November 13, 2017 Show with Tim Bayly on “The Grace of Shame: 7 Ways the Church has Failed to Love Homosexuals”

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Well, today we are going to be addressing a very controversial issue in the church today, and that is the issue of homosexuality.

And today we have a returning guest to discuss this issue, Tim Bailey, who is an author and the senior pastor of Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana.

We're going to be addressing his new book titled The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the

Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals, which he co -authored with two other authors.

And it is our honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Tim Bailey.

Chris, it's good to be with you again, and I'm looking forward to having our conversation. I am as well, and if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Tim Bailey on this subject, our email address is

ChrisArntzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

And please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And please only remain anonymous if it is about a personal and private matter over which you are asking, and I could readily see this subject lending itself to those having personal and private questions.

So we will indeed grant your request to remain anonymous if that is indeed your wish, if it is regarding a personal and private matter.

But otherwise, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence. Well, before we go into the subject,

Tim, since it's been a while since you've been on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, I'd love for you to tell our listeners about Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana.

Well, thanks, Chris. We have a church here that is very much young, which

I think is pretty much true of university community churches, and it's a sweet place to be for me as I get into my 60s.

We have a pastor's group and an elder's group that are really strong and loving men, and we put out music.

That's probably the thing that we're best known for is that we have a whole bunch of good musicians because Indiana University has,

I think, the largest music school in the country, maybe the world. And so we have very good musicians, and we're in the middle of a project called

My Soul Among Lions of writing all of the psalms, music, and versification, and recording them 10 by 10.

And so that's been a very sweet work. It takes a lot of time and energy, and sometimes the children and wives suffer because of the amount of time they're gone.

They've gone on a couple of tours east and west, just recently returned from a couple of gigs in up there

Bayou in Pennsylvania. And it's just a very nice work, a great joy, a church.

We have about 100 kids under the age of five, so there's always new births, and my wife is a doula and has done maybe 60 of them.

So that's who we are. We have a number of grandchildren and children, and they're following the

Lord, which I'm very thankful to God for. Praise God. And I understand that it is an unusual church in that it has a makeup that includes both

Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists in leadership. Yeah, when the church started, the question was whether we'd be

PCA or not, because I was PCA, but about half the men who were going to be officers were

Reformed Baptists, and it just didn't make any sense to split over that issue. And so we have,

I guess, close to half who are Credo and half that are Pedo Baptists, and it's been very sweet.

We have a pastor's college, and each time men come to spend three years preparing for the ministry, it's kind of interesting to see where they'll fall on the issue.

And we have not had any division or conflict. We've had a lot of good arguments, but it's been sweet to see that be something that doesn't divide us, and I think the reason it doesn't divide us is we're all absolutely opposed to sacramentalism.

And if you oppose, in the Reformed world today, an exoperi operata view of the sacraments, that really makes you have more in common with Baptists than you would with some of the

Federal Vision, Lutheran, and certainly

Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic parts of the Church. Well, I have to highly commend to our listeners,

My Soul Among Lions. They are absolutely remarkable. I consider them truly one of my very favorite

Christian recording artists. I mean, obviously, they're thoroughly biblical because they sing the

Psalms, and the way that they sing the Psalms is, I think, breathtaking and unique and has some bluegrass influence, although Jody Killingsworth said that a diehard bluegrass fan might question that assessment.

But I hear that in there, but it's a very unique style for psalmody, and I'm thrilled that the

Lord is using them and that they have their second CD out now. I believe it's only two so far, correct?

Well, they're almost done with the third. Oh, okay. They're moving into the fourth set of ten.

And we use them in worship. Most of them are very, very usable. In morning worship, we used one yesterday.

So I'm glad to hear your appreciation for them. I can't tell you the difference it makes to have...

You know, I have been in churches where I've had musicians who are vain and proud, and to have men who are humble and manly in their writing of music and their leadership of music, it makes all the difference in the world in getting up to preach, because it encourages boldness in your preaching.

So I'm as much of a fan as you are. Amen. Well, we are discussing, as I already announced, a book that you have co -authored with two other brothers,

Joseph Bailey and Juergen Von Hagen. Is Joseph your son? Yes, he is.

And tell us something about your son and also about Juergen Von Hagen. I have not heard of Juergen before being introduced to your book, but if you could tell us about both of your co -authors.

Joseph is named for his grandpa and great -grandpa and great -grandpa and great -grandpa, and if you go over to the

Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg, you'll find almost all of his predecessors.

He's the sixth. Wow, because I do intend to go to Gettysburg for the first time. I've been living in Pennsylvania since 2012, and I haven't been there yet, but I intend to go there.

Well, we have a number of graves just within spitting distance of where Lincoln gave the

Gettysburg Address. They have a park next door to the cemetery, but that's not actually where Lincoln gave the address.

He gave it in Evergreen Cemetery. And so our family goes way back, a number of Presbyterian ministers in the

Lancaster County area going back into the 1700s. Most of them not direct

Bailey ancestors, but rather intermarried with the Baileys. So Joseph is my son.

He is a church planner in Cincinnati at Christ Church, and he planted a church here in Indianapolis before going and working on his second one over in Cincinnati.

And then Juergen von Hagen is an economist, and he was until recently the vice -rector of the

University of Bonn in Germany, and has a long CV, many, many publications.

This is his first publication directly in pastoral work, although he has done things and is currently doing things that have to do with, like, the theology of work.

He gave a paper last week here at IU. He has a double appointment. He always comes over every year and teaches here at the

Kelley School of Business and Economics. His primary strength, that he's a pastor over in Germany.

He pastors a church that is evangelical and therefore a free church, not part of the state church.

And he has about half Germans and half refugees from the

Middle East and from Africa in his church, and he's one of my closest friends, wonderful godly pastor and academic.

Oh, praise God. Well, this, as I have repeated, is a very controversial issue because you have even those who are professedly conservative

Bible -believing evangelicals who disagree on the approach to this sin known as homosexuality.

In fact, there are even some of our brothers who think that we are compromising by even using the term homosexual.

They think that it would be preferable to use the term sodomy or some other term. But what do you think is the main failure in the church today that drove you to write this book along with your son and Juergen Von Hagen?

And then we'll go through as many of the seven ways the church has failed to love homosexuals.

We'll go through as many as time will allow. But what was like the catalyst, the initial wake -up call for you that said, wait a minute, there's something going on here that I need to address because it seems that there is a shift taking place even amongst those who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and who believe that homosexuality is a sin, in fact a damnable sin, but there seems to be a shift going on.

So tell us why this book was needed to fill a void in the literature of evangelicalism.

Well, thanks, Chris. What really started thinking about this book was the fact that on a number of conservative websites and organizations, it was very clear that nationally known leaders were compromising on the issue.

And I realize that sounds like a bodacious statement, but truth is very much counter -cultural now, and all of us,

I think, and pastors know this better than anybody, all of us tend to change our language in order to show ourselves reasonable, especially if we preach.

And so I noticed a number of years ago that if I would use the word sodomy, people would have a fit.

