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Summary
This passage examines God’s design for marriage, sexuality, and gender from Genesis 2, Matthew 19, and Ephesians 5. The one-flesh union of marriage between one man and one woman reflects the relationship between Christ and the church — a profound mystery laid out since the foundation of the world. We are reminded that every deviation from this design distorts the picture God is painting through marriage.
Key Lessons:
- Marriage between one man and one woman is God’s design from creation, and God Himself is the one who joins husband and wife — making Him the sole authority over marriage.
- The one-flesh union of marriage is ultimately a picture of Christ and the church, making every faithful marriage an evangelistic sermon to the world.
- Sexual deviancy and gender confusion are rooted in a crisis of identity — people trying to create their own identity apart from God — and the solution is not behavioral change but a new identity in Christ.
- Homosexuality and transgenderism are not unpardonable sins; the Corinthian church included former homosexuals who were washed, sanctified, and justified in Christ.
Application: We are called to minister to those in sexual sin not by debating or focusing on externals, but by offering the gospel and pointing them to a better identity in Jesus Christ. We should love them as we would any unbeliever, pray fervently, and trust in the sufficiency of Christ to transform any life.
Discussion Questions:
- How does understanding marriage as a picture of Christ and the church change how we view our own marriages and the institution of marriage in general?
- When someone asks whether homosexuality is a sin, how can we steer the conversation toward the gospel rather than getting drawn into a debate?
- Do we truly believe in the sufficiency of Christ to redeem even the most entrenched sexual sin, or has that become merely a slogan for us?
Scripture Focus: Genesis 2:18-24 (God’s design for marriage), Matthew 19:3-6 (Jesus affirms one man-one woman marriage as historical fact), Ephesians 5:31-32 (marriage reflects Christ and the church), 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (former sinners washed and sanctified).
Outline
- Introduction
- God’s Design for Marriage in Genesis 2
- The Helper and the One-Flesh Union
- The Mystery of One Flesh
- The Man’s Role: Leadership and Authority
- Jesus Affirms God’s Design in Matthew 19
- Ephesians 5: Marriage Reflects Christ and the Church
- How Did We Get Here?
- Homosexuality in Scripture: Sodom and Gomorrah
- Transgenderism and Gender Dysphoria
- How to Minister: What Not to Do
- How to Minister: What to Do
- The Sufficiency of Christ and Stories of Hope
- Closing Prayer
God’s Design for Marriage in Genesis 2
Introduction
And then verse 19, out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky, to every beast of the field.
But for Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept.
Then he took one of the ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.”
And then it says in verse 24, for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. So this is the design of marriage.
Now notice it’s one woman and one man, right? Very clearly God did not create Adam and Steve, right? He created Adam and Eve. So it’s not two men and it’s also not one man and multiple women, right? If that was God’s intention for polygamy to be the pattern of creation, then he would have created Adam and many women.
“God did not create Adam and Steve. He created Adam and Eve — one woman, one man.”
The Helper and the One-Flesh Union
No, he created Adam and Eve and it wasn’t multiple women. All of those options are then deviations from God’s original plan, right? So one woman, one man.
And you might ask, well, why wasn’t it good for Adam to be alone? What was it about Adam’s aloneness that caused God to say, “This is not good”? You might say companionship. Maybe that’s part of it, but obviously God was there. Adam had God. Adam had the animal. So it wasn’t only companionship. So what was it about Adam’s aloneness that made it bad?
Well, you can actually see from the text that he’s looking for a helper. He needs a helper, and God gave him a lot of work to do. He can’t do it on his own, so he needs a helper.
There’s like this whole drama in verses 19 to 20. It’s like, well, who’s going to be the helper? Where’s my helper? And he goes through all of creation to try to find a helper that’s suitable. And there is nothing. He finds nothing.
We’re almost meant to get to that point in the text and be like, “Oh no, there’s no helper for Adam. What do we do now?” And then God comes to the rescue and he creates for Adam a helper that is of Adam’s own essence. He says bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
So this helper is in no way inferior to Adam. This helper is exactly Adam’s companion counterpart in standing, dignity, worth, and humanness.
“This helper is in no way inferior to Adam — exactly his companion counterpart in dignity, worth, and humanness.”
That’s what it means to be bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. And then God marries them. God says now you will be joined to your wife. So this is one flesh in Genesis 2:28. And this is the first wedding of the Bible that we see here. Adam and Eve become one flesh. And this one flesh term is very mysterious, right? We don’t really fully understand what that means.
