Welcome back to the Line of Fire where we serve joyfully five days a week as your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Having been saved by the grace and mercy of God, I know it's our calling to have that grace and mercy on others.
And all this month we're talking about very controversial subjects. Can you be gay and Christian? Has the Bible been mistranslated, misused, misunderstood when it comes to issues of homosexuality or transgenderism? How should the church respond in this hour?
Should we be more politically involved, less politically involved? What do we do when a family member comes out as gay? And how do we teach and preach on these things? How do we equip young people who have been so greatly influenced? We'll tackle all of this.
We're using the Bible as our textbook and the book Can You Be Gay and Christian that I wrote. We'll share more about the book a little later in the broadcast. But it's my burden. I pray about this. I really care.
Our whole team, to infuse you with faith and truth and courage. See, God called me to do a deep dive on these subjects. 20 years ago, he laid this on my heart. So that was pretty early on, right, in the process. 20 years ago, I realized that gay activism was already the principal threat to freedom of religion, speech, and conscience in America. 20 years ago. This is long before we were talking about 13-year-old girls having full mastectomies because they're going through a time of gender identity confusion.
This is long before we were talking about 10-year-old boys getting on hormones to stop puberty, puberty blocking hormones that would sterilize them for life. Long before we were talking about this. Long before men who identified as women or boys who identified as girls were competing against women and girls and even injuring them in competition or sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with them. Long before any of this was in place. Long before the Supreme Court redefined marriage.
Long before President Obama came out saying he was in support of same-sex marriage even though previously saying he was against it. Long before any of these things, God had laid this on my heart and spoken to me, reach out and resist. Reach out to the people with compassion. Resist the agenda with courage. We need hearts of compassion, backbones of steel.
This is the world that we're living in, friends, and it is our deep burden to help you stand strong in these areas. By God's grace, there's biblical scholarship as a foundation for my life. I have a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures for New York University.
I just say this for those who don't know me. I wrote the commentary on Jeremiah for the revised edition of the Expositor's Bible commentary. I have a standalone commentary on Job, working on a commentary on Isaiah now. I've contributed to numerous scholarly publications and have specialized in Hebrew word studies and understand the theology of these different words, participated in Bible translation projects, Old and New Testament oversight in different ways. So I've been involved in this world. I've served as a visiting or adjunct professor at eight different seminaries. Most of the leading seminaries here in America have served as a visiting or adjunct professor. So I'm involved in the world of academics.
And as we dig into the scriptures in the days ahead and say, what does the Bible really say? I can assure you I'm not just coming up with some Internet theory. I can also assure you I've read the best of gay theologians. I've read the best of the arguments against our positions, and I can lay out clearly why those things are wrong. So we've done that deep dive to help you stand strong.
We've done that to equip you. There are areas where I have very, very little knowledge, like science and philosophy. So I go to the people like John Lennox and William Lane Craig and others who are known philosophically or scientifically or have great background in these different areas. And I learn from them. They've done the deep dives there. So we've done the deep dives here to help equip and infuse you. If you're not getting our Frontline newsletter every month, we really inspire, encourage, edify and give you testimonies from what our fire team is doing around the world. Then by all means, sign up today.
It's absolutely free. Go to the line of fire dot org, the line of fire dot org and sign up there right on the home page. So the first few broadcasts of this series, because we have the whole month, I'm laying foundations. I'm talking about mindset, attitude, approach. So we've said we reach out to the people with compassion. We resist the agenda with courage.
Reach out and resist. We've said we need hearts of compassion and backbones of steel. I want to lay out one more important principle for you, and that is we must humanize, not demonize those we differ with. We must humanize, not demonize those that we differ with. One rabbi made the comment that it's not right for you to take the best of your religion and compare it with the worst of someone else's religion.
Something that's easy to do. Any group that we differ with will find the worst, most extreme, most ugly, most horrific, most craziest example from their doctrine or group or cult or religion and then compare it with the very best in our group. That's not fair.
That's not honest. We need to have equal weights and equal measures. Scripture is very strong about that.
The need for equal weights and measures. And it's imperative, friends, that we do that and that we not demonize those we differ with. So how do we demonize? It's very easy to look at a gay pride event in your city, especially in bigger cities, and see horrific public sexual displays that are as ugly and appropriate as you can imagine. I'm not going to get into details.
There could be young ears listening as well. But I'm talking about things that are absolutely shameful and deplorable. Could you imagine, let's say you're Asian American. Let's say you're black American. Let's say you're white American.
But whatever. You're Hispanic American. You're Native American.
And you're having a celebration, a heritage celebration. We're Italian Americans. We're Irish Americans. We're Jewish Americans.
We're African Americans. We're having a heritage cultural celebration. Could you imagine any of those things being featured at one of our parades? Could you imagine it? Could you imagine people stripped down and gyrating? Could you imagine, well, little ears won't know this, BDSM displays and all kinds of crazy stuff and people whipping each other. What? And adults there with kids as the parade goes by. And again, I'm going to stop there.
