At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. In preparation for the light-up for literacy, Dolly Parton kick-off event, Foley County Public Library will be accepting children under the age of five for the free book, Gifting Program. Monday we spoke with Programmer and Outreach Amanda Cook and Foley County Schools' Chief Early Childhood Officer, Kim Grubb, about the event. Well, this event is for children who are under the age of five. They will qualify for the free book, Gifting Program. And this program is sponsored through our community champions such as Highlands Foundation, Foley County Schools, Foley County Public Library, Save the Children and our Early Childhood Community Council. With ages 0 to 5 eligible for the program, any child can begin to read. Grubb says the earlier a kid begins to read, the better. Reading is an important skill and with this program we are able to promote literacy in the home and reading and writing starts long before they enter the school doors in her kindergarten. So we're hoping to get more books and more literacy activities in the home. When entered into the program, Cook says kids will receive a book each month. Cook adds how your child can enter. So what they'll do is they can, the parents, guardians, can send us a form in through the mail or at the event and they'll fill it out and we will register them. And as long as they're in the age group of 0 to 5 and a Foley County resident, they will qualify. The Light Up for Literacy Kickoff event will begin at Archer Park Saturday, November 27th from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Chorjol.


So guys, modded items are now on consoles. How's it going people, my name is DPJ and today I bring you another BR3 video. If you do enjoy it leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you want to see more. Ok so back in the very early days of BR3 being released, I uploaded a video, a footage of a grenade which at the time I was told dropped offering 2 legendary grenade prefixes on the same grenade. I was told this was a bug, that grenade you can see on the screen now. Now like I said I had multiple people tell me before uploading this video that this item was due to a glitch where 2 legendos forged together upon dropping, but I also had thousands of people telling me that this was a modded item or they thought it was a modded item even though this was literally a week after the game was released. Now it was a PC item so the more I think about it the more it made sense that it was actually a modded item, but like I said it was so much into the early days of BR3 being released, I was told it wasn't a modded item and it was just a bug, I uploaded a video showcasing this legendary. Since then I haven't seen anything and definitely wasn't aware of any modded items on console. Now I know many of the techniques people used to mod items on previous Borderlands games didn't work now with Borderlands 3 and especially didn't work on consoles where a lot of people were editing save files, but I can confirm people that modded items are here on consoles. Now the reason behind this video isn't to show off this modded item, it's to make people aware that such items now exist and to hopefully make Gearbox aware of said items. Now I will straight up state, I will 100% not be sending this out to anybody, in fact if you message me on xbox asking for this item I will just block you straight away. Things like these just completely ruin the game and it's also why I haven't even shut this thing outside of the sanctuary, as I am interested in such things, like I said it just completely ruins the game we love. Now this item itself was sent to me by someone who I won't mention but also feels the same about modded items and I wasn't even going to upload this video until they told me this is something that's been happening for a while but only a certain few people know about these and share them amongst themselves which tells me there are many more items out there which are modded. So this blood-salt Barry Becker we can see offers 4 anointments, clearly made by somebody who doesn't enjoy playing on fleck but you can see this kind of thing and how it can be game breaking and with said items floating about in reality does indeed ruin the experience for the likes of us who enjoy playing the game properly for the most part that is. Now I will state I can't play a game like Borderlands where this kind of thing is going on, yeah I know you can't 100% eliminate it but for the most part I do expect Gearbox to try and control such things from happening and hopefully this is what they are doing. Now I will give them credit where it is due, this is the first item besides that PC grenade that I have come across so I feel they are controlling this to some sort of degree and also guys we also have a choice whether or not we use such items and I'll tell you to stay away from them, don't spread them about, don't use them, don't abuse them. Now I know people will state this is a little contradictory as you have posted videos of glitches which make the game easier, this is true guys but the fact in which all these glitches I have posted all consist of in reality ingame bugs surrounding certain items which indeed are a part of most games out there, this is different as it is actually changing items ingame, more times they are not using third party apps to do which is most of the time illegal to do in itself, plus modding a game and taking advantage of ingame glitches to make extra money or to make a bus easier to kill are far far different and glitches we see eventually fade out and disappear due to being fixed or certain items becoming useless or level upgrades ingame and so much more, the same in reality can't be said about modded items in which it takes a much deeper process to sort out and a lot of time go unsorted, people having the ability to literally customize a weapon making them as powerful as they want is far far different from glitching an item which makes you run quicker. And in reality guys that's the message behind this video, stay clear of such items, don't ask for them, don't share them about and don't abuse them, this kind of thing always starts somewhere and then just escalates, let's not ruin a game we all love by taking part and feeding such things. And on that note we have come to the end of the video, if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out, if you're new around here and want to see more boardlines be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload, you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by, hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.


Theodore had great hopes for her relationship with Milton. She could catch pictures how they would share in life. She wanted to be with him in every sense, but she hesitated. How much did she really trust herself? Was she letting her fantasies drive her, or was her attraction to him the result of subtle understandings of real potentials? The cost of being wrong could be high, so she decided that caution was required. Her approach would involve a high level of self-control. We are now ready to address what may well be the most appealing part of our study, and it is our personal empowerment as individuals. To this point, we have been assuming people as the unit of agreement, the unit of ownership in the nation, the economy, or some other corporate entity. This is partly because that is where we developed our understanding of empowerment, a study of our knowledge of how we get things done. As you remember, we started with the understanding that almost everything that people accomplish is a group effort. It was in shared purposes that bring us to agreement or an employment to what others value as a basis for our teamed and organized efforts. Indeed, we accomplish little as individuals. We do invent, initiate, and do art. But almost everything else blossoms only with the inclusion of others in the effort. For our deeper understanding of our potentials and limitations, we need to again challenge our cultural orientation. This time, we challenge the very concept of human identity. We face a subtle and pervasive cultural orientation to our disempowerment as individuals. It is even more damaging to our ability to get things done than our reliance upon modern leadership to serve us. It even sets a limit on our ability to come to agreement, a limit we have yet to address. With orientation to performance, to getting things done, we enter into a focus on accomplishment instead of on what we do. And yes, that cultural orientation goes even to us as individuals. We have addressed our freedom, our ability to choose based on our personal sets of value and of cause. We have identified the need to invest ourselves, our personal commitment, in order to accomplish what we most value. Are you ready for the shift? What about setting yourself on both sides of every personal issue? It is recognizing that this is personal with each of us, and there is no less effective way to do anything than to take sides with each effort trying to contain what the other does. We often call it self-control, but even that is like a half-truth of feudal governance working for the benefit of peasants. The idea that some part of you will assume mastery over the other parts of you is a pervasive and disempowering part of our culture. The more you try to work with this concept, the less you will be able to accomplish. Can't quite grasp the reality of this? Well, here we go, the intellectual part of you controlling the human animal, the alter ego and balance with the ego. Consider the very concept of self-control. Can you even bear to recognize that it is checks and balances applied within yourself instead of paralyzing government? It is paralyzing you. All these are concepts that deny the human unit that is you. And as we have performance knowledge to guide our accomplishments in the work environment, we also have technical expertise that professionals apply for individuals. Psychiatric medicine recognizes multiple personalities as mental disease. It is, in its aggravated form, it is totally debilitating. Yet, there it is for us in everyday living with self-control presented as the right thing to do and certainly the right way to do things. We do things as a unit, not as an internal collective. We decide things as a unit, not as a group decision. We value what we seek as a unit. We value what we have to commit to seek a result as a unit. And there is only one you.  