Answering Transgenderism #2

We have to answer transgenderism on its truth assertions, its truth claims on what people feel, and we have to answer with the biblical truth claim, 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.

When we return to Genesis and revisit the garden, it's clear that God was very intentional about how he created humanity as only male and female, and that truth does not change, despite the current cultural push for transgender ideology. Hello there, I'm Bill Wright, and today on the Truth Pulpit, Pastor Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word with a series titled The Bible and Transgenderism. And Don, it seems even pastors are afraid to address this issue for fear of offending others. Bill, I think that there are pastors who would refuse to address these things for fear of splitting their congregation or offending their congregation, but I would also say, and especially based on my reading, that there are men who want to be faithful to scripture in these times. They may not be a prominent voice, but they are a faithful voice. And it points us to something important today as you're listening to us today, my friend, is to let me encourage you to be praying for your pastor if you're in a biblical church.

He is facing difficult forces, and these issues of transgenderism are not easy to sort out. And so pray for your pastor, pray that God would help him be faithful, and encourage him as you can, as you see him laboring for the truth, because your encouragement to him is going to be so vital as he's on the front lines of standing for Christ in a godless world. Thanks, Don. And friend, let's learn more about answers to the issue of transgenderism. Here is Don teaching from God's Word on the Truth Pulpit. 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. What we need to do, what we're endeavoring to do in this somewhat brief series, is to offer a biblical answer for society and for the people of God. 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. This is colossal. This is cosmic. This is not capable of being reduced to an internet meme. The Bible makes a fundamental assault on all the truth claims of men and repudiates them, and tells men you're not even capable of evaluating truth, let alone telling us what the truth is.

Wow. Now, that's the, in one sense, the negative, the convicting side of it. Having exposed that, then we need to tell them what to do, right? Let's just assume that somebody says, okay, I believe you, what do I do then? Or, in the face of hostility, of continued hostility to God's word about it, what is our message then, in light of the inevitable resistance that comes when scripture speaks so plainly and fires missiles at the proud heart of man? What is our follow-up to those truth claim assertions?

Well, beloved, I love this. There's a sense in which I feel completely liberated as I'm teaching these things, and have no regard for what the opinion of unbelievers is about what's being said here. You and I, we're standing on the word of God alone. I stand alone on the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E. What I want you to see with that children's lyric, that children's verse, is that that's exactly where we're at.

We're standing alone on scripture here. So what do we do? Then what's our follow-up message after having made those assertions against their truth claims?

Here it is, beloved. What do we do? We must call those men and women to repent, to repent of the autonomy of mind that undergirds everything about transgender ideology. We are calling upon them to repent of the very way that they think. We are calling them to repent of all of their presuppositions about what is true. Nothing less will do.

Nothing less brings it out into the open. And scripture emphasizes this message of repentance repeatedly, even if the seeker-sensitive movement has been too embarrassed about repentance to speak it to those who come under the sound of their voice. Scripture repeatedly calls men to repent in this fundamental way of which I am speaking here this evening. I'm not going to have you turn to these places. Just write the verse references down for your future reference.

We're still under the label of the intellectual answer to transgenderism. In Ezekiel chapter 14 verse 6, it says, repent and turn away from your idols and turn your faces away from all your abominations. In Ezekiel chapter 33 verse 11, it says, turn back, turn back from your evil ways. In Matthew 4 verse 17, Jesus said, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In Acts chapter 17 verse 30, it says that God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead. God has furnished proof of the truth of his word to all men. Christ is risen from the dead.

This is not to be denied. And so we call on men to exchange their reliance on self for an exclusive reliance on Christ as he is revealed in scripture. For men to openly confess and acknowledge they don't know what truth is, they need to be instructed to come to Christ humbly and saying, Christ, not only save me, but teach me as my Lord and teacher.

To say it one more time, 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. You cannot get out of that.

You cannot get out of that unless you repent of it, unless the Spirit of God opens your blind eyes to see and to understand. And that's why the Christian church, that's why the evangelical church cannot stand idly by while this engulfs our society. We must raise our voice in protest. This is our Wittenberg door. This is our 95 Theses nailed on the public door in protest of everything that is assumed and accepted by society. Transgender ideology exposes men to fall in a terrifying manner into the hands of the living God because it seals off truth from them. It seals them, as it were, under the wrath of God, which we saw in Romans chapter 1. It directs them inward to find truth rather than outward to Christ. And there is no salvation inside your heart, beloved. We must look outside ourselves for truth. We must look outside ourselves for deliverance. We must look outside of ourselves for salvation because our sin has lost us and condemned us.

