TPW 20 Revoice Response to Nate Collins

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Paul warns that evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse, deceiving one another and being deceived.
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The reason Paul told Timothy that was because he needed to be ready to spend the balance of his life in uninterrupted warfare for the truth.
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The most dangerous people alive today are always, always, always ordained ministers.
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They're the most dangerous people in the world, especially the ones that people think are Christians, who will sell you theological poison to the damnation of your soul.
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Folks, I just want to warn you about something. Every heretic in the entire history of the church, without exception, has taught their heresy in the name of being faithful to Scripture.
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That was, that was the day of judgment. That is the day of final salvation, brought back in time and applied to us once for all at the moment of our effectual calling when we repent and believe in our unity to Christ.
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The Proud Son Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines. Today, I'm going to press on with the Revoice Conference, and I want to provide more responses here.
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I've listened to Nate Collins' talk several times, and so I want to provide some feedback to that, as I think there's a lot of very problematic things that were said by Nate Collins in his talk.
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Let's press on here with Revoice. Father God, we're your people, and we're here to call out to you.
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Hear our prayer. Why are you here?
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I want to begin by asking this question. It's a very basic question.
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It's personal for all of us. In fact, there's probably at least as many answers to this question as there are people in this room.
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Are you here because you're looking for something new? Something fresh? Enlivening, maybe?
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A new community. I think that's exactly why many of us are here.
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We're here because we sense that this is the beginning of something new and in many ways exciting community.
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It's an important reason. By the way, just real quick, Nate Collins I learned this because James White reviewed this very same talk, and I thought he did a great job on it.
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Nate Collins is married and has children, and I did not know that the first time
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I listened to this. This is the third time I have listened to this talk because I were studying it as a presbytery.
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I was surprised because it sounds like he really is suffering from terrible loneliness and everything else, but I was very surprised to hear it.
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Just bear that in mind. This is a man who is married to a woman and has children. And that makes understanding what he's saying here a little bit tricky, but just keep that in mind.
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We'll come back to it later, but I want to dig a little deeper than that. New is good.
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Community is essential. Especially when it's fresh and enlivening, right?
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Maybe you're looking for something old, though. Not new. Something solid, firm.
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Something that you can hold on to or that can hold on to you. Or maybe the reason you came here is because you wanted to learn something new or understand something better.
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Something better about yourself. Something better about people you love. Maybe you sense some kind of inadequacy in yourself to reconcile your
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Christian faith with your lived experience. Or maybe you're not happy with the way you understand others who are in this journey of reconciling their faith and their sexuality.
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I imagine that all of us, including myself, are here for at least one of these reasons and probably many, many more.
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But besides all these reasons to be here, one reality stands out in my own life.
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It makes me especially grateful to be here. In the film,
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The Greatest Showman, the central anthem of the movie begins when the circus performers are excluded, excluded from a happy, joyful place.
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Led by the... And this is... I thought this was an interesting way to start this off.
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Circus performers being excluded. Now, that's a going to be a big theme here. This idea of LGBT exclusion.
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Now, what do they mean by this? Ray Lowe, the guy, the Asian fellow that spoke before Nate Collins here in this video, talked about LGBT exclusion.
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And if they mean that the unrepentant cannot become members of churches and certainly can't be officers or ministers in churches, then yeah.
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The thing is, what we need to bear in mind here is that anyone who refuses to repent, not only is there no place for them in the church, there's no place for them in leadership either.
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There's no place for them among God's people. Now, that's always offended people.
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Ray Lowe made the comment, there's supposed to be a place for everybody in the church. And I immediately challenged that because that's not true.
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There is not a place for everybody in the church. The church is for broken, repentant sinners who are at war with sin and who trust in Christ alone to save them from their sins.
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It's real simple. You know, church membership is not complicated. Those who make profession of faith, and I would argue, and their families, their households come in with them, but they've got to be repentant.
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They've got to be repentant. And if you're not repentant, you can't be part of a local church. And if you feel like, well, you guys are persecuting me and excluding me and are hurting me, it's not our intention to do that.
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But the church of Jesus Christ is to be holy. It is to be set apart from the world.
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Now, we all struggle with sin, but the thing that sets us apart is that we struggle with it.
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We don't allow it to define our existence. You know, the sin that I have in my life, and I know that, you know, many people that listen to this podcast, true
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Christians, we have these ongoing battles with sin, and it's terrible. I mean, the battle consumes us.
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It's painful, and we want to be better than we are. We want to be more pleasing to our
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Lord who loved us and gave himself for us, don't we? And so, this playing on the heartstrings here of exclusion, exclusion, exclusion, you know, if anyone was ever excluded as a child, you know, in elementary school, or you felt excluded by your friends, or by your peer groups,
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I mean, that's painful stuff. People remember things like that. Oh, man, yeah, I was bullied, or people mistreated me, or called me nasty names, or I felt excluded from this, or excluded from that.
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No one wants to feel excluded. So, these folks are playing on that emotional issue and trying to turn it into a justification for why we should simply allow them to be unrepentant for these particular sins, and we can't do that.
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Now, he's going to quote some lyrics here from a song, and just listen to this.
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Character of the bearded lady, they sing about this exclusion and the shame that they experience on a daily basis because of who their society perceives them to be.
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The first verse of this song says, I am not a stranger to the dark.
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Hide away, they say, because we don't want your broken parts. I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars.
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Run away, they say. No one will love you as you are.
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See, now, are you tracking with this? So, he's, the parallel he's making is very obvious.
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That's what LGBT people, okay, so LGBT, lesbians, bisexual, or lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender people, that's what he's talking about here.
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That they will never be loved as they are. We will never be loved as we are.
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So, what's behind that? This is just an identity. We were born this way. We were made this way. We can't change it.
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We won't change it. We won't even fight it. The reality that I want to point to and draw your attention to right now is the sheer fatigue that lies beneath these words.
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One thing that he's gonna say here in this message over and over again, probably a hundred times, I'm tired.
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He'll make another statistic, I'm tired. Something else about how badly LGBT people have been treated,
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I'm tired. I'm tired. I'm tired. Now, the first time I heard this, the first time
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I listened to it, I thought maybe, just maybe, when he talks about the sheer fatigue, just being exhausted and tired, maybe what he's gonna do with that is say,
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I'm tired of fighting against this evil desire that is in my body and in my soul.
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I'm weary and I'm exhausted. The sheer fatigue, the sheer fatigue of fighting against something that's perverted and dark and wicked that is in me,
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I'm tired of it. I'm just so tired of it. But that is not what he's talking about here. I can tell you, and I'm sure many people that are listening, are you tired of fighting against the same old sins all the time?
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Are you tired of things about yourself that, man, you would change them. If you could push a button and turn those sinful desires off, you'd push that button in a second.
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To be rid of those sinful tendencies, those sinful desires? Sure, I would. You know,
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I've used that as a as an illustration before. That's one of the marks of a Christian. If you put a button in front of the
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Christian and the sins that are the biggest problem for them, that they struggle with, and by pushing that button, they could eradicate those sins from their life, they would push it in a second.
