Still Time to Care Review

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, to talk about a book called Still Time to Care by Greg Johnson.

The subtitle is What We Can Learn from the Church's Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality. And I've titled my review

Still Time to Deceive. Obviously, I'm giving my bias away at the beginning here. I wanna just say this from the beginning because it's interesting and I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

There were a number of reviews that I could read on this particular book. Now, of course, I listened to the book and took my own notes, but there were a number of reviews that I was able to listen to, or sorry, read on this particular book from astute theological thinkers.

When it comes though to some of the CRT -infused books, the Syncretization of Christianity and Critical Race Theory, social justice issues in that vein, there's not as many resources.

Color Compromise, I mean, has thousands of reviews. Be the Bridge has thousands of reviews.

There's Reading the Bible While Black, I think has like almost 2000 reviews. And in many ways,

I've had to provide resources for a lot of these things from ground level, from square one. Here's a review of these things.

However, with Still Time to Care, which only has like 68 reviews or ratings, it's been out, it hasn't been out as long.

It's been out since last year, the end of last year. But still, it's not being circulated as much at all.

There's a lot of information, which I'm glad to see there's information, but I'm wondering why is there so much about this? Maybe it's just viewed as more deadly than those things.

I don't know, what's your thought on that? Why in the world is there so much effort? And there's not enough effort, but there is a lot more effort to respond to this kind of thing than the

CRT -infused stuff. That's a curiosity that I have. Well, all that to say, let's talk about the book.

It is being promoted by big names like Tim Keller and Tim Keller says, Greg Johnson's Still Time to Care provides a good history and critique of the older ex -gay movement, which is a form of the prosperity gospel.

It's important that we know its history and in light of its implosion and ask now what? So he's talking about this ex -gay movement that existed, this kind of conversion therapy mixed with Christianity.

So kind of like a pop psychology that gave the impression that you could change your orientation, that you could become a straight, a heterosexual man or woman,

I guess, as the case may be. And I think it was mostly focused on men, but he's saying that that kind of a guarantee or that kind of a hope that's given to someone is a prosperity gospel, that you'll come to Jesus and you'll change from homosexual to heterosexual.

That is prosperity gospel apparently, which is a hefty charge. And I wonder whether it's sanctification prosperity gospel, the idea that you will become more like Jesus.

I don't think Tim Keller would say yes to that. I know he wouldn't, but these lines get a little fuzzy.

And I think what is interesting to me is that there are actual false gospels and I've gone to great lengths to show that the social justice movement conveys its own false social gospel.

And yet what you see from people like Tim Keller is they join with that. They give it, they aid it, they abet it, they promote it.

They don't seem to see it as a false gospel. And yet for someone who says, yeah, if you come to Jesus and if you practice spiritual disciplines and become sanctified, you can rid yourself of homosexuality or you can change your orientation or something, that somehow is prosperity gospel.

It just seems to me like there is a level of bias that certainly favors the left and punches way harder on the right with people like Tim Keller.

But that's one of the reasons I think we wanna respond to this book is because I think it is dangerous. I think it is deceiving people.

And I think Greg Johnson actually does a really good job at twisting quotes and giving the wrong impression. And I mean, he's good.

He's good. And I would say someone who's not familiar with or knows how sources should be treated, be careful of this book.

And when it's being promoted by people like Tim Keller, then I think it's worth responding to. And I don't really know of other video or audio formats responding to it.

There probably are. But I wanna add to that. So I'm gonna give you my response and I'll give you some sources as well at the end that will help you as you respond to it or think about it in the context in which you live.

So here's the gist of the book. Here's the problem and the solution according to Greg Johnson.

The problem, the ex -gay movement fostered an unrealized triumphalistic eschatology which lined up neither with scripture nor experience.

And he goes through in detail why he believes that. He doesn't think that people were actually converted from being homosexual to heterosexual.

He thinks that it's not in line with, it actually gives promises scripture doesn't give about a sanctification that will overturn your orientation.

And he just doesn't think that that's a guarantee that should be given. And he says that God was not promising orientation change.

He was promising the grace to forsake an unrepentant pattern of sex with other members of the same sex. So that's, it goes no farther really.

We gotta contain the sanctification power of Jesus gets kind of contained in this, that you will have grace to stop doing a particular action.

But that doesn't mean that your orientation changes. And we've seen from the Revoice Conference of which

Greg Johnson has been a part that there's this thing they call gay culture. And so it's your, the way you dress, the way you talk, all kinds of things.

And of course, this culture was developed and invented by people who were participating in homosexual relationships.

So it's like, so that we need to forsake, but somehow the, all the culture though, that invented this, well, that's fine.

The people who were participating in these evil things, what scripture calls evil deeds of darkness, and they have then developed patterns of speaking and living that are unique to them and their sin patterns.

For some reason, those, those things connected to that, those things, okay, but not okay to participate in the actual sin itself, the action.

And so this gets into the whole idea of orientation and desire and lust, and we'll talk about that.

But does, when you come to Jesus, does Jesus take those things away? Is it instant? Is it a process?

Is it different for different people? Is, but is there a hope that we should have that it will ever be taken away this side of heaven?

Those are the kinds of things that this book is addressing. And this book is saying that, no, we shouldn't have a bad expectation, an unrealized hope that these things are curable when in fact, you know, why would you even wanna cure them?

Maybe you don't have to cure them. Maybe they're actually even not so bad. It's just the action that's really bad. So we can already see problems probably with this.

We'll talk about them. But he also says, Greg Johnson, you need a church that will support your commitment to follow Jesus with your sexuality, and one that will not try to fix you, which always leads to spiritual abuse.

So he's talking about people who are homosexual. In fact, I think I wrote down that he dedicates this book to every gay person.

So gay people, homosexual people who read this, consider themselves to be that, they should find a church that isn't going to try to change them, to fix them, to confront them with their orientation and the desires and the patterns of life that they have, other than having promiscuous, or that doesn't,

I guess, have to be even promiscuous, but sexual relationships with people of the same sex.

Everything other than that is, you really shouldn't have a church confronting you on those things.

That's the idea. So the solution is you'll find churches that are affirming of your sexual orientation, even if it's homosexual.

