Ministry in a Sinful World

Last week, we discussed God’s design for sexual intimacy, and we were reminded that God created two distinct sexes, and He designed sexual intimacy to strengthen and to celebrate the relationship between a man and his wife. Everything outside of that design, therefore, is sin. It’s a rebellion against or a perversion of God’s design.

As we continue discussing sexual morality, today we are going to talk more specifically about the LGBTQ movement. Just in case you’re not familiar, with the terminology, LGBTQ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer. And there have been even more letters added since the acronym began.

There is no way that I’m going to be able to cover all the aspects related to topics like that. But as a pastor, my responsibility is to equip you to honor Christ in a fallen world. So, in order to do that, I’d like to divide our time into two main sections. In the first half, I want to talk about the Condition of our Culture. And then, for the second half, we’ll talk about the Solution of the Savior.

More than any sociological or political commentary on society, I want to give you a theological understanding of what’s happening. We need to see this all from broader perspective. And then, with that understanding as a background, we can talk a little more about how to minister in this type of culture and maybe even more specifically to people within the LGBTQ community.

There’s way too much to cover in one sermon, and I imagine some of you will have more specific questions after today. So, please tell me those questions, and I want to o my best to address them next week as we continue discussing this topic.

To help us understand the condition of the culture, I’d like you to turn to Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1. This is going to be familiar to a lot of you. The homosexual and the transsexual revolution have changed this country, but rather than panic or despair, you should know that this is nothing new. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul talks about. It happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. It happened with the Roman Empire, and it’s happening with us.

In Romans 1, Paul describes the universal guilt of all mankind, and he gives us some specific details about what happens when a society jettisons the foundational truths of God.

Romans, chapter 1, verse 18—For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

This is the universal state of mankind. This is where the downfall of society starts. If you want to track the stages Paul is going to describe, the first phase is an unrighteous suppression of the truth. An unrighteous suppression of the truth. That’s the starting position.

We are unrighteous, and rather than receive the truth, we suppress it by continuing in unrighteousness. And if anyone thinks, “That’s not fair; not everyone has the truth,” Paul has a response. He tells us that everyone has an introduction to God through creation.

Verse 19—For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Creation bears witness to a powerful Creator. None of this got here all by itself; someone put it here. There had to have been, as philosophy puts it, a First Cause or a Prime Mover. It is illogical to think that everything came from nothing. There are systems in place. There is a design, which tells us that there is a Designer. But society, as a whole, proceeds with an unrighteous suppression of the truth. That’s phase 1.

Let’s look at phase 2. Verse 21—For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

We reject God’s truth. We refuse to give Him honor, and the result is phase 2: a darkened heart of foolishness. A darkened heart of foolishness. That’s what the end of verse 21 says.

Light represents illumination, knowledge, and truth. Darkness represents ignorance. Mankind doesn’t know or respond to the truth, so God withholds additional revelation. The darkened and foolish heart of society is made evident by false worship. But that’s not the end. The downward spiral continues.

Verse 24—Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

The third phase of a society’s downfall is a lustful heart of impurity. A lustful heart of impurity. Verse 24 says these kinds of desires lead to the dishonoring of our bodies. People begin to use their bodies in shameful ways which God never intended for them.

This pattern could describe the course of sin in a person’s life, but the same applies at a much broader level. Paul is talking about society. And in terms of the history of our nation, we can see the societal shift into this category with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Some called it sexual liberation.

God specifically created sex for a man and his wife to enjoy, but society began to say that it could be enjoyed outside of that relationship. TV and movies became more sexually explicit, Playboy magazine flourished, casual sex was normalized, and divorce rates increased while the marriage rate decreased. There was a distinct effect on the culture, and many felt it. But that’s still not the end; dishonor progresses.

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; ²⁷and 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.

Humanity starts with an unrighteous suppression of the truth and then, apart from the intervening grace of God, progresses to a foolish and darkened heart. That continued rebellion leads to further lust and impurity, and then we come to phase 4 of a condemned society: the disgrace and dishonor of homosexuality. The disgrace and dishonor of homosexuality.

Paul is not saying that some homosexuality is permitted while other aspects of it can be dishonorable. All homosexual desire and activity is dishonorable. It’s degrading. It’s disgraceful. It’s not the only expression of rebellion against God, but it’s one that is distinctly visible in the culture and contrary to God’s design.

