Gender and Sexuality
Part 7. The Homosexual Dilemma
Galatians 6:1-5
Pastor Charles Price
Now let me read to you from Galatians Chapter 6. I am going to read the first five verses where Paul writes,
“Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted.
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
“If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
“Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load.”
It is very likely that this subject of homosexuality is one to which many here this morning will listen with different ears.
What I want to do is to approach it philosophically first of all to set the scene. And then I want us to come to Scripture and see what the Bible has to say. And then I want to work through the practical implications of this because my purpose this morning is not just to be theological but to be pastoral.
And I want to talk about four things. I want to talk first of all, briefly, about the society of which we are a part, and understanding the context that we live in.
Then we will talk about the Scripture to which we must submit.
And then the struggle with which some of us live.
And then we will talk about the strategy by which I am going to propose that we live.
Let me talk first then about the society of which we are a part. There has been a radical change in the collective cultural consciousness and conscience regarding homosexuality in recent decades.
Fifty years ago homosexual practice was illegal in most countries of the world. But the repealing of those laws permitting homosexual acts between consenting adults was like a fall of dominoes all across the world.
In Canada homosexual activity between consenting adults over the age of 18 was legalized in 1969. Until then it was a criminal offense often resulting in a jail sentence.
Hot on the heels of legalizing homosexual acts came gay rights and with it the demand for civil partnerships and marriage and adoption rights. And here in Canada same-sex marriage was legalized nationally, federally, in 2005.
It was legalized in Ontario in 2003 and provincially different provinces changed their laws at different times, but in 2005 federally.
And this also has been part of a domino effect that is running right across the world at the moment with almost every month a new nation legalizing homosexual marriage. It began only about 20 years ago in Holland.
To most of our society this move is deemed to be good and just and right and fair. That in itself raises an intriguing question: how has something that was universally criminalized 50 years ago, in such a short time, become universally not only accepted, but affirmed, and even promoted, as it is today, in our schools?
Since World War II a radical, philosophical shift has taken place, gradually at first, yet in historical terms, very quickly into what we now call postmodernism. There wasn’t a name for it at first.
This is a chronological term – postmodernism means after modernism.
Modernism is also a chronological term and it was the name given to the dominant Western world view for the past 300 years.
The key feature of modernism is that there is a coherent big picture governed by scientific and moral laws that are inter-related and by which everything was understood.
It is often dated back to René Descartes in the 17th Century, a French mathematician and philosopher who set himself to doubt everything that could be doubted and he came back to his famous maxim that “I think, therefore I am”.
In other words, what I cannot doubt – and the only thing I can’t doubt is that I exist and I know I exist because I think.
And from that position Descartes began to build a worldview that was based on certainties, on rational and provable things.
Of course it wasn’t only Descartes but he is recognized as one of the key figures back there in the beginning.
And this opened up a whole new world that we call the Enlightenment, the whole world of science, the whole world of exploration.
But after a few centuries of this, it left us with too closed a universe and it sort of presented images of men in white coats where everything is predictable and everything is rational.
And so along came postmodernism that has fundamentally challenged the basis of modernism.
The main feature of postmodernism is that there is no coherent big picture. The buzz phrase is there is no mega-narrative. There is no big story to which every little story fits.
And therefore everything becomes detached and stands alone – detached from a context. Truth is no longer absolute; it is relative. Something may be true for you but it’s not true for me. In other words, it is subjective rather than objective.
And here’s the fundamental difference: modernism was built on laws and rules, both scientific and moral. Postmodernism is built on values.
That is a significant different and some of the greatest of its values are equality, tolerance, respect, justice, freedom, freedom to be yourself, non-judgementalism, and love. “All you need is love” was the mantra back in the 60’s.
Modernism created a social world that postmodernism has rejected.
That world included racism where one race considered itself superior over another. Perhaps the ultimate in the evil expression of that (thought there have been many expressions of it) was Nazism where they have the doctrine of the supremacy of the Aryan race and the right to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and so on.
Modernism gave birth to apartheid and to the defence of apartheid on the grounds that races are different and to institutional segregation that we have seen in many parts of the world.
It gave birth to colonialism, the occupation of one people by another with the condescending view, “we know better than you”, dating back to the early days of modernism.
The migrants to this country came with that view of the native North Americans. European countries such as Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, in particular, were notoriously arrogant in their view that they knew better than the occupied nations that they took all over the world.
After World War II with the beginnings of postmodernism (and its roots go back before that), it brought about things like the Civil Rights movement, the demand for equality, and the non-segregating of peoples. It brought the collapse of colonialism beginning with India in the later 1940’s.
But in the 1960’s and 1970’s dozens and dozens of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, became independent of their colonial powers.
It brought about feminism, to give equality to women and dignity and liberty to women.
It brought about the sexual revolution where your sex life was no longer governed by external imposed rules, but by tolerance. And whatever we willingly consent to is legitimate if it is by consent.
And into this mix homosexual practice has become logically a right and a freedom and an entitlement. It is no one else’s business to interfere, especially the business of the state.
I think it was Pierre Trudeau who said in 1969 that the state has no role in the private bedrooms of its citizens, so the government has no role in the private bedrooms of its citizens. And that was part of the legalizing of homosexual relationships.
To deny that right is deemed therefore to be on the grounds primarily of fear or prejudice. Hence there were words coined in the 1970’s that had never been heard in history before but are part of our vocabulary, words like homophobia, being homophobic – that is the fear of homosexuality.
And I have heard it said in media discussions and I have heard it said in personal conversations, words to this effect, “How can you not favor homosexual marriage? This is the 21st Century.”
That begs the question, what is different about the 21st Century that makes this so logical when it was illegal a century ago?
And it is that the whole framework of our thinking has changed significantly.
You know, we are not as free as we think we are, by the way. All of us become victims of the environment in which we live and its worldview, complete with its blinkers and its blind spots, because it always has its blinkers; it always has its blind spots.
It is easy for us to see the blind spots of modernism as in, let’s say, things like racism.
But we have our own blind spots as well.
Another value of course of postmodernism is politically correctness. And I suggest to you that is because there aren’t any rules governing now, only values, and that’s like building on jello. You try to build on jello and everything begins to move.
So don’t challenge it; that’s uncomfortable. Let’s have an assumed consensus that certain things are and don’t challenge them.
