Living Hope Church

Pastor Phil Steiger: We're going to begin reading in verse 26 here in just a minute. We will actually read through the end of the chapter so that we get a feel for everything that the Apostle Paul is trying to say before he moves into some of the next things that he wants us to deal with.

As we start this passage and this topic, I want to think through it in these kinds of terms. Friends, you and I did not inherit the moral world of the Romans. We inherited the moral world of our Christian brothers and sisters who came before us for the last 2,000 years. It may be tempting for some to think that we're the inheritors of the Roman world, what's left of the Roman Empire and their world and their values and the Greek philosophers and on and on it goes. Sure, there is some of that inside of our culture, but when we dig down to the moral things that you and I hold to be true, if even broadly true inside of our culture, you and I benefit from the Christians who have gone before us and how they changed the worldview of the world around them.

So much of what we simply assume to be true morally, even if in very broad terms, comes to us through our Christian heritage. Things like basic human rights, even the notion of universal human rights—it's not Roman; it's Christian. The showing of compassion every time you and I are able to do so. The value of liberty over tyranny. Even political things like this come to us through the Christian tradition.

Did you know that hospitals are a Christian invention? Public education, the idea that we should be able to educate everybody, especially the poor and women, this is a Christian idea. On and on this kind of story goes. The basic moral structures of our culture, whether they're eroding now or not, these basic structures that have been with us for a long time came to us from the Christians who went before us. At the very top of that list of social structures that we have inherited from Christians is the structure of the family and human sexuality.

The biblical view of who men and women are, who gets married, how families are built, how kids are cared for, and how eventually parents and grandparents are cared for—what sex is actually for—the Christian view of all of that utterly transformed the Roman world. The world that Paul was writing to, the world that these Christians were saved out of, that they were becoming distinct from, let's make sure we understand a couple of things about this world.

For the Roman, high-status men were able to sexually take any one they wanted, except for the wives of other high-status men. This meant especially slaves and young slaves, boys and girls. It was common and understood and believed to be normal. If you were a male of high status, this is the reason you had boy and girl slaves—to satisfy yourself sexually. There were roughly no cultural protections for women and children unless, of course, you were married to another high-status male. There were almost no cultural or legal protections for you or for your kids, especially if you were part of one of the conquered nations or slave classes in the Roman world.

Women and children were less than people in this kind of way. No real cultural protections, and family—the notion of family for them—was not at all what you and I think it should be today because again, our worldview has been transformed by the Christians who went before us 2,000 years ago. When Christians recaptured the biblical view of family and sexuality, things changed. It was such a powerful moral advance in their world that you and I inherit the Christian worldview and not the Roman.

The reason this is such a big deal to me—not only does it give us a little bit of context for the things that Paul says specifically—but there are large parts of our culture right now who have decided the Romans were right and the Christians were wrong. A lot of what we see in this moral and sexual degradation and the destruction of the family and the kind of danger that children are in right now inside of our culture are these individuals and institutions who have decided the Romans were right and the Christians were wrong.

That means that you and I are back in this way—you and I are back in the position of the Christians who read this book originally. The living out of our lives the way that God designed them to be, inside of marriage and family and human sexuality, bears witness to our world. This is an incredibly important thought for the church right now, for you and I to be encouraged this way, and for you and I to become light to the world in this way specifically. Sexual integrity is again a witness to the world around us. Does that make sense? That's where the Christians were here, and in many ways, this is where we find ourselves again.

In our passage of scripture, a couple of thoughts are going to help hold all of this together. First of all, Paul says this kind of thing a couple of times. We've been through this one way or another. We see it again in this passage specifically: exchanging the truth for a lie results in unnatural desires and behaviors. Paul gets specific in this passage of scripture. By the time he ends chapter one, your head's just spinning and you're thinking, "This is quite a list."

