#1- A Call To The Church Series

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What Should A Christian Believe About Homosexuality?

A Call to the Church

Our country has recently been through a significant, weighty transition.

I don't know when I've had more interest, more people asking me what I think, more questions about a public event, than this one.

Since that day, lawsuits have been filed about polygamist marriage, a man who wants to have two wives. (Know what he said? "It's about marriage equality.")

What is a Christian to say?

What is there to say for a Christ-follower on a day where, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of our land has approved the change of a definition of marriage? This definition is measured not in decades or centuries, but in millenia.

What to say on a day when my WordPress blog editor has a rainbow banner across the top… when Ben & Jerry’s has a new Ice Cream flavor to celebrate… when American Airlines, Youtube and Google (& dozens of other companies) join in celebration?

What to say on a day when some Christians are angry, others are despairing, and others are resigned?

In the past few days, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court has ruled that we must remove the 10 Commandments Monument.

I don't know if I need to tell you how far our country has moved from when our founding fathers wrote such profound defenses of liberty from a standpoint of the Bible.

* When one of the first acts of a Continental Congress was to approve the import of Bibles, because there was a shortage caused by the Revolutionary War.

* When by far the most quoted source in the writings of all the founding Fathers was the Bible.

Homosexuality is no different from any other sin.

True, but the culture is responding to it in a different way. They are not only excusing it, they are celebrating it.

No one is having "liars pride parades." No one is being celebrated for being a person who comes out as a thief or an addict or an adulterer.

HuffPost’s Gay Voices editor (yes, they have one of those) said this:

“We can pass all of the laws we want and talk about public policy until we run out of air, but until our society stops thinking of queer people as deviant or corrupt or sinful or in any way less than non-queer people, nothing is going to change… It’s only after we’ve challenged and changed the most basic and fundamental viewpoints about who we are that we can really begin to think about true liberation and true equality.”

Did you catch it? True freedom for the LGBT community can only be found when Christians stop thinking they are sinful. Their fight only stops then. This is what insightful Christians have understood: that this was never the “final” battle — it was the first one.

As a Christian, here are the things you need to remember today:

1. The Gospel is still powerful.

Romans 1:16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."

2. God is still God.

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-- his eternal power and divine nature-- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

3. People are still sinners.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-- who is forever praised. Amen.

4. Homosexual behavior is still a sin.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.