When you do decide to seek what you value, it is your decision as an individual. Our decision may certainly be complex and conditional, but our decisions are individual decisions.  Our performance orientation just starts with the general rule that there is no less effective way to do anything than to divide and compete. It is as true for you as an individual as for our corporate gatherings of people. The more you divide and compete within yourself, the less effective you will be. The less effective you are as an individual, the less people can trust you. It hampers your social performance potentials as well. If you cannot find unity within yourself, you know your commitments will suffer from your own indecisions. We have the tools for performance. Just try to address performance in terms of some part of you. There is no separated producer part of you. Neither is one part of you a customer.  Whatever some internal part of you produces is going to be waste. The damage of dividing against yourself is hard to even describe.  And worse still, it is a conflict only as you make it one by the way you approach your potential unity.  Even more on point, you are an operational unit. You are not even divided when you fill different performance roles, as in being the owner of the economy, the customer who receives from the economy or the operating unit within the economy. You are the same person no matter what role you fill. The difference in your viewpoint, your orientation to the situation at hand, it is not who you are. A potent definition of waste is trying to benefit yourself as an owner at the expense of yourself as a customer or a performer. There is only one you. The more you can keep that focus, the greater your empowerment. You do not get to make different decisions as an owner of the economy than you do as a customer, as there is just one of you. One unit of humanity, one sense of what you value, and one sense of what it will cost you to reach what you value. To be empowered as a person, we are going to have to deal with our cultural insistence, one that denies even the possibility of our coming to agreement within ourselves. It is insistence that the ego can never agree with the alter ego. It is insistence that the intellectual you must be in conflict with the animal you. Can you hear the message? You have to do the right things limiting what your ego does, mastering over the animal in you. And then our culture insists that we concentrate on doing those things the right way, on following the pattern that is set before us as an efficient way to win over those contrary parts of ourselves. We are always being warned. These are harmful parts of yourself. They will hurt you if you let them, damage your relationship with others. They will cripple you if you ever let them gain the upper hand. But then you have the witness of the dark ages, the time when one part of our human civilization was indeed set in authority over the rest. It was a time of no progress, a time when little was accomplished for anyone but the aristocracy. We are urged to accept a new dark ages into ourselves. Is there really some benefit in this? The answer is that conflict creates drama, not performance. There is human interest in the complexity that is achieved through internal conflict. There is a level of entertainment. That may be of some value to you, but it will not provide empowerment. The answer is in the entertainment value of people who are complex and internally conflicted. But they will not be effective in getting things done. For your personal investment, our human unit investments, it is the value of freedom, the value of having choices and choosing to invest ourselves where the cost of the investment seems most reasonable in light of what we would accomplish by our expenditure. There probably will be times when the entertainment purpose, the drama, can be enjoyed. There are other situations where we will have something valuable to accomplish and our attention set upon gaining the valued result. Value is not what is right or wrong, it is what you value and what you must commit to gain it. Value is your personal determination and incentive for your personal decision. I would also urge a second look at cost of unity in light of our cultural norm, at least for now we have a cultural orientation to internal division and potential internal conflict. This will be the norm for others and will certainly have effect on us as part of this same culture. It is a threat of rejection from leaders who are told that their privilege is not valued. The reaction from the privileged leader is likely to have some level of hostility in it. In a light manner, openly claiming the benefit of unity can gather hostility from those who accept their value in internal balances and self-broken resolution of internal conflicts. In our business history, the leader reaction to production areas becoming remarkably more effective was quarantine. It was erecting a barrier to the very concept of performance responsibility. When you resolve your own internal divisions and become empowered as a human unit, it will not be hidden. You are just not compelled to otherwise advertise it. The change to be accomplished on a cultural level should be an intentional investment and one based on what you have chosen to commit in order to gain the result of cultural reorientation to performance. In the larger world, we live in a reality where our history is written in divisions and conflicts and revolutions and wars. We have addressed this indirectly in terms of nobody ever really wins a war, everyone who engages in a war ends up losing. In performance terms, the only rational conflict investment is protection from those who would waste their own wealth and lives to harm you. Application of investment is stymied immediately. There is nothing of value in conflict actions that come to the people. The only value is the negative, easing of the threat that someone else is willing to waste their own time and effort, wealth, and lives of people in order to damage you. It is the political statement of the ultimately wasteful nature of political conflict. Our history of political waste is presented to us as something to be valued, to be cherished. And in so many other forms, performance orientation, with focus on the value you and I receive, is immediately countered to what we are presented by political leadership. The waste of war is in resources, time, effort, the lives that are expended in conflicts simply because of the ultimately hostile goals and objectives of other political leaders. Through our division into internal competing camps, we waste our own resources. Internal conflict has no valued product. The time and effort associated with the conflict is time and effort expended without any valued product. Division against yourself as schizophrenia is an incapacitating mental disease. As human beings, we are units, individuals, not collections of elements intent on overcoming each other. That has to be taught to us. Lessons in incapacity. We have to be taught to waste our life energies trying to hold ourselves in check for the benefit of… and then you realize that the hostility toward other people, the need to protect, is also largely learned.  We are in a time and place where we have a culturally determined waste. It is social political, it is personal political, and it has been internalized for each of us as a cultural lesson. The threat is real, but it is not inherent in humanity. People doing wasteful and harmful things to protect themselves or to reduce those threats is also real. War is real, hostile competition is real, personal conflicts are real as they are divisions we have allowed to form within us. The purpose of this course is empowerment and it is most certainly not limited to overcoming and bettering others. For us, empowerment is a choice, a personal freedom to choose when and where you will invest what you have to gain what you value. In this lesson, the focus is on you as a unit of humanity. One option is self-maintained internal conflict that consumes your time, effort, and attention and provides you nothing. The alternative is focus on your internal unity as a person with those same resources now available to invest elsewhere. The lure of the first is that of fitting in with our culture and society. The promise of the second is an increased ability to get things done, even if it is a challenge to our culture and society.  There are many opportunities available for you to exercise your freedom and you are the only party in interest. Your choice will continue to be yours. You are empowered to choose when and where each option is applied and that is a most personal freedom. And as in so much of what we study in this course, there is the value we as humans put in inertia our resistance to change. We have been acclimated to internal competition approaches as part of fitting into our culture and there is a cost in any change.  