Encouragement from God and Others

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calling, depression, encouragement, friendship, homosexuality, insecurity, loneliness, relationships

Quick thought:

I was hanging out with single folks from my seminary the other day for dinner and dessert. We were discussing how difficult it is to get a job in the PCA and EPC if you are single…and I chimed in, “Yeah…but because I’m gay, I’ve got two strikes against me.”

Immediately, my phone beeped. This is the text message I received:

Hey brother, been thinking about you a ton lately. I think God is going to use you to do things you can’t even imagine for the glory of his name. Praying for you and the work He has laid out for you to do, work we don’t even know yet. Love you.

Presumption? Despair?

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depression, despair, homosexuality, hope, reparative therapy

Wesley Hill has written a great article over at the First Things blog. One of my favorite moments of the article is this:

This is what bothers me about what I hear from certain kinds of reparative therapies: offering hope to gay people seems to amount to a prediction of orientation change (assuming the correct regimen is followed). And whenever a Christian expresses doubt about the surety of that prediction, the response can often take the form of, ‘Well, you just don’t have enough faith.’ (Or as a licensed professional counselor, a Christian with a certain angle on reparative therapy, once said to me, ‘That sounds like depression.’)

Yeah…something like that.

Check it out.

Getting It Right

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Christianity, friends, homosexuality, sexuality

Getting It Right

This is a great article from the Odd Man Out blog. Check it out!

Matt Moore: Not Ex-gay

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Gospel, homosexuality, sexual sin, sexuality

I agree with him. If he hasn’t been reoriented, calling himself ex-gay would be inappropriate. It’s why I don’t call myself ex-gay. He’s also right…people in the Church don’t often understand the terminology because they don’t understand what “gay” actually even means in today’s English usage.

This is Matt Moore’s testimony:

Let’s pray for this brother. I appreciate his candor and his repentance.

A Brief Update

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homosexuality, marriage, school

It’s finals time. My goal is to have all of them done by Thursday afternoon so that I can cook and clean for a house guest that will be here for the weekend, so after the end of the semester, I’ll have some new material up on the blog.

Also, I saw this article by Kevin DeYoung and wanted to pass it along.

But, in the meantime…

Yep.

Is Chastity Futile?

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chastity, experience, Gospel, homosexuality, loneliness, relationships, sexuality, temptation, theology

Is Christian practice of chastity futile? Chastity is, culturally speaking, fairly peculiar as a life behavior. In the rare instances that one finds the broader, western/American culture endorsing chastity, it is for selfish reasons: “Wait to have sex until you’re ready. Find someone you love or at least find attractive.”

In generations previous to ours, there was a sense of shame from the community. “If I have a child out of wedlock, the neighbors will talk. I don’t want them to think I am a whore (or, if a man, a “cad,” perhaps).” This is no longer a concern for most people, having been replaced with a concern for personal pleasure.

What Christ Says about What I Do in the Bedroom, part 2

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assurance of pardon, confession, experience, Gospel, homosexuality, insecurity, loneliness, repentance, sanctification, sexuality

Repentance.

Not a self-punishing ritual, but a ritual of turning away from sin and turning toward Christ.

Whether I sin while sleeping alone or if I sleep with someone else out of wedlock, I need repentance to mark my life.

I need the grace of forgiveness which comes from Christ’s sacrificial death to be applied to me on a daily, hourly basis.

Even my thoughts about others–my bitterness, my lust, my anger, my judgmentalism–need to be subjected to this repentance. God’s kingdom extends even to my bed…and fornication is not the only sin that can happen in one’s bed. Not by a long shot.

What Christ Says about What I Do in the Bedroom, part 1

Tags

Gospel, homosexuality, repentance, sexuality

I toyed with a couple of different titles, but settled on this one despite its being too narrow for the first installment. It does, however, get at the punch-line of what I’m going to try to say.

This installment will be brief, but I want to begin with a quote from Robert Gagnon because I think he is unusually clear…not on behalf of himself, but clear in comparison to many other well-meaning theologians from all sides of this debate. It’s from the Introduction of his 2001 book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice:

“The whole of what we do and who we are should proceed from a desire to please the sovereign God who created humankind and is working to redeem it. …To love God with one’s whole being and to pray for the coming of God’s rule entails submitting one’s pursuit of sexual pleasure to the revealed will of God. To suppose that God does not have much interest in regulating the human sex drive, one of the most powerful and potentially destructive human impulses, is both counter-intuative and in direct conflict with Scripture. From a Judeo-Christian standpoint, it is a truncated vision of reality to accept various forms of sexuality merely because the participants involved give their consent to a given sex act.”

–Robert Gagnon, “The Bible and Homosexual Practice,” pg. 33. Emphasis mine.

You see, I have several friends who have said to me that a pastor making pronouncements on this or that is fine, but the pastor “needs to keep out of my bedroom” or private life. That sounds all well-and-good for our modern and American sensibilities, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with the overall story of Scripture.

Does this follow?

Tags

Gospel, homosexuality, Scripture, sexuality, theology

I was reading an NPR article where the following two paragraphs can be read:

Chambers also believes that homosexual acts are a sin because the Bible calls for heterosexual marriage. He says gay Christians must either be celibate, or if they want to marry, it must be with someone of the opposite sex. But he says even if you are in a gay relationship, you can still be a good Christian.

“I believe that once someone knows Christ that they have an irrevocable relationship, that if someone has a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, that God’s bigger than removing something at the first sign of trouble,” Chambers says, referring to salvation.

Now, having “an irrevocable relationship” is NOT the same thing as being “in a gay relationship [while being] a good Christian,” as the article asserts. Maybe Chambers said this in the actual interview, but in terms of this NPR article, I’m not certain Chambers should be judged on a summary comment written by a (most-likely) non-theological writer.

Exodus’ Leadership and Gagnon’s Response

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Alan Chambers, Gospel, homosexuality, repentance, Robert Gagnon, Scripture, sexual sin, sexuality, temptation, theology

Something for your consideration. I’ll have up an analysis by Tuesday, but I thought I’d let my readers hit the ground running.

Alan Chambers’ interview in The Atlantic

Robert Gagnon’s lengthy response

At the present time, I have only read the first link of the two. Gagnon’s article is on my slate for this afternoon since I’m leading worship this morning and need to get going.