• Recommended resource:
  • thenewsisgood.com

[00:00:00]

Selena: Ryan, what’d you do this week? You did something. You asked something a question.

Ryan: Yeah, I did a bit of an experiment and I asked the AI, I asked the computer. I went to chat GPT and I said, “Hey, if you were the devil, what would you do to destroy the family?” I got this idea from another user on X who did it. They said, “How would you make being a woman horrible?” Something to that effect. And basically, ChatGPT described the feminist movement for the last 60 years.

Selena: Ironically.

Ryan: But I got that idea and I thought, “Let’s just do that for family.” And then I shared the results to my personal Facebook author page, which then shared over to Fierce Marriage, which got quite a bit of feedback. So, that kind of put a little blip on my radar. I said, “Hey, this would be fun to talk about.”

Selena: We should talk about it, yeah.

Ryan: Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what the computer, the bits, and the bytes, the devil in the machine-

Selena: Scan it. It’s coming.

Ryan: …how it would ruin the family. The reason we do that… people say, “Well, why do you even do this?” It’s just basically compiling what we’ve already written on websites and things. And they’re not wrong, large language models do that. But I think it’s instructive because it distills it down and it makes it clear. And it actually lets us see in broad strokes just what could be playing into your marital dysfunction or our marital dysfunction, or the state of marriage in the United States or in the world, or the state of attitudes toward marriage in our youth.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: It’s instructive for all those things. And so we’re going to share it with you here on the Fierce Marriage podcast on the other side.

[00:01:50]

Ryan: Well, greetings and hello, Fierce family. All right. I’m Ryan. This is my lovely wife, Selena. We’re the Fredericks. If you look a little windblown, we don’t, you look beautiful as always. We did get back from our road trip.

Selena: So that’s why we’re windblown?

Ryan: That’s why we’re windblown.

Selena: When we left windblown, this was like a week ago.

Ryan: My head out the window the whole time. Hey, that’s the best way to get all the sights and the smells. It was very cold. We got caught in Southern Idaho. We live in the Washington state. We live in Washington State on the rainy side.

Selena: It is kind of a crazy place.

Ryan: And so I had a break in my commitments in terms of schedule, school stuff, seminary stuff. We planned this like a month ago, and we said, “Let’s go South and get some sun. Let’s do a road trip.

Selena: We got some sun, but we didn’t get some heat.

Ryan: Oh, my word. Was I mistaken?

Selena: There was sun. There was no heat.

Ryan: I thought, you know, like Phoenix, like they get sun all the time.

Selena: Yeah, so just a little North of that, the Grand Canyon.

Ryan: So we got caught in Southern Idaho in a snowstorm at night.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: And we couldn’t even see the highway. Anyway, that was the second night of our road trip. And we were gone for quite a few nights. It was a lot of fun, but I think we need a vacation from the vacation.

Selena: Says every parent.

Ryan: We’ve got four kids.

Selena: Anyway.

Ryan: Four kids, 11 down to two.

Selena: It’s just crazy.

Ryan: You know, you’re living in the club.

Selena: You’re just close quarters.

Ryan: Yeah, close quarters.

Selena: So welcome to Fierce Marriage. If you want to partner with us on our adventures-

Ryan: Well, yeah.

Selena: White knuckle some things.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly.

Selena: It’s not for the faint of heart.

Ryan: I would like to make this available to people who feel like they’ve been helped by the content. Go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. That does actually tangibly affect the Fredericks. It helps us. That represents about 40% of our monthly family income is just through our partners. So if you’re a partner already, thank you. If you’re considering it, thank you. If you can’t do it or you don’t feel called, that’s fine. Still, thank you for being here.

Selena: And pray for us.

Ryan: Pray for us, yeah. You can still pray. But today, yeah, we’re gonna talk about the devil in the machine.

Selena: Devil in the machine. ChatGPT gave you 12 ways. 12 ways to destroy the family unit.

