Homosexuality in Light of Scripture

Well, as we dive into this topic, let me give you just a few categories at the beginning here that I want to make sure that you feel the freedom in. I want to give you some space here.

The first thing I would just say, I want to give you some space to be able to disagree. You may hear me today and you disagree with it. That’s okay. I’m glad you’re here. I really am. And my point of this is not trying to win an argument. Here's all I want to ask of you. If you find yourself in a place that you go, “Yeah, I don’t agree with what he’s saying,” I just would ask, would you investigate why you don’t agree?

Would you at least allow yourself to go, “What is it about it that I don’t agree with? It is that the argument itself? Is it what presented?” Because a lot of times we find ourselves in this place, “I don’t agree because I don’t like the implications of that. Or I don’t like how it makes me feel. Or my emotions are leading me in a way that I go, That just can’t be right.” And you may walk out today still in disagreement. I’d just ask you to wrestle with it a little bit.

Second place I want to give you a little space, you may be in process on this too. In fact, for all of us, man, when you come to Jesus every area of our life, we are in this journey with Him, this process that our lives start looking more like Him and as we go through that journey, as the Holy Spirit leads us in that, allowing space for that, God is patient with us.

Now, He always calls us to that truth, but there’s that patient part. And I say that because I’m always amazed in the Church, we give each other a lot of grace in the process on most every other sin, but when it comes to sexual sin somehow it’s like, “Nope, you’ve got to be right there right now.”

And so, you may be struggling in some ways, you may be in process on this. This is the place to do that as we wrestle with God’s truth, as we live in community together, as we call people to truth but we experience that grace.

Final thing I just, category is every one of us needs to realize the whole message of Scripture is counterintuitive. And what I mean in that, if you’re reading through the Bible and if you faithfully read through the Bible, I don’t care who you are, you’re going to hit some part of the Bible that it hits some part of your life that you go, “Man, that is not how I think. That’s not how I would do things.” And maybe that’s the place we’re feeling it most as our culture has moved so much on some of these sexual issues, we start realizing how counterintuitive and countercultural what we are talking about is.

Now, specifically when we talk about the issue of homosexuality, what we want to dive in today is, you know, what does the Bible actually say about homosexuality? We’ve made a commitment that we believe this is God’s revealed truth and so we are looking to it to inform and to lay out for us how do we live in that truth?

We actually believe that it’s God’s Word, we believe He is the designer of life, and as He has laid it out in Scripture, we want to align our lives according to that. And so, the fundamental place that I want to start is let’s see what Scripture says about it.

Here I think is the core question around this. The question is whether two men or two women can date, fall in love, and commit to a lifelong, consensual, Christ-centered,
monogamous union. Has marriage been opened or defined in a way that that could be true? And here again, don’t let your emotions guide you right now. We want to be people governed by Scripture. You have to have a biblical foundation of sex and marriage and understanding that.

God’s design for sex is for a man and woman in a lifetime commitment of marriage. And so, when Jesus was asked about this, and He was asked within that context, notice His definition of this, He went back to the beginning. He says you’ve got to go back to the created design, the way God laid it out in Genesis.

He says, “From the beginning of creation God made them male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. The two shall become one flesh. So, they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

And so, I just noted this point though, when Jesus is talking about marriage, He is asked about divorce in that, for Him, the standard is God’s original design.

And I say that because it’s easy, some people would say, “Well, yeah, He designed that at the very beginning, but it changed over time.” At least by Jesus’ time, He’s going, “No, that’s still My standard. That’s what I still go back to. That’s what I’m quoting.”

Notice in this, Jesus didn’t just speak off the top of His head either. He said, “Okay, let’s let Scripture define for us.” Now, then when you drill into the topic of homosexuality, there’s really only seven passages in the Bible that speak to it. And, again, some who promote would say in that, “Well, if God only speaks to it seven times, it must not be that important to God.”