And our nation of Canada is extremely politically correct. And our media is. (And don’t broadcast this on television later, but CBC is the worst.) It is totally predictable what kind of discussions they will have on some of these kinds of issues because there’s this agreement that there are certain things that are sacrosanct and we don’t challenge them.
That’s the society of which we are a part. We could spend more time explaining that but we have to be limited.
In the light of that, let me turn now to my second area, which is the Scripture to which we must submit. And if we are Christian people then of course the Scriptures are not just guidelines; they represent truth.
And we are dealing here not with reason alone, though they are reasonable, nor with values alone, though they certainly show us values. But we are dealing with revelation.
By that we mean, God revealing what otherwise we may not know and speaking into all cultures at all times in all generations.
That does not mean that the writers were not influenced by the culture of their day and the society of their day because of course they were. They were writing initially into that context and we have to do the hard work of understanding something about the cultural context that the Scriptures are being written in.
But Scripture’s revelation primarily centers on the moral character of God. That’s the supreme revelation that Scripture is to us.
Now let me just take a few moments to give you the biblical passages on homosexuality, and they are very few – there are only 4 of them. There are two that refer back to one of them, but only four occasions does Scripture record anything regarding homosexuality.
In Genesis 19 in the city of Sodom there were a group of homosexual men who wanted to rape two men who were guests of Lot, who was living in Sodom. The issue there is not about homosexual orientation but sexual violence and homosexual rape.
In fact the word sodomy in our English dictionary comes from this event in Sodom. Sodomy is buggery; it is male homosexual relationship, or part of it.
And this event is referred to twice in the New Testament. Just verses that look back – 2 Peter 2:7 refers back to Lot and that he was “distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men”.
And Jude Verse 7 (Jude only has one chapter) talks about Sodom and Gomorrah, “towns who gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion”, which was, as I have said, sexual violence that it is speaking about there.
Then in Leviticus; there are two references in Leviticus 18, but it is all part of the same section of Scripture. There is a catalogue of sexual prohibitions and in both cases it prohibits “sexual activity as one lies with a woman” is the wording that is used there.
Thirdly, in the New Testament in the book of Romans Paul speaks of homosexual acts as unnatural and as contrary to nature. He says regarding women in [Romans 1] Verse 26,
“Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.”
And he is clearly speaking about lesbian activity there.
And in Verse 27 he speaks of men,
“In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”
Now I am going to come back to those verses in just a minute because there is a lot being made at the moment regarding the way Paul has described those same-sex activities.
But let me give you the fourth reference which is in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10,
“Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers…”
So he has a long list of people who he says will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the next verse, Verse 11, is a great verse.
“That is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
What we must conclude from those references is that the Bible says nothing about homosexual orientation – that is, the attraction that one person may have for somebody of their own gender. But it is consistently hostile to homosexual acts.
Incidentally, it is also hostile to heterosexual acts outside of marriage.
Now before I leave these verses, there are two arguments that are being put forward to help us re-interpret those verses. And these arguments are gaining some traction.
And one of them is that the key in Romans 1 is that Paul talks about the natural and the unnatural (“women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones, men abandoned natural relations with women”).
And the argument is that for a gay person a relationship with another person of the same gender is not unnatural to them; it is natural to them because that is their inclination. And that what Paul is talking about here in the context of the extremely permissive Roman context where homosexuality was rife and popular (and we know that from other sources concerning the Roman Empire at that time), that this is speaking about heterosexual people who begin to engage in homosexual activities because it is a trendy thing and it’s part of the culture.
And so they say Paul is not challenging natural homosexual relationships, only unnatural homosexual relationships. That is not just the weird fringe people saying that. There are those in the Christian church, the evangelical Christian church in North America and in Britain (and I have read articles relating to this by some respected people saying this is a possible way we must interpret this).
I personally find that very difficult to interpret that way, not least because Paul actually says that there were men who abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another, which seems to indicate this was something that was consistent with their own lust, their own desires.
And regarding 1 Corinthians 6, the argument is put in the same breath Paul talks about a whole range of things – the sexually immoral, adulterers, prostitutes, homosexual offenders, etc. – and that he is talking about illicit, promiscuous sexual behaviour on both sides and that he is not referring to committed same-sex relationships that may exist as well.
However, nowhere in Scripture is there any endorsement of any homosexual relationship or affirmation of it. And we haven’t time to go into this, but the David/Jonathon relationship where David said of Jonathon, “his love was better than a woman”, very dear to him, is about friendship, a very beautiful friendship. And in fact he implies clearly it is non-sexual by the fact that this is different and better than a relationship with a woman.
And so I think those are difficult arguments to substantiate their hypotheses, but there isn’t much to substantiate them.
And this has been the consistent understanding of Scripture by Christian people in the 2000 years of its history. As you go back through history you don’t find any evidence of this interpretation of these passages before.
So that is the Scripture and the biblical references that exist to homosexuality.
But my purpose this morning is to be pastoral as well as understanding the truth of Scripture.
And so my third area I want to talk about, if we talked about the society of which we are a part and we have to understand that, and the Scriptures to which we must submit if we are Christian people, thirdly I want to talk about the struggle with which some of us live.
For many of us here this morning this is a deeply personal issue. It involves members of your family or it involves you, yourself. You know what it is to be attracted to members of your own gender.
If on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 is completely heterosexual and 1 is completely homosexual, between those two there are those who are bisexual on a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, whatever it may be in that grade, and may be attracted to the opposite sex but also know what it’s like to be attracted to the same sex.
And so there may be people here this morning who know this tension and this struggle. But let us make one or two things clear.
One is that no one decides to be homosexual in orientation. Homosexual attraction is not a decision you make any more than heterosexual attraction is something we decide.
If you talk to people who are attracted to their own gender, most of them will tell you that they have been aware of this since puberty, and right from being young they were aware of these feelings.
The origin of homosexuality of course is much debated. Is it nature? Were you born that way? Or is it nurture – made that way by experiences and circumstances?
Those who would come down on the nature side would look for evidence of genetic factors and there has been a lot of research into that. But from all that I have read, there seems to be no proof of that.
It is true some men are more effeminate than others and some women are more masculine but that does not in itself equal homosexuality. That would be a mistake to assume that. There are many effeminate men who are completely straight and many women who are more masculine but they are straight as well.