Ryan: Yeah. So we have to kind of talk about the gorilla in the room, because some would look at ChatGPT or something like it and say, it’s basically evil. And before you write me off, people do say this because it’s, you know, some sort of distortion of… it’s dehumanizing, has a dehumanizing effect. And I do think that there are aspects to AI that absolutely run that danger, both in terms of how we interact with it, but also how it interacts with us. It’s in some ways misanthropic, which it seems like it’s counter humanity. And that’s one extreme.

On the other side, and this is the way that I view it, is it’s like any other tool. Hammers can be used to build either brothels or barns. Still a hammer. I think it behooves us as Christians to not stick our head in the sand, but to also not be naive early adopters. So just know that that’s on our radar. I don’t think it’s inherently dangerous. I also don’t think it’s inherently awesome. It’s not gonna save humanity. I think it’s a pretty cool tool. As I’ve heard some say, it’s really good at donkey work.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: It’s really good at work that’s kind of like mindless. It’s not good at creativity, in my view.

Selena: It shouldn’t be.

Ryan: Because it’s not an image bearer of God. So nothing replaces paintings by image bearers, stories by image bearers-

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: …artwork by image bearers of God Himself.

Selena: Yeah, never.

Ryan: So that’s the big caveat. That being said, I asked this question. I can’t remember exactly how I phrased it, but I’ll just paraphrase here. I said-

Selena: You asked it just like that.

Ryan: “Imagine you were the devil. How in 60 years or in a period of time, a number of decades, how would you go about strategically destroying the family unit?” And I said, “Lay it out in a bulleted list cause I don’t want all the paragraphs.”

Selena: And it did it in 12 steps. And there’s also like in between. So we’ll see how quickly we get through this.

Ryan: Very quickly, Selena, you’ve read through this. What was your first take on this? How did you-

Selena: It was just like, yep, yep, yep, yep. That’s exactly right. Yep, yep. See it all. It’s all happened. It’s just like it just gave words to what we see happening and what we’ve been seeing happen for the last, I don’t know, a couple of decades. It just laid it out very plainly for you to see.

So as a Christian reading it, there’s a whole nother perspective or view to see this through. If you’re not a Christian, you could still see, I think the breakdown happening. But I think as Christians, we have such a deeper tie and connection because marriage and the family is God’s idea. It wasn’t just a societal marker of this is what you do next. It came from the Bible. It came from the Lord.

Ryan: Somebody who we’ve gotten to know, I’ve gotten to know online. We actually did an event at their church in Wisconsin, Brandon Steinbach, he commented and what he said something to the effect of, it’s amazing that basically this language model that just takes broad inputs, synthesizes ideas, basically described the last 60, basically post-feminist American society, basically described that this past 60, 70 years and then attributed what happened to a plan that the devil would come up with. That’s telling.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: That’s telling. Here’s another caveat. I don’t know, because I’ve done a number of things with this tool and I don’t know how much it’s playing to what it knows I think and believe.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: I mean, I’ve asked all sorts of theological questions. So anyway, it is what it is. The number one thing that the devil would do according to the devil in the machine is that he would undermine marital commitment. So the way that it articulated this is it would normalize divorce and reduce the stigma surrounding divorce. Now, how common is that?

Selena: Right. Yeah, we have-

Ryan: “Oh, you deserve it, sweetie. You deserve the divorce because he’s not giving you what you deserve. You deserve to be happy. Divorce is no big deal. You’ll recover. The kids will be fine.”

Selena: Well, and another one that we’ve talked about is cohabitation. It says to undermine the marital commitment, one thing you should do is encourage cohabitation without marriage, delaying or replacing those traditional commitments. “So let’s try this out. Let’s see if this works.”

Ryan: Which the studies show-

Selena: It doesn’t.

Ryan: The studies show that cohabiting couples have a much higher divorce rate.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: Because there’s an attitude that goes with it. And it has to do with this: undermining the value of the commitment itself. We don’t actually need a marriage to live together, sleep together, make a life together. We don’t actually need a covenant is the lie.

