Jesus Is Enough

Should Christians today embrace a new vision of marriage, a vision that includes same-sex couples? Rachel Gilson doesn't think so. I think the arguments for an evangelical case for same-sex marriage have become extremely sophisticated, and it means that we need to do a good job in our churches explaining God's positive vision for sexuality, not just the verses which say no to same-sex sex. And they're there, and they say no.

But also what God says yes to, when we understand his design for sexuality, it helps us see that what he says no to isn't arbitrary or cruel. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Rachel Gilson has thought a lot about gender and sexuality and about marriage because of her own experience of being same-sex attracted. We'll talk with her today about how she's come to make biblical sense of all of this. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I have sometimes thought that it's a good thing, at least for me it was a good thing, that I didn't understand exactly all I was signing up for when I became a Christian. You know, because if somebody had sat down and said, this is what it's going to mean. If someone would have told me that you're going to marry a pastor and live in Detroit, Michigan, I would have run as far away from God as I could. Not everybody that becomes a Christian is going to marry a pastor and live in Detroit.

You are okay with being a missionary in Africa, but a pastor's wife in Detroit. I think there is some truth to the fact that we often hear and think, what am I going to give up? This is what I have to give up. This is what's going to go away.

Why does no one talk about it? Here's what you get. On the other side, there's an amazing thing.

But anyway. But the disciples that follow Jesus, they're thinking, oh, we're going to follow this guy. Well, one of them said, where else do we go?

You alone have the words of eternal life. That one of them was Peter there, Bob. That's who it was. Just in case you wondered.

That's right. Well, we have got a friend joining us this week on Family Life Today, Rachel Gilson, who kind of came to a point in her life where she recognized, whatever I have to do, I've got to acknowledge that Jesus is who He claims to be. Rachel, welcome back to Family Life Today.

It's my pleasure. You know, and even as you're talking, I'm thinking, my favorite parable is that short one where Jesus says, a man found a treasure in a field and in his joy, he went and sold everything so he could buy that field. Joy. You understand a little about selling everything. You've written a book called Born Again This Way, which is your story of growing up. You've already shared with us about same-sex attraction that you started to experience while you were in high school. You started acting on that. You went to college at Yale.

This was still maybe not the defining part of your life, but a significant part of your life until you were reading Mere Christianity and had to close the book and say, okay. Yeah, what exactly did she say? Fine. Okay. I'll surrender. I'll be a Christian.

Yeah, fine. I'll be a Christian. That was your prayer of salvation. And in that moment, were you thinking this is going to have implications for my sexuality?

I already knew. And I knew because I had encountered those other interpretations of Scripture, which claimed that God supports monogamous same-sex relationships, and I had considered them carefully, and I had found them wanting. So, by the time I got confronted with the fact that I was knee-deep in my sin, over my head in my sin, and there was no way out except the blood of Christ, I already knew that meant, okay, everything belongs to him.

I didn't know what that was going to mean experientially. Right. And I hear people today who are finding the arguments that you found unconvincing, they are finding them convincing. And we've seen a wave of people who have kind of moved from an orthodox view of sexuality to a modern view of sexuality and saying this is still in bounds. I remember reading an article where a woman said, when I was experiencing same-sex attraction, I would have loved to have heard an argument that would have convinced me that this was okay, because it would have validated my desires. What are you saying as you engage with the people who are drifting in the other direction and saying, no, there is a biblical case for this, in fact, it's stronger today than it's ever been? We have to realize most people are attracted to what's been called the affirming view, which, you know, that would say that God affirms same-sex relationships. Most people are attracted to the affirming view because they genuinely care about the gay and lesbian people in their lives. And they have been taught by culture that the only way you can have a happy life is if you have a romantic partner.

Right. And if you have a romantic and sexual partner who fulfills you. So, they say, well, that's what would fulfill my gay and lesbian friend. God has promised that he wants us to be happy, which, hello, is that what he promised? But you know, we kind of take these different ingredients and blend them all in our ninja, and then come out the other side and say, well, God wants me to be happy, and this would make you happy. So therefore, that's probably what God wants.

So, when I'm approaching someone who holds the affirming view, I want to be asking a lot of questions, because usually they've seen some kind of pain in someone's life that they care about. Some type of either promise that was unbiblical, or mistreatment by a church, or there's a dozen different things that can lead people to think, well, maybe this is what God really wants, because it's what my friend or my family member really wants. I think that's why it's important to really gently bring each other back to the Scriptures.

Right. It says in Hebrews 3, we need to exhort one another every day, as long as it's called today, so that none of us might be hardened by the, what's the word? Deceitfulness of sin, right? We are suckers for sin.