So though there are theories and there are speculations, there is no evidence as far as I am aware of any homosexual gene being identified.
Regarding nurture, being made that way by experiences and circumstances, the two most popular claims that are made are that a child grows up distant from the same gender parent (so a son distant from his father emotionally, perhaps physically; a daughter distant from her mother) and this desire to bond with the absent or distant parent takes on a sexual connotation in due course.
Now it seems to be true there are many people who are homosexual who would say, “Yes, that was my experience as a child”. But there are many children from that same environment who are complete heterosexual. And there are a number for whom that is not the case.
Although this is banded around and it is a factor in the experiences of many people, the problem with this is that it tends to blacken the character of parents of gay people by this kind of assumption. But it is not universal, but it is possibly a factor that bears in the reason why some people are attracted to the same sex.
The other most popular claim is that as children they have been interfered with sexually by an older person. Boys interfered with by older men and there was some element of pleasure associated with it. That is the most common factor but not universally so. But it is the most common factor – more common than the absent same gender parent, it seems.
With girls, it tends to be more they have been abused by a man or by men. And so they flee to the security of their own gender. They can’t stand being close to a man because of what has been done to them as children.
That also seems to be a reason in some females who become homosexual.
However, whatever role nature may play, and nurture may play - and we don’t have a simple explanation as to why people have a homosexual orientation, but what we have to face is that this is a reality in people’s lives.
Whether we can explain it or not, it is what it is for many people. Whatever the ideal, whatever God intended at the beginning, there are people who are gay, and many of them wish they were not. But they have found themselves in this situation, not as a decision, but for whatever factors have contributed to that.
There is a particular struggle for Christians who find themselves attracted to their own gender, and that is that they know the Scriptures, they know the passages I have just read, and they immediately feel a sense of shame concerning their feelings, sometimes a sense of condemnation, sometimes a sense of rejection.
More often than not, they bury it and hope they can keep the cap on the bottle, and sometimes that doesn’t work.
And I have known good young men who are growing in Christ and they suddenly seem to disappear off the scene and you discover that they have struggled with homosexual feelings. They have felt rejected by God, they have felt rejected by His people, and they have felt no other option but just to move out.
This places people under enormous spiritual and emotional stress. I have talked in the last four weeks to a number of gay people in this congregation. They have helped me to prepare what I am saying to you this morning.
And I am going to read to you extracts from two e-mails, which were not written for me to read publicly; they were private letters, but it is with their permission that I am reading them to you.
I want you to understand, as I need to understand, what it feels like.
Here is one – he says,
“I fought my sexuality for so long that at one point I almost took my life. This remains the darkest moment of my life. But it was in that place I felt God’s presence strongly. I wanted so much to die because I couldn’t see how He could love me in this state. And I couldn’t get rid of these feelings with all my efforts. It was then I heard Christ say to me so clearly that He loved me exactly as I was and that He delighted in me.
This was the breakthrough that led to a lot of healing. Navigating Scripture, religious conventions and family opinions has been hard. I thought embracing my sexuality would drive me away from God but it has drawn me that much closer to the throne of grace.
There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t lean on Him for guidance, love, correction and grace. And I don’t know if that is any different to any other Christian whether they are gay or straight.
Therefore it is about the attitude of the heart, very similar to what you said about being single. It’s not about marital status; it is about how Christ will fashion His will through us.
It is only when we remember how freely and mercifully His love flows to us that we can truly love each other as ourselves.”
I know this young man and it hurts me, as it probably does you, to feel the pain that he has lived with.
Let me read you another extract, a shorter one, somebody else who also faced suicidal thoughts over this issue. He says,
“There was a combination of feeling as though I was the only one facing it and that I did not feel as though I could approach anyone about it, primarily because I felt it was such a hated and dirty thing, especially amidst the church.”
These two young men, by the way, are godly young men. I don’t say that lightly. I know them, talked and prayed with them.
You see homosexual activity is about what people do. Homosexual orientation is about who they are. That is why it is such a deep, a personal and a painful struggle for them.
Let me finish with a fourth thing. And that is the strategy by which we need to live in relation to this. We can be clear homosexual practice is outside of the will of God. But homosexual orientation is a fact of some people’s lives. Whether this can change or not is a controversial issue.
Some do, and I know people who have given testimony to the fact that through various means their orientation has changed significantly. Others testify that they haven’t.
Some marry in the hope this will provide a cure, and often it has not.
I know people who have been prayed for, who have been through extensive counselling. One person told me that he went to confess to a leader in his church that he was struggling with homosexual feelings and they arranged for an exorcism in which to drive out a spirit of homosexuality, but that didn’t help him at all.
I think it is best to say change is possible but it is not inevitable. The solution may not be that God so works within them that their orientation changes. Some have to live with the fact this is who I am.
And I wonder if some of us realize the pain and the agony that people go through struggling with this issue.
How do we come alongside them? What are the terms of our coming alongside them? What about those who fall, the intensity of temptation is so strong that they end up falling in some way?
Well that’s why I read from Galatians 6 at the beginning this morning.
“Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted.
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
Three things that Paul says there: restore him gently, don’t jump on him harshly; restore him gently.
Restore him humbly. Watch yourself, says Paul. You also may be tempted - and if not in this area, in other areas.
And thirdly, restore him fully. What he says is “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Later in the passage he talks about learning to carry your own burden, but at this stage, share the burden with them.
Now he addresses this to “You who are spiritual should restore him gently”. If we are not spiritual, that temptation we have to make sure they know this is wrong. Bang! And we jump on them.
But those who are spiritual want to seek restoration and they want to walk with them to help them.
You know Jesus never mentioned homosexuality anytime. Nor is there any record of Him dealing with someone of either homosexual orientation that is disclosed or homosexual behaviour.
But we do have His dealing with other sexual sins. In John Chapter 4, for instance, you remember He met the woman at the well. And at one stage he asked her a very embarrassing question, “Go and call your husband and come here.”
And she said, “I don’t have a husband.”
He said, “You are right. You don’t. You have had five husbands and you are now living with a man to whom you are not married.”
So here is a woman, passed through five marriages, how many men she had lived with in addition to that we don’t know, but she was living with somebody now to whom she was not married.