Our hearts and minds—remember the image last week—Paul uses this phrase three times. We're going to read it again in our passage of scripture this morning: that God gave them up. The letting go of the leash of a dog who yanks and yanks and wants its own way. God just gives them up, lets go of the leash. When our hearts and minds are let off the leash, the desires of our hearts become entwined, twisted, and full of sin. This is just universal to the human heart.

We're not picking on anyone in this passage of scripture; we're taking a look at the human heart, every human heart when it is captured by sin. Later on, the Apostle Paul's going to talk about the difference between being a slave to sin and a slave to righteousness. As much as this passage is about enslavement to sin, Paul moves on and he begins to talk about how our hearts get out of this. What is it about the power of the Gospel that changes these things in our lives? This is a universal truth inside of the human heart. Paul in this passage is going to talk specifically about our sexuality and then, of course, much more than that.

But then we're going to have to see this as well. God's design for us is good for everyone. The way God designed humanity is not the way God designed some of humanity; it's the way God designed all of us. It's good for us, all of us. God's design in marriage for sexuality is an important phrase. It is a moral advance compared to how human cultures tend to behave, compared to how human cultures tend to treat people with less social and economic power than I have. One of our jobs as Christians right now is to live out and defend this design with compassion and wisdom and courage.

Let's read our passage of scripture. We're in Romans chapter 1. We'll start reading in verse 26 and read through the end of the chapter. Romans chapter 1, verse 26: "For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but they give approval to those who practice them."

Let's pray. This is quite a list. It's good for us in this context to read all of the rest of chapter 1 because reading the whole passage really makes it clear that Paul is trying to describe the result of sin as it runs amok inside of the human heart. Those last few verses where he just lists one after another thing—there are lists like this throughout the rest of the Old Testament; they're often called vice lists. So the Apostle Paul will walk through these things and sometimes he will introduce them as: these are the things that will not or cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Then he'll walk through a list like this.

Before he gets to the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians chapter 5, he says: but the works of the flesh are—and he goes through another list like this. So the Apostle Paul is clear that there are things that the human heart does when it's just locked inside of sin, slave to sinfulness. It's all a rejection of God. In Romans 1, he says it begins with our suppression of the truth, with our denial of God, a refusal to acknowledge him, to thank him, all of these things that he's talked about. He said when we do that, God just lets us off leash, and this is what happens to the human heart.

But for the gospel of Jesus Christ, right? One of these lists happens in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. He says the kingdom of God will not be inherited by—boom, boom, boom—and then he gets in 1 Corinthians 6:11 and he goes: "And such were some of you, but now you've been saved and justified and transformed. You know this was you, but Christ saved you and changed you." The saved and transformed Christian, especially if you became a Christian later in life, you remember things like this inside of your life and your soul.

The self-aware Christian still sees some of these things inside of our own hearts. One of the more enjoyable chapters in Romans is Romans chapter 7. If you haven't read that chapter, especially the last half or so of that chapter, the Apostle Paul puts himself in our shoes and he says, "Look, things that I want to do, I discover I don't do. The things I don't want to do, I discover that I'm doing those things. I see inside of myself two laws that are in war with one another, and I've got these things inside of my soul that just don't go the way I want them to. I do what I don't want to do; I don't do what I do want to do."

Then one of the most powerful movements in the New Testament, Paul says at the end of that chapter, "Who will save me from this body of death?" Chapter 8, verse 1: "Thanks be to God our Father who changes all of this and gives us the mind of the Spirit instead of the mind of the flesh." You see, what we read here is just the foundation of the argument. There's more hope than we could ever imagine, and it only comes through Jesus Christ.

