All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Sept. 13, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
45:19
Relationships, Marriage and the Transition into Manhood with Pastor Rob McCoy

Charlie is joined by his pastor and America's pastor, Rob McCoy, to delve into relationships, marriage and the often fraught transition into masculinity, explaining the deeper biblical truths that imbue each estate with health, meaning,...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Road to Serfdom Intro 00:04:05
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcast.
Hey everybody, happy Sunday.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
This episode is brought to you advertiser-free by all of you that support us at CharlieKirk.com slash support.
It is Sunday, so it is our conversation with Pastor Rob McCoy.
We dive into mental health.
For those of you struggling with depression, struggling with direction in your life, I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.
It's very important.
Traveling the country, I was just in Minnesota, heading to Arizona, then Southern California.
We are not stopping.
We have a country to save, and we are moving quicker and faster than ever to rally the troops to get our president re-elected.
Before we dive into the interview, my very important interview with Pastor Rob McCoy, where we talk about all sorts of things, marriage, meaning, direction, the crisis of masculinity, I want to talk about our partners at thinker.org, T-H-I-N-K-R.org, who distill the greatest books into bite-sized format, 9 to 15 minutes, so you can listen to summaries about them and get the most important information consumed quickly.
Thinker.org is one of my favorite partners because they allow millions of people to be able to understand the ideas that built Western civilization.
Many of you have been writing us at freedom at charliekirk.com asking, where is all this headed?
What is the left's endgame?
What is the road that we are on?
And so for this book of the week for thinker.org, I thought it would be fitting to talk about one of the most formative books that I read growing up that articulated the problems of central planning, that was able to visualize the tyranny of the majority, and also motivate myself and many others to get behind first principles.
The book is called Road to Serfdom by Frederick Hayek.
At thinker.org slash Charlie, by the way, you guys can get a discount and you are able to have one month free at thinker.org slash Charlie.
Road to Serfdom by Frederick Hayek was right after World War II.
F.A. Hayek, who just can be known as Hayek, started to see that England and the United States were beginning to embrace some of the political and economic ideas that had paved the way for collective totalitarian states like Germany, fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia.
This is one of the most important political essays ever, and definitely in the 20th century.
Here are some of the important insights that you will get from Road to Serfdom.
It is an indictment of central planning.
Basically, it argues, correctly, that malicious and power-hungry people inevitably rise to the top of a collectivist society because they are willing to do whatever is necessary.
The question is not whether or not we should plan or not plan.
The question is who is going to plan and for whom?
The word socialism is overused and has managed to confuse proponents and opponents alike.
And Hayek argued that central planning, put all of your trust into one bucket and one Pullet Bureau of Decisions, does not advance the West's political development.
Instead, it disregards political traditions 2,500 years in the making.
If you want to know where we are headed if we continue to pander to BLM Incorporated, continue to raise taxes, continue to drive people out of the inner cities, and allow crime to go unaddressed.
The book Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek is one of the most important books to understand, articulate, and educate your friends about.
At thinker.org slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R, it's very important you spell it correctly.
Pushing Backward to Tribalism 00:05:21
You are able to dive into this title and so many others.
It's not just political books, it's business books, it's health and wellness books, how to win friends and influence people, rich dad, poor dad, think and grow rich, the 80-20 principle, outliers, basic economics, and more at thinker.org slash Charlie.
In the chaos that we are living through and the bedlam that we are seeing happen in the streets, I think this book, Road to Serfdom, is one of the most important for young people in particular to read because Hayek argues that even though it might feel as if one side is pushing for progress, they're actually bringing us back regressively.
You've heard me talk about this before that sometimes when you push so aggressively to move things forward, you actually push things to go backwards, back to tribalism, away from Socratic dialogue, the disintegration of private property, and turning people against each other.
You guys can check this out and more at thinker.org slash Charlie, thinker.org slash Charlie.
I highly encourage everyone here to get a membership, understand these great ideas, and dive deeper into the philosophy that built your world and is also trying to destroy your world.
Ideas on both sides.
We're going to dive into those ideas and so much more.
And we talk about this also in my phenomenal and important conversation with my pastor, Pastor Rob McCoy from Calvary Chapel, Thousand Oaks, California.
He has kept his church wide open, no social distancing, no masks.
He allows full service in person at his church, and he is being persecuted by city, state, local, and county officials.
Pastor Rob McCoy is a hero.
I'm honored to call him my pastor.
Enjoy this Sunday episode brought to you by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
At charliekirk.com slash support.
Everything you give is matched dollar for dollar by a very generous and anonymous listener who put forth a challenge offer at charliekirk.com slash support.
It's Sunday.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
We are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
And I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job.
We are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
I am joined by my pastor and America's pastor, Rob McCoy.
Thanks, Charlie.
Quite a moniker.
So, Rob, we talk a lot about politics on the show.
I actually want to talk about something a little bit different.
I get so many emails from young people that are struggling with mental health, with relationships, substance abuse.
What we have done to young people in this country by shutting down their country.
There were problems that predated the lockdowns, but it only accelerated all of these disturbing trends.
Can you just comment on this?
