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January 2 - January 20, 2018
However, in the name of opposing this revolution, many of us have forgotten who we are and who “they” are.
And our young people pick up on this. They hear sermons, but they know people.
It is wrong to be rude, even in the name of morality.
Some sins allow you to be a “we,” but other sins require you to be a “them.”
But in all of those services, I could not remember one time when someone said, “I am battling with SSA. Please pray for me.”
He couldn’t wait any longer to hear me reject him, so he rejected himself for me.
Perhaps homosexuality is so insidious that to admit susceptibility to SSA in the church is the moral equivalent to confessing a fling with terrorism in an airport terminal. Suddenly everyone is unsettled. A peaceful church service has been infected by treachery. Benign sins have associated with malignant.
And isn’t homosexuality sexual sin on steroids?
Maybe the church members can offer a handshake, but trust and brotherly oneness seem unthinkable.
SSA does not seem like a sexual choice, but an identity that colors and shapes all of life.
Neither the struggler, the pastor, nor the congregation knows what to say.
Therefore, an SSA struggler in the church could be tempted to conclude that homosexuality is unredeemable. There is hope for the angry and the greedy, but not for the homosexual.
Jesus often exposed people’s misunderstanding of his identity and mission by pointing to their relationships with the marginalized, rather than highlighting their score on a doctrinal exam.
True Christianity creates a casteless society, because we see people through the lens of God’s particular creation: “you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”10 Therefore, what God has knitted together, let no man tear apart!
However, he was emphasizing that homosexuality is a physical illustration of our spiritual condition. The bodily inversion reflects our spiritual inversion. God does not give a homoerotic person over to his sin because he is a homosexual, but because he is an idolater.
The gospel penetrates to the root of the heterosexual and homosexual dilemma: Who am I? Whose am I?
I have talked with men who are convinced God has taken away their unwanted SSA. God is able to perform that kind of miracle, and I rejoice when He does, but this is not the norm. God often calls us down a different road. And the question we wrestle with is, “Why doesn’t God save us like we want to be saved?”
The determined have their own plan. God dwells with the broken and humble, the powerless and planless.
Instead of our
activity determining our identity, our identity determines our activity!
In other words, the passions Paul is calling us to kill often do not appear as enemies, but as friends, or even closer; they appear as who we are.
Anger stands lookout for lust. When Cain was angry, God warned him not to leave his door open. “Sin is crouching at the door.”49 Hurt, disappointment, and bitterness—which may feel like legitimate responses—love to invite dangerous friends into the home of our hearts without our alarms sounding.
One thing is certain: their battle is not merely a fight to change behavior or block tormenting thoughts. The fight is much deeper than that. Ultimately, they are battling to believe that they are defined by the One who made them, not labeled by anything or anyone else.
one way to fight at the heart-level is to agree—at least in part—with the accuser. “Yes, I am a sinner. With the right conditions I am capable of any sin. This is who I am—apart from Jesus.”
If we are not “wearing” the pure love of Jesus, we will weave lust and greed into the fabric of friendship.
When I asked a friend who battles SSA how he would describe himself, he simply said, “I suck.”
When God names us, we can be honest without being either proud or discouraged.
He concludes that his identity, not just his actions, is fundamentally flawed, and he is right. Wesley’s sense of shame is announcing what most of us prefer to ignore: when sin entered our world, it did not merely contaminate what we do, it defiled who we are. We are born sinners.
the very nature of sin is that it is not freely chosen.
As for “sexual identity,” is it anything more than a label that we adopt in order to make sense of the rest? The only thing that remains, when all the factors that are mutable and can be influenced by the action of the will are removed, is raw sexual attraction. The flow of blood to one’s sexual organs in response to gender-specific erotic stimulation. If that is all there is, this is a tremendous amount of smoke pouring out of a very insignificant fire.44
The “age of this world” represents “organized evil in the form of peer pressure, ideologies, systems, and structures that provide us with a script for living life totally apart from God and His purposes.”
Our lives are labeled and scripted by systems and structures of this world that move God to the margins of our thinking.
Once again, beast is renaming beauty, and God’s Word is considered uncertain. “Did God actually say . . . ?”
As long as we live within a church that emphasizes marriage and happiness as the ultimate desires of our heart rather than reminding us that our ultimate desire should be for God, we risk not only alienating traditional singles, those dealing with divorce, and those struggling with homosexuality, but also (and perhaps more importantly) reducing the truth of the Gospel to a simple vending machine that readily supplies all of the good things we desire as soon as we demand them.54
Characteristics that usually don’t appear together merge in attractive symmetry: infinite exaltation and limitless condescension, highest glory and lowest humility, supreme sovereignty and perfect obedience. He is light and He is love. He is victor and victim in one. He is the just Judge and the merciful Savior. He confronted sin, overthrew tables, and walked out of His own tomb, yet He was born in a barn, ate with sinners, and died as a criminal. This vision of Jesus is gargantuan and captivating, yet it is often concealed by the church.
Christian community was not designed to hide who we really are, but to reveal.
Therefore, many SSA strugglers are phobic about homophobia. They agonize alone, for fear of rejection. However, the community needs their transparency—and they need the community.
Many SSA strugglers lament their lack of close, non-sexual same-sex friendships. They feel left out, different, and desperately long to be brought in. Often they begin to anticipate rejection, so they are further alienated.
Since God has not designed us to image Him alone, and since sin fractures relationships, long-term growth as a believer is related to the health of our interpersonal connections.
If I pull away from community because it is messy, humbling, frustrating, or disconnected from my needs, I may be moving away from Christ. Jesus often exposes our sin and highlights His grace in the midst of “insignificant” or, from our perspective, “useless” people. The kind of people we most fear, despise, or misunderstand may be the very ones who open our eyes to more of Jesus.25
Ministry outside the church begins with transformation inside the church. The way we live should raise questions, not just arguments.
“You cannot carry a leper out of death and into life if you are not willing to touch lepers.”18 Jesus was willing.
Paul is calling Titus to remind Christians what it’s like to be swept up in willful and intellectual bondage. Sin is both voluntary (“disobedient”) and involuntary (“led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures”). Sin has personal (“foolish”) and relational ramifications (“malice and envy, hat[r]ed”). How can a saved sinner despise an unsaved sinner? Was my sin of choice better than his sin of choice? If I believe “He chose to be gay,” did I “choose to be self-righteous”? Yes and no.
We are courteous because we are aware of our own hopeless condition, apart from God’s grace.
Christians are courteous to non-Christians because we know what it’s like to earn wrath, but receive mercy. We are heirs, not by birth, but by grace; therefore, graciousness should ooze out of our pores and characterize our speech.