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They would push it in a second. I wonder if he did that with these folks, if they would push it. If you could be rid of this identity,
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LGBT, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender. If you could be rid of it by pushing that button, would you push it?
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I can tell you from my part, I would push it in a second, because I hate sin, and I'm tired of fighting with it.
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But the struggle goes on. Don't grow weary in doing good. You know, we strive against sin.
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What is that passage in Hebrews? You've not striven to the point yet of bloodshed. It may come to bloodshed, you know, fighting against sin.
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But we still fight. We don't, we're not fatigued by how badly we're treated by society.
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We're fatigued by our fight with sin, but that's not what he's talking about here. It's exhausting to live in the darkness of rejection.
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It's exhausting to constantly be defined by others, by the ways you feel broken, or by the ways you don't measure up, or by a warped understanding of how and who you love.
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That statement is very enigmatic to me. A warped understanding of how and who you love?
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Well, in the context of revoice, and the context of what they're talking about, gay, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, what does he mean by a warped understanding of how and who you love?
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Now, the thing is, there's obviously, there's different kinds of love. The love that a husband has for his wife is in a different category than the love he has for his
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Christian brethren, even the love he has for his children, and the love he has for other women. There are women in this church, older women, and women that are my age, that are a great encouragement to me.
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And I would say, yeah, I love them. They're great people. It's a privilege to have them as part of the
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Christian family, and to be connected to them. But the love that you have in a romantic sense, in the sense of marriage, that's a different kind of love.
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And so, for him to say this, as if it's somehow wrong for us to look down on LGBT love, that's not biblical.
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That's not love. Romantic attraction and sexual attraction to the same gender is not love.
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It's not love. And one thing I pointed out when I, a few years ago, preached through the book of Genesis, did a great deal of work looking at the
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Hebrew there in Genesis 2 about the creation of man, and I will make a helper, an ezer that is comparable, that term,
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Hebrew term, negev, if you want to write that, it's n -e -g -e -t -h, that's how you transliterate the Hebrew term there.
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Negev means opposite of correspondence. Opposite of correspondence.
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It's comparable, complementary to. Not the same thing.
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She was different from him. She was the same species. She was a human being made in God's image, but not the same gender.
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And so, who and how you love, I mean, that kind of, that really made me uncomfortable, because how
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LGBT people would love one another would be unnatural and perverted and dangerous and vile.
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It's exhausting to feel like you have no option but to run away from love. No. This is something that is brought up constantly.
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Matthew Bynes does this a lot in his book, God and the Gay Christian, and also in the talks that he's done. He complains that we're excluding him from love, and he's being excluded from marriage.
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And I thought, I remember when he, hearing him say that for the first time, I thought, no, you're not. You're, you are just as free as any other man to get married.
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To a woman. You're not being excluded from marriage. You're excluding yourself by refusing to repent of this sin and fight it.
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You have to repent of the sin and fight it. You're not excluded from love. You're not excluded from marriage.
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You can get married. Anyone is free to get married. This idea of gay identity being unchangeable.
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God is not able to deliver. God cannot help us overcome anything in this. That's just the constant drumbeat here.
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And you can't let them sneak this in under the radar. And later on he's going to start using terms like the church's sexual minorities.
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Gender and sexual minorities. Really putting this in the same category as race.
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It's a very common tactic. People have been doing that for decades. In fact, David Gushy, when he spoke at one of Matthew Vines's Reformation conferences, he actually made the comparison between the
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Holocaust of the Jews and the way that LGBT people are treated.
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And I just remember thinking that's incredible to me. Comparisons are made between LGBT experience and slavery as it was practiced in America.
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And I know that there's some darker skinned American pastors that are offended by that.
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To put sexual sin in the same category as the color of their skin is offensive.
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Not only that, but one thing I've pointed out. People have asked me many times, what do you think about interracial marriage?
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I'm like, there's no such thing as interracial marriage. Because there's the human race.
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In fact, when I registered to vote here in Tennessee, we moved here, I had to fill out that paper that had a list of, you know, races on there.
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And I checked the box that said other and I wrote Adams. We are all descendants of the same two people,
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Adam and Eve. Why do we look different? Because we have different melanin content in our skin. And the fact is, if you didn't marry someone related to you, then you didn't marry a human.
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Because we're all related. We just look different. So there's no such thing as interracial marriage.
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So putting this form of sexual sin in the same category as race, it really doesn't make any sense at all.
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It's another attempt to key in on something that is definitely sinful and wrong. Racism is wrong.
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For people to have any kind of attitude towards someone else because of the way they look or because of their skin color or the way their faces are shaped or anything like that, or because they're bald is wrong.
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People need to be given a chance. You need to judge everyone by the same standard, not by the way they look or because of their ethnicity or where they're from.
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Is it no wonder then that for many of us, the main reason we're here tonight is because we're just tired.
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I'll just say it. I'm tired. He's very emotional here.
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I mean, this is hard to listen to because he's, you know, he's really appealing in an emotive way to his listeners and his voice is cracking there a little bit.
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He's tired. He's tired. And I kept thinking, even the first time I listened to it, maybe now he's going to talk about I'm tired of this sin and I hate it, but he doesn't.
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I'm tired of feeling burdened by loneliness because I believe lies that I'm unwanted. I'm tired of feeling.
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Now that surprised me because my assumption was he's, he's a single man. He doesn't have a family.
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And then finding out later, I listened to James White do his review of it. He is married.
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He's married and has a family, has children being burdened by loneliness. I would imagine that that doesn't, that doesn't go over very well with his family.
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I just found that strange. Is he speaking for himself or is he speaking for others here? I don't know. Being burdened by shame because I think my orientation makes me less human.
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It doesn't make you less human. Our sins don't make us less human, but they do make us simple and they do make us displeasing to God, which is why, you know, we, we need to put on the new man and put off the old and you put sin to death and you pursue holiness and it's a, it's a rigorous battle and you, you cut off and pluck out.
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That's something that, and just in pastoral counseling over, over the last many years, guys, you know, stumble right into sin because they keep it right in front of them all the time and we'll go over that passage and you know, and it's like if you know that something is in your life that causes you to sin, you got to fight it.
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Get rid of it. Get rid of it. Then cut it off. Pluck it out. Remember what Jesus said? It's better to enter into life maimed than for your whole body to be cast into hell.
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If you know something causes you to sin, get rid of it. Be rid of it. I'm tired of feeling burdened by expectations from others because I think so little of myself.
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I'm tired. So you know that, that's sad. He thinks so little of himself.
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I'm tired of being burdened by expectations of others because I think so little of myself.
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I think that as, as children of the living God, if we are true Christians, we ought to think little of ourselves.
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Um, in fact, Philippians two says we're supposed to consider others to be better than ourselves. Look out, look out, not for your own, just your own needs, but for the needs of others to consider others to be better than yourself.
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Don't associate with the, with the high and lofty, but associate with the humble. We're not supposed to think much of ourselves and certainly our sinful tendencies.
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We should not only think, think low of them, um, but they should convict us and we should grieve and have sorrow in our hearts over that sin.
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And it's kind of a, it's a strange paradox. The Christian life is a strange paradox because, and I've talked to many people about this over the years, just in pastoral care and counseling and everything else.