The Mystery of One Flesh
Obviously, there’s a spiritual component of this. In some ways, the one flesh designation of marriage is reminiscent of God’s character himself. God says of himself, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
There’s some analogy here that God seems to be making about the nature of God, the image of God, and man and woman. What is that analogy?
Well, it’s not necessarily the Trinity because it doesn’t quite fit. There’s a triune God, and there’s only two, and it doesn’t quite fit. So what is he really talking about? What is he trying to reflect? What part of the divine nature is he trying to reflect?
What’s amazing about the scriptures is that sometimes you see mysteries in the Old Testament that are solved in the New Testament. We won’t know until Ephesians 5 what exactly God is trying to reflect, but we will see that because we’ll get there in a second.
“Sometimes you see mysteries in the Old Testament that are solved in the New Testament.”
God makes Adam and Eve one flesh. He says the woman is a helper.
The Man’s Role: Leadership and Authority
Eve is the helper. But he gives the man a job as well in verse 24. And that is that the man is to lead.
What does that mean? The man is to leave his father and mother. That is, he was formerly under the authority of his father and his mother. And then he is to leave that authority, take his wife and start a new family, a new unit where he is the authority.
The last thing to say here because this is a class on sexuality and gender is this: one flesh also strongly implies a physical union. This is where sexuality comes in and sex comes in. Sex is here declared to be between a man and a woman in the context of marriage in their fleshly union that expresses the greater reality of their spiritual reunion, their spiritual union.
God declares sex here to be the wedding gift that he gives Adam and Eve so that they can express their oneness.
“Sex is the wedding gift God gives that expresses the greater reality of their spiritual union.”
The only thing I’ll say about that is it’s in joyful exuberance. It’s in joy that they can express that union, that reality that God has created.
Jesus Affirms God’s Design in Matthew 19
Okay. You might say, “Well, all right, all of this sounds good. Genesis 1, Genesis 2. But how do I know that this is literal? How do I know that this is not just some sort of story or some sort of allegory?”
And here we see that these are Pharisees. Pharisees come to Jesus and they ask him some trick questions, right? In Matthew 19:3-6, Jesus answers their questions in this way. Let’s just take a look at that. You can turn there if you’d like.
The parallel verse we’re not going to look at is in Mark 10:6, but just for your notes if you’re curious. But we’re going to look at the Matthew one. In Matthew 19:3, let’s read there. Some Pharisees came to Jesus testing him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?”
And he answered and said, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh.’ What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
Matthew 19:6: “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
Okay, so here Jesus quotes Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. He kind of mashes them together and he presents it as historical fact, right? He says, “Listen, you guys know this. You guys know that this is true.” And he adds some details for us.
So what does he add? Well, who is doing the joining? Who is doing the joining?
God Is the One Doing the Joining
Is God. Okay? God is the one doing the joining, and not only in the union of Adam and Eve but also in every other marriage union. It’s God who does the joining. Jesus says since it’s God that’s doing the joining, who are you to undo it? You’re just a man. Who are you to undo what God has done?
So now we understand that greater level of detail. God is the one doing the joining. What does that mean? It means that God is assuming absolute authority over who is married and who is not.
“God is the one doing the joining — who are you to undo what God has done?”
God gets to determine that. All right?
God is saying it is me doing the joining. You are not free to do what you would like in this area. Okay?
God is the sole authority.
There’s one more curious detail about this text that I missed the first time around that I thought you’d be interested in. Look at Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees, or the beginning of his answer to the Pharisees, in verse 3.
Why Jesus Emphasized Male and Female
The Pharisees come and ask him, “Hey, is it right or is it okay for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” And Jesus could have just started saying, “Well, didn’t you read that for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh?” He could have just started there.
And why did he include this detail that says from the beginning he created you? Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?
That seems kind of irrelevant actually, right? It seems kind of irrelevant to the point that Jesus is trying to make. Why did he put that in? Well, he put that in because he wanted us to know that this was the order of creation: male and female.
Maybe Jesus put that in for us in our time, but Jesus also put that in for them because back then there was a lot of confusion.
Homosexuality, all of that stuff. None of that is new, right? You understand that, right? None of that is new. But God wants us to know that this is the parameter of marriage that God put in from the beginning. It’s male and it’s female.
“God wants us to know this is the parameter of marriage He put in from the beginning: male and female.”
