How to Respond to "Gay Christianity"

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and with me today is Michael Perkins. Good to see you,

Michael. Good to be with you. Michael is a friend of many of us who work with the ministry here and is also the producer and editor of Logic on Fire.

Michael has recently written a book called Dangerous Affirmation, the

Threat of Gay Christianity. And this is a topic that if you follow the podcast, we don't normally deal with the more kind of the pressing modern topics, because we do find that there are many people out there that are doing that well.

So we tend to focus on experiential aspects of Christianity, kind of borrowing from the older writers.

But because this is a topic that's so important, because this is a topic that even in churches that are careful and families that are careful, we're having young people ask honest questions, you know, which in my day, if they would have asked that question,

I would have thought, is that an honest question at all? But there are some honest questions because of the wrong perspective that's being put before us and because of our own, you know, sometimes our own inner inability to see things correctly.

So this, we feel, is a topic that needs to be talked about. But also, we really appreciate

Michael's approach, clear and firm, but gracious. And we'll talk about that at the end when we finish, because I want us to think about, you know, if we have the right answers to some of these very pressing questions, we can have right answers and bring it to the world, to our culture, to our next door neighbor or a family member in a way that just unravels all the good we hope to do.

Or we can bring it in a way that represents Christ and by the wonderful work of God may be used to really change.

So let me just give you some facts about Michael, and they're on the back of the book, and this keeps me from forgetting, all right?

So Michael is the Research Fellow of Church and Culture for American Family Association, and other than Logic on Fire, he has produced

The God Who Speaks, and that's an award -winning documentary back in 2018.

And another, In His Image, Delighting in God's Plan for Gender and Sexuality.

So Michael, why don't you just kind of introduce us to the reason that you would have written a book like this and devoted so much time to this when that's not something that probably ever crossed your radar years ago?

No, it certainly didn't cross my radar until I was working on that movie, In His Image.

And as a producer on that, I was trying to do some research related to the topic, you know, because we're dealing with the question of gender and sexuality issues.

What does the Bible say about it? How are these things happening in the culture? How do we understand these things?

But one of the strains of that whole, you know, big multifaceted topic was the issue of how is this affecting the church, and how are

Christians talking about this, and, you know, how is this impacting theological discussion, and so on.

So the question of gay Christianity was something that I began to research just to try and understand it myself so that we could deal with it accurately in the film.

But really, in the movie, it really only became like this three -minute section of a larger piece, and we began to feel at a certain point with the research that there needed to be something more on this topic, because there was so much confusion that's happening in the church, and there's a lot of pressing issues that are happening even within conservative churches, you know,

Reformed churches, where these questions are coming up, and differing opinions and views are being put forward, and, you know, people are kind of struggling with, well, how do

I reconcile some of these issues, some of these questions? You know, the sociological language and the psychological language that's been handed to us, a lot of times people are just attempting to kind of syncretically kind of put that into a

Christian mold or a Christian framework without really considering the bigger theological and biblical implications of doing that.

So I tried to bring all of that together, because at some point we, AFA leadership felt like there really needed to be a book that dealt substantially with this issue in all of its various forms and the ways that it's coming out now.

So that's how we got to the book Dangerous Affirmation. And this has just been printed?

Yes, yes, it's just been released. Yeah, and you can find it at DangerousAffirmation .net.

Well, Michael, the book is divided into five major sections, and we talked about you just kind of running us through these key points of the book, and maybe that will kind of help us get a, you know, an overview to let us know, is this something, you know, that I would benefit from reading and, you know, benefit from knowing as I interact with people that I care about, but who have become very confused about the issue?

So the first thing to deal with is this whole question of what is gay Christianity, because you might hear that term and not really be familiar with that kind of language.

I'm using that term to describe this overall movement to reconcile the Christian faith with homosexuality.

Now, both of those terms, Christian faith and homosexuality, of course, big multifaceted terms in themselves.

The Christian faith isn't necessarily your individual faith in Christ, but it's the overall values, beliefs, and practices that have been rooted in Scripture that have defined the church throughout her existence.

And then homosexuality, of course, also multifaceted. It's not just a certain behavior or certain desires.

It's also relationships and a sense of community and even a sense of culture and identity and all of those different things that have been connected with it more and more, especially in the last 20 years.

