We welcome you to Stone's Hill today!

A typical Stone's Hill service has:

* music (so feel free to sing out);

* some announcements (things that are upcoming that you can be a part of);

* a message out of the Bible (God speaks to us through his Word);

* and an opportunity for you to respond to the message (either immediately in the case of a decision that needs to be made OR in the future as you live out the message in your daily life.)

So relax and enjoy your morning! We're so glad you are here!

Biblical Worldview
The story of the world can be told with FOUR WORDS representing four plot moves. All worldviews must deal with the questions that are raised in these four plot moves.

Plot Move #1
Creation. This tells us how things began, where everything came from (including us). Who made the world? Where did we come from?

Plot Move #2
Rebellion. This describes the problem. What went wrong with the world? What is wrong with us?

Plot Move #3
Redemption. This gives us the solution, the way to fix what went wrong. What is God doing to fix our world? What is God doing to fix us?

Plot Move #4
Restoration. This explains what the world will look like once the repair takes place. How does it all resolve eventually? Will we become what God intended?

A Biblical Worldview Church - Redeeming Gender
America is in a “transgender moment.” Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). Formerly known as gender identity disorder – it’s characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. Increasingly, when confronted with a person who experiences gender dysphoria, doctors and psychologists are allowed to offer only one diagnosis: the patient is transgender.

It used to be 12 sessions, then you could do hormones. Now, it’s 1 or 2 and here we go. Here’s the four-stage transitioning process:

1. Social transitioning: a new name, new wardrobe, new pronouns.

2. Puberty blockers: prevent normal maturation; no progression of the pubertal stage; regression of secondary sex characteristics.

3. Cross-sex hormones: boys receive estrogen; girls receive testosterone – trying to mimic the process of puberty in the opposite sex.

4. Sex reassignment: I won’t even talk about how the anatomy is changed and the horror stories when it goes wrong.

We are told that not treating people as the gender they claim to be is discriminatory. Is it really true that a boy could be trapped in a girl’s body? But if you have a male brain, how would you even know how a girl is supposed to feel? And there’s a slight change in wording. Instead of saying “a biological boy or girl who identifies as this…”; it is now “people actually are the sex they claim to be.”

People who experience this must be treated with compassion, kindness and respect. And above all, told the truth. You can have feelings that are real to you, but those feelings don’t change bodily reality. Parental authority is being denied and they are told if they don’t use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, then their child is at risk to commit suicide.

What you’re not told, is the risk is far greater for those who bodily transition. That suicide rate is higher. And if you can only read the stories of detransitioners – changing genders never fixed anything; it just gave them a new set of problems. All the transition steps are just really bad coping mechanisms. One girl said “I wanted to identify as a boy because of personal trauma and being a boy at that time I thought would help.”

Before 2012, no one talked about gender dysphoria in girls aged eleven to twenty-one. What happened? Kids from an age-group that has never even registered an issue with this are now presenting at clinics, requesting hormones and breast removal. That’s what the stats show (132). People with gender dysphoria are now commonly given treatments that involve grave health hazards and few if any lasting benefits.

As recently as a few years ago, this was a mental disorder diagnosis, and steps would be taken to align the mind with the body. Today, it’s just the opposite. Gender dysphoria means being born in the wrong body, and treatment aims to align the body with the mind. This is now the expected diagnosis and path of treatment even when the patient is a child. All voices, even the most qualified, that dare to be critical of this way of treating gender dysphoria are silenced. No dissent is allowed. A transgender ideology is being pushed onto the nation, criminalizing someone who “misgenders” another, with pronoun-policing as the lynch-pin, parental authority, even privacy and public safety are falling by the wayside.

Here’s what you’re not told. Nearly 70-80% or more of these cases resolve on their own – that is they revert back to their biological gender if we’ll just give them space and time. Gender dysphoria goes into full remission with time in a loving family.

Problem: The Internet provides many voices that emboldens people to take these radical steps. Peers, therapists, counselors, social media heroes egg these girls on. Parents are depicted as bigots, obstacles, and dupes. Aides by visual tutorials on all the social media platforms, young people are coached on how to manipulate parents, school systems, and care-givers to get what they want. You wouldn’t believe how many teens block their parents from seeing their accounts.

Biology isn’t bigotry; it’s a gift from God. God’s good gift of gender—male and female—has never been more broken or confused. Our passage today helps us reclaim and redeem gender as a gift from God. We’re not born neutral; we’re born as gendered beings with all the chemical, physical, and hormonal makeup of either male or female.

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Masculinity and femininity flow from God who is beyond any one gender. It takes both genders to get the image of God expressed.