We are easily duped. So, where are we going to go? We have to go to God's Word. And so, you were saying you would go to your friend and ask questions, those questions being into their past?

Yeah. I'm asking that for so many of us with friends, of just hearing their story. I want to hear their story. And I also want to hear what they think of God's Word. Do they think of God's Word as something that actually carries life and authority?

Or do they think of it as something where they can cherry pick, right? We actually have an incredibly biblically illiterate society right now. So, if we take something that is this tender, and this disputed, and we throw it to people who actually haven't been trained very well in how to read the Scriptures outside of little verses that have been pulled out and stuck on coffee cups, well, no wonder we've got people confused and easily taken advantage of by these very sophisticated arguments.

I think the arguments for an evangelical case for same-sex marriage have become extremely sophisticated. And it means that we need to do a good job in our churches explaining God's positive vision for sexuality, not just the verses which say no to same-sex sex, and they're there, and they say no. But also what God says yes to, when we understand his design for sexuality, it helps us see that what he says no to isn't arbitrary or cruel, because I think that's the way a lot of people feel. They feel like what God says no to is arbitrary, and it's cruel.

But his caricature is not arbitrary and cruel. PeteL As you give your life to Christ in college, obviously, we're talking now way down the road. Go back. Did you immediately understand God's heart regarding your sexuality? Or was it an easy process to, okay, now I'm a believer, I'm going to step away from this? Was it a journey?

Was it up and down? Obviously, from the very beginning, you had a hermeneutic bent even before you're a Christian to understand, boy, here's what they're saying these Scriptures mean, here's what they mean. You already had that hardwired into you. So, you had this bent, I'm going to understand Scripture, but you've got a life that you're deciding, am I going to leave it? Am I going to continue it? Walk us through that journey because it isn't one day, is it? Jennifer It's certainly not one day. And this is part of why I wrote my book with such openness and honesty, because I think if we can't see it happening in a real person's life, we kind of don't know what it looks like.

We don't know what to expect. The danger, of course, is that when you see just one story, you think it's the only story. My story can be weaponized and people can try to laminate it on to other people, and that's not God's purpose.

But why did he write so much of the Scriptures in narrative? Sometimes the universals are best illustrated in the highly specific. So, part of what was really formative for me is I immediately got involved with the Christians at Yale and with the local church. I had to be in a community of God's people. Jennifer Did you seek them out yourself? Jennifer So, the day that I prayed my Fine, I'll be a Christian prayer, I happened to see a little advertisement for Yale Students for Christ that was going to be having a Valentine's party. So, I just showed up at that party, pretending I was there by accident, because I still didn't even know how to deal. And I just followed them around like a baby quail, learning what it was to be a Christian, you know?

They gave me a Bible, I learned how to pray, I learned we don't make friends by using curse words, I learned that the music is very bad, you know, all the things you need to be an evangelical. I figured out by being with my Christian friends and learning how to read God's Word, but it became pretty clear to me early on, hey, hey, I'm still attracted to women. And it's been 16 years, and I'm still attracted to women. Jennifer Were you surprised that that wasn't gone?

Jennifer I was not surprised. And I think part of that is because I didn't grow up in purity culture youth group, which had made unbiblical promises to me. So, I wasn't surprised. But at the same time, I was a little bit concerned about what I was supposed to do. So, I knew that God's Word said no to acting on those attractions.

But I still didn't understand why. And so, I remember kind of bargaining with God saying, hey, if you'll tell me why you say no to this, then I will obey with perfect joy and obedience, which is ridiculous, right? And the first thing that God did in my life was He really pressed me. He said, hey, what if the most important question isn't, why did I say something?

But what if the most important question is, can you trust the one who's asking? Because if I'm only willing to obey when I understand and agree, how am I not making myself God? I was pressed again and again back to the Garden of Eden, because there's a really interesting situation there. It turns out even before sin entered the world, that God wanted us to live by faith and not by sight, right? He sets this whole beautiful arena, puts Adam and Eve there, and they're given one prohibition. And what's interesting is that prohibition isn't even intuitive.

Like, we could understand if God said, hey, guys, here's your rule. Don't murder each other, right? Because we're like, oh, yeah, murder. That's wrong. It's icky.

It's bloody. Then you'd be lonely, taking the life in an image bearer. We'd all be like, yes, God, very good rule. And if people don't intuitively know that murder is wrong, like we have them go see someone for that, right?

It's understood. But God instead said, here's your prohibition. Don't eat this fruit that's related to growing in knowledge. The day that you eat it, you'll die.