So both of those two things are really irreconcilable. You know, if you think of what does the

Bible say about homosexuality, well, there's nothing good said about it. It's condemned as a sin.

It's recognized as something that bars someone from the kingdom of heaven in 1 Corinthians 6. So, you know, so then what is the response?

Well, there's this attempt to reconcile, to bring two things that are in conflict with each other somehow together.

And there's a lot of different ways that that can happen. And so that's what I'm attempting to kind of unpack over the course of the book.

I remember years ago, a man that led me to the Lord, who was a very godly and kind but clear thinking believer, talking to me about getting a wrong definition, particularly of homosexuality.

You know, he warned me, even this was probably 20 years ago, that there is an increasingly unclear definition of homosexuality.

You know, back then, I would say that the normal reaction within kind of a conservative church is to say, those people, which is a wrong reaction.

And then, you know, but then as the pendulum swings, and oftentimes culturally, evangelicals feel like, wow,

I shouldn't have acted that way. So is the right way to act like the total opposite?

Should I swing all the way? Well, no. But I remember him warning me that if we don't get that definition correct, then it will open the door for a thousand wrong, you know, approaches.

Well, that's certainly what you've seen. And that's part of why, part of my approach in writing this book is

I did want to be clear in the definitions, because so much of the overall cultural and social push has been a redefinition of terms, a redefinition of language, introducing new terminology.

You know, you introduce a term like sexual orientation. Well, this is kind of a new psychological concept that was developed in the late 19th century.

But people are using it now like it's this established fact, even though in many ways it was something that was kind of pushed through the psychiatric and psychological establishment in the late 1970s to kind of establish homosexuality as this normal thing.

It wasn't just this action. You know, sodomy was kind of the term that was used before. Now it's this internalized sense of identity and desire, you know, is now defining the person.

And so things like that were things that I really wanted to deal with in the book, because I felt like there was a limitation in some of the evangelical approaches to the topic where there was an unwillingness or even an ignorance when it came to really dealing with, or maybe even a fear to touch on certain topics, because they're like, well,

I don't know. That sounds kind of like original sin. Maybe you could define it within that category. And so there was a real hesitancy,

I felt, in some of the writing. So I wanted to try and bring all those things together to help

Christians think through these things, because the issues of gay Christianity, you know, you may think because you're in a conservative church, a

Bible -believing evangelical church, you think, well, you know, we hold to the Bible, and we believe that the

Bible is inerrant and inspired, so this really isn't probably a danger for us. Well, in one sense, maybe it may not be a danger in terms of you changing your official policies as a church, but it is a danger for the people in the congregation, because they're going to know people.

They're going to have perhaps children or loved ones or friends or co -workers who identify as gay or lesbian, and they're going to ask questions.

And then some of those questions, then you're going to be trying to understand, well, how can I approach these things and talk about them as a

Christian? And so before you know it, you've kind of started to drift a little bit, because you're not really on sure footing, because oftentimes these things catch us unawares, and we're not really prepared to think through these things carefully at the moment.

Your first two major sections are on rethinking theology and rethinking the

Bible. So how does that apply to this topic? So the way that I deal with the rethinking theology, gay

Christianity really is a big and multifaceted entity or movement.

You know, I define it generally as that attempt to reconcile the Christian faith with homosexuality, but there's a number of ways that that can be expressed.

And so I've identified kind of three main streams of thinking that I've seen over the course of the research.

One, which is the most popular, I guess, the most understood or recognized, is the affirming church or affirming theology, gay affirming theology.

And so that's what people would probably most typically think of when they hear the term gay Christianity, because these are things like saying, well, you know,

Paul didn't really understand what we understand now. So if he had written the Bible now, it might have been a little different, or maybe the

Bible is actually a gay affirming book. It's just because the love ethic kind of overrides all of the other condemnations and admonitions and all that, you know, and the law is fulfilled, so we don't have to obey that anymore.

You know, those kinds of things that people might say. So that's the gay affirming church.

You see that in the mainline churches, you know, the PCUSA, the United Methodist Church. United Methodist Church hasn't officially taken that on, but even the split that's happening now is related to these questions of being affirming or being non -affirming.