Because, you know, the media calls, the media labels you as a political pastor, but you're also mentoring and shepherding and healing people that are also dealing with real-life issues as well.
The reason why we're pushing to stay open as a church is for that exact reason.
People think it's religious liberty.
Now, granted, that is a portion of it, but the greatest reason is we love our neighbor.
We're concerned about the youth in our community that have not been able to graduate or experience a graduation prom.
They're dealing with substance abuse issues.
You know, cannabis distributors are open, liquor stores, abortion factories, and this generation of young people has just received the brunt of this misery of these draconian measures.
And yeah, this is why we're pushing.
So some young people, and I think that there's a mental health crisis in our country.
And for any young person watching this, you're a lot tougher than you might think.
There's someone that needs you out there, and we'll talk about what that all means.
And I don't get into the self-esteem movement.
I think it's all nonsense.
Instead, I think that once you have self-control, then you can find self-worth.
It's a very, it's a biblical principle, but not talked about enough.
Rob, can you just talk about some of the crisis you're seeing with young people in relationships and substance abuse, especially in an affluent area like Thousand Oaks?
Seems like it's almost worse.
Absolutely.
We've had two psychologists on our program, and both of them say their practices are exploding with young people.
The drug use is out of control.
We have a heroin epidemic in Ventura County.
And interesting, you know, my son's 18.
He missed his graduation.
He missed his prom.
And when he was 13 years old, I took him on a walkabout, you know, boy to man.
It's almost like a bar mitzvah.
So cool.
Tell me about it.
Well, it's kind of like a bar mitzvah, where you go, you're a son of the law, where you go from being a child to being a man, and now you're responsible to the law.
And I took him to a cemetery, and I said, you know, every great journey begins with the end in mind.
I had him observe the tombstone, see what was written on it.
What do you live for?
What's the meaning of life?
We had a long conversation there as a flowers of the field are there one day and gone the next.
You know, that's not many people visit a cemetery.
And the idea is if you want your life to be remembered, it's what you leave behind.
And so he got that.
And then, you know, we went to where the babies are born, saw the new life, talked about the responsibility of a man is that you're a provider and a protector.
And I watched him at age 13, both my sons, there was a distinct change in them to receive responsibility at that age.
So, and then I'm watching my 18-year-old go through this misery.
Responsibility for Young Men 00:12:58
And one of the things that I did, and it was actually you who inspired it, because I've always liked Jordan Peterson, but you were the one who turned me on to him.
I took my son through Jordan Peterson's book, Rules on Living.
12 Rules for Life.
Yeah, 12 Rules for Life.
And we went through that every morning.
Now, granted, it's a little bit difficult to read, but we had some fun with the scriptures.
The rules are easy to understand.
They are.
That's when it starts to get, that's when the easy stuff stops.
Right.
Right.
It gets very heady very quickly.
It does.
And, but we had the ability to distill it down to you know, memorable quotes that both of us glean from.
For example, sit up straight with your shoulders back, stand fast and steadfast in the Lord.
Yeah, that sort of paraphrasing the verse, right?
I mean, yeah, and you're going through the whole thing on crustaceans with lobsters and you know, I mean, serotonin levels.
Serotonin levels.
I mean, but you, you, you, you break it down, and he really got it.
And so did I.
I was really blessed by it.
And I wanted, you know, I know you're asking me questions, but I would, I was so blessed by what you shared with me that you gleaned from Jordan.
I want to talk on that.
And then there's an angle, too, that I think young people are struggling with, and that's relationally because the victimization culture that we've created has left an entire generation, especially for males.
How do you hyperfeminization of our country?
Hyper-feminization.
How do you engage?
And people are longing for intimacy.
And what does that mean nowadays for this entire young generation?
And what are the rules for living?
And maybe we can touch on that.
I want to get, I mean, you're the expert on that, but if I could comment on the Jordan thing first, please.
Jordan Peterson has done more to defend and advance the gospel of Jesus Christ than most Christian pastors ever will.
Never forget, there's a three-part series of Jordan Peterson in front of tens of thousands of people, thousands of people, millions of live stream viewers.
I mean, 23 million YouTube views, which is unbelievably hard to get in each video.
Him versus Sam Harris, a devout atheist, where Jordan Peterson, despite the mockery and the persecution of the atheist chattering class when they're going after the Bible, he doesn't not just give it an inch.
He defends and he says, you don't understand.
There's no other document like this ever created.
He says, I can't even quite explain the psychological and there's something, the psychological truth and the harmony of the book where, yes, you can read it sequentially, but the entire book harmonizes with itself the more you read.
From beginning to end.
And so here's a guy that, again, comes from the academy.
He's a social psychologist.
A clinical psychologist who's contending for the greatest book ever and for truth and can articulate Christianity better than most pastors I've ever found.
And I could tell you, Rob, Jordan Peterson did not bring me to Christ.
He didn't.
Pastor did that.
Actually, a Bible teacher did that in fifth grade.
Jordan Peterson set me more on fire for the gospel of Jesus Christ than most any Christian pastor ever would.
You might say, How is that possible?
So he also goes through chapter by verse by verse, chapter by chapter, the whole Bible.
