March 29, 2019 Show with Tim Geiger on “Gender, Sexuality & What it Means to be Human”

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this final day, at least final weekday of March 2019, March 29th, 2019. And we are continuing a discussion that we began not long ago on the theme, gender, sexuality, and what it means to be human.

Although we already started this conversation, we are now doing it with a first-time guest. We began the conversation with Todd Pruitt, who is one of the speakers at an upcoming conference that I'm going to be mentioning in a moment.

But today we have another person who is speaking on the roster, Tim Geiger, and he is going to be speaking on gender, sexuality, and what it means to be human, not only on today's show, but at the upcoming conference I just mentioned.

Tim Geiger had been struggling with secret same-sex attraction for 20 years, and due to the grace and mercy and transforming power of our wonderful and sovereign Jesus Christ, he is now president of Harvest USA, he's a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, very commonly known as the PCA, and he has a Master of Divinity degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and now lives with his wife and family outside Philadelphia.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Tim Geiger.

Thanks, Chris, it's a pleasure to be here.

It's a pleasure to have you on, and I'm going to give our email address right away for our listeners who may have questions of their own for you. It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and I could obviously easily understand that there might be those out there who have personal and private questions and prefer to remain anonymous, so you will be granted that request if that is the case.

But if it's not a personal and private question, please give us at least your first name, city and state, and country of residence. Well, Tim, before we go into your personal story, please tell us about Harvest USA.

Sure, Chris.

Harvest USA is a ministry that has been 35 years, a Presbyterian church.

Any fond memories of that church when the late Dr. James Montgomery Boyce was still with us? I used to go to the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology when it was hosted there, and I still go, but it's not there anymore, it's at another location outside of Philadelphia, but I'm sorry I interrupted you.

I just have such enormously wonderful memories of that church and of Dr. Boyce, and so those are also connected with my late wife, Julie, because she loved Dr. Boyce, and we would actually go see him every time we had the opportunity in New York City when he was.

Visiting.

But I'm sorry I interrupted you.

No, no, no. Not at all. It's yet another thing that we have in common, Chris, and the Lord used you. And I went through the ministry at 10th Church, too, too long after the ministry began back.

In 1983.

We started as a ministry to the gay male community in the city, but pretty quickly broadened out when we began helping men and people struggling. The Lord has seen fit to prosper our ministry through the years, and we have a two-fold mission today.

We continue to help people, but we also, that the church increasingly become, actually can grow in faith and repentance. And I think that that will really grow in repentance. You can't do it on your own.

You can't do it privately.

You know, you used a key word there, I think, a word that has become, as you probably know, extremely unpopular, especially in the 21st century, but it started long before the 21st century. But that's the word repentance.

And perhaps, even specifically connected to the issue that we're discussing today, when it comes to homosexuality, there seems to be a growing movement of evangelicals, even professedly conservative evangelicals who believe in the inerrancy of scripture and so on, who believe at least in the minimal elements of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But they seem to have the impression that there is a neutrality about homosexuality unless you physically consummate that desire in some way. In other words, you're okay and you can be a quote-unquote gay Christian for the rest of your life, but you just can't physically act upon it.

That would be the more conservative bent of this movement that I would be personally in disagreement with because of the fact that they don't, I don't think that the movement takes seriously enough even the thought life or the attraction itself that exists amongst some people.

Could you respond to what I said there?

Yeah, I would agree with you, Chris. I think that anyone who interacts with anyone, whether it's just prairie to God's design for sex and sexuality, is evident. I would tend to think that part of walking in repentance would be to acknowledge that even the disordered desire, the good design for who struggle with same-sex attraction to not only the first part of having changed behavior is to have a changed heart and to begin to understand what it means to submit kind to sexual desire to the Lord and find contentment in what He provides.

Amen.

The Blue Ridge Bible Conference on Gender, Sexuality, and What It Means to Be Human

Well, tell us something about this upcoming conference. In fact, it starts, if I'm not mistaken, it starts tonight.

It starts in about two hours.