Selena: That’s the lie.

Ryan: And how pervasive is that in our society? Here’s why we’re talking about it on this podcast, because our whole aim is to point you to Christ, to give you tools to share our failures, our successes, our thoughts, so that you can have a better marriage. So you can have a happier marriage, a thriving or thriving marriage, not for its own sake, but it’s rooted in Christ.

If you find that anything that we’re gonna share today smells familiar, then friend, that’s us trying to maybe open your eyes to, this is not something that just is neutral. There are spiritual forces at work. Scripture tells us that clearly. And God has a desire for marriage, and the spiritual forces that are counter God are going to do things to undermine God’s design and desire for marriage.

And so if you get the sense that your marriage commitment isn’t actually that important, the covenant wasn’t until death, it was until relational death, or it was until-

Selena: It got too hard.

Ryan: It got too hard. Or we both agreed that we should stop. Like we’ll be happier without each other. Okay, you’ve bought in a lie. You have thought that divorce is less tragic than it is. That’s number one. Undermine marital commitment.

Number two, redefine family structures. Under this, the sub-bullets are, promote alternative definitions of family that shift focus from the traditional nuclear model. Advocate for the idea that marriage and biological parenthood are unnecessary for family stability.

Selena: So we can have children outside of being married and it’ll be fine.

Ryan: Right.

Selena: It’s still a family.

Ryan: Right. Or you don’t actually need two parents to be a thriving individual. Kids are gonna be fine if they have just one parent. It’s the same, some will say. I don’t think smart, well-thought-out people will say this. But the academics will say, “Oh yeah, two dads is totally fine. Or two moms. There’s nothing missing. As long as they’re loved, as long as…” You know, that’s the society. They’re saying that you don’t need God’s way. You can do it whatever way kind of works for you.

Selena: Not only do you not need it, but it’s actually hateful to do it that way.

Ryan: And it’s hateful by the way for a podcast like ours to say that’s the wrong way. Which by the way, we don’t care what… we care what God thinks. We don’t care what these people think. So they’ll advocate for an idea that is counter traditional nuclear family. That’s an under-redefined family structures. What’s the third one?

Selena: Number three, erode parental authority. So under this, undermine respect for parents through media portrayals and cultural narratives. We see this all the time in movies and all kinds of social media. Promote child autonomy to the point of diminishing parental guidance and influence. I mean, this is everywhere in terms of public schools. The idea that kids can, quote-unquote, change their gender without their parents knowing it’s trying-

Ryan: Or at all.

Selena: Or at all. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan: But the idea that the child should be free to make those decisions, to make those calls and they don’t need parental input because the parents somehow are detached from-

Selena: Right. It’s the whole autonomy. I mean, the third point was encourage government and institutional intervention in family decision-making.

Ryan: Ooh.

Selena: Which it’s like-

Ryan: This is a little bit different, but someone came in-

Selena: Children are not Caesars.

Ryan: Thank God. The family court system is so against God’s kind of way of things. And with the number one, the divorce thing, paired up with this idea that the government is going to impose its will on it in the name of whatever the compassion thing is, which basically throws men mostly under the bus. Anyway, it’s wild. It’s wild how this is played out. Again, this is a large language model outputting this.

Selena: You can see how it trickles down. You can see… yeah.

Ryan: I wanna go… because the later ones are more interesting to me. Number four is normalize moral relativism. This is widespread. The idea that what’s right for you is right for you, it’s your truth, but it doesn’t have to be right for me. It’s not my truth, right? So you might say, Ryan and Selena, that marriage is good, divorce is bad. Well, I think actually my truth is that my divorce is good. Or my truth is that I don’t actually have to hold to the commitment that we made.

And it says, you wanna spread the idea that moral values are subjective, reducing the influence of shared family values. Diminish the role of faith-based principles in family life. If you’ve lived anywhere other than under a rock, you’ll know that this has happened.