So then there's a second stream that I also noticed, which is even more radical than that, which is called queer theology, which is kind of taking this rather eccentric academic approach to reading into text certain ideas, and really the goal of it is to dismantle kind of traditional notions and social norms, and you're just combating that, you know, saying that God is queer and saying that, well,

God is holy and God is other, and so then you're kind of using holiness or otherness then as a synonym for queer, and then so you're reading that, and the point of that is not necessarily you're making, you know, the systematic theological statement.

It's really to just kind of disrupt and shock, and you know, it's got a lot of performance art,

I would say, kind of attached to it. And so that's, obviously, it's a very blasphemous kind of take on it, but it is where a lot of things are trending, especially in social media.

A lot of people like those real quick, kind of pithy, shocking statements, and so you'll see things like that.

But then on the conservative side, there's this other movement, which I identify as gay celibate theology.

Now, gay celibate theology is a bit of a misnomer because it's not that everyone has embraced celibacy necessarily, but the idea is that these are people who've grown up within conservative evangelical backgrounds and want to hold to some elements of conservative theology and say, well, yeah, the

Bible does call homosexual behavior a sin, but it doesn't speak anything about the orientation or how

I feel. You know, same -sex attraction is only a problem if you act on it, they would say.

So anyway, so they kind of find these little ways to nuance it and then to say, well,

I can accept this identity that I have as a Christian and this identity that I have as a gay person, and so I can be a gay

Christian without that being a contradiction in terms. Whereas, you know, five or ten years ago, we would have immediately recognized that, wait, you can't call yourself a gay

Christian, you can't call yourself a lying Christian or something, you know, because those are bringing two things together that shouldn't be together.

But in this sense, they're using it as kind of like this element of experience and truly defining their experience, they would say.

And that's having a lot of inroads within conservative churches. The Presbyterian Church in America, the

PCA that I'm a part of, is dealing with this. Southern Baptists are dealing with it. Reform Baptists are dealing with it.

And so even within certain Wesleyan circles, you know, Church of the Nazarene and things like that that are more conservative than the

UMC, they're dealing with these kinds of questions because on the surface, it looks very orthodox.

It's like, well, we're not saying that gay marriage is good or that you should go out and practice this, but we are making some small accommodations that start to stir up this kind of inner turmoil of,

I can be gay and a Christian, and I can take on certain aspects of that identity. And that the work of God—ultimately also, they would say, that the work of the

Holy Spirit would never touch that because it's somehow deeper or at the same level as your original sin nature.

And so somehow the work of sanctification doesn't really touch issues of your sexual appetites and desires.

And so those are kind of the three streams that I tried to identify there within the book.

Obviously, there's kind of loose edges on all of those different categories, but that's kind of the big scene as it is right now.

You also talk about rethinking the Church. So how does that apply to this issue?

Well, there's been a number of ways that the Church has been rethought. And I mean, just in an evangelical sense,

I mean, you know, you've talked a lot about that in the Beholder God study and things like that, you know, just the ways that we've not been careful with how we approach

God and how we think about worship. And so there's a lot of that kind of pragmatism and man -centeredness that is a part of this whole gay

Christian movement and conversation, because the Church is basically there for the people.

It's there to make you feel good about yourself. And if there's a group that says, well, the Church has been harmful to me, or I feel like I can't really worship there because this theology doesn't really suit my sensibilities and who

I am, then the Church is now being put on the spot to maybe adjust some of that, or maybe you downplay it, or maybe you don't talk about it in the same way.

But there's an incremental thing that's happening there, because as people start to remove or de -emphasize, then there is this additional push to, well, now you have to put people who identify as LGBT, maybe even within leadership within the

Church, so that people can look and see, hey, I'm represented here. Someone like me is up on the stage, you know, praying the prayers and kind of leading the worship.

And so that encourages me as a gay person. And so that makes me feel warm and welcome here.

And that's the only way that I'll feel warm and welcome here. And so there's a lot of those kinds of things that are happening.

Even the, you know, I talked about the concept of queer theology and queering the Bible. That's another thing that's happening where it's just, you know, reading into the text to try and to kind of shock and push back against what's called heteronormativity.

This is one of these big academic words that people throw around. Basically, it just means that in some form of society, you see heterosexuality as both normal and good.