And Jesus said to her, “If you will drink the water that I am giving, you will never thirst again.”
In other words, He looked beyond the symptoms of this woman’s running from the arms of one man to another to another to another to another to another to the fact that she had thirst in her heart that had never been satisfied and could only be satisfied by Himself. “I am going to give you this living water.”
I may say something about this next week, I am not sure yet, but our longing for intimacy, whether it’s physical or soulish – and we need both – is symptomatic of a deeper longing, which is to know God. And that deep need to be known, that need to know, is met in our hearts.
Jesus did not say, “I will give you living water and when you get home this evening you kick that man out.”
Now we would think that’s probably what we ought to do. But that is not what He said. He said, “Come to Me. Drink.”
Another occasion was in John Chapter 8 where a woman caught in the act of adultery was brought to Him. By the way, where was the guy? This was an extremely prejudiced handling of this situation by these men who brought her to Jesus.
And they said to Him, “This woman has been caught in the act of adultery. She deserves to be stoned to death. What do You think?”
And if you read the text it says, “They wanted to test Him.” They wanted to make sure He was keeping the rules. “What do You think?”
And Jesus knelt down on the ground and He began to write in the dirt. The Scripture doesn’t tell us what He wrote. When He finished writing He said, “Whoever of you has no sin throw the first stone.”
And they one by one dropped their stones.
So what did He write on the ground? I don’t like to speculate. I never give my opinion, but I am going to give you one this morning, but then forget it because you don’t know if it’s right or not and I don’t know if it’s right or not.
He may well have written the names of the men on the ground.
It would be like if they came here this morning and threw her down here and said, “This woman was caught in adultery. Stone her to death!”
And Jesus was here and we were all clamouring for her to get justice as we might think it to be. And He would write on the ground, “Charles, what sins do you have? Hmm? What’s tucked away in your life? Greg, Jared, Kellen, Warwick, Brian, Sandra, Mary Elle, Joy, Stephen, Dave…any sins we don’t know about? Anything going on in your life? If not, throw the first stone.”
And every one of them dropped their stones and went away. And Jesus turned to this woman and said, “Has no one condemned you?”
She looked up from having been thrown on the ground.
“No one,” she said.
“Neither do I condemn you,” said Jesus.
Has Jesus gone soft on sin? No, He is looking beyond the sin; He is looking to the person. He says, “I do not condemn you.”
And we know why. Because He said in John Chapter 12, “I didn’t come to judge the world; I came to save it.”
Do you know, nobody went home to Samaria and said, “You know that Jesus who talked to that woman out at the well? You know, He’s so bigoted.”
Why is it that people say that about the church so often?
Nobody went home from having seen Jesus handle the woman caught in adultery and said, “That man is so bigoted.”
No, they went home and said, “There is something unusual here.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
“I am giving you a gift of two things. I am giving you the gift of forgiveness and I am giving you the gift of sanctification. That is, the ability to live a new life.”
The big challenge to us as a church, to the Christian community in the world in which we are living is first to be accepting of people of homosexual orientation.
But not just accepting – that’s a bit condescending. Let’s be affirming of them in our fellowship and friendship as we walk with them and carry their burdens with them. “Carry one another’s burdens and so fulfill the life of Christ.”
Let’s come alongside them. And even more than that, let’s be inclusive. Let’s include them. This does not have to be a dark secret that is buried and disguised.
When people are free to be open and to be honest about their struggles, their struggles are eased and their openness gives them an accountability because this is not a dark secret hidden away somewhere; it’s an openness.
You see, secrets can be dangerous. Secrets can be toxic. Secrets can poison you. And you are alone with it. But the freedom to be open, to be honest, to be accepted is what so many need.
Let’s rid ourselves of stereotyping. People talk about a homosexual lifestyle. There isn’t such a thing any more than there is a heterosexual lifestyle.
You know if somebody in the gay pride parade is prancing around in a G-string we say that’s the homosexual lifestyle. Well if somebody goes down to a strip club in Toronto, do we say that’s the heterosexual lifestyle? Of course we don’t.
We prejudice our own thinking by categorizing people unfairly. Let’s treat people as people – all of us with our own brokenness and our need in whatever area of our life that we struggle to be restored and healed.
I will finish with this. I mentioned a few weeks ago that several years ago I was invited to go and speak at a conference of gay Christians from all over Europe. I had never had any connection in this way and I said to them, “I don’t think I can help you. I don’t know enough to talk about.”
“No, no, don’t come and talk to us about anything to do with homosexuality. Come and minister the Word of God to us.”
And they were all associated with networks in different countries throughout Europe, people who were battling with their homosexual orientation and they all came together in Belgium for this conference.
And the first night, a Monday night (it ran down till Friday morning), Monday night the leader got up and I think I quoted this not long ago, but he said, “We are meeting here together this week and we all have one thing in common: we are broken people.”
He said, “We share that with every other human being. We are all broken. But we are broken in a particular way. We are broken sexually. But God loves broken people because again and again it is in their brokenness,” this man said, “in their brokenness that God meets with them.”
He said, “Our desire over these few days, wherever you are in your own relationship with God, wherever you are in your own struggles, our desire is that in our honesty about our brokenness we will meet with God.”
I absolutely loved hearing him say that. It set a tone for that conference that was so God-honoring and fruitful in what God could accomplish in people’s lives.
Let’s not hide our own brokenness. Let’s walk with other people in their brokenness. Let’s invite God into our brokenness that by His Holy Spirit He might live the holy life of Jesus Christ in us and conform us into His image. That is the end result, whatever the starting point.
Let’s be patient with each other. Let’s restore the fallen. Let’s come close enough that they will let us carry their burden with them.
Let’s pray together.
Lord, we are thankful this morning that we come to You just as we are. And I pray for those in this building this morning and those who may be listening to my voice elsewhere, who struggle with this issue of same sex attraction because they want to honor You and live godly lives.
Thank You there are resources for that. I pray Lord Jesus that we will create such an environment they don’t have to hide it and pretend and put on a front, but can be open and honest and have those who walk with them, who will help to shoulder the burden, that whatever our needs, whatever our struggles, whatever our temptations, wherever we live on the spectrum, that we might allow the Lord Jesus to make His home in us, that we live lives that express his fruit. Make this so for us we ask in Jesus' name, Amen.
