I can barely breathe when I think of the state of things in the world right now, especially in America. I simply cant understand how we got to where we are, how the celebration of immorality and mental illness has completely taken over from the Government level down to our private households. We no longer stand up for what is right, and most of us feel like the world has lost its grip on reality. My heart has never been more broken then it is right now. I literally can not sleep because i am so overwhelmed by the state of things. This is not about gay marriage, this is not about transgendered bathrooms, this is about the fall of mankind and we have led the way by losing our ability to offend, by being more scared of hurting someones feelings than concerned for their eternity.
My husband and I were talking about it all yesterday and he asked me how someone could be a practicing homosexual "christian" and how their "church" could justify it and it hit me. We put a line through one passage of the Bible long ago, a line that most of us still don't see as a problem and with that one line, came the lie that started this all.
Matthew 19:5
"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
Sex was and has always been meant to be shared between ONE man and ONE woman who are joined in marriage! When we stopped seeing premarital sex as sin, we put a line through the word of God and this path became a slippery slope. As Ryan and I talked about these christians who felt that homosexual sex was acceptable, a thought popped into my head and I asked him "did your premarital sex keep you up at night before you got married?" He answered "no" and that is the key right there. Neither did mine but it should have! As Christians we know that sex outside of marriage is a sin and yet it has been normalized since the sexual revolution so as much as we heard on Sunday that we should abstain all of the rest of the time we heard that everyone was doing it and that it really wasn't that big of a deal. ITS A HUGE DEAL! I'm guilty of this, I had sex before I was married, I am also divorced. I'm not standing here pretending like I don't have my sins, most of my 20's were lived recklessly in direct disobedience to God. I struggled with sin and battled addictions, but God delivered me from them and with a repentant heart I turned back to Him and He gave me a brand new life! It did require one thing from me, to turn my back on my sinful ways, to die to my fleshly desires and to do things Gods way. I still sin, I still mess up, and I am constantly asking God to direct my path and change my heart. It's not something you do just once, we have to die to self every single day. We have to continue to ask God for forgiveness when we stumble and backslide and we have to press forward again and again and follow after Him deliberately!
We aren't loving our Christian brothers and sisters when we are too afraid to offend them and less concerned about their eternity. Mother and Fathers who have a child who battles with homosexuality have a hard road to face. Loving the sinner and hating the sin is a fine line, but it is a line none the less. I'm not going to stand here and pretend like I have any idea what a struggle it must be for the entire family, but I will not justify the behavior of homosexuals because I love them. The fact of the matter is that we do not get to pick and choose which sins are ok. That would be nice, if we could have just one, a favorite and get a free pass on it, but that is not how it works. There are plenty of people "born this way" that excuse is not a pass for sin. You may be born with homosexual desires but a pedophile is born with attraction and sexual desires for children, shall we allow that? A sociopath is born with a lack of conscience so should we let them get away with murder? Morality is not subjective. The problem is that instead of basing morality on the requirements God laid out people have rejected God and are attempting to base morality on something else, feelings and emotions. That simply does not work, each of us has our own feelings and our own emotions so what may seem right to you will possibly seem wrong to me and vise versa, therefore morality becomes a blurred grey that has no firm foundation. This is the morality we are seeing rising in the world today and it is a house built on the sand, it cannot withstand the test of time.
The argument now for all things LGBT is emotion, feelings. They have wrapped up their identities in their feelings, their attractions, and sexuality. A lot of us do this, we look in the mirror and we see what we feel. Too fat, too short, too shy, sexy, boring, ugly, beautiful, too skinny, you get the point. We let our emotions determine our identity. News flash, our identity has nothing to do with our sexuality, nothing! Our identity has nothing to do with how we see ourselves, nothing! Our identity is not controlled by how others view us! Our identity is supposed to come from one place, from the Creator!
We were created in Gods image, that is our identity. We were created to serve the Kingdom of God, that is our identity. We were created to love and encourage one another, to lead others to Jesus and to serve God alone, that is our identity. When we accept our place and position as a child of God we find our identity. It is not in who you desire to have sex with, that is your sexual preference, not your identity. It is not if you feel like a boy or a girl, your gender comes from your DNA, not your emotions. We lost our identities when we stopped looking for them where they are meant to be found, in a loving relationship with Jesus Christ. God also gave instruction for those who did not feel compelled to follow the natural order of His law.
Matthew 19:12
For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others--and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."