He does.
He actually reads, he doesn't skip verses.
He doesn't say this is inconvenient.
And he talks about what is the historical, psychological, sociological, and cultural impact of, for example, the Tower of Babel.
Don't try to build something on this earth too high because God's going to scatter it to chaos.
That's true governmentally.
That's true sociologically.
That's true individually.
And so he goes through the entire Bible.
And it's not just, he doesn't look like the Bible as an Aesop fable book.
That's not what he does.
Because that's the criticism of him.
It's deeper than that.
He says Matthew 5 is the most important dialogue in human history.
He makes the argument, he does, that Matthew 5 changed the course of human history.
And he says, even an atheist that doesn't understand Matthew 5 is anti-history.
Amen.
The book that you turned me on to is just riddled with biblical wisdom, right?
With biblical wisdom, quoting complete chapters of the Bible.
Uninterrupted.
Not cherry picking.
Yeah.
Not prosperity gospel stuff.
It's, you know, we talk about OIA, observation, interpretation, application.
So when you're teaching, you're observing the text, you're interpreting the text, the original meaning, et cetera, breaking down the nuances of the words in the Greek and the Hebrew.
But the application is where Jordan Peterson just kind of, I don't think, gets it as well.
They don't understand the public square.
They don't understand, you know, and the vast array of education that Jordan Peterson has to be able to bring that into the application of the text is pretty fascinating.
Well, and also how he doesn't give an inch.
What I love is that he has given multiple opportunities by the atheists just to hedge a little bit.
Maybe the Bible is just a good document, the best.
He defends it with more veracity and more personal connection to the text than any person I have ever seen, minus really good Bible-believing teachers like yourself and Jack Hibbs.
I mean, it's the 1% of the 1% of pastors, in my opinion, that I have seen, that I've experienced.
And what's really interesting, though, is that Jordan, and I've seen this, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, he brought more people to Christ because there were people that were raised in a church, got disaffected by the church.
They were raised in observational and interpretive churches, but with no application at all whatsoever.
And here he is.
He has 12 rules for life, 12 being a biblical number, 12 disciples, 12 tribes of Israel.
And he doesn't pick that number out of thin air.
He explains why he chose that number.
He says that number harmonizes with what a human being can remember, interpret, and actually apply to their life.
He has a whole thing on why he chose 12, not 13, not 11, not 14, not 10, not 8.
Anyway.
But then he goes, here are the 12 rules that if you follow these rules, your life is going to be a little less awful and a little more meaningful.
So he actually comes from this thing that we live in original.
He comes from this belief that we live in original sin.
And his whole platform is people are living in a state of chaos.
And that's the whole, it's 12 rules for life, an antidote to chaos.
That if you live in a state of chaos, you're going to be miserable.
So many young people do.
You took those 12 rules for living, and I watched you masterfully use it.
I don't know if you remember this.
We were at Calvary Chapel Church.
I think that was the second visit we made with the great Jack Hibbs.
And we're taking questions from the audience, and a young man comes up who is borderline suicidal.
And he asks a poignant question, and it's almost like you could hear a groan in the audience because it reflected many of the children that were represented in the families.
And you went through for him, you gave him such great advice.
And Jack went on later, Pastor Jack went on later to talk about how that deeply affected that young man.
Will you share with everybody?
Because that was profound.
Yeah, the spirit of his question was, Charlie, is it really worth continuing?
Because all the things are rigged against us conservatives and Christians.
Hollywood and media, the immigration system, tech companies.
He just goes on and on and on.
And I said, I completely agree those things.
And he's a white male.
He's a white male, and people are accusing you, all these sorts of things, right?
And he says, what's the point?
Almost, then what ends up happening is he's starting to just start to wonder if there's a nihilistic path for him.
Yeah, what's the point?
We're polishing brass on the titanium.
Precisely.
And it's even just, we're all just cells.
Might as well end it now.
And that's what a lot of young white men are doing right now, by the way.
Especially in the church.
In the church, a lot.
And the church has, in my opinion, not had a good answer to this.
But using Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life and the Bible, I basically said, all those things are true.
None of those are reasons not to live a meaningful life.
And I asked him, I said, do you have responsibility in your life?
And he says, I don't know.
I said, here's the test of responsibility.
If you don't show up somewhere tomorrow, does someone have a harder day?
If the answer is yes, then you're responsible for something or someone.
It's called being a man.
Provider and protector.
You know what the problem with masculinity in our country?
There's nothing to provide and there's nothing to protect to.
For men.
What ends up happening is they say any sort of your instinct to defend the innocent as a man is wrong.
That's toxic masculinity when we're actually called to do as men to do this, to provide.
No, no, no.
Women can and should provide at the very same equal levels as men.
Now, I'm not against, I think it's reprehensible and immoral and evil and wrong to say that men and women should earn the same, should earn differently for the same work.
I think that is wrong.
I agree.
However, I actually don't, I think it's really bad, Rob, and this is an economic thing that actually impacts cultural and spirituality.
And the American church has failed this.
Donald Trump has actually addressed this, that in order for a middle-class family of $80,000 a year to stay afloat and not go into debt and raise a family of four, they have to work 53 weeks a year.