No, no. What in the world would that have to do with our heritage? But you see it at gay pride events. And then you see some drag queen with satanic horns, reading to little children in a library.
And maybe he's swishing his hips and singing that the hips of a drag queen go swish, swish, swish. And that's what we're looking at. And then we read stats about young gay men and rates of STDs off the charts, etc. And it's easy to demonize as if every gay man is sleeping with 500 or 1000 different men, as if every person who identifies as lesbian or bi or trans is engaging in all kinds of public perversions.
It's easy to look at that and to demonize people. But it's very probable that your gay cousin is not living like that. That the lesbian couple next door is not living like that.
That your uncle that, you know, sounds a little different over the years is not living like that is very likely. Years ago, I had a guest on the line of fire named David Kyle Foster. He's got an amazing testimony and a great ministry dealing with sexual brokenness. David was not just a practicing homosexual. He got heavily addicted to porn. He also engaged in prostitution and he was a drug addict. And he got wonderfully gloriously saved.
He was on the air sharing his testimony with me one day. And I received a call from a woman, self-identified lesbian. And she said, my partner and I are none of that. We've never been into any of that. And we've never done drugs. We're raising our kids together. We're devoted parents. And that's not who we are. Now, I was not implying that everyone that was same sex attracted was addicted to pornography, drugs and was into prostitution. Obviously not.
We got to interact. And for a little while, she actually was a defender. Her wife, I think, had been raised by missionary parents. A woman she called her wife had been raised by strong Christian parents, I think missionary parents. So she was a little reluctant to sit out. You know, I wanted my wife and I to have a meal with the two of them, just get to know them. So her partner was a little gun-shy. But in point of fact, when we talked and interacted, her life was just like any other soccer mom, with the exception of the person that she was with was a woman, not a man. But they were not promiscuous. They were committed to each other.
They were not getting high. They also would be repulsed by the things at the gay pride event. And there are plenty of Americans just like that. We must humanize, not demonize. I will absolutely call out a destructive agenda. I will absolutely oppose gay activism in schools. I will absolutely oppose trans athletes, males competing with females. I will absolutely oppose those things. I will, to the core of my being, scream out against the genetic mutilation and chemical castration of children, of minors.
Absolutely. I will stand unflinchingly in terms of what scripture actually says, without hesitation. At the same time, I realize that people are people. And that there are, I've said for many years, some would be upset with me saying this, but I've said for many years that no-fault divorce in the church among heterosexuals has done more to destroy marriage than all gay activists combined. What about all the promiscuity in our midst? What about all the porn addiction in our midst? What about all the no-fault divorces in our midst?
What about all the strip clubs and the rapes and the abuses and on and on and on and on and on? Let's all recognize that we meet at the foot of the cross. Let's all recognize we meet at all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Let's recognize we all meet as broken people needing the mercy of God.
And to say it again, Jesus shed the same blood for heterosexual as for homosexual. All right. Important announcement for you.
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So call now 1-800-771-5584, 1-800-771-5584, 1-800-771-5584 or online at trivita.com. Thanks for joining in and being part of the Line of Fire broadcast. If you're new to us, we'll put you on our welcome tour when you sign up for our frontline newsletter at thelineoffire.org because we're on a bunch of new stations so I'm sharing a few of these things a little extra. We'd love to get you on our welcome tour, share more about my own testimony, Jewish hippie rock drummer getting saved in 71 and all the resources our ministry has for you, so much free material. That's our job. That's our calling.
That's our grace to be here to equip you and to empower you so you can engage in the world in which you live. I was speaking at a church in Ohio some years ago. The pastor had asked me in one of the messages there to address, can you be gay and Christian? And I did. At the end of the service, a couple came up to me crying. Our daughter came out as lesbian and we kicked her out of the house. I said, you did what? That's when we kicked her out of the house. She was a teenager. I said, where is she now? They said at her uncle's.
She's staying there. And I said, hey, listen, I said, you reach out to that girl. You reach out to your daughter and you ask her to please come back home and you tell her, look, you're our daughter. You know what we believe. You know where we stand. But you're our daughter. We love you. We care about you. We probably feel more tenderness and love towards you right now than we ever have. So talk to us.
Tell us what's going on. There would be one thing if she was bringing a lesbian girlfriend into the home and blatantly doing sexual things around the family, around the siblings or or having some drug fueled sex parties in the home or something. That was that all she did was came out and told her parents that she was lesbian. And please bear in mind that that's the language that she's learned. That's the world that she lives in. She's not going to say, well, I'm same sex attracted. No, she just knows that this is who she is. And and again, it's not in her mind, just part of her nature. She's been told she's been taught this is who you are.
This is who you are. So I said, you get her back home. You know how difficult it must have been for her to to to talk to you and tell you these things?
And of course, they were going to go right ahead and do that. Sometimes we don't know how to respond. We don't know how to act. But I mentioned a situation like this to remind us that we have to humanize, not demonize. As I've taught about abortion, for example, and we're not we're not focusing on that in this series, but I've taught about abortion. We can highlight the absolute horrors of of late term abortion and we can show pictures of the remains of aborted babies. Just gut wrenching.
