Perfect Love

I recently talked to a guy, I think it was last week, and I don't know how we got on this topic. I think he brought it up, but he said that he canceled his Sports Illustrated subscription the day they put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover as the Athlete of the Year because Bruce Jenner became a woman, Caitlyn, and they had her on the cover of the Sports Illustrated. And I said, what do you mean you canceled?

He goes, this wasn't an athletic move. I didn't like what they did, so I canceled. I mean, I just canceled my subscription. And I was like, whoa. And I thought he's telling me that.

But if he would say that out loud publicly, he would get canceled. Yeah. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, if you say something like that in this culture that is not the popular view and you can pick almost any popular subject, if you are going sort of in a different minority position on it, you sort of get canceled. We live in a canceled culture.

I'm not going to follow you, listen to you, respect you anymore. What's up with that? Well, I think our culture is really shifting right now, too. And I think many of us feel like we're walking on eggshells. We don't want to offend. And it's not even it can be offensive. But then the result of what we said can be volatile. If you've been on Twitter any amount of time, it is a crazy world right now where people are being attacked. And so I think in some ways it's good that we're careful with what we're saying and we need to be loving in all respects. But you're right. We're living in a culture that's canceling everything.

I even read this isn't just in the Christian world or the religious world. I read this morning that a pretty famous broadcaster in the NBA said, I'm done. I'm quitting because all of our conversations about what I cannot say publicly because I'll get attacked.

And he goes, I'm not going to live like this anymore. I thought, wow, it's interesting that he says we are afraid to make any comment publicly because of being canceled. And think about what our kids are dealing with on any sort of social media platform.

I think more than ever, they are really careful. Yeah. And I think our kids in the church have a lot of questions about some important issues. And there's a book that came out written by the author who's sitting across the table from us.

Rebecca McLaughlin is sitting in here with us as well. And you wrote a book called Ten Questions Every Teen Should Ask and Answer About Christianity. I mean, you've got an unbelievable pedigree in terms of Ph.D. and Renaissance literature and just a background in defending the faith and writing. You wrote a book that was well received called Confronting Christianity.

And this is sort of the teenage version of that. You've been to seminary. You have three kids. You're married.

How many years have you been married? Thirteen. And your kids are the oldest is eleven? Yes.

Youngest is going to be three soon. That's right. And so in the book, you go through ten questions and you didn't hide from some of the biggies. You know, I mean, several of them are about evidences, the Bible, how do you know the Bible is true and heaven and hell and is Christianity just for me? But you have a couple of chapters in there about gender, diversity, sexuality. So let's get into some of those. But why put those in? Do you feel like obviously you do.

These are important questions for your teenager. Yeah. Yeah. As long as I can remember, I've been a follower of Jesus. And as long as I can remember, I've been attracted to women. And because I've always been a follower of Jesus, it was not something that I chose to pursue. You know, as a teenager or as a young adult, I've chosen to marry a guy rather than a girl.

I think if I was not a Christian, most likely, I mean, who knows, but most likely I'd be married to a woman today instead of to a man. I think for many people hearing that, they're like, oh, my goodness, what kind of strange creature are you? It doesn't really fit into many of our categories because we tend to think of, you know, the church over here and then the LGBT community. Folks can't see me.

I'm gesturing with my hands wildly here. The sort of LGBT community over there. And what we tend not to realize is that actually there's quite a lot of overlap. Is it the Venn diagrams you learn about in middle school?

We have the circles that have some overlap. And the way that we in churches have often navigated this is to just like ignore people within our communities who may experience same sex attraction or who may really sort of struggle with their sense of themselves as a guy or as a girl. So we haven't really we've sort of silenced folks or kind of come down really hard and been like, well, wait a minute, what's going on here? You know, are you really a follower of Jesus if this is, you know, an area of temptation and struggle for you in ways that we probably don't when it's, you know, somebody struggling with heterosexual desire, for example. And then we've created this idea that, you know, it's the LGBT folks out there. We very much too often, I think, kind of stigmatized or had this this idea about what all gay or lesbian or transgender or bisexual people are like. And I think especially for kids growing up today, as they start to meet friends at school or if they go off to college and, you know, have roommates or friends who do identify as gay or lesbian or more as transgender. They'll then go through this process of thinking, well, wait a minute, you know, I used to think the Bible said that it wasn't okay, for example, to pursue a same sex sexual relationship.

