What does the Bible say about Sexuality?

INTRODUCTION TO SERIES (Series slide) Good morning. My name is David Sorn, and I’m the Lead Pastor here at Renovation Church. We are in the middle of a very important series on what the Bibles teaches about Gender & Sexuality. (Gender & Sexuality Schedule) We are in week 2, so today we’ll be diving into the issue of sexuality and same sex attraction. As I said last week, I’ve spent I’ve spent much of this past year preparing, reading, and studying for this series, and there is much I want to share with you. But I can’t cover every issue and question. And keep in mind more is coming: In fact, today’s message might bring up a lot of, “But how do I interact with my family member or friend on this? We’re going to get to that…it’s just in week 4 And even next week on identity, in many ways is a continuation of today’s message. But even if we can’t hit absolutely everything, I think it’s so important that Christians are equipped to talk about these pressing issues of our day. I want you to feel knowledgeable on this issue, and I want you to be able to speak on it as mature Christians do We’re called to communicate, as Ephesians 4:15 says, while speaking the Truth IN love. Truth and love are symbiotic. They should be a package deal. We don’t want to speak the truth in a way that isn’t loving. And we don’t want to lie in the name of love. No, we speak the truth in love. Let me give you an idea of where we are headed today We’re going to have four main areas of focus: #1: What does the Bible say? And then we’re look at the two most common objections to what it says: #2: Two Main Objections And then, we’ll ask…based on what the Bible says: #3: So How Should I Live? And that discussion is going to bring up one more objection for many of you… #4: But, Another Objection! And so I’ll try my best to answer that as well! WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY? #1: What does the Bible say? So, we’re going to start with the Bible. And as we do so, I want to let you know that if you disagree with what I’m saying, I want you to know that this is not a talk on David’s ideas, or some political viewpoint. My aim is simply to accurately share with you the Bible’s teaching on this particular subject. And remember, God’s Word challenges every culture differently. When the missionaries brought the good news of Jesus to Africa, Asia, and even island nations all around the world… …many of the people there passionately disagreed at first. They disliked that the Bible said “not to take revenge” or not to engage in polygamy But God’s Word is a higher law. It stands above every culture around the globe. Even ours. As author Rachel Gilson says: “If God never says anything that contradicts us, and if we find ourselves in total alignment with a perfectly righteous, all knowing Being who comprehends all mystery; which is more likely: that we think just like Him or that we're missing something?” – Rachel Gilson God’s Word is going to contradict us and challenge our culture in some places. (Gender & Sexuality Resource Video) By the way, you can find Rachel Gilson’s excellent book on this subject, and plenty of others, on our Gender & Sexuality resource page on the homepage of our website. #1: What does the Bible say? Let me make one more final preface before we start reading Scriptures. In all of our Bible passages today, the Scriptures are talking about an action, not a person. We’ll dive into this more next week in our identity talk, but you are not what you feel. Okay, so again, we start in Genesis, but this time in chapter 2 of Creation. I’ll keep these mostly on the screen for you because there are many of them. (Genesis 2:18) – NIV The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” And so God intentionally and purposefully creates Eve. Because women are different from men, complimentary to men. And they’re also a match for procreation, which is a part of the creation narrative: In Genesis, God tells them to be fruitful and multiply. The next passage relevant to our discussion is from the Old Testament book of Leviticus. And this is a passage that is quite often misunderstood. So let’s talk about this one so it feels less tricky. Here’s the verse: To the men, the passage says: (Leviticus 18:22) – NIV “‘Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable. There’s a similar verse in chapter 20 of Leviticus as well. If you’ve ever heard people debate on this passage, debaters will say: “But in the surrounding chapters of Leviticus it also says “Don’t eat rare meat, don’t wear clothes of 2 materials, and don’t get tattoos.” So, it’s often said, how could that verse on same sex acts possibly still hold weight for us today if Christians don’t follow those other verses? #1: What does the Bible say? Well, interpreting Levitical Law (which is a very minor portion of the Bible) is a little bit more complex than that. Not a lot… But a little. Unlike the New Testament, parts of the Levitical law in the Old Testament were written specifically for the Jewish people…and therefore, they are not applicable to us as modern Christians. Let me give you an easy example of this that is going to make a lot of sense to you A large part of the book of Leviticus is about sacrificing animals. Which, in light of Jesus’ sacrifice, doesn’t apply to us as Christians anymore It was for the Jewish people. The same is true for some other purely civic or cultural aspects of Leviticus. Many of the unique laws about food, for instance, were to keep the Jews as a separate, unique, and lasting society. But when Jesus came, he declared all foods clean for us. So why then do we still obey some of the passages in Leviticus (like this one)?” It’s because Old