And so I said that the intellectual answer to transgenderism is to assert the depravity of man and to call them to repentance. Secondly, instead of this reliance on feelings, we boldly assert that truth is found in Scripture alone. In the 66 books of the Bible, God has not left us without a witness.

God has not left man in darkness. He has given a sure, reliable, revealed word whereby men can go and read and with the help of the Holy Spirit have their eyes open to what is true, what is real, where reality is. What is reality?

It's the way that things really are. Scripture alone tells us what that is, particularly in the realm of truth claims and in man's understanding of himself. Jesus said in John 17, verse 17, Sanctify them in the truth. Thy word is truth. And so understand that in the familiarity and the simplicity of things that we've said so many times here within the walls of this auditorium, that the things that are familiar truth to us and that undergird our Christian lives are the things that answer this phenomenon, this ideology that has overtaken our world. We assert that God is the authority, that Christ as the second person of the Trinity is the embodiment of that authority. Christ has affirmed the authority of the Old Testament, pre-authenticated the writing of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, who is the third member of the Blessed Trinity, inspired the writers of Scripture to record exactly what the God of truth wanted them to say. God cannot lie, Titus 1-2, and therefore whatever his word says is utterly reliable truth, and that is where we go to find the answers to the meaning of our existence and our understanding of self.

And beloved, there's a beautiful simplicity to all of this. Go to the end of Matthew's Gospel, Matthew 28, verses 19 and 20. We answer transgender ideology by asserting the deceitfulness of the heart of man to reject their presuppositions about truth. We call them to repent of it, and in its place we show them that Scripture is the place where truth is found. Stop looking inside your heart for truth and look to God's word for what is true. This isn't difficult.

This is not complicated. And for us as believers in Christ, for us as his church, as his people, we find the simplicity of what we are to do in what he said in his parting words before his ascension. What are we to do, beloved?

We are to do exactly what we're doing tonight. In Matthew 28, verse 18, Jesus came up and spoke to them, his disciples, saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Remember, when Jesus says all authority has been given to me in heaven on earth, this is the self-same Jesus who said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Christ asserts his own authority. Christ makes his own self-verified truth claim against everything in the world.

And he said that all authority has been given to him. And then he gives us our marching orders. Verse 19, go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Stop there for just a moment.

You know what comes next anyway. I picture, I picture the weak, trembling bride of Christ under the onslaught of this ideology, feeling its weakness, feeling overwhelmed, feeling intimidated by it all, not knowing what to do. And what we find here in this passage known as the Great Commission is that Christ has told us what to do. For us here and those that are like-minded with us that are committed to the Bible and teaching it, we don't have to do anything different. Jesus said, what are we to do, Jesus?

You could approach it this way. Jesus, what then do we do? How do we answer this worldview that is so hostile to everything that we hold dear? Jesus says, verse 20, you go out teaching them to observe all that I commanded you. You just go out and teach my word. You go out and assert the truth of my word.

Explain what it means within its context. And you call on people to believe in Christ, and that's what the church is to do. You say, oh, but Lord, I'm weak. I'm not enough. You know, look, there are people with real governmental authority that are lined up against everything that we're saying here, and it's getting worse, and they call me an enemy of the people.

Not that anyone's called me that, but you get the point. I'm speaking in some hyperbole. Lord, everybody is opposed to what we believe. How can we ever survive? Who's going to listen to this?

Who's going to believe our report about these things? No one's going to listen to this, Lord, you might say, in your weaker moments. Well, Christ anticipated even that concern. He had said in verse 18, he says, all authority has been given to me, and then he tells us after giving us this stunning commission, he says, lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. The Christ who's risen from the dead, the Christ who created the worlds, the Christ who rules over all, the Christ who is coming again, that self-same Christ of glory and honor and truth, that Christ tells us that he is with us as we do this, and therefore we're not intimidated by what anybody says, by whatever the circumstances may be. He is with us, and as you in your workplace, you in your families, you in your neighborhoods, as our church in this pulpit, as we endeavor in reliance on that Holy Spirit to help us, as we are faithful to this truth, Christ says, I am with you, which means that we can just do what we do and trust the results to him without fear, that we can assert these things and then go home at night, put our head on our pillow and sleep sweetly and sleep soundly, knowing that the sovereign Christ is over it all, and he is helping us as we seek to be faithful to him. And in that position, beloved, we're unconquerable, not of anything intrinsic in us, but because our Christ is unconquerable. Satan slew him through his agents, the Jews and the Romans, and Christ conquered death. There's nothing that can overthrow him.

