What Love Demands

SERMON: 2015-07-19--ph0115--what-love-demands SOURCE DURATION: 00:41:57.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The sermon begins with the speaker posing a question about social change in segment [1] and continues through theological exposition and application until segment [714], which concludes the main point before audience applause. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:00:02.720] [CUT] (air whooshing) [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:00:02.720; resume after this marked segment] We've been asking ourselves the question, what can we as Bible-believing Christians do in the face of the rising tide of social change in the areas of sexual identity, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage? Social change that threatens to overwhelm our society as a tsunami after an earthquake. And just to show you how close that issue comes to home, you will have at the information desk today the latest issue of our denominational magazine, The Banner, and I was astounded to notice that the editor who is retiring from his position is calling in his editorial for some way, for the church to find some way to accommodate practicing homosexuals in our denomination. That is contrary to everything that we have ever stood for. It was an aspect of discussion at this year's Synod. It'll be a much greater discussion at Synod next year when there is a committee that is reporting on how to provide pastoral care for homosexual issues. The issue is present everywhere. I was struck by a news clip on the news this past week. Caitlyn Jenner was receiving an ESPI Award for Courage, and they showed a clip of it in the news. She was talking about the importance of courage in the face of gender identity issues. And at the end of her speech, the whole audience, and there must have been hundreds if not thousands of people, stood to their feet to applaud her courageous attitude in the face of her gender transformation. Well, what do we do in the face of that? We have been seeing together that one of the things that we do is we start with prayers of intercession. We posit ourselves between a holy God on the one hand and a sinful humanity on the other. And we plead with God for mercy and grace. We plead with God to withhold his judgment, to pour out his blessings. And we do that, as we saw last week, on the basis of the blood of Jesus. And prayer is a powerful tool and trusted to the church. As James said many years ago, the prayer of a righteous man or woman is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again, he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. As the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson said many years ago, more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Brings us this morning then to a second thing that you and I can do and indeed must do, and that is we must learn what love demands. We must learn what love demands. What does it look like to exercise love in this day and age? What does it look like to love my son when he comes home and he tells me I'm a homosexual? There are families like that in this community. What does love look like when I discover that my parent is a closet homosexual? What does love look like when my friends invite me to their same sex marriage or when my coworkers are overtly homosexual in their behavior? What does love look like? Well, that's what I wanna talk about this morning. I wanna do that. Then as I said a moment ago, on the basis of these verses that we read from Philippians 1, particularly nine and 10, this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ. There are two things in those two verses that I really want us to note, and the first is that as believers, our capacity for love is meant to increase. And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more. As we are rooted and grounded in Christ, our capacity to reach out and embrace people ought to get bigger and bigger because we're no longer a slave. We don't have to defend ourselves. We know that we are securely anchored in the heart of God as his children. Second thing to notice is that our love must grow in discernment. This is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more, but notice how he goes on, in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Jesus Christ. At the end of the day, God wants us to love what he loves and hate what he hates, and that means growing in our discernment to understand what love demands. And in the time that remains to us this morning, I wanna try to cover with you four areas that can help us understand what biblical love in your life or mine might look like. Here's number one, biblical love has two dimensions. It has a vertical dimension and it has a horizontal dimension. And Jesus makes this very clear in Matthew chapter 22, when one of the Pharisees comes to him and says to him, "What is the greatest commandment?" And perhaps you will all remember the answer in Matthew 22, 37 to 39, Jesus says, "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart "and with all of your soul and with all of your mind." This, he says, is the first and greatest commandment. Then he goes on to say, "The second is like it. "Love your neighbor as yourself." So here you have the two dimensions of biblical love. It is vertical and horizontal. Our first obligation is towards God and then secondarily, our obligation is to each other. And our love relationally is defined by our love for God. God's love must always come first and my love for you must be conditioned by my love for God. So here's the big question, what does it mean to love