An old seminary professor of mine, when I used the word sodomy on the website, on the blog, he wrote me and explained that he didn't think

I understood how offensive the term was. And of course, I don't just use the word sodomy, I use gay,

I use lesbian, I use homosexual, I use, you know, all kinds of language to refer to this sin depending on the situation, but consciously

I do include in those words the word sodomy. When he wrote me, it was clear he thought it was just my stupidity that I didn't know what

I was saying, and I wrote him back and then put it up as a blog post explaining that from when

I lived out in San Diego, to living in Boulder, Colorado, to living in Madison, Wisconsin, and now in Bloomington, Mary Lee and I have always had work with people who have committed homosexual sin of one sort or another, sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and having seen a number of these people repent and knowing them intimately, it was clear to me that a lot of leaders today don't have a clue about how to minister to people who are tempted by homosexuality.

I've gotten emails from men specifically thanking me for using the word sodomy occasionally on the blog, because they say it shocks them and reminds them of the shame of the sin that tempts them, and I think when you have people feeling the pressure of Obergefell and all of the incredible lobbying that goes on by what

I refer to as the homosexualist movement, the pressure to show yourself reasonable is intense, and so what ended up happening is on some of these websites you began to see things like,

I used to not believe in homosexual identity orientation, but now

I do. I've changed my mind. I was wrong. I repent. Another thing that started to be said was that godliness is not headed with sexuality.

Another thing was, you know, there's no reason not to hire somebody who's gay just as long as they don't have sex.

Another site that was being promoted was a site called livingout .org and it comes out of the

UK, and all of the common denominator in all of this was that people were saying that to actually have intercourse, sexual relations, homosexually was wrong, but that as long as you didn't have sex, it was fine to identify publicly and to talk about homosexuality and to say you're gay or you're lesbian or if you don't want to say that, say you're same -sex attracted or this, that, and the other thing, and it was being talked about in such a way that it was eroding the shame of the sin, and that's where the title comes from.

God has ordained shame for sin, and not, you know, this isn't just true of homosexuality.

It's true of rape. It's true of incest. John Calvin says the reason the apostle

Paul brings up incest in the Corinthians were such a proud people, and that he excoriated them for the incest they were tolerating in the church, because it was the perfect way to humble them, and that's because of the shame.

And so as I began to see eating away the shame of homosexuality, of bisexuality, of transsexuality,

I realized that this was being done by men who hadn't a clue how to minister to homosexuals, and it had not seen them repent, had not seen them change, and that it was cutting them a lot of slack.

They were getting a lot of kudos for changing their language and saying they repented of this and that, the other thing, but now they used to be against reparative therapy, but now they realize reparative therapy is wrong.

And so the book had to be written. My wife, you know, I went through periods of time where I had no desire to write it, because at the very beginning,

Juergen and I were up spending a week writing together. He was writing in economics, and I was working on the book, and I said,

Juergen, I just can't stand the thought of writing this book, because I don't know how to do it without naming names, and the minute you name names, people think that it's, you know, fueled by animosity or personal hostility, but I could not figure out any way to write the book without actually quoting all these ways that compromise is being promoted.

So my wife is the hero in this book, because she's the one that kept saying to me, that book has to be written, and it has to get out there, and so she strengthened me, along with Joseph and Juergen, as we were all working together.

So that's sort of the idea behind the book, Chris. And I am assuming, having some familiarity with you, that you would be very opposed to the self -righteous, hateful agenda of the quote -quote

God hates fags cult Westboro Baptist Church, who seem to have nothing but exuberant joy at the notion of homosexuals going to hell.

They don't seem to have any message of hope by proclaiming a gospel to them, by calling upon them to repent, they just want to declare that they are doomed, and they seem very happy about the fact that unrepentant homosexuals will be doomed.

There seems to be no compassion, love, or agenda, or mission to rescue these people, and I'm assuming that you would be totally opposed to that kind of a thing.

Yeah, it says in Corinthians, as such were some of you, every single one of our churches has repentant homosexuals in it.

Every single one. Every single one of our churches has people in it who have repented of incest.

Every single one of our churches has a number of men who are committing adultery through pornography.

Now, I know that people who are listening are saying, you don't know what you're talking about, we don't have that in our church.

And I say, invite me out there, let me preach a couple Sundays, and then see what is confessed after the preaching.

And so I have just been involved with so many churches and so many leaders that the idea that Fred Phelps is what defines anybody who speaks of the shame of homosexuality is ludicrous.

That's what the mainstream media wants everybody to believe, that if anybody's opposed to the sin of sodomy, it's only because they're self -righteous, they're haters, this, that, and the other thing.

And we don't have to prove that to each other in the church. And I would mention something. In our church, one of the things that's unique is that we actually believe that when, in a number of places in the

New Testament, it says, greet one another with a holy kiss, that we're commanded to do that, and we need to do it.

And so in our church, the men do greet each other with a holy kiss, much like the Middle East, but the way it came out was not because the scripture commands it, it came out because it just seemed clear to me that the men

I was working with who were tempted by homosexuality needed to have father love and affection.

And so I began to kiss them on Sunday morning because I wanted to de -eroticize male touch to them.

And so, yeah, I realize that people will want to dismiss a book that's talking about the shame of homosexuality as being written by a hater and somebody who doesn't know the love of Jesus, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Well, praise God for that. Well, let's go to the first way out of seven that you believe that the church has failed to love homosexuals.

Well, the first error that we deal with is the error of effeminacy, okay?

And it's removing the sin of effeminacy from scripture.

And this one is very important. It's foundational because what happened is that when the

ESV is released, they remove the sin of effeminacy from 1 Corinthians 2. And the

Greek word there is the word malakoi, and it has a long, long history of use in the ancient world in Greek, and it means soft men.

Jesus uses the root of the word to refer to John the Baptist in defending him and saying that John the

Baptist wasn't dressing in soft clothes and hanging out in king's palaces, but he was out in the wilderness, you know, eating honey.

He was just a rock -hard man. And so when the apostle

Paul says, neither, you know, murderers, and he goes through this list, then he says, nor the malakoi

Greek, nor arsenikoite. Malakoi means soft men.

Arsenikoite means men who lie with males. And so malakoi is a separate sin from arsenikoite.

Well, what the ESV did was it compressed the two into one thing, and it said men who give themselves to homosexuality, or men who have homosexual intercourse.

And so then in a footnote, they say that these two Greek words, they don't indicate it's two Greek words up in the text of the scripture, but they say these two

Greek words refer to the active and passive participant in homosexual sin. Well, yeah, it is true that malakoi can be a word used to refer to the passive participant in homosexual intercourse, but that is by no means the main use of the word in the ancient world.

There's tons of documentation, and it's all over the place. And what the word means is men who dress themselves up to attract other men, men who are cowards in battle, men who look in mirrors, men who can't say no to their desires, men who are weak.

And so it's a word that refers to a category of men who refuse to bear responsibility and to stand strong.

And the other word is very clear. It's men who lie with males, and that word, there are almost no examples of it in the ancient world.

It seems that maybe the Apostle Paul coined it from the Septuagint. But anyhow, it's two different sins.

The one sin often leads to the other. If you're a soft man, often you do proceed to have homosexual relations, intercourse, with another man.

But there's a whole category of softness in the Church that we see everywhere, and that softness is men who are narcissists, who sit at home playing video games, who don't want to have to have a manual job, who don't even date women often because they're afraid of rejection, or who, after they get married, use birth control to avoid having children and propagating a godly seed as God desires.