Masculinity images the strength of God. Protect. Fight. Provide. Adult males have greater total lean mass and lower fat mass than females generally; greater arm muscle mass, larger and stronger bones.

Femininity images the beauty of God. Respond. Nurture. Help. Females have more distribution of fat in early adulthood. Females have this wiring that lets them process many things and feel emotions on multiple levels. Females tend to display more verbal ability in general and recover verbal skills better after a stroke than men do.

What is gender? What is masculinity? What is femininity? In an oversimplified way, masculinity is initiation and femininity is response. Adam was to speak the truth and be the truth. Eve was to hear the truth and respond to the truth. Adam named animals. He brought order and structure. Real masculinity is not the size of your bicep, bank account, or boat. Real masculinity is ability of man to speak truth into chaos and give that chaos an identity and a direction.

Who am I? You’re a God-created human-being. You’re a human being that is gendered - male or female. For some of you, you are male. You have a physical body built to work and a chemical structure that allows you to take in the world. It allows you to move and work and think and create and write and speak and love and organize your life into meaningful pursuits and the accomplishment of tasks. You can even co-create a baby only with a woman, but you can’t give birth to them and you can’t nurse them – “chest-feeding” are you serious? Men can’t get pregnant!

For some of you, you are female. Much of this is true of you too. But the only way you can conceive a baby is through the assistance of the male. So, we need each other; we’re not interchangeable. Your body is built to have babies and your hormonal wiring allows you to see things wholistically. And your giftings are unique. You typically prioritize relationships and have a nurturing capability and a desire to help meet the needs of people in your life.

Man and woman, male and female are social and cultural necessities. When the text says “male and female” it’s telling us that we don’t come into the world as blank slates onto which anything can be written. When we are male or female, then we are predisposed to see the world a certain way. We are not fully developed so we learn many things, but life gets viewed through the lens of gender, something we can never truly change, even though we modify anatomical parts.

It takes maleness and femaleness to get the image of God expressed. Both genders reflect something of the glory of God. Complementarity is God’s intent. Don’t eliminate the differences like so many try to do. Appreciate the differences. If you were both the same, one of you would be unnecessary. complementarians lament the feminist and egalitarian impulses that minimize God-given differences between men and women and dismantle the order God has designed for the flourishing of our life together.

One of your greatest acts of courage is to fully accept the gender that God has given you and to present as that gender and to fulfill any God assigned-roles that come with the gender he’s blessed you with. So complementarians resist the impulses of a chauvinistic, dominating, and abusive culture, on the one side, and the impulses of a sex-blind, gender-leveling, unisex culture, on the other side. And we take our stand between these two ways of life not because the middle ground is a safe place (which it is emphatically not), but because we think this is the good plan of God in the Bible for men and women. if we don’t teach boys and girls about the truth and beauty and value of their differences, and how to live them out, those differences do not mature in healthy ways—but dysfunctional ways. And a generation of young adults comes into being who simply do not know what it means to be a mature man or a woman; and the cultural price we pay for that is enormous.

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What should we do for boys and especially our girls who seem caught up in the "transgender craze"?

Abigail Shrier offers some practicals… (with slight modifications)…
1. Don’t get your kid a smartphone until you have laid the foundation for a biblical worldview. Nearly every problem a teenager faces traces itself back to the iPhone of 2007. Problems skyrocketed. If you had been told that one device would produce a culture that we have today would you have gotten your kid one?
2. Don’t relinquish your authority as the Parent. Don’t be afraid to push back when an adolescent balks at your loving engagement in their life. You don’t have to accept the self-diagnosis of a 13-year-old and neither do you have to belittle them. Teens get mad at you for boundaries. What’s new? But they also feel the presence of a guardrail.
3. Reintroduce privacy into the home. Virtually all parents say that their daughters’ announcement on social media of a transgender identity was the turning point. From then on, their daughter felt locked-in. Stop sharing every part of your life online. If you want to stop something, you don’t have utter an online decree.
4. You may have to get radical sometimes. Bring them home from college to get them out of the “campus cults.” Move to another place. Change jobs. Whatever it takes to get more time as a family.
5. It’s wonderful to be you. In a certain sense, we all transition. We’re babies. Then we’re toddlers. Then we’re children. Then we’re young adults. Then we’re adults. At every stage, there is loss and a transitioning away from what used to be. Our bodies change. Our interests change. And girls even get to become mothers. But stick with your gender; God made you that way.
6. Don’t support gender ideology at any level in your child’s education. You can oppose bullying and emphasize loving everyone without making gender ideology front and center. You don’t have to subscribe to non-reality. Victims of bad ideas need clear and loving thinkers to restore them to reality.

Would you like to come to God and let Him tell you who you are? Come to Him through Jesus today!