You’ve got to be careful making those kind of arguments. One, does it fall under a larger umbrella of sexual immorality that, frankly, God speaks to quite a bit? Two, does He speak to what He actually is designing? And then does Scripture speak directly to these issues of homosexuality? Look at the seven passages; we’ll just kind of walk through. One you’ve got two stories in the Old Testament: Genesis 19, Judges 19.

Genesis 19 is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah when Lot is rescued. And part of that rescue when the angels came, a group of men from the city came and they literally go to Lot’s door. They want to rape these men. And so, there’s sexual degradation, there’s sexual sin in the city in different ways. But it’s a pretty horrific scene.

Judges 19 is almost worse, honestly. And just as you read through these stories you do, you see the breakdown in society as a whole. Here’s the only thing that I think you’ve got to careful though. There’s nobody promoting a monogamous, gay sexual union today that would use those stories to say, “Oh, that’s why it should be allowed.” These stories are horrific in a lot of different details.

The other place you see in the Old Testament is in the Law. Now, just to give you some context, God gave the Mosaic Law. Remember, He called the nation of Israel and He was doing a distinct work through them. And when He called them out as a nation, He gave them the Law. Literally it came from God through Moses. And so, we use that term “Law.”

He’s got two verses. One, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it’s an abomination,” Leviticus 18 [:22]. And then the second one is [Leviticus 20:13], “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.”

Now, let me highlight here in both these chapters, there’s a lot of things He is prohibiting sexually in these chapters. So, it’s not like, oh, this is the only thing. And by the way, He doesn’t just use this word “abomination” to only to homosexuality, it’s the worst. But He does, in a very straightforward manner, go, yeah, God does not consider that within the bounds of the things He would say - “Sexually Permissible.”

Now, I know as soon as I say that, anytime you quote anything from the Law and I’ve heard this from people, they go, “Well, if you’re going to go to the Old Testament Law, I mean, weren’t there rules against eating shellfish?

You do have to look at it as a whole and go, “Okay, what was God doing through this Law?” Anytime you’re talking about the Law, there’s kind of three parts, understanding it today.
There was the moral, there’s a civil, and there’s the ceremonial. Remember, God is doing this unique work through the nation of Israel. And so, when He called them out, He gives them this full law.

And so, part of it is His moral law. These are moral standards that help reveal what God is like, His character, His holiness. And so, there’s a moral law. Part of it was civil law. Remember, they were a country and they had to run in certain ways and God said, “Man, these laws impact this country in this time.” And then part of it, it was ceremonial. There were certain ceremonial functions that only Israel did and it called people and made them unique and it made them different. Part of it was the ceremony that went in the temple system and the sacrifice and the animals.

We now come in the New Testament, remember we are not under that old covenant; we are under the new covenant, and we look at those laws, how do you evaluate those laws today? Let me give you three categories. Either: One, some of the laws were realized in Christ so they were fulfilled in the new covenant.

When you came in today, we don’t have an altar up here. We don’t sacrifice animals. I don’t wear high priestly robes. We don’t have a veil. We don’t…all those things that were laid out and they were good in their time, when Jesus died on the cross, He fulfilled them. They were completely realized in Him.

The second category would be some of them were retracted in the New Testament. They are no longer in effect because of the new covenant.  According to the old covenant, you had to be circumcised to be a part of God’s people. Paul says, “No, that’s no longer true.” That’s why the Church in Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council, they came together and they go, “Man, we need to look at this. What has changed in light of this new covenant?” And there have been changes.

The final thing is this category of what was restated in the New Testament. What parts of that Law would still be true because they said it again in the New Testament? So, we look at the Ten Commandments, they were given as part of the Law, but we don’t throw them out now. Why? Because the Ten Commandments are restated in the New Testament.