That's the goal of all this. And he brings up some folks from the past that are evangelical role models,

Francis Schaeffer, John Stott, C .S. Lewis, Billy Graham, and he tries to use each of these individuals to promote the idea that they would have been opposed to the ex -gay ministries, like Exodus was one of them, that sought to give people hope that they could change from homosexual to heterosexual.

Now, on this point, and I'll get into some of the details, it's a little weak, in fact, more than a little.

In some cases, he is just a sliver of evidence he's trying to use, and it doesn't prove what he's trying to prove.

I don't know that today any of these individuals would be on his side, at least if they were, if you transported them from the times in which they lived to today.

Billy Graham, we know, was going on a more progressive direction by the time he died, but if you would have taken him from the point in which he lived and then transported him to today,

I don't think he would have been with the revoiced people. I don't think any of these people likely would have. And John, what gives you the right to say that?

Well, the thing is, I don't know. I'm just saying that they weren't being confronted in the same way with the same set of issues, and when they're writing, they're not even talking about the same kinds of things generally that Greg Johnson is talking about, but he's trying to recruit these people, is an appeal to authority, recruit these authoritative people so that Christians will reject the ex -gay ministries and reparative therapy and converting orientation, and they'll look to the heroes of the past in evangelicalism and see that they actually had it right.

And one of the things he does with C .S. Lewis is he tries to give the impression that C .S. Lewis would have, in some ways, supported same -sex marriage.

And I'll read you this section. He says, in the world we inhabit, after the landmark 2015 Obergefell versus Hodges case that legalized same -sex marriage in the

United States, Lewis's perspective on marriage law may provide a paradigm for Christian political engagement. Speaking about the then -contemporary political push towards looser divorce laws in the

UK, Lewis cautioned Christians against using political coercion to force non -Christians to act like Christians.

The question of the nature of Christian marriage is one question he insisted. But a different question altogether is the lengths to which

Christians ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by pushing for stricter divorce laws. He explained, my own view is that the churches should, frankly, recognize that the majority of the

British people are not Christians and therefore cannot be expected to live Christian lives. Now, full stop. How far do you wanna take this logic?

Well, I mean, they're eating people, but, you know, they can't be expected to. Oh, man, the pedophile's happening, but you can't be expected to.

Well, murder is legal now. You can't be, you know, racism is all the way, what

I mean by that is hatred towards other ethnicities, but you can't expect the non -believers, like this is a blank check if you really think about this, if you really wanna take it to a logical conclusion.

So we could either interpret it that way or we could maybe dig deeper into what Lewis was trying to say and maybe he's dealing with a specific issue at that time and on a case -by -case basis, he wouldn't view same -sex marriage the same way.

And I would, I can guarantee you just about, because just because of the times in which he lived and who he was as a, this would have been something that he wouldn't have even probably conceived of.

And he didn't write about it, so, you know, we didn't know if the thought entered his head, but we're now dealing with a lot of speculation and this is a dangerous thing to do.

And I think because of some of my background in historiography and stuff,

I look at this and I just think this is dangerous. This is trying to project into the future what

Lewis would have thought based on what he said concerning something that frankly is a lot, like a stricter divorce law.

Okay, so divorce is permissible in certain situations and not in others, perhaps.

Let's say that that's the view that Lewis had and that's a Christian view because Christians have very limited group of exceptions that they will accept.

I know some Christians don't accept any exception, but let's say majority of Christians think that for adultery you can get divorced and maybe for abandonment and that's it, something like that.

And this law, the laws of Britain are now beyond this. And Lewis is saying, you know what, this is just a, it's a symptom of where we're headed and this is, basically it's not the time to fight this kind of thing, that the pagans are gonna do what they're gonna do and to try to impose our view of divorce and what exceptions are allowable won't do any good because the

British people aren't Christians. But there still is an acknowledgement. Here's the thing

I'm trying to say. I'm not defending Lewis's view on this. I'm just trying to say, this is very different than saying, let's change the entire definition of what a marriage is.

So one is, yes, there is divorce, yes, there is marriage. We recognize these things exist in reality, but we're going to, in some ways, and it did undermine, we're gonna undermine marriage a little bit here, not the definition of it, but the condition of it by making it easier for someone to get a divorce.

And there are cultural differences throughout time you can look at to show how, to see how strict or narrow some of these things were.

God has not been silent. There's certainly biblical principles and commands that need to be applied here, but that's a whole different thing than let's just destroy marriage completely, the definition of it at a fundamental level.

What a marriage is by definition, let's destroy that. That is totally different, but this is what

Greg Johnson's doing. He's trying to recruit Lewis to say that there ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage, one by the state, one by the church, basically, and that's the paradigm that we should use,

I guess, with Obergefell. We shouldn't expend our efforts, and I guess it was wrong to expend our efforts to try to fight same -sex marriage, that concept.

And so this is how you, one example, I'm just, there are others, but you can see of how he kind of mishandles or gives an impression, leaves you with an impression that may not be accurate.

You may think, well, Lewis would have thought same -sex marriage was okay in a civil sense, and he would have just thought not in the church, and I don't know that that's the case.

We don't have the information to tell us this. He talks about Lewis's correspondence in private letters a lot as well, which also is interesting because it's things like, he had a friend who was homosexual, and I guess struggled with this kind of thing, and Lewis is generally supportive of his friend, not his friend's lifestyle, but he's compassionate towards his friend, which we ought to be.

And I'm mindful of even situations in my own life where I've demonstrated or felt the same kind of compassion on people struggling with the exact same thing who

I was friends with. So I know a little bit of what that's like. I mean, you could go to my text messages with that particular individual who was struggling with homosexuality, and you could maybe make the case that I was super lenient on this or something, because no, because I'm talking to a friend, helping them through something that they're trying to end or fight.

And so he takes things like that to try to recruit Lewis to his team. Lewis would have kind of, he would have been kind of supportive of the revoice stuff.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Or he would have at least been against the ex -gay movement, and maybe, but maybe not for the same reasons.

And so when you have an incomplete historical record, because these issues simply did not come up in the same way in the past, it's best to be careful and to not be dogmatic on these things.

But Greg Johnson, I wouldn't say is very careful. Now, and I'll give you some more examples of this as we go, but I guess the other thing

I forgot to say, and I almost said it was, it's interesting that in a lot of the sources on Lewis, it's private letters.