So basically, all of our society as we know it. So you're pushing back against that in any form.

And some of those little ways that they feel like they can do that is through things like doing these queer readings of the

Bible, where I've even read in one of these accounts of someone, their approach to queering the text was actually to make the worship of the idol in Exodus, of the golden calf, actually a form of liberation.

Because like Moses went up and he got the law, but all the people were really celebrating who they truly were down there.

And it was this big party. And so that's actually what we should be embracing. That's the kind of, obviously, that's not going to hold weight for a lot of, you know, careful thinkers.

But it's one of those many ways that just introduces a new thought, a new way of approaching it, maybe somebody as a question.

The way that homophobia as a term is being used as another way that the church is kind of being impacted by this.

Because Christians are being told that, well, your beliefs are bigoted, and they're against this other group of people who can't help their desires, and they can't help who they love.

So how dare you say all these things? And how dare you? You know, you can change your theology, but they can't change who they are.

So basically, you have to change your theology or else you're not really being loving. And then they throw the love ethic back on the people of like,

Christians, you know, you need to get your act together. But it's interesting, even the question of homophobia, you know, that's another one of terms that was introduced in the early 70s.

A psychologist by the name of Joseph Weinberg, I believe was his name, was just, it was actually used to define a phenomenon he was seeing of men he was counseling who were fearing that they might become a homosexual by contact or close proximity to people who were gay.

And so he called it homophobia. And he believed some people who identified as homosexual kind of had an internalized version of that too, where they were kind of fearful, you know, because they thought they might get other people infected or something.

But very quickly, gay activists latched hold of that word and had a way, a term to define the opposition that they felt like they were receiving in the culture and from people.

So then that term immediately became weaponized and kind of used in a way to help attack and define, you know, the same way that racism kind of defines animus toward people of other races, they were using homophobia then to define this sense of animus or lesser than between people who identified as gay.

And so all of those things together, I mean, it's kind of a multifaceted snapshot, but there's a lot of ways that this is impacting the ways that Christians think, the ways that churches feel like they should talk about things or interact.

You know, the way that we approach counseling or the ways that we approach outreach are all being impacted by this overall push and sense that I don't feel comfortable with this, or I don't know if I can even speak on this, so maybe

I'll just be silent. And so all of those things are happening now. Other than the wrong reaction of kind of treating a sinful behavior that maybe we're not tempted to hear in our little group, or at least no one is talking about this struggle there, you know, and that kind of freeing of people to have a kind of a pharisaical attitude toward whatever sin it is, whether it's, you know, 70 years ago and it's the divorced couple, or, you know, whether it's homosexuality, and that us and them as if we are, like you mentioned, as if we're kind of almost a different animal, and how could you people ever think that way, you know?

So other than that wrong response, I think that there is some truth to the fact that the church does bear some blame in where maybe we should have been more careful, but not particularly within the whole definition of sexuality.

But if we go deeper than that, many of the things you were mentioning, I was thinking, well, but we have the same problem that you're mentioning with homosexuality and related issues.

We have the same problem in the more common run -of -the -mill sins. So self -identity.

I identify as, but what is every sin? You know, every sin that I have committed, in one sense, is

John Snyder identifying as, for a moment, and I would never say this out loud because of the embarrassment, you know, when you hear it out loud, you think, oh, that's a bit embarrassing.

I'm kind of God for the moment. I'm a king for the day. And in my marriage,

I'm more important than her. In my family, I'm more important than my kids. I'm more important than the people I work with.

I'm more important than the people I serve in church. Every sin ultimately includes, or maybe requires, if we stop and think about it, for a moment, you have to identify as something you are not.

You know, and in a sense, from Adam and Eve to us, identifying, having the right to re -identify myself, having a right to choose a different identity than what my

Creator gives me, you know, and the way that that determines how I relate to Him and the people I live among, you know, that's at the root of every sin.

So, if the homosexual knows people who go to church, who, and if the homosexual is clear enough thinker to recognize, you say,

I'm really wrong, but I see you in small areas that you want to do what you want to do, which are not affirmed by Scripture, you're doing the same thing

I'm doing. You're saying the Bible doesn't actually mean what it says, or more deep than that, you're saying you have the right.