It is an investment potential to shift your own orientation to best meet your purposes. There will be a personal cost in assuming intentional management of your own person to accept the freedom and empowerment that is offered by performance orientation. If you choose to manage that personal change, it is going to cost you some time and effort and your personal investment should start with a valued result that you are to receive from your change management effort. Performance orientation involves a counterculture action on your part and you are otherwise free to pursue your own benefit. What we need to initiate change management is something to accomplish through the efforts we can direct. In the case of personal division and internal challenges, we are most obviously the only party in interest and there is great value in personal empowerment. But then the cost of change and the cost of managing changes is also real as in our empowerment of citizens, we need somewhere to start, some place of investment where that value benefit is so great that personal commitment is personally justified. As in that wonderful teaching platform of the human family, if you enter into conflict with other family members, there is no win for anybody, there is just cost. Family only becomes real for adults when they work to avoid conflicts between themselves, to avoid doing things that will set them against each other. Performance potential arises from being able to act as a unit. So what is it going to cost you to learn not to fight with yourself but to simply make the best decision you can and be prepared to continue or change it as a situation demands? With performance orientation, which is a choice, you can be the decision maker and the one who receives any beneficial or harmful result. There is no blame, no internal challenge, only the reality of your choice and your reception of results. We call that learning, education, it is learning from experience as well as from what we receive as intellectual training. Of course our cultural orientation tells us that we are already free to learn this if only we commit ourselves to it, but performance does not follow. The intellectual us learns, the animal us does not and the conflict just grows. The ego rejects it then the alter ego takes it in as a new value. We are taught to accept the conflict in place of our unity, but there is just one of us and we do not have to war against ourselves. We can learn to assimilate, train and having absorbed what we learn into ourselves can go forward and use it as seems appropriate to us as a human unit. Any internal conflict produces nothing of value but sets us to consume our life energy and contest instead of accomplishment. It is your life, your energies, your time and your attention and when we address internal efforts you are the only party in interest. Your freedom of choice is that of investing in yourselves. The only one who really has any say in this is you and you are free to accept or reject the changes on your personal decision. Again, change is a cost. The investment is not as great as for an adult who has established greater personal inertia. The value of any accomplishment is likely to be greater as it becomes a part of who you are. If this seems a little repetitious and more a matter of alternative perspectives of the same material, it is intentionally so. We are addressing a matter of culture and we receive our culture into ourselves. It effectively becomes part of us. Even this rather minor change can incur a significant personal cost, both direct and indirect. Yes, it is pretty obviously a good investment for almost all of us. The larger challenge is that we are human and have been taught that even such obvious investments are to be divided out between our internal parts and argued from different viewpoints. We are taught that any change, even one for the better, is going to start an internal contest. That is the mentation we have absorbed as part of our culture. And this freedom to choose, this empowerment is going to be approached as a cost. It takes positive decision and commitment to change management to set anything in motion. All that we have been studying comes to focus here, our personal decision. We have technical guidance for making decisions.  And as a result, can only have value as you receive it.  John finds Marcia attractive. He feels the urge to ask her out, but he is shy. Marcia hadn't really been focused on John, but finds him interesting. Does John try to overcome his shyness? Guess what? Only one decision is required, one investment to be made. It has nothing to do with John's shyness or his urge to take action. In performance orientation, the investment is what he expects as an outcome from what he is willing to commit. All the worry and angst associated with internal competition just take time. Focus away, delivering him nothing but drama. I suppose it could be entertainment for some people, but otherwise has no value. The only significant cost here is in John's decision process. His internal choice in approaching the options available. With performance orientation, he is empowered to make the decision based on his best expectation of cost and benefit. A much simpler personal effort. If he chooses to ask her out, he is empowering Marcia as well, offering her a choice. And her choice is also simplified by the same. If she wasn't that interested before, she probably wants to find out what she can about him from her friends, so she can empower him with an I'll have to get back to you response and can empower him with a certain time. Whether they go out or not is really not the shared value. It isn't having a shared choice. It isn't the very act of John's decision having potential consequences that both John and Marcia might receive as valuable. The performance orientation remarkably simplifies the decision process. It eliminates much of the waste that is urged upon us by our culture. It promotes decisive action and learning from that action. The power of the black box is its focus on performance and it is the same level of focus on all human performances. In the case of personal decisions, you are the decision maker and you are the customer. You are the one who makes the decision. You are the one who expects to receive what you value as a basis for making that decision. The entire performance cycle is within you and the enhancement for internal application is that only what is visible on the black box diagram can be effective. It is your choice. It is your action. The result, whatever that may be, is yours and it only has value as you value it. When it comes to that specific value cycle, everything else is waste. There will be no value in producing it or expending your time and effort upon it. It is your investment and your decision and it is singular. There is no confidence. There is no coming together within yourself to find some general consensus. There is just you addressing that cost. You recognize for accomplishing something you see as valuable. And yes, I am not equating the cost you expect with reality. We already know that the real cost is likely to be twice as great as what seems a reasonable expectation. We will also be working from an expectation of value, a belief in how you will value the result that you see as reasonable for making the commitment. And there is even more when we address what has value to us. There are values we share as humans and one of these is interpersonal trust. It is an expectation of what some other people will do because they share a sense of value. Look again at John and Marsha and that John's simple offer. It is an offer to share what he values. It is of such expected value to him that he made the decision to ask. That level of commitment, even to some unknown response, demonstrates a sense of value in sharing something. It is not just that, but that it involves empowering Marsha, recognizing her as an independent decision maker, and gifts her with the power of a choice that she would not have had. That is personal value for her, no matter how she responds, even as she refuses the offer it is a gift to her. Refuse may disappoint John, but it still builds a trust relation. It arises from our consistency as human beings. Unless she indicates otherwise, he has increased trust that her later response would be the same. They have a basis for mutual expectations and that has been shared. They have an interpersonal agreement of sorts on how they will react in the future. It establishes a level of trust where they are likely to be more comfortable with each other. To put it simply, there is no personal downside to seeking agreement with other people. The challenge will be in isolating oneself. We are social beings and there is personal value for people in most common interactions. Isolation disempowers the one who accepts it, and it denies potency to others. Are we going to make errors, cause hurt, or discomfort? Of course we are, especially if we accept empowerment. We will make errors because we will actually be doing things. Success is not assured, nor is our personal sense of value the same as what other people value. The good thing about personal empowerment is learning. It involves investing in ourselves and our ability to get things done. It makes us more valuable when we learn from having our expectations not be realized after we make the commitment. We learn from when our expectations are met and we do not value it as we thought we would.  Both are empowering. Another useful concept for personal empowerment is ownership. It is ownership of ourselves. It is rejection of slavery with performance orientation, slavery is where others make decisions for you. Humans are born effective slaves to their parents, with the care of adults making all decisions for each of us. As we grow, we mature into freedom. We learn to make our own decisions in accord with what we learn. We call it emancipation when we are recognized to be independent, which is equivalent to being free. It is having personal choices and determine what comes to us. That is the opposite of slavery. Slavery is recognized when someone is owned by other people. Ownership gives rights to make decisions for others. As an adult, you will generally own yourself. As to your internal decision process, you are the only party involved. You own yourself. The choices for your investment are your choices. The results you receive are your results. That is ownership in a very real sense. Much of what we gain from our culture is lessons that accept us as isolated units. And that we are to enter into contest and conflict with others. This is the same human culture that teaches us that we are to recognize the divisions within us and find ways to best accommodate their conflicting guidance and value systems. The culture is ours too. It is a human product that has elements that disempower people, that isolate people, that urge conflict and competition. These disempower people, they are waste. With performance orientation, we can see that the investment is ours to make as individuals. And it is ours to share as corporate humans. We are the source of potency, not the subject of the potency of others. Where we exercise our choices, we are empowered. Where we exercise those things on which people agree, we are empowered. And we empower each other.  Others who might interfere with this are not going to empower you or accept you as the owner. The power is already yours because you are a human being. You have the power to identify and work to eliminate the waste that is daily urged upon us all.


