TPW #17 | Response to "Revoice" speaker Ray Low

The Danger of False Teachers and the Need for Warfare for the Truth

Paul warns that evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse deceiving one another and being deceived. The reason Paul told Timothy that was because he needed to be ready to spend the balance of his life in uninterrupted warfare for the truth.

The most dangerous people alive today are always, always, always ordained ministers. They're the most dangerous people in the world, especially the ones that people think are Christians who will sell you theological poison to the damnation of your soul.

Folks, I just want to warn you about something. Every heretic in the entire history of the church without exception has taught their heresy in the name of being faithful to Scripture. What happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross?

That was the day of wrath. That was the day of judgment. That is the day of final salvation. Brought back in time and applied to us once for all at the moment of our effectual calling when we repent and believe in our unity to Christ.

Introducing the Revoice Conference and the LGBT Label

Welcome to the Protestant Witness. This is Pastor Patrick Hines here in lovely, beautiful, sunny Kingsport, Tennessee at Bridgewell Heights Presbyterian Church back in my study. Today, I want to do a program on the Revoice Conference that was held at Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis.

Recently, it was July 26th through 28th in St. Louis. Those talks are posted now. There's a YouTube link I was sent and that has all the talks. I guess some of them, I don't know if they recorded all of them, but from this conference.

Now, people have been hearing about this for quite some time and I was really curious. How exactly are they going to go at this issue? There was an episode of a program called Cross Politic where there's, I guess, there's three pastors on there who talk about different things.

I've never heard of it before, but someone sent me a link to that and I watched it and they interviewed Greg Johnson, who is the pastor of the church that hosted the conference. It was a pretty intense conversation.

There were a couple times I wondered if Greg Johnson was going to get offended and hang up, but he didn't. He held in there with them and went through the whole program. These guys, you know, I'd never heard of that program.

In fact, I don't even remember their names, but I agree with most of what they had to say as far as their critique of this whole concept. Now, I'm looking at the Revoice .us website here. Revoice 2018.

Supporting, encouraging, and empowering gay, lesbian, same-sex attracted, and other LGBT Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality. There's something I want to say before I get into the talks here about that.

If you already have accepted as a legitimate label LGBT Christians, I want you to think about what each one of those letters means. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Christians. So they can flourish while observing the historic Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.

I did a video a while back called, There is no LGBT Community. Now, I figured in these talks, they're going to be throwing that phrase around constantly, just like Danny Cortez did, just like Matthew Vines does, just like Julie Rogers did, even while she was still professing to be a conservative.

Now, of course, she's gone off into, you know, full-blown gay marriage proponent. In fact, I think she's engaged or is actually married to a woman now. Julie Rogers was someone that people were putting out a link, I kept seeing it all over the place on social media, where she had done this talk about 18 minutes long about this issue, and it was very disturbing to me.

And she did say in that talk, she didn't accept the revisionist arguments about sexuality, and she thinks the Bible does condemn this and everything, but she really had a problem with this, like she has the same-sex attraction and just can't seem to get rid of it.

And after the talk, after listening to that, I thought, at no point did she say anything about sin or that this was sinful or that this was perverted or twisted. There was just no part of that conversation.

And I made a comment on social media, and of course, I've left all social media now. I'm not on Facebook or Instagram or anything anymore because it's just it's depressing, and I get, I'm on the email lists of good reform book publishers and things like that, which is one of the main reasons I was on Facebook.

But watching the collapse of everything is profoundly depressing. The collapse of discernment in reform circles, the collapse of the gospel, the collapse of sanity when it comes to this issue. But anyway, I made a comment on a link that someone posted on Facebook.

I said, I'll give her two years. In two years, she will be a full-blown proponent of gay marriage. And people, you know, came down on me. Oh, that's so unloving and everything. Well, it took seven months, I think, as I recall.

Seven months later, she abandoned the church completely. She left Wheaton. I think she was fired. And then she's doing interviews on, you know, gay Christian stuff, and she's a full-blown proponent, and she's friends with Matthew Bynes and all the rest of them.

So it didn't take two years. And you know, I didn't know that for sure, but I thought, this is well on its way to that. So I've wondered, how are these guys gonna do this at this conference? I've wanted to talk about this, but I wanted to wait until the talks were actually out there, because people would say, oh, you're jumping the gun.