And so it means Lewis isn't publicly broadcasting his opinions on a lot of these things. It's not like Lewis is out there saying, this is the position we need.

To have, we need to accept same -sex attraction as a legitimate orientation or something like that in Christianity that doesn't necessarily need to be mortified.

It doesn't need to be overturned in place of heterosexuality. You don't find any of that.

And you don't, and the things he uses to try to say, well, Lewis might've veered in that direction somewhat, it's from private stuff.

So it's not even stuff that Lewis was intending to publicly broadcast.

All right, the whole point seems to be here that change rarely happens.

Change rarely happens when it comes to sexual orientation. Let me give you a few quotes here. Lewis, Schaefer, Graham, and Stott view the homosexual condition not as a cognitive behavioral challenge to be cured, but as an unchosen orientation with no reliable cure in this life, no reliable cure.

And he has a lot of this. He says, what is the paradigm of care? Be honest about the relative fixity of sexual orientation for most people.

In other words, you can't change. You were born this way. He says, we see that the locus of hope lies in the coming age.

This present age is not for a cure, but for care. So you can't change your orientation necessarily.

It's not impossible in some instances, but the rarity of these cases is still striking. So it's rare to ever have anyone be able to change their orientation.

Let's see. God has the power to do anything. It appears that this is something he has chosen to do only very rarely in this era.

And I could just go on. Paul wrote to the Corinthians to stress just how limited our transformation is in this life.

Can we not find a way to acknowledge the reality and persistence of sexual orientations that seldom change? And we are part of the lowercase secondary identities.

So anyway, he's making the case that we shouldn't expend effort. We shouldn't give hope to people who are homosexual, that they can somehow change to be heterosexual as a result of sanctification in the church as Christians.

Now, he does a lot of misrepresenting. He misrepresents cross -politic in one section of this.

He does some equivocation on the definition of the term attraction and tries to make out like the cross -politic guys who interviewed him were saying that it's fine to be attracted to in the sense of lust after another woman that's not your wife.

When, if you listen to the context, that's not at all what's taking place. He also misrepresents the

Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod's 1980 report, Pastoral Care for the Repentant Homosexual.

In fact, he doesn't even call it that except in a footnote. And let me just give you one example because there's a blog that really eviscerated

Greg Johnson on this, but here's one excerpt from it. Greg Johnson, let's see, here's what the report says.

If we who once walked in, I'm sorry, let me start over. If he who once was involved in homosexuality is growing in grace to such an extent that he can walk with exemplary piety before the flock, there ought not to be any reason for a generalized exclusion from church office.

Judgment must be made in individual cases by the session and or presbytery, keeping in mind those aggravations that make some sins more heinous than others.

Okay, that's what it says. Here's what Greg Johnson says about it. Here's his reading of it.

The RPCES report rejected any categorical exclusion to church office on account of sexual orientation.

It's not what it said, not even close. It just says, if someone who was once involved in homosexuality and growing in grace, and so someone who's changed, who's not a homosexual, who's not involved in that, then there ought not be a reason to exclude them from church office.

That's all it's saying. So Francis Schaeffer is misrepresented as well.

Let me read this to you. Homosexuality and lesbianism are growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, there have always been these practices, but now that society is becoming permissive about them, some who otherwise might have felt tempted, but who would have not entered into open practice, now easily fall into the practice of the thing.

It is, of course, all a part of our present post -Christian relativism. Schaeffer also says there are those with homosexual tendencies who can be cured, and happily, we have seen a number of cases here at LaBrie involving both men and women.

That's in the letters to Francis Schaeffer. Now, he quotes from this, but he doesn't pull that second quote there.

Actually, both of them, I don't believe, are in the book. So he doesn't give a full representation of what Francis Schaeffer said about this.

Francis Schaeffer seemed hopeful that there were cures, and that they had seen a number of cases at LaBrie.

He also relies a lot on, I think, letters, or I think he relies on Frankie Schaeffer to some extent.

So this is one of the things that kind of shakes my confidence. The point of the book is that churches need to be sensitive, and I'm gonna get into what that means, but they need to recognize that you shouldn't give hope to homosexuals, that their orientation will change as a result of being in Christ and being sanctified.

And so Christians shouldn't give that assurance or that hope. Churches shouldn't give that hope. But the people he recruits to his side, the people he vilifies, he cherry picks from the historical record.

And that's one of the things that shakes my faith to some extent in his research and in his way of depicting the history of this.

As Tim Keller says, that's one of the things that Tim Keller likes about it is his depiction of the history.

Now, another one of Greg Johnson's issues, in my opinion, is he takes homosexual orientation, heterosexual orientation and in these categories, frankly, that aren't even, these are psychological categories.

These aren't biblical categories. Biblically, everyone would be designed by God and corresponding to someone of the opposite sex.

If you wanna call that heterosexual orientation, okay, but it's just, it's hardwired into us.

That's the created norm. Then there's disorderedness. There are people with proclivities, passions, desires for things that are not intended.

In any pre -fall world, you would not have these things and yet they exist. And so what he does is he says that their heterosexual orientation has a fallenness to it, but a disorderedness to it.

And homosexuality also has a disorderedness to it, as if they both have kind of the same problem.

Now, the verse that often comes to mind when talking about whether a desire is ordered or not is

Romans 1 26. And I have it in the back, actually. It says this, for this reason,

God gave them over to the degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

It's talking about homosexuality. Now, Greg Johnson says this, and did

God design Adam to feel an internal sexual pull toward his neighbor's wife, to see another man's wife and have sexual feelings for her?

Was that our father's good design for sexuality? Or is that not like sexual attraction to a member of the same sex, also an effect of the fall?

Is that not internal corruption? Is that not over -desire? Is that not a natural longing for beauty or approval or intimacy that has been bent by the fall?

Let me expand upon the scope of the problem. We all know that heterosexuality is being drawn to people of the opposite sex, people as in plural, more than one.

And that's the problem. It seems to me that the polygamy of the heterosexual sexual desire, or more technically a polyamory or polyeroticism is also disordered.

Now, this is the thing, heterosexuality can be, you can be monogamous or you could be polygamous.

