Since Mother's Day, I've been worn down, exhausted. Lupus talk belongs on my lupus blog, but I've virtually given up on that one entirely, so I will just briefly mention a mini-flare I've been having: Intense fatigue. Headaches. Aching legs. Low-level buzzing and numbness in my face and hands. Pain in my ankles, big toes, and thumbs. And, last weekend, a burning, stinging butterfly rash across my face. Also, my eyes bother me a lot. The combination of eye issues and headaches makes it very difficult to blog, or even read. Sometimes I find myself lying with my eyes closed on the sofa, listening to sermons on YouTube, in a desperate attempt to do something that is at least somewhat productive.
Sometimes I listen to Tim Keller, or Colin Smith. Sometimes, when my head hurts too badly to think deeply, I listen to Focus on the Family broadcasts. Today, I tuned in Rachel Held Evans, a "Christian blogger and speaker" who recently died of brain encephalitis at age 37 and made the news. I'd never heard of her before she died, but CNN loved her. I was curious.
RHE (as they seem to call her) confronts the tendency of many churches to hide brokenness under a mask of perfection that is supposed to be a good advertisement for God. I thought a lot of what she said was good--better, in fact, than I expected. However, I was troubled, because she blurs the line between male and female.
Why is it that in order to be kind, loving, and accepting--things Jesus absolutely calls us to be--people so often fall into the heresy of equalizing male and female roles, and celebrating homosexuality? Of course, it logically follows that homosexuality would be fine, if a man and a woman are absolutely equal and interchangeable in every way. But that whole package of opinions is troubling.
Men and women are not absolutely equal and interchangeable in every way. There is male, and there is female, and we need both for the continuation of life. That is a biological, scientific fact. It's nature. It's natural. Homosexuality is not part of the natural continuation of life, and so it is a type of aberration. Homosexual activity does not lead to the flourishing of a species. Yes, there are ways to use what we know about science to overcome the obstacles of homosexuality in humans and produce babies anyway, but they are unnatural ways. In this day when we know that organic food is safer and better, and we avoid eating GMOs like the plague, how can we think that GMO children (or, for that matter, GMO adult transgender persons) are a healthy thing?
The way of righteousness, the way of God, leads to health. It leads to health and life, peace and joy.
The way of sin leads in the opposite direction, to disease and death, to conflict and despair.
The world is full of death, disease, chaos, conflict, anger, rage, fear, disappointment and despair. This is the default state of the world ever since the original sin of Adam. We cannot fix it by condoning it.
We bring relief by recognizing that this is what Jesus came to fix. Jesus came to turn our eyes towards God, and to indwell us with His Spirit who transforms us so we desire righteousness instead of sin. Jesus came to clean us from the filth and hopelessness of this world we live in. Jesus came to purify our hearts. Jesus did not come to condemn the world; He came so the world could be saved through Him (John 3:17). We were already chained under condemnation, before Jesus came. Jesus came to show us the way to freedom, by forgiveness through His blood.
We need forgiveness. Forgiveness from sin is our most fundamental need. We need God to forgive us, and then help us, by His everlasting presence in our hearts, to be remade into the image of Christ. As we have borne the image of the man of dust, so shall we bear the image of the man from heaven (1 Corinthians 15:49).
We must never forget that we are all sinners, every last one of us. We are all born to a spot on the bench on the death row of eternity, and it is only by the grace of God that any of us ever gains freedom and release from that condemnation. Yet, Jesus loves us. He loves us so much that He--the perfect, glorious Creator of the Universe--set His glory aside and came to earth to absorb the necessary wrath of God against sin, in our place, while we were sinners, before we even began to become righteous, because without His grace, we were incapable of becoming righteous.
I do not understand how this works. In essence, it seems, God divided and conquered. He divided Himself, so that He could punish sin in Himself, in our place, because He was the only One who could open the scroll, the only One who could face down sin and defeat it.
