Once, while looking at a church’s website, I saw an announcement on their front page telling about them hosting a woman who travels the world talking about homophobia and the Church and accepting your gay kids, but as a way to kick off their new acceptance of gays/lesbians (as church members) in their community. The bio of the woman stated that she had grown up a Christian and understood homosexuality as a sin. So when her daughter announced that she was gay, she had rejected her because she recognized such as sinful. Several years later, the daughter committed suicide. So after much healing and such, the mother had since been traveling everywhere preaching about accepting gays/lesbians, parents not rejecting them, and how it’s not a sin to be gay.
The problem I have with this, after reading more about this woman, I have to wonder if not she’s still confused? Not confused on the topic of accepting her child, but confused on how she sees sin, how she recognizes God’s views on homosexuals, and His views on homosexuality in general (I also think that many Christians have a misconception about this).
How Should Parents Respond When Their Kid Says They’re Gay?
Should parents reject their kid whey they announce that they’re gay? No, of course not! If your kid was heterosexual and sleeping around with somebody of the opposite gender, would you reject them? Probably not. Would you support their sin? Hopefully not.
Let me explain this in the sense of evangelism: If you were to reject every sinner out there, not having anything to do with them, and stayed away from them completely, then how would you share and introduce Jesus with them? You might as well be a monk, isolated, never getting out into the world. You HAVE to socialize with sinners somehow if you are to introduce them to Jesus. The same goes for treating people who are gay. You can’t ex-communicate them from the family because of their sin, for how else will they then come to know Jesus (soon or down the line)?
But The Apostle Paul Said…
One might say, “but the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 5 that you should not associate with people who indulge in sexual immorality.” Yes, this is true, but notice also what Paul said in verse 10, “(I’m) not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or the idolaters. In that case, you would have to leave this world.” See, Paul wasn’t talking about disassociating ourselves with non-believers, but with people “who claim to be believers”, yet are sexually immoral or greedy, idolaters or slanderers, drunkards or swindlers. “With such people, don’t even eat with them.” Why? Because they’re not living as people of Christ, and such behavior has the threat of behaving as yeast in bread, or food coloring in water.
“I Was Born This Way”
The problem though is when people who claim to be believers, including the Church (and/or denominations), confuse people and their sins. They’re even creating an excuse for the sin, and justifying sin! I have a Pastor-friend who used to always say, “Love the sinner, not the sin.” You see, God doesn’t hate gays…He hate’s their sin. God loves the sinner, but hates their sin. But when churches love the sinner and celebrate the sin, they’re moving away from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and moving towards the gospel of cheap grace (similar even to that mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5:1-3). They’re telling them not only that they accept them as people (which is good), and that Jesus died for them also (which is also true), but that they are also accepting their sexual sin, calling it “something they were born with” and can’t help from doing or being. Granted, they are actually correct in saying that they’re born that way, for we were all born that way – not gay, but sinful. We were all born in sin, all of us since the first sin of our original parents in Genesis 3. But saying that they can’t do anything about it is incorrect, because they can. They can invite Jesus Christ into their hearts, follow Him, get to know Him, and allow Him to transform their minds and desires from the inside out.
Remember in John 3? Jesus told Nicodemus that if we wish to even see the Kingdom of God, we must be born again. So we were born sinful, yes, but we can be saved from this sin – born again as a new, holy creation – and not just gays, but everybody who struggles with sin of any kind. But we need the saving power of Jesus Christ, and the costly grace that He offers, if we are to accomplish this.
The Gift of God’s Grace
Understand, God’s grace is costly, so costly that it cost the life of God’s One and Only Son. If Jesus’ dying on the cross simply just opened the doors to Heaven for all to enter, regardless of whether or not they know or have accepted Jesus through faith, and if all Jesus had to do was die, being the perfect sacrifice, then He didn’t have to live 33 years, appoint 12 Apostles, teach others the ways of God, insist on the repentance of sin and a change of heart, call forth the Holy Spirit, resurrect 3 days later, train and disciple people…nor would God have had to give the Jews the Law through Moses during the Exodus. Instead, God could have allowed His people to continue in the ways of the Egyptians. Actually, God could have just left them in Egypt, for what’s the point of having His own people if they’re not going to resemble Him?
Which Do You Want More?
Here’s the thing, and it goes with anybody who’s sexually immoral, not just LGBTQ: You need to choose which you want – God, or sin…a life of Godliness and holiness, or a life of godlessness and sinfulness. The Bible has (and the Church was supposed to have) mapped out what sin is. God loves people: red, yellow, black, white, brown, gay, straight, crazy, evil, etc. What God does NOT like, even HATES, is sin. Yes, God hates sin. I mean, yeah, God loves us more than the punishment of sin (death), which is why He first gave His people the sacrificial order, and later died for us (and was risen) – so that we could choose Him and He could then rescue us from sin – but even with such great love for us, if you choose to remain, or continue, in (your?) sin, then God will actually back off and let you continue in your chosen direction (Romans 1:24-32) – again, this goes for anybody and any sin. And I say “your?” sin because we’re also actually born into sin. So there’s the sin we’re all born into, and the sin that we commit, and both are punishable of death.
The Other Option
Sin also SEPARATES us from God’s presence…in fact, sin is what caused our separation from God in the first place, and is why Jesus had to come and die. But in order to accept Jesus, you must also follow Jesus. And to follow Jesus, you must willingly leave your old life behind – completely surrendered – and be baptized – born again anew, being cleansed from the grime of sin that you’ve accumulated since emerging from the womb. Understand also that accepting Jesus does not allow you to insist on your own terms. It’s either follow Jesus, or don’t follow Jesus, but there’s no in-between. You must be willing to give up your sin and life as you know it if you wish to follow Jesus (and/or be called a Christian). But if you insist on continuing in your sin, then you cannot follow Jesus, and you cannot call yourself a Christian, and you cannot expect to go to Heaven when you die — you’re like the man in Luke 9:61 who said that he would follow Jesus if only he could first go back and say goodbye to his family, and Jesus said, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God.” In other words, if you wish to follow Jesus, then you must do so now, not later.
So,
Parents: Don’t reject your gay kids, but do make sure that you do reject their sin and address it as such (this goes also for sin and your straight kids). Continue to love your kids and support them, but make it known that you don’t support their sin. Don’t try to fix them though, for if they’ve come this far, then they’ve concluded that this is who they are – any attempt to try and fix them will estrange them from you. Instead, pray regularly for them, don’t avoid them, and treat them as you would anybody else who neither knows nor follows Jesus. Set limits of what you’re willing to talk about and such, also, because again, you want to make it clear that you don’t support this, but you do still love them and always will.
Churches: Stop justifying sin. You’re to be like hospitals to sick people. But if you never treat their illnesses, then you’re not fulfilling the purpose of existing. So love what God loves, but hate what God hates, and don’t rename the sin to make it sound natural (renaming a computer virus may cause it to be dormant, but it still needs to be removed). Sin is sin, and it needs to be addressed and regarded as such. But those doing the sinning need to be loved.
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