That as a category is not, it's not really the correct, if we're thinking biblically, that's not the category really we use.

We just, we say that there's men and there's women, God created both and they correspond to one another and anything outside of marriage would be wrong.

But that doesn't mean that everything outside of marriage necessarily would be disordered. There would be a difference. Pulling in from what we just saw in the book of Romans, there's something different about the kind of sin that the homosexuals and Romans were engaging in.

It was against the created order. It was not in accord with God's design. Now you could have a heterosexual person in the sense that someone who is attracted to the opposite sex, opposite gender, and they are, let's say, attracted to someone and outside of wedlock, they have a relationship.

Well, that's wrong. That's evil. That's sinful. It's not though, according to scripture, it wouldn't be disordered.

It wouldn't fall into that same category. Let me give you another example here that might make more sense of this.

Jesus was tempted in all points as we are, as Hebrews says, yet without sin. So if Jesus was tempted in all points as we are, does that mean that Jesus was tempted towards,

I don't know, bestiality, pedophilia? I mean, how degrading do we wanna get here?

I think most people would say, well, no. I mean, he was tempted in the category of sexual sin, but he wasn't tempted by certain fetishes that are unique to certain people.

It's not Jesus didn't, every single kind of imaginable sin that exists out there, it wasn't like Jesus had all those temptations in himself and had the desire for some really strange and weird things and disorders.

Jesus struggled with transgenderism, didn't know if he was a woman or something. No, no, that's not what it's saying.

It's saying that Jesus was tempted in all points and all the categories of sin and all the ways in which human beings sin, not specifically,

I'm not talking about the absolutes.

I'm not talking about the particulars. So not in the particular ways, but in the absolute ways, then yes.

And this is where we get into disordered desires. To be tempted in a disordered desire, there is, as Romans 1 puts it, there is a gradual fall into that disorderedness.

There are a series of things that happen before the point at which someone falls into that.

And Jesus would not have gone down the road of the previous sins that generally at least would have put someone into that category.

For example, when someone grows up, and we're having this more today, but looks at a lot of pornography and develops some very unusual attractions to things, sometimes that aren't even real.

Sexual attractions to cartoons. I'm not joking, these kinds of things exist. And it's because of someone engaging in, just warping their minds, engaging in fantasies and things that aren't natural.

And they start to desire things that just don't even exist in the real world, or things that are just so disordered, like shoes or weird things, that those become the things that end up getting them going.

It takes though, a pattern of sin, it takes previous choices made to sin in other areas to lead down into that pit.

And so those choices aren't available on the front end necessarily. And so this is the kind of, this is what we talk about when we talk about disordered desires.

A disordered desire is against nature. It's against God's design. It's something that is disordered.

It's something that is unnatural, you might say. It's something that is not, on the front end, it's not something that most people would say they struggle with or have a problem with before making certain choices that enabled them to descend into that particular sin.

And so Jesus, I would never say that Jesus was tempted by homosexuality. I would never say that Jesus was tempted by transgenderism or pedophilia or any of these things.

I would say Jesus was tempted in sexual ways. Jesus was tempted in all points, yet without sin.

He never gave into it. So heterosexuality or having an attraction for someone of the opposite sex is not an unnatural or disordered desire.

It's just not. That's actually the way that God set the place up. Now, it can be manifested and acted upon in ways that are wrong, that are against God's design, his plan, but the desire itself is not disordered.

That's the point. By definition, any kind of attraction, sexual attraction for someone of the same gender is sin.

There's no if, ands, or buts about that. There is no way. There is a way to manifest a right attraction, a right sexual attraction of someone who is of the opposite sex.

It's called marriage. There is no way to do that of someone of the same sex. So any manifestation of it is wrong, is disordered from the beginning.

That's a huge difference. I hope everyone can see that. That's a huge difference. Yet what you see with Greg Johnson is he tries to kind of make a morally equivalent.

Yeah, well, we're all just kind of the same morally speaking and we'll know. We all have sin.

We all have heterosexual sin. We'll send you to hell, yes. Without Jesus's atoning work and faith in Christ, yes.

Absolutely, just like homosexuality will. But don't think for a minute that that makes both of them just as disordered.

No, you're taking an order desire and you're practicing it in a disordered context with the heterosexual.

With homosexuality, there is no context. It's always, the only context is wrong.

It's just wrong because it's against the created order. So that's one of the issues that I have with this.

This is trying to make heterosexuality polyamorous in some way so that it's just as disordered or something to make it morally equivalent to homosexuality is this kind of, it flattens the sin in a way.

And he does that even more when he compares homosexuality and obesity later on. I think I might have that quote queued up later on.

And so he does this a number of times. I have a number of quotes here. I'll just read you a few. It seems to me that the polygamy of the heterosexual desire or more technically a polyamory, or actually

I already read this one. Nevermind, hold on. Let me get to the next one. Heterosexuality as experienced on this side of the fall is also a fallen orientation on account of its failure to remain exclusive to one's spouse on the attractional level.

Now this is where attraction in what sense? Yeah, if you're talking about lust, if you're talking about sexual attraction and this is something that you're allowing yourself to go down a path on, then of course, evil, sinful.

But if you're just noticing, hey, that person's pretty, person's beautiful, that's a natural thing.

Even if you're married, you don't stop noticing that there are people of the opposite sex who might be pretty or handsome if you're a woman.

I don't feel the least bit threatened. If my wife thinks that there's a guy and the guy's good looking and that's all it is.

He's a good looking guy. There's no threat there. There's no, oh man, you're committing adultery in your heart.

Now if you have the extra step of, and I desire that person and to be intimate with that person and I've let myself think these thoughts, then that would be different.

But this is where I think Craig Johnson is just, it's like he doesn't make this distinction really and this is one of the problems.

He says, if my internal sexual pole is disordered 100 % of the time, perhaps theirs might be disordered 90 % of the time.

So heterosexuals, people who attracted, men attracted to women, theirs might be disordered 90 % of the time.

So it's not that big of a difference. We don't need to set up a bunch of ex -straight ministries to help your sisters or brothers be cured of your unwanted attractions to other people's spouses.

That approach has been tried for 40 years with a similar fallen sexual orientation and we found that internal corruption didn't go away.

