‘ENJOYING THE GAYNESS OF IT’: Flowing With or Standing Against Sodom’s Culture
Time Magazine calls it a “change of heart” and cites numerous seemingly mainline evangelical churches and denominations not just accepting Gay marriage but conducting the wedding ceremonies and ordaining gay pastors.
There is a rising militancy swerving the American Church and politics toward increasingly mainstreaming homosexuality. When he wrote a Pastoral epistle to Timothy, Paul said in I Tim 4: 3 that “In the latter times, there would be those forbidding others to marry.” Within the context of church and political struggles over homosexuality and redefining marriage and family, many of us can see a potential day coming in which government simply ceases to recognize the institution of marriage in order to get out of this fight.
The Time article, for all its exuberance and positive spin, fails to see the other side. For each Gay person struggling to find affirmation and a place to call a faith home, there is a struggling individual and a family in pain standing in the background. Often, the division in a family runs across multiple cracks as other kids support the gay kid against the “stale morality” of their parents. That struggle is well documented in this article:http://www.christianpost.com/news/for-years-i-pleaded-with-god-to-make-me-straight-so-why-did-my-prayers-go-unanswered-133098/
Several weeks ago, the Theater Director at our son’s High School declared to her student actors and actresses that for a particular performance of Xanadu, she wanted an audience that “Appreciated the Gayness of it.”
For the past two years, we have struggled with a high school child who declares he is Gay. If a lot of you are like I once was… A Pharisee of Pharisees darkening the church door every time it opened and riding a home school high horse, you are already condemning my family and me. You are wondering what we did wrong, if we are sickos like “those people”, if our kid was somehow abused, and on and on.
A very good friend of mine out in California rescues children from sex slavery around the world. Pay attention to how he does it. This man and his team kill sex traffickers (while praying for them), raid their compounds, and terminate their operations because simply rescuing a child only frees up a bed, and chair at the table, for another child. These are REAL men of God, not wussy pacifist Christian screw ups with big mouths.
Sitting around a fire, smoking cigars, and discussing our kids one night, this man commented that his wife observed that in spite of everything they do for the kingdom, home schooling their kids, AWANA, and youth group, their older (twenty something) kids act worse than “normal, well-adjusted public school kids”.
This man went on to comment that in Genesis 13: 12, Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom. The problem in our day is that people of faith in America are not mainstream. We are surrounded by a death culture as opposed to being able to choose whether or not to pitch our tents toward it. In agonizing over “what went wrong,” this evangelist told me, “Not your fault. Especially not in this culture.”
The second article cited above about the man who prayed to be made straight is a great article. He makes the point that praying to be straight in order to be “normal” was for himself. His Gay lifestyle did not repulse him until he started praying for his straightness for God’s sake and glory.
Our son asked us what the big deal was and pointed at Mathew Vines’ teaching about Gayness in the Bible. My son and I have gone around this several times but a young man, like Mathew Vines, with little to no accuracy in his Biblical interpretation has more weight with my son than his grumpy fart old dad who’s been married to one gorgeous babe for 32 years.
It suddenly hit me.
I said, “If you go the Gay marriage and relationship route, you are screwing up a divine metaphor.”
I got the blank look but he was still listening.
I continued, “The relationship of Christ and the Church is that of husband and wife, man and woman. Just as the first couple in the Garden of Eden screwed the pooch for all of us, The last couple, Christ and his bride, the church, bring redemption, salvation, and not just a home in heaven but a special place as the Bride of Christ because he went there to prepare that place for us. Just as every Hebrew bride was abducted romantically in the night, so will Christ come for the Church to sweep his bride away. That bride is always a woman.”
My son could not find any of that in Matthew Vines’ videos.
Now, on the few occasions I have to discuss this with my son, I stay away from condemnation, criticism, and even historical proof that no nation in history endured beyond the second generation after mainstreaming homosexuality. Instead, I simply say, “You are screwing up God’s metaphor. Moses did that and landed in the penalty box. As a result, he gets to come back as one of the two witnesses and get killed. Again. You should not screw up God’s metaphors.”
My heart and fervent prayers go out to all of you enduring this pain in your families, as opposed to “enjoying the gayness of it”.
Image: https://mindspikeblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/warlock-dps-destruction/