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You can look back at your life for being a Christian for many years and you can see there's so many strongholds of sin that have been broken, that they're not part of my day in day out existence anymore.
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God has delivered me. God has given a tremendous measure of victory in a new way that I've never seen in a number of different areas of my life and yet the struggle still goes on.
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And I'm actually becoming more and more dissatisfied with my present level of holiness.
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So you, it's, everyone's heard the illustration, the closer you get to the light, the more dirt you can still see that's on you.
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And so, yeah, I'm tired too. I'm tired of sin and I, the thing about, um, the perfection of the work of my
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Lord and savior, his salvation that he's given to me freely by faith alone in him. The thing
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I look forward to more than anything, more than anything in the world. I mean, I can't wait to see the new heavens and the new earth and to see everything in it and to see the glory of God's creation restored.
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But the biggest thing that we're looking forward to, the most important thing that the thing that makes our hearts just glow is we're hindered by sin.
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There's not going to be sin anymore. There will be no division of our hearts at all. None. And we'll be able to love our
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Lord the way that he deserves to be loved. And that's what bothers me about this. It's almost like these folks are saying,
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I still have this one Island. I will not give this up. I have this one thing. I won't give it up.
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And that's it. That's a really sad thing. I'm tired of people saying
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I'm using the wrong words. I'm tired of people saying that I'm not using enough of the right words. I'm tired.
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I'm tired of hearing about gay people who have unsafe homes, angry homes or no homes.
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I'm tired. I'm tired of the reality that gay people live every day with verbal abuse from their coworkers, bosses, neighbors, relatives, and even friends.
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I'm tired. And that's sad. Um, but there's, there are no gay people and you can't allow people to get away with us.
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There is no LGBT community. The church does not have gender and sexual minorities. He's just assuming it.
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I'm tired of hearing that gay people have unsafe homes that gay people live with verbal abuse.
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Excuse me. And the thing is, um, I, I could show you some emails
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I've gotten, uh, from people who are about as verbally abusive as a person can be, uh, stringing together long, long, colorful metaphors and participles, um, of expletives and all sorts of nasty things about me.
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Um, because of videos I've done on, on the gay issue, I did a video called there is no LGBT community.
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People were unhappy about that and then contacted about sermons. I've preached on Matthew vines and homosexuality and have had some very abusive things.
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Very, very, very nasty things said. Um, so the verbal abuse is going both ways.
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Um, but I think godly Christian people are not going to be verbally abusive towards anyone.
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We certainly shouldn't be. You shouldn't be be rates or swear at or curse at people or, or just be ugly towards them.
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I'm tired of being reminded over and over again that 40 % of homeless teenagers are LGBT, that gay and by youth are three times more likely to seriously contemplate suicide than their straight friends.
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And that they were almost five times more likely to have attempted it. I'm tired. Um, the thing that's left out of that, um, as sad as that is,
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I mean, suicide is a, is a real thing. It's a real problem. It's a real, um, issue. Um, it's not because of the way that they're treated primarily though.
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The reason individuals involved in this kind of sin, the reason that suicide is a big problem there is because you can't live your life this way and it not be destructive to your self image and it'd be destructive to you flourishing.
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Um, it, it, it destroys people's consciences. Um, I've read the testimonies of former people who used to be involved in this kind of sin, who went to gay pride parades and marched and would go home and hang their head in shame because in their heart of hearts, they knew this is unnatural.
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It's vile. It's, it's twisted and perverted. And here we are parading in the streets and trying our best to turn the, turn the volume down on our consciences.
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And yet the image of God in us and that law of God on the heart still gets through and it still bothers people.
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Romans 1 32 is a passage that is profound. Um, where Paul at the end of the long sin list there says, who knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are, are deserving of death.
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Not only continue to do them, but also give approval to others who practice them. We are irrational and crazy in our self destructiveness because in my own analysis of Romans 1 32 and reading a number of commentaries and looking at the text when
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I preached through Romans, I think that what he, what he's actually saying there, who knowing the righteous judgment of God, who knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who do these things are deserving of death.
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I think that that phrase deserving of death means hell fire. We know that we're worthy of going to hell for eternity for our sins.
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We not only continue to do them, but we also approve of others who practice them. I'm tired and grieved because 40 % of transgender adults say they've attempted suicide.
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And then 92 % of those attempts were before the age of 25. I'm tired.
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And so transgenderism is not being addressed here as something that is fundamentally disordered about a person's mind.
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It's a, it's, it's the ultimate denial of the created order itself.
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It is one of the ultimate acts of rebellion that a person could ever do is to pretend to be the other gender, pretend to be the other gender.
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I mean, the, the old Testament forbids, cross -dressing and there's, there's, you know, there's differences of opinion as far as what all that entails, but men are not supposed to wear dresses.
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Men are not supposed to dress like women and put on makeup and try to look like, like women and, and vice versa.
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You know, androgyny, it's a big problem in our culture. We, we've really lost the distinction between the genders, but I'm tired of seeing the fragility of life put on full display in the stories of gender and sexual minorities who are trying to eek by, squeak by every day of the week just to get by.
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I'm tired. Gender and sexual minorities. You got to catch that phrase.
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There are no gender minorities and there are no sexual minorities. There are men and there are women.
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If you're a man, you were designed emotionally and physically for romantic intimacy and sexual intimacy with a woman.
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If you're a woman, you were designed by your creator for romantic and sexual intimacy with a man and that's it.
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There are no gender or sexual minorities. These kinds of things are not identities. They're not on the same level as our ontological gender.
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They're not on the same level as what we actually are. Now, if I'm not alone in this and I suspect
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I'm not, how do we respond? Where can we start?
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I think the first thing we need to do is learn how to corporately lament the reality that gender and sexual minorities live with virtually each and every day in the church right now.
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But lament doesn't come naturally to us. At least lament that leads to life.
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I mean, we all know that person. Perhaps you are that person who just can't seem to move past lament.
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And I don't just say this jokingly. Sometimes it's hard to know where good lament begins to shade into something too dark, into a depression.
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It's actually the opposite of life. So to help us understand what lament that is deeply and thoroughly
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Christian might look like, I'd like to point us toward two examples that we see in the
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Bible, neither of which will be any surprise. So he's going to talk about Jeremiah and talk about Jesus.
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Jesus. Jesus' lament. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. The lamenting of the prophets and of the prophet
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Jeremiah and Jesus. Now his use of Jeremiah is going to focus on Jeremiah's rebuke of the false shepherds of the false prophets of, of bad churchmen at the time, bad leaders in the religious community of Israel.
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And he's going to make a parallel between Jeremiah's opposition that he experiences from the false shepherds and the bad shepherds to basically everyone in the church, pastors, teachers, leaders that don't agree with this perspective, that that's actually a parallel.
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So listen carefully to this. Jeremiah and the example of Jesus. And after we've looked at these two examples, we'll end with just a few words.
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Just some points of application that might help those of us who are great tradition, gay
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Christians know how to lament. Great tradition, gay
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Christians. That's another, that's another term that's been kind of invented. Great tradition, gay
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Christians. I guess, I guess they're trying to set themselves off against the liberal version of this.