And so, that’s why we have to go to the New Testament passages to say, “What do they say about homosexuality?” Would they uphold that same standard? We’ve got three passages in the New Testament. The first one, Romans 1. People have rejected God as a culture, He gives them over to their own sin. Look what He says, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions,” notice that word. It’s “dishonorable.” What they are desiring doesn’t match the honor of what God created.

“For the women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

Some people like to look at it and go, “Well, Paul is just using specific terms of non-consensual sex.” That’s not true in this passage. He’s talking about the very core passions and the very core activity and notice his key argument when he says it’s unnatural, he is not, like, using it as an adjective. “Oh, that’s unnatural.” He is saying it’s not according to God’s design.
And so, he is going back just like Jesus did, back to that Genesis design: This is how God designed humanity; this is how God designed sex.

And part of that when people are handed over in sin as a culture, when they embrace that, you’ll see this acting out in a way that those natural passions and the natural designs are thwarted. It’s a strong passage reaffirming God’s moral standard.

Again, in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul says, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, or idolators, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, thieves or greedy or drunkards or revilers or swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

This defines their life and he lists all different sins. Homosexuality isn’t the only sin here, by the way. In fact, I encourage you, if you read through the list, you’ll probably find something that hits you. And that’s what Paul’s point is. He says, “That’s not your life.” And then, and I love how he puts it, “But you, such were some of you.” That was your life, but not anymore. Because you are washed, you’re sanctified, you’re justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. You have been washed by Jesus, so that doesn’t define you anymore. He is your identity.

One more passage, 1 Timothy. And this is a good one, because remember we had that question about the Law? What do we learn from the Law? Paul says we don’t throw out the Law completely. He says, “Now we know that the Law is good if one uses it lawfully.” If you interpret it the right way, you can learn a lot about it.

It helps show me in my life, man, what is God’s moral standard? “And so, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike mothers and fathers, for murderers, the sexually immoral,” that’s that broad category of that, “men who practice homosexuality, and slavers, liars, perjurers, whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.”

All this behavior, whatever the category, but homosexuality was in it, is contrary to sound doctrine. It doesn’t match what God is teaching. And so, if we put all of that together, sexual intimacy between same-sex partners is condemned in the direct passages of Scripture. I mean, it’s clearly there. There’s a condemnation of that activity.

Second summary point I would say is sexual intimacy between same-sex partners is never portrayed in a positive light in the Bible. There is never a place where you go, “Well, this is showing it.” The third thing out of that, there’s no biblical warrant for same-sex marriage.

Now, again, and as I have wrestled with the different scholars on this and different ones that would say, “Yeah, but I mean, it doesn’t explicitly say that it can’t be there. Couldn’t there be a category for that?” Here’s the only problem with that argument. You’re making an argument of silence, from silence.

And just think about it for a moment, this category of marriage that God defined from the beginning, that Jesus pointed back to, that Scripture by the way, anytime marriage comes up, it always goes back to that Genesis passage. It always repeats that passage.

That somehow God has now redefined or added a new category of marriage and He never spoke to it? That He would be absolutely silent about it? Does God do that in any other way? Or could it be that I want it to be that way and so I am going to just go ahead and add that because I want it there, even if the Bible doesn’t say it?

It’s interesting to me, Luke Timothy Johnson is a New Testament scholar. He teaches down at Emory. He says, “I have little patience with the efforts of those to make Scripture say something other than what it says, through appeals to linguistics or cultural subtleties. If you interpret it exegetically, it is straightforward: we know what the text says.” Now, listen though, what he has chosen to do.

He said, “The text prohibits it, but we do in fact reject the straightforward commands of Scripture and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience of thousands of others that have witnessed to us, which tell us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way that God has created us.”

As a New Testament scholar, as a biblical scholar, and he is up there with them, and he would be somebody who would want to read it into the passage, but he said it’s just not there. And so, we have made a choice, do you hear what he said? We made a choice to trust something other than what is explicitly there and we are trusting our own experience and the experience of others.

