Welcome, welcome to the line of fire. Michael Brown with you as we all stand together in the line of fire. It's unavoidable.
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Sign up today. We continue our series, Can You Be Gay and Christian? Where do Christians stand in the culture wars?
How do we walk out the practical decisions? What do we say when we're invited to a gay wedding? What happens when there is gay activist curriculum in our kids' school? How do we combat the social media influences? What's right to say from the pulpit and not right?
How far do we go? How can we reach out to people with the compassion and love of God without compromising our values? We've talked about three principles thus far. The principle of reach out and resist, reach out to the people with compassion, resist the agenda with courage. We talked about the principle of having hearts of compassion, backbones of steel, and then the principle of humanizing not demonizing those we differ with. Today we begin our journey into the question of what does the Bible say about same-sex attraction, same-sex practice, same-sex relationships?
Is it clear? Is it ambiguous? Has the Bible been mistranslated, misunderstood? And then how do we apply these things, walk them out?
What about trans issues? Does the Bible speak to that at all? Hebrews chapter 4 verse 12, for the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. So, notice that the word of God, it pierces to division of soul and spirit. In this case, sometimes soul and spirit can be used in overlapping ways, and there's a little difference between Hebrew and Greek usage, but in a context like this where it's separating them, right?
Just like the separation of joints and marrow. So, soul and spirit, they're talking about the spirit is our innermost being, who we are, the part of us that was dead in sin and then comes alive in Jesus. That's our spirit. The soul is the aspect of our lives which has to do with consciousness, conscience, emotions, and things like that. So, as some have said, we are a spirit, we have a soul, we live in a body. It's a little oversimplified, and the biblical mentality is that we are just human beings.
I'm speaking to you right now. We don't slice ourselves into different pieces. You're listing, I'm speaking with our whole beings, right? But there is this reality where there is a difference between soul and spirit. So, the soul can be very influenced emotionally. For example, you can be watching some old tearjerker classic movie and the music's playing.
You're crying. It's just a movie. You've watched it 20 times before. You know it's just a movie, but it touches something. And then someone says, hey, hey, we gotta go.
We're late. And suddenly you turn off the TV or you look back for it and the spell lifts because it was just emotions. And sometimes we're clouded in our thinking because we let our hearts rule over truth. We let our hearts rule over our minds. Now, it's not mind versus heart.
It's mind and heart together. But we must renew our minds in order to see things clearly. Romans 12 speaks of that, renewing our minds. And when Joshua was about to go into the promised land, the land of Canaan, God said to him in Joshua 1 8, don't let this book of teaching, this book of the law depart from your lips, but meditate on it day and night, meaning recite it, repeat it, mutter it.
Meditate on it day and night so that you can do everything written in it and then your way will be prosperous. So it is getting the word of God in our heart and our mind. And then we change our thinking accordingly.
We adjust our emotions accordingly to what is true and what is right. What does Jesus say in John 15 7? If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask what you will and it'll be done for you.
Why? Because you'll be in harmony with God. In Psalm 1, the one whose way is blessed by God is the one who meditates in the word day and night in the teaching, the Torah of the Lord, recites it, repeats it day and night. And that's why he'll be like a tree planted by streams of water. That's why his leaf will never wither. That's why he'll always bring forth his fruit in season. That's why what he does will succeed because he's in harmony with God.
He's renewed his heart and mind according to the word. That's why the psalmist says in Psalm 119 105, your word is a lamp to my feet. It's a light to my path. This is what enlightens us. This is what guides us. This is what leads us.
And let me give you a very, very important principle when we come down to the question of can you be gay and Christian? And let me take you through someone's life. I've heard stories like this many a time. Maybe this is your story.
Maybe you're struggling with same sex attraction and you haven't known where to go or what to say. Maybe this is going to be critically important for you. So you grow up in church. You're raised in the Lord from your earliest moments. You remember your parents talking about Jesus, reading the Bible to you. And as you get a little older, now you're seven, eight, nine.
You want to read the Bible more for yourself. And if there's a church service, you want to go and you love to sing the songs. And now you're like 10, 11. And you're actually known for it. Like your other kids, they make fun of you a little bit like, oh, you're the Bible man, you're the Bible girl, you know. But, you know, you love the Lord and exciting to read scripture and all this. Now you're like 12 years old and your friends, they're starting to notice the opposite sex.
They're talking to you more. Maybe your young lady, you know, and your girlfriends are saying, oh, he's cute. Boy, he's really nice. But I like him. Or maybe your young guy and your friends, she's pretty. Isn't she pretty?
