinking about with with his people making a new humanity, we we are to have a new culture that's going to be new in any period of history. Um and as you say, the the way in which the church is conceived of in the new testament is is radical, and I think one of the reasons we are we are struggling broadly in the evangelical world with the challenges around issues of human sexuality is because we've we've under thought through and under practiced what the New Testament says church should be about, and it there's a quite correlation there because so much of our confusion about sexuality is a confusion about intimacy. If we were the the church the New Testament is calling us to be, we would be feeling very, very rich in intimacy and feeling less angsty about whether we get to be sexually fulfilled or not.
SPEAKER_06Because the culture is saying that intimacy must mean sex, and therefore, to therefore to call somebody to celibacy um is to to deny their humanity, to deny their full f flourishing. Um, you're saying, okay, if if intimacy is actually something else and something deeper uh than sex, then yeah, that's you're actually calling someone to love. You're coming you're calling someone to intimacy when you call them to Christ.
SPEAKER_01And the the Bible has much broader ways of thinking about intimacy than we do, as you say.
SPEAKER_07I've always looked up to Sam Aubrey. If you're listening on the podcast, you'll uh you'll have missed out on the uh the camera angle. Cinematography. Sam's auto cinematography, his selfie cinematography. We've never seen his face in full, actually. Yeah, we still have parts of his face. He does have he does have a full face all at once. I can I can testify to that. But um, yeah, speaking a lot of wisdom there, uh yeah, in a in a culture that just sees intimacy as physical intimacy and can't imagine anything other than that, then to s to call someone to celibacy is just a denial of their humanity and how on earth can the church do that. But maybe if maybe we're at fault as the church, if we are not modeling and offering a kind of intimacy, a kind of family for people, that means that uh whether you're married or not, um you you have more intimacy than you would do if you were in a non-Christian relationship outside the church.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Uh it's a big challenge, isn't it?
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm not sure. Not sure we're we're there yet. Um not at all. But it's it's very countercultural, isn't it? So and I think generally as Christians, particularly here in in kind of the UK and maybe more in the West, we're easily swept up into what the culture is like, so we kind of run with those those things. Yes. Intimacy is I don't know, maybe it's being British as well, intimacy.
SPEAKER_08Mm-hmm. Ooh. Right. So Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05You know, I care, but I don't want to show you I care. You know. Yes. Yes. You mind telling your face that you're happy? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07But yeah, you're you're just preaching through 1 Corinthians at the moment, and you're you're up to 1 Corinthians 7? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05So we've we've had kind of two weeks on 1 Corinthians 7.
SPEAKER_07Um or 1 Corinthians 7 for our American friends. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05For those who are pronouncing it wrong. Um so us and Donald Trump, we get it right. Yeah. Um so in yeah, we've been doing 1 Corinthians and um so Steve, our Vicar had done two weeks now on 1 Corinthians 7. And um last time it was on marriage, kind of looking at that angle of the the chapter, so it was very much addressed to married people, but single people listen in this time round yesterday, uh, it was uh day before yesterday. Listen in, you know, you married people, this is this is really about singleness. And actually, I you know I said to him after both of them, you know, I said, Oh, you know, these just these are just great. You know, you he really kind of knocked it out of the park um with both of them in terms of stuff. And yesterday he referred a lot to kind of Sam Albury's book, he had it with him, you know, he said, you know, so I he quoted quite a lot because he he wanted to make sure he said, you know, I'm not just I don't want to just be the smug married at the front, you know. Um but he was saying, you know, a lot of it, you know, the this we live in a kind of culture which is very much the if-only culture. If only I had this, if only I had that, if only I were in that relationship, or if only I weren't in that relationship, yeah, yeah. Um then things would be okay. And actually he talks about how in 1 Corinthians 7 actually there's this calling to live as you are, the live in the situation you're in, whether you're married or not, to kind of stick with it. Um and just you he I thought he handled the whole thing theologically brilliantly and pastorally brilliantly as well, because I don't think anyone could have come away from it feeling oh, he didn't include me or this was offensive to me. Um and just he just pointed out things that I'd never really thought about as well. You know, he said, you know, if you're married, then actually one day you will be single again. Yeah, probability is that half of you will be single, yeah, yeah. Um dead, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Single or dead. So um and it's just like you know, and he was saying the question is really if if you have singleness, um singleness and marriage are both gifts from God, and the question is how do you use them? Um and singleness being a good thing. Um Paul saying, you know, he wishes all were as he was, um and uh and that kind of thing. He was saying, yeah, I think you picked it out from Sam's book that often in the church, not just in the church, but actually outside the church as well, but we should be aware of it, how singleness is often defined in the negative, so