And with a society that is so far removed from God’s design and so negatively affected by the consequences, you might think that society would come to its senses. But by this point, it’s too late. Society rejects and suppresses the truth. The people’s hearts are darkened. Their desires are corrupted. And lastly, even their ability to think rationally is taken from them.

Let’s see the final phase in verse 28—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. ²⁹They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, ³¹foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

The final phase Paul describes is this: a complete corruption of the mind. A complete corruption of the mind. God gives them over, verse 28 says, to a debased mind. They completely overturn God’s design for life and for holiness.

In First Corinthians 6:18, Paul says that sexual immorality has a distinct effect compared to other kinds of sin. He says: Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

What is Paul saying there? Why is sexual sin a sin against your body? Paul doesn’t give us the specifics, but that can apply in a variety of ways. God designed sexual intimacy to be powerful. It’s intimate physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And that power can also corrupt.

That effect on the body can include diseases. It can include the physical and psychological consequences of guilt and shame. And based on what we just read in Romans 1, the consequences of sexual immorality can even include an altering of rational faculties. Eventually, you’re not even able to think straight anymore.

There are secular authors that have written about the effect pornography has on a young person’s mind. Some studies have found a correlation between viewing pornography and having smaller portions of the brain and fewer connections. Related to that, it was only about a month ago that a very famous young musician did an interview where she talked about how, in her own words, pornography destroyed her brain. This is just another practical example of what God has already told us. Sexual immorality is distinctly dangerous to individuals and to society.

The final phase of a society’s downfall, after a sexual revolution and a homosexual revolution, is a total loss of the ability to reason. God gives a people over to a complete corruption of the mind. That doesn’t mean people are less intelligent on an academic scale, but it means that the system stops being rational. It doesn’t make any logical sense. And I think we’re there already as a society.

Since the beginning of time, parents have taught their children that there are boys and there are girls. That’s basic human nature. Apart from rare physical abnormalities, you can immediately tell when a child is born whether it’s a boy or a girl.

But now we have programs and movies and public education telling kids that they can be whatever sex they want. And they do that by making an artificial distinction between sex and gender. “Maybe you have the biology of a man, but on the inside you might really be female.” That’s the message being taught. Boys can be girls, and girls can be boys. Or you can just ignore those categories altogether and make up whatever you want. It’s an abandonment of God’s design and an artificial elevation of human autonomy.

A year ago, the California prison system gave inmates the right to choose whether they should be in a men’s prison or a women’s prison, regardless of their anatomy. No other test is necessary. Science or genetics no longer determines what sex you are; it’s simply a matter of how you feel each day. That’s what it means to be transgender.

The opposite of being transgender, in case you’re not familiar with the terms being used today, is cisgender, which basically means “normal.” You identify as what God made you to be. The term “cisgender” itself is ridiculous because it was only created as a way of broadening the original definition of a man. Biblically, I’m not a cisgender man. I’m just a man. I was born a man, and I will be a man for the rest of my life. No amount of surgery is going to change that.

But according to the culture, your gender is your own. You get to pick. Facebook, I’m told, allows users to choose from over 50 possibilities for gender. Fifty! This is how far we’ve come.

Examples of society’s downfall abound. Let me just share one more. In the prisons in Scotland, inmates also get to choose where they go. And when researchers did a report on the transexual prisoners, they found that men who identify as female while in prison (and therefore stay in a woman’s prison) end up switching back to male once they get out of prison. Can you imagine that? Why would that be? We have a very simple explanation for why that is, but the researchers aren’t allowed to say it, so they have to keep looking for answers to explain this phenomenon. They need to mask their lunacy in academic language. They justify what we know to be sin with all kinds of cultural labels.

This kind of stuff shouldn’t surprise us too much. God has already said it’s going to happen. A society that rejects His truth will fall into chaos. Like Paul says in verse 32, this society will not only practice its wickedness, but it will also give approval to everyone who does the same. Perversion is no longer acknowledged; it’s celebrated and even mandated. Like Isaiah said of rebellious Israel, they call evil good and good evil. They put darkness for light and light for darkness. They put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

If you stand up for the truth and the holiness of God, you are the one who gets attacked.

One more recent evidence of this is a new law passed in Canada that came into effect on January 8. Bill C-4 passed through the House and the Senate without a single opposing vote.