I don't tell straight men they're not real Christians for identifying as straight, even though that typically means attracted polygamy.

So long as they're not bragging about it and they recognize that it's disordered, I don't get too worried. I mean, this is ridiculous.

This is absolutely ridiculous. So it wouldn't, an ex -straight ministry?

No, it would be, identify the actual sin involved. If it's polygamy, if it's, you're actually, you want a whole bunch of wives and you're out there and you have a whole culture and a lifestyle based upon that, ways of dressing and talking and all the rest and you saying,

I'm a polygamist. I'm a polygamist Christian. Like they say they're homosexual or gay

Christians. I'm a polygamist Christian. No one's saying that. People are saying,

I'm a guy who's made in God's image and I have a natural attraction that he's given me for women.

And I have a wife, hopefully. And if I don't, then I seek to have a wife. And that's the natural way that course of events that things go.

There are a unique group of people that have the gift of singleness, which is a whole different matter. But in general, that's the way things go.

That's the way God designed the place. So he's conflating these things.

Like they're the same. Being polygamous and being heterosexual is just like the same thing.

Cause you might notice that there's other, there's women out there who are attractive or something. Look, if it goes, if it's more than that, if it's not just noticing that someone's attractive, but if it's being sexually, sexually desiring them in your heart.

And I think everyone knows what that is. Then yeah, of course you repent of that.

And there, guess what? There are programs to help men with that. This shouldn't be a newsflash.

I mean, and those things are very helpful for some people. There's accountability groups. There's all kinds of things, software and all kinds of things out there and tools.

So why in the world, what's this straw man? X straight ministries. No, it's

X straight. Like you're blaming the orientation, quote unquote, this propensity that men have for desiring women.

You're blaming that for the, for polygamy or something like that, or unconstrained lust.

And that's just not, that should not be. So this is, it's laughable, but it's, it's serious.

It's taken seriously here. He says, you can view us as believers exactly like yourself, just with a sexuality that is disordered differently from your own.

It's not, yeah. We all bring our various disordered desires to Jesus. The gospel is the same for all of us.

You are no exception. Well, it's true. We do. And we also bring our ordered desires that were manifested in disordered ways.

That's the distinction he's not making. And it's a key distinction here. He also talks about this concept of double repentance.

And this is another area where he misrepresents someone. I've taken these quotes from MD Perkins's review of the book.

And he talks about this guy named Lovelace, who is a professor of church history at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and a

Presbyterian churchman. In 1979, the dynamics of spiritual life. This is actually the quote here, actually, that I'm quoting you is from Greg Johnson's book,

I believe. Greg Johnson says, in his 1979 dynamics of spiritual life, that that book would lead countless readers into the beauty of a living orthodoxy of continual renewal.

His words on homosexuality in the church might seem radical in today's climate, but in the 1970s, they represented a transatlantic neo -evangelical vision.

Now, what he's saying is that Lovelace was, this guy was, he stands in opposition to the ex -gay movement.

And so we ought to listen to him. He's a good guy in this, right? Let me read for you the quote that Greg Johnson uses of his.

And then I want to show you what the full quote is. Here's the quote Greg Johnson uses. There is another approach to homosexuality, which would be healthier both for the church and for gay believers, and which could be very significant witness to the world.

This approach requires a double repentance. So Lovelace is saying you need a double repentance.

What is that? A repentance both for the church and for its gay membership. First, it would require professing

Christians who are gay to have the courage to both to avow their orientation openly and to obey the

Bible's clear injunction to turn away from the act of homosexual lifestyle. Second, it would require the church to accept honor and nurture non -practicing gay believers in its membership and ordain these two positions of leadership for ministry.

The church's sponsorship of openly avowed but repentant homosexuals in leadership positions would be a profound witness to the world concerning the power of the gospel to free the church from homophobia and homosexuals from guilt and bondage.

Now, the article that MD Perkins wrote on this gets into the details of the context in the

PCUSA and what Lovelace was attempting to do there as a more conservative member of the denomination, yet there's probably things we wouldn't agree with here.

Here's the thing though, here's the key thing. You notice in the middle of this particular paragraph, there is some ellipses.

There's a section that is cut out. Let me read for you the section that's cut out in context.

First, it would require professing Christians who are gay to have the courage to both to avow their orientation openly and to obey the

Bible's clear injunction to turn away from the active homosexual lifestyle, seeking a heterosexual reorientation when this is possible and adopting a celibate lifestyle when it is not.

He cut that out. They should seek a reorientation.

Well, that flies in the face of what Greg Johnson is trying to say, you shouldn't be seeking a heterosexual reorientation, but that's exactly what the guy he's appealing to is saying.

He just leaves that out. And here's some more quotes from Richard Lovelace. The attempt to persuade the conscience that homosexuality is sinful only if it is expressed in outward acts will not pacify the conscience, which grasps instinctively the fact that all inner motives, which are not perfectly channeled according to the will of God are sin.

The homosexual Christian must therefore learn to relax in the honest admission that his motives are disordered, but he must commit himself to their reordering or at least restrained through the power of Christ infused in the process of sanctification.

As he exercises the faith to believe that he is accepted by God because of Christ, he must also face the harder task of believing that he is free not to act out the compulsive drives that may still inhere in a part of his personality.

If the twin resources of justification and sanctification through Christ are preached and taught and counseled in our congregation, the barriers to reaching and delivering homosexuals will fall.

Delivering homosexuals. He says this, what Johnson doesn't ask is exactly, this is what

MD Perkins says, is what exactly did Lovelace mean by the term homophobia?

One really doesn't have to go very far to find out as Lovelace clearly defined it as an irrational fear and hatred of homosexual persons.

He saw this attitude expressed in the ability of the church, people to maintain an attitude of compassionate concern for homosexuals while disapproving of their active homosexual lifestyle.

He didn't give much detail beyond this, but he was describing an unloving attitude that shows no concern for the soul or state of a particular center.

So Greg Johnson is, when he uses someone like Lovelace, he is disregarding the things

Lovelace said that would contradict his own position or suggest otherwise.

And this gets into the, one of the things I think Greg Johnson and the Revoice guys like a lot, this double repentance idea that the church, they're using this obscure book, frankly, to promote the idea that the church needs to also repent of mistreatment of homosexuals.

