Edited August 26, 2019
This paper helps provide a Biblical perspective on how to respond to the world’s view of the LGBTQ agenda. Many have used it in their churches, schools and small groups.
Hebrews 5:14 “but solid food is for the mature, who through practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”
We all know there is a cost in following Christ. This paper focuses on the huge cost in not doing so.
In the 1999 Columbine School massacre a student was told to renounce God or die. She refused and was killed. Many of us have examined ourselves to ask if we would be spiritually strong enough to do what she did. Hopefully, the answer is yes. But, are you spiritually mature enough to make Biblically based decisions regarding a loved one who claims to be a “Gay Christian”?
The definition of Spiritual Maturity is not one who looks to scripture for guidance when facing difficult decisions. Every Believer should do that. The father in the referenced article below did that and proved his spiritual immaturity. The one who is Spiritually Mature is the one “ who through practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil”. In other words, works out in the Spiritual Gym on a regular basis by lifting spiritual weights (the Word of God and Prayer) – before the storm hits.
I find irony that in the month our nation declares Pride Month (isn’t pride one of man’s greatest sins?) it feels like I have been facing a gauntlet of tests regarding the sin of homosexuality. The Christian camp on the lake where we have a cottage asked us to make a significant donation. Their web site shows the first week of camp this summer is for LGBTQIA+ kids from 14-18yrs. It is run by 2 married lesbian pastors who seek “to celebrate the diversity and value of God’s creation”. They offer a “safe space where all are welcomed and loved”. They do not intend to share what scripture says about homosexuality, but just show them love. They apparently missed Ephesians 4:15 which tells us to “speak the truth in love…” We explained to the Trustee why we can’t support the camp.
Ironically, in the same week of that camp, friends invited us to cruise on their yacht for a week. We have enjoyed their generosity in the past and would love to have joined them. However, we had also walked with them for some time as they struggled with their young adult child preferring to convert to the opposite sex. They are professing Christians whom we have prayed with and studied the Bible together with. They recently shared that they not only helped their child in having transition surgeries performed, they invested in the organization performing them.
Paul is very clear in 1 Corinthians 5 how we should deal with a “so called brother” living in unrepentant sin. Our first choice would have been to meet face to face on the issue. However, there were a number of factors that caused us to put it in writing and send it in a letter. Excerpts from the letter are below.
In discussing this issue with a friend, he forwarded an article describing the universal acceptance of homosexuality as unprecedented. It ran on June 7 on the Washington Post and depicts a “Bible believing” couple embracing homosexuality as an acceptable Christian lifestyle. Many of us have been amazed at seeing this as not all that uncommon. What is the reason for the shift? Their son came out as gay. Perhaps this is why Jesus in Luke 14:26 states “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life he cannot be my disciple.” Most interpret that as our relative love for Jesus must be that much greater, or we will forsake Him. Our love for Jesus only grows through walking with Him. The only way I know to do that is to know His Word. Excerpts from the article are below.
So, how should we respond when our close friends invite us to their son’s gay wedding? What do we do when our own loved one comes out of the closet? While the Gospels primarily focus on Salvation and Christian living, the focal point of the Epistles appears to be Spiritual Maturity. Hebrews 5:14 referenced above seems to be the only solution to the challenges the Bible says will continue to confront us.
I love the concept of “Perform to an Audience of One”. We are raised trying to obey and please our parents, then our teachers, our employer, then our spouse, as well as maybe friends. Not everyone is a “people pleaser” but in view of that “training”, all of us are subject to from our youth up, it is hard to make choices between those groups. In the Luke 14:26 passage referenced above – Jesus says to Please Him above all others. The interesting thing is when we focus on that, we will love all of those groups – because He commands us to. But, we only know that if we know His Word.
And, when He is the Audience of One we always seek to perform to, we will never compromise our relationship with Him over friends, or a loved one.