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Because I think, I think Nate Collins teaches at a
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Southern Baptist seminary. I think he does. But so he would look at himself as a, as a conservative.
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Great tradition, gay Christians. Now again, the phrase gay Christian, it really is an oxymoron.
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You can't be a gay Christian any more than you can be an adulterous Christian or a thieving Christian or a murderous
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Christian or anything like that. So the prophet of Jeremiah prophesied to the
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Southern kingdom of Judah for almost 40 years from the time of King Josiah, all the way until the nation of Judah was carried away into Babylon.
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As a prophet, Jeremiah's primary ministry was to call the nation of Judah to repentance for their idolatry.
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And during his ministry, Jeremiah experienced enormous suffering as a result of his faithfulness to his calling.
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And why, why did Jeremiah experience great hardship in response to his calls to repentance?
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Because nobody would repent because nobody would let go of their idolatry. Nobody would, would turn their back on it.
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And that's a, it's very ironic because I think Jeremiah would lament these individuals for the very same thing.
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I think if Jeremiah were alive, he'd be calling them to repent of these sinful desires and this sinful identity and they would refuse to.
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And then Jeremiah would, would lament. Because if you read through the prophecy of Jeremiah, that, that is what he is lamenting.
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His opponents often plotted against his life. He was beaten. He was put in stocks. He was mocked.
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And perhaps most famously, he was thrown into a well and left to starve to death. Listen to these.
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By people who wouldn't repent. And they were tired of him telling them to repent. Words in Jeremiah 20.
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Cursed be the day on which I was born. The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed.
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Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father. A son is born to you, making him very glad.
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Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity. Let him hear a cry in the morning and an alarm at noon because he did not kill me in the womb.
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So my mother would have been my grave and her womb forever. Great. Why did
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I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow and spend my days in shame?
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Jeremiah was sent by God. God called him and he answered that call to call the nation of Judah to repentance for idolatry.
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And he was punished by his people for that. And why?
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Because they didn't want to repent. Jeremiah was being nothing but obedient.
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He was doing what God had called and instructed him to do. But what exactly was
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Jeremiah saying that got him into trouble? It wasn't his accusations of idolatry that were causing his.
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Yes, it was. Yes, it was. And it was also his rebukes of the false shepherds, too.
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Yeah. Life to be so difficult. The people of Judah weren't the source of Jeremiah's woes.
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It was attacks from false prophets. Jeremiah 14, 13 through 14 says, then
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I said, ah, Lord God, behold, the prophets say to them, people of Judah, you shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine.
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But I will give you assured peace in this place. And the Lord said to me, the prophets are prophesying lies in my name.
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I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lie.
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Now, you got to just recognize here at the end of the talk, he is going to say he's going to say that LGBT people are prophets.
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And those of us who denounce this, we are the false prophets. We're the ones that are prophesying lies in God's name.
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I find this unbelievably offensive. So if we stand up and then call people to repentance from something that shows up in sin lists and scripture, homosexuality,
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I mean, even in first Corinthians six, both terms are used, arson, a coy taste and malicoy that the active and the passive part in male homosexual sex, soft, you know, being a soft man, those show up there.
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So if we call people to repentance of that, we're the false shepherds in Jeremiah, and we are prophesying lies in God's name by calling people to repent of a very simple, easy to recognize sin.
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But I find this amazing that he's actually saying this and that there's not some kind of an uproar going on in the gathered people there.
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Envision a worthless divination and the deceit of their own minds. So on the one hand, you have
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Jeremiah who's saying that the nation of Judah will be punished for its idolatries. And on the other hand, you have these other prophets, false prophets who are saying, no, you're not going to be punished.
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It's the nation of. Can you hear the irony here? The false prophets are saying, no, you're not going to be punished.
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What is Nate Collins saying? What is Ray Lowe saying? What are all these people at Revoice saying?
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It's OK to be gay. It's OK to be transgender.
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In fact, Ray Lowe said a transgender pastor would be a huge blessing to a church.
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So obviously, they're not saying that this is sinful. They're not identifying this as sin. And then they're saying that those of us that do identify it as sin, we're the false shepherds that persecuted
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Jeremiah and all these LGBT Christians. They're Jeremiah. In Babylon, in fact, not
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Israel. It's going to be struck down. Now, this raises an interesting question.
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How are teachers like this, these false prophets able to gain positions of power and influence in the first place?
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Jeremiah gives us the answer to this question as well. False prophets. I can tell you one way that false shepherds get positions of power and influence.
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It's called signing our creed with their fingers crossed behind their back. Good old fashioned lying.
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Saying you believe our standards, you believe our confession when in fact you don't. So lying has always been pretty effective at false shepherds getting in.
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Prophets arise when there are bad shepherds.
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That is quite true. That's quite true. And what he's going to go on to say here is false prophets get into the church.
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Because of bad shepherds. And who are the bad shepherds? People that call people to repentance of this kind of sexual sin.
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Were the were the false shepherds that let false prophets in to the church? Listen to how he spells this out.
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He hints at this all the way. The very beginning, Jeremiah three. Go and proclaim these words toward the north and say, return faithless
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Israel, declares the Lord. I will not look at you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the
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Lord. I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt that you have rebelled against the
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Lord, your God, and scattered your favors among foreigners under every green tree that you have not obeyed my voice, declares the
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Lord. Return of faithful, faithless children, declares the Lord, for I am your master.
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I will take you one from a city and two from a family and bring you to Zion. And I will give you shepherds after my own heart.
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Who will feed you with knowledge and understanding. And his interpretation is,
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I will give you shepherds after my own heart who won't identify lesbianism, homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism as sin.
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In his perspective, those would be the good shepherds. They would just be affirming and accepting of all these sins, and that would make them good.
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Jeremiah 5, 30 to 31 says an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.
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The prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule at their discretion. Jeremiah 12, 10 through 11, many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard.
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They have trampled down my portion. They have made my pleasant portion, a desolate wilderness. They have made it a desolation, desolate, it mourns to me.
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The whole land is made desolate, but no man lays it to heart. And lastly, in Jeremiah 23, 1 through 3, therefore, thus says the
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Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people. You have scattered my flock and have driven them away.
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And you have not. Don't you need to hear the way he's using this? The bad shepherds have done.
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You have scattered my flock and driven them away. Meaning if we don't allow unrepentant people involved in this kind of sexual sin or who identify themselves as these sins, but, you know, might not necessarily act on them, but they're just accepting it as an identity.
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Us calling them to repentance of this and calling them to fight the good fight against this sin.
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We are the ones that God himself would rebuke for scattering his flock.
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This is up astounding that he is saying this from the pulpit of a PCA church.
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Attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the
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Lord. Now, how is Nate Collins using this?
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So if we if we say someone comes to me and says, yes, I'm a gay Christian, I would say, no, you're not.
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Now, let's meet. Let's talk. I'll stand shoulder to shoulder with you. You can text me when you're struggling.
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I will pray for you. We do that. That's what the body of Christ is for. You know, together we help one another be more holy.