Part 7. The Homosexual Dilemma
Galatians 6:1-5
Pastor Charles Price
Now let me read to you from Galatians Chapter 6. I am going to read the first five verses where Paul writes,
“Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted.
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
“If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
“Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load.”
It is very likely that this subject of homosexuality is one to which many here this morning will listen with different ears.
What I want to do is to approach it philosophically first of all to set the scene. And then I want us to come to Scripture and see what the Bible has to say. And then I want to work through the practical implications of this because my purpose this morning is not just to be theological but to be pastoral.
And I want to talk about four things. I want to talk first of all, briefly, about the society of which we are a part, and understanding the context that we live in.
Then we will talk about the Scripture to which we must submit.
And then the struggle with which some of us live.
And then we will talk about the strategy by which I am going to propose that we live.
Let me talk first then about the society of which we are a part. There has been a radical change in the collective cultural consciousness and conscience regarding homosexuality in recent decades.
Fifty years ago homosexual practice was illegal in most countries of the world. But the repealing of those laws permitting homosexual acts between consenting adults was like a fall of dominoes all across the world.
In Canada homosexual activity between consenting adults over the age of 18 was legalized in 1969. Until then it was a criminal offense often resulting in a jail sentence.
Hot on the heels of legalizing homosexual acts came gay rights and with it the demand for civil partnerships and marriage and adoption rights. And here in Canada same-sex marriage was legalized nationally, federally, in 2005.
It was legalized in Ontario in 2003 and provincially different provinces changed their laws at different times, but in 2005 federally.
And this also has been part of a domino effect that is running right across the world at the moment with almost every month a new nation legalizing homosexual marriage. It began only about 20 years ago in Holland.
To most of our society this move is deemed to be good and just and right and fair. That in itself raises an intriguing question: how has something that was universally criminalized 50 years ago, in such a short time, become universally not only accepted, but affirmed, and even promoted, as it is today, in our schools?
Since World War II a radical, philosophical shift has taken place, gradually at first, yet in historical terms, very quickly into what we now call postmodernism. There wasn’t a name for it at first.
This is a chronological term – postmodernism means after modernism.
Modernism is also a chronological term and it was the name given to the dominant Western world view for the past 300 years.
The key feature of modernism is that there is a coherent big picture governed by scientific and moral laws that are inter-related and by which everything was understood.
It is often dated back to René Descartes in the 17th Century, a French mathematician and philosopher who set himself to doubt everything that could be doubted and he came back to his famous maxim that “I think, therefore I am”.
In other words, what I cannot doubt – and the only thing I can’t doubt is that I exist and I know I exist because I think.
And from that position Descartes began to build a worldview that was based on certainties, on rational and provable things.
Of course it wasn’t only Descartes but he is recognized as one of the key figures back there in the beginning.
And this opened up a whole new world that we call the Enlightenment, the whole world of science, the whole world of exploration.
But after a few centuries of this, it left us with too closed a universe and it sort of presented images of men in white coats where everything is predictable and everything is rational.
And so along came postmodernism that has fundamentally challenged the basis of modernism.
The main feature of postmodernism is that there is no coherent big picture. The buzz phrase is there is no mega-narrative. There is no big story to which every little story fits.
And therefore everything becomes detached and stands alone – detached from a context. Truth is no longer absolute; it is relative. Something may be true for you but it’s not true for me. In other words, it is subjective rather than objective.
And here’s the fundamental difference: modernism was built on laws and rules, both scientific and moral. Postmodernism is built on values.
That is a significant different and some of the greatest of its values are equality, tolerance, respect, justice, freedom, freedom to be yourself, non-judgementalism, and love. “All you need is love” was the mantra back in the 60’s.
Modernism created a social world that postmodernism has rejected.
That world included racism where one race considered itself superior over another. Perhaps the ultimate in the evil expression of that (thought there have been many expressions of it) was Nazism where they have the doctrine of the supremacy of the Aryan race and the right to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and so on.
Modernism gave birth to apartheid and to the defence of apartheid on the grounds that races are different and to institutional segregation that we have seen in many parts of the world.
It gave birth to colonialism, the occupation of one people by another with the condescending view, “we know better than you”, dating back to the early days of modernism.
The migrants to this country came with that view of the native North Americans. European countries such as Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, in particular, were notoriously arrogant in their view that they knew better than the occupied nations that they took all over the world.
After World War II with the beginnings of postmodernism (and its roots go back before that), it brought about things like the Civil Rights movement, the demand for equality, and the non-segregating of peoples. It brought the collapse of colonialism beginning with India in the later 1940’s.
But in the 1960’s and 1970’s dozens and dozens of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, became independent of their colonial powers.
It brought about feminism, to give equality to women and dignity and liberty to women.
It brought about the sexual revolution where your sex life was no longer governed by external imposed rules, but by tolerance. And whatever we willingly consent to is legitimate if it is by consent.
And into this mix homosexual practice has become logically a right and a freedom and an entitlement. It is no one else’s business to interfere, especially the business of the state.
I think it was Pierre Trudeau who said in 1969 that the state has no role in the private bedrooms of its citizens, so the government has no role in the private bedrooms of its citizens. And that was part of the legalizing of homosexual relationships.
To deny that right is deemed therefore to be on the grounds primarily of fear or prejudice. Hence there were words coined in the 1970’s that had never been heard in history before but are part of our vocabulary, words like homophobia, being homophobic – that is the fear of homosexuality.
And I have heard it said in media discussions and I have heard it said in personal conversations, words to this effect, “How can you not favor homosexual marriage? This is the 21st Century.”
That begs the question, what is different about the 21st Century that makes this so logical when it was illegal a century ago?
And it is that the whole framework of our thinking has changed significantly.
You know, we are not as free as we think we are, by the way. All of us become victims of the environment in which we live and its worldview, complete with its blinkers and its blind spots, because it always has its blinkers; it always has its blind spots.
It is easy for us to see the blind spots of modernism as in, let’s say, things like racism.
But we have our own blind spots as well.
Another value of course of postmodernism is politically correctness. And I suggest to you that is because there aren’t any rules governing now, only values, and that’s like building on jello. You try to build on jello and everything begins to move.
So don’t challenge it; that’s uncomfortable. Let’s have an assumed consensus that certain things are and don’t challenge them.