So we have to recognize in a passage like we've just read, the condemnation is universal. We are lost in our sins. This again is why Paul begins with: "But I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes." This is God's divine power that changes the human heart and saves the human heart. The Gospel's power is small if I think my sin is small and I can fix it anyway. The Gospel's power is gargantuan if I realize that I am locked and lost in my sin and I can't change it unless God does it for me. This is the power, the depth, the magnitude of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Before we get to this long list of things that the Apostle Paul talks about, Paul deals directly with human sexuality. Paul says in that opening verse, "God gave them up to dishonorable passions." So the sin that comes out of our lives—and as he speaks here of sexual sin especially—we need to recognize these are dishonorable passions. He's speaking about what starts inside of the human heart. Our activity, our sin, it begins in our hearts and in our minds.

In fact, this is where all of our behavior one way or another comes from. While you and I work, and rightfully work, to stop the activity of sin—the things our hands, our eyes, our tongues do that are sinful and destructive—we rightfully work against those activities. We discover that there's something else. There's a fountain, there's a spring in our hearts that becomes the river of my life because this is where it all begins. They've been turned over to dishonorable passions.

The Book of Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23 is a wonderful way of remembering this truth. Solomon tells us, "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life." Keep your heart. Watch what's happening inside of you because what happens inside of you is going to start coming out of you. It's just the way the heart and our activities work. So all of these things listed at the end of the chapter begin inside of the sinful human heart. The sexual behaviors that are listed in those first two verses do as well.

So Paul begins by saying women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. Paul is, in this passage of scripture and next, inside of the context, inside of all that Paul is saying, the vocabulary that he uses in the Greek, Paul is referring to sexual license and especially homosexuality. He probably begins by talking with women first because in their culture, this would have been more of a surprise than the men. They knew it was common, especially amongst men with some version of social or economic status inside of their world. They knew this was common, but Paul says, "You know what? It happens among women as well, and it's a sin among women as well."

So he says, "And then likewise men," and he goes on. This sentence is powerful. He says they give up what is natural—what God designed them to act like—gave up what is natural. They burn with passion for other men. Again, this is an internal thing that turns into an external act. They commit shameless acts, and in doing so, they harm themselves physically as a result of their behavior. Paul pulls no punches. Paul could not care less about politically correct vocabulary. He just doesn't.

He's talking about the way our hearts are broken and the things that God can fix. If you read this in the English for the very first time, you're thinking, "Man, this sounds really sexual." You're right. If you were reading this for the first time in the Greek, that is the vocabulary that the Apostle Paul uses. So when he says here the phrase that's translated "consumed with passion," the word "passion" just means craving or lust. He says they commit "shameless acts" with other men. The word "shameless" implies nudity. So this is really straightforward in Paul's language.

So friends, we're going to rip the first band-aid off right now, and then we're just going to keep talking about it. We're going to keep talking about the word of God here. Homosexuality is a sin against God and against his design for us. The behavior and, in addition to the behavior, the desire is also part of our sin nature. It's one of the ways in which some of us find this brokenness inside of our souls. That is this law, as he speaks of in chapter 7. There's this thing inside of me that is at war with the law of God. For some of us, this is where that tipping point is, where that pressure point is.

But it's the behavior and it's the desire. This is also part of the sin nature. But remember where Paul started all of this: all of this can be subject to the power of the transforming work of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is part of the hope and the strength and the movement forward that the Apostle Paul gives us. As we talk about this kind of issue, I want to get at it from another angle. So we're going to get at it by looking at it like this: God's design for human sexuality, chastity, or marriage.

This little sentence, this little phrase "chastity or marriage," comes from C.S. Lewis right out of his book *Mere Christianity*. So C.S. Lewis has this wonderful way of putting things very straightforwardly, sometimes in a very simple and memorable way. And he's absolutely right. From beginning to end, God's design of the human being, the way we're designed to behave sexually and what marriage and family is for, he says here's the Christian ethic: chastity or marriage.

We go back to the very beginning to sort of get the foundation, the taproot of this doctrine of who we are as humans and what this looks like. We go all the way back to our creation, Genesis chapter 1, verses 27 and 28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with lots of other human beings and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'" The only creatures in all of creation that have been given the image of God are you and me, made male and female. So it's very specific, it's very biological in that sense, but it's not just our biological creation; it's our theological creation as male and female. It is sociology, it is psychology, it is biology. God infused us with his image as men and women.

