Lgbtq

“I know many LGBTQ people who live lives in Christ. They abstain from sexual gratification to be closer to God and it is not easy, it really is not. It is perhaps not fair but it is right and it is good. These people are being let down. I have had people crying saying, ‘I could have got married but I did what the Church taught me was right and now the Church is saying they were wrong all along. I have wasted my life.’ As Christians, we are called to be in the world but not of the world.

“In the secular world, we already have equality in law. People can enter civil partnerships or even ‘Gay marriage’ outside of the Church and that is their prerogative. However, the faith is inherently discriminatory–God is discriminatory. He sets conditions on us entering His heavenly kingdom. It is not a free-for-all. We must want to specify it is the sin that is the problem, not the sinner. Every single person is loved by God and God forgives all of us of depravity, but we have to turn away from all of our sins and turn toward Him and it sums the panel opposite me has forgotten to separate the sin from the sinner.

“One can denounce sin while still welcoming the sinner. So as a wrap-up, my message to the proposing side is, ‘Do not lead us astray.’ Do not be wolves in sheep’s clothing. Do not be the false teachers that the Bible warns us about. Remember your obligation to defend the faith. Stop teaching about diversity, inclusion and equity. Get back to teaching redemption and salvation.

“This is spiritual neglect. Help people by telling them the truth. Be kind to people by supporting them through those struggles and reminding them that Christ suffers with them. Be compassionate by leading them to Christ when the world tries to lead them away from Hm. The Church is imploding and the faithful masses have stopped turning up on Sundays and we are seeing the rapid decline of Christianity in the country that we may have ever seen. Do not accelerate it with heresy. You do not have the authority to bless sin. … I hear the devil at work. … It’s a shame but in the words of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, ‘If the world is against truth, then I am against the world.’”

It is also important to distinguish between principle and specific application of scripture. Therefore, I must cover one more problem, cultural relativity. There are scriptures that speak to specific situations in the first century setting, the culture. For example, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. … Or are you the only people it has reached?” Paul never voted a woman from exercising the prophetic gift that so many women in the primitive church enjoyed. In all likelihood, what as uppermost in Paul’s mind was the lax moral state of Corinth and the feeling that anything that might bring upon the infant Church the faintest suspicion of immodesty must be avoided. Further, this first century church’s culture had the women sit on one side of the congregation and man on the other. The culture gave the men a better education than it did women. He women could well have questions about what the speaker said. Conversation between a man and a woman would be likely to cause interruption of the speaker’s message. That is to say, there is every reason to believe that this was a cultural thing and not a religious requirement.