And our nation of Canada is extremely politically correct. And our media is. (And don’t broadcast this on television later, but CBC is the worst.) It is totally predictable what kind of discussions they will have on some of these kinds of issues because there’s this agreement that there are certain things that are sacrosanct and we don’t challenge them.
That’s the society of which we are a part. We could spend more time explaining that but we have to be limited.
In the light of that, let me turn now to my second area, which is the Scripture to which we must submit. And if we are Christian people then of course the Scriptures are not just guidelines; they represent truth.
And we are dealing here not with reason alone, though they are reasonable, nor with values alone, though they certainly show us values. But we are dealing with revelation.
By that we mean, God revealing what otherwise we may not know and speaking into all cultures at all times in all generations.
That does not mean that the writers were not influenced by the culture of their day and the society of their day because of course they were. They were writing initially into that context and we have to do the hard work of understanding something about the cultural context that the Scriptures are being written in.
But Scripture’s revelation primarily centers on the moral character of God. That’s the supreme revelation that Scripture is to us.
Now let me just take a few moments to give you the biblical passages on homosexuality, and they are very few – there are only 4 of them. There are two that refer back to one of them, but only four occasions does Scripture record anything regarding homosexuality.
In Genesis 19 in the city of Sodom there were a group of homosexual men who wanted to rape two men who were guests of Lot, who was living in Sodom. The issue there is not about homosexual orientation but sexual violence and homosexual rape.
In fact the word sodomy in our English dictionary comes from this event in Sodom. Sodomy is buggery; it is male homosexual relationship, or part of it.
And this event is referred to twice in the New Testament. Just verses that look back – 2 Peter 2:7 refers back to Lot and that he was “distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men”.
And Jude Verse 7 (Jude only has one chapter) talks about Sodom and Gomorrah, “towns who gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion”, which was, as I have said, sexual violence that it is speaking about there.
Then in Leviticus; there are two references in Leviticus 18, but it is all part of the same section of Scripture. There is a catalogue of sexual prohibitions and in both cases it prohibits “sexual activity as one lies with a woman” is the wording that is used there.
Thirdly, in the New Testament in the book of Romans Paul speaks of homosexual acts as unnatural and as contrary to nature. He says regarding women in [Romans 1] Verse 26,
“Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.”
And he is clearly speaking about lesbian activity there.
And in Verse 27 he speaks of men,
“In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”
Now I am going to come back to those verses in just a minute because there is a lot being made at the moment regarding the way Paul has described those same-sex activities.
But let me give you the fourth reference which is in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10,
“Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers…”
So he has a long list of people who he says will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the next verse, Verse 11, is a great verse.
“That is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
What we must conclude from those references is that the Bible says nothing about homosexual orientation – that is, the attraction that one person may have for somebody of their own gender. But it is consistently hostile to homosexual acts.
Incidentally, it is also hostile to heterosexual acts outside of marriage.
Now before I leave these verses, there are two arguments that are being put forward to help us re-interpret those verses. And these arguments are gaining some traction.
And one of them is that the key in Romans 1 is that Paul talks about the natural and the unnatural (“women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones, men abandoned natural relations with women”).
And the argument is that for a gay person a relationship with another person of the same gender is not unnatural to them; it is natural to them because that is their inclination. And that what Paul is talking about here in the context of the extremely permissive Roman context where homosexuality was rife and popular (and we know that from other sources concerning the Roman Empire at that time), that this is speaking about heterosexual people who begin to engage in homosexual activities because it is a trendy thing and it’s part of the culture.
And so they say Paul is not challenging natural homosexual relationships, only unnatural homosexual relationships. That is not just the weird fringe people saying that. There are those in the Christian church, the evangelical Christian church in North America and in Britain (and I have read articles relating to this by some respected people saying this is a possible way we must interpret this).
I personally find that very difficult to interpret that way, not least because Paul actually says that there were men who abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another, which seems to indicate this was something that was consistent with their own lust, their own desires.
And regarding 1 Corinthians 6, the argument is put in the same breath Paul talks about a whole range of things – the sexually immoral, adulterers, prostitutes, homosexual offenders, etc. – and that he is talking about illicit, promiscuous sexual behaviour on both sides and that he is not referring to committed same-sex relationships that may exist as well.
However, nowhere in Scripture is there any endorsement of any homosexual relationship or affirmation of it. And we haven’t time to go into this, but the David/Jonathon relationship where David said of Jonathon, “his love was better than a woman”, very dear to him, is about friendship, a very beautiful friendship. And in fact he implies clearly it is non-sexual by the fact that this is different and better than a relationship with a woman.
And so I think those are difficult arguments to substantiate their hypotheses, but there isn’t much to substantiate them.
And this has been the consistent understanding of Scripture by Christian people in the 2000 years of its history. As you go back through history you don’t find any evidence of this interpretation of these passages before.
So that is the Scripture and the biblical references that exist to homosexuality.
But my purpose this morning is to be pastoral as well as understanding the truth of Scripture.
And so my third area I want to talk about, if we talked about the society of which we are a part and we have to understand that, and the Scriptures to which we must submit if we are Christian people, thirdly I want to talk about the struggle with which some of us live.
For many of us here this morning this is a deeply personal issue. It involves members of your family or it involves you, yourself. You know what it is to be attracted to members of your own gender.
If on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 is completely heterosexual and 1 is completely homosexual, between those two there are those who are bisexual on a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, whatever it may be in that grade, and may be attracted to the opposite sex but also know what it’s like to be attracted to the same sex.
And so there may be people here this morning who know this tension and this struggle. But let us make one or two things clear.
One is that no one decides to be homosexual in orientation. Homosexual attraction is not a decision you make any more than heterosexual attraction is something we decide.
If you talk to people who are attracted to their own gender, most of them will tell you that they have been aware of this since puberty, and right from being young they were aware of these feelings.
The origin of homosexuality of course is much debated. Is it nature? Were you born that way? Or is it nurture – made that way by experiences and circumstances?
Those who would come down on the nature side would look for evidence of genetic factors and there has been a lot of research into that. But from all that I have read, there seems to be no proof of that.
It is true some men are more effeminate than others and some women are more masculine but that does not in itself equal homosexuality. That would be a mistake to assume that. There are many effeminate men who are completely straight and many women who are more masculine but they are straight as well.