What does that mean?
Two people have to go to work.
Bingo.
All of a sudden, that's the destruction of the American family right there.
Now, it should be where it was in the 1985, 33 weeks a year.
So they could take a ton of time off.
And if the male worked 40 weeks a year, their earnings would go up and they'd be able to save some money.
Michelle and I have been married 30 years.
We've got five kids, four homegrown, one grafted.
Natasha, we adopted when she was 12 from Russia.
So we've got three daughters, two boys.
And she's been a stay-at-home mom for all 30 years of marriage.
And that's a choice that we made together that she wanted to do.
Now, that meant we lived in some pretty dicey places.
And he did that on a pastor's salary.
But it was critical to us that there would always be somebody home.
And it's worked.
All of our kids are flourishing.
They're doing well.
Yeah, they're doing well.
I know all four.
I've never met.
I don't know if I've met Natasha or not.
Well, she's at Liberty right now.
She's doing great.
But I've met all four.
I've met Molly, Kelly.
I've met Kelly, Mikey, and of course Daniel, and they're all superstars.
Well, thanks.
Take care of the mother.
But I can speak.
I could reaffirm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that was.
And I'm not trying to say that when two parents work, I'm going to be very clear that it's necessarily going to be a bad thing for the kid.
I'm not.
I'm just talking statistics.
The statistics are if both parents go into the workforce, and if that kid gets home at 3 o'clock when he's 15 years old, he is far more likely to do things he should not be doing in substance abuse and otherwise.
It's just the statistics.
If there's not a human being waiting for that 15-year-old when he gets home at 3 p.m. from school, everything drops off the ledge.
It's just the way it is.
And some parents might really contest with this.
They might say, Charlie, you're totally wrong.
You know what?
If you have it worked out, God bless you.
I'm just talking about what social psychologists and what the macro data shows.
That when both your parents go in the workforce, especially during those formative years of 12, 13, 14, 15, where there is just an incoming of temptation for young people, especially in the modern era, then there's not that check.
There's not that check and balance.
My father was a Navy captain, three tours of Vietnam, a lot of tours on duty, gone quite often.
My mother was always home.
The connection I had with the transition as we called into manhood happened in Boy Scouts.
Now, that's an institution that's been dismantled by the secular left, and it's had troubles clearly, and yet the entire thing has been pretty much, I don't know, dismantled.
It's still existing, but not where it was.
Yeah, Boy Scouts.
I'm an Eagle Scout.
It's a disaster.
But I had John Sanford, who, you know, he was our scout master.
And when my dad was gone, he was that guy.
And so the first thing I did when I became the pastor of church is set up a Boy Scout troop, Troop 7-Eleven.
And Scott Nave is a scout master, and he was instrumental in the formation of my boy's life.
And so, you know, you seek out those areas where you can have that transition into manhood.
Yes.
But we're losing all those.
Football's being taken away.
That's right.
Anything that's a transition into manhood, whether it's Boy Scouts, football, et cetera, they're deconstructing all of that.
Intentionally.
And for men, they need physiological encounters more so than women.
They need recess.
They need sports.
And they need outdoor activities in the woods, in the wilderness.
They need to wrestle.
They need to do these sorts of things.
Competition is critical.
And we have removed all of them.
All of it.
And it's an incredible disaster.
So, you know, young men message me a lot.
They're 16, 17, 18.
They say, Charlie, I have, you know, I'm struggling with problems with mental health and all these sorts of things.
And my message to them and to parents is, and I deal with a lot of these.
My message to the young man is different than the message to the young parent.
And I want to be clear: young women have many problems as well, but they're completely different.
They're about social acceptance.
They're about ridicule, about social media bullying, that sort of stuff.
Not that men don't experience that, but it's completely different problems.
And we need to differentiate those.
For young men, the biggest problem they have when they're 16 or 17 is they've not been challenged and they have not been put into a place where they're pushed into the unknown to find out who they really are and what they can do.
That's what the Boy Scouts used to do.
When I was a Boy Scout becoming an Eagle Scout, they put you in to get your wilderness survival merit badge, you had to go out into the woods and survive a night, start a fire, pitch a tent, make a meal.
Actually, you wouldn't even have a tent.
You'd have to build a woman.
No, that's correct.
To get the merit badge, you have to build it out of, you have to build a what's the right word?
A fort, a fortress, whatever.
But that's not an insignificant exercise.
There's a reason why so many U.S. presidents were Eagle Scouts and U.S. senators and astronauts.
And now the Boy Scouts is a complete and total moral failure for a lot of different reasons.
But so there's a crisis of masculinity.
But for young men listening out there, say, Charlie, how do I get my life together?
Challenging the Unknown 00:03:25
I've said this before.
I'm going to say it again.
And I got a beautiful note the other day where someone said, Charlie, this helped save my life.
So it's amazing.
And it's biblical.
I saw what you do with a young man.
Well, and again, it's not me.
I'm just a communicator.
I understand.
We're all just communicators of this ancient wisdom.
Where one beggar shown another beggar where the food is.
Amen.