Now, here's the thing, if you are in a church and that church legitimately mistreats homosexuals, then yeah, your church should repent, but don't think this is every, this is just characteristic of the church.

I'm gonna get into at the end what this means, because the key thing I just read for you about Lovelace's view of homophobia is, hey, look, if there's a rational fear and hatred of homosexual persons, then yeah, church needs to repent of that, churches that do this.

But is that what the Revoice people mean? Is that what they're reacting to? Is that what they think is wrong about the church?

I'm gonna give you some specifics later on, and I think you're gonna find it's different. There's also some data that's given.

The, Greg Johnson, the author, gives some sources on what he thinks. I didn't look deeply into these at all, but he gives sources on the fact that he thinks conversion therapy doesn't really work, that people who were part of the ex -gay movement never really became heterosexual or it didn't happen really hardly at all.

And MD Perkins, personally, provides in his review of Johnson's book. I think this was from MD Perkins.

I give some sources at the end to help you all out if you're looking to do some more deep research here.

But MD said that there were a number of other sources here that were,

I think this was from MD. Let me see, hold on. It's either from MD Perkins or the

Aquila Report. And I'm pretty sure. So anyway, no, maybe this was from Gospel Reformation Network.

But yeah, I think it was. Gospel Reformation Network said this. But the point is that there's information that actually contradicts this idea that actually shows that people have gone from homosexual to heterosexual and using these disciplines, including variations of conversion therapy.

Joseph Nicolosi, a well -known and respected counselor in reparative therapy. His work is dismissed by Greg Johnson, but he's actually,

I guess, fairly successful. And his colleague, Dr. David Pickup, reports daily changes in clients who come to his office as they discover their true selves.

Johnson cites research showing that gays are more likely to have suicidal desires because straight culture is dangerous for them.

However, Paul Sullins, professor of sociology from the Catholic University of America, opposes legislation that seeks to criminalize conversion therapy.

He demonstrates that undergoing sexual orientation change efforts reduces the risk of suicide.

Which, so Greg Johnson basically says that it's the opposite, that it increases that.

And Paul Sullins is saying, no, it actually, the research says the otherwise. His study found that, well,

I won't read the study, but regarding the efficacy of therapy, Professor Sullins' research on the situation in the

UK reveals that from 45 % to 69 % of sexual orientation change efforts, participants received at least partial remission of unwanted same -sex sexuality after counseling.

Full remission was received by 14 % of sexual attraction and identification and 26 % for sexual behavior.

And they cite some more studies here. So all that to say, there are some, there is data that does support the idea that some of this reparative therapy or conversion, whatever you wanna call this, that it has had an effect.

One of the things that I wanted though to say is that, cause I wrote this down in my notes, is that Greg Johnson gives the impression that the ex -gay movement was declined, that it was declining and dying.

Here's the deal. It wasn't just declining and dying. I'd suggest it was killed.

It was killed by literally, I don't even know how many states it is now. I think it's a majority. A lot of the states that have banned conversion therapy.

It's the political pressure that was brought to bear on these kinds of things that have really ended up killing a lot of this stuff.

He wants to, he kind of leaves that out and wants to just give the impression that, well, it's just these things failed.

Well, how much have they failed and how much have they been killed by forces that hopefully

Johnson would not agree with? Secular forces that want to promote homosexuality and make it a protected lifestyle choice.

So anyway, just thought I'd at least mention that. Other issues that I have with this,

I'm categorizing this as the inner directed man. Let me read for you some quotes. I'll tell you what I mean. Well -intentioned, the name of the interlocutor, this is in Greg Johnson's book, he says this.

So it's a guy named well -intentioned, has not made any attempts to understand, let alone move towards and accept the

Christian in question. So there's a Christian and there's well -intentioned and they're well -intentioned trying to help Christian.

Without realizing it, well -intentioned is functioning to police terminology, not to empathize or understand. Even if the intention is to help someone, the effect is that the sister or brother in Christ feels judged or controlled instead of feeling seen and known.

I guarantee a Christian will experience such conversations as emotional abuse. So you have someone well -intentioned who comes along and corrects, policing terminology,

I guess. And, but that's not the point of this quote that I wanna bring up is what, on what basis is well -intentioned wrong?

It's on the basis of the effect of feeling judged. Feeling judged is now the morally determined, the determining principle as to whether something's moral or not.

Do you feel judged by it? Here's another one. Until we know that our father actually likes us, we will lack the ability to get outside of ourselves enough to see the beauty of God's law, particularly at the point at which it tells us we are defective.

Well, you're under God's wrath apart from him. You need to repent apart from him, justification. The father is pleased in the work of Christ and he gives us an alien righteousness and he loves us and includes us into his family when we come through Jesus Christ.

And so there is, yes, I guess you could say the father likes us, but here's the thing.

It's not like the engine for motivating our sanctification. And so we have to, just look at the emphasis here.

We gotta make sure that people don't feel judged. We gotta make sure that the father, we gotta know that the father likes them first.

And guess what happens if we fail? The end of Christianity is upon us. Our children and grandchildren are watching.

I am not saying we are at risk of losing Christians who are attracted to members of the same sex. That's a given. I am saying we are at risk of losing the next generation.

We're losing the next generation because of our stance on homosexuality, because of the church's position on it, because of ex -gay movements, at which he really conflates the church and ex -gay movements as if they're the same kind of thing.

My church was never involved with that. I didn't even know what that was until I was much older. And then there's the flat lining of sin.

Greg Johnson says, when we treat the temptation to overeat differently than we treat the sexual attraction to a person of the same sex, it's the ex -gay movement walking dead among us.

Now, think about this for a moment. Wanting something good that the Lord's provided, he's giving you taste buds to cherish, but wanting too much of it is the same as wanting to sodomize someone.

No, they're not. That's why there's a dissent in Romans 1 and there's a certain, homosexuality is specifically referred to as disordered, as a natural desire there.

It's, there are degrees, there are levels, there's different civil penalties for different sins. And we know what the acting on that temptation would have, what would happen to someone in the

Old Testament under the Mosaic law if they were caught by two or three witnesses. We also know that you don't find those same kinds of laws, those civil penalties for something like gluttony.