This is God's good creation for you and me. We move a little bit further on. Genesis chapter 2, verse 24, before the fall and all of that, the expulsion from the garden, the text says this: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." It's an incredible teaching to be given before there's even a mom and a dad. It's just Adam and Eve, but you see our theology's being given to us. This is why we pair up like this, male and female. This is why we create family units like this, male and female.

Now it's not just the Old Testament. The New Testament is full of both the assumption of this doctrine and the teaching of this doctrine and why it is so important to us. C.S. Lewis could write during World War II in *Mere Christianity* "chastity or marriage," and everybody will have in their heads roughly the same kinds of definitions of those terms. In our culture today, we might need to clarify a few things as we walk through the biblical teaching on this.

Chastity or marriage is true. God's design for marriage, you and I can say, is heterosexual, monogamous, and lifelong. This is God's design. This is God's design for marriage. My oh my, has this culture attacked every single one of those in powerful ways? But we also see at the very beginning that God's primary building block for all of human civilization is marriage and the family. That's the first institution that God creates there in the garden with Adam and Eve.

In this context, let's see this again. The biblical view of marriage was an advance in the Roman world. It did good things for people, and it is a bulwark now, something that you and I should live to defend, live to proclaim. The Christian view taught in the New Testament and lived out in the early church was radically different from the world around them. Because of its moral advantages, it raised the lives of those who followed the standard. Eventually, the Christian view outlived the Roman Empire and all of its debauchery.

So you and I now follow in those footsteps in our debauched culture. We don't have time to dig into this deeply, but you and I need to see how rich and beautiful God's design truly is. Christian marriage is infused with theology. It's infused with meaning. It's full of the image and design and purpose of God. Christian marriage and human sexuality is filled with God's design for all of it—for how male and female love works, procreation, safety, holiness. Christian marriage is full of these things. It is an ethic that is infused, marriage and human sexuality, with moral and divine meaning.

The two, male and female, becoming one flesh, turns the sexual act into an expression of mutual love, commitment, and procreation instead of self-serving lust and physical gratification. God has given us something powerful and beautiful that actually becomes a reflection of his covenant with the church. I mean, that's how full of God's good design these things are inside of marriage and family. It becomes this covenant that mirrors God's very covenant with us.

So friends, contrary to what we hear a lot, wherever you hear it—social media, school, work, friends, family—we need to see the opposite is true. God's design is not random, it is not oppressive, and it is not fungible—it is not changeable. But it is shot through with divine power and meaning. And it was attractive. Now this is interesting because we don't, as Christians, think in these kinds of terms often. We think about the growth of the early church and we think about missionaries like Paul and Peter and all these other apostles who spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. So many people are becoming Christians and baptized in water and baptized in the Holy Spirit. So the church continues to grow.

But as historians look back, they see that, and then they also see that the Christian ethic became attractive to people who otherwise would have been walked all over in the Roman world. They saw safety, they saw stability, they saw meaning, they saw a future in the way Christians built their homes and their communities. One historian by the name of Rodney Stark—the book is titled *The Triumph of Christianity*—very simply puts it like this: women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led.

Does the church still live this way? Can the church still be this kind of witness to a world around us that's growing more and more confused all the time? That at some point, someone can turn around and see their local church, see the Christians in their family, see the Christians who live beside them and think, "That is so much better than what the world is offering me." And yes, it's the message that Jesus Christ saves, but it's also the message that this is the goodness of God's design for us. Still a very powerful witness.

Thinking in these terms, I want us to see this about some of the things that are going on in our world around us. Are you guys still with me? It's a little quiet out there. Some of you didn't realize what you were in for this morning, but here we are. Let's recognize this: our current culture denies our creation and affirms our rebellion in very specific ways. It denies our creation and it affirms our rebellion. Our creation as male and female. Everything from the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle to the trans issue denies the goodness of God's creation of us as male and female for each other as male and female.

