GAY TRUTH

I often speak on controversial subjects: homosexuality and transgenderism. These aren’t topics that are casually brought up over Christmas dinner and calmly discussed with out-of-town family. That’s why believers often ask me how they can stand for truth on controversial topics without being offensive. Here are three quick things I tell them. Grace First, I’m grateful for their concern to avoid being crass and offensive. I see too many believers who don’t care at all — or at least appear to not care. They use the truth like a club to beat people over the head. Grace? What grace? That’s for Christ to extend to non-believers, they say. But believers should do whatever they can to communicate the truth in a winsome and gracious way. Scripture identifies them as ambassadors for Christ (2 Cor. 5:20). That means they represent Jesus with their life. How they come across to other people will be a reflection upon the good name of Jesus. Believers, therefore, should strive to speak in a warm, f

Male and Female, God Created Them The Bible is unequivocal on the question of homosexual sex. First, men sleeping with men is prohibited in Jewish law (e.g., Lev. 18:22; 20:13). This does not prove the case for Christians. Many Old Testament laws are specifically declared not binding in the New Testament (for example, food restrictions). But the logic of opposite-sex marriage and the prohibition on homosexual sex are reaffirmed multiple times.1 Let’s start with Jesus’s framework . Jesus is sometimes caricatured as a prophet of free love, unconcerned about sexual ethics. But his teaching on sexual morality was consistently stricter than the Old Testament law.2 For instance when the Pharisees asked Jesus whether a man may divorce his wife “for any cause,” he replied: Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one fles