And yes, gluttony is wrong. Gluttony should be confronted when someone is indulging in that.

But it takes a little time to figure that out sometimes, whether or not someone, I mean, you could look at someone and think maybe they're obese, but that doesn't always necessarily mean it's because of gluttony.

There's health issues that could be going on here. I mean, look, my people I know have blood sugar issues that they have to eat at certain times that other people aren't eating.

And, you know, do you immediately say, well, that's gluttony. I mean, you have to watch someone for a little while to kind of figure out what's going on with them.

And then, yeah, you confront it. Absolutely. And maybe we don't confront that enough, but to compare that with the desire to sodomize someone, something that is totally contrary to God's natural,

His design and a total disordered desire, it's just not the same thing.

It is just not the same thing. But there's a desire here to flatline sin. Yeah, I'll send you to hell, but it doesn't mean that it's all the same.

That's why places Jesus went are judged more than Sodom and Gomorrah, because they had more light. So the other thing, let's see, let me,

I'm winding it up here. Let me just give you this. This is the end here. And this is, you know, kind of ties together. What is it that Greg Johnson's after?

He wants a paradigm of care. Instead of converting people from homosexual to heterosexual, he wants a paradigm of care.

What is this paradigm of care? This is what he says. It's not control.

It's not fixing people. It's not, as Lewis cautioned, he says, using political power to coerce non -Christians to act like Christians.

It's not disgust. It's like Schaeffer, savior disgust for homophobic preachers who joke about killing gay people.

Well, I mean, I can be disgusted by someone who does that, jokes about killing gay people, as I can be disgusted about what kind of things gay people do, homosexuals do.

The biblical term, Sodomites, what they do to other people. I, this is just, this is

Greg Johnson's opinion. You're gonna find, what are we supposed to be disgusted by?

What are we supposed to be repulsed by? What do, what are we actually disgusted by?

I mean, are you disgusted? Are you offended when you see, maybe it's on television, maybe it's not on the internet, but when you see one of those gay marches come through town and the bondage and all that, shouldn't you be disgusted by that?

Wouldn't that be a sign that you have a conscience that's intact? When there's library drag queen hour,

I mean, does that disgust you? I guess it shouldn't. Should that not disgust you?

You know, that's one of the things, this gag reflex needs to be intact because that's one of the things that tells our conscience or shows that we still have a conscience, that we know that certain things are wrong and we can see it and we just know it and we're so repulsed by it.

And he wants to short wire that, to don't have that, I guess, disgust.

All right, not excluding your fellow believers, not avoiding, not blaming, not rejecting, not fighting, not hammering at them with your theology.

Well, what does that even mean? Hammering at them with your, is your theology that you need to turn and repent? If that's your theology, should you not plead with someone along, but also not compromising a biblical vision for sex.

Okay, so you can't do all those things, but at the same time, you can't compromise your biblical vision for sex, no matter what our surrounding culture says.

I don't know how these two are gonna, not hammering at them with your theology, according to who, what constitutes hammering?

Most people in the world would think just quoting a Bible verse, opposed to homosexuality would be hammering them. And with Stott, he says, not compromising biblical discipline when it's necessary, instead, feeling empathy towards sexual minorities.

And there, he's using that term, sexual minority. That is a Trojan horse term. Feeling empathy towards them.

Okay, I can do that, but can I also feel disgust? Is it okay to feel that?

What if, here's the thing that's interesting to me. Why is Greg Johnson telling me what I should feel internally?

Maybe that's part of my orientation for what constitutes disgust in my mind. And maybe that's something that's, maybe it's disordered, my gag reflex, but as long as I don't act on it and say the things

I'm thinking, then I shouldn't be judged. And I can just turn this logic right around. I'm Greg Johnson.

I mean, he's acting like a Puritan here, right? Isn't this what he's trying to argue against? Weep with them as Schaefer did.

Okay, if they're repentant, yeah. Champion their human dignity as image bearers. Defend gay people when under attack.

Okay, what's an attack though? Again, these things need definition. Is it an attack when they're denied the marriage, in a sense, because that's not what a marriage is and that's what they think it should be?

Champion their human dignity. Oh, I already read that. Like Graham calling the White House. So there's a story of Graham calling the

White House because Richard Nixon, one of the people that he worked with, was caught in this scandal involving homosexuality.

And basically Graham just says to be lenient. And Greg Johnson takes this as like, Graham would be opposed to the ex -gay movement.

It's like, you're picking a letter of a specific situation and it's shoddy. But anyway, like Graham calling the

White House, intercede for them when they fall. Remember that Jesus blocks the rocks that get thrown at vulnerable people.

Be honest about the relative filthy fixity of sexual orientation for most people. Okay, so you gotta now be honest that, you know what, most people are just gonna stay in that and there's no hope for them to actually transform.

False hope doesn't help anyone. Be honest about everyone's sin, your own above others, make the radical grace of the gospel central in everything.

Okay, the radical grace of the gospel is you're new, creation in Christ Jesus. That there's hope now, that you should be.

The power of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, why not pursue living in such a way and having desires that line up with God's created order and his will, why not?

But apparently you can't do that. That's one of the things you're not supposed to do because that would be shaming people and giving them false hope.

Okay, so you have to, don't give them the false hope that they can become heterosexual and have the rightly ordered desires and at the same time, be honest about the gospel, the radical grace of the gospel.

Like Lewis, he says, commend gay people who follow Jesus. Tell their stories, hold them up as models to follow, support them whether in celibacy or in biblical marriage.

Preach our Lord's calling for all believers, straight ones included, to prayerfully consider celibacy.

Pull straight ones included to prayerfully consider celibacy. I don't know if there's a neo -monk thing going on, but it's not something,

I think it's something you either have a gift or you don't. And some of the things are determined just by whether or not the opportunities exist in your life to have a spouse or not.

But to prayerfully consider it as a life choice, I mean, it's okay. If someone wants to do that for a specific reason, that's too dangerous, they're going on a missions trip, but there's something else going on here.