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That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to be a family that cares about each other. But the tie that binds us all together, though, is that we all have the same goal, and that is holiness.
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Holiness. We want to be more like Christ. And so if there are desires in our hearts that are evil, that are wicked, that are vile and perverted, we need to to seek to put those to death and to overcome them.
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Now, we might not ever fully overcome them. And the thing is, every Christian listening to me right now has had some measure of sanctification in their life.
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But you haven't overcome everything perfectly yet. We never will. Not in this life. There you know, we are
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I'm a very strong opponent of the Wesleyan, Keswick, higher life, you know,
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Christian perfectionism ideas, things that you see in like authors like Andrew Murray and John Wesley and some of those individuals that come out of the hole, the
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Keswick holiness movement and all that kind of thing. Perfectionism, perfection is not possible. So, yeah, you're going to have to fight it.
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You're going to have to struggle. You know, one of my favorite B .B. Warfield lines ever in his volumes on against Christian perfectionism,
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Warfield says, anytime a man tells me he's attained sinless perfection in this life, I quickly push him aside and begin discoursing with his wife.
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Yeah, she'll tell you whether he's perfect or not. So Jeremiah lays the blame for the plight of the people of Israel, not only on their own idolatries and not even on the prophets who were prophesying peace, peace, but also on the spiritual shepherds of these people.
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Yeah, the spiritual shepherds did not do their jobs in the church there prior to the coming of Christ, that, you know, there is there is the organized church there and there were these leaders and they didn't do their jobs.
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They didn't tell the people the truth. They didn't declare the word of God to them. And that's what as a pastor today, these kinds of passages where these rebukes are given to shepherds, that's something that's real serious to me.
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What is he rebuking them for? Because they are healing the wound of my people lightly. They're not calling things iniquity.
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In fact, real quick, the book of Lamentations is a is a neglected book of the
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Bible, and it's a real shame. The book of Lamentations is is a gold mine.
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I mean, it really is. I mean, almost every state, every phrase in it is just is remarkable. And you all know the story.
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You all know the historical narrative here. Jeremiah prophesies and people people don't listen.
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So he actually sees the destruction of Jerusalem and the people carried away. And Lamentations is his response to that, to the destruction and the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem.
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Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians come in and take the children of Israel away captive. And Jeremiah is left kind of looking at the ruins and the smoke, you know, still ascending from, excuse me, from Jerusalem.
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And he's lamenting it. And there's that wonderful passage after pouring out his heart and such incredible sadness, the first few verses of Lamentations three.
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And then suddenly he has the great change of heart there towards the end of Lamentations three. Yet we are not consumed because of the
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Lord's great mercies. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness, O Lord. Of course, that that great hymn, great is my faithfulness, is taken from Lamentations three.
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But listen to one of the things that Jeremiah writes in Lamentations chapter two and apply it to what we're being told here.
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Listen carefully to Lamentations chapter two, verse 14. Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions.
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They have not uncovered your iniquity. Now, reflect on that.
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Jeremiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God, your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions.
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They have not uncovered your iniquity. What was the biggest problem with the prophets? They did not uncover the people's iniquity.
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They did not uncover the people's iniquity. In other words, they didn't call them to repent of the sin they were engaged in.
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And that's exactly what Revoice is doing. That's exactly what they're doing. They are not uncovering this iniquity.
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And listen to the rest of the verse. To bring back your captives, but have envisioned the false prophets, have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions.
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Anyone that would ever say or even think an LGBT pastor would be a huge blessing to the church.
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That's a false prophecy and a delusion. And someone that would in their preaching and teaching ministry and even in their life as a
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Christian, if you're not a clergy or not an officer in the church, anyone that would refuse to identify these desires as sinful, anyone that would refuse to call people to repent of them, they have not uncovered your iniquity.
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It's a hard thing. You have to call out sin and people will attack you for that.
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People will get very upset at you, especially if you call something sinful that's very dear to them or something that they identify as.
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Yeah, you're going to evoke an emotional, sometimes violent response. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah?
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Remember what happened in that city in Genesis 19? There's something that I think is often unnoticed here.
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But you know, the whole narrative, the angel of the Lord and stays in Lot's house there.
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And it says that the men of the city came from every quarter and they surrounded
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Lot's house and they say, bring the men out here that we may know them carnally so we can have sex with them, so we can rape them.
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And Lot comes outside the door in Genesis 19, verse 7. Listen closely to what
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Lot says to them. Please, my brethren, do not do so wickedly. He calls what they're wanting to do wicked.
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Wicked. Don't do so wickedly. And what's their response in verse nine?
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They say about Lot, this one came in to stay here and he keeps acting as a judge.
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Has anything changed in what, 3 ,500 years? The people engaged in this kind of sin, these kinds of perverted, twisted sexual desires.
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When someone says, don't do this wickedly. What are they still saying? You're judging us.
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You're excluding us. You're persecuting us. You're oppressing us.
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You came to sojourn here and you keep acting like a judge. How dare you judge us? I mean, how many times are
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Christians said to be judgmental when we actually try to be prophetic and identify sin for what it is?
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It's been happening for a very, very long time. And I'm sorry, but if you're a
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Christian and you love the Lord Jesus Christ and if you love the souls of the people that are around you, you have to call sin what it is.
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You have to call sin what it is. And there have been times, you know, I've had to do that in pastoral work. You know,
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I've been through church discipline cases and stuff. You have to call sin what it is. You got to you got to call it what it is.
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Uncover the iniquity of the people so you don't get God angry at you. To fail to call people to repentance of whatever the sin is that they're in is to bring yourself under the very judgment of God.
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What separates a good shepherd from a bad one is the good shepherd. A good shepherd in the church is going to call sin what it is and call people to repentance of it.
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And he may have lots of enemies because of doing that. The bad shepherd is going to heal the wound of my people lightly, saying, peace, peace, when there is no peace.
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They're not going to uncover iniquity. And you know what? They'll be a lot more popular. They'll have a lot more followers on social media.
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Their churches will be bigger. Their churches will be bigger. They may be invited to speak at more conferences.
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But folks, we can't do that. We cannot sacrifice faithfulness to the truth of God in the name of popularity and pleasing men and not coming under the judgment of people like this who refuse to fight the good fight, just like the rest of us have to.
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So where does that leave us? How does that help us lament?
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We read the next few verses, Jeremiah shows us what lament couldn't look like. What it can look like to cry out to God while suffering for doing what is right.
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Jeremiah had hope. The very next four verses, Jeremiah says in 23, three through six, then
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I will gather the remnants of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them. And I will bring them back to their fold.
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And they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over. You need to hear that.
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And they shall be fruitful and multiply. LGBT, LGBT, be fruitful and multiply.
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Those two things don't go together. Those two things don't go together. Because if there's one thing that every form of perverted sin like this has in common is there's not reproduction going on.
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Be fruitful and multiply. I, you gotta, you gotta catch that there. For them, who will care for them.
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And they shall fear no more. Nor be dismayed.
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Neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord. Do you hear what he's saying? He's saying that he's making an application to gay people.
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People who are engaged in this kind of sin or who have these kinds of desires. No more shall be missing.