You're just jumping to conclusions before you even give these people a chance to talk. So I listened to really two talks in one video. One is Nate Collins. The other one is a fellow named Ray, who looks like an Asian fellow.

Anyway, I was really disappointed by some of the things that were said, and rather shocked at some other things that were said. This, in some ways, reminded me of David Gushy. His keynote address at one of Matthew Bynes' Reformation Project conferences, where Gushy really portrays, you know, people who are like this, people who have these struggles, LGBT, whatever, as being victims.

That they are victims of people who don't, I guess, support or encourage or whatever. But anyway, before we start the talk here and start going through these talks, the guys at CrossPolitik published a website, Revoice .xyz, that was really spot-on in terms of taking the the premises of the Revoice conference and pushing it into other areas.

They said here, supporting, encouraging, and empowering racist, pedophile, and other minority Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic Christian doctrine of marriage, sexuality, and racism.

And of course Greg Johnson was offended by that, and they let him know that on the CrossPolitik interview that he did. But anyway, so here you have the first speaker, his name, his first name is Ray, but his story is interesting, and there are some very troubling things that are said here, so I hope that this comes through clearly.

What a Pastor Is and How a Call to Ministry Is Discerned

Yes, hear me? Great, thank you. So Nate asked me to share a story about what it means to lament and to share a story that should cause us to lament.

This was an interesting way to start all this off. They talk about.

Lamenting, and.

At first, when I first started listening to this, I thought maybe what they're gonna say is they lament this sinful desire that they struggle with and have a problem with, and they lament sin. Lamenting over sin, that's a biblical thing.

We mourn, we grieve over our own sinfulness, and we're ashamed of our own sinfulness, and we should be ashamed of our own sinfulness, and we should lament our own weaknesses and our own sinfulness, but that's not where he goes with this.

Listen closely.

I wonder if that's gonna be really hard.

So to start off my story, I want to pose a question to you guys. What is a pastor?

This was interesting. This was an interesting way to start. What is a pastor? What, what, how does he say it? What do you look for in a pastor? Well, we're told in Scripture what to look for. That's defined clearly in 1 Timothy chapter 3 and in the book of Titus.

It's right there. The qualifications and what a pastor is supposed to, what you're looking for. What are your qualifications?

They're in Scripture. Some might say that a pastor is someone who is supposed to preach on Sunday. Some might say that a pastor is somebody who is supposed to listen to your problems and to help you with them.

For me, a pastor is someone who lays down their life for the sheep. I know that's what Jesus did for us. I know that's what Jesus talked about in John chapter 10 when he speaks about the good shepherd.

And halfway through college, I myself received the calling to become a pastor as well.

Now, I wish that he had had developed this a little bit more because I think that there's a biblical way that a person is called to the ministry. Yes, there is a sense of inward calling, but I've been asked the question many times.

How do you know? How do you know? How do you know if you're called to the ministry? And the first thing I always say to people is the church of which you are a member will let you know. The first thing you need to do is join a church and be a long-haul member of that church and participate in all of its activities.

Be aware of what needs prayer. Be aware of what's going on. Be aware of who the shut-ins are and participate and be a lively member of a local church. Your local church will let you know if you're called to the ministry.

There is a sense of inward calling, yes, but that has to be confirmed by your church. And so guys that kind of drift around and they're not really a member of any church, but they they feel called to the ministry because they love to read about theology and they study and they argue with people online.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you're called to the ministry. A calling to the ministry is something that your local church will let you know. If you have those gifts, the people of God will recognize them and and ultimately they will let you know.

They will let you know.

The Claim That an LGBT Pastor Would Be a Blessing

Now you would think that the idea of an LGBT pastor would be a wonderful thing.

That was a very strange statement to me. That would be a wonderful thing, an LGBT pastor? So a person who's T, transgender? Someone who's transgender would be a great pastor? Folks, someone who has gone through the lie of transitioning that there's you can't make yourself the other gender.

I don't care how much you mutilate and do hormone therapy. God doesn't make mistakes when it comes to gender assignment. Okay, a transsexual pastor would be a great thing? A lesbian, gay, or bisexual pastor would be a great thing?