You're kind of unique, and maybe this is just the way I am. Therefore, God is okay with it.

And so, you know, you see the same pattern being repeated. So, I do think that in one way, as a believer,

I look in the mirror and I think, well, have I contributed to that pattern?

You know, have people, I'm a pastor, and people see me and they say, well, you just have a different set of things that you claim your right to.

I claim my right to be who I think I am. You claim your right to this, but it's the same root system, you know.

And for the believer, not to, you know, not to expect that we're going to live sinless lives, but to be very honest, you know, to remove the mask that we are tempted with those same lies.

And I find in Christ all that I need to put the lie to death and to embrace the fullness, the wonderfully beautiful reality that is the reality that Christ is.

And to be able to then humbly say to a person next to me who is tempted in a way that maybe

I find just strange, you know, why does that even appeal to you? Instead of treating them as some kind of alien, to say it's the same rope that forms the noose that I hang myself with, if I'm not careful, you know.

And it's the same cure, ultimately, to find my identity in something so infinitely larger, more beautiful, more valuable than what

I can do or what my job is or what people think of me or me getting what I want today, something bigger that I could belong to Him, and that could reshape every value that I have.

Yeah. Yeah, and that's, you know, what you pointed out is something that is underneath, and that's part of the deceptive lie of so much of part of what makes the gay

Christianity movement effective is that it does have things that you realize, well, have

I been thinking that way? Have I treated people improperly?

You know, I can hear stories from people, and I mean, I guess you can question people's experience, but at the end of the day, you're just kind of like, well,

I don't know what happened. I don't know what people said to you or how they treated you or what they said or what they did or anything like that.

But as a Christian, you can still say that you shouldn't have received that treatment, but that isn't a reason to jettison the only source of hope that you have in Christ and to kind of act like this is now something that you have to dismantle or that the church can't offer you any hope or healing or that Christians hate you, because the other side of it is that in many places,

Christians are really wanting to be helpful and really wanting to show compassion and love.

You know, true believers really want other people to be helped and to find hope in Christ. So there's kind of those two competing things that are happening.

Obviously, you know, the church is mixed. You know, there's wheat among the tares, there's goats among the sheep.

So there's an element in which you never know what someone might have experienced, and that may be a true thing that they experienced.

So you can't just dismiss it out of hand, which would be convenient. But at the same time, you have to recognize, well, how can we think about these things carefully?

How can we think, how can we have the Bible inform how we think about these things?

And that's what I tried to do at the end of each section. You know, I had this little point at the end called, what's the problem?

So what's the problem with all of this? And, you know, I was really daunted writing that because I'm like, who am

I to say, to offer the answer? But it wasn't really my answers.

It was just, here's how we can apply the Scripture. Here's what Christ says. Here's what the

Bible offers. And here's how we can apply it in these differing situations to help us think through honestly and assess points where maybe we haven't been as clear or as careful.

But also to not just jettison the whole Christian idea because we feel like, well, you know, so many people have gotten it wrong and, you know, we're just gonna get it wrong too.

And people are still gonna have a problem with us anyway, so maybe we should just give up. So that's,

I don't think that's what we should be doing at all, so. I think that one thing that makes it difficult for a church, other than, you know, misinformation, um, misapplied, um, sense of compassion, perhaps, you know, where if you have a friend that says, okay,

I'm going to just come out and be honest, I'm gay. And, you know, I know of young people who will send, you know, to some announcement, some

Instagram thing that, you know, they'll do a heart. And, and I asked them, why did you do that?

And I said, do you think that that was right for them to do? And they said, oh, no, not at all.

I just want them to know that I do still care about them no matter what, you know, I don't agree with them, but I do care about them.

I'm like, well, but what you did is, like, affirmed it. And, um, you know, so there, there are some times where we make mistakes just out of ignorance.

But I think one of the, one of the reasons we struggle with this as we do generation to generation with different things is that, you know, if, if we say, well, we should treat these people as we treat every other type of sinner.

So here's a man who has been adulterous, or here's a person who's lost his job because he's a thief.

Here's a person, you know, that's kind of destroyed so much with drug abuse or whatever it is.

Here's the self -righteous Pharisee, you know, who goes from church to church because they can't find a group of people that recognizes how wonderful they are yet.

So we say, okay, so that is a sin. It's a sinful behavior. It's a sinful temptation.

And we need to respond the same. And then here's this, I think, here's the struggle.

So do we say homosexuality isn't as bad as we've been saying it is? Is that the cure?

Well, okay. So you're not, you're not some weirdo out there. So you're like us.

So your sin isn't quite as bad as we've been saying. Well, no, actually we have to look in the mirror and say, all of our sin is, is worse than what we've been saying.

It's against an infinitely pure God. It is, you know, it is a strutting before the face of the

God who has sent his son in humility. It is, you know, a rejection of his rights.

It's, there's so much wrong with it. It is self -destruction. It is embracing something that promises to build me up something.

I, you know, if I embrace the sin, it may not be really the best thing to do. It'll give me something. No, it steals.

It'll build something. No, it'll destroy. You know, it'll, it'll give me real life. No, it will kill. So when we look at a person who has made choices in this area and we think, well,

I need to be honest. Sin is sin. All right. Then that means my sin is much worse than I've been pretending, you know, and it's not okay for us all to have our favorite thing because of who

God is. And, you know, and it's with the Christian, we cannot lay the foundation of our choices on my personal preferences or my culture.

You know, if it, if we as Christians have been basing our moral choices based on the kind of a religious culture that we're in, you know,

I go to a church that smokes and drinks, so I smoke and drink, but then the next town I go to, they don't smoke and I quit smoking and drinking, you know, earrings in, earrings out, tattoos on, tattoos covered up.

I mean, so we're always shifting to fit into the group. But what if we went back to the scriptures and we saw

God as he describes himself and by the work of his spirit and through his son, we love this

God that is so different than us. And that begins, then his word makes sense and it becomes the path of my feet and not, you know, whatever my personal desire is or the desire of the person next to me.

The quote that you give at the beginning of the book, I find really just so helpful.

You have a dedication to David Linden. Who's David Linden? David Linden is a guy on,

I first encountered him on the Aquila Report. He was writing things about the whole revoice conference, revoice movement, which is kind of the gay celibate thing emerging within the

PCA. And I was just really stirred and helped by the things that he was writing. And so we conversed a little bit online.

I've never met him in person, but I was just stirred by the fact that this retired minister would devote some of his time and efforts and kind of the twilight years of his life in retirement to really try and deal with these issues and warn people about what was happening.

So, you know, I felt a kindred spirit in him and I really wanted to honor him with the opening of the book.

The quote that comes at the very beginning of the book is by Francis Schaeffer in his work, The Great Evangelical Disaster.

And this is what Schaeffer says, Make no mistake, we as Bible -believing evangelical

Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman's discussion.

It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ.

It is a conflict on the level of ideas between two fundamentally opposed views of truth and reality.

It is a conflict on the level of actions between a complete moral perversion and chaos and God's absolutes.

But do we really believe that we are in a life and death battle? Wonderful stirring quote.

So, Michael, it's kind of, we bring this to a close. When we believe that this is a battle, and battle language is certainly not lacking in our day, you know, over whatever, you know, with the political divisions and the heated arguments and the rhetoric that kind of continues to climb.

And, you know, and in some ways our leaders have removed some of the fences that we would have felt like it's not appropriate to, you know, attack in this way.

You know, that's just not really the right way to talk about ideas. Well, now that's gone. And so the common man feels like, you know,

I was right. The way I talk is right. And so whether, you know, you're in like a little echo chamber with your friends that all agree with you and you're bashing some other group, or whether you're on, you know, social media and you're, like you said, you know, you're using these shock tactics, using language that you probably wouldn't use face to face with the person, certainly not if you cared about them.

It is easy to see the battle and the importance of the battle and then to make some wrong choices.

So how would you advise, as we come to an end, how would you advise a person to take these things seriously and see the battle, but yet to follow

Christ? Well, I really like the way that apologist Michael Brown puts it.

He talks about his approach to dealing with the homosexuality topic is reach out and resist.

The idea is that with an individual, with a person, you're trying to reach out in love and compassion because you want to show them

Christ. You want to hear their story. You want to hear the things that they're thinking and feeling.

How did they get here? How are they thinking about themselves? So that you can offer help and hope in that situation.