But then I met this really nice guy who's he's gay and he seems to have a great relationship with his partner. And, you know, he seems like he's a really committed sort of person, like all the things that they may have been raised to believe about gay people don't seem to fit with this guy. And so then they say, well, now I don't really know that I believe what the Bible says is true. Now we have a hard time sometimes knowing what to repent of. But I think the two things that we need to do on all sorts of cultural issues right now as Christians, we need to repent and believe.

And that should be deep in our DNA, right? That's how we become Christians in the first place. We repent and we believe. I think we need to recognize there are meaningful things that we as Christians need to repent of in the way that we've too often treated gay and lesbian folk outside the church or people who struggle with same sex attraction within the church. But we also need to believe what the Bible says. Well, let's go to repent.

How have we treated in general? I'm going to bring another area in here because they're so interlocked in people's minds. And I think sadly, they've been quite interlocked in the sort of history of Christian sin. And it kind of goes back to your original point of like today to not affirm somebody's transgender identity, for example, isn't just to be like a little bit dated or, you know, aren't you sweet, you Christians, you don't really you're not really with the times. There's a sense of sort of righteous anger that will come at you if you don't affirm somebody's transition, for example, or somebody saying that they're trans.

Where does that come from? The more that I've sort of studied this as someone who's kind of come from the outside from the UK and trying to get my bearings in the US the last decade or so, the more it's become clear that actually the argument goes like this, just as the white 60s segregationists use their Bibles to go against like interracial marriage and to the desegregation of schools and all the things that sadly, many white Christians did. So you Christians today are using your Bibles to reject and oppress LGBT folk. And until we fully recognize that part A of that statement is true, and until we're ready to kind of reckon with that, we're not really going to be able to speak with clarity and authenticity and love into our issues today. Because for many of our peers today, and especially for our kids peers, the transgender rights movement today is the new civil rights movement. And so the people like us who aren't going to affirm gay marriage or aren't going to affirm transgender identities, this is like the new civil rights movement. It's not just a kind of agree to disagree situation.

It's a question of deep justice. And again, I think we need to sort of take that moment to repent at the same time as we believe what the scriptures say when it comes to sexuality. And I, as I mentioned earlier, I've always been someone who's sort of primarily attracted to women. If I had come to the script, like I looked quite carefully in the scriptures. And if I had found that they said, yeah, no, sure, it's fine. Like gay marriage is certainly something that's compatible with being a follower of Jesus. I'd have probably been quite pleased to find that.

That's not what I found. But instead, I found something more profound and more beautiful and more surprising, which is that the very reason that God made male and female, the very reason he made sex and sexuality and marriage was to tell us the story of his love for us. It's not when we see the Bible talking about Jesus as like a husband and the church as his wife. That's not just like looking around. Oh, look, it's human marriage.

That looks nice. I'm going to compare Jesus and the church to that. No, the actual the reason that God even made us as sexual beings and that he even created this kind of relationship was to give us the tiniest glimpse of Jesus's passionate love for us. And I think understanding that then puts everything else into perspective, whether it's your struggle with pornography or whether it's your struggle with heterosexual lust or whether it's your struggle with same sex desire.

Like for all of us, recognizing that our ultimate lover is Jesus completely changes the way that we think. So when you say repent, because there's a belief also that, OK, we use the Bible in injustice, in civil rights, in slavery, you name it. And the argument goes, you know, 30 years from now, you're going to repent of saying that same sex marriage was wrong.

It's fine. You're going to change. Just as you realized 50 years ago, you're wrong. You repent of that. Is that what you're saying is going to happen or are you saying repent of the past?