So though there are theories and there are speculations, there is no evidence as far as I am aware of any homosexual gene being identified.
Regarding nurture, being made that way by experiences and circumstances, the two most popular claims that are made are that a child grows up distant from the same gender parent (so a son distant from his father emotionally, perhaps physically; a daughter distant from her mother) and this desire to bond with the absent or distant parent takes on a sexual connotation in due course.
Now it seems to be true there are many people who are homosexual who would say, “Yes, that was my experience as a child”. But there are many children from that same environment who are complete heterosexual. And there are a number for whom that is not the case.
Although this is banded around and it is a factor in the experiences of many people, the problem with this is that it tends to blacken the character of parents of gay people by this kind of assumption. But it is not universal, but it is possibly a factor that bears in the reason why some people are attracted to the same sex.
The other most popular claim is that as children they have been interfered with sexually by an older person. Boys interfered with by older men and there was some element of pleasure associated with it. That is the most common factor but not universally so. But it is the most common factor – more common than the absent same gender parent, it seems.
With girls, it tends to be more they have been abused by a man or by men. And so they flee to the security of their own gender. They can’t stand being close to a man because of what has been done to them as children.
That also seems to be a reason in some females who become homosexual.
However, whatever role nature may play, and nurture may play - and we don’t have a simple explanation as to why people have a homosexual orientation, but what we have to face is that this is a reality in people’s lives.
Whether we can explain it or not, it is what it is for many people. Whatever the ideal, whatever God intended at the beginning, there are people who are gay, and many of them wish they were not. But they have found themselves in this situation, not as a decision, but for whatever factors have contributed to that.
There is a particular struggle for Christians who find themselves attracted to their own gender, and that is that they know the Scriptures, they know the passages I have just read, and they immediately feel a sense of shame concerning their feelings, sometimes a sense of condemnation, sometimes a sense of rejection.
More often than not, they bury it and hope they can keep the cap on the bottle, and sometimes that doesn’t work.
And I have known good young men who are growing in Christ and they suddenly seem to disappear off the scene and you discover that they have struggled with homosexual feelings. They have felt rejected by God, they have felt rejected by His people, and they have felt no other option but just to move out.
This places people under enormous spiritual and emotional stress. I have talked in the last four weeks to a number of gay people in this congregation. They have helped me to prepare what I am saying to you this morning.
And I am going to read to you extracts from two e-mails, which were not written for me to read publicly; they were private letters, but it is with their permission that I am reading them to you.
I want you to understand, as I need to understand, what it feels like.
Here is one – he says,
“I fought my sexuality for so long that at one point I almost took my life. This remains the darkest moment of my life. But it was in that place I felt God’s presence strongly. I wanted so much to die because I couldn’t see how He could love me in this state. And I couldn’t get rid of these feelings with all my efforts. It was then I heard Christ say to me so clearly that He loved me exactly as I was and that He delighted in me.
This was the breakthrough that led to a lot of healing. Navigating Scripture, religious conventions and family opinions has been hard. I thought embracing my sexuality would drive me away from God but it has drawn me that much closer to the throne of grace.
There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t lean on Him for guidance, love, correction and grace. And I don’t know if that is any different to any other Christian whether they are gay or straight.
Therefore it is about the attitude of the heart, very similar to what you said about being single. It’s not about marital status; it is about how Christ will fashion His will through us.
It is only when we remember how freely and mercifully His love flows to us that we can truly love each other as ourselves.”
I know this young man and it hurts me, as it probably does you, to feel the pain that he has lived with.
Let me read you another extract, a shorter one, somebody else who also faced suicidal thoughts over this issue. He says,
“There was a combination of feeling as though I was the only one facing it and that I did not feel as though I could approach anyone about it, primarily because I felt it was such a hated and dirty thing, especially amidst the church.”
These two young men, by the way, are godly young men. I don’t say that lightly. I know them, talked and prayed with them.
You see homosexual activity is about what people do. Homosexual orientation is about who they are. That is why it is such a deep, a personal and a painful struggle for them.
Let me finish with a fourth thing. And that is the strategy by which we need to live in relation to this. We can be clear homosexual practice is outside of the will of God. But homosexual orientation is a fact of some people’s lives. Whether this can change or not is a controversial issue.
Some do, and I know people who have given testimony to the fact that through various means their orientation has changed significantly. Others testify that they haven’t.
Some marry in the hope this will provide a cure, and often it has not.
I know people who have been prayed for, who have been through extensive counselling. One person told me that he went to confess to a leader in his church that he was struggling with homosexual feelings and they arranged for an exorcism in which to drive out a spirit of homosexuality, but that didn’t help him at all.
I think it is best to say change is possible but it is not inevitable. The solution may not be that God so works within them that their orientation changes. Some have to live with the fact this is who I am.
And I wonder if some of us realize the pain and the agony that people go through struggling with this issue.
How do we come alongside them? What are the terms of our coming alongside them? What about those who fall, the intensity of temptation is so strong that they end up falling in some way?
Well that’s why I read from Galatians 6 at the beginning this morning.
“Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted.
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
Three things that Paul says there: restore him gently, don’t jump on him harshly; restore him gently.
Restore him humbly. Watch yourself, says Paul. You also may be tempted - and if not in this area, in other areas.
And thirdly, restore him fully. What he says is “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Later in the passage he talks about learning to carry your own burden, but at this stage, share the burden with them.
Now he addresses this to “You who are spiritual should restore him gently”. If we are not spiritual, that temptation we have to make sure they know this is wrong. Bang! And we jump on them.
But those who are spiritual want to seek restoration and they want to walk with them to help them.
You know Jesus never mentioned homosexuality anytime. Nor is there any record of Him dealing with someone of either homosexual orientation that is disclosed or homosexual behaviour.
But we do have His dealing with other sexual sins. In John Chapter 4, for instance, you remember He met the woman at the well. And at one stage he asked her a very embarrassing question, “Go and call your husband and come here.”
And she said, “I don’t have a husband.”
He said, “You are right. You don’t. You have had five husbands and you are now living with a man to whom you are not married.”
So here is a woman, passed through five marriages, how many men she had lived with in addition to that we don’t know, but she was living with somebody now to whom she was not married.
