Pages of Joy // John Greco

Note: This post is a bit of a departure from the sort of devotional fare I usually serve up on this site. It’s part of a series called Simple Reminders, in which my goal is to remind us all that the Bible speaks very clearly into the cultural debates of our day.

This world is a strange place, and if we aren’t aligned with the One who is always true north, we can quickly find ourselves upside-down.

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Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? (1 Corinthians 6:9)

I remember well when a certain popular evangelical pastor was invited to deliver the benedictory prayer at Barack Obama’s second inaugural ceremony in 2013. Immediately, the press began investigating this preacher, and it didn’t take long before they discovered a sermon he had delivered in the mid-1990s. In the message, the then-rising evangelical star rightly referred to homosexual acts as sinful. He also talked about God’s power to transform same-sex desires, and he insisted that the church needed to stand strong against the unrelenting agenda of gay and lesbian activists.

As you can imagine, it was quite the scandal in popular culture. So, less than twenty-four hours after news of this supposedly hate-filled sermon broke, this well-known pastor declined the invitation to pray for the president and the nation, saying he didn’t want his presence at the event to be a distraction. As shocking as many in the press found the smoking-gun sermon to be, the real scandal was that this evangelical rockstar pastor—whose ministry was primarily aimed at college students, mind you—hadn’t delivered a single message, written a paragraph, or uttered a public word about homosexual sin in some fifteen to twenty years.

Strange, isn’t it? All those years teaching the Bible to college students, helping them understand how to navigate this world with the truth of Scripture, helping them forge a life that pleases God, and not a single mention of homosexuality, one of the hot-button issues of our day? It’s not that I expect this preacher to hunker down on the texts that speak about sodomy and unnatural relations each and every time he gets up to speak, but I assume college students must have lots of questions about the topic. It’s certainly an issue that matters greatly in our time.

I don’t want to single out this preacher—and I can’t. He’s not alone. It’s getting more and more difficult to find pastors and Christian leaders willing to repeat the Bible’s plain teaching on homosexual behavior and same-sex “marriage.” There are some who have “evolved” on the issue, who have parted ways with Scripture on this point. There are others who hold to the Bible’s ethic but “don’t want to be controversial,” “want to lead with love,” or “want to focus on evangelism.” The end result is the same, of course: a church that is increasingly at odds with God Himself on issues of sexual perversion.

Right about now, you may be thinking to yourself, Perversion? Isn’t that a bit strong? Love is love, right? But it’s not. Not really, anyway. For our good, God has placed guardrails around romantic love and sexual intimacy. He’s designed sex to be at home only in a heterosexual, monogamous marriage. That is where families are born, and families are the building blocks of every flourishing society.

While all sexual sin leads to death, homosexual activity is especially grievous, because it is rebellion against God’s created order and the very first commandment: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number’” (Genesis 1:28). There can be no fruit from a homosexual union. A child cannot have two mommies or two daddies, no matter what the women of The View or the newest children’s books tell us. God is the Author of life, and His ways always lead to life. All other paths bring us down to death, in this life and the next.

With the full authority of God the Father and Jesus, His Son, the apostle Paul explains it: “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 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” (Romans 1:26–27). A person cannot bow their knee to Jesus as Lord one minute and then embrace a life that denies His design and calling on their lives the next. Those who do “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9).

It’s common to refer to same-sex attraction as an orientation, and that is what it has become. Unlike other sins, in our culture homosexual acts form a person’s identity. Thieves don’t identify as such; neither do liars or child abusers. If anything, people tend to distance themselves from their sins, not step into them. But not so with the LGBTQ+ crowd. And so, while Christ stands ready to forgive, repentance can appear much more costly for those trapped in homosexual sin. Same-sex attraction is like quicksand. The longer one allows the pull of culture and their own flesh to have them, the harder it is to climb out.

So, let’s not kid ourselves any longer. Our silence on the subject is not born out of love, no matter how much we might try to convince ourselves.

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