God did it. All other marriages that do not look like that are illegitimate because God didn’t do it. All right.
Ephesians 5: Marriage Reflects Christ and the Church
Okay. We step back one more time and ask, what is it about this oneness we were talking about before that God takes so seriously? Why does God take this concept of oneness of man and woman so seriously? And what is it really reflecting? What heavenly reality does it reflect?
Everybody here is familiar with Ephesians 5. If you look at Ephesians 5:31, the Apostle Paul tells us that God is doing something very intentional in redemptive history. In verse 31, he says, “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
The apostle Paul is quoting from Genesis as if it’s literal fact. He says this is the real reason. Verse 32: “This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
Ephesians 5:32: “This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
So the apostle Paul says this is the picture of God’s redemptive plan. This is the picture of God’s ultimate redemptive plan, laid out since the foundation of the world. When he created Adam and Eve, he wanted to paint this picture, which is an amazing thing.
What is it? It is what Christ and the church look like. That’s the picture that God is painting. Joel Owen said that a good marriage is the best sermon preached in all of history. A good marriage is the best sermon that you can preach.
Why is this? Because a good marriage is the best example of marriage that you personally know where the husband is loving his wife in a sacrificial way, where the wife is respecting and honoring the husband, and they’re faithful to each other and loyal to each other and affectionate with each other and they exhibit joy with each other.
That is the best picture that we can get on this side of eternity of Christ and the church. That’s the picture.
Whenever there is a deviation from that picture, then this picture is sullied. God is very serious about this picture.
Marriage as an Evangelistic Statement
Christ’s relationship with the church. In this way, you should understand that your marriage is an evangelistic statement.
It’s an evangelistic statement. You are making a statement to the world with your marriage. This is how Christ treats the church.
“Your marriage is an evangelistic statement — you are telling the world how Christ treats the church.”
If you think about God’s plan, there are billions of people in this world. Every marriage that follows God’s plan is another sermon being preached simultaneously and echoing throughout history.
“Every marriage that follows God’s plan is another sermon being preached simultaneously, echoing throughout history.”
That is the reality of Ephesians 5:31.
This is God’s plan laid out in scripture for us for marriage.
How Did We Get Here?
So how did we get here?
There’s actually a lot of flags. I didn’t know there were this many flags.
But how did we get to where we are today? Because we seem like our world has drifted pretty far from God’s plan, right?
Well, as I said a few minutes ago, we understand that deviation from God’s design for sexuality is nothing new. Even in biblical times there was Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Roman times there are lots of reports of sexual deviancy. This is not surprising. Satan hates a good marriage. Satan hates the picture of Christ in the church. Is that surprising to you? Satan hates that. He does not want that to happen. He does not want that picture to be painted.
A sign of a society that celebrates sexual deviancy is a society that is controlled by Satan. It’s basically showing us that Satan is in control of all the systems and all the philosophies of that place.
“Satan hates a good marriage. He does not want the picture of Christ and the church to be painted.”
And that’s where we find ourselves. It’s a society that has turned its back on God. If you want to ask how did we really get here, well, in this particular era, you can draw essentially a straight line from naturalism, which is basically the idea that there is no God, or maybe God just wound up the clock way back and then everything just proceeds as natural processes—like the blind watchmaker type thing—and chemical reactions in our brain and evolution and all this stuff, right?
From Naturalism to Existentialism
You can draw a straight line from that to this, believe it or not. How do I mean? If you believe in naturalism, you believe that there is no real moral standard, right? Because in naturalism everything is just atoms and molecules.
It’s just chemical reactions. How can you get a moral standard out of that?
And then you start to realize pretty quickly, if you’re a consistent and logical person, that naturalism leads to no meaning, no purpose, really no significance at all about you as a person. There’s no such thing as being made in the image of God. And so naturalism in the 1950s and 1960s evolved into existentialism.
Existentialism basically says, okay, we have to save this idea of meaning in our lives. How do you save that? Well, there’s no God, so we can’t base our meaning off of that. But we can create our own meaning.
We can create our own significance, right? Existentialism means you are free to live in your own invented sense of meaning. Nobody can ever tell you that meaning is invalid because everybody has their own different sense of meaning. It’s your invented world and it’s up to you to determine your own purpose and essence.
What is the ultimate expression of that? Well, the ultimate expression of your own essence and your own purpose is your gender. Your body is now no longer the image of God, but it is a blank slate on which you are free to draw your identity however you wish.
