God, Gender & The Gospel - [Matthew 19:4-5]

Well, unlike many evenings, this evening we are going to be kind of looking at a myriad of scriptures.

I wrote a very brief retelling of the emperor's new clothes.

I entitled it a future telling of the emperor's new clothes. One day the emperor was riding through the capital on his horseback and all the people were remarking about how beautiful his clothes were.

Suddenly a young child of about six years of age said, he has no clothes on, he's naked.

All the adults around the child turned and scolded the child. After all, if the emperor believes he has beautiful clothes on, he does.

And who is this child to say otherwise? What you believe is more important than what is real.

That's the moral of the story. From that day forward, the child said nothing.

And everyone in town agreed the emperor's clothes were quite fetching. We live in a time where not only is the gospel an offense, but telling somebody a scientific truth, a scientific fact, is enough to get the crowd to turn around and scold you.

Our nation is not on a slippery moral slope, it is plunging full speed into the moral abyss.

Anything goes and anything must be commended. Failure to do that results in what?

Condemnation and mocking. They tell you how judgmental you are, what a terrible person you are basically.

Now listen to this, I'm going to have several news sources this evening, and almost all of them are drawn within the last few months.

I have one that's a little bit older, but they're all within the last few months. This one is just last month. An Oregon court has become the first in the nation to declare a person, listen to this, legally in a court, neither sex.

Judge Amy Holmes -Hen ruled last week that US Army veteran

Jamie Shoup, who identifies as neither male nor female, can legally, or can change legally from female to being considered non -binary, she says,

Jamie says. It feels amazing to be free from a binary classification system that inadequately addressed who

I really am, a system in which I felt confined. Shoup was born male, later retired

Sergeant First Class from the Army, then transitioned to female in 2013 because Shoup said it was the only option at the time.

The court's ruling was described as an historic attempt toward the government recognizing non -binary members of our community, ensuring they have access to identity documents that reflect who they are, just like everyone else, non -binary.

If you listen to what she said there, what Jamie Shoup said, she said she felt that this was the right thing to do.

She had a high regard for herself, and that is probably the definition of where we are today.

We're in a postmodern world where truth cannot be known, and what you believe is more important than what actually is.

When she talked about binary system, binary is ones and zeros, machine code, it's what goes on, what tells a computer what to do, and in this case, male or female.

She said, you know, that system doesn't work for me. I don't identify as either male or female.

I want to be non -binary, and the judge said that's fine. Let's open our

Bibles tonight to Matthew chapter 19, and I'm going to start reading in verse 3, and this is going to seem a little odd at first, and then again this whole thing is a little odd.

And Pharisees came up to him, Jesus, and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

He answered, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

There are a few things to just point out here. First of all, you know, you might be thinking, well, this is kind of an odd text to start talking about this whole idea of transsexualism, or transgenderism,

I guess is more current. Why this text? Well, first of all, I'd say, look,

Jesus says from the beginning, God made them male and female, binary, two, there's only two genders, on, off, male, female.

But secondly, he made them uniquely. Why? So that Adam and Eve would become what?

One flesh. You can't become one flesh when there are a multitude of self -identified genders, non -binary people.

Adam and Eve were made for each other. The so -called, and I say so -called, transgenderism, because it is, as we will see, a figment of people's imaginations.

And it really is the latest assault on God's design for men and women.

He created the so -called binary system, and what did he call it in Genesis 1? He said it was good.

Genesis 2. Let me say at the outset, there is no way to cover all the variations and all the implications of this topic in less than a pretty good book, and we don't have time for that.

But I have several questions, and then I'm going to give some answers, and I'm also going to give some more illustrations.

First we need a definition of the issue. What is a transgendered person? And I found a few definitions.

Firstly, it's an adjective. A person is transgendered. They are not transgender themselves, but I digress.

Here's one definition. Denoting or relating to a person, listen to how many times

I say tonight, self. Denoting or relating to a person whose self -identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender.

So again, this is entirely subjective. It's entirely up to the individual. He or she gets to decide where they are on the male -female spectrum, because it's no longer male or female, according to them.

Another definition, and this is longer. Transgender people are people who have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex.

And there's more here, but I want to just pause there. Just listen to that language. Assigned sex.

Who assigned it? Transgender people are sometimes called transsexual if they desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another.

Transgender is also an umbrella term. In addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex, trans men and trans women, it may include people who are not exclusively masculine or feminine.