Frankly, it’s the same thing that a lot of Christians are doing. And hear me on that, when you make that movement, away from what God has said clearly, and maybe on this issue you go, “Yeah, but this is what feels right to me,” where do you stop?
So, if homosexuality is not permitted biblically, then why are some people attracted to the same sex? I mean, if this isn’t how God designed it, why do people have that? And as we wrestle with that, Christians and secular experts continue to grapple with the issues of causality. We go, “What is the core of that?”

And over the years, this is one of the issues we have not done real well. There was a time in the Church where the quickest thing people would say is, “Well, it’s a choice. It’s a choice. Just don’t do it.”

If you have ever sat down with a brother or sister in Christ who loves the Lord and they have struggled with same sex, almost every one of them, I have heard the same thing, “I didn’t choose this. I didn’t want this. It’s not like I got up and decided, Oh man…” And so, to just equate it simply to choice, for people who would go, “Man, from my youngest time, I have struggled with this.”

On the flip side, the secular experts try to find a genetic cause. It’s got to be in the genes, got to be in the genes, Simon LeVay, neuroscientist, was one of the leading forefront on this, determined to find it. They didn’t find it. They have not found it in the genetic code.

Here's what I would say. There’s not this one-size-fits-all story for every person who struggles with this. We kind of like that because it makes it easy for us and we’re going to go, “Okay, it’s over there and I can explain that.” There’s not one-size-fits-all story. There is a one-size-fits-all source, though. We have to realize the impact of the fall cannot be underestimated in the ways it has shaped our humanity.

All of our humanity. Guys, this is why God hates sin so much. This is why Adam and Eve’s choice was so devastating. This is when Romans says, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”

Man, the moment sin came in the world, death came with it. And it’s not just talking about physical death, by the way. Adam and Eve didn’t drop dead, but there was relational death - a death of sin and sickness that came in the world. There’s sexual death that we were all impacted. And when you look at that, when sin came into the world, the areas that you look at and you look at our planet, you look at these struggles, and the screaming thing whenever you see sin is, “This is not the way it was supposed to be. This is not goodness of God in His design.” And the impact. And, guys, it impacted our desires.

And so, things that would have been normal desires get thwarted through sin. Not just around sex. We take something like food. Is there anything more normal than food, eating food? But, you know, there are people that struggle, their very existence around food and the choices with it and the control of it. And the same way sexually. All of us, our desires have been impacted by sin.

And so, if you have these desires, well, here’s what Scripture tells us out of it. God never tempts us, it always comes from the world of flesh and the devil. And I say that because if you struggle with an ongoing temptation, you reach a point and you’re mad at God over it. And that’s actually a trick of the devil.

The devil wants to make you mad at God over a temptation that he is constantly fueling. And he separates you from the One who actually can make a difference in your life about it.

The second thing you see is Jesus was tempted as we are, so temptation is not sin. The fact that you have the same-sex attraction in that and you feel a temptation in that, the temptation itself is not a sin. It says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every way, in every respect, has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

And when I read that verse, I think about, you know, Jesus faced sexual temptation and He never sinned. I mean, you realize His strength? Do you realize the model that He is for us? You realize His ability to relate to and to walk with and to sympathize with single adults and to draw close to them? Because He knows their struggle in way that, frankly, those of us who are married and got married early, we don’t understand that struggle in a way. And they get to relate to their Savior in a way that we don’t. And He relates to them.

Here’s what it comes down to. When we allow our desire to cross the line to thoughts or action, contrary to God’s design, then we have sinned.

Any time you cross over from temptation and James puts it so well. He says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I’m being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil and He Himself tempts no one. But each person,” every single one of us, “is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.”

When you allow that desire, so that desire is there and the temptation is there, and I love the “lure and entice,” you give it some time. You think about it a little bit. You allow yourself to go there a little bit. You feel it like it’s drawing you out. “And then desire, when it has conceived gives birth to sin.” So it didn’t happen immediately, there’s a conception of it and then it leads to sin. “And sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth,” what does it bring? Remember when we talked about…? Death.

So, as we look at this, let me walk through a couple of categories. We’ll get more direct with it. But how have Christians with same-sex desires chosen to live out their faith?

Bruce Miller who is a pastor in Dallas, he wrote, and [I’m] indebted to him. I think it’s good categories. And one is celibacy. A choice of devotion to Christ. Those adults that have said, “Hey, I have these same-sex desires. I cannot live this out in a way, so I am giving that to Christ and I have chosen a life of celibacy.” And I don’t say that lightly, by the way. That’s the part where I think as we talk about it in the Church, we need to recognize the sacrifice that maybe in a way some of us haven’t had to.

I’ve got a friend named Tim and he, for a part of his life, grew up in a conservative church, but a lot of wounds from it. Walked away from Christ, really embraced the whole gay lifestyle, he was an actor, he was in some movies. And finally, he just reached the end of himself that he just said, “I,” as he described it, “I missed Jesus.” And so, he came back to Christ. He came back to the Church.

Now, I always like talking to him because he is always really honest and really funny. And we would just talk together and I remember one night we were at dinner and he was eating at our house and so, I just start drilling in a little bit and said, “Tim, you think God is changing your desires any?” And he said, “Yeah, I don’t think so.” He’s just honest.

He said, “I tried dating some women. That is not my thing.” And so, I mean, in honesty, I said, “So, if you’re not going to date and you don’t think that’ll change…you just have embraced celibacy?” And he said, “Yeah.” He said, “I’m not saying it’s not hard.” And I love this. He goes, “But Jesus is good. And so, when I was living out in that, there’s nothing in that that compares with walking with Christ and what I experience with Him.”

And then he laughed and he goes, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve got a lot of friends in the same boat. Some are divorced, some have never married, all of us are in the same boat together.” And then I go, “Yeah, there’s an honesty in that.”

And this is the part we don’t like talking about it, because there’s a level of sacrifice in this. And maybe you’re there and you go, “Gosh, that would be a hard step.” I would encourage you, wrestle with Jesus on it.

Now, another category is those who have chosen marriage, heterosexual marriage, a choice of self-denial for Christ. Now, I’m not talking about they got married so that they could make it go away. That usually doesn’t work. Or they didn’t tell their prospective spouse. And so, they have chosen, in a very honest way, to talk to their spouse and as they have looked at this, they chose to get married.

Rebecca McLaughlin is a writer I really like. Christian writer, I have read a number of her things, she is married, has kids. I was surprised when I got to this chapter on one of her books where she is talking about this and she starts telling her own story. She said, “When I was growing up, I would find myself attracted to girls. In fact, when I turned eighteen, I thought, Oh, this is gone. I found myself falling in love with another girl.” But as she wrestled with that, she said, “This doesn’t match the biblical ethic,” and she wasn’t exclusively attracted to girls. She dated a man and they married.

Listen to her words. She said, “If I am ever attracted to someone outside my marriage, it’s always to a woman. But I am not in that one percent of women who can only be attracted to other women. So, I am able to be happily married to a man and just like any other married Christian, when I find myself attracted to someone other than my husband, I need to ask Jesus for help to not follow that pull.” It's just an openness and honesty.

Another category is kinship partnerships, it’s non-sexual intimacy with others. Those who form deep relationships. They are not sexual, but they are deep. And it meets some of those intimate, deep friendship needs. The last category is transformation - those that would say nothing is impossible for God.

Those that have had their desires transformed. And as much as the culture wants to deny it, you can’t deny their stories either. I think of someone like Rosaria Butterfield, who was a women’s study professor at the University of Syracuse who was in a lifelong partnership with her lesbian partner, went to the Universalist church that gave permission over that.

And was fully entrenched and said, “This is me; this is who I am,” until she developed a friendship with a pastor and his wife who would have her and her partner over for dinner. And by the way, when they came over to dinner, they didn’t hammer them. They just loved them, they got to know them, they talked about everything in life.

Until finally Rosaria was intellectually curious enough, she said, “I know you don’t think the Bible speaks the same way I do. Can you tell me what the Bible says about homosexuality?” And in a straightforward manner, he laid it out much like I have this morning.

She told herself, “I don’t like this, but I can’t deny what it’s saying.” And as she came to Christ, she knew she had to leave lesbianism. She is married today. She would say God has changed her today. She is one of the best writers on this today. There can be transformation. It doesn’t mean everyone.

Some people have prayed their whole life, they have not experienced that change. And some people, they have seen God totally change them. Again, I don’t understand the mysteries of God in this all. But I think we have got to be honest about, when people are in this, what God can do and then what He chooses to do.

As we finish out, how do we respond as a church? Let me just give you a few walkaway things. One, we can love all people knowing it’s not our responsibility to judge them. We think if I’m going to define this biblically, now I’ve got to go change everybody in the world on this.

Look what Paul said to the church in Corinth. He said, “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.” They were dealing with big sexual issues in the church and people had just kind of condoned it. And so, he says, I was not at all meaning the sexually immoral of the world, or the greedy or the swindlers, idolators. Since you would have to go out of the world, for what have I to do with judging outsiders?”

Here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying, “Hey, I’m addressing you as a church.” This is what you’ve got to focus on. You don’t have to worry about them out there. You don’t have to go out there and judge everyone. We don’t need to go out of this place and tell everybody, “Oh man, we are against that.” Man, I leave them to Jesus. In fact, as I go interact with people, my number one message is not trying to change somebody sexually out there.

Here’s the number one message when we go out of this place, “Man, can I introduce you to Jesus?”

Because here’s the deal, guys, no one changes apart from Jesus. And so, our number one goal is: how do I introduce people to Jesus and then through the power of the Holy Spirit, then through the power of the Bible. Man, as they start that journey, I would love to see their life match God’s design, but I’ll never get them to live the design until they have experienced the Savior of the design. And so, that’s our message to the world.

And so, much like today, we don’t try to camp out on issues, but we do call people to what the Bible says, because that’s what we are aligning our lives to. We must continue to speak the truth in love to those in the Church, calling all of us to the sexual standards of Scripture.

The reality is, in the American Church, in the evangelical Church, and Bible churches today, homosexuality is probably not our greatest issue. It’s actually calling heterosexuals to live according to standards of Scripture. And we have got to speak that truth in love as well. We must support and celebrate our brothers and sisters in Christ who struggle with same-sex attraction, but are choosing to pattern their lives according to Scripture. Support and celebrate them because they are sacrificing in a way that many of us are not.

We must develop a more robust understanding and celebration of single adults in the Church. Final thing I would just ask all of you to do, we must open our homes and families to those who are longing for community and we are promised it in the Church.

You want to make a difference on this issue? Maybe there’s part of it, you go, “Man, I see our culture is changing, I see what is going on out there,” you want to make a difference on this issue, you know where you could start? You could start by looking at your dinner table and asking yourself, Who have I invited in our family? Who am I doing life with together?

When you come to church on a Sunday morning, who sits alone in your section every week and you let them sit alone? And you have yet to go over and introduce yourself and you have yet to grab them on a Sunday and say, “Hey, let’s go get lunch together. Let’s do community together.”

There’s a reason the LGBT community has their arms open wide, especially to young people who have left the Church. They say, “Come here, we will love you.”

We need to be the community that actually deliver on what we promise. We need to be the people that we cross in fellowship and in love and open our homes and lives in a way. You know, somebody may leave our church one day, maybe after today, because they go, “If that’s what you believe the Bible says, I can’t believe that.” I understand that. But you know what I would want? I would want, if they left over that reason, they were so sad to go, because they were so loved in this place. And the people of this place offered real community in it.