And so there's a whole, and of course pornography. That's the raging sin among especially young men today in the

Church. And so what you see today is that the Church is filled with soft men who can't say no to their desires, their pleasures, their lusts, who satiate themselves with pornography, with video games, increasingly with marijuana, with dope, with alcohol, with drugs, psychotropics.

Now, immediately everybody's going to say, well, you're saying that you're opposed to psychotropics, or you're opposed to video games, or you're opposed to men playing the flute, to men writing poetry, to men singing tenor.

And the answer is no. Any man who's honest and is willing to admit it is going to talk about the sins of softness that are constantly tempting him.

As a matter of fact, one of the ways that I deal with people on the issue of the shame of homosexuality is

I say to them, look, isn't it true that it's hard to be a man? And almost always, immediately, they'll say, you bet it's hard.

I say it's hard to ask a woman out on a date and to make yourself vulnerable to rejection, isn't it?

You bet it's hard. Then you say, is it hard to not have sex before marriage? You bet it's hard. Is it hard to get married, to ask a woman to marry you?

You bet it's hard. And so you go through all these, is it hard to have children? You bet it's hard. Is it hard to have a lot of children?

Yeah. Is it hard to discipline your... And so on every one of these questions that you ask, you're going to get men saying, you bet it's hard.

And then what you say to them is, so in other words, all of us are tempted to throw off our manhood, aren't we?

Okay. Then you move over to women and you say, by synecdoche, if hard men won't enter the kingdom of heaven, soft men, then hard women won't enter the kingdom of heaven.

You ask women, is it hard to be dependent on your husband? Is it hard to submit to him?

Is it hard to make yourself vulnerable to his mistakes and to be yoked with him?

Now, if you follow my logic, I hope it's evident. My point is that every single person is tempted to be unfaithful to the sexual duties that God gave them when he made them man and woman.

And so there's a way in which homosexuality, which is to eviscerate your sex -specific calling from God, male or female, there's a way in which homosexuality permeates the

Church. And we have to think in terms of the obligation we have before God to be men and to be women, not to be persons.

Now, I'm not talking about a hackneyed, macho, chest -thumping, bench -pressing, stupid expression of what it is to be a hard man.

We're not talking about somebody that his son can't please him, somebody who gets into fights with people over parking spaces.

But we are talking about men who will fight to protect morally and physically their wives and their children.

Men who will say no to their lusts for the sake of the sacrosanct nature of the marriage bed.

And so that's the first error, the error of leaving the sin of effeminacy out of our preaching, out of our

Bibles, and not wanting to think about it. And what people say to me is, they say, well, wait a second, if you're saying that the soft man can't inherit the

Kingdom of God, and I stop and I say, hey, wait, wait, wait, I didn't say it, the Apostle Paul said it. Okay?

I didn't say it. The Apostle Paul said it. I'm not willing to have people remove it from Scripture and from the sins of Scripture.

Then they say, well, what are you saying? Are you saying that a man who plays video games can't get into heaven?

And I say, no, of course not. And they say, well, are you saying that a man can't wear purple?

And I say, of course not. Are you saying a man can't drive a Prius? I say, of course not.

And that's how people nitpick it. They want to say that because it's ambiguous, you know, because it has to be a matter of the conscience, they want to write it out of Scripture.

But look, in that same list is greed. So what if I were to say, well, to be greedy is to want to build your pension fund.

They say, are you saying if anybody builds their pension fund, they're greedy and they can't get into heaven? I say, of course not.

But then what I want to say to everybody is, if the Bible says greed is wrong, all of us better have an idea what is greed in us.

And the same thing is true of soft men and hard women. If it says that soft men will not inherit the kingdom, then we have to be willing to describe that sin in us and to repent of it.

And that's a perfect place for us to go to our first break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Tim Bailey, our email address again is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

If you live outside of the USA, please only remain anonymous if it is about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Tim Bailey and more of our discussion on the grace of shame.

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And we are back now with our guest for the day for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go,

Tim Bailey, author and senior pastor of Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana. Today we are discussing his latest book,

The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals.

Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, and only remain anonymous if it is about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

Tim, it seems so far that the title of the book, or should

I say the subtitle of the book, Seven Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals, I'm getting the impression that one of the ways that the church has failed to love homosexuals is by being, no pun intended, too soft on the sin, which is in some way, or some ways, to the modern person, the liberal person, they would equate being softer on the sin with being more loving towards those involved in it.

Whereas you are, I can gather, are saying that we've been too soft on the sin, which is actually not loving if we really believe that that sin, unrepentant of, will send a man or woman to hell, that we have to be tougher on this issue.

Am I correct in assessing that? Yeah, I think that we're soft on the sin because the parts of the sin that we're going soft on are the parts that we share with people who are involved in the gay lifestyle.

And so if you think of being homosexual, you can be homosexual in sexual relations, but an awful lot of homosexuality is just simply avoiding responsibility, avoiding doing the hard thing, avoiding identifying as a man, being vain about your appearance.

And I think that's the reason that it's pulled out of the USC, is that you have all of a sudden, instead of us talking about them, we start talking about ourselves, and we realize that in major ways, we, by cutting ourselves slack and being cowards and not being bold and not confessing the

Lord, that we are not manifesting ourselves as the men that God made us.

And so I don't think it's just that we shouldn't be soft on homosexual intercourse.

Of course we shouldn't be soft on that, it's bondage. But we also should not be soft on the sin that the

Apostle Paul says will keep us from heaven, and that's the sin of effeminacy all through history.

That's the way it's been translated in English Bibles, the word malachoi. And I've noted in my lifetime that the word effeminacy has just died.

Nobody is worried about it anymore. You can go back and read the Calvin Translations, Society Translations, Calvin's Commentaries, and the

Institutes and other works, and you just find the word effeminacy all the time in our Reformed fathers.

And it was a sin they knew well, and it was a sin that they would call people, especially people who traded in false doctrine and who were very, very precious about their scholarly reputation.

They just call them effeminate. And so yeah, I am against being double -minded and double -tongued about the sins that tempt me and the people

I love, whether it's homosexuality or incest or rape, or whether it is refusing to bear responsibility, abdicating those responsibilities and authorities

God has given us. Greed. Yeah, I don't think that it is loving anybody for us as pastors to not be bold in preaching

God's condemnation of our sin and God's mercy to sinners. And you said something before the break that was interesting to me because it actually in some ways was a stereotype breaker.

It occurred to me while you were speaking that it seems that you are including in this group of soft men, men that the world might look upon as virile and macho.

And what I'm speaking of is men who cannot control their sexual appetites, men who cannot wait until marriage to have sexual intercourse, men that cannot commit to one woman, who think that promiscuity is actually a sign of virility, masculinity, and machismo.

And you're actually including that group within a soft male category. Yes, absolutely.

I recently was accused on Facebook of being, you know, against men who write poetry.

Somebody was talking about me and, you know, I was on there watching the discussion of the book,

The Grace of Shame. And I wrote in and I said, and this person had said that they had been reading me for years on the blog, and I said, if you can hear me for years, you can't even imagine how you could think that I would say that men that write poetry are not manly.