There's nothing that can overpower him. He is Lord over all, and he is with us. And when I think about it from that perspective, then what it does to me is it makes me just all the more want to do this.

It makes me want to proclaim this in faithfulness to him. And for us together, as we learn together, as we preach together, as we minister and go out together, for us to drink deeply from the well of God, to drink deeply from the profundity of its teaching, to go beyond simply that which helps us get through our day with a happy attitude, to plumb the depths of the truth claims of the word of God, and then go out and assert them and let God bless his word as he wishes to his own glory and honor. Secondly, let me just handle this very quickly, the intellectual answer. Secondly, the cultural answer. The cultural answer by which I intend to just very briefly address the sexual revolution and how that affects us and how we respond to that and how we answer that part of it. Christians, the church, must return to a biblical sexual ethic in their teaching. We oppose those professing evangelicals who want to play footsie with the LGBTQ movement in an effort to win their approval.

We cannot do that. We cannot compromise with the world on what sexual morality is. And to just get right to the core of what I think needs to be addressed within evangelicalism, perhaps almost certainly within our own body even, that Christians need to return to a biblical sexual ethic in our own lives and in our own life practice.

Beloved men and women, the private use of pornography, the casual acceptance of divorce, the role of women in the church, all play a role in standing apart from the sexual revolution and calling men out of the world. And indeed, we must say that those things and those practices are inconsistent with biblical salvation. For just one text, we could look at many, but for the sake of time, look at Galatians 5, 19. Galatians 5, verse 19. Galatians 5, 19. On Sunday, we looked at 1 Corinthians 6, 9 to 11. That's a crucial passage here also, but for tonight, we turn only to this passage, verse 19. Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, it's not an exhaustive list, everything that circles around this immorality and sensuality, I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. We have grown so accustomed to preachers teaching a false view of grace that encourages men in their sin and affirms them as Christians, even as they are living in iniquity, even as they leave their spouses to join with another mate. And we say, that's okay, you're a Christian, it's a struggle, I understand. And we blunt the cutting edge of the knife of God's word that says, people who live this way unrepentantly will not enter the kingdom of heaven. It was Jesus who said, many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did I not? And he'll say, depart from me, I never knew you.

Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. And so for us, the cultural answer, as much as we might say it to the world outside, I think that this needs to be said to the Christian community, this needs to be said to us, we need to take this to heart ourselves and to understand that the prevailing licentious culture of seeker-sensitive religion means that they are not Christians at all. And so we tell them, even as we tell the world, that they must repent and turn to Christ to be saved. We warn the church about the danger of its disobedience, we warn the world about the danger of its truth claims, and we come to this conclusion, a two-fold conclusion here. Nothing about this is going to be easy, because nothing about this tickles the ears of those who need to hear it the most. This is a direct confrontation with the way that people think and the way that people live, and in one sense, it's not going to be easy.

There are centuries of momentum and inertia in place. We are going up against the Rocky Mountains with two bare hands and pushing back. Nothing is easy and no one is predisposed to listen. Which, on a human level, Beloved, means this. It means we're doomed to fail, right?

Humanly speaking, we are doomed to fail. But we press on. We press on in a renewed recognition of our dependence upon the Holy Spirit to help us live the Christian life and to proclaim Christian truth. And we are brought anew to a fresh recognition of how much we need the help of the blessed Holy Spirit to help us as we proclaim truth in our day and age, and we hope and we ask and we pray and we look forward that maybe the Holy Spirit will help us in our day like he helped our spiritual forefathers in the past. That maybe the Spirit of God would be pleased to help us like he did Luther and like he did Calvin and Zwingli, like he did John Knox, like he did Charles Spurgeon, like he did Jonathan Edwards in The Great Awakening, George Whitefield and John Wesley. Throughout the course of human history, the Spirit of God has been working revival in his people and converting people in large quantities, in large numbers, honoring his Word as it goes forth. Maybe, just maybe, the Spirit of God would do that for his people in this age as well. What a powerful reminder that we can always turn to God's Word to find reassurance about our true identity.

And when we understand that, we can share that truth with those who might be confused and struggling with theirs. On our next program, Pastor Don Green will discuss God's guardrails on gender. So join us then for more of our current series, The Bible and Transgenderism, right here on The Truth Pulpit. But for now, here again is Don with a final message. For the sake of time, we are only able to broadcast a few of the selected messages from the overall series that I did at Truth Community Church. My friend, we're offering you the full pulpit series for free. The complete set of messages. And again, that website is thetruthpulpit.com. Thanks, Don. And friend, I'm Bill Wright, inviting you to join us next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word here on The Truth Pulpit.