It starts tonight in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and this is the conference, Gender, Sexuality, and What it Means to be Human. And as I said, Tim Geiger is one of our speakers today, Todd Pruitt is another, and Carl Truman, who I've had on this program before, is the third man on the roster, but unfortunately Carl's schedule is so hectic that I could not include him on one of my interviews promoting this event, but I look forward to getting Carl back on nonetheless in the future.

But to tell us about this conference, the Blue Ridge Bible Conference on Gender, Sexuality, and What it Means to be Human.

The Blue Ridge Bible Conference is being put on by Covenant Presbyterian Church, which is, and as you mentioned the topic this year is Gender, Sexuality, and What it Means to be Human. And if anybody wants more details they can go to AllianceNet .org, that's the website.

Of our friends at the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, we always try to promote as much as we can the events that they are helping to orchestrate. And go to AllianceNet .org, click on events, and then scroll down to wherever you see Gender, Sexuality, and What it Means to be Human, with that famous Leonardo da Vinci drawing on the advertisement.

I forget what that was called, do you remember the name of that Leonardo da Vinci drawing? It was something that has to do with the span of a man's arms being equal to his height. But anyway, I don't know if you've...

You must have paid more attention in school than I did.

Well, I was an art major.

No, but you should be ashamed you don't remember that.

Yes, I definitely am. I'm ashamed every day I do this show. I'm always saying something incorrect or stupid or what have you. But now we're going to go into your own fascinating story. If you could tell our listeners, to start with, what kind of religious atmosphere you were raised in, if any, and when you first became aware of your same-sex attraction.

And then, of course, the most glorious and wonderful and amazing part of your story is how you came to Christ and discover his saving grace and mercy and transforming power.

Amen.

Tim Geiger’s Childhood, Abuse, and Early Same-Sex Attraction

Well, I continue to be an unwilling participant. I am the oldest of five kids. I was Pennsylvania. And I was raised in a church, to the best of my knowledge, in my family, through the agency of my... I'm not sure why he kept me there, except it was a place where I heard his word read and proclaimed, I think, fairly early.

The first time I met him and had a relationship with him through Jesus was at the age of five. Pretty much where my spirit was, a Lutheran church, 35 years ago, you know, not completely off the... Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I was a part of the ELCA, not the... So the ELCA, and it was still, you know, fairly orthodox, proclaimed. And you know, to a certain extent, I heard... Around that time, I also began to feel drawn toward other boys.

I didn't have any friends growing up who were boys. All of my friends... I found that I was drawn to them, not sexually, because I wanted a friend. I wanted the TV show, The Partridge Family.

Oh yeah. But...

David Cassidy played the role.

It was played by David Cassidy, yeah. And I wanted to have Keith as a brother. I wanted to have him as a friend, because there was something about him that made me feel free. When I imagined being... And what I was really looking for at the time was companionship.

Someone, again, to build me up. I began to find that there was someone who wanted to build me up a couple of years later.

Named...

Why?

I don't even remember how we met, other than we went to the same school. But again, he was in the same classes. And Jimmy began to sexually abuse me. Early age, I had no idea what was going on, except what was being communicated to me was, finally, here is telling me what it means.

And the means by which I learned... After a couple of years, Jimmy moved away. A fantasy life that continued for years.

Now, was your father's pornography homosexual in nature?

No, no, it was heterosexual. And unlike so much of the pornography today, none of it was electronic. It was all magazines and books. But I would turn to that, Chris, sometimes multiple times a day as an escape.

Lonely, I would turn to that when I felt... Any time I was really looking at pornography and enter into that fantasy, I would wind up comforting myself through pornography in that way.

But I'm assuming from what you just said, this pornography, though, that was becoming a part of your life, you had some heterosexual attraction, even as a young person, because of what you just said about the nature of the pornography.

It wasn't homosexual pornography. I'm guessing here. I don't know. But if you could, explain about that.

Yeah, so I think that I tend to agree with you at some level, but the images that I latched on to pornography were the male images. So, you know, there weren't a lot of them, but I would look at a male image, read a story.