So it denies our creation. Male and female does not determine our sexuality. We get to, or something else determines our sexuality. This term "gender"—I want you guys to at least be a little bit sensitive to this word because this is the word that's often thrown out, maybe even more than our sexuality: "My gender preferences are this, this, and this." If you sign up brand new on Facebook, there's still something like 52 different genders that you can choose from when you sign up.

The word "gender," especially the way that it's used now, was injected into our culture by some feminist thinkers and philosophers 60 years ago. The phrase that they liked to use was "gender is performative." That's a very powerful phrase because what they were injecting into this conversation was: your gender is not part of who you are biologically; it's not a part of you male or female; it's however you want to perform. It's however you feel, it's however you want to act, it's however you want to be called—it is performance. That's the sum total of it.

So that term, and it's used ubiquitously today, that term was designed to inject confusion and breakdown into this very conversation. Our culture denies our creation and it affirms our rebellion. If you disobey God, you can become God, right? We now determine our own identity apart from God and creation and reason. This is common now—what my identity is and that I have the opportunity to build and to shape that.

Instead of God's good design, we have been set adrift. It's this contradictory combination of "I was born this way" versus "I feel this way today." It's just this contradictory combination that again just sows pain and confusion in so many lives. Paul highlights this. He highlights homosexuality because it is a unique denial of God's creation of male and female. But to understand the larger topic, you and I, every one of us, need to understand this: every sexual sin breaks God's will for humans, marriage, and the family.

Are you married? Then I cannot harbor lust in my heart toward my neighbor. I need to realize that adultery is sin, right? We go all the way back to the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20, verse 17. One of the Ten Commandments is about the condition of my heart toward my neighbor: "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife." Covetousness is a sin that starts here and then turns into physical behavior. Am I single? I need to guard my heart against lust in my heart and mind toward others and to realize that fornication is a sin.

The reason this part of the conversation is important is that there are a lot of Christian organizations, like Revoice and others, who will tell you that it is okay to identify as a "Gay Christian," as long as you don't do whatever. They'll fill in the blank and say, "Well, as long as you don't do this, this, this, and this." It's all just kind of arbitrary, but you can identify as this. They say, "Well, because that's how you were made, you can't change that, so you're just—you're gay and you're a Christian as well."

Well, can I identify as an "adulterous Christian"? That's just who I am; it's in my DNA; I can't stop it, but man, I'm still a Christian. I'm a "greedy Christian." I just—I want more and more money, I need more stuff. I don't care what this vice list says—maliciousness and greed and gossip—that's just how I'm made; it's how God made me; he loves me the way that I am; I'm still a Christian. I'm a "murderous Christian." I have hate in my heart for about half of you. I still love Jesus, and he's okay with all that because that's how he made... Can I say any of that? No, I cannot. Because the Apostle Paul is saying there is something that happens in our disordered passions that breaks our own lives and dishonors God and dishonors others, and that's the sin that starts here.

I know that the sin that is in my heart is harder to deal with. Many of us know how to hide the sin that's in our hands or eyes or tongues, but that does not give me the right to say then what is in my heart is okay. The power of the Gospel is the power to change everything from the outside to the inside. One of the things that Jesus said is so important to this part of the conversation. Every single follower of Jesus Christ is called by him to take up our cross, to deny ourselves—meaning deny our sin—and follow him instead.

Listen to how Jesus puts it in Mark chapter 8, verses 34 and 37: "And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.'" Every one of us has a cross to carry. Every one of us is going to have a different cross to carry depending on what it is that is at work inside of my heart that I need to give up for Christ. "For whoever would save his life"—if you'd rather hang on to all of those things, Jesus says eventually you're just going to lose all of it—"For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the Gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?"

