Have You Not Read S3E16 Interview with Stephen Black (Part 1)

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, Stephen Black, Chris Giesler.

Today we have the honor of hosting Stephen Black in our podcast studios and we are looking forward to asking him a series of questions and we want to introduce him and his ministry to our listeners as he is one of the missionaries that our church supports financially and through prayer.

And so we just recently had Stephen come speak to our church about his new chapter in ministry called

Coram Deo. And without further ado, I'm going to ask Stephen, would you please tell us something about how

God saved you, how he has delivered you, and how he's using you as a follower of Jesus Christ?

Well, very concisely, it was a radical transformative experience in 1983 when

I had this encounter in a home. People would say I was being prepped. I had already had some really amazing situations that occurred that were honestly rooted in tragedy and difficulty.

My little brother died on Mother's Day on May 10th, 1981, and I cried out to God for a year and a half.

I was raised as a Catholic in parochial school, and I just happened to be in this mobile home in Nekoma Park, Oklahoma, where people were just on fire for the

Lord. Their home environment, the atmosphere of their house, because they lived a godly, uncompromised life, walking into their home, immediately challenged me, just being in their presence.

They didn't witness to me. They were actually talking to my friend Mary, who was their sister, and they were talking about Jesus Christ coming and going from their lives.

I thought they were kind of crazy, because Jesus was answering their prayers. Jesus spoke to them.

I'm like, well, Jesus has never spoke to me like these people. And then all of a sudden, I'm sitting there, the women leave the room, and I'm just with this guy, and he's actually tuned in the

TBN, and I'm sitting there, and all of a sudden, I hear this voice, and this voice in my mind says, if you do not accept me tonight, you're going to die.

And I'd already been crying out to God, please help me to know what the truth is about the homosexual existence

I was living. I had lived gay -identified for eight years at that time, and when my little brother died, it caused me to really reiterate in my mind, heaven and hell, heaven and hell, heaven and hell, where is he in my parochial school upbringing, even as a

Catholic. And so when I was sitting there, this voice came upon me.

My heart started racing, and I felt this presence, and I didn't know what it was. I look back now, and I know it was the

Holy Spirit. And I looked over at him, and I said, brother, I need to know Jesus like you all know

Jesus. He stood up out of his chair, and he said, brother, the Lord is calling you. And I was like, you have no idea.

My heart's pounding. He prayed the sinner's prayer with me, but during that time, you know how

Catholic churches, there's always a crucifix. The crucifix, the man on the cross, was alive suffering.

And all of a sudden, I saw my sin coming up and out of me, and I realized, Jesus Christ, Son of God, God incarnate, my sin coming up and out of me and into his body.

And that was a radical transformation. A lot of people I've ministered to over, you know, 34 years of ministry, and 32, going on 33 now full -time, they don't necessarily have that kind of an experience.

And I did. And I was driving home with Mary that night, and she said, well does this mean you're not gonna be gay anymore?

And I said, I don't know. I guess it means whatever Jesus has for me. And I literally went home, and my parents had this big,

I mean, this thing is five inches thick. It's from the Pope. Blessed papal edition of the

Bible, with all the extra pages and pictures and books. And I mean, where are you gonna find truth in that thing, right?

Well, it's there. The Scripture is there. And I literally flipped it open to Leviticus 18, having prayed over it.

And my parents priest, who had been trying to seduce me by saying, it's all the more reason for you to come to Mass.

And I looked down, and there was verse 22 that said, man shall not lie with mankind as he does with woman.

And I knew that it said, such a thing is an abomination. And I literally fell down on my knees, and I was angry because I saw verse, chapter 20, verse 13, that I should be dead.

And I said, Lord, I don't know how to change, but if this is your will, I surrender.

And that set me on a journey for about three years of inner healing, counseling, really integrating the

Scripture into my life. Psalms 107, verse 20, is my life verse. He sent his word to heal them and to deliver them from their destruction.

And it was in 1983, that year, in that summer, we heard about a mysterious disease cropping up in all the hospitals in Oklahoma City.

And three years later, when I married my wife, more than half of the people in the gay community that I knew were dead.

And so, you know, Psalms 30 and Psalms 40, you know, I cried out to the Lord, and he heard me.

He delivered me out of a miry pit, out of the miry clay. I mean, he heard my voice, and he delivered me.

And so, since then, the Lord made it very clear within a few years that I was to be in ministry.

And in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 1, it says, you know, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, this

God of all comfort. And this God of all comfort wants us to comfort others in the same affliction.

I knew within three months, at an Arthur Blessed meeting in Seminole, that I was called to ministry.

Within three months of salvation, I thought I was gonna be in Jamaica or Haiti, ministering. And the

Lord had a different idea for me to do missions, and it propelled me into ministry to the ex -gay world.

But thank God I had nine years of preparation before that, because the theology and the twisting of scripture, even among ex -gay ministries, that I had a rock -solid foundation of truth.

And I attribute that a lot to John Ward, who was the pastor out at the TP Church in 178, and MacArthur.

He's one of my fathers in the Lord. He did this thing called Timothy Studies with me, and showed me how to use a lexicon, a dictionary, and the

Strong's Concordance, how to, you know, search out scripture, you know, read it, look at the different verses, and look at what the word means.

And I've been an ardent student of the word ever since, and helping people overcome, and looking at the root causes.

And there are some psychological soul -ish, when I say psychological. The soul that has been wounded, people have been sinned against, to help them to process the pain and the grief of and sorrow of their life.

What have you found to be, in your sharing with people, and obviously you're going to be speaking to those that you're counseling, about your own personal experience, what have you found to be similar between their experiences and yours that ended up having a factor?

I have this saying, sin begets sin. Yep. And what have you found to be a common factor between your personal testimony and others to whom you're ministering?

That's a great question, and because we have some solid evidence now. Actually in 2012,

Alan Chambers announced to the world on Oprah Winfrey's network that no one really changes, and 99 .9

% of people go back or are going to be gay. And so that propelled me to do a study on 25 years of client folders.

The ministry that I once directed actually had that information. I directed that ministry from 2000 to just recently.

And so we were able to look at 25 years of client folders, and we did a survey.

We were able to contact over 500 people. 185 filled out a very pretty methodical survey.

But it's not just First Stone that did that survey. There's been other studies that have shown that when people put really hard work into this, dealing with their traumas, their childhood sexual abuse, which is very common, the study showed that more than 60 % of males, 80 % of females have been sexually molested pre -pubescent.

Then post -pubescent, those numbers go really high. And I have never met any man that I have ever ministered to that dealt with any form of sexual sinning or sexual addiction, pornography addiction, all the above.

I've never met a man who was not exposed to graphic pornography high 90 % pre -pubescent.

So it begins the attack in the mind, and that is a statistic that is,

I mean, it's just hard evidence that when you rob the innocence of a child and you sew in sexual perversion, which is happening at a scale we've never seen before.

I mean, when you've got Disney actually saying, we want to queer the children, you know, that's

Nickelodeon and all the cartoon network putting out towards our children, every single one of them are doing something to promote, you know,

LGBTQ. So we see these root causes, and we unpack those root causes.

My wife was at a doctor's appointment this week at OU Children's, and my older two daughters witnessed a gay marriage in one of the cartoons.

It was on PBS at OU Children's, and so she had to have that conversation. And that's like publicly funded, taxpayer, and it's just there open to cartoon characters and dresses.

And it's like, yeah, that's there. And then also school systems, you know, this is being fed to them and all that kind of stuff.

Well, the last three presidents we've had have all been gay affirming. And Barack Obama and Biden both.

Trump is kind of a, you know, he's nuanced. But those two men, Barack Obama and Biden, both specifically have said we need this kind of education from K to 12 to indoctrinate our children nationally.

Well, the link between the, shall we say, the pornografication of our society.

Yeah, it's a well said. I just heard a stat earlier from Generation, as it

Z, that 30 % are LGBTQ plus identifying.

This is not coming as some sort of natural, shall we say natural,

I put those in quotation marks, an occurrence of events where it's just a background of somebody in the family abused this child or somebody in the community abused this child or did something and or that the dad was just simply absent and there was just a whole lot of emotional hurt from this.

And this child responded and grew and he was not nurtured or she was not nurtured properly in the

Lord. And thus they have all of these extra issues and that that was going on. And we had various expressions, people, these young people grow up and the insult, insulting word of queer is now the championing word.

The, you know, we're going to own this word and celebrate this word. That's right. But that's not used to be a cuss word when

I was growing up. Yeah. And then in the sixties and seventies, but now, okay, now we don't have these isolated incidents.

We have the sexual abuse systemically entrenched in the schools and the education system.

This is intentionally being done to children and the results are that 30 % are identifying as this, right?

It's called the queering of this generation. And then they communicate it that way.

And the LGBTQ community, like in the human rights campaign, the biggest gay lobby in Washington DC in the world, they with over, you know, millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to propagate this message, we are going to queer this next generation.

In other words, in their minds, queering is full acceptance of everything

LGBTQ and that plus sign. Now that plus sign, when you look at the

American Psychological Association, means something. So, queering also includes taking away the word pedophile.

Yes. And in now injecting two new terms, maps and yaps, minor attracted person and youth attracted person.

So, this is very dangerous what's happening in this world with that plus sign and the idea of queering this generation and that is something that they have their eyes set on not just the

United States, the entire world. It makes sense that they're trying to get rid of that term pedophile.

Right. Because of such a large pandemic, shall we borrow that term, of pedophilia going on in our culture and in the school systems.

And sex trafficking. And sex trafficking. The amount of sexual abuse happening between administration and teachers and staff in schools and the children who are at the schools.

Nobody wants to do an honest look at that, I wouldn't think. No. So, the concern in the legislature is being turned towards homeschool parents.

You know, we need to be really careful with people who educate their kids at home. House Bill 4130 has just been proposed about treating all parents as if they're suspects.

They all have to have background checks to see whether or not the state will allow them to homeschool their children anymore because we're really concerned about homeschool parents.

But nobody seems to be concerned about what's going on in the government funded schools. So, it was just an observation that with all this going on,

I'm seeing that there's a little bit of a difference. Whereas, perhaps there's a really sad story here and here in this generation and out of this trauma comes somebody who is identifying this way.

Now, it's being the children are being catechized into this queerness. Yeah, the level of darkness that has now been pervasive in our culture with the removing of prayer, removing of the commandments, removing of God's Word, has now a generation later, literally 50 years later, we now have a culture that is completely biblically illiterate.

We even have churches that are biblically illiterate. And so, all of those people that were children 40 years ago are now in place of authority and they are normalized into this worldview that these things are good and proper.

And so, we are really moving fast towards a place where there is going to be an all -out assault and persecution of those who believe in true righteousness and God's divine intent on human sexuality.

As it pertains to your experience, like we were starting the episode off with, kids now and what they're being assaulted with now, either from the culture or from school or from even parents at this point, as regards the perversity of all these things, what was it like for you during your time period?

Were these things, were some of the pedophilia latent? Like it wasn't public like it is now. A lot of this is starting to crop up as a popularized thing.

Was that in the background? It was. Okay, and it just has come to fruition now that all those people are in authority is what you're saying?

Absolutely. And you know, when I was in the gay community, it was always talked about the term chicken hawk.

And it was laughed about and there were men that called themselves hawks. And they were men that were predators.

And so, even in the gay community in the 60s and 70s, it was laughed about.

It was fully known. Even had men, because I was a young somewhat attractive teenager into my 20s, and they wanted someone like myself.

And I was a used and abused. And that was a subculture.

It's always been there. And ironically now, even in the 80s and 90s, the level of exposure of even in the church world and in the

Catholic Church and how much actual pedophilia that was going on. And you know,

I'm just one story, but I had two different priests in the Catholic world that actually, you know, tried to seduce me.

And so, to say that it wasn't there is just not true. But now, because of modern -day psychology and this erosion that has taken place, and you even have people like Mark Yarhouse and others that have dropped these scholarly papers into the church to say that we need to embrace sexual minorities.

And this is what psychology has done, is now it's infiltrated all the way into the church in higher learning to make us accept orientation as normative.

I wanted to ask you one question, just kind of on based on your experience, because you've been in the trenches in this field for a while now.

And I wasn't aware of all the nuances going on. But I wanted to ask you, was there some sort of landmark year or moment in recent history?

I'm thinking like, my guess is 2012. But did you sense something before and after, like something has really shifted here?

If so, was there a moment like that? Yeah, 2010 brought the Mark Yarhouse Christian perspective on human sexuality in the

Gospel Coalition, which when you look at the leaders at that time in the Gospel Coalition, you have main heads of the

Southern Baptist and the PCA, the conservative branch, so not

PCUSA. We're talking Bible -believing Presbyterians, and these leaders were being inundated with this white paper.

So there was behind -the -scenes discussion with these scholarly people about the idea of orientation and legitimizing orientation.

And so that really brought in a flood with, beside Exodus International, because Exodus was connected with focus on the family.

They used to do these loved one out conferences. It was a very influential thinking and demonstration of what was somewhat good theology as far as being able to help people.

But then it became this erosion that started taking place that psychology really does need to be embraced.

I see. Yeah, I've read that paper by the Yarhouse in some research that I've done. So it's a travesty.

And you know, I just read it today, just was thinking about it, and I just pulled it up for whatever reason.

I was looking at some other stuff, and I reread it. And you know, it sounds so nice.

Yes. And you start reading through it, and if you're not paying attention, it seems so merciful and kind.

But then what it ends up doing is it interjects this new language, sexual minorities, which also he interjected the idea of being in a homosexual marriage with a woman.

So that was the terminology, mixed orientation marriages.

And so to try to kind of legitimize the idea, you know, if you're a Christian and you really want to follow the

Lord, you probably can only express your sexuality in heterosexual relating one man, one woman, but then they queer it.

He's querying it. And this is being accepted in the church at large, in many places, even in the

Assembly of God now. Which, you know, they're, you know, Holy Spirit, Bible -thumping, right? And we thought the

Southern Baptists were too when you got J .D. Greer, you know, communicating as the president and having a gay dance on his church stage with a gay staff member.

Yeah, we're seeing a very strong shift in what we like to call Big Eva around here.

Yeah, it is Big Eva. And it's a disturbing shift. And there is a reaction where many churches and pastors and podcasters or YouTubers and so forth have, apologists essentially, and plebiscists have come out and said, this is not right.

There's been a surge, there's been a strengthening of some voices, even as others have become very much, they've lost their power, they don't stand convictionally with the

Scriptures. And of course that's going to be the focus in our next session, is we're going to be looking at the unchanging standard, the unchanging anchor for why we are taking the stands that we're taking.

It's in psychology, or we've had a furtherance of cultural development.

These are all things that change, but we're not to be tossed to and fro by every new wind of doctrine, but we are to stand firm on God's Word.

So I think, wrapping up, I want to talk about maybe some resources that can help us, resources that take into account and agree with Scripture being our unchanging authority upon which we are to stand.

Resources that would be helpful to pastors or to family members who are concerned about their loved ones, who are saying these types of things, or perhaps there's somebody out there listening who is a member of a church who are not, that church doesn't have a very clear stance on some of these things.

What are some resources that we can recommend that would be helpful, that would truly be equipping of the saints?

Do you have anything in mind? Well, my own book, Freedom Realize, and the subtitle of it, because of the survey, is called

Living a Life, Finding Freedom from Homosexuality, Living a Life Free from Labels, because of this whole revoice movement, the gay

Christian movement. And then, of course, M .D. Perkins just put out a book that actually labored through all of the things that we've been talking about, all of the history of this, and how this came about.

And that book is called Gay Affirmation, A Threat of Gay Christianity, The Threat of Gay Christianity.

I wrote the forward on that book. He wanted me to write the forward because he and I labored over that, and I helped him in the development of this book, which is actually a well footnoted resource for pastors.

So I highly recommend this book, and then I'd be amiss for just any layman or anyone that just wants to understand this whole idea, but can you be gay and Christian, is

Michael Brown's book, Can You Be Gay and Christian. And he's got some actual really great YouTube videos out there that are very concise.

And then we have the In His Image movie, and it's a documentary that I'm in, and got the pleasure and honor to be able to help the storyboard on that.

And it is a vital resource for churches, and it has 25 other additional videos that you can use that are from 5 to 15 minutes long and like a

Bible study. Yeah, that sounds great. I really appreciate those documentaries that follow it up with a lot of extra educational opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be able to fit, otherwise the documentary gets too long, right?

Right. But that sounds like a marvelous resource. I know you've recommended that to me before. And it has its own website,

In His Image dot movie. And then the book by M .D. Perkins is called Dangerous Affirmation?

Yes. Okay. And that's at afa .net. Yeah, and we hear that word affirmation a lot, don't we? Oh yeah.

And it's almost equated with being loving or being Christlike, right? That we should be affirming of others, but that can be dangerous if we're affirming sin.

And you'll hear people say it. They'll say things like, well, we need to affirm this. Yeah, it's very much a buzzword.

I like the title of your book, Freedom Realize, and I think that that's one of the most disheartening things for me when

I was doing a research paper on this very matter, the issue of the LGBTQ plus identifying within the

Evangelical Church. One of those heartbreaking thing was seeing time and again Christians carving out space for people who had same -sex passion, same -sex attractions, who were identifying themselves as gay

Christians, and so on and so forth. And they were carving out space for them and saying, you know, you're just as you're just as fallen as anybody else, and there's, you know, this is never going to change.

There's nothing to be saved from here. You're just as holy as other people are holy. And that was that was disheartening to see that.

But your book talks about freedom. Yeah, it's addressing that very issue.

And when we come back, we can, there's scripture that actually addresses this. I think one of the greatest passages is

Ephesians 4 and 5. Oh yeah. And just looking at the nuancing of this terminology with orientation and this corruption, because we have to agree with Paul in Romans 1.

Yes. It's an unnatural lust or an unnatural desire.

It's not merely an orientation. And so we have to agree with God that God says divine human sexuality is innately, where it's in other words biology, heterosexual.

And that's different than an orientation. Very good. That's the way we're physically made. I'm looking forward to that.

That will be in our next session together. But let's go ahead and wrap it up with our normal. Yep. We'll go right into what are we thankful for,

Michael. Why don't you start for us? I am thankful for the elders here at Sunnyside Baptist Church. We were very blessed to have six elders here.

And while three of them right now are doing good work, caring for wives or mother -in -laws that are sick and ailing, and we greatly appreciate them.

And even now we are praying for one of the elders wives in our church who's undergoing a complicated surgery.

And there's nothing that'll make you appreciate someone when they are not as available as they usually are. But I'm still thankful.

Still thankful for the elders here and the extra labor they go to to help shepherd the flock here.

So that's what I'm thankful for tonight. Amen. Mr. Black. I am so thankful for so many things. I guess

I have to, in this environment, to say I'm so thankful for Sunnyside for coming beside me to give me and other supporters the opportunity to go.

And so I'm thankful for this new chapter in life. I've gone through a real crushing and learning some things through it.

And so I'm thankful for the Lord, His Word, that has been confirmed to me. The Holy Scriptures really do matter.

And they have brought salvation, literally sanctification, and giving me instruction.

And so I'm so thankful for that. And so again, you know, church community propelling me to go.

And I am planning on going. And that means to other nations and places that are actually 20 years behind where we are in the corruption that's coming in the church and some of their leaders saying, can you please come and help us?

All right. Chris. I guess given the topic, I'm grateful to God that I did not go down this route.

I'm kind of a creative type and I've got a music major. And I can see places in my life, in my early childhood, where things like this had come up.

Being propositioned and I was too young to know what's going on. And public school too? Yeah, public school.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, oh, as a parent, I see what was happening. And I'm so thankful for the grace of God that He shielded me from it.

And whatever voice or the spirit leading saying, don't go down, don't follow them, don't listen, stay with your siblings, stay with your parents, all of that stuff.

And so I'm so grateful to Him that He does protect. And then that for those that have gone down that path,

He can lead them out. Amen. Amen. Yeah, there's hope. I'm thankful to God for brothers willing to put their hand to the plow, go to work and meet the challenges, great or small.

I know over the last couple weeks, we've been revamping a lot of the way that we communicate within our deacon body here at Sunnyside.

And I'm seeing a lot of willingness from the whole deacon body to accept some of the changes and learn how to deal with some of the communication that we're trying to foster between one another and the joking going on.

But really a willingness to pick up and get to the labor of stuff that we need to get to.

And I'm so thankful for brothers willing to do the work both inside our body here and outside of our body here.

It's a very encouraging but also emboldening thing to know that you're not alone.

You've got division of labor and your brothers are walking right along with you. And that wraps it up for today.

We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Having Not Read.