I believe that some of us have great purpose in the kingdom of God and those who may have the greatest purpose may be called to trust in God alone for that deep relationship. I also believe that those who will do the most for the kingdom face the greatest struggles. This may mean that someone who battles homosexual desires needs to commit to a life of chastity in the service of the Lord. I also believe that like most flesh desires, you have to make a choice to turn away from what God tells us is off limits regardless of how natural it feels to you. Denying our fleshly desires is not some new thing and its not just something God asks a few of us to do, He asks all of us to do it! Our flesh is contrary to Him and we cannot have it both ways. We all struggle with our own personal brand of sin. To think that one is harder than another is to think that you can fully understand every person and what they face. Jesus didn't say it was going to be easy, He told us to pick up our cross and follow him. That is a life of sacrifice, a life of self denial, a life of flesh battles and surrender to Gods will. We don't get to draw lines through sins of our choosing and homosexuality is clearly called a sin over and over again in the Bible. Remember, our identity is not our sexual inclination, or our emotional desires, our identity is rooted in our relationship with God!
If we continue down this path of normalizing sexual sin and immorality future generations will struggle more and more, just as those of us following the sexual revolution grew up knowing that God said sex was meant for marriage but still not seeing it so much as sin but skirting the issue. Our hearts were hardened to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and we were able to act without guilt. There are many Christians living with little thought to their premarital sex, but this is a sin be it heterosexual or homosexual sex. Homosexual sex is forbidden, however, and is considered an abominable act.
Romans 1:26-28
"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 it fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done."
Its time to stop being afraid of offending someone and time to start speaking the truth in love no matter what. This isn't about judgement, its about truth. We are all sinners, and God does meet us right where we are but He loves us WAY TOO MUCH to leave us there. We need to get on our knees and face to face with Him and let Him open our eyes to all of the lies of the devil. I'm not saying it will be easy, and I'm not saying it wont hurt, but eternity is at stake and we do not have time to worry if we have been politically correct. As Christians speaking the truth in love and not condemnation we are serving God in a world that hates the truth and we will be hated for it, but our identity lies in the one who saved us, and He doesn't care how popular and well liked by others we are, he cares about the millions of salvations at stake.
This isn't about transgender bathroom laws, this is about normalizing an agenda, about raising a generation who no longer sees the truth but is spoon fed these lies. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness that needs to be lovingly addressed. These bathroom laws do not help the transgender community because the truth is that those who identified as women were most likely already using the ladies room and vise versa. This law does open a free for all for anyone who wants access to a place of vulnerability, locker rooms and bathrooms. Of course they have twisted the concern to somehow reflect that those who oppose the bathroom laws fear the transgender community, but that is a bold faced lie! I have no fear that a transgender man will harm me while I am in the locker room. I do not feel, however, that just because he feels like a woman means that I need to be exposed to his body in a locker room. My concern is for a sexual predator to use these laws to his advantage as he will not have to justify why he has entered the locker room or bathroom and he may be there to harm or take advantage of someone. Yes, a sexual predator can enter a ladies room with bad intentions with or without these laws, but these laws don't give me to the right to ask him to leave, where as before, security would have been called. These laws are bad, they don't protect anyone. I think if people open their eyes to the reality that they should be able to see how letting our teenagers choose which bathroom to use based on how they feel is a very bad idea. If I had a daughter who felt like she was a boy I certainly would not think her to be in a safer situation by having her shower with a bunch of teenage boys! Her body is still that of a girl and needs to stay where that body is safest, with girls. That is common cents!
This all boils down to one thing. We need to find our true identities where they are meant to come from, we need to see ourselves from Gods eyes. We are deeply loved, created in His image to serve love and honor Him. We need Him, we were created for Him by Him and He does not make mistakes. We are being blinded by the lies of the devil. It's time to open our Bibles, get down on our knees and pray. There is nothing that God cannot heal. There is no sin to great that God cannot forgive. There is nothing too broken that God cannot restore. We need to trust in the Lord, to turn back to Him, to stop following the ways and lies of this world. The devil wants you to think that it's impossible, that you wont be able to break free. The devil wants you to think that your identity is wrapped in these desires, but it's not true. God created each and every one of us, perfect in his image, and we were designed to live out our lives according to Gods will! He will never leave us and He will help us through anything but we have to trust Him and we have to surrender to Him.