Part of sin is rebelling against God's righteous designs for creation, creation before the fall into sin, when He created male and female, to work together and help each other and care for each other in unity and love, to extend the life of humanity together. If we love God, we must love His ways and His designs, the way trees grow outward with expanding branches, and water ripples down a mountainside, and daylight follows the dark of night, and both sunshine and rain make the flowers bloom. We should not try to fight against the patterns and the seasons and the life cycles of creation. We should embrace them, sway and flow with them, rejoice in them.
Loving God's creation, His patterns, and His ways requires humility. It requires humility for us to admit that He is the unfathomably great Creator of all things: the origin, the source, the artist, the designer, the producer. He made it all, and He knows how it works best. He wants us to share in the joy of the Universe set right and working in perfect form. Someday, when He brings forth the New Heaven and Earth, this is what we will experience. But He wants us to practice now, to cooperate with Him in reversing the flow of death into a glorious flow of life and light.
Unfortunately, reversing the flow requires that we go against the natural flow, the bent we all carry to be selfish, to grasp for our personal interests and desires, regardless of God's will or others' best interests. Reversing the flow first requires a death to our own pride and selfishness, and then it requires incredible courage and wisdom as we navigate the tricky path of figuring out how to help others also learn to die to themselves, which nobody naturally wants to do, even though it culminates in the death of death and resurrection to eternal hope and life.
This is why the Great Commission is so incredibly difficult. "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you..." It is not good news for people to hear that they are on the wrong side of righteousness, that they are sinners in need of forgiveness, and that they need to die to their selfish desires and surrender to the will of God. Only broken people will respond to that, only those who have come to the end of themselves and tasted the truth of the bitterness of the way of the world. In His grace, God brings us to a point of brokenness where we can receive the truth of His hope, but Satan masquerades as an angel of light, constantly trying to avert us from seeing the truth about the darkness. Satan capitalizes in deception, and we are prone to wanting to be deceived, because we are prideful. Like the hard chunk in the depths of a massive pimple, pride is the core of the problem.
The problem is not homosexuality. The problem is pride. Pride is a much deeper and more pervasive problem than any sexual inclination, and it affects more people. Those who find it easy to marry the opposite sex and raise families, sometimes feel no compassion for those whose temptations are different from theirs (even though they have plenty of struggles of their own). Instead of showing kindness and compassion, they respond with revulsion and disgust. This is not the way of Christ, who regularly made people raise their eyebrows as He supped with tax collectors and prostitutes. Rather, this is pride, and pride begets pride. For every self-righteous person who looks at a struggling sinner and says, "You are disgusting," there is a host of struggling sinners who join hands to shout back, "You are more disgusting than we are, and you have no right to speak to us that way." It is a terrible cycle of ever-increasing pride, people who hate each other, calling each other haters.
Christ's followers are called to love as He loved, and He regularly showed love to sinners. He said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Luke 5:31). The irony, of course, is that none of us are righteous. Thus, Jesus didn't come to call people who do not exist. He only came to call sinners, which means that He only came for all of us.
However, He didn't merely come to eat lunch with sinners. He came to call us to repentance. Repentance is a change of heart and a change of direction. Repentance is when we recognize our sin in light of God's perfect love and righteousness, and we say, "I wonder how you could love me, a sinner condemned, unclean," and we invite Him to purify our hearts, to put His Spirit into our hearts and teach us to love the things He loves, to pursue the way of righteousness, to leave our sinful habits behind. Repentance produces change. Our habits, tastes and inclinations do not usually change instantly, but as we grow to know the Lord better, we become quicker to recognize the folly and emptiness of sin. Over time, it does become easier and more natural for us to choose righteousness over sin, willingly and joyfully. Yet, it is good, and humbling, for us to remember and talk about our struggles with sin, and how but for the grace and power of God, we would be stuck there. We should always remember that those locked in sin need hope and encouragement. It is not our job to shame people. The Holy Spirit convicts. The Holy Spirit in us will shine His light where He chooses to shine it, if we will only walk in obedience, humility and love.
Obedience, humility and love, these are the attitude and mind of Christ to which we are called. If only we could all put away our pride, every one of us, and stop insisting on our own way, our own desires, our own fulfillment, our own success or acclaim. If only we could trust God and believe in His perfect love, goodness, compassion, and mercy toward us. Oh Lord, help us, please.
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