You would think that? I wouldn't think that. I thought that was just bizarre that he would make that comment, but listen to how he reasons here.

After decades of, you know, just LGBT people being kicked out of their churches,.

Who better to bring about... After decades of LGBT people being kicked out of their churches? Kicked out of their churches? What do you mean by this? Someone who has a struggle like this, but is a Christian, and stands their ground, and fights against it, and fights the good fight?

They're not gonna be thrown out of their church. Now if someone says, this is who I am, it can't be changed, and I will not repent of it. Yeah, they would need to be thrown out of a church. No one is allowed to be unrepentant about such gross sin.

And the only reason that people are thrown out of churches, that people are excluded from churches, is because the church, the people of God, are supposed to be holy. They're supposed to be set apart.

They are set apart by God's word, and they have a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and they are repentant for their sin. The only reason, in the final analysis, the reason that people are disciplined, or thrown out of churches, or excommunicated from churches, is unrepentance.

They will not repent of whatever their sin is. Everybody has sin. Everybody struggles with sin, but what marks a Christian, what sets them apart, is that they do struggle with it. They don't allow sin to be their identity.

They're not willing to say, yeah, this is just what I am. I am a serial adulterer. Yeah, but you're married, aren't you? Yes, I'm married, but I'm a serial adulterer, and I can't change it, and that's just who I am.

That's my identity. Of course not. Or I'm a thief. I can't stop stealing. I'm just, I steal constantly. No.

No.

A Christian is someone who is repentant for those things. Decades of LGBT people being excluded from their churches. The only reason anyone who struggles with any sin would be excluded from a church is if they refuse to repent of that sin.

Without this change, then someone who understands, in a position of leadership, who knows. Someone who would never judge or condemn you for being attracted to the same gender or feeling like you don't fit the stereotypical gender norms.

That's another thing that's weird. So now, God's design, his creation order design for men and for women,.

Is.

Stereotypical. Instead of, according to God's good creation design. Now it's because you don't fit into stereotypical gender norms. They're not stereotypes. It's just the way things are. Okay, God designed men and God designed women in such a way that romantic and sexual love can only righteously take place in a marriage union between one man and one woman.

So I thought that was another just odd comment of someone who would never judge or condemn you for being attracted to the same gender. We judge and condemn constantly. When I see desires in my own life that are wrong, I judge and condemn them.

When I have men that I'm accountable to and we talk and are transparent and there's sin that's confessed, we together judge and condemn that sin. Because sin is evil. It's contrary to the character of God.

And as a Christian, I want to fight the good fight against sin. I want to be holy. So it's not a matter of, well, they would never judge or condemn you for being attracted to the same gender. We have to judge and condemn that and the person engaged in it, just as we judge and condemn ourselves when we sin.

And so there's this very postmodern of you can't judge or condemn anybody. Folks, the day that we think we can't judge and condemn people and judge and condemn ourselves in the light of God's law is the day that we no longer think that we need a savior from sin.

That's what my friends told me as I finished my seminary degree and prepared to apply for pastoral jobs.

His friends were telling him, you'd be a great pastor because you're gay. Because you'd never judge or condemn people for being attracted to the same gender. I wonder if this fellow would preach a sermon denouncing homosexuality, as the way the Bible does, as a degrading passion, as a vile, perverted thing.

I don't get the feeling that he would.

They told me any church would be lucky to have you, Ray. You're going to be such a blessing to your church. The church needs you. But I soon found out that this was far from the case. You guys can probably imagine the first thing, the first question that they ask you whenever you apply for a ministry position.

Tell us your testimony. How did you come to faith?

See, now the first thing that I thought here was, I would love to know how he shared this with search committees. I would love to know did he say I had been fighting this desire and still fight it. It's an ongoing struggle in my life.

With the help of God, I've been able to overcome it to some degree. It's still very much there though. It's something that I would ask for prayer. I still fight it. I stand my ground and fight it. It doesn't identify who I am as a person.

But I hate this sin and I'm working to overcome it. By the grace of God, I think more and more and more. I'm going to overcome it. I'm going to die more and more unto it and live more and more into righteousness.

Is that how he described this? I don't get the feeling that it was.

And you can probably imagine what a surprise it was to them whenever I shared my story and my sexuality.