And I just happened to be lucky enough to find it, and I want to share it, which is you take out a piece of paper.
If you're listening to this and you're like, man, I just, my life's screwed up right now.
I just feel bad.
I'm just not doing things right.
Here's one suggestion and one task.
The task first.
It's called maps for meaning.
And Jordan Peterson turned me onto this.
It's phenomenal.
You take a paper, front and back, and you write specifically where you want your life to be five years from now.
You want what you're driving, where you're living, what you're doing, how you feel, what you're seeing, what you're experiencing.
And then you have that kind of true north.
You have to understand that we as human beings are aiming preachers.
You know this.
You hit what you aim at.
For lack of a vision, the people perish.
Is that biblical?
Yep.
There you go.
And that's exactly right.
When there's no vision, you will be in a state of chaos.
And so you have to get your aim right.
You have to.
Most people, young people in particular, have no aim at all whatsoever with you because they've been told by people around them that it's a waste of time.
You'll never achieve it.
Or then told by the society at large that everything is broken.
What's the case?
And it's almost, again, it's this nihilism that has seeped into every facet.
Then here's a suggestion.
You can actually multiply your life by subtracting your life.
I got an amazing email on the podcast here, and you guys can always email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I want to help anyone right now that's dealing with this.
I want to help you wrestle through this.
And anyone doubting that, I have watched.
You are amazing when it comes to email.
You respond to every email.
I'm looking going, Charlie, how do you do this?
Where do you find the time?
But you're very not every email, but every email I get on my podcast, I read, and most of which I respond to.
Yeah, and you've copied me on a couple that have pertained to me as well.
And I'm just, I'm amazed, Charlie.
One of the reasons.
Well, I don't know about that.
I do.
I'm going to make it more technical.
One of the reasons why this podcast has grown so amazingly is I have the combined wisdom of all my listeners.
Yeah.
Is that people are sending me ideas all the time.
Like, let's do a podcast on that.
Let's do a podcast on it.
This is a great idea.
And your guests.
And my guests.
Yeah.
So it's not me.
I just work here.
So, but you can multiply by subtraction.
So this young man emailed me and said, Charlie, you challenged me in one sentence that changed my last couple months.
You said, What if you went one month with no drinking, no drugs, no bad food?
You exercised every day.
And he said, I did it.
And I feel like such a better person.
And I have my life sorted out.
Now I did your maps for meaning.
It's an incredible email.
And I just kind of said it flippantly, Rob.
And someone applied that to their life.
And it brings me great joy.
But I mean that, which is that instead of indulging yourself, challenge yourself.
You'll find a lot more in life.
The greatest joys and the breakthroughs are actually what happens when you make a tough, tough, tough goal, a tough aim, you challenge, and you actually don't deprave.
That's not the right word, but you forego the instant gratification for something that can happen next.
You apply restraint in order to pursue excellence.
Isn't there a plaque that I refer to in the stairwell or something?
They're going to remove it any day now, but I keep referring to it.
It's like a ticket.
We're talking about it too much.
Yeah.
So one final thought on this, and I'd love to ask you about relationships really quick, which is that I think we overcomplicate some of this stuff through self-help books and through all these big seminars and all this.
Jordan's 12 rules for life are amazing, and he wrote it like a psychological journal, right?
Marriage as Sacrifice 00:10:33
If you just look at the 12 rules and just kind of get an essence of it, I actually like Jordan's lectures better than his writings.
I think he's a better lecturer than a writer.
And I know him as a friend.
He got a little evolutionary in the book itself.
Yeah, and if you don't subscribe to Darwinianism, then it kind of has some contradiction.
It's like eating a whole chicken.
You eat the meat and spit out the bone.
Yeah, and look, there are some Christian Darwinists, and I don't really weigh into that, to be honest with you.
But some people believe in that.
But I think he's trying to justify everything there with good reason and logic.
And I take some exception with part of it.
I will say this, though, that for every young person out there, think to yourself, Am I doing something right now that I know that's bad for me?
That if I stopped doing it, my life would be better.
And the answer is yes, then stop doing it.
I know that's a really simple equation, but most, and this is why the ethic of Christ is so amazing: freedom from sin.
The secular culture says sin makes you free, right?
That's what our whole culture is.
Indulge yourself.
Whereas in Christ, it's actually the sacrifice of that sin where you get to true liberty.
Whoa, that's a concept that no other religion ever can conjecture.
And the Lord will be in you to give you the strength to do that.
Total gift.
I mean, nothing else.
Nothing.
Yeah.
So let me ask you, Rob, I have a lot of young people that also message me about relationships, difficulty with relationships, people having trouble finding partners, maintaining partners, being in intimate relationships.
You have a whole talk on this.
In fact, you've been doing this for years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, God creates man.
He said, let us make man in our image.
And the word used is Elohim, which is singular plurality or unified diversity.
The Godhead is relational, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
And when he says, let us make man in our image, he makes us relational.
He creates man, creates woman.
And the only thing in the Garden of Eden that wasn't good after all the creation was it's not good that man should be alone.
And so God created marriage to resolve the aloneness of man.
He didn't do it for procreation because you can procreate outside of marriage.