And so my dad wrote poetry. In fact, we have paintings on the wall of our home growing up where my daddy painted the paintings.

He cooked probably a third to half the time the meals, the best recipes we ever had that we still use in our home that come from my dad.

And so I think it's extremely important that we not allow people to shout us down by saying that, you know, we're just bigots and we don't like poetry and the flute and opera.

But on the other hand, what I always turn around and say to them is what machos do is there's a very high percentage of gay men who are bodybuilders, right?

And so bench pressing, having muscles, all that stuff is an attempt to get by means of sort of cheap exercise and pictures and mirrors and oils, what you don't have in your character.

I've never met a man who loves to work physically. Now, I know I'm going to upset people by saying this, and I'm sure there are lots of men out there, but I've never known a man who's a hard worker and loves to work physically, who's a bodybuilder.

And the reason is men who know how to work with their hands and love to sweat and to put in a good day's work, like sewing tents, like the apostle

Paul did, are not men who are trying to beef up their self -image as masculine. They know they're men and they have typical manly traits.

It doesn't mean they don't play the flute. It doesn't mean that they don't write poetry and cook. And so, yeah,

I do think that machismo is a perversion of manhood.

Oh, in fact, the Nazi party, as you may recall, one of the very first members was

Ernst Röhm, who was a notorious homosexual and pederast.

He wasn't even closeted about it. And he was a poster boy for machismo. He was a very rough and violent man.

He had the battle scar, the dueling scar on his face. He was known for wanting to beat people up, and so were his homosexual cohorts amongst the brown shirts.

And yet these rough, tough men were actually homosexuals. Yeah, you look at Sodom and Gomorrah and, you know, none of those guys would have had their pictures on the front of Vanity Fair wearing a bustier.

Well, before we go on to reason number two, we do have a listener in Slovenia named

Joe. And by the way, Tim, if you could be conscious of the fact to keep your mouth near the mouthpiece of the phone or however you're using it, because sometimes you fade out.

So I'm not sure what's going on on your end, but I'm sorry about that. That's okay. We have

Joe in Slovenia, and he says, Dear Brother Chris, thank you so much for having the courage and love to address the tough topics that we need to face biblically.

Please ask Brother Tim to discuss how the sin of homosexuality, sodomy, and how the church has failed to love homosexuals is different from other sins in the church, like gluttony, obesity, gossip, etc.,

that are accepted, excused, and ignored. In what ways, if any, is the sin of sodomy unique or different from other sins that our licentious and antinomian culture embraces, even in the church?

Thanks again for Christian radio that is edifying and challenging in our walk with Christ. That was

Joe in Slovenia. What was his list? He said gluttony. What were the other sins?

Let's see. The sin of gluttony, obesity, gossip, etc. That's as far as he went with that.

Well, as far as gossip is concerned, I think one of the things you have to realize is that if you go directly to homosexual intercourse, there could be no context in which desiring it or committing it can ever be good.

And that's one of the things that's different about gluttony and obesity and gossip, that each of those things involves the use of your mouth that is hard to pin down when it goes into sin.

We have to eat. We have to talk. We have to pray. We have to share prayer requests. And so we have a tendency when it comes to sins that are judgment calls that require judgment, okay, to sort of back off on them, because we don't want to say where the sin begins and where, you know, we eat.

We have to eat. We have to continue to eat. Fat people have to eat. And so where does it move into gluttony?

Where does it move into their God is their belly? With homosexuality, that's just not true.

This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You can't have good homosexual desires. You can't have good homosexual intercourse.

Now, having said that, honestly, I don't think the church goes easy on homosexuality or gossip or gluttony or obesity.

I think the church goes easy on everything. I think in our churches today, most of us act as if we don't have any sin and that what sins we have are private and we confess them privately.

We don't ask for help. I was just reading about Calvin and Pharoah that they would announce to their congregations before communion that they were happy to meet with people who had issues of conscience and needed help in working through their sins.

Well, I don't think that happens in any of our churches today. I think we're clean machines. And so when people say, well, you know, you're harping on homosexuality, but you don't say anything against gluttony,

I think that's bogus. I think we don't say anything against any sin. Maybe in some churches, there's some group of men that talk about fighting against pornography, but I don't know any church that's disciplined women for gossiping or disciplined men for being greedy.

As a matter of fact, I'd say in the PCA, my denomination for many years, I'd say the prime...

You ready for this, Chris? Okay. I'd say the prime qualification to be an elder is that you are greedy and successful at it.

Well, you know, the ring of truth, to take a different angle on it from what

Joan Slovenia is saying, I think a very common thing that has been said that I've heard said frequently is sin is sin is sin.

Who are you to judge? Just because somebody is a homosexual doesn't mean that they are going to be any less likely to enter into heaven than somebody who has a heterosexual lust problem.

But isn't there a enormous difference between a man who is a heterosexual who battles a lust problem and does everything he can from protecting himself, from actually committing the act physically.

I'm not saying that he is free from sin, but I am saying that there's a difference between somebody who makes sure that his spouse has the same email address and he goes through all of these ways to prevent himself from looking at pornography and other things.

There's a difference between that and somebody who has given in and yielded to and surrendered to homosexual proclivities by either fulfilling those desires in physical acts or by identifying him or herself by that sexual proclivity.

Yeah, I think that that's absolutely right. I think that, again, you don't have to have sex, you have to eat.

And so we have to keep these distinctions in mind. Everybody has to eat, everybody doesn't have to have sex, so you can be celibate and not have sexual relations with a wife or a husband.

But you can also be married and you can move, even with your wife, into a degree of lust and concupiscence.

It's a word that actually in the reform world there's been discussion of before, but we don't talk about it today, because actually we don't talk about any sexual sin.

We don't ask people and work against incest, we don't work against child abuse, we don't work against fornication.

You know how many churches have regularly asked the children of the elders and pastor, and look out to see if they're being pure with their girlfriend or boyfriend and ask them prior to marriage whether they're being pure.

Now, coming back to the issue of how we deal with sin, I think that in the reform world today we've gotten to the point where we no longer believe in the depravity of man.

We say we do, but when it comes to pastors getting into the trenches with the souls that they're supposed to shepherd, we really don't believe in pastoral care anymore.

And so, you know, I realize that people would think that pastors are dealing with fornication and adultery and incest and stuff, but I think in most churches, pastors are scared out of their wits of trying to work through these problems with the souls under their care.

And so I think pastors generally are no more involved in condemning homosexuality than they are in condemning fornication or incest.

Now, I will say this. Pastors do condemn Obergefell.

They do condemn the marriage of two homosexuals, and they do condemn homosexual intercourse, but all of those things are the outside of the cup.

Inside the cup is all kinds of filth, and whether that's pornography that's heterosexual or homosexual, whether it's incest, whether it's child abuse, whether it's adultery, all these things are—we need shepherds.

We need shepherds to stand with us and to fight these sins. In fact, we'll pick up right where you left off there when we return from our break.

This is a rather long break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires a 12 -minute gap between our two hours of programming, so please be patient with us as we go to our commercial break.

And now is a great time for you to write questions in for Tim Bailey, and we know that some of you are already waiting in line to have your questions asked and answered.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with a little less than an hour to go, is

Tim Bailey, author and senior pastor at Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana.