How's everybody doing? Okay, show of hands at both campuses. How many of you think the LA Rams are gonna pull it off tonight? Raise your hands. How many of you think it's inevitable that Tom Brady wins another Super Bowl? How many of you are just not caring? I got that, yeah, that's right. I thought after hell Michigan froze over a couple days ago, I thought, well, this is the year for the Lions. So, so 2019-20 might be fun, but sorry. Hey, if you have your Bibles, open them with me to Malachi chapter two. And before we go there, you can turn there and hold your place there. I just wanna update you on a couple of family things and we're all family, so we're a big family, but we really do, Jane and I really do view you guys as our family and we have a couple of announcements. One that a lot of you probably already know, if you follow us on social media and I'll get to that one last. The first announcement we want you to know is maybe a year ago or a little while, even longer than that. We just let everybody know that Jane has for the last several years been battling against a, I don't know, it's a disorder, it's a neurological disorder called cervical dystonia. And it's a motion disorder that's connected and kinda related to Parkinson's a little bit and she's struggled with this for about 25 years. At first, we really didn't know what it was and then as it kinda continued to progress and we got some additional information out, that's what it is. Cervical is referring to the neck and dystonia is a, it's like a tremor and a pulling disorder. If you're unfamiliar with what that is, your brain sends signals to your muscles when to contract and when to let go. Her brain is telling her neck muscles to contract all the time and never letting go. So it's like a pulling of the neck and what she's done to compensate really, really well is the other side of her neck pulls against this to keep her head straight.  And every husband in this room knows that your wife already has a higher threshold for pain than you do, we're babies. Jane is tough and gone through this for 25 years and we've looked at just about every type of option remedy for it. So we believe in the power of prayer. We believe that Jesus is still a healer. God still does signs and wonders and miracles and so we have prayed fervently for that and we have also tried holistic and massage and all kinds of things. And a couple of years ago, we connected with a fantastic neurologist in Grand Rapids and we're very grateful for the medical community as well. And this doctor has just been a godsend and she's been getting treatments with Botox in her neck where they shoot about 20 different shots with needles this long, all in different places of her neck and it lasts for about three months and gives her a little bit of relief. Every three months we have to go back. And maybe six months or so ago, her neurologist brought up a surgery that they have, it's relatively new and it's changing all the time. It's incredible technology. It's called DBS, Deep Brain Stimulation. And what they do in essence is they drill down through your skull into the cortex of your brain, the part of the brain that controls that movement and they put electrodes down in there. It's very small and it gives off a signal. They run that under the skin connected to a battery pack that they place here, it's a small battery and it sends out an electrical impulse that they can manipulate to short circuit the brain's message to the muscle to contract. And so in Parkinson's, it's just amazing the difference that it makes in Parkinson's patients who couldn't function and now can. And in cervical dystonia, it has also a very, very good rate of change and transformation there. It's on a spectrum a little bit, but they can dial it in and take several different months. So when the doctor told us about this, he was telling us about this, I'm thinking to myself, that makes me nervous because I don't like needles. I don't know if anybody else is like that, but I am not a scalpel needles type of guy. And but I am the risk taker in their family. Jane is a little bit more, let's take our time into things. And so when we got out to the car, I said to her, well, we've got a lot to pray about. And Jane looked at me and said, I don't have to pray about this, I'm doing it. If there's anything that can fix this or help me with this. And so what is gonna happen at the end of the month? There's gonna be a couple of different surgeries.  They're gonna shave her head completely.  There's gonna be a couple on either side of the main surgery that are connected to that. And so we just wanted you to know that for two reasons. Number one, so that when you see Jane in the next several weeks and she has her head shaved, it's not because she has cancer. It's not what's going on. This is a very hopeful thing. We're very encouraged by it. We believe it's a gift from God and we're grateful for the medical community and that God uses doctors to heal.  I offered to shave my head in solidarity with her and she said, oh, dear Lord, please don't do that.  But Jane is. Second reason we're telling you this is so that you'll pray with us. It'll be like somewhere between the 18th and the first week of March where they will have this succession of three surgeries. And so we'll kind of be out of the pocket. I will probably be preaching on the weekends, but I'm gonna be mostly with her. And we just thank you all for your prayers, for your concern, words of encouragement. We've gotten so much already from those of you who know. So we wanted you to be aware of that. That's first announcement. Second is that on Friday evening at 6.33 p.m., Jane and I became grandparents. And we have, this is our grandson, Owen Lee Dillon. I almost said Owen Lee Cummings, but last name is Dylan. So Pastor Zach and our daughter Ashley, beautiful little baby boy, seven pounds, 10 ounces, 22 inches long, little world changer, wasn't he the cutest?  In fact, after church, we're going right there and we are gonna see him. Cause when our kids were growing up, we determined we are not spoiling our kids. But now that we got grandparents, let the spoiling begin. So I had somebody tell me, you should not spoil your grandchildren. And I said, get the behind me, Satan. Cause I am spoiling rotten. So be praying for Pastor Zach and Ashley and Owen and Jane and I are ready. It's gonna be a lot of fun. It's hard to believe we're grandparents, but we're gonna embrace it. It's gonna be awesome. Malachi chapter two, you guys there? Looking at your Bibles. Malachi chapter two, the title of this installment of our series, First Love is entitled Marriage Matters. Marriage and Family Matters. And just by way of recap, you'll remember that the entire book of Malachi, which means messenger, is a prophet that God raised up to speak to the people of Israel 400 years before the time of Jesus, at a time when the people of Israel had grown cold in their love for God. They were still going through the motions, the religious obligations of, in our language we would say it like this, they were going to church, they were reading their Pible, they were praying prayers, they were giving their tithes. They were doing all the external things, but their heart had grown cold, their passion for Jesus had dwindled and internally they were more like the world than they were like the God they were worshiping. And so God raised up a prophet by the name of Malachi to go to them and to remind them who they are and to share some things with them that matter to him that if they would address these issues and repent from their way of thinking and see it the way God sees it, that their heart can be changed and they can return back to their first love. And so we talked about honor that honor matters and God wants to be honored in our lives, he wants to be honored as our father. We talked about worship that worship matters. What we think maybe it doesn't really matter does God really see I can worship the way I want to? No, God says actually the way you worship changes you and it blesses me worship matters. Last week we talked about God's word that God's word matters, that God's word is not God's ideas or suggestions, it's God's mandates and decrees, it's true. That when we honor God's word, we actually honor him. And today we're gonna talk about marriage and it's interesting that God speaks to the people of Israel, he speaks to his people when he's talking about their first love, he talks to them about their relationship in marriage. And it's interesting to me that one of the areas that God addresses, and he only addresses about five or six issues in the entire book and says these things matter to me, that he actually addresses marriage because you would think well, if we're talking about our relationship with God, obviously honor as an attitude matters, worship that's spiritual, the word it matters, that's spiritual, but relationships, marriage, I mean God, you really care about horizontal relationships? And God says yes, because what you don't realize is your horizontal relationships are a reflection of and affect your vertical relationship with me. So look with me here at verse number 13, Malachi chapter two, and this is the word of the Lord, he said, in this second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and with groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, why doesn't he? Because the Lord was the witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless. Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant, did he not make them one, he's talking about a couple or husband and wife, did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Answer, godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord. The God of Israel covers his garments with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourself in your spirit and do not be faithless. It's interesting what God has to say about marriage. Now, here's the danger that we have presented before us this morning. The danger is that if you're not married today, you could tune this out and say, well, that doesn't apply to me. But it does apply to you in a couple of different ways. Number one, because most of you who aren't married will one day be married. And don't wait until you're married to settle issues about how you view marriage ahead of time. The second thing that we stand in danger of is if you are married to just choose to say, well, I've already this deep into marriage and this is the way I see it and this is the way we do it, so I can't really change. The worst possible thing that we can do is to say that I'm married but not deal with our hardheartedness because much of what God is going to say to us out of Malachi here about marriage really has to deal with the issue of our heart. That's why he addresses it because what he's saying to Israel in essence is that marriage matters and I'll tell you why marriage matters because it's impossible for you or me to have hardened hearts towards marriage itself and yet have a soft and tender heart towards the Lord. You say, well, prove that to me. Okay, first John chapter four says this.  What's the moral? The moral is this, that the relationships we have with each other are both a mirror and a reflection back to us and a thermostat or starting point or tipping point of our relationship with God. They're in, they're inextricably connected. You can't say, well, I love God but I hate the person I'm married to because if you truly do get into the place of being hardhearted in your marriage that same heart heart is the same heart you're trying to love God with. That's why God is addressing this issue with the people of Israel because they had gotten into a place where they had abandoned their families, they had abandoned marriage, they had become just like the world around them. There were very permissive ideas around in the culture around Israel at the time of Malachi just as they were in the time of Jesus just as they are in our day that were affecting the people of God who were called to be different from the world around them. So they were being affected by that and they were abandoning their marriage vows, they were divorcing left and right, they were having affairs, they were marrying women, in this particular case these were men that he was dealing with because men were the only one who had the ability legally to actually file for divorce. They were divorcing their wives putting away their families and they were marrying pagan women that God had told them not to intermarry with and they were doing it. But here was the bigger issue. They were doing it all and could not figure out why God was upset about it. They were saying to God, God, we're still going to church, we're still going to the temple, we're still offering you sacrifices, we still sing the songs of worship that you like and we still pray prayers, we're tithing, we're giving our 10%, we're doing all those things externally so why does it matter what we do over here in the realm of our relationships? What they were doing was they were compartmentalizing their lives. They were saying, my spiritual side of my life over here and then I got my relational side of my life over here. Do you know that as human beings, that's one of the biggest lies that we believe and all of us believe it at one time or another and it's this, that we have different rooms in the house of our life and that God's happy if we just give him the front room. But we can keep private rooms in the back hallway of our life that is our secret sin, our relationships, our career, our money, all of these different things. Those are rooms that it's like, God, you're invited into a living room, sit on the couch, have the TV, I'll bring you some food, maybe we've invited him into the kitchen but do you know that God is not just concerned about that when he comes into your life and he comes into your house, he wants to come in the living room, he wants to sit and talk to you, he wants to go in the kitchen and commune with you but he also wants to be invited into the bedroom, he also wants to be invited into your office, he wants to be invited into the basement, he wants to go through every one of the boxes of your old junk, he wants access to the attic because he's either Lord of all or he's not Lord at all. And Israel was compartmentalizing their life and saying, God, you can have this part of our life, we're gonna worship you, we're gonna do all that kind of stuff but what we're not gonna do is we're not gonna allow you to have access to our heart and heart and that's exactly where God wanted to go because they were missing the significance of marriage, they were diminishing it and it reminds me a lot of a couple of months ago I was on a road trip, I was preaching at a conference and kind of my rhythm when I travel is I'll fly in as early as I can, get a rental car, drive to a hotel, get settled in, kind of rest pray, get ready and so I was driving down I-80, I was in Nebraska, I think it was Nebraska and as I was going along the highway there was a huge billboard on the side of the expressway. I mean huge and it said something along the lines of need a fresh start, easy divorce with no fuss, call and then it was the name of a divorce attorney and the phone number and as I looked at that I just thought how many millions of people saw this billboard and is there such thing as easy and fuss free divorce? Now we live in the state of Michigan that is a no fault divorce state which means you can divorce for any reason at any time no matter what you want. Do you know that what's interesting is that in Jesus' time even though it was a Jewish community the rabbis had so misinterpreted the scriptures for the sake of men, it was a very misogynistic culture that men could actually divorce for any reason. That's why Jesus and Matthew 19 that we'll get to in a minute actually says it was because of the hardness of your heart that Moses actually allowed you to divorce but it was not always so from the beginning. In other words, God didn't intend this. So in Jesus' time if a man came home and looked at his wife and didn't like the way she looked that day, he could divorce her for that. If he didn't like how she cooked he could divorce her for that. If she got old he could divorce her for that. If he asked her to do something and she didn't do it he could divorce her for that. You could just go down to your local rabbi and ask that she doesn't please me anymore. And here was the problem. Women had absolutely no rights, legal rights.  A lot of scholars believe that's why the Samaritan woman at the well had been married and divorced so many times and why she's living with a guy now because she just needed a place to live. Men had all the power, women didn't. Now our situation is a little bit different because now we've kind of evolved culturally and we realize women and men are equal which is a good thing and have equal rights which is a good thing but the problem is now we have seemingly doubled down and made it just as easy for any reason at any time to get a divorce. And what's happened is the church in the middle of a culture that views marriage through the lens more often than not of the world instead of through the lens of the kingdom of God is doing all the things that Israel did. We say to God, I'm going to church, I read my Bible, I pay my tithes but God what does it have to do with this room of my life? What does it have to do with my marriage? What does it have to do with my relationships? What does it have to do with my sexuality? And God says it has everything to do with that because it has a connection to your heart and I want all of you. So this morning what I want to do is I want to zero in on three things from God's perspective of how he sees marriage that are found in this text because how many believe that just like in most things God sees marriage differently than the world sees it. Raise your hand if you believe that. I believe that. I think there's most things that God sees things differently. God sees money differently. God sees family differently. God sees destiny differently. God sees, it's flipped upside down. We live in a world that sees divorce as we actually view marriage more like the boyfriend, girlfriend scenarios that we had in high school level commitment than the covenant that God speaks about them. And so let me zero in on three things from this text this morning that will help us understand how God views marriage and why it's significant important. Number one is this, marriage is primarily a spiritual issue. Marriage is a spiritual issue.  You are body, soul, and spirit. First Thessalonians Paul says part of his prayer for the Thessalonian Christians was this, I pray above all things that the God that we serve would sanctify you or set you apart, body, soul, and spirit until the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Your body, soul, and spirit. You have a body, you have a spirit. When you're born again and you're saved, it's your spirit that comes alive. It's your spirit that was created in the image of God. It's made perfect and it will live forever.  