The only way you can obey that is if you trust the one who told you. That's exactly where the serpent pressed Eve, right? He's like, hey, is that what God really said? He gets her to look at the fruit and to use her own data to evaluate it. She sees that it looks good, that it would taste good, that it's desirous to make her wise. So, on the one hand, she has all this data saying the fruit's going to be good for her. And the only thing she has on the other side is God's word saying, if you eat it, you're going to die. And I feel like that's where so many of us are when it comes to sexuality. When we use our own data, we're like, whoa, but I should treat sexuality this way. But God's word says something else.

Like if you treat sexuality that way, you are going to die. And Eve and Adam both ate that fruit because they said, God must be holding out on me. He's not telling me the truth. He's keeping something from me.

I need to get it myself. And we all live downstream of that decision. That impulse is in all of us. And over and over again, early in my Christian life, through an open dumpster fire of failure, by the way, if my 34-year-old self now was discipling my 19-year-old self, I think she is not going to make it. But over and over again through that time, I had to get pressed again and again into, is Jesus trustworthy? Because if I'm going to trust him with this aspect of my life, if he is not perfectly for me, then what am I possibly resting on?

And he is shown again and again and again that he is perfectly for me. So you discovered in your college or early journey that he was trustworthy. Did you also discover the community you are now bonding with, the Christian community was trustworthy? Were you able to tell them who you were?

Yeah, how did that go? It was so great. Now again, I hadn't grown up in the church, so I hadn't grown up with a history of experiencing me being honest with people and them telling me things that were unhelpful or shutting me down. So I assumed, well, I should tell people my real story. And they responded to me with such grace and truth.

And that's what I needed. You know, if they had only extended me grace, but not truth, I mean, there's no power there to say no to temptation. They would have helped me destroy myself. But if they had been all truth and no grace, I mean, I would have been crushed because I did fail several times. And they were so wonderful in demonstrating the grace and truth of Christ to me. I'm convinced that every single one of us needs God's word and God's spirit and spirit and God's people.

And if we miss one of those three, we're going to go off track somewhere. If you look back on your 19-year-old self and you picture yourself telling that community your desires and they responded negatively, judging, what do you think would have happened? Well, I have a lot of friends who are disciples who experience same-sex attraction. And some of them have stories of trying to disclose to God's people their temptations and experiencing things like, you know, the person they're telling saying, well, that's not really how you feel. Or immediately saying, well, that's disgusting. We don't want you here.

I mean, there's all kinds of reactions that can be really unhelpful. And a lot of those people left the church for a long time and kind of went through wilderness stages. But once God starts with us, we can't ultimately find our satisfaction anywhere else.

Even if we wander a long way off, He is extremely patient and extremely beautiful and He will call us back. Rachel, there are some people who, on coming to Christ, recognize the claims of Christ on their life, but the power of the temptation is so strong that they just can't turn off the spigot and they drift back. I'm just wondering if that was a battle for you or whether God enabled you to resist temptation that still continued for you.

Well, there were times of victory. There were times of me being able to say yes to God and no to my sin. But then there were also times where I said yes to my sin and no to God. It was extremely extremely bumpy up and down as I learned, really, as I trained my muscles of obedience. And part of what I had to commit to was to figure out, hey, is what my flesh is promising me, is that actually better than what God is promising me?

I had to come face to face with that question many times. And once I had actually tasted the goodness of Christ, even imperfectly, I just was never as happy with sin again. I kind of lost my taste for it. Doesn't mean I didn't choose it sometimes. Doesn't mean I didn't have to fight it. But I think what really helped me was an actual relationship with the living God that was better than even the good things I experienced when I was giving into my desires. Have you found that the same-sex attraction, temptation, is it any different? Is it harder to resist than other desire, you know, sin temptations? I'm thinking even of the parent who has a daughter or son who's like, they tell me they can't stop, that this desire is just so who they are. They can't—is it different in terms of the intensity of the desire?

People who experience same-sex attraction, I mean, we experience it all in different ways, just like people who experience opposite-sex attraction experience it at different levels, both in their own season of life and differently from other people. There are some men who are attracted to women and sexual temptation is a battle they have to fight their whole lives. There are other men who are attracted to women for whom they learn the obedience of faith and actually sexual temptation isn't that big of a deal for them. Their battle might be elsewhere, like with anger or with passivity, things like this, right? Some of us, same-sex attraction is the place where we are fighting for obedience.

And certainly early in my Christian life, it was the main arena of battle. But now, for example, 16 years into my faith, I still experience same-sex attraction, but honestly, the grace of God is so worked in my life that even when it comes up, I know exactly what to do. It really helps me squash that down and say yes to the Lord. Not repressing my feeling, but just saying like, hey, I don't even want this, actually.

Not really a temptation. And we've got to say, 16 years into your journey, you have a kindergartener and you have a husband. And so explain to us, because not everybody goes on that path who has experienced same-sex attraction.