I pray for those who fight this battle, my heart truly breaks for your struggle. Being someone who understands the nature of addiction and being swept away by the struggle of sin, I wish that there was a magic trick that would just set each and every one of us free from our personal struggles, but there isn't. There is, however, and all knowing, all loving God who wants to walk with you through this and if you trust Him He will get you to the other side.
My husband and I were talking about it all yesterday and he asked me how someone could be a practicing homosexual "christian" and how their "church" could justify it and it hit me. We put a line through one passage of the Bible long ago, a line that most of us still don't see as a problem and with that one line, came the lie that started this all.
Matthew 19:5
"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
Sex was and has always been meant to be shared between ONE man and ONE woman who are joined in marriage! When we stopped seeing premarital sex as sin, we put a line through the word of God and this path became a slippery slope. As Ryan and I talked about these christians who felt that homosexual sex was acceptable, a thought popped into my head and I asked him "did your premarital sex keep you up at night before you got married?" He answered "no" and that is the key right there. Neither did mine but it should have! As Christians we know that sex outside of marriage is a sin and yet it has been normalized since the sexual revolution so as much as we heard on Sunday that we should abstain all of the rest of the time we heard that everyone was doing it and that it really wasn't that big of a deal. ITS A HUGE DEAL! I'm guilty of this, I had sex before I was married, I am also divorced. I'm not standing here pretending like I don't have my sins, most of my 20's were lived recklessly in direct disobedience to God. I struggled with sin and battled addictions, but God delivered me from them and with a repentant heart I turned back to Him and He gave me a brand new life! It did require one thing from me, to turn my back on my sinful ways, to die to my fleshly desires and to do things Gods way. I still sin, I still mess up, and I am constantly asking God to direct my path and change my heart. It's not something you do just once, we have to die to self every single day. We have to continue to ask God for forgiveness when we stumble and backslide and we have to press forward again and again and follow after Him deliberately!
We aren't loving our Christian brothers and sisters when we are too afraid to offend them and less concerned about their eternity. Mother and Fathers who have a child who battles with homosexuality have a hard road to face. Loving the sinner and hating the sin is a fine line, but it is a line none the less. I'm not going to stand here and pretend like I have any idea what a struggle it must be for the entire family, but I will not justify the behavior of homosexuals because I love them. The fact of the matter is that we do not get to pick and choose which sins are ok. That would be nice, if we could have just one, a favorite and get a free pass on it, but that is not how it works. There are plenty of people "born this way" that excuse is not a pass for sin. You may be born with homosexual desires but a pedophile is born with attraction and sexual desires for children, shall we allow that? A sociopath is born with a lack of conscience so should we let them get away with murder? Morality is not subjective. The problem is that instead of basing morality on the requirements God laid out people have rejected God and are attempting to base morality on something else, feelings and emotions. That simply does not work, each of us has our own feelings and our own emotions so what may seem right to you will possibly seem wrong to me and vise versa, therefore morality becomes a blurred grey that has no firm foundation. This is the morality we are seeing rising in the world today and it is a house built on the sand, it cannot withstand the test of time.
The argument now for all things LGBT is emotion, feelings. They have wrapped up their identities in their feelings, their attractions, and sexuality. A lot of us do this, we look in the mirror and we see what we feel. Too fat, too short, too shy, sexy, boring, ugly, beautiful, too skinny, you get the point. We let our emotions determine our identity. News flash, our identity has nothing to do with our sexuality, nothing! Our identity has nothing to do with how we see ourselves, nothing! Our identity is not controlled by how others view us! Our identity is supposed to come from one place, from the Creator!
We were created in Gods image, that is our identity. We were created to serve the Kingdom of God, that is our identity. We were created to love and encourage one another, to lead others to Jesus and to serve God alone, that is our identity. When we accept our place and position as a child of God we find our identity. It is not in who you desire to have sex with, that is your sexual preference, not your identity. It is not if you feel like a boy or a girl, your gender comes from your DNA, not your emotions. We lost our identities when we stopped looking for them where they are meant to be found, in a loving relationship with Jesus Christ. God also gave instruction for those who did not feel compelled to follow the natural order of His law.
Matthew 19:12
For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others--and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."