It's kind of the bridge between your body and your soul and your spirit. So when we talk about marriage being primarily a spiritual issue, that's in contrast to how the world views it because from the world's standpoint, marriage has everything to do with physical and has everything to do with emotional. But even though it involves all three parts of us, marriage is about body, soul, and spirit. It's primarily a spiritual issue first. So think about this when you read this text in verse number 15, here's what God says. Did he, talking about God, not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And then twice after that, he says guard your spirit. Guard your spirit. Why? Why would God say guard your spirit? He doesn't say guard your heart, he says guard your spirit. Why? Because marriage primarily is a spiritual issue. When two people get married, they become one. Genesis chapter one, God says let's create man in our image. And according to our likeness, let us make them. And so God made them, it says and let them be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the earth, the birds, the fish, all that kind of stuff. And then it says, and so he created them in his image, male and female, he created them. And then later on in chapter two, we get the full picture of how God created man and woman. It says first he created man, Adam. And he said that everything else in creation was good. It is good, it is good, it is good. Until he got the man and he said it is not good, man is alone. So he made a companion, a helper, that was perfectly fit for Adam. And he made it from Adam, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, took from Adam's side, the Hebrew word for rib means from his side. He put Adam to sleep, knocked him out, like a Sunday afternoon nap, took him out, took a rib out and he fashioned woman, Eve. When Adam comes to, here comes God the Father performing the very first wedding ceremony. He's got Eve on his arm and God the Father is walking her down the aisle between the trees and the Garden of Eden. And that's where she got her name from, woman. Because when Adam saw her, he goes, whoa, man. And she's been called woman ever since. It's grandpa jokes, I'm telling you. And the two became one. And here's what was said right at the beginning. God said this, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling only to his wife and the two shall become one. It's not just talking about physically, it's talking about physically, emotionally, but it starts spiritually. Because when two people get married, it's a spiritual uniting of two people in one. And then it becomes a physical uniting of two people in the one. Sex was always meant to be a bonding agent in the covenantal bonds of marriage.  It's recreational. It's a hookup culture, it ain't no big deal. It's just our bodies, it's my body, I can do what I want to.  And part of the reason why we have such dysfunction about sex in our culture is because we blush in church, but we don't out there. And God's not afraid of sex. Can I let you in on a little secret? Sex was God's idea. He came up with it. He didn't like bring Adam and Eve together and then they met and a few hours later, he's looking at him going, oh my, look. Did you see that coming? Whoa. I didn't know they could do that with, hmm. It's like he hardwired even our physical bodies and our souls and our spirits so that when we came together in covenant, there would actually be a uniting and a oneness. Do you know what Paul writes about this in First Corinthians when he says, a man when he unites himself physically with a prostitute actually becomes one spirit with them? Because I'll just tell you this, one of the biggest issues, one of the biggest causes of emotional, psychological and spiritual hardness in our culture is directly correlated to the sexual promiscuity of our culture.   And so marriage is spiritual. We come together and the two become one. But our culture says, ah, no, marriage is emotional. It's an emotional issue. What I mean by that is when we fall in love, what's the thing that we wanna do? We wanna get married. And we fall into love, but when in our culture do people, most of the time, divorce. It's when we don't feel in love anymore. So our culture has made marriage about physical and emotional first. And yet God says it's spiritual first. We treat marriage kind of the way we did when I was in elementary school, we called it going together. Anybody remember that? I remember fifth grade, I got a note pass to me on my desk and it was about a girl named Nicole Stengel. And it said, do you like Nicole? Yes, no, maybe. So I checked maybe, gave it back, friend who gave it to her. And then I got another note. The next day it says, do you wanna go with Nicole? I'm like, where are we going? She's like, no, go steady. And I'm like, yes, we never talked. I never talked to her. Fifth grade, never said a word to her, I was scared to death. Saw her on the bus, I'm like, hi. Two months later I got another note. It says, Nicole wants to break up with you. I'm like, I'm good with that, check the box. So we had a two month relationship and I've never spoken two words to her. But it's based on feelings, fickleness. If we base the foundations of marriage on emotions, we'll be very fickle. And love will be something that you fall into and anything that you fall into, you can also fall out of. But love is not emotional primarily. Love is spiritual because God is love and God is spirit. So love has spiritual foundations long before it has emotional implications. And then obviously it has physical things.  When you have sex together, there's actually a hormone that is released in the brain that bonds you emotionally to the person you just had relationships with. And here's what's damaging in our culture. I know it's graphic, but just we need to hear this. What's graphic is that in our culture, there's a huge increase in pornography, both in men and in women. And here's what scientists and neuroscientists have figured out that different hormones are released when we view pornography than when we have sexual relations with another person. One bonds you, the other is the same as cocaine. So what we've created is a culture of independent sexual beings that are actually addicted to the same high as cocaine instead of being bonded to a person for life in the safety and the security of a covenant. And that's why we have so much insecurity. That's why we have so many identity issues. That's why we have so much dysfunction.  Listen, I know that we all have sexual background sin issues that we had to deal with, but it can be under the blood. It's what you do now from this point forward that really matters. And it may be old fashioned, but I'm gonna tell you, there's some old fashioned things that we could do really well to go back to that will actually heal the wounds that we have in our modern sophisticated society. And God would call us back to that purity. Why? Because marriage primarily is spiritual issue. Number two, marriage is a covenant issue. And that's different than the way the world views marriage. Our world views marriage as a contract. And here's the difference between a covenant and a contract. A contract says, I don't trust you, so I want an agreement. And in the agreement, I want it to be legally binding and it's all about me preserving my self-interest and rights. That's different from a covenant. Because what a covenant says is, instead of it being built like a contract on mistrust, a covenant is built on trust. And it says this, I will not preserve my self-interest. I'm actually going to lay myself down for you, regardless of what you do. And I'm actually not gonna seal it in ink, I'm gonna seal it in blood. And God is not a contract, God. Nowhere in this Bible will you ever see God presenting a contract to anyone. How many of you know that when you come to Jesus, you come to Jesus in terms of a covenant? A covenant that was established in His blood.  Blood is a covenant, it's called the new covenant. When we take communion, we're remembering a covenant that He cut for us and with us that is binding even to the point of His death. And here's what I know, when we follow Jesus, Jesus doesn't call us into a contractual relationship with Him. There's no prenuptial agreement in following Jesus. He doesn't present to you a contract and says, if I don't bless you the way that you think is appropriate and if you ever don't feel as passionate about following me, if life ever gets hard and you're persecuted, I'll tell you what, then you can leave and I won't hold you responsible. There's no such thing as a no-fault savior. We have a contract and the reason why we're willing to lay down our lives for Jesus is because He laid down His life for us and it's sealed and it's signed in His blood. Now why that's different is we live in a contract culture that views marriage as a contract. It's an agreement, we can have prenuptial agreements, we can have all this kind of stuff. Look at verse number 14.  Now in our culture, we can divorce anyway that we want to and divorce is rampant. Do you know that even though God looks at divorce and hates divorce, He actually realizes that there are certain circumstances in which divorce is now impermissible but actually necessary. And the Bible gives four, I think, it definitely gives three and I think a case can be made for four reasons for divorce.  It doesn't mean that you have to divorce, it just means that if you as a follower of Jesus are bonded together to someone and they've been faithless to you, unfaithful to you, that you have the right to say trust has been broken and I no longer can stay in this household because you violated terms of our covenant. So that's number one. Number two, it's called the Pauline exception in 1 Corinthians, Paul says if you're a believer and you're married to an unbeliever and the unbeliever packs their stuff up and leaves you and abandoned you and says I don't wanna be married to you anymore, it says that if you're the believing innocent party you have a right to be free. Once they've left, probably after you've exhausted everything you can to try and get them to stay, then you're free to remarry, but if you remarry, marry a Christian, don't marry an unbeliever, don't be unequally young. Third way that a marriage is dissolved is through death. When your marriage partner dies, you're free from that and you can remarry and I think a case can be made for four and the fourth is when a person is in a marriage relationship that is extremely emotionally and ultimately physically abusive and damaging and there is no repentance and no help that is to be had at some point a partner with the help of their pastor, spiritual leader and the Lord can come to a place where they say I just have to because in that position that person has become like an unbeliever, hard hearted and will not lay their life down and embrace the covenant. But those are the four reasons, do you know that in our culture today you can get divorced for any reason and we actually celebrate unfaithfulness. We celebrate it. We have whole websites and apps for people who are married and want to be unfaithful, need a little spice things up or you need to hit a reset and start over again. God says that doesn't just affect your marriage, that actually affects your relationship with me and we need to be aware of that because marriage is a covenant. Marriage isn't just about sentiment. In our culture we spend so much of our time, our money and energy on the wedding day but yet we don't spend as much time or investment and