Answering Transgenderism #1

Transgenderism removes the external objectivity of truth and replaces it with a subjectivity that is based on feelings.

That approach to determining truth claims is a retreat into irretrievable darkness. The first gender clinic for children opened in Boston back in 2007. In the past 10 years, there are now more than 30 clinics for children with purported gender dysphoria in the United States alone.

Hi, I'm Bill Wright. Today on The Truth Pulpit, Pastor Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word with a series titled The Bible and Transgenderism. Don, is all this push for transgender activism a case of the culture driving us further away from biblical truth?

Well, Bill, it's that, and it's even more than that. You know, the Bible says in Romans 1 that God hands people over who deny Him and hands them over to the lusts of their hearts so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. And that's what we see happening here. It's an outworking of the wrath of God on a godless society. And it's important for us to frame the issues in those ways, my friend, because when we frame it like that, we understand that the issue is sin, and the answer, therefore, is Jesus Christ. When we rightly understand transgenderism, we're in a position to point people back to their Creator and the provision for reconciliation to Him that He has made in the sending of His Son. Stay with us as we explain these things from Scripture today on The Truth Pulpit.

Thanks, Don. And friend, let's delve further into the topic of transgenderism today as Don addresses it from God's Word on The Truth Pulpit. The Cincinnati Inquirer reported on what they perceived to be a news story. Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Sealback, an open homosexual, had called for a boycott of the TriHealth local hospital network. He called on TriHealth to actually terminate the employment of a nurse who had made comments on her personal Facebook page, which challenged the reality of transgender identity. The nurse's post was admittedly profane, but it was on her personal page, a matter of private expression. This story illustrates what is at stake in our social structure and helps illustrate why we are spending time examining the issue of the Bible and transgenderism at Truth Community Church. Think with me for just a moment about what we just heard. A homosexual elected official used his public position and access to media to pressure a corporation to fire a nurse for private comments that he disliked. Beloved, that is a chilling reality. You're not even allowed to voice disagreement, and if you do, we will punish you even though you have not harmed us actually in any way whatsoever.

TriHealth quickly and predictably placed the nurse on administrative leave and issued the standard statement on tolerance and diversity in bowing to the pressure of Councilman Sealback. Beloved, here's what I want you to see as we start. The threat of this transgender activism and this transgender ideology, the threat is real. The threat is immediate, and the threat is local.

Speaking from Cincinnati, Ohio here as I speak, right? This is our world in which we live, and we need to be equipped to live in it and to respond to it in a godly biblical way. In transgender ideology, if a man feels like a woman, whatever that means, whatever it means to feel like a woman, half of you here might be able to help me understand that. If a man feels like a woman and he chooses to live like a woman, then society is now declaring that he is a woman regardless of his anatomical structure or anything else corresponding to external reality. As we saw last time as we looked at the sad path that led us to transgenderism over centuries, abandoning further and further God's revealed truth which was restored to us in the Reformation, and reaching a point of postmodern so-called reality where the very concept of objective truth is denied and truth is whatever you make it out to be. Transgenderism is the logical outcome of that.

If I believe, if I think, if I assert that I am a woman with the biological sex of a man, then not only am I a woman, you must agree with me and you must affirm that, or you are committing a crime against humanity. The autonomy of the individual trumps everything else, including anything by which until just a few years ago external reality was measured. Autonomy, the God of autonomy is supreme now, and that's why we are addressing it here from the Pulpit of Truth Community Church. Now with that said, beloved, I want to make one thing very clear.

I'm under no delusion as I speak. It is very difficult to take on transgenderism today because postmodernism has created this radical relativity that allows men to determine truth for themselves. What a few years ago would have been labeled a psychosis is now enforceable dogma upon the rest of the world. It is autonomy taken to an extreme. So last time we looked at the sad path that led to transgenderism.

We looked at the intellectual path, which I've already alluded to, how we drifted away from the Reformation's emphasis on revealed truth, followed a pattern in human thought, a decline in human thought that led us to this postmodern age in which we now live, and then we also considered the cultural path that we followed in the United States and Western culture for the last several decades of the sexual revolution and everything that that has entailed. People that I consider friends and people that are certainly sympathetic with everything that I say, I think that their approach is not helpful on dealing with this matter. It is not helpful, it is not constructive to simply hold up transgenderism to ridicule and say how you'd have to be out of your mind to believe this.