I believe that some of us have great purpose in the kingdom of God and those who may have the greatest purpose may be called to trust in God alone for that deep relationship. I also believe that those who will do the most for the kingdom face the greatest struggles. This may mean that someone who battles homosexual desires needs to commit to a life of chastity in the service of the Lord. I also believe that like most flesh desires, you have to make a choice to turn away from what God tells us is off limits regardless of how natural it feels to you. Denying our fleshly desires is not some new thing and its not just something God asks a few of us to do, He asks all of us to do it! Our flesh is contrary to Him and we cannot have it both ways. We all struggle with our own personal brand of sin. To think that one is harder than another is to think that you can fully understand every person and what they face. Jesus didn't say it was going to be easy, He told us to pick up our cross and follow him. That is a life of sacrifice, a life of self denial, a life of flesh battles and surrender to Gods will. We don't get to draw lines through sins of our choosing and homosexuality is clearly called a sin over and over again in the Bible. Remember, our identity is not our sexual inclination, or our emotional desires, our identity is rooted in our relationship with God!
If we continue down this path of normalizing sexual sin and immorality future generations will struggle more and more, just as those of us following the sexual revolution grew up knowing that God said sex was meant for marriage but still not seeing it so much as sin but skirting the issue. Our hearts were hardened to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and we were able to act without guilt. There are many Christians living with little thought to their premarital sex, but this is a sin be it heterosexual or homosexual sex. Homosexual sex is forbidden, however, and is considered an abominable act.
Romans 1:26-28
"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 it fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done."
Its time to stop being afraid of offending someone and time to start speaking the truth in love no matter what. This isn't about judgement, its about truth. We are all sinners, and God does meet us right where we are but He loves us WAY TOO MUCH to leave us there. We need to get on our knees and face to face with Him and let Him open our eyes to all of the lies of the devil. I'm not saying it will be easy, and I'm not saying it wont hurt, but eternity is at stake and we do not have time to worry if we have been politically correct. As Christians speaking the truth in love and not condemnation we are serving God in a world that hates the truth and we will be hated for it, but our identity lies in the one who saved us, and He doesn't care how popular and well liked by others we are, he cares about the millions of salvations at stake.
This isn't about transgender bathroom laws, this is about normalizing an agenda, about raising a generation who no longer sees the truth but is spoon fed these lies. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness that needs to be lovingly addressed. These bathroom laws do not help the transgender community because the truth is that those who identified as women were most likely already using the ladies room and vise versa. This law does open a free for all for anyone who wants access to a place of vulnerability, locker rooms and bathrooms. Of course they have twisted the concern to somehow reflect that those who oppose the bathroom laws fear the transgender community, but that is a bold faced lie! I have no fear that a transgender man will harm me while I am in the locker room. I do not feel, however, that just because he feels like a woman means that I need to be exposed to his body in a locker room. My concern is for a sexual predator to use these laws to his advantage as he will not have to justify why he has entered the locker room or bathroom and he may be there to harm or take advantage of someone. Yes, a sexual predator can enter a ladies room with bad intentions with or without these laws, but these laws don't give me to the right to ask him to leave, where as before, security would have been called. These laws are bad, they don't protect anyone. I think if people open their eyes to the reality that they should be able to see how letting our teenagers choose which bathroom to use based on how they feel is a very bad idea. If I had a daughter who felt like she was a boy I certainly would not think her to be in a safer situation by having her shower with a bunch of teenage boys! Her body is still that of a girl and needs to stay where that body is safest, with girls. That is common cents!
This all boils down to one thing. We need to find our true identities where they are meant to come from, we need to see ourselves from Gods eyes. We are deeply loved, created in His image to serve love and honor Him. We need Him, we were created for Him by Him and He does not make mistakes. We are being blinded by the lies of the devil. It's time to open our Bibles, get down on our knees and pray. There is nothing that God cannot heal. There is no sin to great that God cannot forgive. There is nothing too broken that God cannot restore. We need to trust in the Lord, to turn back to Him, to stop following the ways and lies of this world. The devil wants you to think that it's impossible, that you wont be able to break free. The devil wants you to think that your identity is wrapped in these desires, but it's not true. God created each and every one of us, perfect in his image, and we were designed to live out our lives according to Gods will! He will never leave us and He will help us through anything but we have to trust Him and we have to surrender to Him.
I pray for those who fight this battle, my heart truly breaks for your struggle. Being someone who understands the nature of addiction and being swept away by the struggle of sin, I wish that there was a magic trick that would just set each and every one of us free from our personal struggles, but there isn't. There is, however, and all knowing, all loving God who wants to walk with you through this and if you trust Him He will get you to the other side.