Selena: Number five, promote hyper-individualism. So encourage self-centered thinking, emphasizing personal fulfillment over family responsibilities. We’re very humanist in our approach to everything in our lives, I feel like in culture today.

Prioritize career success, personal freedom, material gain, and family cohesion. Again, it’s all about pleasure to oneself. It’s meeting the desires that you want to have.

Ryan: There’s a few ways this plays out. There’s within the marriage, you backseat the marriage because a) we’re pursuing a lifestyle or we’re pursuing the career ambitions that we have as individuals. And we happen to be in this agreement together. So I’ll pursue my thing, you pursue your thing. We’ll cover the bills together. That’s how it plays out.

But there’s also, and this is why we do the parenting stuff, is this plays out in how our kids approach and view marriage in their formative years.

Selena: And family.

Ryan: So the 16 year old, 17, 18 year old, who are looking out at college and a career, marriage is in many cases, completely off the radar. Like they’re not looking for someone to build a life with, they’re looking for career. As this says, they’re looking for personal freedom, material gain. They have to get theirs.

Selena: Which by the way, career is not as fulfilling as everyone thinks it is. You’ll find out. If you haven’t already, you’ll figure it out and it’ll hit you. And you’ll be like, wow, I really thought that was going to be amazing. And it wasn’t what I thought it was. It’s very, very-

Ryan: So this plays into a marriage podcast by way of, you have most likely, given our demographic that I know from the analytics, you probably have kids. It’s important that we don’t normalize the worldly view of marriage because it’s for their good. It’s for their future. It’s for God’s glory. Number six.

Selena: Sorry. I think women or moms can definitely deal with the hyper-individualism because I think that’s one of the strains on a mom’s heart oftentimes or temptation is that, well, I’m just at home with these kids all the time. Like I don’t have personal freedom. I don’t have a career to show off. What about me? What about my desires and my needs? I mean, there’s that whole line of thinking and that voice in the head just promotes the breaking down of the family.

Ryan: And we’ll see that even in number nine. So these are intertwined for sure.

Selena: Sorry, number six though, shift cultural norms through media.

Ryan: Oh man. Listener, viewer, think about the movies you’ve seen. And so often we don’t critically watch these things. We kind of just take it in for the story. We are either entertained. We feel good or we feel down. We don’t feel good about it. But think about the movies and TV shows, particularly the popular ones.

Selena: Yeah. What are they glorifying? What are they highlighting? What are they emphasizing?

Ryan: So are they glorifying infidelity? Are they glorifying casual sexual relationships or transient connections with people?

Selena: Yeah. Oh, I slept with him, but I don’t really… I don’t know who he is.

Ryan: Right. Another clear one is not just in the content that you watch, which we’ll talk more about how men are perceived and shown in entertainment media, but also the normalization of porn. As a society, you have people who fight for the ability to make and to create and watch porn. What? There’s no good that comes from it.

Selena: There’s nothing manly about that. There’s nothing-

Ryan: There’s no good that comes from it. It’s victimizing to women and children. It creates depraved conditions.

Selena: It’s oppressive. It’s abusive.

Ryan: But it’s so normal. It is so normal. People consume it. Now they won’t talk about it necessarily-

Selena: It’s one of the biggest things people write into us about how it’s destroying their marriage.

Ryan: And yep.

Selena: So number seven.

Ryan: Sorry for the downer of the episode, by the way. So our hope is from this you will walk away with at least one thing that you can think about and talk about with your spouse.

Selena: Yeah. I just think it’s uncovering tactics of the enemy, to be honest. And so that gives me hope. And that gives me instruction, you know, from the Bible and how to live righteously. And it just highlights, I think, the ways that the Lord has shown us to live. Like, this is marriage, it’s between one man, one woman for life. This is what it means. This is what sexual intimacy means. It just puts more weight. It’s like the darkness just makes the light shine brighter. So I think that’s our hope.