That's a real thing that we should own. But and I think you are from what you just said. But the truth is, scripture says this. And so, no, I'm not going to change my mind about this, although I can I can repent of it in a loving way.

Yeah. So the problem with the sixties segregationists was not that they were too Christian. It was that they weren't half Christian enough. It wasn't that they were clinging to their Bibles too hard.

It was that they were actually completely failing to read the Bibles or reading it in such an extraordinarily selective. I mean, the kind of interpretive gymnastics you have to do to justify segregation from the scriptures is actually about as drastic as the kind you have to do to just to affirm gay marriage from a Christian perspective. If we read the Bible, we'll find that it pulls us in in one direction when it comes to racial equality and justice and in a completely different direction when it comes to same sex sexual relationships. And so I think in both cases, we need to come back to the Bible.

So when I say repent and believe, I mean, look at what the scriptures say. See where our lives or our attitudes or our treatment of others doesn't align with what the Bible says and then believe that what the Bible says is true. And what's really fascinating is that even, and this is a point made by a non-Christian historian called Tom Holland in the UK, even the very basis on which folks who were gay rights advocates, for example, or transgender activists, the basis of their arguments is to say, look, all human beings are equal.

Those who've been historically oppressed and marginalized shouldn't be trampled on, but they should actually be protected. And there's this sort of individual uniqueness to everyone and this equality that is regardless of who you are or where you are or where you come from or what you're doing. Where do we get those ideas? They're actually straight out of the Bible. They're not just self-evident truths that all human beings are created equal. That's a specifically Christian claim. And so folks on both sides in our current conversations about gender and sexuality, whether or not they realize it, are sort of standing on Christian ground and we just haven't looked down to see the sort of moral soil beneath our feet, which is only there because of Christianity. Let's talk about this practically when your kids come home from school and they say, oh, my friend has two moms or my friend just said she came out and she said she's gay today. Talk about how you dialogue with your kids about those conversations or how our listeners could have that dialogue in a very loving way, but really honest and biblical way. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the super helpful things for me, because my kids absolutely come, they have a non-binary friend who has two moms, for example, and they're, you know, 11 and nine. So this is pre anybody coming out as gay themselves.

But there's certainly, you know, that's very much part of the air that they're breathing. One of the things I'm able to do is to talk them through the stories of several of our Christian friends. You know, I taught them through my friend Rachel's stories and stuff with crew who came to Christ out of a lesbian atheist background when she was an undergrad at Yale. I told them through my friend Lou's story, who grew up in the church, has always been attracted to men and really not to women at all and is living as a single man serving the Lord with all his heart in our community at church. I'd share a bit of my story as sort of, you know, less exciting in some ways than Rachel's, but like, I want them to know that Christians aren't different because we necessarily have different patterns of attraction or different struggles or different whatever. We're different because Jesus has called us and that within Jesus's family, we're going to believe different things and do different things than folks outside. And I'm going to encourage them to love their friends regardless of who they say they are or whether they have two moms or two dads or one mom and no dad, that actually our disposition always needs to be to love. But the part of loving someone, an important part of loving someone, is pointing them to Jesus and telling them about his exclusive claims on them. And if and when one day they put their trust in Jesus, a whole lot of things will need to change in their lives. Now, when you say we've talked about repent and I think we've talked about believe, I want to make sure I understand the believe part. Believe what? Believe that sex only belongs in male-female marriage for Christians and that actually same-sex sexual relationships consistently through the scriptures are seen as not being appropriate for God's people. But here's the thing. I like to say this sometimes a little bit provocatively because folks will sometimes say, you know, the Bible condemns same-sex relationships.

And I say, no, it doesn't. The Bible actually commands same-sex relationships at a level of intimacy that we Christians hardly ever reach. If you think about it, Paul talks about it as being one body together. He calls his friend Onesimus his very heart.

Imagine how awkward that would be for you to say to like a male friend, you know, you're my very heart. He talks about us as being comrades in arms, as being knit together in love. Like the language of intimacy, sure, are opposite sex as well, but actually I think particularly same-sex closeness that we see in the New Testament.

