Confronting the Sexual Chaos #2

True identity is found in understanding that a wise God sovereignly made you in your mother's womb and made you precisely as he intended you to be. Hello and welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I'm Bill Wright. Last time we brought you part one of a powerful biblically based talk that Don gave on the subject of sexuality and gender at the Truth Matters conference. Today, as he continues teaching God's people God's word, we'll hear the rest of what he had to say regarding the current cultural chaos surrounding what some conservative voices have called a case of mass psychosis. Here's Don Green with part two of Confronting the Sexual Chaos from the Truth Pulpit. You do not search your heart for truth.

The answers are not found within. Psalm 36 verse 1 says, transgression speaks to the ungodly within his heart. There is no fear of God before his eyes. The famous passage in Jeremiah 17 verse 9, the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick.

Who can understand it? Sin and deceit dwell in the heart of man. And so to say that I'm going to find truth subjectively by looking inside what my opinions are, what my feelings are, is to enter into the realm of sinful satanic deception.

And that explains how we end up with the sexual chaos of our day. The mind and feelings of man are utterly defiled. They are completely deceiving. There is no truth to be found in them. They do not and cannot guide us into truth.

They lie. Your heart is not your ally in finding the truth. It is the enemy of you finding the truth if you are relying on it to determine what is true.

If we believe the lordship of Jesus Christ, if we believe the Lord Jesus, what other conclusion could we draw from his own words? In Matthew 15 19 and 20 where he says, out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and slanders. These are the things which defile the man.

And indeed, we go even further. The present wrath of God rests on the modern mind. In Romans 1 28, we read, just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper. Beloved, this is basic biblical truth. This is basic theology as we describe the effects of the total depravity of man. The heart of man is corrupt. It is evil.

It is full of falsehood. And we must go to people who love themselves, who are wrapped up in their internal psychology, and we must tell them and we must insist to them that their feelings are irrelevant to determining what is true. Indeed, their feelings lead them away from truth. And they're not going to like that.

Because to them, that is an assault on their very identity. What I think is what I am. What I feel is who I am. But we can't back down from that confrontation. We could sum it up this way from Proverbs 28 verse 26. He who trusts in his own heart is a fool, but he who walks wisely will be delivered.

We must insist on this. You know what the beauty of doing it this way is? The beauty of insisting on truth. As you trace truth through the Scriptures, it all leads you to Christ himself. Christ of whom the Bible says the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 14 6, I am the way and the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father but through me. As we insist on the principle, the philosophical principle of objective truth, of truth revealed in the Word of God, it leads us to the Lord Jesus Christ himself. As we honor his truth, as we honor the Word of God, the Word of God leads people to the Lord Jesus Christ which is where they need to be in the end. It's where the church needs to be at the end. Christ filled, Christ centered, Christ glorifying.

Forget what the seekers want. Isn't it time to embrace what Christ wants for the church? What Christ thinks about truth? What Christ says about it all?

And honor him vertically regardless of what men think about us. It leads us to Christ. Secondly, the church must preach biblical creation. The church must preach biblical creation and I can only touch this ever so, so briefly. The church must preach truth. The church must preach biblical creation.

And you'll see why this is important. The LGBTQ movement seeks identity and meaning from their psychological feelings and their sexual self-perception. We need to help them. We need to help them understand that they're looking for identity in all of the wrong places. They find identity in being authentic to their inner man.

I had to let it out. You know, fathers that leave their adult families in order to pursue because I've always felt like I was a woman. And I've got to be true to my inner identity now. I haven't been true.

I've been living a lie. We need to confront that mindset and reject a sexually based identity. Not just an identity based on feelings but one that is sexually based.

You know, as Carl Truman said in his book, sex used to be something that you do. Now it's what people are. It's how they define themselves. Everything has been sexualized and that partially explains the mindset as they groom children with sexually explicit material at such a tender, young, innocent age. From their mindset, they're just helping them find what the truth is because the truth is found in sexual identity. We have to confront that and reject it.

True identity is vertical. Man is created in the image of God and for His glory. Created by God, created in the image of God and for the glory of God.

You know the passage but let me just remind you of it quickly. Genesis chapter 1 verses 26 and 27. We have to go back to these kinds of fundamental things and as you are going back there, understand that the supposedly science-based rejection of Genesis 1 in a literal six-day, 24-hour creation, a young earth, understand that that is also part of the problem because it undermines the foundational authority of these basic things from Genesis. God said in verse 26, let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created them.

