[Darris McNeely] In an explosive new ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States has decreed that your gender is determined by your personal preference. How should we view this issue?

Eight-year-old James Younger is encouraged by his mother, his teachers, and his therapists to go to school under the name Luna. Now while his mother fights to raise him as a girl, his father fights to raise him as a boy. Does that sound odd? It's a tragic story. And it's gained a lot of attention in America of late. It's a story about a mother who's attempting to gender transition her eight-year-old son into a girl. Recently she was awarded the decision making ability in the power regarding her son's health care and his schooling. Here's an article from "The Christian post” that talks a little bit more about it. It says, "In the ongoing case of an eight-year-old, James Younger, Dallas judge Mary Brown canceled a hearing and removed his father, Jeffrey Younger from having any say in his son's medical, psychological, and psychiatric care. Instead, the judge gave decision-making power to Dr. Anne Georgulas, a pediatrician, and the non-biological mother of James and his twin brother. Jude. Younger has been ordered by the court to pay for these trans-affirming counseling sessions, which he'd previously objected to, as he was not permitted to help select his son's counselors." It's a tragic, compelling story. Now this ruling that the judge came up with doesn't really cover the medical procedures that would affect a sex change medically in the boy, only the education and the therapy sessions that are involved in shaping the young man's perception of his sexuality. It's frankly, an alarming and a tragic story on many different levels.

The gender and identity wars that are rolling through society are turning upside down the norms and the traditional teaching about gender. So today we have to talk a lot about identity. Politics identity, race identity, gender identity, sexual orientation. And what has happened? People have divided and subdivided into groups. And sexual identity, it's been very contentious. And obviously it can be a divisive issue in the country. It's also defiantly against the Biblical revelation.

You see God created humanity as male and female. There's a divine godly order to creation. And all of this identity talk contradicts directly what God has revealed in His Word. What is behind the sexual identity politics, the multiculturalism that we're having to deal with, and all the other related issues of this wokeism? Is it just about politics? Is it just about race or gender or is there something bigger behind this large, epic making issue? We really do need to understand this. We're dealing with an internal challenge that intersects all the fundamental building blocks of a functioning society. This issue, identity issue, it will destroy a nation. This issue will lay waste to people. It is the biggest adversary that the United States, Canada, and Australia face today. I'm going to show you today why this is a critical matter and where society is headed. Let's go back to a Supreme Court decision that was made back in June of 2020. The Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling at that time that had the effect of what we call settled legislation. They redefined the meaning of the word sex. Now their decision was based on an interpretation of Title 7 of the 1964 civil rights law, which was itself an important landmark piece of legislation that aimed to end all racial discrimination in the United States.

It was a noble bill and goal. But today the court took that long ago made a ruling, and they decreed that sex, which was in that civil rights law means more than biology. It means more than genes and DNA. Sex as now interpreted by the Supreme Court means preference, whatever you might feel like this time or next time. It means identity. It's a sweeping ruling and it will impact every part of American culture, from schools and businesses to churches, and yes even restrooms and affect the prevailing avalanche of progressive culture and trends has one in the nation's highest court, what has not been decided by law in Congress. And in fact the Supreme Court crossed a line into the realm of God and has interfered with the Biblically established divine order of life itself. God made humans in His image declaring them male and female, with distinctive biological and yes even spiritual roles. Without a hint of God's will or purpose mentioned in their ruling, the Supreme Court rendered a debasing and unrighteous decision on sexual morality that will further erode America's moral and spiritual culture and other nations as a result. This decision invites, really, divine judgment upon a people who do not wish to keep God in their knowledge.

Dissenting justices on that opinion labeled the decision preposterous. They said it betrayed a "breathtaking arrogance." Well I'll have to say amen to that. So what does God have to say? In the book of Romans the 1st chapter, the Apostle Paul was talking to the culture of 1st century. And in Romans 1:22, Paul had this to say about the 1st-century world that actually applies to today. He said, "Professing to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God, into an image made like corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed animals, and creeping things. Therefore, God gave them up to uncleanness and the lusts of their heart to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for a lie. And they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen."