What would it be like to be that guy? What would it be like? And so that became, like, for many, many years. I was a Christian while all of this was happening, and the little bit that I knew about Scripture, and yet I couldn't stop.

I felt, I mean, the guiltier I felt, the more ashamed I felt, the more I felt drawn to want to comfort my peers. I became increasingly discouraged. I became... God hated me. And I mean, that just fueled my need for comfort more and more.

I became depressed. I actually really felt that at least as many good were...

It wasn't...

It really brought everything crashing down in my life in my late 20s, but I realized I couldn't continue. I first began listening to the Sermon to the Tenth providentially, a series from Romans that taught...

And for the first time, Chris, I... The Spirit brought to life these doctrines that I had read about but never really understood. And one was that there was no way that I could be good enough to earn God's favor.

I had to die on my behalf. No Christian could ever be taken from me in order to be removed. It just really began giving me a different maybe about God and myself might not be... At 10th that I first learned about Harvest USA, even though it was a separate thing in their bulletin.

And Chris, I took that bulletin home. I took that bulletin home. Time after time, I would pick it up. You know, sometimes I would even pick the phone up and begin dialing the number and up again. Even though the Lord was bringing a new understanding into my heart, what I had done, and was still so confused because I thought I was...

And I thought that is because no one in church ever talked about it. The only context I ever heard will behavior discuss conversation with another Christian and say, hey, here's what I'm struggling with.

What I was afraid of them saying in return, 1997, told me two very for me.

One was.

And the second thing, he struggled with and what he identified that was, was I died. And it's really amazing when you think about that, how all of that fits together. James tells us in James chapter one, that when we experience temptation, we should know that we're tempted.

When we experience desire, temptation began the process of me really, what I was struggling with behind the same so many other people struggle with, not just kinds of sin, sexual and non-sexual. Those kinds of, to the extent that I began to submit those desires to God and to begin to find contentment in my life, I didn't have to run to sin to satisfy those desires.

Because I could be content in Christ. I could do, you know, I could, I could experience what Paul talks about in Philippians chapter four through seven, when he, when he describes this peace of God that passes understanding.

That, you know, that peace of God, isn't some magical voodoo, it's, it's actually believing God's promises and resting in who we are as people who have been, particularly during the first couple of years, I began to notice, been dating a woman, thousand one, a beautiful 15 walk together, obedient, praise God.

Father Wounds, Sexual Abuse, and the Roots of Same-Sex Attraction

Well, we have to go to our first station break right now. I want to pick up where we left off when we return. And as I said earlier, if anybody out there has a question of your own that you would like to ask Tim Geiger, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please, as always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Tim Geiger after these messages from our sponsors.

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We are now back with our guest today, Tim Geiger, and Tim Geiger is someone that is on the speaking roster at the upcoming conference, Gender, Sexuality, and What it Means to be.

Human.

This is the Blue Ridge Bible Conference, which is being held in Harrisonburg, Virginia, starting tonight and running through the 30th Saturday of March. And he is also the president of Harvest USA, and he is an elder in the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America.

And by the way, I think I might have forgotten to give you the website for Harvest USA. In case I forget to do it later, let me do it now. It's HarvestUSA .org, HarvestUSA .org. If you have a question for Tim, 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, city, and state, and country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. And before we go to any listener questions, Tim, I wanted to kind of backtrack on some of your story.

Sure.

Every time, or at least 99 of the time that I can remember, I've heard a person who struggles with same-sex attraction, either whether they were not at all a Christian, as lost as lost could be, and perhaps even fully committed to that activity and proud of it and celebratory of it, or even Christians who have repented of it.

Somewhere in the story, almost every time I can remember, their stories involve two things. And of course, I'm not trying to broad brush here because there are individuals who are an exception to what I'm about to say, but typically you hear that the person, especially when we're talking about a male person involved in homosexual activity, or at least in same-sex attraction, they were neglected in some serious level of neglect by their own father, and they were sexually molested by an older male figure in their life, whether it be a relative or neighbor, a friend or a stranger.

