The Sad Path to Transgenderism #2

You found the truth pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. Today, as Don continues teaching God's people God's Word, he'll continue our current series, The Bible and Pride Month, with part two of a message titled The Sad Path to Transgenderism. But first, Don's here to share a word about this current series titled The Bible and Pride Month. Well, Bill, we are undertaking a month-long series of messages here on The Truth Pulpit to counteract the existence of Pride Month. You know, in my opinion, Bill, the Pride Month is the most ridiculous and destructive propaganda campaign that has ever been perpetrated on the American people and beyond them to the entire world.

It started with the acceptance of homosexuality, moved to the mandated acceptance of homosexual marriage, from there to the promotion of transgenderism, to the infliction of transgenderism on children, to the current grooming of children through the appalling existence of drag queen hours. You know, it seemed to me that there needed to be someone saying something each day in opposition to Pride Month in response to all of those things. So my friend, as you listen today, all that is being promoted here on The Truth Pulpit this month is designed to bring a biblical perspective to help you process what you are seeing in the world around you. Our goal is to be a voice in the wilderness of opposition to it all one day at a time. And so I trust it will help you see things clearly from God's perspective and that you will be encouraged to speak boldly for Christ in your circle of influence. Thanks for being with us today on The Truth Pulpit.

Thanks, Don. And friend, let's get right to it as we join our teacher in The Truth Pulpit. Coming back within a Christian mindset and a Christian worldview, here's what you need to see and understand just very clearly and straightforward. Reality and identity are no longer tied to revelation and even to reason, and the necessary outcome of that is the acceptance of transgenderism. And the way that this is working out in every area of society is just astonishing, is that it is to the point where public school policies are such that if a child says anything to a school official, this is not universal yet, but these are the kinds of codes that are being promoted and in some places accepted, a child that goes to a counselor and says, I believe that I'm transgender, they are affirmed in that in such a way that under a guise of privacy, the parents are not even notified that this is taking place. So that parents are increasingly being robbed of any voice in this matter with their own children, and where this is going is that parents are going to lose the right to, and in many places already are, losing the right to object to a child's proclamation of his gender, even down to the youngest of ages, five, six, seven, and sometimes even less than that.

This is utter insanity, beloved, and we need to have an awareness of what is happening so that we can help each other and protect our families and have some kind of idea about how to respond to this world in which we live. A writer named Jonathan Grant expresses it this way, Modern authenticity encourages us to create our own beliefs and morality. The only rule is they must resonate with who we feel we really are.

The worst thing that we can do is to conform to some moral code that is imposed on us from outside by society, our parents, the church, or whoever else. It is deemed to be self-evident that any such imposition would undermine our unique identity. The authentic self believes that personal meaning must be found within ourselves or must resonate with our one-of-a-kind personality." He's being descriptive, not an advocate there.

The idea being that the best thing, the most honest thing, the highest thing that you can do is to let out whatever is inside of you. Everyone should understand that you have a unique identity and you are allowed to assert that whatever the case may be. It may shock many of you to realize that on this whole transgender gender identity thing is that it is now no longer simply a question of are you a man or are you a woman. There is a website advocating gender issues that you can go to and it lists out 117 at last count different genders that a person might be.

117! That's where this goes. And if truth is up to me, I can define what's true about myself. I am free from God.

I am the master of my own destiny and my own identity. That is the intellectual path that leads to it. When you reject revelation, when you reject reason, you are left with this self-perception of truth and it can be whatever you want it to be and no one can contradict it. This is the worldview that we have to confront and we have to answer and we have to respond to. What are we to make of that mindset and how do we answer it in an effective way?

Now, that's the intellectual path. Secondly, there is a cultural path that has led to transgenderism as well and time forbids tracing the impact of the sexual revolution and the rise of homosexual marriage which feeds this fire. Al Mohler has traced it all compellingly in his book titled We Cannot Be Silent and I can only commend that to you if you're interested in tracing it.

One writer summarizes it all, not Al Mohler, someone else. One writer summarizes this cultural path as follows and I quote, transgenderism is simply one part of a much broader social and sexual revolution that has engulfed Western culture, a revolution that includes the advent of the contraceptive pill, the various waves of feminism, premarital sexual experimentation, cohabitation, no fault divorce, abortion on demand, the lowering of film and television standards, the repeal of blasphemy and sodomy laws, and the legalization of same sex adoption and same sex marriage, end quote. Now, beloved, here's the point that over a course of several decades in our American culture especially, there were these incremental steps that were taking place.