In fact, they list here gender fluidity. It's this idea that gender is fluid and may change even for one person from day to day.

So one day they may consider themselves male, the next day female, the next day something in between.

Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a third gender or conceptualize transgender people as a third gender.

Being transgender is independent of sexual orientation. Transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual.

Someone sent me an article about asexual orientation and asked if I'd talk about it.

Well, I'll just say this. It just means people who allegedly are not interested in sex. And I have no words for that.

The term transgender can also be described from intersex, a term that describes people born with physical sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

And I'll say something about that in a minute. The degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable.

Notice that word again, feel. Feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity has been called transgender congruence.

Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria. That is, they are male but they imagine themselves to be female or vice versa.

And some seek medical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy, sex reassignment surgery, or psychotherapy.

Not all transgender people desire these treatments and some cannot undergo them for financial or medical reasons.

So now you're going to be able to join the military though and get that done. Or you can commit murder and get that done. But I'm not going to talk about those things today because we don't have time.

Let's start with science. Let's get some basics of biology. Women have chromosomes, thankfully.

They have two X chromosomes and men have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome.

And this is true for 99 % of people. Now there are some variations but I'm not going to go into all of them because there's about seven or eight variations and we don't have time to cover all of that.

And it's really not the issue that we're talking about here tonight. Transsexuals by or transgender,

I want to stick with that, by definition are not those with chromosomal abnormalities.

They are either male or female at birth. So these aren't people who because of some genetic abnormality are confused.

These are people that are born strictly male or strictly female at birth and then they aren't comfortable with that.

And we are told by people that scoff at the idea that we would say that evolution is unbiblical and it's wrong.

We're told by those same people that gender is not determined by biology. That just the fact that you're born male or you're female doesn't mean that you identify that way.

In other words, science can be subjective. And this subjective understanding of identity is pervading deeply into Western culture.

We now have grown men who dress and act like dogs. I don't know if you've seen that, that nonsense.

We have parents who nurture allegedly transgender children as young as four years old and encourage them in that path.

I asked one parent of a so -called transgender child, why should parents who have a four -year -old who says, you know, you have a little boy and he says, well,

I want to be called, you know, a girl. I want to be treated like a girl or vice versa. Why would you do that to your child?

And they said, well, if the child is consistent in what they say, if they say the same thing over a long period of time, then that reflects their true feelings.

Well, just think about what that means. I mean, my attitude is, listen, children are foolish.

Let's just use that word. They're foolish because the Bible describes them as that. So let's just encourage them in their foolishness.

Let's just feed that foolishness. Let's just push them along in this foolishness line.

And it gets worse because as the children get older, they start giving them hormones to stop their growth or to even start the transition.

Children have parents for a reason. The children or the parents are supposed to have wisdom. They're supposed to stop children from doing foolish things, not encourage them from doing it.

But as I said, we're told that science is irrelevant. Genetics and genitalia are to be ignored in favor of a person's feelings.

I mentioned gender fluidity before. And really the idea again is just that gender is a sliding scale.

And nobody can know it. It's up to the person to determine for themselves. But according to the sources

I looked at, when you hear all the laws and everything that are going on right now, keep this statistic in mind.

0 .03 % consider themselves transgendered.

And all the tumult and all the hubbub and all these laws being changed are for 0 .03 % of the population.

It's crazy. Question number two. How does the change in laws about gender affect us?

Why should we care? What's the big deal? And I have some illustrations about why we should care.

First of all, it's being imposed on school children at public schools.

I read this. Some of you may have seen this too. Pastor Chad Vegas pastors out in Bakersfield.

I actually went to his church a couple years ago. Just over a year ago.

Explaining why he can no longer serve on the school board there in Bakersfield. He was elected several times.

But he can't do it anymore. This is a quote from him. He said, it is now law in California that your children must be taught how to have safe homosexual sex, how to obtain an abortion, and that gender does not correspond to biological sex.

Think of that. It is legally required to teach your children the

LGBTQ sexual mores, while simultaneously it is illegal to mention

God. He says, I can't and won't enforce that foolishness.

He goes on, I don't know how long Christian teachers and administrators can ethically continue to work in schools.

They will certainly need to increase in their wisdom as they navigate this new legal reality in our states.

Please pray for them. I also do not know how Christian parents will afford to find other options for their children.

