Needs or Deeds
Do you see the deeds or the needs of the unsaved? God looks down upon the wickedness and sin of this world and against the backdrop of his absolute holiness one would expect Him to obliterate all of human kind in an understandable expression of His righteous indignation. Right? After all, mankind has taken His pristine gift of life and the glory of creation and poisoned it all with his sin and rebellion. Should not the Judge of all the earth do right? Would it not be within the revelation of God’s nature to avenge His enemies? The entire world was one entire teeming mess of cultural sewage that was repugnant to a holy God and deserved to be visited by His righteous vengeance. Amen.
By soft! What light in yonder window breaks? It is the love of God, the illogical and unreasonable love of Almighty God, laying aside His vengeance and lo He comes planning and reaching and, oh my, He comes Himself in the form of these very rebels. Does He not realize the depth of man’s depravity? Or the abject refusal of His redemptive offer by most? Can He not see the wicked inventions of the race He created and loved? These sinners steal and covet. They envision and carry out acts of promiscuous relationships. They are prideful and self serving. And look, does He not see that there are homosexual sinners who do not deserve anything but His most violent and open throated contempt?
But with full knowledge far beyond our ability to understand, complete with the experiential understanding of the past, present, and future events comprehended absolutely at any given moment, Almighty God designs an immutable plan to reach out to and offer forgiveness and reconciliation to the entire human race. Wesley’s coming words “And can it be?” ring true and reflect the confounding nature of what was to come. Not only was God going to offer redemption, He would pay the price for their judgment Himself. This sacrificial expression of love is beyond our ability to understand as to the motive and the application of that motive. Was there no other way in which God could “save face” and yet accomplish His loving mission? Was this infinitely condescending plan the exclusive way of providing a redemptive escape for these rebels?
So God comes in the form of sinful flesh, despising the shame, and vicariously takes upon Himself the sins of the world. How should we, how can we emulate God’s expression of loving reconciliation? With the full knowledge that we are limited by who we are and yet understanding that as much within us lies we should reflect the same divine heart as does our Father, we must surrender to His will and not ours. And today the church behaves and speaks in a way inconsistent with the overt exhibition of the redemptive love of God toward sinners.
Not once in God’s letters to the New Testament church does He specifically deal with the sin of homosexuality alone and exclusively. That sin is always in the context of other sins and sin in general, and of course that practice is a sin. One wonders why the New Testament apostles never dealt with child molestation or rape or necrophilia if indeed God had a hierarchy of sins that were to be identified by the church in a unique way, especially as it applies to the lost. How the heart of God must break over both the sin of this world and the misrepresentation of His saving Gospel. And in the forefront of this misrepresentation are the vicious attacks on homosexuals on one hand and the doctrinal attacks to the Biblical teaching concerning that sin.
Let no one misunderstand, homosexuality is a sin and indeed a perversion of the Creator’s intention concerning sex and the male/female bond. Because of the media exposure and the approval of that lifestyle the numbers of homosexuals are increasing. It is impossible to know if that reveals an unfolding of latent desires or a choosing of that same lifestyle based on its acceptance. Only God knows.
Yes there are some who by virtue of insisting God creates and accepts homosexual relationships attempt to alter the nature and immutability of Scripture. But I want to deal with the other end of the spectrum, those who feel a calling to combat homosexuals with caustic words, political activism, and a general spiritual ambiance of self righteous condemnation and “full throated contempt”. Now if you are among those who believe no one can be born with homosexual tendencies and desires than you will not find this article of any benefit. You will be left with attempting to explain how a baby can be born with female and male genitals and yet deny that the curse of sin can affect someone’s mind.
God has never called the church to any political activism, He has called us to preach the gospel to every creature on the face of this earth. The political and governmental systems of this world fall under the sovereign will of God, but they are by no means God’s spiritual representatives. Many governments have put millions of Christians to death and many persecute and torture others. This notion that God desires the church to become involved with the political system in promoting some specific areas of morality is humanism at its zenith, for any morality without Christ is graceless legalism when it is espoused by the body of Christ. We as the body of Christ are in this world but not of this world, we work and raise our families but our spiritual calling cannot be unequally yoked with the systems of this world and with those who deny Christ.
The attempt to influence fallen governments is a misguided notion that pushes Biblical morality upon unsuspecting sinners by legislative force, which the government will do without the church. Can we not trust the Almighty to take care of us or do we so need to participate that we suggest God desires us to become entangled with the affairs of this world? We even use the world’s terms such as “conservative” and “liberal” when they should not have any place in spiritual vocabulary. A politician may be conservative and yet be lost and even anti-christ.
These people have a need to be exposed to both the explanation and the exhibition of the love of God as showcased in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It surely added to their assumptions about the church when people said that AIDS was God's vehicle of vengeance on the gay community. They already stand condemned, both spiritually and many times within the society, so how can we drive the nail deeper by our smug and ungracious moral attitudes? No one needs abandon their Biblical understandings about the nature of sin, but we must not sacrifice our understandings about love and grace on the altar of moral pejoratives.
Let us be Christians, followers of Christ, and reject the badge of moral police and cleaners of the “cultural sewage” that includes sinners for whom Jesus died. Should we all not hold ourselves accountable and remember we have no righteousness of our own and that many of us would still be part of the “moral morass” were it not for God’s redemptive love? We should not hold tightly and exclusively to the elephant’s tail ,of God’s justice and claim we are representing Christ in all His fullness. People have desperate needs, many homosexuals will become so desperate they will this very year take their own lives. “Well let them die and decrease the surplus population”. (Ebenezer Scrooge)
Our mission isn’t about cleaning up society or improving cultural standards, and it isn’t about legislating morality or condemning sinners, and it surely isn’t about culling out certain sins as extraordinary and in need of a deeper gospel than that which God used to save us. No, we are called to spread the life saving gospel of Jesus Christ accompanied by works of compassion that authentically reflect the Father’s heart and substantiate the words we share. We are the church, the living body of Jesus Christ and we must hold out the lifeline to the group of friends we were once a part of and not speak in such a way as to act as if we would never think of being such people. We were them and God loves them.
So should we.
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