8. Banning Conversion?

Welcome to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 8, Banning Conversion. If you've not yet heard about the staunchly liberal government of Canada has just passed a new and radical law ramming it past both the House of Commons and the National Senate just before the end of business year in 2021, well they have and this law has went into effect just a few days ago in Canada on January the 10th, which makes it illegal in all of Canada and every single one of their providences for any person to practice, promote or profit from a controversial kind of therapy known as conversion therapy.

What Canada's Conversion Therapy Ban Says

Essentially what it's done is it has made this kind of therapy illegal moving forward, which is any kind of action that is both clinical or otherwise, it is meant to persuade a person away from an LGBTQ identity in any way.

Conversion therapy is persuading someone against their homosexuality, and in a minute we're going to read the language from this law so that you can see how controversial it is, how vague it is, and how the entire thing is set up as a sort of massive liberal Trojan horse against Christianity, against pastors, against faithful churches.

But for the moment, I want us to understand that this is something that's now in effect, and it carries a maximum of a five-year prison sentence for anyone who just appeals to a biblical worldview and calls someone out of their sin.

So we need to pray for our friends in Canada and for the pastors who are going to be sharing the gospel. Now, as you can imagine, this move was celebrated by liberal and conservative parties in Canada because really Canada only has one party.

It's a misnomer to actually call one of their parties a conservative party because they're staunchly liberal. They're the party that ushered in gay marriage, for instance. You can imagine that their ultra-liberal Justin Trudeau, who's the prime minister of their country, applauding this.

He even took to Twitter saying that this was a good thing, that they've banned the despicable and degrading practice of conversion therapy, which his words were, of course, immediately lauded by. With hearty approval, the LGBTQ activists and movement.

Why the Law Is Uneven and Vaguely Written

So with all of that, what I want us to accomplish today, first and foremost, is I want us to discuss what kind of conversion therapy that is actually being banned in Canada. I want us to examine why this law is so tyrannical, the way that it's written and the way that it's going to be applied, and I want us as Christians to understand how this is going to have an impact on our brothers and sisters up north, how this will eventually probably trickle into America and have an impact on us, and in the weeks ahead, I want us to actually examine and observe what a biblical sexual worldview is when it comes to homosexuality, LGBTQ identity issues, and things like that.

So we've got some work to do. Today I want us just to focus on how does this apply to us as Christians, and to begin with that, I'm going to ask the question, what is conversion therapy? Now, earlier we gave a sort of general definition that's kind of being floated around right now in culture, but what I'd like to do right now is I'd like to read to you from the law itself.

This is what it says. Conversion therapy means a practice, treatment, or service that's designed to change a person's sexual orientation to heterosexual. Second section, to change a person's gender identity to cisgender.

Number three, to change a person's gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth, meaning that you're helping them become who God made them to be. Number four, to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or behavior.

Number five, to repress a person's non-cisgendered gender identity. Or finally, six, to repress or reduce a person's gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to that person at birth.

Now, obviously they're saying that gender and sex are different and they're convoluting language with a lot of vagaries and a lot of different things like that, but there's some problems with what they've said at a deep level.

We could talk about hundreds of them, but I just want to choose two. There's two problems with this statement that I have that I want to share with you. The first is that it's not evenly applied both directions.

In fact, it's only actually going to be applied in one direction, which is towards those who have a Christian worldview. The Canadian government is more than willing to make it illegal for anyone to promote the suppression or the reduction of an LGBTQ identity.

They're okay if you try to persuade someone away from an LGBTQ lifestyle, or they're not okay with that. They're not okay if you try to persuade someone away from a treatment plan that is certifiably bad for them, and it's going to lead them to all kinds of lifelong damage and loss of organs and things like that.

That is not okay because our Canadian overlords above us have dictated that to be so in their new moral paradigm. But again, the irony is that it doesn't apply equally both ways. While it's illegal to persuade a child or an adult out of the homosexual lifestyle, it is actually celebrated, and it's encouraged to persuade a child towards the homosexual lifestyle, which lets us know that Canada now deems conversion a legitimate enterprise so long as they are converting people into the LGBTQ movement or converting people deeper into their idolatry and their sin.