That's the strange thing. When I shared my story and my sexuality. See, this is one of the problems here. This is just taken as part of who they are. This young man basically would say, I am a gay Christian.

That's just who I am. I am same-sex attracted. That's what he's saying. That is his identity. And I say, no, you are a man designed by God for emotional and sexual fulfillment and love and happiness with a woman, not with other men.

Now, if this is a struggle, then please do struggle. Keep fighting, keep standing your ground. That's how I counsel anybody that comes to me and tells me they have a certain sin. Why do these people think that as a pastor, there's just this one set of sins, LGBT, this kind of sexual identity stuff, that I'm supposed to just accept and be affirming and encouraging.

If people express that they have a sin, they struggle with coveting, they struggle with gluttony, with overspending, with anger, with being a serial adulterer, with pornography. Yes, those things, I'm supposed to say, yes, those are sinful, those are evil.

We're going to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight against those things and in Christ, you're going to overcome them. But gayness, homosexuality, no, no, no, no, you don't condemn or judge this. You just accept it.

I don't understand why these people think this gets some special status here. Now, listen to the way he describes it.

And to be fair, I would be as clear as I possibly could. I would talk about how my sexuality actually brought me to church in the first place because I was questioning and seeking answers and it's the reason why I'm a Christian today.

It's the reason you're a Christian today. You were asking questions about your sexuality, about this same-sex attraction you had, and I would assume that if it's the reason you're a Christian, you could see that this is contrary to the will of God.

This is a degrading passion that you have. This is wrong. It is perverted, twisted, and that there is grace and there is forgiveness for such perverted desires and perverted behavior. I would hope that that is, okay, well, maybe that was the main sin that you were dealing with before you became a Christian, but now you've found forgiveness for that sin in your life now.

That's not made clear and that's one part that's troubling about this.

Learn what it means to surrender my sexuality to the Lord and how I'm committed to a life of obedience. And how about how I agree with the church's beliefs on marriage and sexuality and I have no agenda to change it.

That's encouraging to me that he said that the way that he did. He has no agenda to change it. He agrees with the church's teaching on it. That's good. I commend him for making that statement, but listen to what follows.

It is very troubling.

But every time I shared I could already see the gears turning in their heads. I could feel their opinion changing of me as I went from being a young energetic and outgoing candidate to becoming a danger.

In their eyes. See, but the thing is I would really really want to know how did he share this? How did he share it? That's not made clear and because of that he's making these these search committees or the people that interviewed him.

He's demonizing them as these judgmental hypocritical, you know, bigoted people. When I wonder how he shared this. What exactly did he tell these people that made them kind of do a double take and go, I don't know about this.

A danger to their church. I had one interview with a church that lasted no longer than 15 minutes before I was told that I was not a good fit, which is the most diplomatic way that a church likes to put it.

And I had somebody tell me in another church that on paper I was the perfect candidate. But my sexuality made it difficult for them to hire me.

See here again, it's just taken as an identity. My sexuality. This young guy I think would just say I'm a gay Christian. I'm a gay Christian. I think that's how he would just, that's just the way it is.

And this is one thing in listening to just his talk and then the one after it, Nate Collins's talk. The thing that really burdens me, the thing that really breaks my heart is the complete hopelessness that is being communicated here.

There's no hope being communicated that you can overcome these things in Christ. And I'll tell you, as far as I can tell, I really think I was converted when I was about 18 years old. It might have been a little bit earlier than that, but things radically changed in my life when I was 18.

The reason I think it was then is there was the beginning of a massive war where before there had just been compromise and playing around and managing sin. When I turned 18 and really started getting into the scripture and was really convicted that I was hell fodder and saw Jesus Christ in his perfect saving glory, especially in the book of Hebrews, Hebrews 5 through 10, I just read that like obsessively compulsively over the course of months.

Every day I'd come home and read Hebrews 5 through 10 and just looked at the priestly work of Christ and it just drew tears from my eyes. It was just so glorious. And seeing how he had saved me perfectly from all the terrible things that I had done and thought.

And there was an all-out war declared on my sin. I hated my sin. I hated myself. I loathed myself over all the things I had done, all the things I had tolerated, all the things I had compromised on in my life.