I like to go out with her. You don't even think about it. To be honest, it's not even on your mind at all.
Why? Well, you probably just see you're more spiritual. Now another year goes by, you're a little surprised.
No, you're not surprised. You're scared because you notice the same sex. You notice how good looking the guy is and you're a guy. You notice how pretty the girl is and you're a girl. You notice you're attracted physically to them.
You notice you have thoughts about them. As Dr. Mel White explains, he was a professor at Fuller Seminary, a pastor, beloved Bible teacher, only to come out years later and say he's been same sex attracted this whole time and lived in torment and went through shock treatment and exorcisms and tried to kill himself and finally realized, hey, God made me gay. I've been misreading the Bible. He and his wife allegedly amicably separated and so on. And now he's led an organization for many years called Soul Force to fight against the mistreatment of gay Christians.
Of course, you can be gay and Christian. Mel White says that in high school, his friends were noticing the cheerleaders. He was looking at the quarterback. So you start to go through that. What are you going to tell? You can't tell your mom and dad. They're like wouldn't understand it.
They'd be disappointed. They tell you youth pastor because he thinks you really love Jesus. Maybe he's going to think something's wrong with you. What if he told your friends that they wouldn't want to talk?
God can tell your best guy friends. You got the cooties. I'm not going over your house.
I'm playing ball with you. I'm not something wrong. So you see your own little secret now. So you pray. You pray. Oh, Jesus changed me. Jesus changed me.
Jesus changed me. You really, really pray. You really pray. You really cry out to God.
Nothing happens. There's a service at your church and the Holy Spirit's moving and people are getting prayers. Think I'm going to get prayer. God's going to touch me. You're not going to tell anybody. You're not going to tell anybody what's going on.
No, no, no. But, but you're going to get prayer. God's going to touch you. And one night you go to a church where they believe in deliverance and demons are being cast out of people. OK, maybe I'm demonized and but nothing changes. Nothing changes.
Now you're 14, you're 15. It's getting more and more frustrating. All your friends are, you know, hanging out with opposite sex and flirting and interacting or going on a little date or an outing with a few different ones.
Not you. What do you do? So you get online and you start searching gay Christians. It's like, whoa, what's this gay Christian network?
I didn't know there was such a thing. You can be gay and Christian wife. Holy homosexuals. What are these books about?
What are these websites about? And you begin to dig in and you find people saying, hey, we love Jesus. We love the word. We hold to the infallibility of scripture. We believe in holiness. But the church has misunderstood what the Bible said about homosexuality. The church has gotten things all wrong. The Bible was against promiscuity. The Bible was against pederasty. The Bible was against prostitution. And where those exist in same sex relations, that's what the Bible was against. But loving, committed same sex relations doesn't say anything about at all. The Bible's fine with that. And you read it and it's like, wow, this makes sense. And you feel this weight lift off your shoulders.
You think, OK, God made me gay and I can be gay and Christian. I don't have to be alone all my life. I can have a partner. I can we can love each other. We can love Jesus together.
Oh, it sounds so liberating. And here, my friend, is the trap that rather than interpreting your sexuality through the lens of scripture, you interpreted scripture through the lens of your sexuality. Let me say it again.
Rather than interpreting your sexuality through the lens of scripture, you interpreted scripture through your lens of your sexuality. I've heard this story over and over again. It's powerful. It's a trap. It's deceptive. It's destructive. But this is how it happens. All right. I know you're engaged and you're listening. We will be right back.
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It's like, well, I I'm liking this. I want to get involved. Well, we'll tell you how later in the broadcast. And my book, Can You Be Gay and Christian? Everything I've just told you about is in the book. Everything I just talked about today, it's in the book. So you'll be able to share this with others. You can get it for your gift of any size by calling 800-538-5275, 800-538-5275 or on the home page, TheLineOfFire.org right there on the home page.
Just click to get this book for your gift of any size right at TheLineOfFire.org. Okay, so the peril of interpreting the word through our experience, through our background, through our culture, through our desires, through our weaknesses, it's fatal. We must interpret ourselves through the Word of God. You say, but hasn't the Bible been misused before? Come on, that's why gay activists will talk about the clobber passages. You just have six passages in the Bible and you hit us over the head with those verses.
You're clobbering us. And they'd say, look, look at what the church did with homosexuality. Hey, I'm sure I've got a good number of Southern Baptists listening right now. So many fine, fine Christians who identify as Southern Baptists, the largest single Protestant denomination in America or network of believers in America. And hey, how did Southern Baptists start?