resources into the marriage after the fact. Average wedding in America is over $30,000 but the average married couple that is in critical condition on the verge of divorce according to recent ads will spend less than $1,000 investing in resources or counseling to get their marriage better. So we spend $30,000 on a day and we won't invest $1,000 of our life over the course of a period of time of giving interest, getting counsel, doing whatever we can to triage and get our marriage back because we believe the lie that marriage is emotional and so if I don't feel it anymore if I've lost that loving feeling then there must be somebody out there who's my soulmate. I still love technology but not as much as you you see always and forever. La Fonda's my soulmate, Napoleon. We've got this mindset that says that there's one magic soulmate out there. No, listen, instead of focusing on finding the right person how about we focus on being the right person? How about we focus on Jesus, change me, shape me? How can I lay down my life because this is a covenant that I've entered into. When I said for better or for worse and sickness and health till death do us part those weren't just cute poetic words they were covenantal vows that I made. When Jane and I were 20 and 21 years old I was 21, she was 20 years old and we stood in the front of Elger Park Christian Reform Church front of God, our friends and our family we weren't just saying checking boxes on a note in fifth grade saying I love you, we don't wanna go with me I was saying I'm married to you for life and I wanna tell you something Jane would testify to this if she liked being on stage. 26 going on 27 years there have been moments I know it's hard to believe this where she has not liked me there's been times where she irritated me seasons even periods of time where it's just like, ooh and you know what we've done we've gotten help we've asked for counsel counselors and mentors we've thought through it we've had conversations that were painful we've forgiven one another and we just didn't quit there were times where it's like you ain't gettin' out of this this easy I said till death do us part and she's like well that might be tomorrow but today I can say this our marriage is stronger than it's ever been before and it's not because we never hit skin it's because we did and we didn't quit it's because when we tore down the muscle of our emotions like you do in the weight room we were willing to feed it what it needed to rebuild and now it is rebuilt stronger so many people quit so many people give up because it's easier and because it's celebrated and they never get to the place where they actually experience what they're really looking for in the first place you see my grandparents have been married 68 years and if you were to ask them like you would ask any other legacy couple they would tell you it's not because they never hit skin in the road it's not because they hit the lottery and found the one person that they're always going to like and never disagree with it's because they just honored their covenant they remain faithful in a world that is faithless third thing that God would say to us and he's saying to Israel here in Malachi is marriage it's a family issue look at what he says in verse 15 what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring translation children right from the beginning God's whole purpose of marriage was for companionship yes but also for the multiplication of his image through his image bearers in the earth he said it let them be fruitful and multiply let's create them in our likeness according to our image mankind your ultimate purpose as a human being was created to reflect the image of a good God back to its world and God says now Malachi I want godly godly offspring why godly offspring? because the more offspring the more kids that we raise in the security of covenantal marriage and train them up and pass on our faith there is a generational blessing and acceleration and intensification of the righteousness and the blessing of God from generation to generation it's like compounded interest think about this he reveals himself in the Old Testament as the God of Abraham Isaac and who? three generations it's compounded interest of blessing what we don't realize is that there's blessing and cursing and what we are experiencing right now ladies and gentlemen in our culture is we're not seeing the compounded blessing of God through secure nuclear families of one man and one woman in the sight of God married in covenant fighting for it what we're seeing is the destruction of the nuclear family the redefinition of family the destruction of the importance of family and we have dysfunctional kids self-centered homes in a culture that is not experiencing compounded blessing but compounded dysfunction if blessing goes from the first, second and third generation before God releases the promise then what we're seeing is the third, fourth, fifth generation that God says I will visit the iniquities of the fathers to the third and the fourth generation we're a generation right now that is seeing the full fruit of our abandonment of God's ideas and it's destroying our culture when God built the Garden of Eden he didn't build a church or a government building before he built a marriage it's because he understood that marriage is the foundation through which blessing is handed down my dad was married and divorced three times lived with another woman for eight years and by the way, if you're single and you're living with somebody it does not equal marriage marriage is when you enter into a covenant and you say until death do us part and if you're living with somebody and you're not married to them and you're sexually engaged don't tell me your heart is right with God because you are living in fornication and sin and you will stand before God and give an account for your life you might say well that's old fashioned you tell that to God when you stand before him if you're married and you're having a relationship with somebody you're not married to you might think you're living a BBC fantasy but you're just setting yourself up for judgment and we need to have a longer term view of the actions we take church because what I'm interested in is I don't want to pass onto my kids the curse of promiscuity divorce that my dad handed to me I wanna hand a legacy to the third and the fourth generation where my great great great grandchildren someday say our great great grandparents Lee and Jane Cummings were married for 90 years loved Jesus stayed faithful to one another impacted the world for the kingdom of God and that's our legacy you see we gotta have a long term view of what we wanna hand off let me tell you this in closing if you are single today maybe you're single because you just haven't gotten married yet or maybe you're single by choice because God's called you singleness we honor that and I want you to know this as a single person you can bear the image of God faithfully to the world you don't need anybody to complete you you are a child of God and you can reflect the glory of God to the world around you if you are married today doesn't matter what condition your marriage is in you have the potential of reflecting the image of God back to the world around you and if you are divorced today and it was not your will and you didn't want that and things happen and ramifications happened we understand listen you still have the opportunity to change your heart and reflect the glory of God to the world around us and we desperately need us all to do this but listen to me if we name the name of Jesus and we disregard his word and we treat marriage the way the world treats it we should not be shocked when they reject what they see in us because they're not seeing the image of a faithful God they're seeing a mere reflection of a broken world we're acting just like them and I know statistics have been out there that said you know divorce rate in the church is the same as it is in the world that's true except for one thing when a married couple go to church regularly together that number of 50% one of every two marriages actually drops down to 20% why? It's because we choose to put God first just because you name the name of Jesus and you pay your tithes, go to temple offer your sacrifices and your offerings doesn't mean your heart's right but when Christians boy I wanna preach like a whole nother message how dare we say that we have the God who created the universe living on the inside of us two people who've been redeemed from our sins looking at each other and we say that we're at an impasse I thought we serve a God in whom there is nothing impossible for it I thought he's the God who can call dead things back to life well we need to take a great big spoonful of grow up and we need to act like Jesus so that we can pass a blessing down to the third and the fourth and the fifth and the thousands generation because we got a lost and dying world that needs to look at the church and say we've made a mess of marriage we've made a mess of sex but you guys seem to have your act together because they don't even know it but the way we're living is the way God designed us and we're flourishing and we say come on in there's room for one more and we bring healing and blessing to broken marriages and we restore hope to the earth the world's not gonna do that it's gonna be you and I and I'll tell you what I got a little grandson and someday after I spoil him rotten I wanna hand off the baton and I never want him to have to deal with the pain I dealt with as a kid who experienced divorce and abandonment I want him to know that he grew up in an environment with his mom, with his dad and his grandfather and people who loved him and a grandmother and the word of God deeply entrenched in his heart so that he passes it down to his kids and so on and so on and so on and I want everybody to stand up with me so I don't preach anymore and here's what I wanna say to everybody because I know that there's some people right now you would probably if you felt anonymous enough would say you know what, I had an affair and I wish I hadn't or I'd lived sexually impure before I was married and I wish I could go back and redo