And it was just no more. No more of this. And I am going to be at war with sin now, and I'm going to be fighting against sin right now. That's the thing that's missing from this is where is the desire to fight against this sin?

Because it's contrary to the character of our Lord. It's contrary to our God. And we want to be holy in this way. We want to be rid of these desires. We want to be rid of all of the sin in our lives. That's not what comes out of this at all.

It's not what's coming out of here at all. And that really bothers me. This is pure.

Hopelessness.

This is what we are. Can't change. We'll never be delivered from it. And I just think, you know, by the grace of God, I am so different than what I was when I was 18. I'm 43 now. So God has been at work for a long time in my life.

And I think how much of a distant memory so many sins are that I felt like, I mean, they just had me in the vice grip, like a death grip. I just couldn't break free from it. But over time, you stand your ground.

You stand shoulder to shoulder with God's people. You get help from pastors and elders. You accept counseling, and you go, and you fight, and you fight, and you fight. And by the grace of God, you change.

You do die more and more into sin, and you do live more and more unto righteousness. What's communicated here so far, what I've heard, this talk and Nate Collins, hopelessness. Pure hopelessness.

I come from an Asian American background. Believe me when I say that I know what it means to work hard, to be really successful, and to do everything right.

And I had.

I went to church all of my teenage years. I joined a Christian fellowship in college and became one of the most prominent leaders. And I finished my Master of Divinity degree in seminary in only two years.

I did everything formidably right to become the perfect candidate. And it still wasn't enough. No matter how much I had sacrificed, no matter how much I had laid down my life to get to this point, it still wasn't enough.

And the one thing I couldn't change about myself became the very thing that disqualified me in their eyes.

I think that's the problem. That's the problem. If I was on a search committee and someone said, I am a gay Christian, I would definitely explore that. I would say, well, wait a minute. What are you saying like this?

What are you saying by that? He says, the one thing I could not change about myself. Well, that's certainly true. We can't change ourselves, but we can roll up our sleeves and put up a good fight. When men come to me and tell me they've got problems with this kind of thing, and people have told me they have this kind of a struggle in their life.

I had a guy tell me once he was sexually attracted to little kids. Yeah. You know what I told him? I said, it is good that you recognize that is evil and you need to fight that sin. This guy sounds like he's not fighting anymore.

He's, yeah, I'll go along with the church's teaching, but this is just who I am. I would not be okay with a pastor identifying himself like that. I would not be okay with that. If he said, this is an ongoing struggle that I have, but I fight it.

It's a daily struggle. I know that it's perverted. I know that it is evil. I know it's sinful and it's wrong, but I stand my ground and with the help of other men in my life that love me dearly and have counseled me and helped me and prayed for me.

I've been able to overcome it to a very significant degree and my hope and prayer is that eventually it'll be gone altogether. But you know what though? I still have struggles that I had when I was 18.

They're still there, but I would never identify myself by those struggles. I would never say, yeah, those sins, that's who I am and I just can't change it. No.

No.

Metanoia means a change of mind.

God really.

Changes us. He sanctifies us. He makes us better than we are. He makes us more holy. Think about that. If you've walked with Christ for a long time, think about all the sin you used to struggle with that you don't struggle with anymore or not to the same degree anymore.

That's the work of God. Overcoming sin, recognizing you are not slaves of sin. You're slaves of righteousness. Sin shall not have dominion over you. How shall we who died to sin live in it any longer, be identified by it any longer?

That's what's missing from all this. He says no matter how much I laid down my life, no matter how many sacrifices I made, I blazed through an MDiv in two years and I did all these things right. But the one thing I couldn't change is the one thing that was the showstopper.

The fact that you're saying you can't change it shows that there's a massive problem in your theology here. There's a massive problem in your understanding of sanctification, the new birth, the fact that we are not the slaves of our sin any longer.

Do we still have sin? Do we still struggle with sin? Yeah. Does it identify our existence? No,.

Not anymore.

What identifies me now is Christ and the pursuit of holiness and the changes that he has done and is doing and will do as he conforms us more and more to the image of his son.

I know what it means to do everything right and still never be good enough. It's not a matter of being good enough.

It's not a matter of being good enough. It's simply a matter of being willing to identify something as evil that is evil. Identify something that is sinful in the sight of God as sinful in the sight of God.

Not this is my identity. I just have this issue. It can't change. I won't change it. That's not appropriate.

You see what my friends couldn't understand is that this is the way that things are. This is the reality of the church. Where my friends thought that I'd be a valuable asset to the church, instead the church just saw me as a liability.

Somebody who by being hired would challenge the church in a new way. Someone who would hurt the church's reputation in the eyes of the other churches.

Yeah, if you stand up in a pulpit and say I'm gay and that's just who I am.

And I'm.

I also bent to the church's teaching on this, but I'm not going to stand up and denounce this as a great sin. That's a problem. Because the apostles, the scriptures do denounce homosexual desires and practices as sinful.

Colossians 3 .5 says that evil desires are among the sins that exclude us from the kingdom of God. Excuse me, evil desires. Evil desires have to be put to death along with fornication, covetousness, and everything else.

Evil desires are in the category of sin. And so if we desire something that is contrary to the law of God, contrary to God's created order design, that's sin that needs to be repented of. And if you were going to these search committee interviews and saying that this is not something that you can repent of, this is not something that you will repent of or identify as being evil and sinful, yeah, they were right.

They were right to say you're dangerous and you can't be a pastor here. You know, Greg Johnson in that cross-politic discussion he had made an amazing statement. He said we're not going to ask these people to repent of something that they can't be that they can't repent of or that cannot be repented of.

That is nonsense. No matter what the sin, it doesn't have some special status as being unrepentable or something like that or it's something that you cannot overcome in Christ. That's nonsense. That's not God as he is presented to us in scripture.

God liberates people from these kinds of things. Sometimes it takes a long time and it takes a great deal of effort. And you know one thing that that Nate Collins says over and over and over, I'm tired.

I'm tired. I'm tired. I'm tired. I'm tired. Yeah, I'm tired too of fighting against sin. But I'm not going to stop. Because Jesus is worth it. His gospel is worth it. His holiness. His glory is worth it.

It's worth me paying the price to hate my sin and to crucify it and to put it to death all the days of my life no matter how tired I get of doing it.

Someone who would force the church to stop avoiding this issue and actually deal with it.

No one's avoiding anything. If this is not a difficult issue, it's a sin, it's wrong, repent. Okay, that's it. That's all there is to it. It's just like any other sin. You repent of it. You identify it as sin.

You preach about it as sin, especially today where you have so much going on that's trying to say it's not a sin. You need to denounce this as a sin. Not fixate upon it, but you denounce it as sin and call people to repentance of it.

Just like every other sin.

It happened in every single interview. But after months of searching, I was finally hired by a church in New York City. It was a blessing from God. It was a full-time youth pastoring position, and they even set me up with a place to live.

The pastors there knew about my sexuality, but they didn't think too much about it. For the first time in a long while, I felt like I was wanted by the church.

Again, though, it's just identified as my sexuality. It's an identity. It really functions as an identity. This is as absurd as someone saying they knew about my stealing and that I just was completely overrun with the desire to steal.

But they didn't think much about it. I mean, folks, just insert whatever sin you want to identify yourself with here. I mean, it could be a form of sexual sin or any other kind of sin.

I served joyfully there for a couple weeks, loving the youth that I worked with and loving the leadership team that I had there. And then one day, my supervising pastor hesitantly asked to meet with me.

A couple of weeks? Two weeks? That's it?

We sat down. I saw that he was holding a folder in his trembling hands. And inside the folder was an anonymous letter. The subject line read this. Ray is gay.

Gay.

The funny thing is that this anonymous letter actually had a return address on it. So if they were trying to remain secret, somebody really dropped the ball. I know, right? You can't even blackmail somebody, right?

So it was actually very easy to trace the letter back to this.

If it only took two weeks for someone to write a letter that says Ray is gay, I'm thinking that this is a topic this fellow talks about a lot. It's got to be something that he brings up and puts out there for discussion a lot.

I think that's not healthy. I preached three sermons on this topic. I read Matthew Vines' book, God and the Gay Christian. And that's it. In the 10 years I've been preaching, three sermons on this topic.

Because frankly, I don't like thinking about it or talking about it. I really don't. So I did those three sermons, but it took two weeks and people are writing a letter. This must be something this guy talks about a lot.