As long as you're not pulling them away from their sin, you're okay. Think about it this way. You could, in theory, actually try to convert the entire nation of Canada to be homosexual, transgender, transvestite, whatever else you want to call it, and the most likely outcome that you would receive is that you would receive awards, grants.

You would receive honorary doctorates. You'd be celebrated. You'd have your face plastered all over every woke magazine in the world. But if you were to try to convert a single person out of that lifestyle, if you were to tell a single girl to stop her hormone therapy and to repent for finding her identity and her sex, or if you were to tell a teenager to slow down and think carefully before going through a double mastectomy because it's forever going to change their life and the way that they view themselves and their self-image, and it's probably going to lead to depression and suicide, if you were to tell a young boy to be proud of his masculinity, that it's not toxic and it's not something that we should try to suppress, but he should actually try to learn how to harness his masculinity for Christ, you do that, you're going to end up in a Canadian prison.

You're going to end up in a jail cell because you've now committed a hate crime against Canada's new supposed reality. This law, even if you don't agree with God's revealed truth in Scripture, is unevenly and unfairly applied to all of its Canadian citizens because now Canada is in the business of subsidizing immorality.

That's the very first and most general problem that I have with this law is that it's unevenly and unfairly applied. But I also think that there's a second issue, which is even more important than that one, and that's that the bill is so vaguely written by these tyrannical overlords that it can almost be committed by anybody anywhere, anytime, which is sort of baked into the purpose of this bill.

Either you're going to submit yourself to their tyranny or they're going to beat you into submission. That's sort of the point of it. We are going to define reality for you, and if you don't submit to our vision of reality, then you will be in trouble.

And I don't want you to get me wrong here. If what we mean by conversion therapy is actually banning electric shock therapy and violence and other things that have been used against the homosexual movement to cause them to repent of their sodomy, then I'm all for conversion therapy.

I think that we should not be using violence against any person because all people are made in the image of God. Nobody, not even Christian or atheist, believes that you should be tortured into a belief, and yet this is sort of what they're equating what we're doing as preaching the gospel with.

As Christians, we forcefully decry when China shuts down churches or when Islamic jihadists terrorize Christians and set them on fire because they won't turn to their repugnant god, Allah, but yet in this bill, that is being kind of equated with preaching the gospel.

This law is written in such a way that abusing someone through electric shock therapy and telling someone the good news of the gospel is the same kind of offense that comes with the same kind of communicatory violence that you're placing on someone, and it warrants the same level of punishment from a depraved, wretched government who's establishing their own version of the Third Reich.

In all actuality, the only thing that Canada was specific about in this law was the guilt and the sentencing for the violation, which lets us know that they intend on using fear and intimidation to actually promote and advance the LGBTQ agenda, and with this kind of vagary and such expertly worded legal speak in this particular thing, what they're doing is they're banning any practice, any treatment, any service by anybody that attempts to assist anyone away from being a lesbian, gay, bi, queer, transsexual mermaid, or whatever else.

If you try to help anyone move an inch away from the LGBTQ movement, then you are now in violation of this law. That could mean that a counselor who wants to slow down a child and slow down a family, have conversations before people make life-changing decisions, that's now illegal in Canada.

That could mean that a doctor who's unwilling to prescribe hormone therapy that's going to medically castrate someone's son, that's now illegal because he doesn't want to do that in Canada. That can mean a pastor who's preaching sermons about turning from your sin and repenting of a homosexual lifestyle, preaching a message about biblical sexual ethics, that's now illegal in Canada.

But that also has come into your living room as well, because now it's also illegal for a Christian to have a conversation with another person telling them that they should repent of their lifestyle. If someone comes to you and asks you, what is homosexuality?

Is it a sin? And you say, yes, you're now in violation of this law, and you could be punished for it. Now, I'm not sure that they're going to throw every single person who has a conversation at the water cooler in jail, but my point is that they are weaponizing a law against people who have a moral, sane view that's based on the Bible.