I know they will need to make sacrifices their parents likely didn't have to make. Please pray for them.

He says, we must wake up to the reality of where our state has headed. We must prepare the church to live as sojourners in a foreign land.

A land that feels more foreign by the day. We need to help parents find alternatives to public schools as they disciple their children.

We have to shepherd our public school teachers and administrators through wisely and faithfully working in this new legal environment.

There are many challenges that face us. I have not given up the fight. I have chosen to direct my efforts fully to these pastoral responsibilities.

That's what's going on in California. And California matters. We're not far behind here in Massachusetts. Let me go on to our speech, what we can say in public.

And I took this from a liberal website because I didn't want any conservative slants. This is in New York City.

In December of 2015, the New York City Commission on Human Rights announced new protections for transgender and gender non -conforming

New Yorkers. One of the many guidelines released at the time requires employers and covered entities to use an individual's preferred name, pronoun, and title.

For example, Ms., Mrs., etc., regardless of the individual's sex assigned at birth, again

I say assigned by whom, regardless of their anatomy, regardless of their gender, their medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual's identification.

That includes pronouns such as they, them, theirs, or zee and here, or whatever that is, her, h -i -r, which some transgender and gender non -conforming people prefer to the conventional binary pronouns of he, him, his, or she, her, hers.

Now listen, those guidelines also noted that the Commission can impose penalties of up to $250 ,000 for violations, and this is why they say, well, it's not that big of a deal, for violations that are the result of willful, willful, wanton, or malicious conduct.

So it can't just happen to anybody. They have to be found guilty of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct.

But my question to you, who do you suppose decides that these violations fit these guidelines?

Who decides that using the wrong pronouns was willful, wanton, or malicious?

I'm going to guess it's the Commission on Human Rights, the people who wrote the ordinance. We'll see what happens with this, but it just kind of tells you where things are going.

You have to watch what you say. This year in the Olympics, the word is, this hasn't been officially pronounced, but I think this is going to happen in England, two transgendered athletes, males who perceive themselves to be females, are likely to make the

English Olympic track team, the female team, even though they're males.

How about girls' sports? Some of you probably saw this in Alaska. A Thai native who was born male and identifies as female, qualified and competed in the

Class 3A girls' sprints at the state meet, capturing third place in the 200 -meter dash, and fifth in the 100.

She also played for the girls' volleyball and basketball teams during her senior year.

Now, women for years fought to get equal funding for girls' sports at schools, right?

You have to spend as much on women's sports as you do on men's sports, and if you don't, you're going to get fined by the federal government.

So now, you're spending money on girls' sports and girls' teams, but you're letting boys play.

That doesn't even make sense. But that's what's going on. How about in churches?

Certainly, the churches are safe. Maybe not so much. This was from this last week.

Iowa churches, in fact, there's a lawsuit on this, Iowa churches and church -run daycares must let males and females use the bathroom, dress and shower next to each other, and pastors and Christians could be brought before extrajudicial tribunals if they directly or indirectly make persons of any particular gender identity feel unwelcome, according to the new regulations from Iowa's Civil Rights Commission.

The commission's new regulatory guidelines pertaining to a 2007 state sexual orientation and gender identity law also require private businesses, schools, libraries, police departments, and any private organizations that receive government funds to let men and women shower, change clothes, use the bathroom, at whichever formally sex -protected facilities they choose.

No sex change operation, no birth certificate is necessary for biological males to use the ladies' room.

Declaring oneself a certain sex is all that is needed. So now the

Fort Des Moines Church of Christ is filing suit with the

Alliance Defending Freedom. That happened last week. They filed suit.

And here's their press release. The speech ban could be used to gag churches from making any public comments, including from the pulpit, that could be viewed as unwelcome to persons who do not identify with their biological sex.

This is because the commission says that the law applies to churches during, listen, any activity that the commission deems to not have been a bona fide religious purpose.

So in other words, the government is going to decide when a church meeting has a bona fide religious purpose or when it does not.

Examples the commission gave are a child care facility operated at the church or a church service open to the public, which church services aren't open to the public.

The state of Iowa claims, this press release goes on, claims it has the power to regulate what churches can teach about human sexuality and how they operate their facilities.

The government has absolutely no authority to force a church to violate its religious beliefs. This is a massive violation of the

First Amendment. So that's going on and that's going to be tried in Iowa. Okay, how about restrooms and other facilities right here in the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts? This is from the Boston Globe this last week, and I believe the governor signed this.