So let's flip the coin just a little bit here for a few minutes. Christians who live faithful lives refill family and human sexuality with God's divine purpose, goodness, and love. You and I have an opportunity to put God's meaning and purpose back into what it means to be male and female, what it means to be married and have a family and parents and grandparents and kids and grandkids. We walk in the way of Jesus Christ in this way, and we refill it with meaning. You see, our culture is busy sucking all of the meaning out of what all of these things really are. Pulling all of that out and leaving us as these kinds of spiritual zombies trying to create our own identity and make ourselves work. None of that in the end works.

But Christians now, the church now, the faithful church now, has an opportunity to tell the world and to tell each other: we can refill all of this that the world is trying to take away. We can refill this with God's goodness. And it can be beautiful and powerful and strong and good. Doing these kinds of things sometimes means making difficult decisions. I believe that we've gotten to a point now where probably everybody in this room—our lives are touched by either homosexuality or the trans issue, either in our immediate family, our extended family, or people who are very close to us.

Which makes the emotional tug inside of this issue very difficult for us sometimes. I get that. But this is one of the reasons why you and I gather and we renew our faithfulness to the truth and the goodness of God. As we bear witness to this world, it just means sometimes you and I are going to have to make difficult decisions. And that's going to look different for every one of us depending on who it is in our lives, what kind of relationship we have with them, what kind of pressures are on us because of our work or our friends or whatever circle it is. Nonetheless, our Christian forebears 2,000 years ago refilled family and marriage and human sexuality with Christian meaning, and we can do the same.

I've got a handful of pieces of practical advice. A couple of these might be where some of you want to throw something at me; that's okay. But again, I spent a lot of time years ago and I've spent a lot of time since paying attention to people who have been saved and transformed by Jesus Christ, both out of the homosexual and the trans lifestyle, reading and trying to understand the word of God and what all of this means and what this means for us, listening to people that we can trust and listening to the word of God.

Here's a handful of pieces of practical advice. The first is this: love but do not affirm. Love but do not affirm. In fact, in its most fundamental form, this is what good parents do when they raise kids. You love them, but you don't affirm them sticking quarters in their sister's ear. You don't. You don't affirm the selfishness, you don't affirm the whatever it is inside of their hearts that we're trying to fix and train and discipline and raise them into citizens and followers of Jesus Christ. We love them, but we know that their behavior is not their identity.

So this, friends, is one of the life hacks to understanding why this is such a sensitive topic. 30, 40 years ago, our culture started making a decision. Many in our culture began to decide that if you disagree with my behavior, you hate me as a person. Does that make sense? Some of you have felt this; some of you have probably told other people this. If you disagree with how I want to behave, then that means you hate me. It is this powerful lie of the enemy that identifies behavior with identity. I get reduced to a behavior. But learning how to love someone without affirming everything they do is critical.

I want to think in this context of the parable of the Prodigal Son. The parable of the Prodigal Son is this powerful story that Jesus tells. This younger son decides that he wants to squander the inheritance that his father wants to give him. So he goes to his father and he demands, "I want to receive my inheritance now." Everything that you've given me, I want it now. The father gives it to him and he splits, and he takes all of everything that his father has given him and he squanders it in sin, runs away from his father's household.

Wakes up one morning in a pigsty and realizes it would be better for me to be a slave in my father's house than where I am here now in a pigsty. He took everything that was given to him by the father and squandered it in sin, and one day woke up and realized, "I've ruined everything." Part of the beauty of the parable is that when he comes home and the father sees him, the father runs after him and pulls him back into the household and shows him love. The father did not follow the prodigal son into his sin and end up in the same pigsty affirming his lifestyle. If the father left home, the prodigal child would not have had a home to return to.

If the church or Christians affirm lifestyles that we know to be sin against God, if we affirm lifestyles that we know are eventually destructive to heart, soul, mind, and body to the people that we love, then we're in the same pigsty with them eventually, and they will believe the church affirms this, God affirms this. Someone has to stay home—I hope this is making sense—so that there is a home to come back to. Love but do not affirm.