We are discussing his new book, The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals.

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That's chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Before we return to our discussion, I just have a couple of important announcements to make in regard to special events that our sponsors are conducting.

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And now we are back with our guest, Tim Bailey. Tim Bailey, who is the senior pastor at Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana.

We are addressing his latest book, The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals.

And this is a book that is co -authored with his son and another author.

And if you would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And Tim, before the break, you were talking about how the outward physical manifestations of sin, like active physical homosexual behavior and other sins, that's just the outside of the cup.

And what you were saying right before we went to the break is that the inside of the cup needs to be dealt with as well.

Yeah, I was just reading, because of the Judge Moore case, I was just reading some history about Calvin's conflict with Pharaoh, that wonderful man that made him stop there in Geneva and serve the church.

And when Pharaoh was 69, he decided he would marry a woman who, depending on which story you read, was 40 or 50 years younger than he was.

And so the question is, why did Calvin refuse to attend the wedding and even to officiate at the ceremony?

And why did the harshest letter he ever wrote, Pharaoh, condemning him for this marriage?

And the reason is that Pharaoh, at 69, Calvin believed that a man who is 69 can never be faithful to a woman sexually in the way he needs to be, because his sexual desires are just not what they used to be.

And that if a man at 69, well past the age of having children, if that man has such a strong urge...

There was another guy who had been a monk who married somebody who was very old, and he felt that this said bad things about their sexual desires, that at that point in life, with that age, it was immodest, not just immodest,

I don't know that he would say immoral, but that it was scandalous for them to desire to have sex with people in a way that was not appropriate for their age.

He was not saying you shouldn't have sex at all, but he was making a statement that the disparity in age was unseemly because of what it said about sexual appetite.

Now, that does not mean, again, that at my age, people don't have sex.

That doesn't mean we're not intimate with our wives. It does not mean that it's wrong to get married when you're older.

But we have to admit that sex is not just a matter of body parts. It's not just a matter of keeping it in marriage.

Sex is lust, sex is desires, sex is desires which are fomented by habits of eyes and thoughts that bring them into the area of concupiscence, where the desire turns into a lust that is sinful.

And this is the thing that the Church has to reclaim. We have to reclaim our ability to think about something other than simply body parts in marriage, and that's something that we're all uncomfortable doing.

I think this Judge Roy Moore debate that's going on in the national media today is indicative of that.

You know, I just got an email from a man in Baltimore, the public square, and he's asking me whether I think that there's something wrong with a 35 -year -old man dating women in their late teens.

And so Pharisees always just focus on the outside of the cup, make sure the body parts are right, make sure you're married.

But God looks on the heart, and we all have to begin to look at our hearts again and see what are the desires that are in there?

Are they correct in terms of being aimed at the opposite sex? Are they correct in being aimed at our life?

Do we look but don't touch and think somehow that's not sin because we're not committing physical adultery?

Do we have a gay identity that we spread publicly, and we just assure people that there's no moral content to it because we don't bed other men, or if we're a woman, other women?

That's the place that we have to begin to focus. If we're not going to compromise and become a bunch of Pharisees about sexuality.

And by the way, I forgot to tell our friend in Slovenia, Joe, that you have won a free copy of the book that we are addressing today,

The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals. We thank you for giving us an

American address where your daughter lives in Georgia, where this can be much more affordably shipped to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com.

So keep your eye open in the mail for a package from CVBBS .com, and your book will be in that, or should

I say have your daughter keep an eye open for that package in the mail in Georgia. Keep listening to Iron Shepherd's Iron Radio and keep spreading the word in Slovenia and beyond.

Let's go to number two, the second reason why or how the Church has failed to love homosexuals.

This is called the gay Christian era. A few years ago, Phil Reichen and the chaplain at Wheaton College hired a woman who identified as a lesbian to work as one of the chaplain's assistants with sexual minorities on their campus.

And after she'd been there, she was a former Wheaton student that played on the women's basketball team. After she'd been there a short time, she came out and said that she didn't believe it was wrong to have homosexual intercourse, and that she said that this, as she put it, the hypocritical condemnation of sexual intercourse was not helpful to what she referred to as gaybies,

G -A -Y -B -I -E -S, and she lumped them in with transsexuals and bisexuals and people who call themselves queer or questioning.

She lumped them all together and referred to them as, quote, sexual minorities, unquote. Now, right away, once she actually said publicly that she felt homosexual intercourse was proper, her time on the payroll at Wheaton ended.

But there's a movement across all of these organizations endorsing people who identify as gay

Christians, quote, unquote. And again, the way they do it is they say, well, we're not having intercourse.

So, Julie Rogers did that for a short time, and then she said, well, actually, I do believe in having sexual relations.

Most of them, though, say, we don't believe we should go ahead and have sexual intercourse with somebody of our sex, but we're gay.

Or they won't say they're gay. They'll say, I'm same -sex attracted.

Or they have a number of different ways of saying it. And what they say is, cut me some slack on my desires, my identity, and everything.

I won't have sex. And this is the sweet spot in the conservative church today.

Everybody's just falling over themselves, showing themselves open to this life.

The best -known group is on a website called livingout .org out in the

UK. And the thing that's wrong with this is that you don't have any organization, livingout .org,

for pedophiles. You don't have any livingout .org for boys that have sex with their sisters or fathers that have sex with their daughters.

And people will say, well, wait a second, those are two different things. And my response is, now, actually, they're compressed together in Scripture.

If you go to the places where sins that are horrendously shameful are listed, you have child sacrifice, you have bestiality, you have incest, and you have sodomy.

They're all put together. And so if rhetoric about homosexuality has the word homosexual or gay removed, and into it is put pedophile or incest, does it work?

And of course, it doesn't work. You don't have, you know, Gospel Coalition isn't having a conference where they have a pedophile get up and talk about, you know, how hard it is to be a pedophile and be in the church, and people aren't open to you sharing your temptation.

They only do it with homosexuality. And that's because we don't have an active, out -there movement by the

Supreme Court and by cultural forces to approve of incest and pedophilia yet.

It's still condemned. And so we have to have discernment. We have to think.

You know, if iron's going to sharpen iron, it has to have something to sharpen against. And this gay

Christian era, or this, sometimes they refer to it as same -sex -attracted

Christian, sure, there are people with temptations towards pedophilia, towards sodomy, but they should not be identifying themselves publicly, because what they really need is to come and to meet with their pastor, and to have their pastor, or if it's a woman, a

Titus II older woman in the church, bear their burden with them, love them, and help them to take them.

We don't need all the horrendous sins that there are to come out of the closet and announce their presence in the church so that everybody becomes inured to the wickedness and the shame of it.

That's not a way of loving people tempted by those sins. It's just not.

It cuts us slack. Everybody thinks we're real sensitive and helpful and loving, it makes people, you know, not accuse us of being haters and everything, but honestly, that's not what the

Apostle Paul ever did with anything. You read Romans 1 through 3, and not only did he not go soft on homosexuality, he didn't go soft on adultery, he didn't go soft on any sins.