But the aloneness, this intimacy, is something everyone's searching for.
So some people don't make the argument that marriage is for children.
And your argument would be it's actually a lot deeper than that.
Yeah, it is deeper than that.
It's to resolve the aloneness of man, that we are relational.
And it's not good that man should be alone.
That's what God said.
It was the only thing in the Garden of Eden that wasn't good.
It's not good that man should be alone.
And like I said, you can procreate outside of marriage.
We've proven it, right?
Yeah, in fact, actually, there's more babies out of wedlock than within marriage.
So to resolve the aloneness of man, God set it up.
And it's fascinating.
He creates this estate of marriage.
I hate I use that word institution or a creative.
I knew corrected me.
Well, and it was rude of me.
And I was tired that day.
It was a long year that week.
Yeah.
That's a great line.
I was a little short.
No, it's all good.
But I was thinking to myself, it is an estate.
It's beautiful.
And this estate of marriage, it's the greatest intimacy man can have this side of heaven, where a man and a woman have intimacy.
And the Bible says in Genesis, they were naked and unashamed.
And the idea is that there's complete intimacy, complete clarity, that there's no hidden secrets.
They're completely revealed to one another.
And so when you look at that, and then you see the fall of man, marriage is the only estate that survived the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.
So marriage is still intact.
And the way it is, it's a microcosmic picture of Christ's love for the church.
He's the groom, the church is the bride.
And if you look at a Western wedding, it's fascinating.
A Western wedding, the woman comes down in white, washed in the blood of the Lamb, white as snow.
The groom, which is Christ, comes out in his burial outfit, which is the tuxedo.
No, serious.
This is a Western theme.
Comes out in his burial outfit.
And it's his death that has cleansed us of all unrighteousness, his death, burial, resurrection.
And they're united, and the two become one.
And this is a picture of Christ's love for the church.
He laid his life down.
So when you go through Ephesians 5 and 6, it gives the outline of the family.
It says, submitting to one another, submitting to one another in the fear of the Lord.
Wives submit to your husbands is unto the Lord.
Children obey your parents.
It'll go well with you.
You'll live long on the earth.
And husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church.
So you see this big umbrella of God, and then immediately under that is the husband, then the wife, then the children.
It doesn't mean that they're not equal.
It just means they have different roles.
And if you look at it, of the four, God, husband, wife, children, what's the weakest physically and mentally of the four?
It's obviously the child.
Who has the most levels of protection?
The child.
Physically, between a male and a female.
Of course, there's always exceptions.
But physically, who's the weakest between the male and the female?
It's going to be the female.
She has the next most levels of protection, then the husband.
Now, if the husband pulls out from under the umbrella of God, the wife can raise the children with the Lord.
And there's single parents that have done that and done it well.
It's not ideal, but it works.
And maybe a wife pulls out and there's the husband and the children.
It still works.
It's not ideal, but it works.
But the optimal is what God designed.
And so with that, how do you have intimacy?
How is marriage established?
The Bible says a man will leave his mother and father, be cleaved to his wife.
The two shall become one flesh.
And the Bible says, a man who lays down his life will then find it.
And so marriage is really a sacrifice.
It's laying down your life.
And you look at that and you think, okay, how does that work?
Well, as Christ loved the church, he laid his life down.
Husbands, do the same.
Love your wife as Christ loved the church.
Lay your life down.
And so, in doing this, the picture is he initiates, the wife responds.
This is a picture of Christ's love for the church.
And then you talk about intimacy.
Sex is an expression of intimacy, both physical, emotional, and spiritual.
You connect on all three levels and you're intimate.
And how that works is the Greeks, we talk about the most misunderstood word in the English language.
And you can use it in two sentences, and it means something totally different.
I love my brother, and I love my wife.
Well, I love my brother.
I got a great brother, wonderful brother, but I don't love him like I love my wife.
You know what I'm saying?
So it's the same word, two different meanings.
And we only have one word in English for love.
The Greeks had many words, three in particular, that constitute more than 90% of the meaning itself.
And you find those three words in the scriptures.
There's eros, which is the idea of eros, is that it's selfish and it's only intended for objects.
For example, I love this shirt because it makes me look skinny.
And you're going, well, no, it doesn't.
But you love it because of how it makes you feel.
And you're selfish.
It's all about you.
And that's where we get the word erotic.
I was going to say, yeah, that's the.
And the word erotic, the idea is you take the pinnacle of God's creation, which is man, and reduce them to an object for your pleasure.
And that's where pornography comes from.
You know, much of the pornographic industry is driven by drug addiction in many respects.
And you see, if a guy's walking on campus and he sees a girl coming across, he's never spoken a word to her, Day in his life, doesn't realize that her parents are going through a divorce or her brother's dying of cancer.
He doesn't care.
She's an object for his pleasure.
She's eye candy.
I'd like to get some of that.
And he, you know, says a growls or something.
But he has no clue about her world.
That's an object for his pleasure.
So humans can love other human beings with Eros, but they have to do one thing, reduce their intrinsic value as a pinnacle of God's creation to that of an object.
And every object can be purchased for a price.
If I take you to dinner, we sleep with me.