I know that the second was a part of your story. Was the first a part of your own testimony? Because I don't remember you saying anything about your relationship with your dad.

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up, Chris. I, you know, like so many other instances, was very emotionally, pretty much sitting in, you know, it turns out as I learned, he was a very broken man, and I don't think he had much to offer, certainly didn't have much to offer, married up until the day he died,.

But...

The Difference Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Desire

Now when you have had conversations with other people with same-sex attraction, is the same true as far as a typical scenario with lesbianism? Is it also true that very often, if not most often, a girl who is neglected by her mother, and perhaps was sexually molested by a woman, has the same kind of unfortunate spiral down into perversion and a lifetime, if not rescued by God himself, of this either same-sex attraction or even ongoing physical consummation of that attraction?

Sure.

I'll answer that, and then...

Sure.

...generality with you as well. Typically, women who wind up struggling are abused, often abused, not where a woman is abused by a man abused. And they don't tend to report the same kind of men and women, kind of, that there's no guarantee that a man or a woman experiencing those circumstances is going to wind up struggling with same-sex attraction.

Right.

And one of the reasons why we merge different ministries for men struggling with same-sex attraction and men struggling with same-sex attraction was because we found that, probably 95 of the time, their back story was typical for a man who's in pornography to have the, at least the exact, go out and teach experiences shaped by other people and God in particular.

Ways.

And it's just some people...

Now, having said what you said, I believe, and I've said this before in the program, and even your colleague who's going to be speaking at the upcoming conference that starts tonight, Todd Pruitt, he agreed with me that there needs to be clarity on the issue when we are discussing sexuality in regard to the difference between heterosexual and homosexual, even though all sex, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual, outside of the marriage bed is sin and damnable, but at the same time, heterosexual desires are not only natural, but they are a gift.

I mean, that's why we can get married and procreate, etc. Whereas homosexual desires, and especially obviously activity, are unnatural and perhaps even more dangerous to the psyche and so on. So wouldn't you say that there is a distinction to be made?

Because I know that there are a lot of people in outreach to those struggling with same-sex attraction that seem to minimize the severity of that unique sin. In fact, some will even go on to say something as extreme as, look, homosexuality is no more of a sin than gluttony or stealing office supplies at work or wishing that you owned your neighbor's Cadillac and coveting over his property.

Isn't there something uniquely distinct and even dangerous about homosexual desire and physical consummation of it?

I hear exactly what Todd, and so I can't speak directly to that. What I would say is that on same-sexual desire, that is not directed toward one's spouse. Both of those are... You know, there are distinctions in how they relate to one another, even in societal lust.

But God didn't create us to be sexually... Sexual desire is something that is a gift from God, but it's something that we're called to steward and to only act on when it's within the... Fairly frequently with men who don't struggle with same-sex attraction, and they say, well, you know, at the convenience store, you know, that is...

You know, perhaps that's not an explicitly drawn-out sexual fantasy, but that is a misuse, a sinful misuse of sexual desire that is just as sinful as saying, boy, you know, that other guy is attractive over there.

But if he used a different word, let's say he just said, wow, that woman is stunning. She's really a remarkably beautiful woman. Is there something wrong with a Christian man saying something like that?

No, because to the extent that you say that that person is beautiful, or that then, yeah, you're acknowledging as someone to whom God has given an aesthetic sense, that person is beautiful. But if in your mind, if you say, boy, you know, it would sure be nice to be physically involved with that person.

It would sure be nice to get something out of that person to serve me. Whether that person is your own gender or another gender, that's a sinful misuse of that person. That's envy. That's covetousness.

Yes, in fact, you know, obviously we both know that Jesus Christ said that you've committed adultery already if you have those desires in your heart. But I guess the difference would be, though, that there is never an acceptable sexual attraction that one can have towards someone of his own gender, whereas even with the most seasoned of Christians, there will be a guard he has to put around himself because of a natural God-given attraction to the opposite sex.