In the preamble of the bill, it refers to the following myth. According to Canadian law, this is a myth: “Heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity, and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.” In other words, if you think it’s better for people to identify as their biological sex, you are wrong according to Canadian law.

The bill goes on to explicitly bans any “practice, treatment, or service designed to (a) change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual; (b) change a person’s gender identity to cisgender; (c) change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth; (d) repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour; (e) repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or (f) repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.”

Now, it will be up to the courts to decide how that law gets interpreted, but the way it’s written, it could be used to punish any pastor or even Christian who preaches, discusses, or counsels someone using the biblical and divine design for marriage and sexuality.

Because of that new law, many Canadian pastors agreed that today, they would do just that. They are going to preach on God’s design for sexuality, probably illegally. And many pastors in the United States decided to join them. This topic aligned perfectly with the kinds of issues I was going to address anyway, and I’m glad to be part of that group.

As a pastor, however, like I said already, my goal is not to stand up here and simply tell you how evil the world is so that you can go home feeling better about yourself. My goal, according to Ephesians 4:12, is to equip you as ministers of Christ for the work God has laid out for you. And so, to that end, after getting a theological framework for the condition of our culture, let’s talk now about the solution of our Savior. The solution of our Savior.

The Lord Jesus Christ came to bring the hope of salvation to the entire world. And now, the church of Jesus Christ is charged with taking that message to the ends of the earth. That includes the LGBTQ people at school, and at work, and in your own family and neighborhood. I’m sure most of us have homosexual or transgender individuals that God has placed in our lives. How do we minister to them?

That’s really the question that was bouncing around in my head this week, and I ended up organizing the response under three key words. First of all, we minister to them with confidence. With confidence.

If you’re listening to the culture, it can seem like LGBTQ issues are confusing or convoluted, and I think that’s part of Satan’s deception. It leads to people saying, “Well, I don’t really understand all that, so I can’t minister in that area.” That’s a lie.

You can go into any scenario with the confidence that God’s word is powerful. You should have the confidence that the Spirit of God can use you to minister to this person. They can be saved. They can come to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

Despite all the wickedness that the Apostle Paul was seeing in the culture, and which we read about in Romans 1, he also said this back in verse 16—For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Whether it’s a pagan, idolatrous, immoral Gentile, or a self-righteous, hypocritical Jew, Paul knew the gospel could save them.

Later in chapter 10, he says: Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

You need to be confident in the power of God’s word to save someone.

You also need to be confident in the power of God’s word to sanctify someone. They can be forgiven, and they can begin to experience victory over sin in their everyday life. He who began a good work in someone will be faithful to complete it. As we learn to hide God’s word in our hearts, we are more successful in fighting sin.

You need to express that confidence to those is the LGBTQ community, and those struggling with those kinds of thoughts. Tell them, “God is aware of your sins, but He sent Jesus Christ as the perfect sacrifice. If you will make a decisive turn away from that sin, and if you will trust in His death and Resurrection, God will forgive you. God will cleanse you.” That’s the promise of Jesus Christ.

Some people come to Christ, and they experience a kind of deliverance from that kind of temptation. Other’s don’t. Some people may live the rest of their life fighting a particular temptation. But by the Spirit of Christ, and with the help of the church family, over time there will be a growing victory and a growing joy in Christ. God will bring spiritual growth in all who trust in Jesus Christ.

One really important passage in this regard is 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. I’d like you to turn there with me. It’s right after Romans. First Corinthians 6:9. It says: Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, ¹⁰nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

From a human perspective, even the worst of sinners can be saved and sanctified by Jesus Christ. Amen?

So, that’s the first principle. We minister with confidence. Secondly, we need to minister with compassion. Compassion.

The heart of Christ is a heart of patience and compassion. If Jesus, who is perfectly holy, can respond to sinners with grace, how much more grace should we have as fellow sinners?

I’m not so sure that the debate over what causes homosexuality is all that important. There are some principles that might be helpful, but in the end, homosexual or not, we all face temptation, don’t we? We all have desires in our hearts that dishonor God. We can confess those desires, and repent, or we can give in to them.

When Galatians 6 talks about correcting a fellow brother or sister in the Lord, it says we should restore them in a spirit of gentleness, keeping watch on ourselves, lest we too be tempted. I think that’s a helpful principle even for evangelism.

We know that the gospel brings an inherent offense to sinners. We don’t need to add to that offense by our demeanor.