Or Jesus saying greater love has no one than this that he laid on his life for his friends. It's not that we don't believe in love between people of the same sex. We actually believe in a better love between people of the same sex than anything this world has to offer us. And we believe in that because we believe in Jesus.

Yet we keep the sexual part of that non-existent. Yeah, because sex is telling us one very particular story about God's love for us. And as I mentioned earlier, it's about we see it in the Old Testament as God as the faithful husband and Israel as the often unfaithful wife. And we see Jesus calling himself the bridegroom. And we see Jesus in Paul being presented as the husband so that the church is his bride. So that that's one human relationship in which we glimpse God's love for us. But then we see other different ones. We see the parent-child relationship.

Very clearly, God being called our father throughout the scriptures. We know that that's a really close and important relationship, but it's not a sexual relationship. It's a different kind of relationship. And likewise, we see friendship. As I mentioned, Jesus saying greater love has no one than this. Not, well, this is a love that's okay if you can't get anything else. But greater love has no one than this that he would lay down his life for his friends. So I think we need to recognize that sex and marriage are actually beautiful and important gifts from God.

But they have a very specific design and purpose and that it's a different design and purpose than other kinds of relationship that also give us different glimpses of Jesus's love. Now, obviously, you mentioned your journey, you know, but I'd love to know what was that journey like as you realize I'm same-sex attracted. I'm a follower of Christ from a young age. How did that go?

Was the navigation something that was very difficult, easy? How did the church, how did your community respond to you? Walk us through that a little bit. Oh, I didn't tell anyone. Yeah, you kept it quiet. Which I think is true of a lot of Christians. I get emails every week, often more than once a week, from people, whether they're 15 or 45, who have never talked about their same-sex attraction with their Christian friends or family and are really struggling. I think one of the things that we can all be part of is actually making this something that we can talk about. Because Satan's one of his greatest weapons against us is making each of us feel like, well, your struggle is the thing you can't talk about. You can't get help with this. Your pornography addiction is far too disgusting to talk about to your friend or your experience of same-sex attraction. Nobody's going to understand. They're just going to reject you.

I think for me personally, I only started talking to Christian friends in my early 30s. And the reason was I was terrified that if I opened up about this, then all of my female friends would take just like half a step away from me. Not that they would run screaming. I knew they weren't like that. But that they would just, you know, take a little half step back.

Is that what happened? No, what I realized was that actually I'd taken half a step back from them because they were sharing the real struggles in their life. And I wasn't. And I never had. And so actually I hadn't given them the opportunity to step in alongside me and to be friends who know me and love me and who will speak truth to me when I need to hear truth and will speak encouragement and love to me when I need that.

So I think that's true for all of us, whatever our patterns of attraction or whatever our struggles with sin. I think we all need friends in the Lord and we all need to be people who others are going to be comfortable opening up with. Have you talked to your kids about, let's just say this, your kids would come and talk to you about that. Is that what you would hope that they would open up?

I really hope they would. Because some listeners are thinking, I don't know if I want my kids to open up about that because I don't know how I would respond. Well, she knows me.

I'm the withdrawal guy. I'm like, yeah, I'd rather not know. Right. I would want to know.

And of course I want to know. But there's, you know, there's a part of the uncomfortable like, oh, my goodness, what am I going to do with that? Or say.

Right. And so I'm guessing that you would hope your kids would tell you. Whatever they're struggling with, I hope that they would tell me. And I hope that they would have other people as well around them because I think we have a profoundly important responsibility as parents to disciple our children. But I think also God puts all of us in a family that's broader than even the nuclear family. And so I would want them to be able to talk with my friend Rachel or my friend Lou or like others who can give their own angle on the same truth. But who can actually walk with them alongside them in ways that can complement how I can do that as their mother as well.

And talk about your response. If one of your kids came and talked to you about that, or if you had talked to your mom about that, what would you hope the response would be? I think the terrifying thing in particular about this struggle, I think I'm sure it's to some extent true of any struggle that you might be bringing to your parents. But I think that worry that I'm suddenly going to be seen as like completely other or like there's something really wrong with me and that I can't be loved in the same way that I was loved before.