Ryan: That’s actually a good point. What I’d like to do at this point… So we’re at number six, we’re halfway through. What I’d like to do is go back over them and say, what’s the positive to the negative?

Selena: Sure.

Ryan: Right? So this is what the enemy is trying to do. Well, what is he trying to undo that God has said to do. Maybe we break it into two episodes. I don’t know. But the positive for number one. So undermining marital commitment. Well, what do we have as Christians? We have a covenantal framework instituted extrinsically from the outside. And our creator has given it to us from the outside and said, humanity, this is my model for you: Covenantal marriage. Who, by the way, our God is covenantal, that He’s chosen to relate to His people in a covenantal way at every turn.

So what is the covenant then? It is something that is stronger than us. Its authority is not derived from us. It is derived from God. That’s the contrast to the devil’s, quote-unquote, prerogative of undermining marital commitment. It’s not just a whimsical thing. It is a covenant.

Selena: It’s a lifetime covenant.

Ryan: A lifetime covenant.

Selena: It’s something that we do not take lightly, but it can also be a very simple and beautiful thing too if you have been raised in what it means to be in a godly marriage and the blessings that that can have on generations, right?

Ryan: Right.

Selena: So the second one, redefine family structure, that was what the devil would do, is just promote what really is a nuclear family and it doesn’t have to be what the tradition says.

Ryan: And what do we have as Christians? Is we have a model that’s been laid out for us clearly in the garden.

Selena: Yes. In the beginning of time.

Ryan: One man, one woman coming together as one flesh in a covenantal bond.

Selena: Being fruitful.

Ryan: Being the fruitful ones, the multiplying ones. And then we have that continually reinforced throughout scripture. So we don’t have to define family because God has already defined it. And we don’t have to figure it out what that structure is because he’s already told us. So the enemy would have you say, is that really the structure?

Selena: Yeah, why can’t it be this?

Ryan: So we hear the negative, but let’s replace it with the positive. Number three, eroding parental authority. Obviously, our children are taught, Christian children are taught, obey your mother and father.

Selena: Yeah, it’s the first commandment of the promise and it may go well with you.

Ryan: And it may go well with you. That cannot be eroded. Like your parental authority isn’t something that’s granted, it’s something that just is. Just by virtue of you being the parent. It’s by fiat. God has said, you’re the mother, you’re the father. Child, obey them.

Selena: Step into this role, yes.

Ryan: Then we have responsibilities as parents.

Selena: To lead and instruct and to correct and discipline.

Ryan: And to love and not exasperate and not to exhaust our children and to lovingly correct them.

Selena: Number four, normalize moral relativism.

Ryan: Seems like I always argue with people online about this.

Selena: God’s truth is the only truth there is. It is the only true thing. If you feel like it’s subjecting you to something you don’t like, well, that’s your pride, that’s your self-centeredness rising up. We pray that the Lord gets a hold of your heart.

Ryan: What you’re saying there is that just, you are then the arbiter of moral reality in the universe.

Selena: Right. And you’re not.

Ryan: Okay, you’re here, so you’re probably a Christian, but you may have bought this idea that morals are kind of like, yeah, God just wants you to be a good person. No, God has a character. He hates certain things. He loves other things. He hates sin. He hates evil. He hates the things that are against his law. And He loves the opposite of those things, right? Again, we don’t have to create a moral system. You see how everything here… the enemy’s devices are always centered on the individual as autonomous, as the one who gets to be the arbiter and decision maker in whatever the issue is?

Selena: It’s the same song and dance as it was in the garden.

Ryan: It’s always been the same.

Selena: You wanna be like God? Don’t you wanna be like God?

Ryan: He’s just holding out on you.

Selena: Just holding out on you. Same song and dance.

Ryan: You can do better.

Selena: You on your own. On your own.