“Your body is no longer the image of God but a blank slate on which you draw your identity however you wish.”
Right? Any self-expression that you would like to choose, and you can abuse it if you want. Nobody can ever say anything. The main thing you have to have is consent.
It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you have consent because it is your body. You can do whatever you want with it. This philosophy opens up the door to all types of delusions.
The society cannot ever say that this is wrong because everybody is operating under this idea of existentialism: I can’t tell you what your meaning is. You can’t tell me what my meaning is. We’re all sort of living in our own bubbles of reality.
This gets into our schools. Schools across the country teach that you can express yourself however you wish. Even when I was in school as a grade schooler, they taught that. Back then at least there were bullies that would bully me if we did that.
But now there are all of these programs that come in nicely packaged forms like anti-bullying or anti-racism that seem good and innocent. But then in that program they teach you that gender is fluid and it’s self-determined.
Identity at the Root of Sexual Deviancy
And they sort of sneak in that agenda in there. You just have to realize that this is at the end of the day because of all of that—well, we understand that this is all about identity. All of the sexual deviancy, all the homosexuality, all the transgenderism, at the root of it is about lost people trying to create their own identity.
In fact, just listen to how the American Psychological Association describes it. It says, “See, this is the American Psychological Association.” Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes. Sexual orientation also refers to a person’s sense of identity based on these attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions.
We have to understand this because for other sins, for example, if you struggle with stealing or if you struggle with gossip, you’re not a gossip. Gossip is not like the core of your identity, right? Or maybe stealing or something else. Those aren’t the core of your identity. You don’t embrace that as “that’s who I am.”
But in these sexual sins, the people who promote that encourage you to embrace that as who you are. This becomes very insidious because if you try to tell them that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, what are they hearing? They’re hearing that you’re telling them they’re wrong—their whole sense of personhood.
Let’s put that aside for a second. We’ll come back and talk a little bit about what I think we should do, how I think we should treat them and deal with that. But let’s talk a little bit about deviations from God’s design.
Obviously, these are not the only deviations. There are a lot of deviations we can talk about. There’s fornication, and that has also straight line led to abortion, divorce, prostitution, polygamy, pedophilia, and you can go on and on. If you have a question about those specifically, you can ask a question over email if you’d like, so I can address it next week.
But for today, we’re going to focus on these two topics: homosexuality and the transgender movement. Homosexuality—we’ve already seen in God’s design that marriage is between a man and a woman.
“In sexual sins, people are encouraged to embrace it as who they are — their whole sense of personhood.”
Homosexuality in Scripture: Sodom and Gomorrah
But lately, there have been many people who have tried to come into the church and convince the church that homosexuality is in fact not condemned in the Bible. I’d like to go through a few verses. We’re not going to go through all of these. Maybe we will. We’ll see. We’ll take a look at some of these things just really briefly.
The first time we see homosexuality expressed is in Genesis 19:9, which is Sodom and Gomorrah. We’re not going to go through the whole story. It would just take too long.
Basically, there are two angels that come into Lot’s house as guests. The only way to express what happened there is that a homosexual rape gang from the town—pretty much the entire town—comes to their house and says in Genesis 19:9, “Stand aside.” Furthermore, Lot says, “Leave these people alone,” and they said, “Well, this one talking about Lot came in as an alien and already he is acting like a judge. Now we will treat you worse than them.”
So they’re going to obviously rape Lot as well. They pressed hard against Lot and came near to break the door.
It’s a famous story. We know what happens next. Lot, very hard to understand, offers his daughters and they reject him. It’s like, “No, we really want the angels.” All of a sudden they’re blinded, and then apparently that doesn’t stop them from continuing to want to rape the angels. And all of a sudden the whole salt thing.
Anyway, the whole point is in this particular story we see that there’s a homosexual rape gang, and the traditional Christian understanding has always been that this is why God has judged them.
But recently, and in fact maybe even in the past, people have tried to tell us that because of Ezekiel 16:49-50, which says, “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.” People have come in and said, “Well, because of this verse, the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was just lack of hospitality—lack of helping the poor and needy.”
But then how do you deal with this argument? Well, you just look at the next verse. The next verse says, “Thus they were haughty and committed abominations before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.” So it seemed like the abominations had something to do with it as well.
What were the abominations? Well, all you have to do is go to Jude 1:7 to see what the abominations were. It says, “Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.”
So it’s really about gross immorality. Now, you might say Sodom had more than one sin that they were judged for, but you cannot say that one of them was not gross immorality in the form of homosexuality.
Jude 1:7: “They indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.”
This was not the only time this happened in the Bible. This is not an isolated incident. In Judges 19:22, the same thing happens, but this time it’s inside Israel. Again, a homosexual rape gang comes to the man and says, “Bring out the man who came into your house that we may have relations with him.” There the man sort of sends out his concubine.
Homosexuality in the Law and the Prophets
Basically Israel almost lost their entire tribe of Benjamin because of this. But the point is this is actually not an isolated incident and this probably happened more than that even that time, which is a crazy thing to think about.
Leviticus 18 is a chapter about sexual deviance. I’ll let you read through that chapter on your own. There’s a lot of wild stuff in there—incest, bestiality—but we’re just going to focus on verse 22.
It says, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman. That is detestable.” Pretty clear.
But some people would say that was just a cultural thing for Israel to set them aside from the other nations, right? Maybe that was just a cultural thing.
Then you just have to look at verse 24, and it says, “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. And even the land was defiled. So I punished it for its sin and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”
Well, that doesn’t seem very cultural. In fact, God judged all of the other pagan nations for this very thing, right? So there it is.
Leviticus 18:24-25: “God punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”
Homosexuality in the New Testament
Sometimes you just have to look at the next verse to be able to understand some of these arguments. We’re running a little low on time unfortunately.
So, Romans 1:24-27. We are going to simply look at verse 26. All right, we’re just going to look at verse 26. You can read this yourself. Basically, it says, “God gave them over to the lust of their hearts for impurity.” And then it says verse 26, “For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions.
For their women exchange a 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 towards one another, men with men, committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
And how do homosexual advocates deal with this verse? Well, they say that this is dealing with the reality in the old Roman worlds about pederasty. Pederasty is this sort of practice, very detestable, where you would take a male child as your apprentice, but then it would be expected that you would commit sexual acts with this child. But then you would sort of teach them your trade too, and then they would grow up and after 18 or whatever they would become their own tradesmen and then they would take their own child for pederasty. Okay, this is terrible stuff.
But if you just look at the verse, that can’t be what it’s talking about because it’s talking about men versus men and there’s nothing to do with children in this verse.
Romans 1:26: “God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.”
Okay. And the last one is 1 Timothy 1:8-11. “But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, realizing that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the holy and profane, for those who kill their fathers and mothers, don’t do that. For murderers and for immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers.”
Okay, so here homosexuality is tucked into this long list of sins that include murder, lying, kidnapping, and don’t kill your fathers and mothers, Caleb and Kylie. Right? So both the Old Testament and the New Testament we see is consistent that homosexuality is wrong.
Okay, let’s move on. We’re always running out of time. Transgenderism.
Transgenderism and Gender Dysphoria
I got this slide actually from a children’s website. This is trans studentent.org.gend gender. I think the people who designed this may actually be high school students.
This is the gender unicorn. In contrast to the homosexual movement, which is something you might not have thought about, the homosexual movement tells you and has always maintained that sexual orientation is fixed at your birth. So you can’t do anything about it. And obviously because you can’t do anything about it, you are not responsible, right?
But the transgender movement says the opposite. It implies that gender and all aspects of your gender, including who you’re attracted to and including how you express yourself, are all fluid. They just kind of change. Maybe it’s under your control or not, but it just kind of changes and we all just have to affirm whatever state you are in at that particular point.
Gender identity, gender expression, physical attraction, emotional attraction—these are all changing chaotically, I suppose.
Here’s one quote that somebody on social media expressed. Someone’s sexuality through transition is something that could totally change or stay the same. I went from straight guy to by woman. Some people have gone from gay man to straight woman all the way over to lesbian and others go the opposite way around.
Everything is fluid, all right? This is the ultimate expression of self-made identity. It’s my body, my choice taken to the ultimate extreme. And this is being true to yourself. This allows what I feel to supersede the reality of your biology.
“This is the ultimate expression of self-made identity — what I feel superseding the reality of biology.”
Deuteronomy 22:5 and Gender Expression
And the best verse to pull out about this is Deuteronomy 22:5, which we see: “Women shall not wear man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on women’s clothing, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”
What can we glean from this verse?
Well, we glean that God really wants you to express the gender that you are born with. Not only in clothing, but in all aspects. God does not want you to raise any sort of confusion about your gender. He’s really serious about the male and female thing. I believe this means your pronouns as well.
Again, we have to stress this. Why is that? Well, God made that division of male and female. God made that distinction, and he is reflecting Christ in the church. When you go against that, that muddies the picture.
At the end of the day, transgenderism and gender dysphoria represent a really sad condition where the person has completely lost their identity. They’ve compensated by putting themselves in God’s place and created an identity of their own in their own mind. They think that means freedom.
“God really wants you to express the gender you are born with — He is reflecting Christ and the church.”
But the Bible tells us that that is slavery.
How to Minister: What Not to Do
Okay, the last part is how can we minister to people in these movements? What do we do as Christians? I have a few don’ts that I got from this book that I kind of recommend by Christopher Yuan called Out of a Far Country.
It details how he basically descended into darkness, into homosexuality, and lived that life. He even became a drug dealer and eventually went to jail and got HIV.
But then his mother prayed for him for the best part of a decade. Now he is a minister or a professor at a seminary.
It shows his journey down into darkness and back up through the grace of Christ.
But here are the things we don’t do.
We don’t want to think of people in these movements as other, right? These people are just sinners just like you and us. There’s nothing more sinful about them than about us. We have to really understand that we could be just like them but for the grace of God.
“These people are sinners just like you and us — we could be just like them but for the grace of God.”
The other thing we have to understand is don’t think you can’t help.
One common thing that people say is how can I help someone with same-sex attractions if I don’t struggle with that myself? Well, since when do you have to struggle with a certain sin to help anybody else with it? That’s not in the Bible, right? Any Christian should be able to help any other Christian with any sin, including same-sex desire and gender dysphoria.
Another thing you don’t want to do is make it about the externals. A lot of formal programs try to change people’s mannerisms and what they look at. You can’t make this about what you can’t and can’t do. A right theology can’t be built on what we’re not allowed to do.
A Christian life is much more than just the avoidance of sinful behavior. You have to address the heart. You can’t make it about the externals.
The last thing he says not to do is don’t be embroiled in debate. When an unbeliever asks you, is being gay a sin? You could answer that directly, but they would probably hear you as saying that being gay is sin because that is their identity. A better way might be to ask them a question, which is what Jesus does a lot of times when he’s cornered by the Pharisees.
He would answer their question with a question. The question you might want to ask is, well, how do you define sin? What do you think sin is? Get them to talk about that. Or what does it mean to be gay? Get them to talk about that.
A lot of times when somebody’s asking, is being gay a sin? they’re looking for a fight. Unless they’re asking a genuine question, of course, you should answer that. But hopefully these questions will lead to a better conversation about morality or identity.
Somebody might ask you, do you think gays are going to hell? When I was in mall evangelism a few years ago, somebody asked me that question. I think they were spoiling for a fight. You could ask instead, well, what do you understand about God’s judgment? What do you think is God’s judgment? What is hell?
How to Minister: What to Do
And try to get into a conversation about that and just understand that people are not debated into the kingdom, right? Especially in this category of sins, there’s a lot of times where people are just going to try to get you with a gotcha, right? So you have to make sure you give a wise answer.
Okay, what are the things to do? Well, number one, you want to give them the gospel, right? Realize that everybody is redeemable. Homosexuality or transgenderism is not the unpardonable sin. We have this idea in our heads that this is so far away.
Sometimes it’s just like, how could this person possibly repent? They’re already married to someone of the same sex and they have children sometimes. Like, how can this be unraveled? But you give them the gospel.
You have to understand that homosexuality a lot of times is their identity, or transgenderism is their identity. So what do you do? Well, you tell them there’s a better identity, right? There’s a better identity that you can find in Jesus Christ. You tell them the gospel and you understand that same-sex attraction is a moral consequence of the fall.
It doesn’t matter if they say, “Well, I was born this way.” You say, “Well, it doesn’t matter. You have to be born again just like everyone else. Everybody has to be born again.”
The biggest sin, remember, that people in these movements are committing is not homosexuality. What is the biggest sin they’re committing? It’s unbelief. Right? And just like every other unbeliever out there, it’s the same sin, the same sin we committed.
This is what Chris Ren said. He says, “I didn’t leave pursuing a same-sex relationship because my parents convinced me it was sinful, and I didn’t leave it because they convinced me it was unhealthy. I left it because I was shown something better.” And his name is Jesus.
“I didn’t leave because they convinced me it was sinful — I left because I was shown something better.”
Realize the opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, right? Make it clear that holiness is the goal, not heterosexual feelings. One thing that actually kind of blew my mind when I was looking at this was that one person said God never said, “Be heterosexual as I am heterosexual.” That wasn’t what God said, right?
In fact, if you think about it, heterosexuality leads to a whole lot of sins as well. It leads to lust and adultery and sex before marriage. All of these things are just as sinful.
So the goal here isn’t to make somebody heterosexual. It’s to make somebody holy. There was a term that was coined called “holy sexuality,” which means that realize you actually don’t have to be attracted to all women. That’s not what the goal is. The Bible never tells you to be attracted to all women, right? You only have to be attracted to one woman actually. If you want to be in a marriage covenant, and that’s a very different thing, and that’s been known to happen.
So realize this is all about identity. You show love just like you would show love to any other unbeliever. You want people to understand that you love them and that Christ loves them.
Of course, you pray. Christopher’s mother, Chris Ren’s mother, prayed for him for eight years every morning in the prayer closet. She got another 200 people to pray for him. She had a schedule where she would fast twice a week until he came to Christ.
So prayer is the best thing you can do.
At the end of the day, it’s about identity. One of the things we have to understand is that people today are just lost, and we have to somehow get out there that the identity they have adopted leads nowhere. It only leads to death and destruction.
The Sufficiency of Christ and Stories of Hope
Let me read to you two stories, and I think then we’ll be out of time. There is hope. In fact, for people who think this is still hopeless, one thing we have to realize is: do you believe in the sufficiency of Christ? If you believe in the sufficiency of Christ, is that just a slogan to you? Or do you actually believe that Christ is sufficient for even these sins?
I want to show you this verse and read you a story. Look at 1 Corinthians 6:9. “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor those habitually drunk, nor verbal abusers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
But then you say, well, that’s another laundry list. This is the most hopeful verse.
And it says, “Such were some of you, but you were washed. You were sanctified and you were justified.” What does that mean?
1 Corinthians 6:11: “Such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, and you were justified.”
That means there were people in the Corinthian congregation who struggled with these sins and they came to Christ. There is hope.
Let me read you two stories. In God’s design for sexuality, you can be married to a man and a woman, or you can be single, and both of those options are good. Here’s the first story.
At 33, Bill became a Christian after being in and out of same-sex relationships. These are true stories. He had a desire to marry and have children. However, 30 years later, he remains unmarried and perseveres in the midst of same-sex attractions. Now 63, he has been able to find contentment in his singleness.
Bill leads a full life and mentors many men in the church with experiences like himself. That is one success story.
But here’s another success story. After years in the gay community, Mark became a Christian and no longer pursued same-sex relationships. He never had interest in women. Even as a new believer, with a close network of friends from his new family in the church, he was content to be single for the rest of his life, assuming it was the only option.
Mark had a close friend, Andrea, who was also a new follower of Christ. She came out of a broken past that consisted of abusive boyfriends and a few abortions. Because of her past toxic relationships, she decided to hold off on dating and focus on a relationship with God.
The two felt really safe together. Mark knew she didn’t want to date, and Andrea knew he wasn’t attracted to girls. He considered her his best friend and most trusted confidant. He loved her like a sister.
After some time, Mark began noticing new things about her. New affections blossomed, both physical and emotional. He jokes now, saying that puberty was hard enough to go through once. Try going through puberty twice.
He built up enough courage and asked Andrea out on a date. After several months of dating, he asked her to marry him. On their wedding night, he confessed to his new bride, “Honey, I cannot explain this. I am not attracted to any other women. I’m only attracted to you.”
Mark may still experience attractions towards the same sex, but God has supernaturally given him emotional, romantic, and sexual affections for Andrea that he has never had for any other woman. Who are we to say that the improbable is absolutely impossible?
I didn’t leave time for questions. I’m sorry. It’s not God’s will. We’ll have to try again next week. If you have questions, email me hopefully by Thursday so I have some time to develop a coherent response.
Closing Prayer
Okay? You can still leave me after, but then the response will be less coherent. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you Lord for this topic. It’s a difficult topic, but it’s a topic we must confront in our culture today. Help us Lord to be equipped to share the gospel and to win over those who have found their identities in places other than in Jesus Christ.
And we pray Lord that we would be effective as evangelists and as those who would go out and give your gospel to those who need desperately to hear it. I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.