So I think whether it's a child or a friend who shares this experience with you, the first thing is just to affirm that you love them and that this hasn't made you love them any less for you to know this about them. That this is actually a pretty normal experience. I mean there's statistics show that about 14% of women and about 7% of men experience some degree of same sex attraction. Though actually only 1% of women and about 2% of men are exclusively attracted to their same sex. So folks like me who are primarily attracted to women but actually doesn't mean I can't make a marriage to a good man work, it's actually the largest category of folks who experience same sex attraction. So help them to understand that they're not the sort of one strange person amongst this massive crowd of other people who've, you know, the thoughts never crossed their mind. And then give them some good resources. There are some great books that have come out recently on these questions. Rebecca, thank you.

Yeah, thanks for being here. One of the great resources that Rebecca has in mind on this subject of same sex attraction is a book written by her friend Rachel Gilson. Rachel's been a guest on Family Life Today. I wrote a book called Born Again This Way. We've got her book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. And we have links to the podcast episodes with Rachel. I know this is an issue for so many moms and dads today as teenage sons and teenage daughters are wondering, am I gay?

And if I have same sex attraction, what do I do with that? Rachel's book deals with that specifically. And of course, Rebecca's book deals with it in part along with other questions that teenagers are facing today. We're making Rebecca's book available this week to those of you who can help support the Ministry of Family Life Today with the donation of any amount. The book is called Ten Questions Every Teen Should Ask.

These are good, important, healthy questions, not questions that we ought to ignore, but questions we ought to deal with head on. And as moms and dads, we need help in knowing how to help navigate our teens through the minefield that is in front of them. Rebecca's book does just that. And again, we'd love to send you a copy if you're able to support the ongoing mission of Family Life Today. Our goal is to effectively develop godly marriages and families. This radio program is a part of how we do that. We have events and resources. We have our website, podcasts that are available.

All of this is made possible because listeners like you make it possible through your donations. So again, if you can help with the donation today, be sure to request your copy of Rebecca McLaughlin's book, Ten Questions Every Teen Should Ask. You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make your donation. The website again is familylifetoday.com or call to donate. Our number is 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. Now this is a month when traditionally our thoughts turn toward Thanksgiving, not just the holiday, but being thankful. And here at Family Life, we've got a lot to be thankful for. David Robbins, who's the president of Family Life, is here with me. And David, this has been a year where much of our traditional ministry has been challenged because of COVID. And yet we have seen God continue to work through the ministry of family life in some pretty remarkable ways.

Yeah. Those of you know us, know us likely for our We Can Remember Getaways or for Family Life Today and other resources we bring. But one of the things that we're passionate about that is described in our mission statement of effectively developing godly families who change the world one home at a time. We are passionate about helping families, disciple families, their own and the families in their community. And so we for a long time have created resources that allow people to pass on the timeless truth of the scripture and the gospel to homes around them. And so this year alone, over 300000 people have gone through one of our family life small groups that's been facilitated by someone who gets a passion to host a group and impact people around them.

And it's encouraging to see what happens in the US and a number like that. But I just got an email this past week of a group of people in Philippines trusting God for for a movement of godly families in the Philippines. And so they took one of our latest small group resources, vertical marriage, and gathered a group of people.

And dozens of leaders all over the country have been leading vertical marriage small groups in churches in the Philippines. And that's what our hearts for. That's what our mission is about, is to have families, discipling families living out Jesus's call to fulfill the Great Commission. And those of you who support this ministry financially, you make all of this possible.

So thank you for that. Thank you for partnering with us in helping to effectively develop godly marriages and families. And we always look forward to hearing from you. We hope you can join us again tomorrow when our friend Ray McKelvey is going to be here along with Ron Deal. Ray shares his story of growing up not knowing his biological father and then having his mom and stepdad divorced when he was a child. So there was a lot going on in Ray's family that affected him and later affected his marriage to Robin. We'll hear all about that tomorrow. Hope you can join us for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.