Maybe you remember Peter’s words in his first epistle. He knew that Christians in the Roman Empire were facing all kinds of immorality and wickedness. But he continually says we need to be holy. Don’t repay evil for evil or insult for insult. And when you are given the opportunity to give an account for the hope of Jesus Christ, do it with gentleness and reverence.

Going back to that list we saw in 1 Corinthians 6, notice that God mentions homosexuals, but he also mentions thieves and drunkards. We’re all in the same boat.

Homosexuality and transsexuality might have a distinctly visible rebellion against God’s design, but it doesn’t mean that someone given over to that lifestyle is in some distinct category of greater condemnation. They are sinners, and so are you and I

Maybe it’ll be helpful to put it like this. People don’t go to hell simply because they are homosexual or transsexual. People go to hell because they have rejected Jesus Christ. They have refused to surrender to Him as King. Homosexuality, along with every other lifestyle of sin, is an external evidence of that rejection. And before you and I came to Christ, we rejected Him as well. So, let’s have a compassionate response to the people ensnared in this movement.

The LGBTQ community is not our enemy. They are our mission field. They are people made in the image of God, and they were made to represent and to worship the God who made them.

Listen to how Paul told Timothy to respond to his opponents. This is from 2 Timothy 2:24-26. Listen to this in light of the LGBTQ community: The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, ²⁵correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, ²⁶and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

Obviously, the greatest example of faithful and compassionate ministry is Jesus Christ. When he looked out on the crowds, He felt compassion. When he saw the lepers, he felt compassion. And when he came across a rich, young self-righteous and greedy man, Mark tells us, Jesus felt a love for him.

Another wonderful example is Jesus’ interaction in John 4 with the woman at the well. She wasn’t a lesbian. She wasn’t transgender. But she was definitely outside the boundaries of what the religious leaders would have accepted. She was a Samaritan. She had been married to five different men. And she was currently living with a man to whom she was not married.

But Jesus spent time with her. He talked to her, and He gave her the truth. Jesus’ desire wasn’t just to get her to stop sinning. It was to see her become a worshiper of the living God in spirit and in truth. That should be our goal too. And we should work to that end with compassion and gentleness.

There’s one final word I want to give you for how we should minister. And we’ll close with this. We should minister with confidence. We should minister with compassion. And, thirdly, we should minister with conviction. Conviction.

What I’m trying to get at is the idea of urgency and faithfulness. Loving people won’t mean a thing eternally, if we never share the truth with them. We need to be compelled to bold proclamation.

It’s possible to be very bold but have no compassion. And it’s also possible to be very compassionate, but never proclaim the truth. And I think that’s where most of us fall. I think that’s where most of Christianity falls in this country.

I think our inabilities and our inadequacies in reaching out to the LGBT groups is symptomatic of a bigger problem. We don’t value evangelism. We don’t pursue it as a priority. We haven’t internalized our own identity as ambassadors of Jesus Christ. Like Peter said, we are here to proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s crucial. No one who has rejected Christ is going to be converted and saved without hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. And God’s ordained means of giving it to them is the church of Jesus Christ. That includes the public proclamation of God’s word, and it includes your personal interactions with people.

Like Peter said to the crowd on the day of Pentecost, we need stand up and say, “Repent of your sin! Save yourselves from this crooked and perverse generation!”

Again, we are ambassadors of the living God. God makes His appeal to this world through us. That takes boldness and courage.

Like the prophets of old, we need to be able to identify sin, expose it as sin, and then call people to repentance in Jesus Christ. We need to faithfully proclaim the message of Jesus Christ.

We can pray that the Spirit of God would bring another revival in this nation, but we don’t know if that’s going to happen. That doesn’t mean we can’t be faithful.

No matter how corrupt this society might get, we have the words of eternal hope and eternal life. We have the truth that our sexual desires don’t need to define us, and that in Christ we will have the final victory.

To that end, let me close with the words of Jesus Christ. And again, think about how this might be applied as we lovingly and boldly proclaim the truth to the LGBT community.

These are the words of Jesus Christ in Mark 8:38—If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ³⁵For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. ³⁶For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? ³⁷For what can a man give in return for his soul?

And here’s the closing verse of that chapter—For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

For the sake of our eternal destiny, let’s not be ashamed of Christ and His message. Let’s not be intimidated by a sinful and immoral generation.