Born Again This Way: Coming out, coming to faith, and what comes next

by Rachel Gilson

I want to show you that Jesus is beautiful, powerful, and worthy right at the heart of this conversation, right at the heart of our sexuality.

It felt as natural as hunger.

By the end of high school, I was convinced that everything central to my identity was opposed to everything central to Christianity. I was devoted to scholarship, to ideas, to truth.

God could have declared to Adam, Don’t murder Eve. This would have been self-evident—I expect all of us would have nodded in approval.

Jane and I soon found that the subject of sexuality is everywhere in the Bible.

Whether we’re married or single, through the blessing of sexuality God communicates powerfully about three things: his prizing of diversity, his priority towards new life, and his love for his people.

There is strength and beauty in difference. And when we value diversity, we’re acknowledging the beauty of something God designed. We see the first notion of God’s priority towards diversity right in the Garden of Eden in his purpose for humanity.

Others struggle to feel internally aligned with their sex. Still others were born with intersex conditions, so determining their sex is more difficult than with most people.

We realized that even in all the goodness of procreation, men and women are never encouraged in the Bible to be fruitful and multiply outside of the bounds of marriage. This is not a machine-gun method, aggressively sending our genetic material into the world for the sake of the species. The family, centered on sex-differentiated marriage, is intended to be a bond of love, commitment, and durability, which supports the growth of children.

Our culture would answer that the more is made up of companionship and sexual pleasure.

A woman can find satisfying, joyful, erotic connection with another woman. Of course they can. So how could the Bible deny same-sex partners marriage when they have the main ingredients for it? Denial seems arbitrary and cruel.

The designed purpose of marriage is to illustrate metaphorically God’s relationship to his people (as we’ll see from Ephesians 5:22-33). And just as a car’s engine is complex, and fails if it lacks a crucial part, so the engine of marriage is complex, and fails if it lacks a crucial part. A marriage cannot rightly depict God’s relationship with his people if it lacks faithfulness, or pleasure, or fruitfulness—or sex difference. The metaphor demands it.

We are never promised relief from the presence of dangerous desires, but we are promised power to fight victoriously (1 Corinthians 10:13).

First, there can be the tendency to blame our desires or our situation on God. That way it’s his fault, not ours. In James 1:13 the hypothetical tempted person declares that God is the one tempting them. James dismisses this by declaring twofold truth: God is untemptable by evil, and he tempts no one. He never desires evil, so it cannot tempt him; and he does not desire for anyone to sin,

so he does not tempt them to do so. James says that when we are tempted, it is because of our own desire—and since that is so, we must take responsibility. Yes, God allows us to live in this world filled with temptation. He allows our faith to be tested. But his desire and his command are that we stand firm.

But we

are wrong when we wrench the gift out of his hands and use it against its design.

If you are a Christian, this is the call God has put on your life. Not just a piece of it but the whole thing. When you submit your whole life to him, in thankfulness for what he has provided for you in Jesus, it is a holy offering—and God delights in it!

That grew eventually, like a pearl that takes years of irritation to form, into a realization that same-sex-attracted Christians have unique and powerful ministries—that is, we serve the church and the world through our example of obedience. How so? Because we witness powerfully to the beauty of Jesus over romance. Because we embody the necessity of relying on him alone to choose holiness. And because we prophetically call the church to honor God and neighbor by neither taking away from nor adding to God’s word on sexuality. That’s what we’ll see in this chapter.

To choose celibacy, Jesus must be really precious to you. What a chance to testify that he is! What an opportunity to call into question the narrative of salvation-by-romance, and to point to what all love dimly reflects. And not just with your words, but, like an Old Testament prophet, with your life. You only give up something awesome for something even better. I could only give up the pleasures of a girlfriend—even someday a wife—for the more pleasurable embrace of Christ.

When people are offended by our obedience, it is because our culture, both inside and outside the church, has bought the lie that sex is a merely private matter.

It warns that redefining sin harms all people, not least same-sex-attracted believers. We already face immense pressure from the world; to be questioned by our siblings in Christ only increases the burden. We are a reminder from the Lord to his church that his law is good, and that trying to work around it brings ruin, despite good intentions.

All people are sexually broken, in need of forgiveness and transformation.

Same-sex-attracted believers have a ministry in the church to show the good news that, even in the face of enduring temptation, life in Christ can be found.

I believe that one of the most beautiful things that faithful same-sex-attracted Christians bring to the church and to the world is this clear path: a vision of Jesus more beautiful than romance, of the Spirit empowering us to live in holiness, and of the Bible not as a death sentence but a balm of hope.

Without the beauty of Jesus, we won’t leave the safety of our LGBT family.

Romance is not appropriate between people of the same sex, just as it is not appropriate between siblings. Think of the intimacy of healthy sisters. They are close emotionally, often having intimate access to each other’s lives. This relationship can be a special blessing, a cherished reality. But it would veer into unhealthiness if one sister was unreasonably jealous of the other having close friendships with anyone else, or if the sisters felt possessive of each other’s time or emotions.

On one side, we may be in a church that is dangerously lax or even outright disobedient when it comes to biblical sexuality. How can we receive strength for our fight against our temptations if our elders or our siblings think we’re crazy for trying? Sin works primarily through deceit. Being exposed constantly to empathetic but biblically unsound teaching will provide just the ear-tickling words our flesh wants to hear. I cannot encourage you to remain in a body that takes your struggle against sin as a false pursuit. A church like this is a dangerous place to be.

You may have noticed several similarities between Emily’s story and mine, but perhaps the most significant one is this: we were both women who discovered and came to terms with our attractional patterns while we were outside of the church. I’m convinced that for both of us, being able to identify our attractions without shame early on has helped us to process them later in a healthy way in Christ. By contrast, many people who grew up in the church did not find it to be a safe place in which to discuss same-sex attraction, let alone admit to experiencing it.