I'm just telling you, there's something else going on here that homosexuals in Christian circles for a long time have tried to make the gift of singleness, this thing that, and even the idea of a eunuch, what a eunuch is, they've tried to kind of use that to support the idea that there is this kind of single, this significant single status that Christians have that same -sex attracted people can kind of fit into, that there's this kind of model laid down for them that's a part of the church's, the vision for what the church should be.

And it's this role that exists in that. We don't get that in the scripture though.

You're not gonna find that like, oh yeah, and for the same -sex attracted people, be a eunuch or become, you have the gift of singleness or something.

You don't find this, but that's what they're looking for, a sense of belonging and a place to exist and feel good about themselves and all that, so anyway.

Pull single believers into the center of your church like Schaeffer, invite them into your home, into your family. Don't let them sit alone at home on Christmas day.

Show them what it means to be family in Christ, like Lewis, vacation with your gay best friend. Part of the problem is it's so vague, so much of it.

But the other thing is, if this is the standard and it's, this is the law, this is the new law, and the church, any

Christian in church that fails to meet this is now under condemnation for failing to properly treat homosexuals among them, then this is a much different standard than some of the people he's trying to draw inspiration from in the past, who are looking at this of like, yeah, don't hate, don't practice hatred against homosexuals.

Well, this is going far beyond that. This is, you gotta carve out a place for them.

You gotta do kind of like the Caring Well initiatives audit of your church to make sure it's, homosexuals feel comfortable when they come into your church or something.

It's giving them a special status, a special like protected status. And it's not challenging them and it won't push them to where they actually need to go.

It won't push them on the road to sanctification of mortifying their sin.

And that includes their desires. And I'll give you some verses on that. Let's talk about it. Here's some relevant passages,

Romans 12, one through two. Therefore, I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Renewing of your mind. It's not just what you do with your body. It's renewing of your mind. Romans 1, 26, we read earlier.

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged, what? The natural function for that which is unnatural.

It's a sign of judgment. Now, again, I said in the beginning,

I mean, I had a friend for a while who was homosexual and not a

Christian, thought he kind of was. And I shared the gospel. I walked through this with compassion with him.

And he was very open to me. He asked me a lot of questions. And it was an interesting experience in my life doing that.

And I did have compassion for him, but at the end of the day, he decided to choose his sin over the grace of God.

And I didn't mince any words about what that meant and how serious of a thing that is.

Never stop fighting. Never stop fighting. Righteous man falls seven times, but gets up.

I mean, never stop. And that's the thing is, do you believe in the power of God? Progressive sanctification, we're not there overnight, but we keep fighting, we keep desiring.

And look, if you get to the point, I'm just hypothetically here, you fought your whole life and you still have those temptations arise, no matter what they are, what sin it is, then it's not wrong that you fought your whole life.

You shouldn't have just given up at some point and said, well, guess I'm this. I guess I'm just a murdering

Christian in my heart. Yeah, I won't act on it, but I just hate some people and I want to kill them and I have struggled not thinking about it.

Or I'm just a, fill in the blank. I'm just a Christian who likes to really blaspheme and I think those words in my head.

And well, you fight that and you don't identify yourself by it, which is what Gray Johnson does. He uses this as part of his identity.

This is something that confers identity to him. And he minimizes the identity that, it's funny because in the book, he's like, he minimizes sexual identity, that we're so much more than that.

Well, we are, but it is still fundamental to who we are. And we have to believe who God says we are and designed us to be instead of what we feel inside.

And that's part of the whole problem with this is people are so involved. They lose themselves.

They lose their minds when they dive into themselves because they're trying to parse things they can't, they can't understand themselves and they're so focused on them.

And their emotions and how they feel and you just get lost rather than just focusing on Jesus, rather than focusing on what he's called us to do, who he's designed us to be and then living a life of repentance and confession and gratitude to him.

This is a hopeless thing that Gray Johnson's giving. I don't know if you see that, but this is hopeless. This is just, this is sad to me because there actually really is hope.

And I am privileged to have a number of friends who were living a homosexual lifestyle of sin and are now, they have families, they are saved by the grace of God and they rejected that.

And you would, by the way, not even know in many of the cases that they ever were in that because they're not trying to retain any of the elements of that particular lifestyle.

Colossians 3 .5 says, therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, and evil desire and greed, which amounts to idolatry.

So you should consider your earthly members dead to evil desire. Guess what? Homosexual temptation is evil desire.

Desire for someone, the desire to sodomize someone is evil desire, okay?

There's no ifs, ands, or buts about this. The desire to have sex with a woman and you're a man is not an evil desire.

In and of itself. Now, it can be evil if it's directed at the wrong object.

But the desire in and of itself, definitionally is not wrong, it's something

God given. But it is always wrong to desire something God, that is impermissible in all circumstances.

Now, one of the reasons I brought this up is that word evil desire there, the word desire, that is the same word in Greek for Romans 1 .26,

degrading passions, that word desire and the word passions, same word, okay?

Ephesians 3, 20 through 21, now to him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works within us, to him be the glory in the church.

He's able to do, and that's what I think the hope that needs to be there. Look, he is able, don't ever give up.

Romans 6, 11 through 14, even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead.

And your members as instruments of righteousness to God, for sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace.

I think scripture is pretty clear on this. It's not just that the action level, it's at the desire level.

And this is a struggle. And admittedly, we need to help people through this in the church.

We do, we really do. And we don't minimize this and say, it's not a big deal. It is, but we don't give up.

We don't give up on these things and just say, well, I guess that's who that person is. And be careful, don't give them hope.

If you give them hope, then you're giving them the prosperity gospel. Oh my goodness. If you give them hope that they could change and Jesus could change them to have desires that are ordered the way that he wants them to be according to his will, then man, that's an over -realized eschatology.

You shouldn't do that. I mean, that's not where we wanna go. And that's where Greg Johnson would have us go.

So here's some resources. I'm going to put the slideshow link in the info section for patrons, and you'll have that available to you along with the video.

I hope this was helpful for you all as you're thinking through these things, because I suspect that this issue's not going away, that it's actually just gonna increase and that this might be one of the next big issues possibly, that things kind of revolve.

So one day it's the Me Too stuff and it's the BLM stuff, and it depends on the day.

It's gonna be the environmental stuff, but I think this stuff's gonna come back around. And so we need to be prepared for it.