No, that's right. Several disciples who experience same-sex attraction will never be called into an opposite-sex marriage. They will actually testify to the goodness of God in their singleness by saying, hey, marriage is good, but it points to the real marriage that's coming in the new heavens and the new earth, and there's nothing I'm going to miss out on.

Actually, by choosing singleness for the sake of Christ, a person is saying, I believe in the resurrection with my whole life. But God does and will call several of us who experience same-sex attraction into opposite-sex marriages. And it's not like, I don't need to be attracted to every man in order to be faithfully married to one man.

I just need to receive from God what I need for this marriage. Sometimes it's helpful to not be attracted to every man, right? It's helpful to just be attracted to the one man God has called me to. And I think there's actually something really helpful in the fact that everyone who wants to follow Jesus has two options for their sexuality.

They can be faithfully single, or they can be faithfully married as God defines marriage. And my attractional patterns don't really have to bear on that at all. I could be attracted to men, or women, or both, or neither, or potted plants.

Like, it doesn't matter what my attractions are. God has called me to live faithfully in one of these two stations, and He is going to equip me to live there. So, to the person who would say, these desires are too strong, I cannot say no to them. I want to say, who owns you? Do your desires own you? Or does Jesus Christ own you? He has promised in 1 Corinthians 10, 13, there is no temptation that has overtaken you, that is not common to man, but God will give you the way of escape. Does He say it's easy? Certainly not.

But He does say it's possible. I think that's a great question of who owns you, because all of us have to come to that point of answering that question. And I know for me, as a young woman, as a 16-year-old, I gave my life to Jesus, not really knowing what that would mean. And that means your sexuality as well, but I didn't know that at the time. And I had a boyfriend, and I remember being an 18-year-old, feeling like God was asking me, will you give me everything?

Can I own all of you? Which to me meant probably breaking up with this boyfriend who really wasn't walking with Jesus. Of committing to not having sex anymore, because Jesus was asking me to live a life of purity as a single woman.

And that was a hard, like, I remember even now, I can't even now, I can feel my heart beating of remembering, I knew the cost of that. And I knew that Jesus was enough, and I was going to walk into that, surrendering everything, no matter what it meant, kind of where we started. Did we ever think we would be in places we are now? But I'm so glad that Jesus takes us on a path that He knows what will bring us more joy and purpose in our lives than even we know. It's easy in the church, in the Christian community, to use these words, Jesus is enough. And I think many of us don't know Him well enough for Him to be enough. That's a good point. And so, we go back to our sin, or we go back to that pleasure that we think we'll fill, and we end up always the same place, empty.

Why did I do this? And I think, Rachel, you've helped us understand, I mean, you've said it so beautifully, Jesus is enough. When you really surrender all and experience the very presence and power of God in your life, He is enough.

And nothing quite compares either. It's something that you have to taste. Think about the title of the book, Born Again This Way. I mean, the cultural mantra is, if you're born this way, that you can't overcome that. Rachel, what you're saying is, when you are born again, there is now something that is bigger than how you were born. In fact, I am saying, I cannot overcome this. But what I am saying, there is someone who can.

That's right. And you tell it so beautifully in the book. I hope our listeners will get a copy of your book.

It's called Born Again This Way, coming out, coming to faith, and what comes next. Rachel Gilson is the author, our guest today. You can order her book from us at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy. Again, the website to order a copy of Rachel's book is familylifetoday.com or call to order 1-800-FL-TODAY, 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. I had a conversation yesterday with a mother of four who said, I didn't grow up in a Christian home.

Neither did my husband. And she said, I just want to say thank you to you guys. You have discipled both of us over the last 20 years as we have started our marriage and our family.

We've been to Weekend to Remember Getaways. We listen regularly to Family Life Today. You've helped us understand what it means to live for Christ in our marriage and in our family. And I wanted to share that with you, especially those of you who are monthly legacy partners here at Family Life Today.

That's what you're investing in. You're investing in the marriages and families of hundreds of thousands of people in this country and all around the world who we are reaching with the ministry of family life today. We are so grateful to those of you who are part of this ministry and who make this ministry possible. This week, we've had some friends who have come to us knowing that we need new legacy partners to join with us. And they've agreed they will match every donation that comes from a legacy partner who signs up this week as a new legacy partner. They'll match your donations for the next 12 months, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $25,000.

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That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now tomorrow, we're going to talk with Rachel Gilson about meeting a guy who ultimately proposed to her and wanted her to marry him, knowing about her history of same-sex attraction, how she processed all of that, the conclusions she came to. We'll have that conversation tomorrow. Hope you can join us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.