And Jesus said to her, “If you will drink the water that I am giving, you will never thirst again.”
In other words, He looked beyond the symptoms of this woman’s running from the arms of one man to another to another to another to another to another to the fact that she had thirst in her heart that had never been satisfied and could only be satisfied by Himself. “I am going to give you this living water.”
I may say something about this next week, I am not sure yet, but our longing for intimacy, whether it’s physical or soulish – and we need both – is symptomatic of a deeper longing, which is to know God. And that deep need to be known, that need to know, is met in our hearts.
Jesus did not say, “I will give you living water and when you get home this evening you kick that man out.”
Now we would think that’s probably what we ought to do. But that is not what He said. He said, “Come to Me. Drink.”
Another occasion was in John Chapter 8 where a woman caught in the act of adultery was brought to Him. By the way, where was the guy? This was an extremely prejudiced handling of this situation by these men who brought her to Jesus.
And they said to Him, “This woman has been caught in the act of adultery. She deserves to be stoned to death. What do You think?”
And if you read the text it says, “They wanted to test Him.” They wanted to make sure He was keeping the rules. “What do You think?”
And Jesus knelt down on the ground and He began to write in the dirt. The Scripture doesn’t tell us what He wrote. When He finished writing He said, “Whoever of you has no sin throw the first stone.”
And they one by one dropped their stones.
So what did He write on the ground? I don’t like to speculate. I never give my opinion, but I am going to give you one this morning, but then forget it because you don’t know if it’s right or not and I don’t know if it’s right or not.
He may well have written the names of the men on the ground.
It would be like if they came here this morning and threw her down here and said, “This woman was caught in adultery. Stone her to death!”
And Jesus was here and we were all clamouring for her to get justice as we might think it to be. And He would write on the ground, “Charles, what sins do you have? Hmm? What’s tucked away in your life? Greg, Jared, Kellen, Warwick, Brian, Sandra, Mary Elle, Joy, Stephen, Dave…any sins we don’t know about? Anything going on in your life? If not, throw the first stone.”
And every one of them dropped their stones and went away. And Jesus turned to this woman and said, “Has no one condemned you?”
She looked up from having been thrown on the ground.
“No one,” she said.
“Neither do I condemn you,” said Jesus.
Has Jesus gone soft on sin? No, He is looking beyond the sin; He is looking to the person. He says, “I do not condemn you.”
And we know why. Because He said in John Chapter 12, “I didn’t come to judge the world; I came to save it.”
Do you know, nobody went home to Samaria and said, “You know that Jesus who talked to that woman out at the well? You know, He’s so bigoted.”
Why is it that people say that about the church so often?
Nobody went home from having seen Jesus handle the woman caught in adultery and said, “That man is so bigoted.”
No, they went home and said, “There is something unusual here.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
“I am giving you a gift of two things. I am giving you the gift of forgiveness and I am giving you the gift of sanctification. That is, the ability to live a new life.”
The big challenge to us as a church, to the Christian community in the world in which we are living is first to be accepting of people of homosexual orientation.
But not just accepting – that’s a bit condescending. Let’s be affirming of them in our fellowship and friendship as we walk with them and carry their burdens with them. “Carry one another’s burdens and so fulfill the life of Christ.”
Let’s come alongside them. And even more than that, let’s be inclusive. Let’s include them. This does not have to be a dark secret that is buried and disguised.
When people are free to be open and to be honest about their struggles, their struggles are eased and their openness gives them an accountability because this is not a dark secret hidden away somewhere; it’s an openness.
You see, secrets can be dangerous. Secrets can be toxic. Secrets can poison you. And you are alone with it. But the freedom to be open, to be honest, to be accepted is what so many need.
Let’s rid ourselves of stereotyping. People talk about a homosexual lifestyle. There isn’t such a thing any more than there is a heterosexual lifestyle.
You know if somebody in the gay pride parade is prancing around in a G-string we say that’s the homosexual lifestyle. Well if somebody goes down to a strip club in Toronto, do we say that’s the heterosexual lifestyle? Of course we don’t.
We prejudice our own thinking by categorizing people unfairly. Let’s treat people as people – all of us with our own brokenness and our need in whatever area of our life that we struggle to be restored and healed.
I will finish with this. I mentioned a few weeks ago that several years ago I was invited to go and speak at a conference of gay Christians from all over Europe. I had never had any connection in this way and I said to them, “I don’t think I can help you. I don’t know enough to talk about.”
“No, no, don’t come and talk to us about anything to do with homosexuality. Come and minister the Word of God to us.”
And they were all associated with networks in different countries throughout Europe, people who were battling with their homosexual orientation and they all came together in Belgium for this conference.
And the first night, a Monday night (it ran down till Friday morning), Monday night the leader got up and I think I quoted this not long ago, but he said, “We are meeting here together this week and we all have one thing in common: we are broken people.”
He said, “We share that with every other human being. We are all broken. But we are broken in a particular way. We are broken sexually. But God loves broken people because again and again it is in their brokenness,” this man said, “in their brokenness that God meets with them.”
He said, “Our desire over these few days, wherever you are in your own relationship with God, wherever you are in your own struggles, our desire is that in our honesty about our brokenness we will meet with God.”
I absolutely loved hearing him say that. It set a tone for that conference that was so God-honoring and fruitful in what God could accomplish in people’s lives.
Let’s not hide our own brokenness. Let’s walk with other people in their brokenness. Let’s invite God into our brokenness that by His Holy Spirit He might live the holy life of Jesus Christ in us and conform us into His image. That is the end result, whatever the starting point.
Let’s be patient with each other. Let’s restore the fallen. Let’s come close enough that they will let us carry their burden with them.
Let’s pray together.
Lord, we are thankful this morning that we come to You just as we are. And I pray for those in this building this morning and those who may be listening to my voice elsewhere, who struggle with this issue of same sex attraction because they want to honor You and live godly lives.
Thank You there are resources for that. I pray Lord Jesus that we will create such an environment they don’t have to hide it and pretend and put on a front, but can be open and honest and have those who walk with them, who will help to shoulder the burden, that whatever our needs, whatever our struggles, whatever our temptations, wherever we live on the spectrum, that we might allow the Lord Jesus to make His home in us, that we live lives that express his fruit. Make this so for us we ask in Jesus' name, Amen.