Under this law, all the actions above that I just mentioned are completely illegal by a government who now wants to give you their ire and their consequences. A government that's trying to promote sexual confusion and madness, a government that's hell-bent upon destroying its own country.

I mean, think about it. If a nation is encouraging men and women to surrender their best years of fertility to fruitless debauchery and sinfulness so that they can't produce children, then the society itself is going to be doomed to collapse in upon itself, because they can't produce children.

And the children that they do produce are going to be so godless, inculcated in such a terrible culture, that the entire culture is going to fall in on itself, if God even allows it to continue much longer.

Biblical Sexual Ethics and the Image of God

Listen to the way the statue reads. Section A denotes that it's illegal to help someone become a heterosexual, which is just another way to say that it's illegal now to help them become who God made them to naturally be.

You see, because God did not design them to be homosexual. God did not design them to commit evil. God is not the author of evil. And I did. I called homosexuality evil there in the same way that I called lying, cheating, stealing, and fornication evil.

But homosexuality is an abomination to God. He didn't design men and women to have attractions for the same sex. He didn't design people to have proclivities towards polyamory, no matter what the politicians tell you.

He didn't design a human being to be born in the wrong body, waking up confused, thinking that if I could just cut off my breast and add a penis and make myself into a modern-day Frankenstein, then somehow I could possibly be happy.

That's not the way God designed us. God designed us to find our happiness in Him. He designed us, male and female, from the beginning to be married in covenantal marriage and to create human beings who would be fruitful and multiply across the face of the earth.

Teaching that message now is illegal in godless Canada. In Section B, I'm only going to go through two sections of this law because it's so bad, but in Section B, you can no longer help someone out of their own psychosis.

It's become completely illegal to help someone realize that they're not a boy trapped in a girl's body. They're not a man who has an attraction to toddlers, and that's okay. They're not a man who has a period.

No, they're a short-haired woman who wears man's clothes who's living with a mental health problem that needs to be addressed by a mental health provider, which is now totally illegal in Canada. I mean, I feel for the people who are stuck in these delusions in the same way that I feel for a man who thinks that he's a seven-foot-tall butterfly.

But what I don't do is I don't encourage him and placate him in his fantasies. I tell him the truth, I point him to Scripture, and I point him to a medical health provider who's equipped to serve him and care for him, not taken all the power away from them by a Canadian government who's bent on idolatry and debauchery.

The whole thing is absurd. And if you think about this bill, it's patently false, it's patently absurd, and it's soon going to make inroads into the Church, which, again, is this sort of Trojan horse that I've been describing, carefully designed by the Canadian government to be weaponized against Christians.

Courage for Pastors Under Threat

My prayer is that Christian pastors would serve Christ in this time and not get angry and be fueled by hate and frustration. But I'm also praying that they would not be terrified and scared and be given over to cowardice.

My prayer is that they would not respond in the negative way in both ways, that they wouldn't be angry and licentious in their approach, but I also pray that they wouldn't be fearful and cowardly either.

Christianity is not a religion of fear. It's not a religion of avoidance, and it's not a religion of cowardice. Christianity is a faith that is built upon the rock who is Jesus Christ, the author and the perfecter of our faith, the cornerstone that we've been shaped after and molded after, who did not cower and run in his moment of greatest darkness.

He marched boldly up the hill of Calvary to the cross. He knew that God could take the darkest moment in human history and turn it into the greatest moment for his glory, because that's who God is. He can turn darkness into light.

He can bring people in darkness into the kingdom of light so Christians don't fear. We're not a people who are afraid, and we're also not a people who are just going to disobey for disobedience sake. We are commanded to obey the government.

When the laws of the land do not violate the laws of God or compel us towards lawless living, then we're willing to obey. We're a model of what it means to be a citizen. We're humble. We're quiet. We're ready to participate in the health and welfare and the building of society and culture.