Testament Law is divided up between 3 categories: 3 Types of Old Testament Laws: Civil Which were governing, practical laws for the Jewish nation. Ceremonial Those are about the sacrifices Moral And the only ones Christians follow today are the moral laws, things like the 10 commandments. …or teachings on sex, how we treat our parents, and on and on. Well why do we still follow those moral laws? Because God’s character and his view on morality (right and wrong) does not (and can not) change over time. And so thus, they still apply today. I want you to grab a Bible for this next passage Romans 1:24 24 Page 768 Perhaps the most comprehensive text on today’s subject in the Bible is from the Apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Romans…about 30 years after Jesus resurrected. The context of this passage is that: People know God exists, yet they keep denying His truth and instead living for their own pleasures. (Romans 1:24 27) – NIV 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. The Bible also lists acting out on same sex sexual desires as sinful in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1 You can read about it more in Genesis 19 in the passage about Sodom & Gomorrah, or in Judges 19, or in the book of Jude. Also, it’s worth mentioning that sometimes people say, “Well, Jesus never talked about same sex attraction, so HE’S okay with it in a loving relationship.” While it’s true that Jesus never talked about it explicitly (although I would argue that he did implicitly when he mentions sexual immorality…which is all sex outside of heterosexual marriage), it doesn’t matter that Jesus didn’t explicitly talk about it. Because we interpret all of the Bible as authoritative…not just Jesus’ words. Besides, Jesus also never talked about subjects like rape or incest…and that doesn’t’ mean He’s okay with them simply because He didn’t talk about them. BUT WHAT ABOUT…? Okay, that’s a lot. And this is heavy. Let’s acknowledge that those Biblical passages are really hard for a lot of people. And maybe you have a number of objections or questions to what the Bible teaches here. And that’s okay. This is a church where it’s okay to ask questions. In fact, what I want to do now is move to our 2nd major focus, which is to look at the two most common objections to what the Bible says on this. #1: What does the Bible say? #2: Two Main Objections We can’t just read the passages and move on. Let’s face right up to the objections, and talk about them. What’s interesting is 10 or 15 years ago, the main objections I heard to the Bible’s teaching on this were from people who tried to say, “Well, no, what the Bible actually means (and they would try and go through each passage and say, “The Hebrew COULD mean this, and the Greek COULD mean that…” But that objection nearly doesn’t exist anymore. It was almost silly to have to go through 9 different passages and say they all actually meant something else. Instead, many of those people have now just settled on saying, “I guess I don’t believe the Bible anymore” And so the main objections of our day are not arguments about the Scripture, but instead catchphrases that have really ingrained themselves into our cultural imagination. So much so that when most people think about this topic, these two phrases are what typically wins the day. Here is the first one. The Two Main Objections: #1: Love is love This is the idea that “if 2 people love each other, and they’re not hurting anyone, what’s wrong with that? Love is love…it doesn’t matter who is doing the loving if they’re both consensually in love.” But here’s the problem: No one actually believes that “love is love” (that all consensual love is okay) The truth is…everyone draws a line somewhere. Can 4 people get married if they are all committed and in love? What about a 40 year old and 14 year old who feel in love? Is it okay for a brother and sister to get married if they both love each other? Do you see how we can’t determine if something is morally right just because “people are in love?” We get a helpful example on this in 1 Corinthians 5 Paul says: (1 Corinthians 5:1 2) – NIV It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? Here a man is sleeping with his step mom, and it’s consensual. They’re in love But does the presence of “love” make everything morally right?? The Two Main Objections: #1: Love is love And if you say “no, it’s not okay” to some of those examples, I would ask you, “WHY?” Why do you draw the line where you do? Most people haven’t actually thought deeply on that. They are just influenced by the culture’s current tastes. But our culture’s current tastes keep changing, and thus the boundaries for what is “morally acceptable love” keep moving. We are almost certainly going to be mass debating the morality of polygamy and polyamorous relationships over the next 10 years. But while culture’s boundaries for love rapidly changes in front of our eyes, the Bible’s boundaries for romantic and sexual love are fixed (because of His Wisdom, His Creation Design). And if someone is on the other side of that line, it doesn’t matter if they are in love and even faithful. But as Sam Allberry says: “Consistency and faithfulness while sinning in no way diminishes the sin.” – Sam Allberry Okay, but let’s say you even agree that romantic & sexual love must have a boundary somewhere…and it makes sense to trust God over a culture that’s constantly changing… But what do you when you personally feel this way though?? That brings us to the 2nd main objection. The Two Main Objections: #1: Love is love #2: I was born this way We talked through this fairly extensively last week in our Gender Discussion. And we said that because Adam & Even fell into sin in the Garden