And that just, that devalues humanity.
Now, it's attractive because you're drawn to somebody with your eyes and you look at them and it does something to you, but that doesn't sustain intimacy.
And what happens is we immediately go to the eros and we lose the building block of intimacy.
You get to know someone first.
You spend time investing in their life both emotionally and spiritually and come to understand them so that when the trials of life come, you're not just connected by an animalistic connection of a physical realm.
And now you can share through life's burdens and joys.
So the next level of love in the Greek is called agape, agapeo, which is where you find in the scriptures, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.
For God so agape the world.
Agape is a selfless love and it's only intended for human beings, not for objects.
It's the love that a mother has for her child.
Whereas Eros would be the love that a newborn baby has for the mother.
And you go, wait a minute, if it's only for objects, how can a baby love the mother?
The mother's not an object.
The baby doesn't look at the mother as a human being.
The mother is the milk wagon.
Hook me up.
It's two o'clock in the morning.
I'll scream until I get what I want.
So it's still an object love and eros.
But when you get to agape, the mother loves the baby selflessly.
It's two in the morning.
She's given birth to that child.
She hurts in places she didn't know she had.
And she gets up and loves on that baby, cleans, you know, a child that age, we've had four of them.
They make a noise on either end.
It results in a mess.
And it's never at a convenient time.
And the mother is loving on that child.
And that is agape love, selfless.
When I was a young boy, I'd be driving with my mom in the car, a Volkswagen bug, and a car would cut in front of us.
And that was before we had seatbelts.
And she'd put her hand and get in front of me.
And what she was communicating to me without words is, I'm going to put myself between you and danger because I love you more than I love myself.
It's a selfless love.
Greater love has no man than this, and he'll lay down his life for a friend.
That's agape.
And then the third type of love, agape is the highest form of love a human being can give.
But the highest form of love a human being can experience is called phileo.
It's misunderstood as brotherly love because we get the city of Philadelphia, city of brotherly love.
It's deeper than that.
Because if you look at the discourse in John 21 with Peter, when he's restoring him, he interchanges agape with phileo.
And what he's saying is, phileo is a mutual love.
Having the same love, being of like mind, let the mind that was in Christ Jesus be in you.
So phileo is achieved by agape, laying your life down, the husband initiates, the wife responding, laying her life down like we did when we came to Christ.
And the two become one flesh and we have a like mind.
The Highest Form of Love 00:05:12
We operate together in intimacy.
And this is phileo.
This is A plus A equals phileo.
That's the idea.
I can give you two illustrations.
I know limited on time.
I'll wrap it up with two illustrations if you want.
Is that good?
All right.
When I was young and crazy, I was dating a girl and she came to me and she said she was pregnant.
And I set up an appointment at the abortion clinic.
Because at that point, you know, I wouldn't have believed her.
And that child was an inconvenience.
And I wanted to get rid of that kid because, listen, her father, big guy, he'd kill me.
And when he was done killing me, my dad would resurrect me and he'd kill me.
And I didn't want anyone to know.
So, you know, I had money for my paycheck, money I'd had saved, set up the appointment at the abortion clinic.
And that week, she said, I had my period and I'm not pregnant.
And of course, that relationship ended.
And fast forward, Michelle and I, newly married, she's pregnant.
And we go to the doctor's office for the trimester checkup, Dr. Teresa Avance, amazing doctor.
I'm holding my wife's hand.
She's working the ultrasound device.
I've got a name picked out for a boy and a name picked out for a girl.
And she's working the device and we're excited to find out.
And Dr. Avance looks over at me and looks over at Michelle and looks down at Michelle and there's tears in her eyes and they weld up.
And when she looks down, the tears start to fall.
And she says, Rob, Michelle, I'm sorry, but your baby's died.
And I'd never been through anything like that my whole life.
Michelle, you know, she was crying.
She squeezed my hand so tight, you know, just and she went in for a DNC, a dilate and cutarage is what they call it.
Same procedure as an abortion, but in this case, our baby was already dead.
And during the procedure, something happened where she began to hemorrhage horribly and she almost died.
And they wheeled her out.
And I remember her passing by me as they were rushing her to the emergency room.
And her face was so ashen gray that you couldn't tell where her face ended and her lips began.
And her eyes would roll back in her head and they rushed past.
And I remember just collapsing in the seat in the waiting room.
And I just remember saying, God, please don't let her die.
And for the first time in my life, I realized I love somebody more than I love myself.
And when they finally stabilized her and they let me come in the room, this is like over 30 years ago.
I walked into the room and there, tubes were running in and out of her body.
Her hair was thrashed.
Her lips were cracked from dehydration.
I grabbed her hand.
It was cold and she was out.
And I just said, you know, don't die.
I don't want to go through life without you.
And she recovered.
Our baby died.
My wife lived.
And at that moment, God spoke to my heart and he said, Rob, what's the difference?
Not an audible voice, but it was very clear to me.
What's the difference?
I said, God, what do you mean?
What's the difference?
He said, what's the difference between the child you want to get rid of and the one that you're weeping over?
And I said, well, Lord, this one was all about me.