But also at the cultural level, at kind of the societal level, there's all of these shifts and things that are happening that are worth resisting because they are destructive.

And they're destructive to that individual even, but they're destructive. Obviously, we feel uncomfortable by the push, the post -Obergefell world where gay marriage is now legal and it's kind of set this precedent that culturally is going to be really hard to overcome.

And it just normalizes things to a certain level where everyone looks around and they say, well, this is just normal. This is just how things should be.

In fact, this is what a civilized society should do. And so, can you resist that while also showing hope and compassion to someone who's right in front of you?

And he says, yes, you can. And that we should do that. And that's part of the call of Christians is to kind of recognize it's not always easy to deal with because we feel that tension.

How am I saying this one thing over here and then it's going to maybe alienate this person I'm trying to reach out to over there.

But if we're trying to be honest with where God has placed us and what God would have us to do, then we have to trust

God to even those situations that, yes, I really do need to say something over here because this is really a problem.

And this is going to be really destructive and it's going to be destructive to my friend. He doesn't realize that. He's not willing to say that to me at this point and to have that sort of self -awareness.

But I know that sin leads to death and to ruin and to just normalize it, to celebrate it as a society is going to lead to things that are really destructive to us overall.

And so, actually, out of love for my neighbor, I'm standing up and resisting some of these things so that, you know, other people don't have to deal with the things in the same way.

And hopefully, you can stem the tide or at least, you know, bear witness to the truth so that some may hear and kind of, you know, be pulled back from the destruction.

Yeah, you mentioned love. And in some ways, that just is the simplest answer.

As long as our love is defined by Scripture, that how does God love the sinner?

How does God command me to love? So, whoever God brings across my path, it doesn't matter what sin, what lie is being told them, what sin is drawing their attention and enticing them.

If I really love them, I will love them in the way that the best lover loves, the way

God loves. And that would mean, like you mentioned, it would mean speaking the truth to them, but it would change the way

I spoke. So much so, sometimes I just say to church folks, maybe an overly simplistic way of saying it, that the true follower of Christ dealing with these issues ought to be as different from a mere conservative who says, these people are ruining my country, as the conservative is from the liberal.

You know, so the Christian is as different from Fox News as Fox News is from CNN. You know, we ought to be, in a sense, while people say, hey, you hold the same value as I do.

Yes, in this way I do. So why aren't you joining me in this kind of harsh and hateful approach?

Because I follow Christ, and He is the only answer to this, and to the answer to all of our emptiness and rebellion.

Yeah. I mean, there's times where I've been in an evangelistic interaction with someone, and I've felt particularly compelled to say some hard things to them.

And there have been other times where I've been in a similar interaction, and I haven't felt that same compulsion from the

Holy Spirit. And I don't believe I was being disobedient and just like, oh, I feel like I should say something, but I'm gonna hold back.

You know, but like, no, I feel like right now the time is to listen and to try and cultivate this relationship at this moment, and to pray that the

Lord would use my listening as a means of drawing them to hear more.

And, you know, this is not a formula. You know, it's not like, well, this is what I do with some people, and this is what

I do with this other type of person. It's so individual to the situation, and just trying to obey

Christ in that individual moment of, how can I speak the truth, and how can

I show love? And when is the time to press in? And when is the time to just kind of patiently wait?

And when is the time to kind of gently nudge? And, you know, we hope that we get it right, but we ultimately trust the

God who's sovereign over all these things to work all things for His good, so. Yeah. It is really wonderful to realize that this is not a separate category.

You know, this is not a unique thing. This is a lie from the same liar that we have all heard and will continue to hear.

And therefore, Christ, Scripture, these are, you know, these are the sources of our hope for anyone.

And we don't have to despair and say, but, you know, I don't know what to say to a person like that.

They're stuck. Well, they're not, you know. Well, thank you, Michael, for spending the day with us.

Yeah. And it's really good to see you again. So, Michael Perkins, who has just released a book,

Dangerous Affirmation, The Threat of Gay Christianity, and you can find it. It's published by American Family Association, and you can find it at DangerousAffirmation .net,

and we'll have a link to that in the show notes. And next week, we'll be back with Steve and looking again at the theme of the

Gospel and the Law, the New Covenant, and how that all comes together in the life of a