Binary gender, that's it. To and no more. And understanding that God not only made humanity male and female, not only created humanity in His image in Adam, but understand that even for the individual, for each one of you, there is a precious truth and reality about the way that God made you that we see in Psalm 139. If you want to turn there, Psalm 139 in verses 13 through 16.

Again, this emphasis of the vertical aspect, biblical creation in God making humanity and in God giving life to individuals in their mother's womb. Verse 13 of Psalm 139, for you formed my inward parts. You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance and in your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them. David says, you, oh Yahweh, you formed my inward parts. You wove me in my mother's womb. God made the man, God made the woman as He wanted and as He intended in the mother's womb. And we know that by the objective, external, observable reality of physical anatomy. Now, as I heard someone say recently, somebody has a baby, you really don't even know whether it's a boy or girl until their kindergarten teacher weighs in on the matter. This is insanity.

This is insanity. But how well and how clearly and how often has the church emphasized the truth that would contradict it? The truth that would stand up for these principles. Colossians chapter 1 says, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, meaning He's of the highest rank. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authority, all things have been created through Him and for Him.

And so, understand that as we emphasize truth and as we emphasize creation, that is going to lead us directly to holding forth the Lord Jesus Christ, to His people first and foremost and then to the world as they go out into the world. I speak as a friend to transgender people even though I know they throw this back in my face. True identity is not found in the way that you think that it is and you can't alter your identity with hormones and surgical mutilation.

You cannot do it. True identity is found in understanding that a wise God sovereignly made you in your mother's womb and made you precisely as He intended you to be. And that is reflected by what you observe on your body, not by what you feel in your heart. True identity is found in saying, I am made in the image of God and I am made for His glory.

Not my identity is rooted in what I feel about myself and what my perception of gender is in modern society and what I want to align myself with. Image of God, that's true identity. That's lasting, it's permanent, it's transcendent, it gives hope, it gives actual eternal meaning. True identity going further is found being in Christ and being the object of His saving and eternal love. And so as we preach biblical creation, we point to Christ. We point to the image of God and that man is made in the image and that it defines who you are. And that is why you exist. That is why you exist, we say to all. God made you in His image, God made you in your mother's womb, and God made you to live for His glory.

And that glory can only be expressed as you come to faith in Christ. And so we must insist on a God-centered approach to the very nature of self. We do that by insisting on truth, insisting on biblical creation. Third, the church must preach the moral law. The church must preach the moral law.

In an understandable and important desire to preach on the loving kindness and the mercy and grace of God, I fear that the church has overlooked what it is that makes the gospel necessary. How many Christians even know where the Ten Commandments are in the Bible, let alone being able to recite them in any reasonable order, or being able to name five or six out of the ten? How many even know that they're found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5? How many know about the two tables of the law, the first four commandments relating to our duties to God, the last six relating to our duties to man, which are a reflection of our duties to God. Absent the moral law, men simply do what is right in their own eyes. But God's Word in the moral law speaks definitively about sexual sin. The seventh commandment in Exodus 20 verse 14 says, You shall not commit adultery. And understand that in the nature of the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments are brief statements of categories of sin.

It's not only the sin of adultery of a married man with another man's wife, but it's expressing a prohibition against all of sexual immorality, as Jesus makes clear in Matthew 5. And it's even a positive call to fidelity in marriage and other matters of righteousness. We must preach these things and understand that the moral law, especially expressed in the seventh commandment, has direct application to the sexual chaos in our society. But if we neglect that, we're being silent on a point that we most need to emphasize.

You know 1 Corinthians 6, 9 and 10, Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. We must preach these things. We must preach them, beloved, even if people leave our churches as we do so. That is so important to understand.

There is more at stake. It is a higher matter of principle to be faithful to the truth, to be faithful to the God who saved us in Christ, to be faithful to the God who has given His Word to us. It is more important to be faithful to Him than it is to keep people together at the expense of truth. Jesus said, He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.

There are some things that are more important than human relationships. As you preach the moral law, you know what the beauty of it is? It leads you to Christ. Jesus said in Matthew 5, Don't think that I came to abolish the law of the prophets. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. And in Galatians 3 verse 24 it says, The law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith. For those of us that care about the souls of the lost, we must understand what God uses in order to lead them to Himself. It is not your relational skill. It is not your testimony that's going to save a man.

It is not your so-called godly life or you living out Christ in front of them and being missional and all of that other nonsense. Faith comes from hearing and hearing by the Word of God. This is everything to us.

This is essential. This is the sine qua non of the church. The thing without which it does not exist. And beloved, as we point men to Christ in this way that I'm describing here, you know what will happen? The Holy Spirit will honor the truth that He Himself inspired. Christ said this, When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak. And He will disclose to you what is to come.

Preeminently a promise to the original apostles as they wrote out the New Testament. The Spirit will glorify me, for He will take of mine and will disclose it to you. The Spirit of God will honor this.

It's His Word. He saved us for this. And beloved, understand this. Whatever we may think of wishing that we lived in a prior generation when these matters of sexual chaos were not so front and center and in our face, the truth of the matter is God has appointed us for exactly this hour. We are in this hour by His providence.

Charles Spurgeon said, speaking about men who want to go into ministry and are delayed in it, He said, As surely as the man wants his hour, so surely the hour wants its man. And the hour of today calls for Christians who will meet this challenge of preaching this kind of truth without shame, without fear, and without apology. Pastors must train their churches in this. Parents must train their children in this. In that brief window of time in which those little lives are given to you, you must be teaching them these things.

When you stand up, when you sit down, when you lie down, when you walk along the way. Teach them in small groups. Ultimately, small church pastors are going to be the front line of defense in this. Many of you are pastors in here like me, pastors of small churches. It depends upon us to be faithful to this and to take this up as our burden and our life mission. We face a long-term, multi-generational task that aims at no less than changing the very fundamental way that people think and the way that their minds operate.

Anything else in this sexual chaos is not worth pursuing as a goal. In 1886, a seminary professor at Princeton Seminary, when that was a noble institution, named Francis Patton, gave a eulogy for his colleague, the Princeton theologian Archibald Alexander Hodge. In words that apply today, Dr. Patton said this, We need a theological revival. We need an era of conviction. We need, if this appalling inertia and religious indifference is to be overcome, we need the outbreak of an epidemic of faith.

We need a revolution of thought that shall reach the core of manhood and that shall make men see that they have forsaken God, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out unto themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. I understand that this is no path to ease in ministry. It's no path to numerical church growth.

It's no path to popularity in the world. Frankly, it's no path to popularity in the church at large. In the church, lukewarm church members will walk away. Pastors, let them go. They threaten our purpose if we let them. If we must cater to their desires and itching years in order to keep them, that's a price too high to pay. We cannot cater to men who do not seek and love sound doctrine. We must feed the sheep, not pet the goats. We must develop men who want to know how to think and are committed to the long-term effort that it takes.

I'm grateful to have men like that at Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, just up the road an hour or so from here. We understand that the world will mock us and despise us as we set this chart, but we must confront their dysfunctional minds, and we know that it will make them angry. So be it. So be it.

As Pastor John said in that book, Why One Way, he said, what really underlies the postmodernist belief system is an utter intolerance for every worldview that makes any universal truth claims, particularly biblical Christianity. They will accuse us. They will accuse us of being a threat to human rights. So be it. This conversation comes up in our circles. What if they ban us on social media?

You know what? Here's my answer to that. To me, it's not complicated.

It's not complicated at all. I don't worry about that at all. If they ban us on social media, we will teach from our pulpits. If they confiscate our pulpits, we will preach in the fields. If they arrest us in the fields, we will preach in prison. And if they threaten us with death, we will not recount. If they kill us, we will go to heaven while God uses our influence on a generation yet to be born.

This sexual chaos is the watershed issue facing us today. And we must rise to the challenge. We must be faithful to the One who called us to His beloved Son. We must be faithful to the One who loved us and gave Himself up for us. Let the world go. Let our friends go. Let our families leave us.

Let our families reject us. We must be faithful to Christ. We must be faithful to this truth because this battle is fundamentally about the nature of truth itself. We cannot avoid this fight. We must be faithful. We must take up the cross and follow Christ.

That's a powerful admonition to all of us as we're bombarded daily by the social and cultural pressure to go with the flow of sexual identity politics. Well, friend, if you'd like to share this important and timely message with a friend or loved one, just send them to our website. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Once again, thetruthpulpit.com.

And now, just before we go, here again is Don with a closing word. My friend, if you enjoy these broadcasts, I am sure that you would enjoy the live stream of our church services from Truth Community Church. We meet Sunday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern Time and Tuesday evening at 7 o'clock.

You'll find the live stream link prominently displayed at the top of our website, thetruthpulpit.com. And you know, if you do join us like that, drop us a note at the website to let us know. Even your brief note helps us know that our resources are reaching friends who want to grow in God's Word. We thank you, and may Christ be with you. Thanks, Don, and friends, we're out of time again for today, and we're thankful that you've chosen to spend some of your very valuable time studying God's Holy Word with us. I'm Bill Wright. We'll see you next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word here on The Truth Pulpit.