You still with me? Use the pronouns that God gave. Use the pronouns that God gave. Using anything else is living by lies, and we shouldn't live by lies. I know in some of our contexts, this is complicated. But use the pronouns that God gave. If we affirm lies, then we're affirming lies, and we shouldn't do that as people of the truth. In some cases—some maybe you'd call them extreme cases—if we use chosen pronouns, we're actually affirming deep and profound emotional and psychological hurt; we're just affirming it, instead of staying home, so to speak, and hanging on to what is right and good and true.

Here's another one: do not affirm any amount of trans confusion. Gender dysphoria is a recognized issue, and it has been for a long time, where there are some folks who genuinely have this disconnect between their biology and their psychology, between their bodies and how they feel. So for a long time, it's been a known issue, and the percentage of a culture that's been a pretty steady percentage—it's a very small percentage of a culture, but it's been pretty steady; it's been a known issue for a long time.

In the last several years, the reports of gender dysphoria or the desire for trans transitioning has skyrocketed well beyond what is traditionally the case statistically. How on earth and why has that skyrocketed? Well, there are a lot of reasons, I am sure, for a lot of that, but right at the top of that is social media and the confusion that especially already broken and confused young kids, preteens and teenagers, have. They open up social media and a lot of other confused and broken people—some groomers as well—are ready to tell them that if you go trans, if you identify as something else, you're going to fix everything about yourself.

It is a lie if someone tells you, "Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?" The data does not back that up, and that is emotionally manipulative. Friends, social transitioning will eventually cause psychological damage. Hormones cause lasting biological damage. Puberty-blocking drugs will eventually sterilize teens and create lifelong pharmaceutical dependence. And then friends, what is Orwellian—the Orwellian phrase "gender-affirming medical care"—is nothing short of permanent genital mutilation. It is nothing short of barbaric and flat-out demonic.

The church just can't walk into this world. The church has to stand outside of this world and say even if you have genuine confusion about this, there is hope in the Gospel and the power of Jesus Christ because God created you in such a way that you can find unity between your biology and your psychology, between your body and your emotions, because this is how God has built you and he wants you to flourish like this. So the church just stands in a different place than the rest of the world.

Then my last practical thought: pray, pray, pray. These people I mentioned earlier on—Beckett Cook will tell you the story: his mom and his family prayed for him for decades. Christopher Yuan had an older Chinese mother who all she did day in and day out was pray for him. Pray, friends. Confused and hurt people are God's sons and daughters as well, and all of them are made in the image of God. Until the soul leaves the body, we want to pray for the health and the healing, the salvation, and the transformation for these people inside of our lives.

If the church follows the prodigal into the pigsty, there's no home to come back to. Salvation and transformation only comes through the repentance of sin, not the affirmation of sin. This is our final thought: our Christian witness relies on both truth and love. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul told the Ephesians in Ephesians chapter 4, especially verses 14 and 15. Paul in that little chunk of scripture, he's telling the church: God gave a bunch of gifts to the church so that the church could be grounded in truth, know who Jesus Christ is, be encouraged in what is true all the time, so that we are not blown to and fro, back and forth, by every idea that comes blowing through the church or through culture. But instead, speaking the truth in love, we grow up into Christ.

So there's truth and there's love. You and I, friends, as individuals, as a church, as a body of Christ, we need to learn how to hold both of these things together: truth and love. The future of the church of Jesus Christ belongs to the faithful and the courageous. Those who bend to emotional manipulation of the world will find themselves adrift over time, and if they are not careful, they will eventually find themselves away from the true church. There's no witness there. There's no power of the Gospel there at all. The future of our neighbors and the people that we love belongs to a church that loves them enough to be clear about God and his good will for our lives. There is witness, there is true witness and power in this kind of love. This is where the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ does its work. Let's pray.