they referring to people as unmarried. So synchronous is often talked about as being the absence of the good things you get in marriage, right, rather than just a good thing uh in itself. And and I mean he quotes from Sam's book saying how Sam talks about those conversations when you meet someone and they ask, you know, what do you do, etc. etc. And do you have a are you married, you have a family? And when it kind of s when he kind of comes out and says like no, he says it almost kind of kills the conversation, people don't really know where to go with it, right? You know, like well, you know, because he said if you have if you've got kids or something, you say, Oh well, how old are your kids? and yeah, tell us about that. And people just don't quite know what to do. Um, so that can you know how that's kind of a a hard thing. Um but I thought Steve also did a great job of you know, he's he was saying, Why is singleness good? And he looked at it from the the positive and the kind of uh contrasted it with marriage as well. You know, Paul talks about marriage bringing troubles. Right. Um and I thought he just really helpfully said these are some of the troubles marriage brings. And he said, you know, he'd been a vicar for sixteen years, he said the first couple I married are divorced. Um he could point to loads of couples with difficult relationships, people who don't like each other but are still married to each other um but sticking together, people for whom sickness came quicker than they thought it ever would, you know, and it completely changed their marriage, you know, they stood there and said for richer for poorer, sickness and in health, and actually something happened um that completely changed where they thought they would be. Um children, whether like having children or an inability to to have them, um kind of children who make bad choices or had special needs, and again it was just a a massive kind of weight on their relationship. Um partners or children walking away from the Lord, you know, and you say all these things, he just laid out all these things, and you kind of go, actually, yeah, these are all really realistic. Yeah. These are not just like oh it's hard sometimes being married, isn't it? Like oh, don't get my own way, you know, in a kind of trivial way. These are all big things that are part of people's lives. Um so he pointed to that side, but you know, he was saying, you know, singleness actually is a is a it frees people up, it shouldn't be a burden. Um he quoted someone, I missed who the quotes from, he said, let not your longing enslave the appetite of your living. Wow. Which I thought was a great one. Let not your longing enslave the appetite of your living, so you can spend so much time just being bound up in longing for what's over there or over there, um, that you don't actually get on and live. Um and he talked just about all the great ministries that you know people who are single have had, and he mentioned people like John Stott and Dick Lucas and Vaughan Roberts and Sam, um, who just wouldn't have been able to do the things they did if they were divided in their kind of things. And he was saying it's not to say that and Sam Albre in his book was saying it's not to say that if you're if you're single you don't have concerns, but you have a different set of concerns, and and he I mean he was saying as a single guy, um he felt a single person is pulled in fewer directions than the married person who maybe has children and stuff like that. Um that's what Paul says, you know, more undivided attention. Yeah, yeah. And I just thought one of the things he said really helpfully as well, uh and it's not a direct quote from Sam, but the kind of general gist was when you're single, you tend to compare the the downs of singleness to the ups of marriage. Right. And then they said if you're married, you tend to compare the downs of marriage to the ups of singleness, so the grass is always greener. Yeah. But then interestingly, Sam said Um he would choose the lows of singleness um over the lows of marriage marriage any day. So he'd rather be low and single than unhappily married. He said he saw that he he reckoned that could be far worse. Yes. Um so I just thought it was I mean, it's worth maybe we'll link to the talk and maybe put the marriage one in as well from the other week because they were just both excellent, yeah, excellent talks that I thought were so pastorally sensitive, theologically um meaty, you know, not lightweight at all, um, but absolutely accessible, absolutely spoke to everybody. Um great. So I'd I'd say go and check him out. Yeah, we'll put the links in, but it links um if you can't see the links, allsaintscrober.org. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's dot uk. Allsaintscrober.org. Yeah, yeah. Um and go to the sermons, Steve Reese, and you'll be able to find it there.
SPEAKER_07He's a good one. Yeah. Uh Roger Marshall has commented, he says, I was discussing with a couple of friends yesterday just how couple-centred, wedding-centered, and nuclear family-centred evangelical churches have become. Singles feel frozen out, and same-sex attracted singles all the more so, because there is no pathway to intimacy available to them under the current definition of intimacy.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and so part of it was talking about the family, that family thing, and how actually we are very much like that, but how if we are a church family, so you obviously one Corinthians is moving towards the idea of the church being the body and needing all the people. Um Steve was talking about, you know, if you are a family, like do you let the drawbridge down? You know, like and do we include single people in our in our family life as well? Do we holiday with them, you know? So you know, no one should really ever go home on a Sunday, kind of not having anyone to have Sunday lunch with.
SPEAKER_08Right.
SPEAKER_05Um, just a really practical thing like that.