But when a law violates the law of God, we choose God, and not that of some semblance of self-importance or a penchant for violence or a bent towards activism or a personality quirk where we're just contrarians or any of that.

We desire that secular governments would repent of their lawlessness and they would turn to the living God, and they would turn to Him, and they would repent, and they would be satisfied in Him. You can imprison us, you can beat us, you can burn us, or you can kill us, but He matters more to us than you matter to us, and you've been warned.

And I don't say that to threaten you. I say that you can try to do all those things, and we're not going to bow our knee to you. We're not going to bow our knee to you. We're going to obey our God, and that's it.

As we draw this first part of the discussion to a close, I want to remind us all as American Christians to pray for our brothers and sisters in Canada, to pray that pastors would have the courage that it takes on Saturday night not to erase their sermons and to preach something more palatable to the modern man or to please the tyrants who are in charge of them.

I pray for them that they would keep their sermon illustrations, that they would use homosexuality as an example of sin, along with every other sin that needs to be exampled so that we would repent and turn to Christ.

I pray that they wouldn't be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ because it says that He was ashamed of me, I will be ashamed of Him. So I pray my brothers and sisters in Canada would be bold and loving and humble and lionhearted and zealous for truth, and they would balance all those things out according to the love of Christ.

I'd also ask you and I as American Christians to pray for our nation as well. Currently, 20 states in America plus the District of Columbia have banned conversion therapy in this country. That means that doctors must go along with whatever whims and fancy that their patient tells them to or risk being shut down and sued over it.

In the state that I'm currently coming to you from, which is Massachusetts, a very liberal state, there is still some distinction between a pastor who can perform religious services and a clinician in an office.

I still have the freedom to make videos like this, but there's no guarantee that this is going to continue. We live in a state and a country where all the political energy is jolting forward to the left as quickly as it possibly can, and with progressives always needing new moral frontiers to normalize, it's not going to be long before something as egregious as pedophilia is going to be legal in this country, and preaching against it is going to be a hate crime.

So buckle up, everybody. You're either going to have a backbone and you're going to say, I'm going to follow God rather than man, or you're going to cave, and I hope you don't. As we close, I want to speak directly to my brothers and sisters who are in Christ.

I want to speak to pastors. I want to speak to anyone who will listen to what is going to be said here, and I want to share the truth and the hope from the Word of God so that you will be encouraged. I don't want you to be fearful about what's going on in the world.

I don't want you to be afraid. I don't want you to be nervous. I don't want you to be any of those things. I want you to be encouraged in the truth from the gospel so that you'll have confidence as you live a Christian life in a world that is very pagan and lost and given over to all sorts of sin and idolatry.

Scripture for Courage and Faithfulness

So with that, we're going to take a moment here as we close, and we're going to cover a lot of biblical truth. We're not going to dive deeply into one particular verse. We're going to share lots of verses.

I'm going to blanket you with Scripture for a moment because we have a government in Canada that's turning against its citizens. We have a government in America that hates God and that will eventually turn against its citizens.

You need to know what the Word of God says so that you can be encouraged in your faith and so that you can be strengthened in your devotion to Christ. So what does the Bible say to us Christians in moments like this?

Well, let me tell you. Let me share it with you. Number one, dear Christian, the Word of God is true even if everyone else is exposed as a liar. That's Romans 3 verse 4. We know that God's Word is true no matter what anyone says.

We know that all aberrant sexuality is an abomination to God even in a day when it's become en vogue. Not to say that's Leviticus 18 .22. We know that everyone who practices such things is not going to inherit the kingdom of God.

That's 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. We know that we don't want them to die and go to hell, so we have to share the gospel. But if we share the gospel, we must not be ashamed of that gospel message, and we must share it and preach it boldly and declare it because that is the only hope that the world has to be saved.

That's Romans 1 chapter 6. Do not be ashamed of the gospel, for it's the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. We must not be ashamed of what God's Word teaches us because it's just no longer en vogue with our secular society.