In a sense, that's true, but that does nothing to explain why people believe it, and it does nothing to answer it. To simply insult people for what they think and what they believe is no answer to it and provides no stable philosophical basis upon which to respond to it and to move forward. We need to do something more than that.

We need to do more than simply experience moral outrage at it. We have to be able to look at this objectively and say, what is the answer to this? So, if there was any merit to what I said last week about the intellectual path and the cultural path that led us to this point, today's message now is forward-looking, and the title of tonight's message is Answering Transgenderism, by which I mean how do we respond to it?

What is the Christian response to transgenderism on a biblical, philosophical level? How do we break the stalemate when people are saying, that's your reality, I've got mine, leave me alone, you can't question what I think about myself? How do you begin to answer something like that? It's almost self-insulating from critique or review, isn't it?

Well, so what I'm going to do tonight is just parallel the points tonight. We looked at the intellectual path and the cultural path last time. Tonight I want to give you an intellectual answer and a cultural answer to this phenomenon, this ideology, and hopefully give you some perspective that will give you a sense of how we move forward from here. So let's just take a moment to discuss the intellectual answer to transgenderism. As I said last time, transgenderism rests on a worldview, oh this is so important, beloved, this is everything, what we're about to say here in the next few minutes.

Transgenderism rests on a worldview that believes that truth is found in the heart of man, that what you think and what you feel is the ultimate determiner of reality. Men can decide for themselves what is true, and some people would be shocked to think that that presupposition of theirs is even open for discussion, but it is, and Scripture responds with a two-fold answer that is a collision of cosmic proportions between biblical thought and humanistic thought, and I'm convinced that we have to understand and deal with this issue at this most fundamental level. We have to challenge that assumption that men can know what is true by looking inside their hearts. That is not true. That is fundamentally false. That is a lie from the pit of hell itself.

The Bible teaches, so I'm giving you a two-fold response, a two-fold intellectual answer here, a negative and a positive. First of all, the Bible teaches that mankind does not know what truth is, and further that mankind does not want to know what the truth is. The mind of man is utterly broken.

It is out of order. It is distorted and cannot be reclaimed to anything functional by human effort alone. The mind of man is broken and the will of man is perverted, and this cannot be avoided in this discussion, because if you understand that the mind of man is depraved and lacking truth and not seeking truth, then you can understand why it is not possible for truth to be found in the feelings of a man or a woman in what they think and believe about themselves, or what they say about the world about them. Feelings are no source of truth whatsoever. Jesus Christ himself made this clear in the Gospel of John. Look at John chapter 3 verse 19 with me as we turn to some scripture now.

John chapter 3 beginning in verse 19. Jesus said, this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, meaning that Christ himself has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. The heart of man is diametrically opposed to what truth is. Truth found in Christ. Truth found in the Word of God revealed. And scripture says that men do not want the truth, but rather they prefer to love the darkness in which they find themselves in. They love their sin and therefore they are morally opposed to the truth, and this means that the heart of man is no vessel by which truth could be communicated whatsoever. Jesus goes on to say, but he who practices the truth comes to the light so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.

And so part of the beginning of our answer to the intellectual challenge of transgenderism is to say that your whole premise of what is true and where truth is found is fatally flawed. You cannot find truth in the heart of man whatsoever. Jesus' apostle Paul was even more explicit and instructive on the point. Turn to Romans chapter 1 with me. Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 23 as a start. The Word of God says that the wrath of God, verse 18, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

Let's stop there for just a moment. What Scripture says about the nature of man, the nature of humanity, is it is the nature of man to suppress the truth, to oppose the truth in a manner that leaves them morally and spiritually culpable. They are without excuse for this. It is a moral choice that has been made, and as a result of that, their heart is foolish and it is darkened. Now, beloved, I want to tell you that when we see, based on the light of the trustworthy Word of God, that the heart of man is suppressing truth, that the heart of man is foolish, that the heart of man is darkened, there is no possibility that truth can be found there.

That is not the place where truth is made known. Man has rejected the God of truth, and once the God of truth has been rejected by man, the only thing that's left to fill the void is lies, and that's what we are seeing in transgender ideology. And as a consequence of the rejection, Scripture, Paul here goes on to say that God has handed man over to a depraved, distorted mind which has left him in darkness and in wrath. Look at verse 24 with me.