Unfortunately, Christianity today is about 5 miles wide and 1/2 inch deep. Our total focus has been on our’s, then other’s salvation, then “being a good Christian”. Very few focus on pursuing thier own Spiritual Maturity, much less bearing as much fruit as possible (Matthew 13:23).
That is the case of the parents in the article who’s son announces he is gay. These are only excerpts, but in reading the full article, the father is very silent and the wife does all the talking with the writer. It is clear their choices were based in emotion, not the logic of scripture. Sounds reminiscent of a story in Genesis 3…
American’s views flipped on gay rights, how did minds change so quickly? Excerpts from June 7, 2019 Washington Post article
Steve and Teri Augustine met, fell in love and got married in a conservative evangelical Christian community. They grew up believing homosexuality was a sin, and that the ‘gay agenda’ was an attack on their values.
Then, six years ago their son Peter – their youngest child who loved theater and his church youth group – returned home from his first year of college and came out as gay.
Teri asked her son not to tell anyone and drove herself to a mall parking lot to cry. Steve questioned his son’s faith, reciting Bible passages from Corinthians. The Augustine’s decided to put their son through a year of conversion therapy, determined to ‘set him straight’. But after that failed something changed. Steve and Teri started meeting Peter’s friends and inviting other gay Christians to dinner. Two summers after Peter came out, the family stood off the sidelines of the Capital Pride Parade wearing rainbow beads and shirts with the words “I’m sorry”. Teri now hosts a support group for Christian moms of LGBTQ children.
“I knew that if I was going to get a handle on who my son was” Teri said, “I really needed to step into that world.” The transformation in the Augustine family parallels a shift in public opinion that social scientists say is unlike any other of our time.
As recently as 2004 polls showed that the majority of Americans – 60 percent – opposed same-sex marriage while only 31 percent were in favor according to the Pew Recearch Center. Today those numbers are reversed.
“You can’t find another issue where attitudes have shifted so rapidly” said Don Haider-Markel a political science professor at the University of Kansas.
As for the Augustines, the family left their old church, a conservative evangelical mega church, for Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Laurel Md, which calls itself “an affirming community of faith”. Walking into a service last Sunday, Teri and Steve Augustine passed a rainbow Pride flag in front of the small church, and a sign that read. “Minds are like parachutes. They only work when open”. The pastor wore a rainbow stole around her neck.
Exerpts from the Letter to a Brother:
“… of the three options I am presented with, the first is the one I prefer, to forget about you telling me you have invested in a sex change clinic and say we’re coming on the trip. To do so would not be putting Christ first in my life – but my own pleasure. The second would be a bit less distasteful than the one I am choosing, but just tell you we aren’t interested in another trip. In addition to being a lie, it would be an ultimate form of selfishness – the avoidance of my own discomfort. The third option is to “Perform to an Audience of One” in spite of the discomfort both of us may have to endure and obey a command to love my brother.
We have struggled with and prayed for your situation for some years. When I heard that you had now invested in these procedures, your problem became my problem. I am fully aware of the passages that say “do not judge” (Matthew 7:1) and “first take the log out of your own eye” (Matthew 7:5). Trust me, I would prefer to close my Bible right there and let you know we’re coming. However, I also know we need to seek all of scripture, not just the ones that suit our desires. Unfortunately, Jesus also said in Matthew 18:15 “If your brother sins go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother”.
Paul also addressed the issue in his first letter to the people of Corinth: (1 Corinthians 5:1,2) “It has actually been reported that there is an immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even amoung the Gentiles, that someone has his fathers wife. You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst”. I find it interesting that Paul does not say they were lazy or even selfish in not dealing with the problem. Instead, he uses the word “arrogant”. In other words, even though they had instruction on how to deal with these issues, they thought their way would be better.
In 1 Corinthians 5:6 and 7 Paul explains that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” and we are to “clean it out”. The reason is because when we tolerate unrepentant sin it conditions others to not see it as sin and all are stained by it. He gets very granular in verse 11 when he says “I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person”.
