Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman,

Todd Pruitt and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

What's the most incomprehensible verse in the Bible?

Here's a hint.

It's not what you think.

Listen in as the gang talks about the cultural obsession with youth and its inevitable impact

on the church.

Keep listening after the conversation to find out how you can download an MP3 from the Alliance.

Today, from the Alliance. Today we want to talk about the implications of the most incomprehensible verse in the Bible.

It isn't one that you'll find in the more obscure passages in Daniel or Revelation.

It's actually one that you find in Paul's pastoral epistles,

specifically his first letter to Timothy, his young colleague. In 1 Timothy chapter 4 and

verse 12, Paul says this, and as I've said, this is, I think, completely incomprehensible to us today. Paul says this, let no one despise you

for your youth. And it's incomprehensible because the idea today that somebody would be despised for

their youth is so far outside of our cultural framework as to sound completely bizarre. We live in a world where

youth is that which is prized. The fashion industry is predicated on selling clothes to the youth or

selling clothes to older people who want to look like the youth. Plastic surgeons, generally speaking, do not train

in order to be able to operate on people to make them look older. By and large, they are

trained to make people look younger. People do not dye their hair in order to add years to their

age. They die their hair in order to take years away. So we

live in a culture where youth has become highly prized. And we want to talk today about how this is

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