After a decade of emotional and divisive debate, Massachusetts House and Senate leaders came to final agreement on a transgender rights bill

Wednesday and are likely to send it to Governor Charlie Baker by the end of the week. And like I said, I believe he signed it.

The bill will allow people to use restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms that match their gender identity and would protect transgender people from discrimination in museums, malls, libraries, restaurants, and other public accommodations.

Baker said he believes no one should be discriminated against based on their gender identity and backed an earlier iteration of the bill.

So now, that's what's kind of brought all this to my attention.

Question number I think it is three. Is gender a matter of personal choice?

Is gender a matter of personal choice? Well, today's experts tell us that the answer is yes.

And they insist that we must differentiate between sex and gender. So, Bruce Jenner can father children, win the 1976

Olympic gold medal for the decathlon which is a male -only event, and then simply declare himself a woman.

No surgery, no hormones, nothing. He just declares himself a woman.

Gender is entirely subjective, they say. Well, Genesis 2 .18

says then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him.

Again, binary from the beginning, and not a matter of choice. Even the experts say that sex is assigned at birth.

They acknowledge that. But either Adam or Eve were consulted on the matter.

God never asked them what they wanted to be. He never asked them how they felt. And nothing in scripture would even hint that gender is fluid, flexible, or changeable.

Question number four. Why would someone want to change genders? Well, now we're really hitting on it.

There is one reason why someone would claim to be transgendered. In my mind, there's one reason.

And that's as rebellion against God's created order. Let's turn to Romans chapter 1. And this is familiar, but I'm going to focus here towards the end actually.

But Romans chapter 1, I'm going to begin reading for the sake of context at verse 18 when you want to know why these things are happening, why our nation seems to be heading down the drain.

The first three words of Romans 1 .18 pretty much explain it. For the wrath, we're getting the wrath of God, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

And if you want to talk about suppressing the truth, looking at a male and saying, well that might not be a man, that's suppressing the truth.

Suppressing obvious truth. Verse 19. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him.

But they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal

God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. In other words, they committed idolatry.

Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.

This is sexual sin, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.

Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Talking about homosexuality. But it keeps getting worse. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge

God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.

They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give hearty approval to those who practice them.

They give them awards. They put them on television. But those three words there in verse 30, inventors of evil.

When we see things coming up, just changing so quickly, and we wonder where do these ideas even come from?

It's because men are inventors of evil. One commentator says about that phrase, he says, it suggests a certain ingenuity in devising wrong.

These people are not content to go on in the established paths of evil, but are eager to strike out in new and worse ways.

So really they just delight in being wicked. They delight in, as it were, shaking their fists at God.

And few delight in it quite like those who are proud of their sexual sin. You have to know that we've been in trouble for many, many years when we started having gay pride parades.

You know, those who in the Old Testament under Mosaic law would have been subject to a death penalty are now parading around and proud of what they're doing.

They are rebels, much like the nations, even as Pastor Mike preached through Psalm 2 here a few weeks ago.

Listen to it again. Give it a slightly different context. Psalm 2 verses 2 to 4.

You don't have to turn there. Just listen. Should be familiar. The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the

Lord and His anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. But when you think about that first case,

Ms. Shoup, what did she say? She said she didn't want to be confined by societal norms.

She didn't want to be known as binary, either male or female. Let me read verse 3 again.

Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. We don't want anybody putting restrictions on us, telling us what we have to be.

But God has designed rules for us. He has given us boundaries. And the fact that people want no part of it doesn't matter.

He will not be defeated. He will not be pushed aside. He will not be mocked. And ultimately, no one can change gender anyway.

You know, for all this talk of transgender, you think, you know, if I wanted to, I can't even think of something I would want to change into.

Well, let's put it this way. When I want to trans -clothes myself, right, when I want to change my clothes, I change my clothes.

That's not hard. But transgender people never change their gender. They don't change.

It doesn't matter how many surgeries you go through. It doesn't matter how many chemicals you take.

You're still going to wind up being a male. Or you're still going to wind up being a female. That can't change.

Question number 5. Well, what about those who are transgender and are so depressed they want to commit suicide?

Do you want them to just kill themselves? Because you get that kind of stuff. I knew somebody who was, that's what

I hear. Well, I knew somebody who was transgender and they were going to kill themselves. You know, what would you rather have?