And I want to get rid of that baby to protect myself from the girl's dad.
But this child wasn't about me.
I'd give my life away.
And as painful as this day was when I lost my baby and I almost lost my wife, I wouldn't give up one day of this for a thousand of these.
Because that day I never felt more loved and more human in all my life.
Love is what can I give.
Sex is what can I get.
And intimacy comes when you lay your life down.
You serve another human being.
And I'll leave you with this last thought.
Four most intense drives of a male adolescent.
They say a male adolescent has a sexual thought every 15 to 18 seconds.
Like, I got to go to history class.
Oh, you know.
So you got air, three minutes without air, water, three days without water, food, 40 days without food.
Fourth most intense drive, male adolescent, sex drive.
And I remember saying this in a public school and the kid goes, wait a minute.
Why would God make me this way, make my fourth most intense drive as a male, my sex drive, and then say, wait until marriage?
And at the time he asked me, all the girls are giggling.
He goes, don't you test drive a car before you buy it?
And the girls were laughing.
And he had me baffled.
And he goes, is God cruel or something?
And I thought, yeah, he kind of is.
But then all of a sudden, the Bible says, you lack wisdom, and I asked God.
James 1, 5.
Yeah.
And I looked at him.
I said, tell me about your dad.
You got a good dad?
He goes, no, he's a jerk.
Divorced my mom.
I said, okay.
And I had told him about a guy named Jeff that I'd worked with who his first time he ever kissed a woman was on the altar and very first sexual experience after their honeymoon night.
Good dad, 50-hour work week, serves a kid, serves his wife.
And I said, wouldn't you like to have had a dad like Jeff?
And don't you wish your mom would have had a husband like Jeff?
And he goes, yeah.
I said, the reason why God takes a fourth most intense drive, you can't do without air.
You can't do without water.
You can't do without food.
But he takes that drive to teach you how to serve, to lay your life down.
So when the day comes, you know how to serve a family and care for them.
And he got it.
And this was a secular kid in a secular school that understood that principle.
God's not cruel.
He's in the business of making men.
Men are providers and protectors.
And if you want intimacy, you got to learn how to be a provider and a protector and lay your life down and serve other human beings.
That's awesome.
Providers and Protectors 00:03:41
Well, Rob, we'll have to keep this conversation going.
You bless me, Charlie.
And this is a generation that is blessed to have you as a voice.
Autodidactic.
I say that a lot.
But Charlie, keep it up because there are a lot of people out there, young people, who they've been misled and they're longing for a way out.
And God's used you as that voice.
And I just pray God continues to do that.
So bless you, man.
Thank you.
And everyone can email us, freedom at charliekirk.com if you want to email Rob.
And the last, last thing I'll say is if you're going through something, talk, talk, talk, talk through it, talk to somebody, write it out.
Dialogue matters.
I'm not as good at you, Charlie, with email, but I'm Rob at Godspeak.com.
I'll do my best to respond.
In Instagram, I'm better, Rob underscore McCoy.
There you go.
Let's get him a bunch of followers, everybody.
Yeah, well, whatever.
But anyway, I can help.
Thanks, Rob.
Thanks, everybody.
See you soon.
Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode.
I really encourage you guys to get involved with Turning Point USA.
Go to tpusa.com right now, tpusa.com.
If you are a student and you want to get involved on campus, go to tpusa.com to get involved in the fight for free enterprise, for American exceptionalism, for a strong country, for freedom of speech at tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
If you feel like you're losing your country and you want to do something about it, maybe chip in some money, a great place to do that is at tpusa.com.
Also, check out our professor watch list at professorwatchlist.org.
Find out who's teaching your children.
Find out who's teaching our children ideas that are trying to destroy our country.
We unmask radicals and advance freedom at professorwatchlist.org.
For example, we just added a new professor, John Cheney Lippold at the University of Michigan.
John Cheney Lippold is an associate professor at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on internet studies, cultural studies, and algorithm studies.
Lippold made headlines for his blatant discrimination against pro-Israel students at Michigan.
After agreeing to the initial request, he refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student that wanted to study abroad in Israel due to his adherence to the BDS movement.
He said, as you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine.
Made up.
This boycott includes writing letters of recommendations for students who study there.
This is John Cheney Lippold at University of Michigan, who refuses to write a letter of recommendation for a student if that student wants to study in the Holy Land, the state of Israel.
You guys can find out those stories and so much more at professorwatchlist.org.
Brought to you by TurningpointUSA, TPUSA.com.
At TurningPoint USA, we are on over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country building the base of support for young people.
Educating, identifying, empowering, and organizing the next generation around the values of free enterprise, American exceptionalism, and a better tomorrow for our generation.
Email us your questions, as always, at freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you guys want to win a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller, The MAGA Doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, hit that subscribe button, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you do that, you guys will be in the running to win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
Again, thank you guys so much for supporting us at CharlieKirk.com slash support.
Thank you guys so much.
God bless you.
Big episodes coming up tomorrow.
That's all I can say.
So make sure you're subscribed.
Make sure you guys are refreshing your episode queue very early on Monday morning.
Thanks so much.
God bless.
Export Selection