Through creation, God has made each one of us. It is sin that has corrupted His creation. I am not saying it was your child’s specific sin that began the perversion in them. I am not trying to deal with how they landed where they did, only that it is sin in this world that got them there. The definition of sin is anything apart from God. I know that you would never consider profiting from running an abortion clinic, yet the Bible has way more to say about sexual perversion than it does about murdering helpless baby’s.
Genesis 1:27 says “God created man in His own image… male and female He created them.”
Jesus repeats it by saying in Matthew 19:4 “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female.”
Genesis 2:23,24 says “The man said ‘This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called woman, because she was taken from man’. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” The institution of marriage – between a man and a woman – was given to us by God.
Satan has four primary attack points. His first is the Word of God. The first time we see Satan in scripture is when he asks Eve “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1). He has constantly created doubt since then by asking “did God really say that?” The second attack point is Creation. If God created Satan (and the Bible says he did), Satan is a lesser being than God – but he makes himself to be equal with God. It has only been since the early 1800’s that man has even considered anything other than God being the Creator. The theory of evolution (now known as a “fact”) has been very effective at creating questions for much of scripture. The creation account is foundational to who man is and the institution of marriage. Eliminate the truth of creation and many dominoes will fall… and they have.
Satan’s third attack point is marriage. We can see the devastation wrought by single mothers trying to raise children in the inner city. Prison construction plans are based on single mother birth rates. Divorce is now as common among professing Christians as it is among all others. He has won that battle. Yet, he continues the battle by making homosexual weddings a very exciting thing for Millennials to boast about attending today. The whole construct of marriage has been turned on it’s head. His fourth key attack point is the Church, but that’s another story.
Your situation is square in the crosshairs of 3 of Satan’s 4 favorite attack points: The Word of God, Creation, and Marriage.
I highly recommend meditating on Psalm 139. It is loaded with wisdom regarding God’s creation of us and plan for each of us. Verse 13 says “For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.” Verse 16 adds “ Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.”
In the first chapter of Romans, Paul declares that because of creation all around us, we are without excuse for not believing in God (Romans 1:20). The rest of the chapter is about people who turn their back on God and decline on a slippery slope into all forms of sin. Interestingly, he spends the most time on sexual sin. In verses 26 and 27 he said “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” In verse 32 he says “and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”
God’s attitude toward sexual perversion is throughout the Bible. It is never more clear than with His handling of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. As a result of their sexual perversion, He obliterated both towns. He declared He would wipe them off the map and they would never be found. They have excavated many ancient cities of the Bible, but have never found those two. The word Sodom is stated 48 times throughout the Bible. Always in reference to their perversion and what God did about it. Most cities in America had anti Sodomy laws until the sexual revolution rewrote the code for much of morality in our country.
The fact that God declares homosexuality a sin in the Bible is no surprise. However, the fact that He includes the effeminate should give us pause. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 Paul says “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals… will inherit the kingdom of God.”
The fact is, there is no such thing as a gender change. We are just beginning to understand the complexities of DNA. We now know that our gender is written in code in every cell in our body. Sure, we can alter outward appearances, but all we are really doing is making a female more masculine or a male more effeminate. The very thing God calls sin.
All of us face temptations every day to sin. The only One who didn’t fall was Jesus. Both the heterosexual who is tempted in adultery and the one tempted through same sex attraction – are tempted. They both become sin when the act is committed (or as Jesus raised the bar – when we lust). To declare “its just the way I am” in either case does not take away the sin.
This paper, “The Cost of Spritual Immaturity” is intended to point us to the need for Individual Spritual Maturity. We can’t ride on anyone else’s coat tails. It has been said that God has no grandchildren. Each one of us will report directly to Him per 2 Corinthians 5:10. No one else will stand in our place. While most of us want a recipe for how to handle situations like these, it is clear that God didn’t intend that. Instead He wants us to know Him intimately (Colossians 1:9) and to make choices with Him as our primary audience. The good news is that with Jesus we have freedom in Christ. That also means we need to know Him – before the test comes.