SPEAKER_08Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um and I think I think that's probably well, I mean that is the case. Obviously, we've seen from that comment there that the churches new need do need to better be better at it. Um so I would say like the the the thing I find tricky about that is what you don't want to come across as being like you know, you're poor you. You know, you're just did you need there? Do you want to come and hang out with us? You know, like I don't know, you you see how it could come across, or at least you feel it might come across that way.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, Sam's good about saying, yeah, and singles need to actually take the you know the first step in saying, hey, why don't your family wasn't your family come to mine for Sunday lunch? Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and you know, in in the Puritan settlements in New England, like it was the law that single people couldn't live by themselves. They had to they had to like sort of team up with families. Um everybody had to live in a broader, a much broader definition of of a family than we used to. And you know, and it used to be that you'd have, you know, grandma and granddad, you know, living with you at home and and that and that sort of thing. And this this whole nuclear family thing stripped down to mum and dad plus 2.2 children is just is just terrific, really.
SPEAKER_05But I mean also say Steve mentioned at the end of his talk, he said, you know, he he knew people who are single, and they would say, so much of my time is is is taken up with kind of helping my friends who are married, like and that was almost their ministry. Yeah, you know, part of their ministry was was loving was loving some of their married friends um as well. And he said, you know, that that is that is a good thing as well. Um you know, and I know we've been blessed by I mean, particularly I can think of one person I we we know from church who's unmarried, um, but you know, she just loves our kids and the kids are gone out with her for the day, or she babysits and things, and then we can go off and do things and um or you know, she's come round at different points, you know. So they're they they have this kind of wider thing, it's the whole it takes a church to raise a child, that kind of gives you whatnot.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and as and as you're living in much closer proximity to one another, the the capacity for saying if only is much diminished. Because you know, if I'm seeing the lows in your situation, you're seeing the lows in my situation, we're much less likely to say, I wish I was in your boat, because you know, no, we no, we wouldn't actually.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. Um but I'm sure, you know, I mean Steve said it a lot better than I did, and um I'm sure Sam Sam's book just goes into even more detail on it and greater depth, so I think all worth looking into.
SPEAKER_07Definitely. And ha and uh we've put in the notes, uh certainly on Facebook, uh, the Sam Aubrey uh interview. We've got all 35 minutes of it. It is fantastic to hear uh his wisdom there. Um uh Eric Neal, we might finish with this. Eric Neal says, Seems most people don't have an eternal perspective on intimacy. Human intimacy is of this world, Christians are married to Christ for a tad longer period in eternity. Just saying. Um He must be British. That's a British understatement.
SPEAKER_05No, no, he's he's Texan. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Just say it. You'd fit in well.
SPEAKER_07I think argy, I think. Um But yeah, that that's running through one Corinthian like three times. You know, he says the time is short, the time is short, the time is short. Right? So bloom where you're planted, and you know, don't look in it, don't don't don't keep looking at the grass on the other side. Brilliant. Well, next week uh we're going to continue our Bible series uh looking at um can you can we trust what the authors actually said about the Bible? So you might trust that this is what the author said, but how do we know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are telling the truth? Yeah. We'll have a look at that in our Thorny question coming out on Monday. Uh this will come out as a podcast on Friday. Yep. Um and what else? What else do people need to know?
SPEAKER_05Um the foundry and support. So we're still looking for interns. We've already got one intern signed up to join us. Officially appointed one. Officially on the books now, so that's exciting. But we'd love to have a few more. So there are people kind of applying. But if you know people, um do check out speaklifefoundry.com and you can find out more information about the internship there. We'd love you to come and join us kind of from September time. Um so pass that on to people you know. Um, and then think about if you can uh supporting us. We can't do this um by ourselves, we kind of rely on you guys for your kind of finances and generous gifts. So um if you head to speaklife.org.uk forward slash give, um, then you'll be able to find various ways to support us through there, and we'd really appreciate that.
SPEAKER_07So thank you. Excellent. Well, another good show pancakes and peditants, life and death, sex in the Bible. We've done it all. What haven't we covered? What haven't we covered? Uh you'll find out next week uh when we'll do it all again on Tuesday on Facebook. Thanks for your coming, because we will be away next week. Oh, that's true. That's true. We're in a school praise next week. We are reaching out to a school in Cambridgeshire called Felstead School.
SPEAKER_05Tuesday lunchtime next week. I'll be speaking on suffering. Yeah. Actually, so kind of lunch bar-esque type thing. So appreciate your prayers for that. Big topic, isn't it?
SPEAKER_07So yes. Okay. So no no live coming.
SPEAKER_05It's still a video on Monday. Should be a video Monday night still. Excellent. We know what we're doing. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_07Sort of. We make another week on the month. Send money. Send help still. Send help. I'm gonna go and uh completely dying in the cool a little bit more. Anyway, I'm gonna go and take some pills. See you guys. Take care, guys. Thanks. Bye.