They broke away from the Northern Baptists because they wanted to have their slaves. And all the founders of the Fine Institute, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, all four of them were slave owners who defended slavery based on the Bible. Look, you know, when slave owners would preach, quote scripture, slaves obey your masters. They'd preach from it. They would preach from the Bible, gather their slaves together, because they wanted to Christianize them, but remind them what the Bible said, to submit to their masters and to be good slaves.
Seemed to have the Bible on their side. Well, are we doing the same with homosexual practice? Do you know how many white Christian leaders were on the side of segregation?
Are you aware of that? Major white Christian leaders on the side of segregation as a good and right thing. Are we doing the same now with the Bible when it comes to homosexual practice? And think of how Christians have used the Bible, male Christians, to keep women down.
Women shouldn't be able to vote. Yeah, Christians held to this. Male Christians held to this. Maybe we're doing the same thing with the Bible today when it comes to homosexual practice. Ah, here are the fundamental differences.
Are you ready? Again, if it's too much to get through in terms of retaining everything, we lay it out in Can You Began Christian. When it comes to slavery, number one, God never celebrated slavery itself. That's number one. Number two, Israel was redeemed from slavery. And Israel was always called to be compassionate because of that, to remember they were slaves and not to mistreat the foreigner in their midst.
That's number two. Number three, slavery in the Old Testament was more a form of indentured servitude because of debt as opposed to the horrors of the African slave trade, which would be explicitly forbidden by scripture. Scripture forbids kidnapping people and selling them into slavery in that regard. So the mistreatment, the barbarism of it is completely contrary to scripture.
That's number three. Number four, Jesus came with a message that ultimately was a message of liberation for the captives and the great goal of scripture is the liberation of all captives. And number five, it was Christians rightly using the Bible and the principles of scripture that brought about the end of slavery in the British Empire and America. Slavery was just a way of life around the world.
Whether you were Muslim, whether you were Christian, whatever religious group you're part of, slavery is just a way of life around the world. It was Christianity that ultimately abolished it. And it's the same with segregation, even though there were so many white Christians on the wrong side of segregation. In point of fact, it was a gospel-based message. Reverend Martin Luther King, yes, there may have been some aberrations in his theology, but he would quote scripture and other leaders would quote scripture.
It was a gospel-based message that opposed segregation. So I can show you, on the other hand, where God calls us to be one in Jesus and where it says that God made all nations out of one man. All right? So we start there. We start there fundamentally and foundationally. That's where we start.
That's number one. When it comes to women, I think it's important to remember that when it comes to women, the Bible celebrates women. Yes, there are different roles. It's a patriarchal society in scripture.
There's no question about that. But you have, for example, the end of the book of Proverbs is just a celebration of the noble woman. And on and on it goes in terms of great women leaders and women used by God, the Deborahs of the Old Testament and the Mary, the Miriams of the New Testament. And so many women who are Paul's co-workers in Romans 16. And in fact, as the gospel goes into cultures like radical Islam, what does it do?
It lifts women, raises women up. In complete contrast, there's not a single passage in the Bible celebrating homosexual practice, celebrating same-sex couples, not a single passage. In fact, every single reference to marriage, family, sexual relations that are blessed by God, every single one presupposes and requires a man and a woman.
We'll get into that probably tomorrow. Every single one. And every single reference to homosexual practice in the Bible, when it is mentioned every single time, it is categorically condemned as being contrary to God's order in very, very strong terms. So we must use the Bible. Yes, many Christians did to our shame to support slavery. We must use the Bible to our shame to support segregation. We must use the Bible to support the oppression and suppression of women. We are rightly using the Bible to say homosexual practice is sinful in God's eyes.
But I don't want to end there. I want to declare what the gospel says. If the Son sets you free, you're free indeed. The blood of Jesus, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin. If our posture is God have mercy on me, a sinner, God will have mercy and grant us repentance and new life. And when Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6 verses 9 through 11, 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11, when he talks about if you live like this, you will not inherit the kingdom of God, be it practicing adultery or practicing homosexuality or practicing drunkenness or extortion. You will not inherit the kingdom of God. He then says in verse 11, that's what some of you were, but you've been washed and cleansed and sanctified. That's not who you are anymore.
There is new life in Jesus. This is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for tuning in. Just a reminder that we are listener supported. If we have been a blessing to you, if you're being enriched in the word and prayer and your own walk with God through this broadcast, then stand with us so that we can reach many, many more and bless many, many more. Together, friends, we're making a difference. So go to TheLineOfFire.org, TheLineOfFire.org, and click donate.
