Al Mohler, in addressing how the Church must respond to homosexuals, speaks to how we must respond to anyone identifying themselves as sinners.
We must be the people who love homosexuals more than homosexuals love homosexuality. This is a tough challenge. We have to be the people who, because we are possessed by a passion to see God’s glory in his creation, love homosexuals more than they love their sin. This means that our love has to be a tenacious love. This will also require that we come to know and establish relationships with those struggling with homosexuality. Armed with an awareness of both the problem and God’s provision, we have no right to consider that homosexuals are beyond the grace of God or that any individual is beyond the hope of redemption and transformation. Compassionate truth-telling is deeply rooted in Christian love, and this means that we must love homosexuals more than homosexuals love homosexuality.
Every sinner loves his sin, but the church must love sinners more than sinners love their sinfulness. This is precisely how Christ has loved us, and we must love other sinners even as Christ has loved us.
We cannot allow a homosexual to reduce his identity to being a homosexual. This is a tough message, but we live in an age of identity politics when people say, “What I do in my sex life is who I am—period!” We are the people who know that this is nonsense. Sex is a part of who we are—a vitally important and powerful part—but it is only a part of the total human being. Our sexual desires and sexual practices are genuine pointers to our inner reality and our relationship to God, but sexuality is not the end of the story.
Christians must be the people who refuse to put the period at the end of the sexual sentence. We cannot allow homosexuals to be isolated as a class of persons who are beyond the grace of God and exist in some special category of human sinfulness. We must be the people who say to homosexuals, “I am going to love you even more than you love your sin, because in this same way I was loved until I came to know the Lord Jesus Christ. Someone loved me more than I loved my sin, and this is how I came to know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior.”
Our doctrine of salvation must be accompanied by a strong doctrine of the church. The ecclesia—the purchased people of God—are a covenanted community gathered in mutual accountability to the Word of God. In the bonds of Christ, we are to love each other even more than we love ourselves. Even in the process of church discipline, our purpose is not only to protect the integrity of the people of God, but to love persons into obedience and conformity with the Word of God. The common life of the church is really all about this mutual accountability, mutual encouragement, and exhorting each other to faithfulness unto the authority of the Word of God. The church sins when we deal with these issues wrongly, unscripturally, and superficially.
Al Mohler at 2004 Desiring God National Conference via Justin Taylor ...
1 comment:
Great article, Rick. Totally agree.
I used to help with a ministry that went into gay bars to listen to homosexual men and their stories. Heartbreaking, nearly every one. "Gay" is the worst oxymoronic, overcompensating word now in the cultural lexicon. There is so much depression and sadness in that community, but only our caring enough to listen will help us draw it out and show how much we can love. Christians always want to talk, but few of us care to listen.
I hate how some people, who are typically not homosexuals themselves, have stymied the conversation by immediately rushing to the "intolerance" label whenever Christians want to engage homosexuals while at the same time not endorsing their behavior. Truth is, it's more likely that outsiders will toss that bomb of a word than anyone in the homosexual community, especially in a one-to-one conversation.
I'm fully convinced that most homosexual men do not want to be in the lifestyle. Many were dragged into it through molestation or unfortunate experiences. Most of those men are looking for a way out. I pray that we can help them find it through Jesus.
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