that I think there's probably some young people that I'm looking at right now all across the room who right now you're living sexually impure and you're just like I wish I could change I think there's some people you divorced a spouse when you know you didn't have biblical grounds and there's some people who are watching listening right now and say I was divorced and it was never what I wanted but I feel stigmatized how can I ever be whole again? I want you to hear me wherever sin abounds grace does much more abound there's hope, it's right here you don't earn it there's no penance to be paid what's God looking for? That's what he was looking for here for them to turn their first love back to him to repent so God I'm sorry God I've got a hard heart right now I'm married to somebody and I'm not investing any time into it we're just kind of living in the same house and I don't know how long it's gonna last I don't wanna feel like that God changed my heart God I made a mess of things and I don't think I can go back and restore it or fix it they've already moved on but God would you forgive me would you soften my heart once again so I don't have to carry that into my future God I know I'm living wrong right now I repent I say that it's my way it's not your way and I'm sorry and I repent and I'm stopping it right now because I wanna be like Jesus I don't wanna be like the world and here's what I know soon as you turn your heart towards him grace meets you grace is not just the eraser that forgives your sins grace is the divine empower that allows you to live righteously he wants you to be your first love again would you buy your heads with me Heavenly Father would you right now pour out the oil and the wine soften our hearts Lord we confess before you that we're human beings and we're prone to wander we're prone to sin we're prone to see things the way we wanna see them we're easily deceived and our heart so vulnerable to becoming hardened but none of that surprises you none of that catches you off guard you know each and every one of us in this room you know each and every one of us at both campuses and even those that are watching online you know us intimately you not only know where we're at you know the dreams and the desires where you wanna take us we need soft hearts to get there when no one looking around please this is a sacred holy moment it doesn't matter what it is specifically but you just know that today you need to repent of something might just be hardness of heart in your marriage towards God it might be sexual sin I'm gonna leave it very very general so that there's no shame associated with this but I do want you to make a response if you're saying God apply the oil to my hard heart give me grace to forgive me and to change me so that I can live righteously I want you to be my first love that's you I just want you to lift your hand God meet us meet us in this holy moment free us set us free forgive us stir us change us I wanna invite the prayer team make their way here and over at Portage down to the front in just a moment I'm gonna pray and dismiss us and here's what I'm gonna invite you to do you may just by responding to that that's all you need to now you've repented and now repentance means turning going a different direction maybe that's all you needed today but some of us might need we might need prayer we might need somebody to pray with us and our spouse or just us over something we need to maybe confess something we need to ask somebody to help us maybe you need to sign up on your way out today in a community group, a marriage group a purity group doesn't matter what it is but I want you to take some action today and when I pray and we dismiss if you want prayer I just feel like there's some hard hardened hearts and marriages where you just need to take the hand of your spouse and walk and say come on let's walk down to the front and come together and let God meet you here and soften your hearts Lord we love you and as we leave this place we always want to be able to say you are our first love meet us as we pray down here today in Jesus' name, amen


What was the impact of the 2009 shift in recommendations to delay routine screening until age 50? Ironically, mammography rates of women in their 40s may have actually gone up. The thought is that all the media attention may have just reminded women about it, underscoring the need to better translate evidence into practice. The new recommendations bring the US closer to European standards, mammograms over a few years starting at age 50. In 2015, the American Cancer Society split the difference and recommended starting at 45 annually, then switching to every other year at 55, suggesting this would decrease the lifetime risk of dying from breast cancer from 2.7% down to under 2%. Based in part on a systematic review performed by the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected bastion of evidence-based medicine. The authors of the Cochrane Review, however, wrote in to say they used the wrong number, and that if you look at the studies they considered were adequately randomized, there did not appear to be any significant mortality benefit from mammograms at all, and that the data certainly do not support the popular idea that breast cancer screening saves lives, or choosing the American Cancer Society of being more of a political organization with financial ties to the multibillion-dollar mammogram industry. Here's the Cochrane Review they're talking about, which concluded that the studies which provide the most reliable information evidently show that screening did not reduce breast cancer mortality. If that's true, then that changes everything. They conclude that the time is therefore come to reassess whether routine mammograms should be recommended for women of any age, which is what the Swiss Medical Board did. They were struck by how non-obvious it was that the benefits of mammography screening outweighed the harms. It's easy to promote mammography screening when the majority of women believe that it prevents or reduces the risk of getting breast cancer and saves many lives through early detection of aggressive tumors. I mean, if those beliefs were valid, they'd be all for it. Unfortunately, they concluded they are not, and so believe that women need to be told so. From an ethical perspective, a public health program that does not clearly produce more benefits than harms is hard to justify. Their report, not surprisingly, caused an uproar. Scientists argued that the report unsettled women, but we wonder how to avoid unsettling women given the available evidence. If you ask women what they perceive to be the benefits of regular mammogram screening, they think it cuts the risk of dying from breast cancer in half. That's the orange box saving the lives of about one in 12 women, but in reality, the numbers appear to look like this. First of all, the risk of dying from breast cancer regardless is smaller than most women think, and the reduction in risk. The differences in size of the orange boxes is much smaller, maybe only 1 in 1,000 women benefits. But hey, doesn't saving the life of even 1 in 1,000 women make it all worth it? Imagine if you were in that 1 in 1,000 families whose mom was saved. But that may not be true. 1 in 1,000 women's screen may not die from breast cancer, so there's no evidence suggests that overall mortality was affected, which would mean no lives are actually saved. There's been 10 randomized trials of mammogram screening and not one has ever showed an overall mortality benefit. Wait, how does that make sense? If mammograms prevent 1,000 women from dying from breast cancer, then the only way no lives are saved is if mammograms ended up somehow leading to the deaths of 1,000 healthy women. That's preposterous, right? Let me introduce the concept of overdiagnosis, the fact that some of the tiny tumors picked up on mammograms may have never progressed, or even disappeared on their own. And so had they not been picked up, the woman would have been none the wiser and would have never been affected by it, or even known they had it. But once you pick up a cancer on a mammogram, you have to treat it since you don't know what it's going to do. But in some cases, the overdiagnosed cases where it would never hurt you, you're treating the breast cancer unnecessarily. How common is that, though? For every life saved by mammography, as many as 2 to 10 women are overdiagnosed, meaning turned to the breast cancer patients unnecessarily, along with all the attended harms of chemo, radiation, or surgery without the benefits. Horms can include death. Imagine being in the family whose mom was killed. The concern is that unnecessary radiation treatments may kill as many as are saved, hence the no evidence of net mortality benefit. Radiation treatments to the chest increase the risk of dying from heart disease and lung cancer. Now those may be acceptable risks.  Breast that are beneficial for real patients can be lethal for those who never should have been treated in the first place.  I mean, if you catch a tumor early, maybe you can avoid a mastectomy. The opposite may actually be true. The Cochrane researchers explained that that's why they published their report. They thought it was important for women to know that screening may increase their risk of losing a breast. Basically, mammograms have been promoted to the public with three simple promises that all appear to be wrong. Screening does not seem to make the women live longer. Instead, may unnecessarily increase mastectomies and cancers are not caught early. It may take decades for a tumor to grow large enough to be picked up on a mammogram. And even when they are, they may not grow any further. That's the concern we're catching too many. There's so much overdiagnosis that if a woman really doesn't want to become a breast cancer patient, maybe they should avoid mammogram screening altogether.  The small probability that a woman may avoid breast cancer death must be weighed against the more likely scenario that she may have a false positive or false negative result, or most critically, a diagnosis and treatment of cancer that would otherwise not have threatened her health or even come to her attention.