The Bible tells us that the beginning of wisdom is to fear the Lord. That's Proverbs 1 .7. The Bible tells us that the fool says in his heart that there is no God. That's Psalms 14 .1. God tells us this because we are supposed to know and understand that sinful people are usually not going to repent because their deeds are evil, Romans 1, and they don't want to come into the light because they love the darkness and they're afraid that their deeds are going to be exposed, John 3, verse 20.

But we also know from Scripture that God's wisdom is foolishness to those who are perishing, 1 Corinthians 1 .18, and that all who desire to live a godly life in Him is going to be persecuted, 2 Timothy 3 .12.

We know that we need to share the gospel because that's the power of salvation. We know that we're going to be persecuted. We know that they're going to reject us, and we know that we can have joy in the midst of various trials and circumstances because those trials are going to produce righteousness in us.

That's James 1, 2 through 4. We know that we're going to have problems in this world as we share the gospel, but we know He's already overcome the world, John 16 .33. We know that nothing is going to separate us from the love of Christ.

That's Romans 8 .1. We're called to be shining lights in a perilous time. That's Matthew 5 and Philippians 2. We know that whatever hardships that we face in this life are going to work for us an eternal weight of glory, 2 Corinthians 4 .17, because God is working all things for our good, even right now, Romans 8 .28, and to the ends of the earth.

That's Revelation 22. We can rest in the truth that God's truth is still good, and it's still good for the world. The world still needs to hear it. God has no plan B for how He's going to reach the world other than the declared gospel.

He has called you and I to declare it. He's called you and I to share it, and that begins in pulpits across this country with people who have ironclad spines, who are ready to preach the word of God with boldness and love and fearlessness because they know that that's how God's going to rescue humanity out of their sin.

So do not be afraid, Christians, because Christ is with you. Don't be discouraged because Christ is with you. Do not fear what man is going to say about you or think about you because Christ is with you.

It's better to please God and to stand in opposition to the world than to stand in opposition to God and please the world and stand before Him and try to explain to Him why you were too ashamed of Him to please Him.

Remember, to live is Christ, which means all of your life is His, but also to die is gain. That means that whatever the world can throw at you, whether it's they hate you on social media or whether they burn you in the streets like happens in some countries, whatever the world throws at you, to die is gain.

Your life matters only to the degree that you give it up in the service for Christ. Only when life will soon be passed, only what is done for Christ will last. That's how I would encourage you, my friends who are believers.

Preach the Word Without Fear

Now, to pastors, I also want to encourage you because there is a disease in American Christianity, and I hold the pastors in this country responsible. You have abnegated your duty and you failed to preach the gospel, and it's not all of you.

There's a lot of great pastors, and I know a lot of them by name, but I want to remind you of your calling in the Lord. This is what 2 Timothy says. I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who was judged at the living and the dead, and by his appearing in his kingdom to preach the word, brothers.

Be ready in season and out of season to reprove and rebuke and exhort with great patience, but also instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.

But you, brothers, be sober in all things and endure hardships, do the work of an evangelist, and fulfill your ministry. Brothers, you've been charged in the presence of a living God to preach the word, and I would call you to preach it.

Preach it with boldness, reprove sin, encourage sinners, point people to Jesus Christ. Don't water down the message of the gospel because you think it's going to give you more popularity or it's going to take the heat off of you.

You submit your life under the mighty hand of the living God and do what he's told you to do. Don't adulterate his word to make it more palatable to your audience. Preach it as it is. It is beautiful.

Preach it with conviction and with boldness and with passion. Preach it with love and sincerity and affection. Preach the truth of the word of God no matter what anybody thinks of you. Don't waver in your calling, and don't worry whether the word is in season or out of season.

Preach the word of God, my brothers. Preach the word of God and fulfill your ministry. You're not going to fulfill your ministry by making fans and making followers. You're going to fulfill your ministry by preaching the word of God.

That's it. Your people need the word of God, and God will hold you accountable to what you do with it, and I pray that you would do your ministry well. Until next time, I hope that you are blessed. I hope that you are encouraged, and I will see you again next time on the broadcast.

Until then, God bless you.