Listen. Each and every person is an image bearer of God. We value that.

And the last thing we would want is for that person to take their own life. Because the reality is we know that as soon as they did that, they would be face -to -face with God.

However, even that sin or that desire to commit suicide is what? Sin. The very idea that we should approve of a sin so the person would not commit another sin, well, that's just foolish.

I worked talking about how we should approach these people. I think we have to be compassionate. And I'll tell you, there's nothing so heartbreaking as dealing with some of these people.

When I, for a couple years, I worked the house arrest program in the jail. My job was to get inmates out of jail.

I became their favorite deputy. And what I would do is

I would go, there were about, there were four different facilities on our property. I mean, we had thousands and thousands of inmates.

And I went one day down to this other jail, and they have this one little section, and it was filled with guys who didn't want to be guys.

And many of them had gone through some surgical enhancements. And the hard part was, as I would talk to those guys, especially the ones who were minority, they'd been cut off of their family.

Their families were all ashamed of them. They would have nothing to do with them. Because it wasn't acceptable within those cultures, within those family constructs, to do what they were doing.

And you could see genuine heartache in them, and just talking to them.

And you never lose sight of the fact that you're talking to a person. And there's no question about that.

The question is, what's the solution for them? And the solution isn't more surgery and more drugs.

So how do we respond to this issue? Question number seven. Well, firstly with compassion.

With compassion. I mean, we again, keeping in mind that these are souls who will appear before God one day and have to give an account for what they did with the

Lord Jesus Christ. Go ahead and turn to 1 Corinthians 6. Again, a familiar passage.

But I want to just hit on this because it's really important to think about. 1

Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 11. The Apostle Paul writes,

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived.

Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. Now usually when we talk about this list, we think about the homosexuals, we think about other groups, and we think, okay, they're not going to inherit the kingdom of God apart from repentance.

But look what it says there. Sexually immoral. Unrighteous. Well, I don't know what else to say about these folks.

These transgendered folks. They don't want to conform to sexual morality, right?

They want to be immoral. That's part of the enticement, part of the attraction to all this.

So how do we approach them? Well, with compassion, understanding that we're no different from them other than the grace of God.

But secondly, we have to give them the truth. We have to tell them the truth about their condition. We don't affirm them, we don't say, you know what,

I saw a Christian, a woman I think, maybe a Christian, the other day, say this on Facebook, she goes, we just have to accept people as they are.

God loves everybody regardless of their situation, and I'm like, I wanted to, you know, Facebook arguments are never a good idea, but I wanted to just kind of put that in there and go, well, what does this mean?

What does Paul mean here? He says, you know, you can't be greedy, you can't be a drunk, and by the way, you can't be a homosexual, and you can't...

What does that mean? We don't leave people where they are, we call them to repentance. We give them the truth, and we give them, of course, the gospel.

No person... I mean, we need to preach Jesus Christ, we need to preach that forgiveness is possible, that they're in sin, that they need to repent, and we tell them that the good news is

God sent a Savior, Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life, died a substitutionary death, and was raised on the third day, and by believing in Him, you can be forgiven, and you'll have a new life and new desires.

Practically speaking, though, we have to make sure that nobody who says that he or she is transsexual joins a

Bible -teaching church. We wouldn't admit anybody into our church who holds... who believes that they're transsexual.

In fact, let me go a step further. There's no such thing as a Christian transsexual, just as there's no such thing as a

Christian homosexual, or a Christian murderer, or a Christian adulterer. In other words, if this is the pattern of your life, if you're a serial murderer,

I don't know what to tell you other than the fact that you need to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And the same thing if you're a thief, or if you're transsexual.

But once you are saved, the good news is, once you're saved, your former life of sin no longer describes you, right?

We don't sit around, gathering around and go, well, what are you? Well, I'm a thief. I'm an adulterer. No. That's what we used to be.

Now we are Christians. We're in Christ. We're forgiven for those sins. So we need to approach them with compassion, with truth, with the gospel, and also with urgency.

With urgency. This is, I mean, this virus is really out of control.

And like I said before, we're not on a slippery slope. We've fallen off a cliff. These people are bent on going to hell, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

It's a very self -destructive path that they're on. And none of the examples

I've given, like I said, are more than a year old, except for Bruce Jenner.

It's just amazing how fast this is all going on. And we have to respond just as quickly.