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So unrepentant people involved in this kind of sin are going to have, they're going to be fruitful and multiply.
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Be fruitful and multiply. And God's going to bring them back. Very, very bad way of handling this, the entire book of Jeremiah and the whole historical episode that's being discussed here.
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Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord. When I will raise up for David a righteous branch.
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And he shall reign as king and deal wisely. And shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
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In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called.
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The Lord is our righteousness. Jeremiah knew that his sufferings were real and that they were a real cause for lament.
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But he also knew that true lament ends in hope for deliverance.
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Not ultimately from suffering, although that's part of it. But from the injustice of his suffering.
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And what's the application he's making here? Is that LGBT exclusion, unrepentant
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LGBT exclusion from church membership and from pastoral leadership is unjust suffering.
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It's unjust suffering. And who is the source of this justice?
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It's Jesus, who is the Lord, our righteousness. And this is exactly what we encounter in the
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Gospels, right? When Jesus takes on a prophetic posture, it's always towards the
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Pharisees. Who were the bad shepherds. So just like Ray Lowe before him spoke here, who are those of us who would preach because of the love that we have in our heart for Christ and for God and for his law and the love we have for people's souls would denounce this kind of thing as sin and call people to repentance and call people to fight against it and to try to live a holy life and to get help and to fight the good fight.
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And we're the Pharisees that crucified Jesus. We're the bad shepherds.
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Isn't that amazing? I find this just shocking. Matthew 23.
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I'm just going to read one of the famous woes. Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the scribes and the
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Pharisees sit on Moses' seat and so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do, for they preach, but do not practice.
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They tie up heavy burdens. There are some thoughts and opinions about our experience of orientation that are heavy burdens, right?
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Bad shepherds. Are you catching this? There are thoughts and opinions about our orientation and experience that are heavy burdens.
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This subject is not complicated. Everyone in their heart of hearts knows that if a man has romantic feelings for another man or sexual desire for another man, that is a sin.
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He's calling that thoughts and opinions. No, it's not thoughts and opinions.
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It's the word of the living God that he has testified to in the
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Bible, in scripture. It is the word of God about this kind of desire and these kinds of behaviors.
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It's not tying a heavy burden. And you could argue like this about any sin that you were into.
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You could use these very same arguments to justify adultery, theft, and coveting, and whatever else, whatever else you, you know, is your thing.
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Give us those burdens. They are hard to bear and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.
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This is the first of seven woes that Jesus pronounces over the Pharisees, the bad shepherds, and the common thread through all of them.
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There's a real us and them mentality that's being pushed here. We, you don't understand what we experience.
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Well, in a sense, everyone understands what everyone else experiences because we all experience sin.
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And we all experience desires that are unholy and are displeasing to God. It's not tying a heavy burden on someone to identify sin as sin.
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It's what the scriptures command us to do. Those who refuse to repent may become violent.
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Just like Genesis 19. What do the people do there? It's one of the most amazing narratives. I remember studying it in some detail when
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I was doing my sermons on it. These guys that surrounded Lot's house, when they were struck with blindness, they don't say, hey,
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I'm blind. I can't see. Hey, we all can't see. Instead, it says they wearied themselves trying to find the door in their blindness.
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There is a recklessness and an irrationality to sin that we all know about and we all experience.
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And as Christians, we have to fight it. We have to fight it. And the results of fighting it are joyous and wonderful.
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Is that they're being unjust. If you're unsure...
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Man, we are being unjust. I mean, the concept of justice is a reflection of the very character of God.
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When God says it is an abomination for a man to lie with a man, for the parts that God designed here are intended to function a certain way, and it doesn't work that way.
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When God declares that's abomination, those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
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Those who live in those sins will not inherit the kingdom of God. That is not tying up a heavy burden on someone.
01:00:14
That's just giving them the truth. Unsure that this link exists between prophecy and injustice, just take a look at the end of the chapter.
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It ends with lament. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.
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See, the thing is, I would look at these guys as the leaders, and we come to them and say, repent, and they stone us.
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They stone us. Okay, so both sides think that the other is stoning them. Well, how do we find out who's right? You go to the word of God.
01:00:52
You go to the text of scripture. You look at Leviticus 18. You look at 1 Corinthians 6. You look at 1 Timothy. Look at the sinless right there.
01:00:58
Homosexuality. And sexual perversion. They're all listed. And that's not what he's saying it is.
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How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her rings, and you were not willing.
01:01:17
So where does that leave us? How does this help us lament?
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I think to answer that question, we can go back to Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 15, we can all say with him, oh
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Lord, you know, remember me and visit me and take vengeance for me on my persecutors.
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In your forbearance, take me not away. Know that for your sake, I bear reproach.
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Are you hearing what he's saying here? Jeremiah is praying for vengeance to be taken on his persecutors.
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What's the parallel being made here? We are Nate Collins's persecutors.
01:02:09
And as he's going to say at the end of this, LGBT people are prophets to the church.
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And if we call them to repentance and we don't allow them to come into the church as unrepentant
01:02:22
LGBT people, we are their persecutors. And they're praying imprecations from scripture against us that God would destroy us.
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This is not subtle. This is really, really quite in your face.
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Listen. Your words were found and I ate them.
01:02:49
And your words became to me a joy and the light of my heart.
01:02:56
That would be wonderful if that was true of these individuals. What if they looked at the passage, 1
01:03:02
Corinthians 6, 9 -11? What a great text. Paul says, do not be deceived. Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?
01:03:09
And then he goes down the sin list and he lists, you know, the active and the passive, the arsonokoites and the malakoi, homosexuals and sodomites, the terms that are used to translate those referring to the active and passive person.
01:03:23
And he says, such were some of you. You used to be engaged in all those different kinds of sins.
01:03:30
And it's not just those sins. It's all the other sins that are listed there. Fornication and idolatry and covetousness.
01:03:36
I mean, everything, every kind of sin that people engage in and serve is spoken of there. That's what you used to be before you were washed.
01:03:44
You were justified. You were sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. I am called by your name,
01:03:51
O Lord, God of hosts. Is it possible the gay people today are being sent by God like Jeremiah to find
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God's words for the church, to eat them and make them our own?
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No, it is not possible. Because God would not send unrepentant people who define their very existence and their constitution as human beings as particular forms of sexual perversion to do that.
01:04:35
He asked, is it possible? And I answered, no, it is not. Because God is holy and his character does not change.
01:04:42
And when he saves people, he grants them repentance and brings them away from and out of servitude and slavery to sin.
01:04:50
So no, it is not possible. To shed light on contemporary false teachings and even idolatries, not just the false teaching of the progressive sexual ethic, but other more subtle forms of false teaching, is it possible that gender and sexual minorities who live like...
01:05:14
Remember, I told you, gender and sexual minorities, you need to bear that phrase in your mind because that's a mantra.
01:05:22
And it's not argued for, it's just assumed there are gender and sexual minorities. You got to challenge that every time you hear it.
01:05:29
The church in the world does not have gender and sexual minorities. There might be people with certain skin colors that there's fewer of them in certain areas, but this is not in the same category as something like that.
01:05:42
The term minority usually refers to people of certain ethnic backgrounds where there's fewer of them in places that are dominated by people of other ethnic backgrounds.
01:05:53
But gender and sexual minorities? No, that's a mixture of categories that don't fit together.
01:05:59
Lives of costly obedience are themselves. Live lives of costly obedience.
01:06:07
Again, I want to emphasize this. I want to talk about this a little bit. I mentioned this in Ray Lowe's talk. When Scott Sauls had that open forum at his church with...
01:06:18
Randy Moss was a wide receiver in the NFL. Stephen Moss, a guy who defines himself as a gay
01:06:25
Christian, same -sex attractive. Scott Sauls kept making a comment that really bothered me.
01:06:32
He said, you know, Stephen Moss, it costs this guy something to follow Christ. And immediately
01:06:38
I thought, it doesn't cost him any more than it costs me, or you, or any other
01:06:44
Christian. To be a disciple and follower of Christ, what does
01:06:49
Jesus say? Take up your cross, deny yourself, deny yourself, and follow me.
01:06:56
That means all the sin issues in your life have to be acknowledged and repented of and fought against.
01:07:03
Because in our hearts, we are hardwired only to serve one master. Pathetic call to the church to abandon idolatrous attitudes toward the nuclear family, towards sexual pleasure.
01:07:20
Now, I think what he might be talking about here is this idea of spiritual friendship that there's a panel discussion about it.
01:07:27
I haven't watched it yet, but I would like to eventually review it. But as I understand it, it's people who are same -sex attracted, cohabitating together, but living celibate lives of close spiritual friendship.
01:07:41
You know, one thing that was really disturbing to me when Scott Sauls had
01:07:47
Stephen Moss at his church, Scott, in one of his talks, talked about John the disciple leaning on Jesus's breast and tried to make the case that, you know, what would your reaction be if you saw two adult men cuddling with each other there in the pew at church?
01:08:05
I mean, Jesus did that with John, the beloved disciple. And I just thought at a conference that you're doing, talking about same -sex attraction, you're going to bring up the special love that our
01:08:20
Lord had for John in the context of same -sex attraction? And to even mention that in the same context as a same -sex attraction conference is just not something that should be done.
01:08:36
There was no attraction between Jesus and the Apostle John, and it is just horrendous to even suggest such a thing.
01:08:44
But Nate Collins is here talking about idolatrous attitudes towards the nuclear family and sexual pleasure.
01:08:51
Well, certainly any good thing can be made into an idol, and we don't want to idolize our families or idolize sex.
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A lot of times I think young folks can do that. Their expectations on sex when they get married is that this is going to make all your dreams come true, and that's not what it's intended to do.
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And then they become interested in deviant, kind of weird things, and that's not healthy. That's not normal.
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You need to have the right biblical context for sexual pleasure. It's a gift from God to be experienced in monogamous heterosexual marriage, which is the only kind of marriage there is.
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But certainly you can be idolatrous about it, but just having a normal, healthy love and respect for those gifts, excuse me, of marriage and sex is a good thing.
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It's something that shouldn't make us squeamish or uncomfortable. That's just the way it is. So it's not necessarily idolatrous.
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I mean, I guess I haven't noticed that there's a big problem with an idolatry of the nuclear family.
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We certainly value it because it's the only kind of family that there is. If so, then we are prophets.
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Now you got to catch that here. LGBT people. So if a transgender person comes in, they want to be told there's nothing wrong with the fact that you're transgender, and that's all good.
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And if we have a problem with this, if we have a problem with someone who says they're gay and tell them that you need to fight against this, this is not your identity, your identity is in Jesus Christ, and he can set you free from this, and we're gonna work with you and stand shoulder to shoulder with you and try to help you overcome this in Christ, and they say no, then they're prophets to us?
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That is just absurd. Listen. But in order to embrace this, we also have to embrace lament.
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We have to cry out to God, in hope for deliverance.
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But if we want to follow Christ... The irony of that statement is just amazing. If we want deliverance, yeah, deliverance from your sinful desires, you do need to cry out to God.
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All of these people do. Just like I do. Just like everyone else does. Nobody gets a free pass with any kind of sin.
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We all have to repent of all of them specifically. We are to repent. God is not content with a general repentance, but we are to repent of all of our sins specifically.
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Individually, as we see them and know them and are disgusted by them and want to be rid of them all. We never allow any one of our sins to define us as people.
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That's not right. In the same path that you took, we have to understand that deliverance only comes when we can trust
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God in our own experiences of unjust suffering, because Jesus also trusted his
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Father perfectly for the unjust suffering that he experienced. That is a horrendous comparison.
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Someone who is made to feel ashamed of sin because it is sin and because it's evil...
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Shame over sin is a good thing. In fact, that reminds me of a passage in Jeremiah.
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Jeremiah 6. Listen to this. Jeremiah 6 .15. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
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You know what that Hebrew word is there? Toeva. Abomination. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
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No, they were not ashamed at all. They did not know how to blush. What does it mean to blush?
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When people blush, what is that? Well, they're embarrassed. They're self -conscious of something that's making them uncomfortable.
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When we come face to face with our own vile sinfulness, which is what the Holy Spirit of God does, to every person that's converted, the
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Holy Spirit of God was sent, Jesus told us in John 16, 8 -11. What does he do when he is sent into the world?
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He will convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. He convicts us.
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We are to be ashamed. And folks, that's not unjust suffering. Shame over sin is a gift of God.
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I remember reading Calvin's commentary. I think it's on Psalm 32. John Calvin makes the comment there that one of his greatest fears is that Satan would so beguile him, would so deceive him as to remove from him his own sense of personal wretchedness.
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Having a sense of your own personal wretchedness is a gift from God because that's what causes us to do what?
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To cling to the cross alone and to cling to Christ and his shed blood as the only hope that we have.
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And so for this man who identifies himself as a gay man and a mixed orientation marriage, as a gay
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Christian, for him to say that us crying out to him to repent of this and to stand your ground and fight against it and watch the
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Lord begin the process of sanctification and begin to change those desires and to remove them completely and to begin that process, we're being told we're inflicting unjust suffering on him.
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Now, there have been times in my life that people have confronted me about my sin and my response has been to get upset at them.
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Well, how dare you? Who do you think you are to tell me that I've sinned and this, that or the other way? But then you reflect on it and you think about it.
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Yeah, that was wrong. This happens in marriage all the time. I tell people,
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I really thought, I really did think that I was a nice person until I got married.
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And then you see just how selfish you really are. And it's hard.
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I don't know how non -Christians stay married. I don't get it. It's hard to go to your wife and know, yeah,
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I was thoughtless towards you and the way I spoke to you was wrong and I forgot this.
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Why did I forget this? And why was I thoughtless? Because I'm an evil person. I'm a self -centered man. I'm a self -centered person and there's no excuse for the sins that I commit.
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And so, honey, please, please accept my apology. Please forgive me. You know, that's a mark of Christian maturity.
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You don't, in pride, just refuse to repent when you've done something obviously wrong. And feeling ashamed of yourself, that's not unjust suffering.
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That's a blessing from God. To feel ashamed of yourself in sin is a blessing.