One, a few years go by, another one, then another and just what I'm wanting you to see is what I said at the start is you have all of these gradual incremental steps like you're walking down into a basement. Maybe better stated, you're walking down into a dungeon and all in the name of freedom, all in the name of constitutional rights to privacy or whatever the justification may be, but all being steps that are stepping away from or stepping against revealed biblical morality. And as these things gradually expanded and we reached the point where four years, five years ago, it seems like a lifetime ago, that the United States Supreme Court legitimized and mandated the acceptance of homosexual marriage across all 50 states, what I want you to see is that this ever expanding and the ripples of this great sexual so-called liberation lays the groundwork as well for what we're finding in the transgender world and in the transgender ideology. Think about it this way, accepting, affirming homosexuality inevitably paves the way for what we're seeing in the transgender world. But beloved, if there is no necessary correlation between your biological sex and your sexual practice, why should there be any necessary correlation between your biological sex and your gender identity? You have separated human relationships, you have separated human behavior from any necessary connection to the biology of the man or woman involved. And once you've set that aside and said that's not important, you can do what you want with whomever you want or with whatever you want, with however many you want, once that becomes accepted, then the dominoes are already falling in a way that makes transgenderism inevitable. And so, on a cultural level, one by one these steps have taken place, you could say one by one the dominoes have fallen, and we have arrived at a place where 50, 60 years ago they weren't thinking about this when this was all set into motion in the sexual revolution of the 60s. No one was anticipating this outcome, but it clicked the first domino and everything started to fall along with it. That is the problem. Philosophical trends over the centuries, beloved, and incremental steps of sexual license have led us to this place that you and I find today that most people call the realm of freedom.

We don't believe that this is freedom at all. A spiritual tsunami has reached our shores. Its forces lie deep in the ocean of the human heart. And that's what I want you to see, that there are forces at work in the human heart that have shaped the way that men think and the way that men behave that goes far beyond people cross-dressing or asserting that they have a different identity than what their body would suggest is real.

What I want you to see is that this is a symptom of something else. This is the outcome of greater things that have occurred leading up to it. Just as the tsunami hits the shore with enormous force without much prior warning, that's where we find ourselves here today.

I want to answer this question. What shall the church do? What shall the church do in response to this environment in which we live? We're standing on the beach and the tsunami has hit us. What are we to do?

Well, we're kind of getting into the game a little bit late here. The compromises that took place over the past decades in the cultural realm, we are inheriting the whirlwind of things that other people have accepted and yielded on in the past. And we are left to deal with the consequences of it. We as biblical Christians, those devoted to Christ, those devoted to truth, what are we to do in response to this? Well, what we must do is recognize the nature of the battle. This is about more than individuals who struggle with understanding who they are. And so often the discussion in Christian circles starts with a transgender individual and says, we have to find a way to minister to this person.

Well, I think that's a totally misguided approach even if it's well intentioned. We need to understand how did this ever come to pass? What is it that justifies that in the mind of so many? How are we to understand this? And what I think the reality of it is, is that the church must assert truth in a fundamental clash of world views. This is a fight to the death.

This is a colossal, titantic engagement. This is a battle of colossal proportions that far transcends the less than 1% of people in the population identify as transgender. This is a clash of world views of monumental consequence. We are dealing with the very nature of how truth is asserted and how truth is understood and how truth is believed. We cannot, Christians cannot yield to the transgender ideology at all because it's premised on a subjective approach to truth. If we do that, we have surrendered Christianity.

Because truth is objective, it is found in God's Word, it is absolute. There is no compromise to be had here. This is a fight to the death.

This is a different kind of world war. What's our response as believers? We're calling men to repent. But we're calling men to repent of more than transgender behavior. We are calling men, the church must call men to repent of the very way that they think. Of the very fundamental world view that they have adopted until now.

We are not simply suggesting that these facts ought to be interpreted a little bit differently. We are saying that their thinking is wrong, their thinking is ungodly, their thinking is corrupt and they have to repent of everything that informs their mindset and their world view. They must repent of their autonomy and consciously submit to Jesus Christ and to His inerrant Word and to exchange their self-centered, self-justifying way of thinking and come humbly, as Scripture says, to humble themselves and to come to Christ and to come to Scripture as though a little child.