There is this judicial handing over that God has done to mankind because they have rejected what he has clearly made known about himself, even in the created order of things. So that in verse 24, it says, therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

Amen. He goes on to say, For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. Stay with me as I read verse 28 and following. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, here it is, beloved, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful, and although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but they also give hearty approval to those who practice them. The judgment of God on the mind of humanity is, is that it is depraved and it is incapable of thinking anything proper, and in the place of the truth of God, what has been replaced instead is a mind devoted to all kinds of depravity and deceit. And so, beloved, what we're doing here far transcends the issue of transgenderism.

Understand? What we're doing here is that we are cultivating and developing and reinforcing a biblical worldview to understand what is happening around us. We are not directing this attack at individual transgender people. We are assaulting an ideology that undergirds the delusions in which they live. We are, in the words of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 10 verse 4, using the Word of God to destroy speculations that are raised up against the knowledge of God with weapons that are divinely powerful for that purpose. And so, brothers, sisters in Christ, friends who will hear this later on, in fact, I just, I just want to be plain that even as I'm stating these things plainly, I'm stating them with a hand open extending the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who hate what I'm saying. I'm extending the offer of salvation through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ even as they despise what's being said here from the Word of God.

I am not hostile to individuals, but I have to speak against the ideology that undergirds it all. Man's heart is not where truth is found. To the exact contrary, let me take you to three or four familiar passages. Go back to Genesis chapter 6, if you will. Genesis chapter 6, beginning in verse 5 all the way back prior to the days of the flood since the fall. Genesis chapter 6 verse 5, the testimony of the Word of God is this, is that the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

That's the heart of man for you. In the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verse 3, you can just jot the reference down. Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verse 3, it says that the hearts of the son of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. Evil and insanity is the mark of the heart of man.

There is no possibility, there is absolutely no possibility that anything true could be based on what someone feels. In Jeremiah chapter 17 verse 9 it says the heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it? And then turn to Mark chapter 7 verse 20. Mark chapter 7 verse 20. As you're turning there, Jeremiah 17 9 specifically, I paraphrased it. Jeremiah 17 9 says the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick.

Who can understand it? Mark chapter 7 verse 20, Jesus said that that which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man. Now, beloved, what that means is when you understand the testimony of Scripture about the nature of the heart of man and his fallen sinful condition, for somebody to say that I premise the truth of my condition, the truth of my self-identity based on what I think and what I feel inside, it is a completely self-refuting statement. They have contradicted themselves biblically by saying that the truth about me is found within me. No, no, within you are lies and deception. No matter how strong your feelings are, they are not a guide to what the truth is. Your heart is fallen. Your heart is desperately sick.

Your heart cannot be fixed by human means. And therefore, to build a worldview, to build a life approach based on what you feel inside, is to build on quickly collapsing quicksand that will engulf you in the end. Answering transgenderism, then, in light of these things means this. The sad path to transgenderism last time, the hard path from transgenderism going forward means this.

It's no less than this. This is an ultimate collision of reality. Christian preaching and Christian witness on an individual level must tell men that their minds are warped and incapable of finding truth on their own. We have to answer transgenderism on this most fundamental level because it premises its truth assertions, its truth claims on what people feel. And we have to answer that truth claim with the biblical truth claim that truth is not found in your feelings. It is not found in your heart. Your heart is full of deception and you cannot trust what you feel as a guide to what is true.

In other words, we have to defy the postmodern spirit of our age whether anyone is standing with us as we do or not. While the Bible is clear that we'll never know what is true by looking inside our hearts, instead we must always seek God's Word for truth. And that's important to remember as we interact with those who promote the transgender worldview. On our next program, Pastor Don Green will continue his look at the issue of transgenderism. Join us then for more of our current series, The Bible and Transgenderism, here on The Truth Pulpit. But right now Don's back here in studio and he has an important message for you. Friend, I invite you to our website, thetruthpulpit.com, to request your free CD album or find audio downloads of all of the messages that I did on this matter of transgenderism. Again, look for the series, The Bible and Transgenderism, at our website, thetruthpulpit.com. Thanks, Don. And friend, we're out of time for today. I'm Bill Wright, inviting you back next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word here on The Truth Pulpit.