And something that you said is interesting, because, well, everything you said is interesting, but one specific thing that I want to address is that those who are identifying themselves as homosexual activists, whether they themselves be homosexuals or heterosexuals, those that are activists in favor of the cause of the legitimacy of homosexuality are, in public anyway, fairly unanimous in their condemnation against pedophilia.

And yet, many, if not most, of those same voices are saying that a child should be able to determine what gender they are, and that would include parents allowing their children to have either surgery or hormonal treatment or whatever, in attempts to, in vain of course, change the gender of that child, which

I think is amongst the the most grotesque and disgusting forms of child abuse you can imagine.

But it's interesting how they think a child, even a young child, has the maturity to make a decision like that, but not who they are going to have sexual relations with.

I think that pedophilia is riding on the heels of that. I mean, doesn't that just make logic perfect sense?

Yes, it's the great hypocrisy where, for instance, in Cincinnati, where they've made reparative therapy illegal.

They also will help to fund parents having sex change mutilation of the body of a child who is questioning, even though studies show that children that question, even into adolescence, what their sexual identity is, they call it a gender identity, will, in the majority of cases, not go on to live a homosexual life as adults.

And so, you know, there's a tremendous number of people who have had some level of mutilation of their body and hormone therapy who are now reverting back to the sex that God made them, because they're not happy even with the sex that they chose or think that they're choosing.

And this is error number five in the book, the reparative therapy error, where you have the association of certified biblical counselors,

Al Mohler, Heath Lambert, men like that, who are announcing publicly that whereas in the past they were supporters of reparative therapy, of counseling people who don't like the sex that God made them to learn to like it, that's what reparative therapy is.

Some people will do an end run and say, no, reparative therapy is a very specific therapy.

But look, the specific therapy that people say they're opposing is not what the world means when it makes laws.

And these laws are spreading like wildfire across the country. There are many cities and a number of states,

Illinois, California, New York, I could go on with the states, who have now made it illegal to do any sort of therapy that calls people who don't like the sex their body is to learn to love it.

That's what reparative and conversion or gender identity therapy is. And so in the church today, you have all these people who are conservative who are saying, no, we don't believe in reparative therapy, we don't believe in conversion therapy, we're against that.

And they announced it precisely at the time when across our country laws were being passed against that form of counseling.

And they even tell pastors that they're not to do that kind of counseling. And so there's a movement against helping people to learn to love and live the sex that God made them.

And that movement is among conservative reform people. And it's the most crazy thing in the world.

What is the actual reasoning that is being used to be opposed? I mean, I can understand that some conservative

Bible believing Christians who believe in inerrancy and who believe that homosexuality is damnable.

I can understand some of them not being into pop psychology as a as a methodology to quote, unquote, cure people without even the regenerating power of the

Holy Spirit. But I don't know what what are the specific reasons that are being used by conservatives?

Sure, nobody's saying a particular form of therapy. If you look at the laws that are passed across the country, it simply makes it illegal to call someone who identifies as gay to learn to love and live their heterosexual identity as a man or as a woman.

That's what's being outlawed. And right as it's being outlawed across the country, you have the

ACBC and Al Moore and Keith Lambert announcing that they oppose reparative therapy, even though in the past Al Moore has promoted it and has defended it very, very firmly.

And so some of these guys, if you get them in a private conversation, they're going to say, well, you know, we don't believe you should go back into the psychological identity of the individual.

The gospel's the only hope of change. And that's a direct quote, you know, and they'll say that they believe in the gospel, not change efforts of somebody's sexual identity.

But the thing that's fascinating is precisely at the same time as they're announcing that they're against reparative therapy,

Al Moore also announces that he was wrong about homosexual identity and that homosexual orientation is a real deal, and he uses the word apology, apologizes for saying that homosexual orientation wasn't real and now he believes in it, and he says it happens at a very young age, that people don't choose it.

And so when you look at both of those errors together, saying that homosexual orientation is a real deal that people don't choose and it happens very young, and then you look at them opposing reparative therapy, and then you look at the issue that godliness is not heterosexuality, and you look at the growth of the same -sex -attracted, go -public -living -out .org

movement, all of these things together end up, again, holding the line.

It's sexual intercourse that's homosexual, but it's saying nothing about the nature of sexual identity and sinning against our sexual identity, sinning against what god calls men and women to be.

And so it's a very difficult thing, because, you know, nobody wants to think that anybody in the country who's a

Christian is caving to the homosexualist forces. But you don't have to cave completely.

All you have to do is send out signals that you're reasonable about it, and then you are included in the conversation and the media continues to come to you to be a spokesman.

The people in the church still think you're faithful because you're against homosexual marriage and you're against homosexual intercourse.

But listen, sexuality is much more than intercourse. Much more.

It has to do with every aspect of how we live our lives, and we have to return to thinking about what it means to be men and women.

We have to raise our sons to be men, raise our daughters to be women, and we have to help them to understand what god was telling them when he gave them the body parts he gave them, that it's not just your body, it's your calling, that we have callings to be fathers and to be mothers, to take initiative and to be receptive and to be firm in responsibility.

And these are the errors that we have to realize we're all being seduced by today, and we have to stand against them.

Well, I'm going to read a question for you before we go to the break. I'll read it to you, and then you can answer it when we return.

We have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says, I have heard

Chris Arnden, the host of this program, say that he is personally opposed to using the term gay, or especially gay community, when referring to homosexuals, because it seems to be acquiescing to the demands of the left culture.

Do you agree with Chris on this, or do you have a disagreement with the usage of these terms that have become acceptable labels in our culture today?

And we'll have you answer Ronald's question when we return from the break.

This will be our final break. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question before we run out of time, and there are still a couple of you waiting,

I know, if you want to get in line to ask a question of your own, our email address is chrisarndsen at gmail .com.

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Iron Sharpens today. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, Pastor of Providence Baptist Church. We are a

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back. This is Chris Aronson, and this is the last half hour of our discussion today with Tim Bailey, author and senior pastor at Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana.

We are addressing the theme of his latest book, The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the

Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals. If you'd like to get in line and ask a question before we run out of time, our email address is chrisaronson at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and only remain anonymous if it is about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

And before the break, Pastor Tim, we had Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, saying, basically, aren't we acquiescing to the anti -biblical culture by using the term gay or gay community when referring to those involved in homosexual activity?

Well, you know, to say we shouldn't use the word gay and gay community, I just used the word gay and gay community, right?

I had to say what I wasn't going to use. Language is really tough. The introduction of this book is words matter, and in the introduction,

I explain the history of the doctrine of inerrancy or the plenary verbal inspiration of scripture, and I think we do have to be extremely precise and careful in how we speak of sin, and of course of the sin of sodomy, or men lying with men, and soft mannishness or effeminacy.

I think living in a university community, I'll have people tell me that, you know, I'm not nuanced enough for the academics, and I appear ignorant to them, and I should change the way

I preach. And I try to explain to them that if I use the word sodomy, it's not because I'm unaware of how people will respond, but it's because I want to maintain the shame of the sin through the way that I speak of it.

Now, does that mean that if I'm publicly testifying at a meeting, and the gay community wants to open a halfway house or something,

I won't use the word gay? No, I just used it in saying the gay community. Generally, I think

Christians should just make sure that we use biblical language to refer to things condemned by Scripture, and so you'll often hear people talk about somebody having an affair, and almost always,

I will say, you mean they committed adultery. Okay? I think we have to speak biblically.

