You take something like smells - women like sweet smelling things, flowers, perfume, things like this. You hand a woman a bouquet of flowers, she sniffs it. You hand a man a bouquet of flowers, all he sniffs is $80. It smells like $80 to me, what are you talking about? Two women can go to a candle shop for an hour and a half, and sniff wax and call it fun. It's weird - you never see two men doing that. Hey Leroy, check that out, that's that new chrysanthemum smell, check that out man, that is sweet! Never! Why? Because men like stinky stuff. Women like sweet-smelling stuff, men like stinky stuff - nothing funnier to a group of men than something stinky happening. That's funny. To women - that's disgusting.
If a man plays a rugby match, and he gets all bloody and nasty and muddy; and because he's got to run to a meeting, he puts the clothes in a plastic bag and seals it up, puts it in the boot of his car. Three months later, he's looking for something in the boot of his car, and he finds the bag. Every man in the world knows what he's going to do. He's going to open it up, and he's going smell it. Men do this. Women, you notice if you get your husband to put his clothes in the hamper, if you watch him when he takes his dirty clothes off after a day at work, especially the socks before he throws them in the hamper - he'll sniff it. It's like we have to prove that we've worked for the day. We have like three levels of it too; like we'll sniff it, and we'll go: hey, I think I can get one more wear out this Betty, this is pretty good. Then we've got another level that's sort of like: wheweee! Then there's a third level, that's sort of like: you know what, I think three minutes in the dryer is going to do this just fine!
That's us, because we like stinky stuff, and every man knows if you get the bag of dirty clothes out the boot of your car and you sniff it - if any of your friends are around, they owe you to smell your stinky things. They have to - oh check that out! That is something! We all share, and then whoever smells my stinky thing - when they have a stinky thing, I owe them a courtesy sniff, to smell their stinky thing - and men do this. That's why, if you're ever in downtown Hastings, stuck at a red light; and you see four men in a car, and three of them have their head out the window, and the last one's in the back seat just laughing - he just cashed in on his courtesy sniff. That's all that's happened.
So when you say: my family had tension - of course it did. You had a species that was designed by God to like sweet-smelling things, trying to coincide with a species who loves stinky stuff. There's tension. Men and women are just different. Your mum had issues, your dad had issues, there was tension in all of our homes; but at some point - this is what Ezekiel's saying - at some point, we have to make a decision to live in the light and not in the darkness. You can't say: my father ate sour grapes so it set my teeth on edge - forever. Where does that lead you? Where does that go?
Next verse, Verse 4. For every living soul belongs to Me, the father as well as the son. Both alike belong to Me, but the soul who sins, is the one that will die. In other words, the one who goes away from God's ways enters the realm of death. It's not a question of: who belongs to God, and who doesn't belong to God? That's not the issue. Every living soul belongs to God. You want to know if you belong to God? Are you breathing? Yes. Are you using God's name to keep you alive? Yes. Are you held together by His word? Yes. So whether you realise it or not, you sort of belong to God right? God says: the whole universe belongs to me. The question isn't: who belongs to Me and who doesn't? It's the one that will choose to receive and enter into My ways - the ones who do that, will live. The ones who don't, don't. The soul that sins is the one that will die; and there's this long explanation that we won't read, but there's this long explanation. Let me just summarise it in Ezekiel 18.