It's a stirring indictment of that culture then and it has application frankly to any culture subsequently that has defied and denied God. And that's today. We are reaping the whirlwind of a God-denying age. And on this matter of identity, it is frankly a time to understand the truth of God on the topic. The identity movement in all of its forms, race, gender, sexuality, or otherwise, has the effect of favoring one group over another, placing power in a group based on anything other than merit and equality. It divides. It segregates people into groups and nations. The identity movement that we see is part of really a larger ideology that seeks to overturn cultural norms, and it will destroy a people through division, anger, and injustice. The identity movement, frankly, is a cancerous rot in the body of America, Canada, and Australia, and the Western world. It frankly is a satanic conspiracy.

No single issue of our lifetime has such a damaging God defined mark on our society. It cuts like a knife through the fabric of our culture and we're watching the seams of normalcy begin to be ripped one by one. Focusing on a physical aspect of identity is the opposite of what God intended for humanity. When you understand the full spiritual teaching of God, He intends that humanity be one spiritually in Christ, neither male nor female, spiritually, neither Jew nor Greek, spiritually. But identity issues are designed to deceive us about who we are and why we're created.

It's designed to rob us of our true identity and God's creative order. And that identity is bound up in the structure of the family, the nuclear family of a committed marriage between a man and a woman, a holy God-ordained, God-sanctioned, and God-intended union.

What we're talking about here in this program today is really an opportunity to understand God's gift of marriage to His human creation. This topic is ground zero for understanding the real purpose of life, of your life. In the next segment, we're going to talk about what Jesus Himself said about this topic of gender identity and the battle that is going on. It's some very interesting comments that He has to make.

What I first want to do is make available an offer here on the program today, our free study guide, entitled, "Marriage and Family: The Missing Dimension." The study guide is an important one that we have produced that takes the person through the Bible and all the definitions of God's intent for mankind. Have you ever noticed why sexuality, and gender, and marriage are being redefined in all of this talk but you still hear the words family and marriage? Could it be it's because that they are such basic parts of humanity that we really can't escape what they are, what they tell us?

This guide will help you to understand. So I'd like for you to call the number on your screen or go to beyondtoday.tv and order or even begin to read your free copy of this book, "Marriage and Family: The Missing Dimension." Identity issues of race and gender and sexuality have come front and center in today's discussion. And they pose many challenges. The rapid pace of cultural change is impacting every segment of our society. So what did Jesus say about identity, about mankind?

The question of who and what is man and the purpose of life? Let's examine that. First let's look at Matthew 19 and beginning in verse 1. It was a very interesting story as Christ was talking in the area of Galilee. And it had come to pass that when He had finished doing some teaching, He departed from Galilee and went into the region of Judea, beyond the Jordan area. A lot of people, great multitudes it says, who were following Him, He performed a lot of healings there. And then comes a group of Pharisees, the kind of the lawyers the legalists of the time with a test question. And they asked Him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?" Now the Bible says God hates divorce. So it was a test question. And it was a big question and it's a question that still impacts people today. Christ answered, and He said to them, "Have you not read that He who made them male and female at the beginning, said, "For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh?" So then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together let not man separate. That's a dynamite package. Let no man separate. Divorce, God says no. Marriage, He says, it's between a man and a woman, and only a man and a woman.

For Christ that was the end of the discussion. His passage that He quoted was the teaching on marriage, and divorce, and sexuality is the basic package right there. He affirms the creative order of male and female for the purpose of coming together in a marriage to form a union. A union that pictures a divine spiritual relationship, a relationship that should be permanent between a man and a woman. It's really a restatement of the creation account back in the book of Genesis. Christ went all the way back to the original moment of life, where the first man and woman were made and brought together in a union, a relationship of marriage that was intended to endure the challenges of life.

So back in Genesis 2:7 and then continuing on in verse 21, "Where God caused a sleep to be upon Adam, he slept, and God took one of the ribs out of Adam's side, closed it up in the flesh in his place, and he took that rib," it says, “which He had taken, and God who made it into a woman and he brought her to the man. And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.’