We have to speak in a way that makes clear our confession that this is sin.

And so the Apostle Paul, in the most sophisticated city maybe the world has ever known, in the most sophisticated group in that city, the

Areopagus of Athens, he said, in the past, God overlooked such ignorance.

And, you know, we don't hear that the way they heard it, because, you know, we've heard it read from Acts again and again.

But we have to speak in a way that reminds people that God is a judge, and that he is holy, and that sin is exceedingly sinful.

So, yeah, I basically agree with what you've said, Chris. It doesn't mean

I won't ever use language like that, but we have to make sure that we speak biblically, and that's one of the main points of the book.

So, in other words, if you're using the term gay or gay community, you should be very quick to back up the seriousness of that behavior, and not let people think that this is just another people group like Blacks, Italians, and Asians, or something.

You have to be very clear that this is a sin, and not only a sin, but it's an unnatural behavior.

Yeah. At the end of the book, I talk about the such are some of you and living out there, and I point out all the words that are used in Scripture to refer to this sin.

It's an abomination. It's unnatural. The very word sodomy connects the sin with God raining fire and brimstone from heaven.

The Apostle Paul in Romans 1, it's awful the things that he says, and this sin was just as common back at the time of the

Apostle Paul as it is today. And so, yeah, you have to make it clear if you're trying to confess

Christ in our world today, there must regularly be opportunities for people listening to sort of blanch and gasp and grow red in the face, because you're speaking biblically.

You're speaking as the Apostle Paul did. Yes, absolutely. If you use the word gay or the gay community, you need to then say what

I'm referring to is people who commit the sin for which the sodomites were destroyed by God.

And just to follow up very quickly, because we are running out of time, and I already know that we have to have you back, because right now we've only addressed one, two, and five as far as the seven ways that the

Church has failed in this area, so we'll definitely have to schedule you for a return visit after the program is over today.

But I assume that the difference between using a term like sodomy and an abomination and unnatural, which are biblical terms, using a term like the

God hates fags group uses, fag or whatever you might want to choose, although it seems that those involved in the advocacy of homosexuality have adopted queer for themselves.

They include it in their eye chart of initials LGBTQ. The other words are, they jump out as being intentionally cruel, hateful, and juvenile, perhaps, to use terms like that.

Christians shouldn't be going around using those types of terms, especially when they are trying to bring the gospel to the lost who happen to be involved in that particular sin.

They shouldn't be using the terms like fag and fairy and all that kind of thing. No, and we have to be adults about our language, and we can't deny that we know what we're saying.

It's one of my objections to the phrase that's grown popular, that godliness is not heterosexuality.

You know, when you press against people what they mean by that, they then talk, well, somebody that rapes a woman is heterosexual.

Well, when you say godliness, it's not heterosexuality. Nobody understands you to be condemning rape.

It's a very sort of equivocating way of speaking that leaves people confused what we're actually saying, and yeah, to say that God hates fags is intentionally demeaning to people who struggle with sin.

You know, God hates adulterers. God hates men who masturbate.

God hates the greedy. We don't want to communicate that we think we're better than the people that we're witnessing to, even though, in God's grace, it may well be that we don't have any homosexual desires for sexual intimacy, but Christians are as approachable with those caught in the bondage of sin as our

Lord was, and it is true that the lady at the well, the Samaritan woman, he did say, you know, go call your husband, and then he pointed out how many husbands she'd had, and she wasn't married to the man she was living with, and you know, there were people then that might have said to him, you're a hater of women that are divorced, but it's so clear the tenderness and love he had for her, so much so that she bragged when she went as a witness into the village.

She said, come meet a guy who told me everything I've ever done, and everybody in the village knew everything she had ever done, and so when they came out, they didn't come out to hear somebody who was saying that he realizes that she had an insatiable appetite for sex, and it happened when she was very young, and she didn't have any choice over it, and so she's living out as a fornicating woman or adulterer.

They came out because somebody loved the sinner enough to point to their sin and to say that he, if they drank of his living water, they'd never be thirsty again.

People want people who will be honest with them about their sin and tell them that God can give them victory over their sin, and more than that, that he is merciful and he'll wash them with the blood of Jesus.

That's what people want to hear, is that they're sinners and that Christ came to save sinners.

And by the way, Ronald in eastern Suffolk County, you have also won a free copy of the book that we are addressing today,

The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals, please give us your full mailing address, so Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com

can ship that out to you in a timely fashion. Thanks again for contributing an excellent question to our discussion today.

We have somebody closer to your neck of the woods, Pastor Tim. We have Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana, who says,

What a great discussion with many new thoughts, description of soft men, and finally discussion about the church reclaiming things.

Thank you for talking about the difficult topics. My question is, how does the church strike a balance between loving sinners no matter what sin?

What I mean is a friend who claims to be a Christian blasts homosexuals on Facebook while living with her boyfriend out of wedlock.

Each is a sin, but politics causes us to grade sins. How does

Pastor Bailey think we should stop that in the church? That's interesting because before we were saying it's very problematic to say all sin is sin because there are different kinds of sins.

There are sins that would not warrant, for instance, a pastor to be removed from his office because every pastor is a sinner.

So obviously we were not only to elect to church office perfect men because they don't exist, but at the same time we have to be careful of not being hypocrites.

So I guess that's what really Aaron is talking about, a hypocritical judgment. Well in the case of his friend,

Aaron's friend up in Indy, I would just go to the man or woman that's doing that, I think it was a woman, and just say to her, you're being hypocritical, your sin is terrible, and you should say nothing about homosexuality because what you need to repent of is fornication.

I think that that's what he mentioned that this woman was giving herself to. Yeah, everything gets politicized, and so if the

Supreme Court currently is not approving of abortion but is approving of homosexual marriage or mirage, as my friend

Doug Walser calls it, if that's what is defining the schism between conservatives and liberals in our country today, we're all going to want to jump on the bandwagon of the point of current controversy, which is homosexuality.

But we can't do that. Our message has to be a message that God is holy, and that he will not tolerate obliterating the beauty of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the

Church. And that relationship can be lied about by us in our lives in any number of ways, by men not being men, by men having sex with other men, by men divorcing their wives for younger flesh, by looking at pornography, by committing incest, all these things are in scripture.

And anytime you sense, and this is a little dicey to say,

I've never said this in the book, but it just occurs to me to say, anytime you sense that there is an anger and a vindictiveness in somebody, in their talking on social media or publicly about homosexuality, it really, there's a need for us to take that brother or sister aside and talk to them, not trying to minimize the wickedness of the sin, not trying to minimize how many

Christians are suffering persecution, because they won't give in on the sin. But you don't ever want people to be able to show you to be a political partisan in opposing sin and exposing it and preaching against it.

People want to know that our concern is the redemption of a sinner by the blood of Jesus Christ, that the message of both the wickedness of the sin and the holiness and perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, they are both the gospel.

And without the naming of the sin and the exposing of the horror of it, people won't flee to the cross.

But without the holding out of the hope of Jesus Christ, and that somebody who's killed their unborn child, somebody who has had sex with other men, that these are the same kind of people that were in the

Corinthian church, that these are me, that I'm these men, and that God sent his son to die for sinners, but for sinners, not for the self -righteous who engage in partisan politics.