To receive Christ and to receive His Word as Lord and authority over not only their lives and their behavior, but of the very way that they think. That is how fundamental the conflict is. And any Christian response to transgender ideology that falls short of this is inadequate and is doomed to failure. Now, with all of those things said, let's end on a few Scriptures here. What you and I have to understand is that ultimately this is a supernatural conflict that we are engaged in. Look at 2 Timothy 2, verse 24.

The Lord's bondservant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition. If perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil having been held captive by him to do his will. The transgender ideology and those who embrace it are under the captivity of Satan himself, and they need to be confronted with the truth. They need to be called to repentance to turn away from all of that so that their repentance would lead them to an understanding and a knowledge of what is true. As we make those assertions, as we make those appeals, we realize that we are dealing with more than a cognitive understanding of factual matters. We are dealing with those that have been spiritually blinded by a supernatural force over which they have no control. The only answer, the only power in a realm like that is the Spirit of God taking God's Word expounded to people and opening their eyes. God has to do a work here. The Holy Spirit has to help us.

We cannot simply argue people out of this. There is a supernatural dimension to it that Scripture speaks to clearly. I believe it's over in 2 Corinthians 4 where a similar statement is made.

In verse 3, even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. This is a supernatural conflict that is taking place. And so as I'm teaching this series, I'm just happy to acknowledge my utter dependence on the Holy Spirit to give any success to anything that I say because this is beyond my power to persuade anyone of. This is supernatural and we must have help from God. And if there is to be a reversal of this history of human rebellion in the realm of philosophical thought, we need nothing less than a sweeping revival of the Holy Spirit to make it happen.

And He has the power and the capability to do that. Now, 2 Timothy 2, and I would say this, in addition to the fact that it's a supernatural conflict, brothers and sisters, this is a difficult conflict. This is not easy and it was never intended to be.

Hand-to-hand combat, in other words, being the mark of a soldier and doing so from a position that the world views not only as silly and outdated, but as dangerous. To be silenced, that's what we are up against. It will be difficult.

There will be times like this where we're teaching on these things and it's not comfortable teaching even for you to hear. Part of the difficulty is for a congregation to embrace hearing some of these things for the sake of a broader cause than what our personal lives might require. Now, with that said, what the ultimate reality of all of this is, is this. Is that God has already given to us everything that we need to be faithful in the battle. We lack for nothing as Christians to respond to this world environment in which we live. Look at 2 Timothy 3, verse 16.

Actually, we'll go to verse 14. In light of the difficulty, in light of the supernatural nature of the conflict, shouldn't we just go home? Shouldn't we just hide? Shouldn't we just wait to die or wait for the Lord to come?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is not what we should do. We should not run and hide.

We should run to the battle. Paul told Timothy, verse 14, after just having said that evil men are going to go from bad to worse, he said, here's what you're to do. You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Even as we are confronting the world view, we are simultaneously offering people eternal life if they would repent of their sin and put their faith in the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ.

We are not their enemies in this. We are their best friends because we are offering them deliverance from the snare of the devil and deliverance into the kingdom of Christ where there is forgiveness of sin and eternal life and real truth. And scripture is sufficient to lead people to that knowledge of Christ. Verse 16, all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. Do you realize that in the scriptures, as we study scripture together, as we know scripture together, as we proclaim and honor scripture and obey scripture together, we are equipped for the good work that is before us in our day and age. God's Word has prepared us. God's Word equips us. God's Word has sufficient answers for everything that we are seeing here today.

We lack for nothing. And so, what do we do? Chapter 4, verse 1, I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead and by his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the Word. Be ready in season and out of season, when it's popular and when it's not, when people want to hear and when they don't.

You be ready. You reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all things. Endure hardship. Do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry. So what do we do? What do you do?

What do I do? We preach the Word. We endure hardship. We fulfill the ministry that the Lord has given to us. Providentially, He appointed our lives for this very time.

We are given a challenge, a battle, an opportunity, not given to the Reformers in the 16th century, not required of Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century. This is our day and this is our responsibility to preach the Word, to endure hardship, to fulfill our ministry. And in the coming days, Lord willing, Lord helping us, we will try to answer that noble biblical call on behalf of our Christ. You've been listening to Don Green with part two of a message called The Sad Path to Transgenderism, part of a series titled The Bible and Pride Month here on The Truth Pulpit. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Bill Wright and we'll see you next time as we continue to teach God's people God's Word from the Truth Pulpit.