of Eden, all of us are born in a “fallen state.” We’re born with a sinful nature. And that means our minds, feelings, and actions are predisposed to sin. And therefore, our feelings and desires, can’t be trusted. They can’t tell us “who we are” (they’re broken) And besides, our predispositions don’t excuse our actions. If someone is born with a predisposition towards alcoholism (which many are), that doesn’t make it okay for them to indulge in those feelings and get drunk And we’re going to talk next week about how sexual desires cannot be your identity. Who you feel sexually attracted to, is not who you are. It’s a desire you have, sure, but it’s not the core of who you are. And when people say, “I was born this way,” why do we then talk about our feelings? If we’re going to say, “I was born this way,” why do we not then reference the physical bodies we were born with?” Because our feelings change all the time, but our bodies are fixed. And our bodies were designed, sexually, for the opposite sex. We were born that way. One of the things I love about Christianity, is that it has such a high view of our bodies. To many secularists today, the body is just a bag of bones, but the real you, they say, is how you feel…in your mind (so never mind your body) But God’s Word says you are a unified being. You are a soul composed of mind, spirit, AND Body. All of those things are WHO YOU ARE. And I also think it’s important to point out that the “I was born this way” argument has been a compelling argument for many people these past 20 years, but I suspect it won’t even be a politically correct thing to say that 10 years from now. And let me tell you why: Over the last 12 24 months, those writing and speaking about gender have had an incredible amount on influence in the LGBTQ+ world regarding the concept of “fluidity” In gender, fluidity is idea that your gender is not fixed…it’s fluid. It doesn’t have to stay the same. And tons of young people are attracted to this new idea. This is why I hear many people saying that the number of those identifying as nonbinary (as neither male nor female) is even going to pass those identifying as transgender. And the new emphasis on fluidity is starting to have a growing impact even on sexuality. You’re going to hear a lot about this in the coming years. Because the idea that a person is born with a fixed sexuality, like a sexual orientation, is just beginning to go out of style in our culture. The culture is increasingly going to say that you should be willing to consider even your sexuality as fluid over time…not something permanently fixed. Let me prove to you that this change is already happening before our eyes. Look at this chart about women: And so each bar is broken down by sexual identity. The dark grey section is those who identify as lesbian, the purple is those who identify as bisexual. For Baby Boomers & Gen X, roughly the same amount of women identify as lesbian or bisexual. But look at Gen Z, the generation being affected by this new kind thinking… Only 4% identify as Lesbian, but 20% identify as bisexual. A recent study of high school students said, 25% identity as sexually fluid. And so the idea of “I was born this way” (and only this way) is falling out of favor…some in the secular culture might even consider it a bit narrowminded. And why does that matter? It matters because thousands upon thousands of Americans made their same sex sexual desire their identity because the culture convinced them that “You were born this way.” And now, that same culture is saying, “That’s not really true, sexuality, for so many, is apt to change over time.” Hear me on this: The culture is going to continue to change its mind, and change its mind, and change its mind…because it has no fixed morality. And so I urge you to anchor on to something HIGHER. Trust in God’s Word. It is a rock in ever changing, turbulent waters. SO THEN HOW SHOULD I LIVE? And if you do that… …what do you do, practically, if you still experience the temptation of same sex attraction? This is our 3rd major focus for the day: #1: What does the Bible Say? #2: Two Main Objections #3: So How Should I Live? Firstly, remember, the Bible clearly teaches that to be tempted is not a sin. Jesus was tempted and never sinned. It’s only when we act on these temptations (in lust, or sexual acts) that they become sinful. But what about your desires? I think what many Christians ask here is: Will God change me? Will my desires and same sex attraction go away? I don’t know…I don’t know. I know that the Bible teaches that the more we obey God and grow in God, our sinful desires weaken in their dominance over our lives. But will those desires go away? To answer that question we can look at some helpful comparisons with other sins that we all fight. For instance, I know there are plenty of people in this church who have, with God’s help, fought against the strong foe of alcoholism And I talk to some who say, “When I became a Christian and started following Jesus, He changed me so dramatically, that I just have never even desired a drink, even once, in the 10 years since. But I talk to plenty of others, who say, “It is still a definite temptation…but through my faith in God, through recovery programs, and my daily surrender to Him, I’m living in sobriety, and freedom, and God gets the glory” That’s how God works in so many areas, and it’s how He works here too. Sometimes God does provide radical healing and change. And those are moments where we glorify God because of His miraculous power. God is doing some of this in America right now. Some of our best Christian thinkers and writers right now have this exact story: Rosaria Butterfield, Rebecca McLaughlin, Jackie Hill Perry They