"Therefore," verse 24, here's the clincher verse, "a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and they two shall become one flesh." That's it. That's God's true intent for the human family. That's bigger than the Big Bang that started it all. A case could be made, very strong, that the rest of the Bible and the story of humankind flows from and is based on that event because that event sets the real identity moment for the human race.

Now today there's a conspiracy to destroy not just the family, in fact a lot of you probably already know that but there's more. There is a plan today to destroy us as individuals, to destroy our spiritual potential and to rip that out of our lives. It's all being thrown out today by this gender discussion about identity and the issues cultural and societal that are behind it. I want to take you to an article that appeared in "The New York Times" that came shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that I was talking to you about earlier. That article I think as much as anything else shows today's thinking that seeks to remove this Biblical teaching that I just read to you from Matthew 19 and Genesis 2 about male and female, how God created us. The issues seek to just rip it out of our vocabulary. Not only does the Bible teach truth, but it does it by using words, right? Words that have meaning. So look at this article from "The New York Times." The headline begins to say at all. "Sex Does Not Mean Gender. Equating Them Erases Trans Lives."

It's written by an individual named Devin Michelle Bunton who's a professor at the MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Right away you see in the title of this article that we have a worldview that is completely different from what I just read to you out of the book of Genesis and the Gospels, where the headline says, "Sex does not mean gender." The article goes on to show that sex should not be acquainted with gender. Talks about transgender revolutionaries arguing that sex is really nothing more than a social construct, not a biological reality. That sex, male and female, is something created by human culture. Now we just read in the Bible what God says, “male and female created He them.”

Biology affirms that truth. Common sense says the same. Yet a headline in "The New York Times" and a confused mind, says otherwise. Here's a quote from that article. "Sex is a biological framework, a panoply of possibility on its own. Sex needs precise words like male and female and intersex to describe the origins, components, and functions of bodies. But we can't maintain the precision if we use words about sex to describe gender, the social and political roles, and possibilities that we take on as women, as men or something else, or none of the above." Do we see that phrase, none of the above, in terms of selections? It goes on, the article, "Full embrace of this new trans reality will mean leaving behind old vocabularies." Some changes are simple. We can speak of trans mothers, trans brothers, and siblings as easily as any other family member.

Warning right now. When you see the word trans, take a half a step back and read very carefully. The article goes on. "Some words will need to be reconfigured entirely. The most important section of this article is where the author says, "Stop using male and female to refer to men and women." In fact, stop using sex-based words to refer to people at all. They're just words for the body and not from people with hearts, and minds. and souls.

The clincher in this article is where the author says the battle for civil rights is the battle over words. Denying trans people passports because of gender doesn't match the sex assigned to us at birth. It limits freedom of movement. Here's where the transgender movement is heading. A denial of the distinction of male and female as God created humanity. We say it through a redefinition of words, which is always a point in political talk when you see arguments that seek to make sweeping changes in culture and society. You control the words and you control the definition. You control the definition and you begin to mold the thinking to a completely new ideology. And that's what the transgender identity movement seeks to do. It's a denial of what is intrinsically human. The article said, "There are words for bodies, male and female, not people with heart, souls, and minds."

Well, I say yes, they are. They are descriptions for living, breathing beings, with hearts and minds, humans, created in the image of God with a great potential to become spirit beings. God's building a family and He wants to bring us into that family. Satan wants to see mankind destroyed, through confusion and sin, and to miss out on that family of God. That family of God, defined by marriage is what this booklet that we're offering today is all about. "Marriage and Family: The Missing Dimension," an in-depth study that will take you through a study of Biblical study of what God is doing with mankind and the purpose, the spiritual purpose behind what we just call the traditional family. God uses the term family to teach us who He is and what His plans are for humanity. It's all about the family, the far better and far more than what we've ever understood. It's in God's family that we will find our true identity. So call the number on your screen or go to beyondtoday.tv for your free copy.