And even like we have a profound example of that in the Old Testament with Joseph, when Potiphar's wife was seducing him, he didn't hang around and evangelize her. He ran from her because he was afraid of what he might do, I'm assuming.

So I'm just saying that I think that there is, in fact, I'm convinced that there is definitely a difference between the sin of abusing a gift of sexual attraction, which is heterosexual, than someone trying to say that it is equal on every level to have a homosexual attraction, as long as it's not consummated physically, if you understand what I'm saying.

Sure. And I mean, just to put it simply, if the Lord did not give me to steward my wife, I would have no desire.

Right.

The way that God would be calling me to steward my sexual desire is to—has given me sexual desire toward my wife. And it is completely right and appropriate that I should feel that toward her. By the same token, other women as well.

It's not appropriate for me to—.

Of course.

It's only appropriate for me to steward that desire.

Well, I'm also happy to hear that God has obviously transformed you in that way because I have heard other people who, unfortunately, will call themselves gay Christians. And they'll say, yes, I am gay, but I don't act upon it physically.

And this is the way I am. It's basically an attitude of waving the white flag, saying I've given up on any hope of God changing me. I am this third category of gender, if you will, and I will just obey God by not physically acting upon it.

So I would disagree radically with that understanding of things.

Definitely.

And, you know, today we have this whole movement within, you know, I'm a tradition. We have this group of people who call themselves gay Christians. Interestingly, I think calling yourself a gay Christian, it probably means something different to them.

But one thing to land on is that calling yourself a gay Christian means this is now your identity.

Right.

And they don't look to see how the Lord might sovereignly work to change your affections, to change your desire. I should say, and this is one of the ways in which, as they've said, the proof of your repentance is that you're going to develop and hopefully get married.

And that simply isn't the case for everyone.

Right.

Even there are, even as the scriptures teach, there are eunuchs who were made that way by God, not physically by men with a knife, but by God himself, and they just never had any sexual attraction, either way.

Right.

You know, those are eunuchs who could be, I would tend to think, if you broaden that category, what it means is that for the same-sex-attracted man or the same-sex-attracted woman, repentance will have a variety of...

For some people, God calls, and if God calls you to be married, he'll give you sexual attraction, sexual desire toward your spouse. If he doesn't call you to be married, then he won't give you that gift.

When we work with men and women who struggle with same-sex attraction at Harvest, we say that's something that's not really within your control. It's certainly something you can pray for. It's something that you can earnestly desire up to the Lords on your life.

Same-Sex Desire, Stewardship, and the Limits of Identity

We're going to a midway break right now, and as those of you who listen to my program regularly know, this is a longer-than-normal break, because Grace Life Radio in Lake City, Florida, a 90 .1 FM, they air Iron Trip and Zion Radio as well, in addition to it being live-streamed over the Internet, and they have to localize Iron Trip and Zion Radio to their local community in Lake City, Florida, and they air their own commercials while we air ours.

So they need this station break to air Lake City, Florida, public service announcements and commercials. So please be patient as we take this elongated break, and use this time wisely by writing a question for our guest, Tim Geiger, on sexuality in general, or specifically homosexuality, and also please write down the information provided by our advertisers.

The only way that we remain on the air is through the generous support of our advertisers who purchase advertising on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. Those advertising dollars, in addition to the generous donations of listeners, are the only way that we can survive.

So I would appreciate it if you could write down the information provided by our advertisers during this break so that you can more frequently and successfully patronize them, and that, as I said, enables us to remain on the air longer, because obviously if our advertisers are getting results, they're going to want to remain as our advertisers, and some might not have the financial ability to do so, even if they love this show, if they don't get results.

So please do both of those things, write down information provided by our advertisers, and also send in questions to Tim Geiger. And by the way, Tim, I forwarded you two questions from our listeners so that you can look them over during the break, and perhaps be further equipped to respond when we read the questions on the air when we return.

Great.

And so, we're going to be right back after these messages, so do not go away.

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