grew up in lesbian relationships, came to Christ, and are now married to men. And before you go, “Meh,” look at what the Scriptures say on this: (1 Corinthians 6:9 10) – NIV 9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. But then look at verse 11. (1 Corinthians 6:11) – NIV 11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. And listen, Corinth, where Paul was writing this letter, was the Las Vegas of the ancient world. Paul was literally writing to a group of people, many of which had personally engaged in same sex sexual relationships. But now, because of their walk in Christ, he says, “That is what some of you were!” Let’s not underestimate the power of what God can do! So sometimes God takes the desire away…or even changes our desires. But sometimes, He doesn’t…….. In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says he has a “thorn in his flesh,” a messenger from Satan. And we don’t know exactly what that is. Was it an ailment, a sin he can’t get past? But Paul says this: (2 Corinthians 12:8 12) – NIV 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Paul praises God for his remaining difficulties because they will be the reason that He presses deeper into God. The thorn itself was clearly not a good thing, but God allows it to remain because growth is going to come from it. And so understand this: God uses both of these methods to grow us in Christ #1: Sometimes He removes our difficulties #2: Sometimes He teaches us dependence in difficulties And both are ways in which He matures us in Christ. And I think that is really, really important that we understand THIS Biblical truth on this subject. Otherwise we’re left with what is almost a Prosperity Gospel: “If God loved me, He would heal me.” A number of years ago, I remember seeing someone I knew come out as gay on social media. And I felt his pain when he said, “For years, I’ve been praying for God to change my same sex desires. I’ve cried many tears, but those desires still come. And so today, I’m coming out, as a gay man.” But just because sinful desires remain, doesn’t mean we can embrace them…or claim them as our identity. Even the Apostle Paul in Romans 7 cries out to God, “What I want to do, I do not do, but I keep doing what I hate to do!” We’ve got to remember that we won’t be perfect this side of heaven. And our remaining sin, painful as it is, is an opportunity for us to rely more deeply on God. When we are weak, he is strong. So practically, what do you do then, if your desires, even if God is lessening them along the way, what if they don’t change? And you never feel any attraction to the opposite sex? You would pursue a holy life of following Jesus like every other Christian, but because you would be choosing not to act on any same sex desires, you would remain single. BUT DOESN’T GOD WANT ME TO BE HAPPY?! But that then brings us to our added objection. #1: What does the Bible Say? #2: Two Main Objections #3: So How Should I Live? #4: But, Another Objection! Because as soon as I start talking about singleness, a lot of our hearts say: A Third Objection: But doesn’t God want me to be happy? And the first reason we feel that way is because we have made a ‘god’ out of sex in this country. And we’ve made an idol out of marriage in the church. Marriage is not the goal of the Christian life. Even in the next life, it’s not the goal. Jesus says that in heaven we will neither marry, nor be given in marriage . And remember, two of the greatest people from the New Testament, Jesus and Paul, were both…single. Life without sexual intimacy or marriage is not a deficient life, but life without a deep and faithful relationship with Christ, is a deficient life. Secondly, we wrongly think singleness for the same sex attracted would be too much to ask because the rest of us wrongly think of our own Christian walks as so much easier than that. Author Sam Allberry, who lives as a single Christian who still experiences temptations for same sex attraction, says it this way: “Ever since I have been open about my own experiences of same sex attraction, a number of Christians have said something like this: ‘The gospel must be much harder for you than it is for me.’ As though I have more to give up than they do. But the fact is that the gospel demands everything of all of us. If someone thinks the gospel has somehow slotted into their life quite easily without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.” – Sam Allberry Because the truth is, the Bible speaks strongly not just against same sex relationships, but also against materialism, gluttony, or not giving 10% of our money away. It’s just that we’ve excused those passages away, but said to the person struggling with same sex attraction, “Oh, sorry, you need to obey that one.” No, we ALL should trust God in ALL things. A Third Objection: But doesn’t God want me to be happy? But we’re asking, “But doesn’t God want me to be happy”… because we’re stuck back in Romans 1…forgetting once again that happiness is not found in the created things, but in the Creator. I can’t stop thinking of John chapter 6 this month, when Jesus gives a hard teaching, and many of his followers turned back and no longer followed him. And he turns to the 12 disciples and said, “You do not want to leave to do you?” And Peter says, “Where else would go? You have the words of eternal life!” Jesus Christ is the treasure in the field…that we sell everything we have to get. Jesus Christ is the pearl of great price that you give up everything for. Jesus Christ came and give his life on the cross for our sin. And so we walk away from our sin, to walk with Him. \ Because He is the way to true joy. . He is the truth that never changes. And He is our life. Let me pray.