Let me shift gears for a moment. Let me ask a question. Some of you might know the answer already. Who am I? Well, I'm Darris McNeely. I'm a male, a married man, a father, and a grandfather. I'm a minister of the Gospel and I'm a Christian disciple. I know my identity, do you? What's that? It's a fingerprint. Do you know something about fingerprints? We all have unique fingerprints. No one else has the same fingerprint that you do. No two people have ever been found to have the same fingerprint. There's one in a 64 billion chance that someone else has the same fingerprint as you. They're more unique than DNA, than genetic material. And no one else has that same fingerprint as you. I think God's telling us something here. Each human being has a unique identity that can't be changed, and we should not want to change our human biological identity. Earlier I showed you how God created us male and female. Let me show you why. God has a plan for mankind. Every purpose for every person who has ever lived comes from God and is reflected in that plan. Shortly after Christ came to earth and lived as God in the flesh, one of His followers, the Apostle John, wrote a book that proved to his contemporaries that Jesus was indeed God. In that work, John said of Jesus, He was in the world and the world was made through Him. And the world did not know Him. He came to His own, but they didn't receive Him. And He gave the right to become children of God to those who believed in His name, children of God. It tells us everything about what God's doing. There are so many additional passages and Scriptures that reveal the same truth. In Hebrews 2:10, we find that Jesus was and continues to be about the purpose of God of bringing many sons to glory.

In one of the great sermons, the Apostle Paul said that we are all the offspring of God. And Paul also said in one of the great passages on this topic in Ephesians 3 that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family and heaven and earth is named, the whole family of heaven and earth. In Corinthians, 2 Corinthians 6 it is said this. God says, "Come out from among them. Don’t touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a father to you and you shall be my sons and daughters," says the Lord Almighty. Just as human families have children born to them as part of that family, God created Adam and Eve, and their children, all of us to become part of His family. And we are a type of that spiritual family God is doing. A family right now is composed of a man and a woman bound together before God. That's God's design for the very purpose of human life. Anything less falls far short of what God intends.

God's great purpose of producing literal sons and daughters in His family has been in effect since before the foundation of this world. He's creating children who will possess His holy righteous character, children who will share eternal life with Him and the divine Family of God. And He wants to bring us into His family. God became flesh. Jesus of Nazareth came among mankind that we might have the opportunity to become divine spirit. We will be like Him. And that is God's great purpose and plan as it is all laid out.

The Father intends to bring us forth as His full children, to transform us into the very kind of beings that He and Christ now are. Spirit beings of glory and majesty so incredible as to be beyond our limited human comprehension and understanding. God says, "I will be a Father to you and you shall be my sons and daughters," says the Lord Almighty. And it's time that we discover that God-given identity and hold fast to it. Embracing that identity banishes fear and confusion.

Your life is worth far more than you can begin to comprehend. We're given this life from God as co-heirs with Christ of all the universe. We get it as a gift. And God puts all of this before us at that time. The booklet we're offering today, "Marriage and Family," free study guide, you can get your free copy by calling the number on your screen or going to beyondtoday.tv and beginning to read this, and study it, and actually open your mind to understand the great God-given purpose that is before every one of us. That purpose is sure. It is defined from Holy Scripture. It is God's intent for every human being. And no human ideology, no human plan can rip that from us. You have a choice. Live with the confusion of this world or the truth of God's purpose for all humankind. Let God create in you His identity.

[Narrator] Call now to receive the free booklet offered on today's program, "Marriage & Family: The Missing Dimension." Why did God design the family unit? How can husbands and wives work better together to give their kids the best start in life? Learn the many practical truths about parenting straight from your Bible. Order now, call toll free, 1-888-886-8632 or write to the address shown on your screen. Parenting is one of the most intense jobs you can have. Our free study, "Marriage & Family: The Missing Dimension" will help you be the parent you were meant to be. When you order this free study aid, we'll also send you a complimentary one-year subscription to Beyond Today" magazine. "Beyond Today" magazine brings you understanding of today's world and hope for the future. Six times a year you'll read about current world events in the light of Bible prophecy and Godly principles to guide you toward a life that leads to peace. Call today to receive your free booklet, "Marriage & Family: The Missing Dimension" and your free one-year subscription to "Beyond Today" magazine, 1-888-886-8632 or go online to beyondtoday.tv.