Let me just give you another little story. And this kind of really, this is just from last month, and this is

Washington State. And I cut it way down. But a few years ago, parents of girls on a high school swimming team that practiced at a college pool complained about the presence of a transgendered woman.

And it gives the woman's name here. Ms. Francis, who has all of her male equipment, was walking around the women's changing room completely without clothing.

She calls herself bisexual with a special attraction to women. So let me see if I got this right.

It's a male who says she's a woman and that she has an attraction towards other women.

So this is really, let's just call it what it is. And it turns out this guy's middle -aged. He's really just a middle -aged pervert who's allowed to walk among these young women.

The girls on the swim team were told that they could use a small changing area nearby while this woman used the larger women's room.

So they get crammed into a little closet. She gets to use the big facility. One writer on a feminist site, skeptical of the transgender movement, pointed out the evergreen state situation that's the name of the college was reminiscent of pre -Title

IX America, when girls' sports teams frequently used facilities notably inferior to those of male athletes.

The Washington State law is being used to attach a condition to Title IX equality for females. And that condition is that equal access to facilities for teenage girls is predicated upon their willingness to undress and shower in front of a middle -aged heterosexual man who refers to himself as a teen girl.

But his idea, his subjective opinion is more important than all these girls.

The good news is we don't have to panic. God's in control. But we need to arm ourselves with the

Word of God. In closing, let's turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 3 to 5, again familiar.

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

By the way, those are not physical locations, those are ideas. Look at verse 5, we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey

Christ. Well, how do we do that? With the Word of God. Whether it's homosexuality, transsexuality, asexuality, or whatever new wickedness is invented, and believe me, it will be invented.

It is immaterial. Each and every one of these isms is a demonic deception.

Designed by the powers of darkness to deceive men and to drag them to hell. We must not affirm these abominable activities.

We cannot tell people God is indifferent to them or that we have no opinion, because we do.

The Bible is very clear. At the same time, we must be mindful that we are dealing in each and every case with, as I said, a soul that will one day stand before the eternal judge of souls.

Just as the child in the emperor's new clothes, we must unashamedly tell the truth.

But we must do it with love, with compassion. We must reason with these folks, but only from the scripture.

If we get into how they feel, what they think, what they believe, if we're told we must ignore scientific truth, scriptural truth, and just take their opinion, we've lost already.

But when they tell us to be quiet, or when they mock God, we have to be ready to just shake the dust off our feet, as it were, and move on.

We can't argue with them on their own ground. We must declare the truth, tell them the truth in love, but then just move on.

It's hard, and we're going to be surrounded by more and more of this. We see it, and if this

Iowa thing goes the wrong way, and even if it doesn't, we can expect more and more limitations on what we do, and what we can't do, allegedly.

We just have to keep telling the truth. And if people don't like that, or if the government wants to shut us down, or if the government wants to do, fine us, or remove our tax -exempt status, we can anticipate all those things.

But there's this and so many more. I mean, there's a California bill. I just don't have time for all this stuff. There's a California bill that's going to basically put limitations on Christian colleges.

It's going to preserve seminaries, but for Christian colleges, it's going to basically remove everything that would make them

Christian. And this is the way equality is being imposed on us by the government.

Our religious rights are being stripped away slowly but surely, and we are being coerced, as it were, into believing, or into accepting this new reality, and we can't do it.

We simply cannot do it. Let's pray. Father in Heaven, Lord, we're mindful that this world is wicked, and just bound to get more wicked, because men will go from one level of depravity to another.

They suppress the truth and unrighteousness. They seek after their own pleasure.

More than anything else, it pleases them to display their hatred for you.

Lord, we would pray for the repentance of many sexually immoral, so -called transsexual people, transgendered people, homosexuals.

Father, would you give us the opportunity to preach the gospel to them? Would you permit us to give them the good news that Jesus Christ saves sinners, all kinds of sinners?

And would you cause many of them to believe? Father, for our leaders, would you give them the wisdom to stand up and say, this is just wrong.

This is wrong. I know it's wrong. It's evident that it's wrong. Father, would you save even them?

Think about Governor Baker, about our legislators, about legislators and governors all across the country, and Father, even at the federal level.

Father, would you keep us from any sort of legal entanglements?

Would you keep us able to proclaim your truth and to lovingly share the gospel of Jesus Christ with all that we can?