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And I'm disgusted with myself most of every day. You know what, though? That's a gift.
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Because I see that so clearly. My hope rests on nothing other than Jesus. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
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I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name. You know, it'd be great if they'd quote some lyrics like that instead of these lyrics from whatever, this circus show thing.
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And then Ray Lowe was quoting from a guy that eventually comes out as gay, wrote a song called Lament. And it's all victim,
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I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim. No, we're not. We're not victims. We're criminals. We're not victims.
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We're bad guys. You know, and I pointed out in that other video, one of the reasons
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I really do locate my conversion at age 18 is I stopped thinking about all the ways I thought people had wronged me.
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And God turned my mind to all the people I had sinned against. I'm not a victim.
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I'm a perpetrator. I'm a criminal. I'm a bad guy. I'm a sinner. And I hate being that way.
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And that's why in Christ, you can overcome these things. See, so many people like this, like Nate Collins and people who have these kinds of struggles and have struggles in all sorts of different areas.
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They feel defeated a lot. They feel defeated and they'll stop using the means of grace and stop vigorously studying the
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Bible and really trying to overcome their sins. Over and over again, I've had to tell people, you can overcome these things in Christ.
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You will overcome these things in Christ. Trust Him. Cry out to Him.
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Remove the occasions of sin. Cut off and pluck out whatever it is that's causing it. Get rid of it. Even if it's really inconvenient.
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Get rid of it. Pursue holiness. Believe that God can deliver you even from this.
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Something that's got its claws into you all the way past the barbs. Long pregnant pause.
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If this is true, we have a hard road ahead. We have suffering to endure.
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We have injustice to endure. It's not suffering and it's not injustice.
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Not righteous suffering. We have a long road ahead of us. Well, you're going to face opposition from faithful ministers of the gospel who are going to, because they love you and because they love the truth and they love the triune
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God and they love their Lord and they love His Word, are going to call you to repentance and are going to tell you, there is no sin that Christ cannot break and deliver you from and really change you.
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That's again, Ray Lowe's talked to this and now Nate Collins is doing it. The message here is one of complete despair and hopelessness.
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This is an identity. There has been no acknowledgement that this is a sin and no hope given that anyone can overcome these things and be delivered from them to some degree in Christ.
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We're never rid of sin altogether. We're never rid of it altogether. But John Murray, I was reading in preparation for a sermon
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I preached two Sunday nights ago on sanctification. John Murray made the point that there's a big difference between surviving sin and reigning sin.
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You see, you understand what he means? Reigning sin means it controls you. You're under its dominion. Surviving sin means you're under Christ's dominion.
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There's still sin there. There's still sin in your life, but it doesn't reign over you anymore. And that's what's not being communicated here.
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And I just think, what if you had people that did struggle with these kinds of sins who could stand up and talk about what a glorious thing is and the glorious work that God has done to deliver them at least to some degree from that sin's clutches.
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Wouldn't that be encouraging? Initially, I thought maybe that's what these guys are going to do, but that's not what they are doing.
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...for only flesh to endure. The hardest thing about injustice and unjust suffering is that when it comes from fellow believers, our call is to forgive.
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I guess they are saying our calls to them to repent and to fight is unjust suffering.
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That's just amazing to me. Theologian Harris Lawful says, Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans, even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.
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I'm going to read that again. Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans, even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.
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Even though we've been trying to understand what it means to lament, the last word tonight cannot end with lament.
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Lament is real because injustice is real. And for us, that means injustice against gender and sexual minorities is real.
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You hear the mantra? Injustice against gender and sexual minorities. The irony is those that would reach out to people engaged in those kinds of sins or who identify as those kinds of sins, who would love them where they are, just love them right where they are.
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But when it comes up, you need to tell them the truth. That's what people always ask me. How do you deal with if you know someone who identifies himself this way?
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You deal with them the way you would deal with anyone else. You love them where they are. Be kind to them.
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Talk to them. Get to know them. Find out what they like. If they're into music. If they're into bicycling or something.
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You get to know people. Give them a chance to get to know you. And then love them where they are.
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But when it comes up, you tell them the truth. You don't start out like... You don't walk up to people and shake their hand. Hi, you're going to hell.
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That's obviously not how you do this. You befriend people. You're kind to people. You listen well to people.
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Ultimately, the injustices we suffer come from others. We must be forgiving.
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Particularly forgiving our other Christians. We need the church.
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And the church needs us. The church needs godly, faithful people who are repentant for their sin.
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Who acknowledge as sin what God says is sin. People who do not come to the church saying,
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This is who I am. This is my identity. Now deal with me. Rather, we need people to come to God and say,
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What do you want me to be? What do you say about me? What does your word say my identity is?
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That's what we really need. And, you know, Ray Lowe said this. And now Nate Collins is saying it.
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It sounds like they're all saying there's supposed to be a place for everyone in the church. And I say, yes, there is.
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Everyone who's repentant. Now, non -repentant people can come to church. And I invite people to church who are not
01:23:01
Christians. Yeah, come to church. But you can't join the church. And you can't be a member of the church.
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And you can't take communion at the church. And you can't be a leader in the church if you identify yourself as a sin.
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Nobody gets a free pass to identify themselves as a sin. And that's not right. And it's not unjust suffering for us to say that you need to fight against what
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God's word very clearly. And this is not an ambiguous topic. The God's word very clearly identifies this as sinful behavior and as sinful desires.
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Colossians 3, 5 identifies evil desires as sin. So when someone's attractions are perverted and twisted and are contrary to the law of God, they need to repent of that and they need to fight against it.
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And maybe even form groups where they can encourage one another to fight against this kind of sin and get help from the church and get counseling from the church.
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People counsel and help and encourage me a lot because I need that. And I'm a help to others.
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I'm an accountability partner to many other men. And we encourage and help one another because we know that we can't do it alone.
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The body of Christ needs one another. We all need one another. And we need to encourage and love one another.
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But we're not doing that if we refuse to identify as sinful desires like this that are clearly contrary to the created order and clearly contrary to God's revealed law in Scripture.
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That's pretty much the end. I think it was just a couple more seconds. I'm having some sound problems here. The sound kind of faded out there.
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But really what he basically says at the end is that we've got a long road ahead and it's going to be tough and we gotta be sacrificial and forgive the people that persecute us and everything else.
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Sinners who are unrepentant have always looked at those that call them to repent as oppressive and persecutors and everything else.
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But the church today needs to have enough discernment to see this for what it is. This is an insult to the power of God to deliver people from this kind of desire, this kind of sin.
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And we really need to stand our ground and make sure that we are faithful to God and to His Word and calling people to repent of whatever the sin is that they're into.
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Nobody gets a free pass to just be that kind of sin, whatever it might be. Not just this kind of sin, but any kind of sin.
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Because our God is able. He is able and He does set people free. So much that Paul says in 1
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Corinthians 6, such were some of you. Not such are some of you, but such were some of you. You used to be these things.
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So I hope this has been helpful. I am going to try to press on as time permits. Probably not going to have any more time this week to do anything else.
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But I hope that's been helpful to you. Thanks for listening or watching. God bless you and keep you.
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The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.