Ryan: And then boom, you’re picked off and your life is ruined because you bought a lie and lies bring death. All right. The number five one, we’re gonna give the positive is… so the negative is promote hyper-individualism. This is not a Christian concept that I am an individual. This is an enlightenment concept that has been twisted by the post-enlightenment into this relative hyper-individualism. It says “I’m not only an individual standing before God, but I’m an individual standing before myself as God”. So what that does is it makes you the arbiter of everything, which we see a lot through here. Again, we see that in all of the 19th and 20th centuries and in the 21st.

Selena: It’s gotta be just a lonely place to be because I don’t know that I wanna be around people that are always telling me what they’re about and what they stand for. It’s just very condemning to me.

Ryan: The thing is it’s not always so outspoken though. People believe this stuff implicitly, right?

Selena: True.

Ryan: But the Christian notion of humanity, of an individual is that you are part of a collective.

Selena: Thank you, Lord.

Ryan: You are part of a covenantal people, namely the gathering of the saints. Now you’re part of the saints who have died and who will come. You’re all part of the church. But you are called to live in a lattice of interconnectivity and dependence, interdependence on one another.

Selena: Thank you, Lord.

Ryan: The family unit included. So I’m not a husband married to a wife. We are one flesh. We are husband and wife together. Yes, we have individual aspects of us. We’re not resorbed into each other, as Dwight resorbed-

Selena: The twin.

Ryan: The twin. No, like we don’t lose our individual identities, but we’re not primarily that.

Selena: Yeah. And we’re not fighting for our individualism. We’re fighting to have unity, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Selena: We’re fighting to have a oneness because the drift will happen. It’s a default. The fight is not for myself. It’s for us.

Ryan: Yeah. The final one we’ll cover for this episode because we’re getting a little long. But don’t worry, we’ll do the next six next week. The negative was the devil would shift cultural norms through media. So glorifying infidelity, casual relationships, and so on and so forth. What’s the positive here?

Selena: What’s the godly?

Ryan: What’s the godly rebuttal to this? What’s the opposite of this? So we have been given a helper who helps us divide between truth and lies, between death and life, help us discern the times. That we don’t have to be those who are just taking whatever ideas are thrown at us, but we can test the spirits. We can test the ideas that are thrown at us. We can know God’s truth and be discerning. Not only that, we can turn off the stupid stuff and stop acting like it’s okay, stop acting like that stuff is okay.

Now, obviously something’s glorifying infidelity, and that turns into some version of pornography on a movie. Well, that was already sin, right? But shows that normalize… I just think of the show Friends. We used to watch Friends when we were newly married. We watched all the seasons.

Selena: No, I know, I know. It’s fine and it’s fine. I know there’s haters.

Ryan: No, no, no, no, no. And I tried to go back. So I was like, I remember this being a pretty funny show. Oh my word. I was like, I can’t watch this. It’s too depraved.

Selena: It really is.

Ryan: I mean, they laugh and the jokes are funny and there are legitimately funny things. Like we still say pivot. Pivot! But man, they’re sleeping around.

Selena: Some of the things they laugh at, some of the things they make light of are really… I mean, people are depressed and living in dark, anxious homes alone because they’ve bought the lie that, oh, it’s not a big deal if I get divorced. It’s not a big deal if I sleep around. It’s not a big deal… Well, talk to those people that are struggling to have a relationship with someone.

Ryan: Remember, this is the devil’s agenda.

Selena: Right, right.

Ryan: They would destroy marriages and destroy families and, in a sense, just destroy society. Remember, the enemy loves death. He’s a death eater. They use the Harry Potter term.

Selena: Steal, kill, and destroy.

Ryan: Loves to steal, loves to kill, loves to destroy. He loves to see God’s crown jewel of creation die and suffer. So this has been, I think, an instructive exercise.

Selena: I think this starts in the home. The culture shift starts in the home.

Ryan: 100%.

Selena: Renormalizing a father and a mother that love one another, that work through hard things together, that repent to one another, that do family worship. Go check out our episode on the Fierce Parenting Podcast, our latest one about the five pillars of a godly and joyful family.

Ryan: That’ll come out in two days.

Selena: I think that’ll be encouraging to you.

Ryan: I saw something-

Selena: Culture doesn’t change overnight. It’s a generation.

Ryan: I saw someone write, do you want to be in a high impact Christian influencer? Said, go home and read your Bible to your kids.

Selena: Amen. I was waiting for it. I was like, oh no.

Ryan: Go home and pray with your wife. That’s where it starts.

Selena: Renormalize. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Ryan: And I think being discerning people of God’s word who are unwilling to capitulate to these tides and these cultural norms, but also wise enough to stand up in ways that are gonna be heard and understood. And if you need to, just put your foot down and say no.

Selena: What does the Bible say? Be wise as?

Ryan: Wise as a serpent, innocent as doves.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: Yeah. So that’s us. By the way, thank you for watching. If you’ve made it this far and you don’t know the gospel, we want to make sure that you hear that at least one time. If you’ve not caught onto it throughout this episode, the gospel is this, the good news of Jesus Christ is this. That Jesus Christ is a son of God who became flesh and that’s Christmas, that’s what we celebrate, it’s God himself became flesh. You can imagine. The God of the universe, creator God of the universe adorned flesh of this creation. Why?

The Bible says God so loved the world. He loved the world in such a way that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life. So Jesus was born in a manger, fully God, fully man, lived a perfect life, a sinless life, died the sinner’s death, didn’t stay dead, but instead He conquered death, was resurrected on the third day. That’s what we celebrate on Easter. And He says, if you believe in Me, Jesus says this, you will be raised to new life with Me. And so when you place your faith in Christ, that new life happens immediately. You are spiritually raised into new life with Christ.

And the promise is that even in our death, we will raise again with him because he has conquered death. He reigns even now in heaven. And so we want you to experience that life right now with Christ. We want to see you, brother or sister, in heaven in glory with Christ. We want those things.

So if you don’t know Christ, we say this, talk to a friend. Find somebody who’s a Christian, say, “Tell me about Jesus. Can we read the Bible together?” If you don’t have a friend like that or you can’t think of one right now, find a church that will preach out of God’s word.

If you don’t know where a good church is, I don’t blame you. They’re hard to find. We have a website set up that will give you some more info on what the gospel is. It’s not complicated. But there’s also a church finder at this website. It’s thenewsisgood.com. We pray that that blesses you.

Let’s pray. Father, what a sobering episode this has been to think through the vices of the enemy and how they may perhaps they’ve played out over the past number of decades in our nation or society. So I pray that you would use this, this output from this technology to help us see more clearly, perhaps areas in our lives and our marriage that we believed these lies. Help us to instead reject the lies and lean into your truth we find in your scripture that hopefully you’ve laid out some of that here today.

I pray for the couples who are struggling, who they get all the ideas, they get all this stuff, but still they just can’t connect, they feel like they’ve been hitting their heads against the wall, their intimate life is suffering, their communication is down, Lord, and they are struggling to even talk to each other. Lord, I pray that you would somehow help them break the ice, help them find one step forward, that they might begin repairing what was lost. We ask this in your name. Amen.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: Amen. Okay. Join us again for next week. We’re gonna cover the last 6 of these which I’m a little bummed because number 7 and 9, I really wanted to get into today.

Selena: It’s okay.

Ryan: We’ll cover those next week. If you’ve been helped by this and you want to partner with us, you can go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. As we mentioned earlier on, that is a big part of our livelihood, and we appreciate that. It helps us to build out this ministry even more. We have some exciting resources coming down the pipeline, things that God has been brewing for years, frankly. Things for children, things for women, things for men. We’re excited about that. But yeah, it’s been a good episode. Alright, this episode of The Fierce Marriage podcast is—

Selena: In the can.

Ryan: I’ll see you again in about 7 days, so until next time—

Selena: Stay fierce.