Well, thank you, Aaron. In Indianapolis, please give us your full mailing address in Indianapolis, Indiana, so that CVBBS .com

can ship out your free copy of The Grace of Shame, Seven Ways the

Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals, which have been given to us compliments of Warhorn Media and our guest,

Tim Bailey. So please get that out to us so we can have CVBBS ship that out to you as soon as possible.

We have RJ in White Plains, New York. Who says,

I have heard Chris Arnzen, host of this program in the past, say that he is not completely opposed to the idea of people being born with the proclivity of homosexuality because of the doctrine of total depravity, as we see in Romans 3 and other places, and even

David describes himself as coming from the womb as a liar. Why would this be wrong to believe in this as a possibility, as long as you don't use it as an excuse to continue in that lifestyle because you were born that way?

Yes, the listener is correct that I have posed that question. I haven't 100 % fallen on that side, but being a

Calvinist, I do believe in total depravity, and especially when you're talking about a reprobate, why would it be impossible for someone to be born with the proclivity toward that sin?

And again, I have to say it 100 times over, not that we can use that as an excuse for a person remaining that way or living that way proudly or what have you, but can't somebody be born with that proclivity, just like David described himself as being born a liar?

Well, we're all born sinners. We're not sinners because we sin, we sin because we're sinners and because of Adam's federal headship, so I'm completely in agreement with you.

When people talk about being born, though, with a homosexual orientation, there are some problems with that, starting with the fact that research simply doesn't bear it out, and this is counter to what all the pop psychological wisdom is today, but if you actually look at a survey of the literature of people who have no faith and they study the etiology of same -sex attraction, or what they call gender dysphoria,

D -Y -S -P -H -O -R -I -A, what you find is that many people who have gender dysphoria in adolescence, early adolescence, end up living lives as completely heterosexual people.

You also have a large percentage, something like a third, of men who are surveyed asked whether or not they've had sex with a woman in the previous three years, and they'll cop to it.

They'll say, yes, in the previous three years I have actually had sex with a woman, or if you ask them whether they, if you ask men who say they're gay, if they have looked at lesbian pornography, so the thing that turns them on is a female body, they'll admit to doing that, and if you look in the ancient world, you read like Eve Cantarella's Bisexuality in the

Ancient World, where she's an Italian classicist, it's probably the best work on the expression of same -sex sex in the ancient world.

She specifically refuses to call it homosexuality, because everybody that had sex with the same sex with younger men back in the ancient world, these guys all were married and had children.

And this is an extremely important point, because everybody wants to act as if homosexual orientation is fixed at birth, nobody made the choice to have it, and therefore you can't talk to them about their identity, you just tell them don't act on it, don't act on it, don't act on it, don't act on it.

But in fact, the identity itself is not fixed. It never has been in history, there are only,

Eve Cantarella in her book Bisexuality in the Ancient World, she says that there were very, very few men who would only have sex with another man, that it was permeable across both men and women.

And so we have to be very careful that when we say that we believe in homosexual orientation, that we're not committing the error of thinking that this is fixed, and that men, now hear me carefully on this, the

Apostle Paul is writing in Corinth, two Corinth, two people who were very, very sexually debauched, wicked, incest, all kinds of sexual sin, and he says it's better to marry than to burn.

And everybody just assumes that that's referring to a couple that are petting or fornicating on some level, and what we have to realize is that having sex is a prophylactic to sexual sin, not just from heterosexuals, but homosexuals.

And so yes, you can have a sexual desire for the same sex from a very young age, maybe there is a propensity, although they don't find it in twins, that it goes together with both pairs of the twins, but it really doesn't matter.

The fact is, it's not just intercourse that's wrong, it's also identifying in a way that is contrary to the sex that God made you, and we need to keep that in mind.

Chris, can I just quickly mention that there is a podcast on Warhornmedia called

The World We Made, eight episodes, it's titled The World We Made, and it goes into all of these issues we've been talking about deeper, and I'd really recommend that to people who want to know how to witness to and work with people repenting of lesbianism and gay sex,

I think it would be very helpful to them. It's on Warhornmedia. Yeah, and the website is warhornmedia .com,

warhornmedia .com. Thank you very much,

RJ and White Plains, and please give us a full mailing address where we can have CVBBS .com

mail you a free copy of Tim Bailey's book, The Grace of Shame. By the way,

Pastor Tim, I never, in my posing the possibility of a person being born with a proclivity towards that sin of homosexuality,

I never believed that that was a fixed thing, as if somebody is doomed to that for the rest of their lives, because there are all kinds of things that people have scientifically had theories about, even a higher level of testosterone in men leading to more violent and murderous behavior, that doesn't mean that that person is doomed to be a murderer or something.

With the blood of Christ, anything can be transformed and made new. But I want to make sure that before we run out of time...

Yeah, I agree with you, Chris. And before we run out of time, I want you to have three minutes of uninterrupted time to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

Well, thanks, Chris. I want us to be careful and to sharpen one another in how we talk and how we think about homosexuality, because it's so intense today.

We have people getting fired, people getting brought up on charges before, you know, the human resources committees of their companies, of state government.

There's just so much pressure on this issue for Christians to say that, you know, bisexuality, homosexuality, transsexuality, queer questioning, all these things are sexual minorities and they're equivalent to racial minorities, that there's no moral content to them.

And so there's a lot of pressure on us. And, you know, when we go around talking about godliness is not heterosexuality and I believe in homosexual orientation and I'm against conversion therapy, they just need the gospel.

All these ways are attempts on our part to cut ourselves some slack by not being clear in the way we speak of this sin.

And all of them are to leave, are ways of leaving behind the way scripture speaks of the sins that we refer to under the rubric of homosexuality, which is sodomy and lesbianism.

And we have to be willing to trust God that what he calls shameful and an abomination is that his use of words under the inspiration of the

Holy Spirit, it's not something that we can just leave behind, you know, leave to scripture to do the heart -heavy lifting and we can go around making peace for ourselves.

It doesn't mean that we have to fall on our sword all the time, but we have to guard the way we think and speak about this and doing that guardianship is to protect the grace of shame.

Shame is a grace, it's a gift from God to us. He didn't have to have

Adam and Eve know their shame after they sinned, but Calvin says that God was merciful to them, that they knew they were naked, he exposed their sin to them, and that was a precious gift from God when they felt the shame of their sin.

Amen. Well, I want to make sure that our listeners have all the contact information they need. First of all, we have the

Clear Note Church in Bloomington, Indiana. That website is clearnotebloomington .com,

clearnotebloomington .com. And again, the website for Warhorn Media, where the book can be purchased,

The Grace of Shame, that website is warhornmedia .com. W -A -R -H -O -R -N -media .com.

And it also has other things that you can view and read and so on. And I want to thank you so much,

Pastor Tim Bailey. And do you have any other contact information you care to give before we go off the air? Warhorn Media and The World We Made is the podcast.

I think people will find that helpful. It builds on the book. And then Daddy Tried, it's my book on fatherhood, and I wish people would read it.

Well, I want to thank you again. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who wrote in questions today. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater