I think we need to push back in a loving way when the world so idolizes marriage. Even the Church has painted it to be the All-in-All. It’s almost as if we can’t serve God until we’re ‘whole’ in marriage. That’s just not the way I read Scripture. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of churches are in error in that they will not hire a young man as a pastor if he is single. They’re under the false impression that single men are dangerous but married men are not. That’s a lie! Think about it: With that expectation, if Jesus Christ or Paul lived today, they wouldn’t be able to serve in many churches out there. There’s something wrong with that!
Yah, I’ve been rejected for pastoral roles a couple times because I was single.
That’s just crazy to me! It’s not biblical at all in my mind.
So, a couple other points you made which were interesting. You wrote that many people believe that bad parenting is what makes people gay, but this belief is more Freudian than it is Christian. I hadn’t thought about it like that, in terms of us thinking that way, inspired by secular psychologists.
See, that’s how secularism and humanist philosophies creep into the Church. They do it without us even realizing it. That’s why I wanted to frame it in that way, so when people think, ‘Wow, that’s right!’ we can point them back to Scripture. When people think, ‘Well, that person has same-sex attractions because he had an absentee father or a dominant mother,’ and although parenting is very important and as parents — they should do all that they can to influence and shape their child — parents are not God. Parents cannot turn a sinful heart and make it holy. They can’t make it one that beats after God. Only God can do that!
However, parents can point people to God. And in the same way, even if parents were perfect — along with the whole True Love Waits movement in the ’80s and ’90s — there was this movement among Christian parents that if you just read these books and you just do x, y, and z, then your kids will turn out great. I know so many parents who did that. There were so many mothers who stayed home and didn’t go to work, homeschooled their kids, and so on, but the reality is that there is no guarantee for your child to be holy and to love the Lord. I think that’s really important for us to realize. If there’s any root cause [for same-sex attraction] it’s sin. Original, actual, indwelling sin. That may sound depressing and bad, but the good news is that when we recognize the real problem, we can then recognize the real solution. Sin is the problem, Christ is the answer.
The thing is, everyone’s going to have a struggle of some kind and that may or may not be from how you were raised. For some people it may be alcohol, it may be drugs, or porn or anonymous sex or greed, workaholism. I think the big difference, though, is whether or not you see yours as sinful. I get asked probably once or twice a week to address homosexuality, which is why I was so excited to have you on, because I’ve never publicly addressed what I think about people with same-sex attractions, because it’s just not something I’ve experienced at all. So maybe in a couple sentences, what would you say specifically to a Christian who thinks there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality and thinks it’s good and God blesses it? What would you say to a Christian like that?
So for a Christian like that, I know that they’re expecting me to go at the six passages [which specifically address homosexuality] and begin explaining what they mean. I would be really well prepared for that because I’ve studied them for close to a decade. I’ve studied the passages in the original languages, I’ve studied the context, and I’ve read a LOT. I know all the arguments out there, so I know how they are all insufficient and incorrect. But I would also say to others, who may not be as familiar, know this: The Christian who believes God blesses same-sex relationships has probably done a lot of reading and they may even be more prepared to discuss those six passages than you are.
So, I always like to surprise people. I like to see what they think I’m going to do and then do something different. Honestly, although Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and 1 Timothy 1:9-10 are all very important passages to go through, if — let’s just say if — we didn’t have those passages, we still would have a clear articulation of Biblical sexuality. There are many places, but the two main places I would go to are actually parallel passages in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark: Matthew 19 and Mark 10. In those two parallel passages, Jesus was asked by the religious leaders about divorce. ‘Is it okay to divorce for any reason?’ What they wanted to do was to pull Jesus into that argument about divorce and whether it’s okay to divorce if my wife burnt my meal or whatever. But what Jesus does is answer them by asking what they’ve read in Scripture. He says ‘In the beginning, God made them male and female and the two shall become one flesh.’ Of course, He’s quoting from Genesis.
So here’s the important thing. So we look at the context. Jesus was being asked by the religious leaders about divorce — is it lawful to divorce for any reason? All Jesus needed to do was say, “therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.” That’s from Genesis 2:24. He just needed to say that to explain why divorce is not right. But, Jesus is God. And Jesus is never constrained by the questioner. Although the questioner might be asking about divorce, Jesus often times will broaden the question and then give the answer to a question that wasn’t even asked. So now Jesus is not only teaching about divorce, but He’s teaching about the essence of marriage. So Jesus throws in, “In the beginning, the Creator made them male and female.” What was the purpose? If you think about it, the fact that He threw male and female into this conversation on divorce is kind of irrelevant. Saying that there are males and females doesn’t answer the question about why divorce is wrong. But the reason Jesus threw that in there is [that] Jesus was realizing the Biblical mandate that marriage is male and female. That actually, this male/female complimentary relationship is essential to marriage because, without it, there is no marriage.