You just weep when you see them. And we can talk about the horrors of what happened in the abortion mill of Kermit Gossel, Dr. Gossel, who's in jail for the crimes that he committed against little ones. We can talk about that. But that's not your average abortion. That's not the average reason that someone has an abortion. Now, I know that cases of rape and incest are less than one percent statistically of abortions.
But your average abortion is not late term. And in many cases, the mothers have agonized over this. In some cases, the mother and father together have agonized.
And in some cases they have Christian background and they're trying to struggle. What's the right thing to do? And, OK, the baby has a severe genetic defect. And what's the use of bringing this child into the world just to suffer for months and then die? We'll probably never even get to hold the baby and end up with hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars of hospital bills and an agony of seeing our child suffer.
Isn't it compassionate to terminate the pregnancy in the womb? Or maybe a woman married with a few kids. The husband got her pregnant one last time before leaving the family. Alcoholic, took off, is completely derelict, not caring for the family, providing. Now she finds out another baby coming.
I got three little ones already I'm trying to care for. I feel like I'm going to lose my mind and we can't possibly afford this. And she agonizes and feels this is the only right thing to do. And he's not even there to care.
He's an alcoholic on top of it. Best to not let this baby come in the world and suffer and burden everybody else. Okay, it's still wrong. It's still wrong.
It's still wrong that's a human being in the womb. But we have to humanize, not demonize. And that's why for years now, when I meet someone that is obviously gay, lesbian, either it's just obvious the way they present themselves or in our conversation that emerges, you know, maybe on a flight or something. I immediately engage. I'll tell them who I am. I'll tell them. I'm a minister of the gospel. I'll tell them that I'm a follower of Jesus with conservative moral and cultural values, but I want to hear their story. And I can't think of a single time where the gay, trans, bi-identified person did not want to tell me their story.
And I will listen and try to understand so I can be more compassionate. My mom passed away in 2016 at the age of 94. And we had moved her up or down, excuse me, from New York to North Carolina to live with us for a while and then to be in a health related facility just so I could be there to help her more, be around her more. My sister had moved down.
My sister had helped her for many years. She moved down to Florida. So we had my mom with us, North Carolina, and she passed away. So I talked to the funeral director here in North Carolina, and we're having my mom's body shipped back to New Jersey where there's a plot next to my dad. He died in 77.
There's a plot for the two of them there. And she'd be shipped back and he wants to know, did we want a rabbi at the funeral? So I asked my sister. She suggested like a rabbi. And the gentleman said to me, there may just be some problems.
There may be some problems because of who you are. And this is a Jewish cemetery. In other words, I have a lot of notoriety in the Jewish world as being an outspoken, messianic Jew, Jewish believer in Jesus. Well, next day or two, I get a call from a rabbi.
And in fact, we were just in touch a few days ago. I get a call from a rabbi saying, hey, Dr. Brown, this is Rabbi so-and-so. I will not have any problem at all during the funeral. I do interfaith funerals and services all the time.
It's not a problem for me. And he said, but actually, I got a call from the cemetery in New Jersey. And they said to me, Rabbi so-and-so, we need someone to do a funeral. It's for Dr. Michael Brown. Does that present a problem for you, for his mother? And he said, why would that present a problem? They said, it's Dr. Michael Brown. And he said, oh, oh, OK, no, I get it.
No, no problem at all. He goes, Dr. Brown, I listen to your radio show every day. And if I miss it, I get the podcast afterwards. I thought, how interesting is that? I knew, I felt there was more to the story, so I get online and lo and behold, he's a pioneer gay rabbi, Reform, which is very liberal, a pioneer gay rabbi.
Here is a gay rabbi who listens to my show, who knows not only where I stand on who Jesus Yeshua is as the Messiah of Israel, but who knows where I stand on homosexual practice being sinful in God's sight and same sex marriages not being marriages in God's sight. He knows it and he listens because he heard my heart. And I thought, that's absolutely the Lord that we are there together at my mother's funeral. And we talked, greeted him, gave him a hug, and we talked. And I said, I think I should write an article about this. And he said, absolutely.
And then he'd send me notes later. We traveled with my daughter. Hey, I want to know if she got back safely.
Everything was good. And we've stayed in touch. The point is, he's a fellow human being. We said, look, when it comes down to loved one dying, we stand together, even though we have these massive gulfs between us. We humanize, not demonize those we differ with. We can categorically call sin out as sin and categorically stand against a destructive agenda without demonizing people.
I hope this is helping you. We're going to dig into a lot of scripture. These are foundations that are so important. And these foundations, the Reach Out, Resist concept, Hearts of Compassion, Backbones of Steel, that's exactly what you'll get as you read Can You Be Gay and Christian? You won't just get the knowledge and the information. You'll get a heart impartation as well to help you to really stand with love and truth, grace and truth together.
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.