God? Doesn't just mean to have nice feelings towards God, but it is to embrace his values. And to embrace his values means that what God is looking for in the human heart are people who walk in repentance and in faith. That is to say, what God is looking for is an awareness of my sin, a realization of his holiness, his judgment on my sin. He's looking for me to recognize that Jesus died for my sin so that I'm washed clean, that he arose from the dead to give me his Holy Spirit and to transform my life and that now I walk in repentance and in faith. I'm going to fail, but every time I fail, I say, "Lord, this is not my identity. "This is no longer who I really am. "I am a child of God. "I want to follow after your heart, "and I want to walk obediently." And the message of scripture is that everybody, no matter who they are, what they've done, or where they have been, who comes to God on that basis, on that basis alone, is accepted by God because they're justified by faith in Jesus. But those who persist in sin, whatever that sin is, we often specialize in calling sexual sin seriously, but as we'll see in a few moments, from God's perspective, all sin is sin, and yes, some sin has more implications and impact than others, but sin is sin. And from God's perspective, from God's perspective, he will not accept those who do not turn away from their sin. Paul says that repeatedly, so clearly, Galatians 5:21, "I warn you as I did before, those who live like this," and this is preceded by all the sins of the flesh, "those who live like this will not inherit "the kingdom of God." And so for me to accept, unconditionally, somebody who deliberately lives in sin because I call that love, is a mistaken notion of what love is. If I really love you, then I want God's best for you. And if I want God's best for you, I must stand with you against sin, and I must call you to repentance. And a lot of what passes as love in the world today is not love, any more than a physician who looks at my cancer and turns away and says, well, we'll just leave it, that's not love. Love means I want to take you and recognize that if you don't deal with the underlying sin issues in your life, you are not going to enter into the kingdom of God. I don't know of anything more serious than to be cast out into the outer darkness at the end of time. And so we need to understand, love has a vertical dimension, it has a horizontal dimension, and the horizontal dimension needs to be subject to the vertical. If you ignore the vertical, then love becomes a tolerance of just about everything under the sun, and we end up where we are ending up in today's society. Does that make sense? That's a hard thing to do. And I'm often reminded of that story of the Levites in, where is it, Exodus chapter 32. You will recall that when Moses was up in the mountain, the people got antsy because he wasn't coming back fast enough, and they persuaded Aaron to make the golden calf, and they got totally out of control, and Moses comes down, and he's furious, and God's furious, and he calls out to the people who's on the Lord's side, and the tribe of Levi steps forward. They're the only ones that haven't participated in this idolatry. Remember, that was always sexual in nature, because that's always where it goes. And he says, who's on the Lord's side, and they come forward, and he says, I want you to march through the tribes of Israel with your sword in your hand, and you kill brother, sister, father, mother, anybody that gets in the road, because love for God takes priority to love for man. That's a horrible story, but this is what the Lord says in verse 29, or Moses says to them, you have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day. There's a vertical dimension, there's a horizontal dimension. Doesn't mean any of the sort of negative things that we often think of in terms of the religious extreme right. It doesn't justify ruthless or rude behavior, but it does mean that we understand that loving people means that we call them back to the Lord, and it means we call them back to the Lord's standards, even if we're going to be persecuted for doing that, because it is not love to stand by and watch their lives be lost, not only for time, but for eternity. So that's one thing that love demands. We need to love with wisdom, as God loves. Secondly, we need to distinguish, and this is really important, between individuals who struggle with sexual identity issues and movements that seem to normalize and legitimize such behavior. Let me say it again, we need to distinguish between individuals who struggle with these issues and the movements that try to change society. One reason it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about this topic, even in church settings, is because increasingly we are exposed to folks who struggle with gender and identity issues. As I said, there are people here who have family members who struggle with sexual identity issues. We have people who struggle with parents. We have people who have coworkers. One woman I know, she's not part of this congregation. 25% of the people that she works with in the particular organization that she's part of are avowedly and openly gay. And whenever you address the kind of issues that we're talking about here, we tend to get a little edgy, don't we, because we don't want to alienate our friends and we don't want to feel embarrassed on their behalf. And we know somehow, as Christians, we're supposed to love them, what does love look like? Well, it's really important to distinguish between individuals who struggle with issues, because we all have issues one way or the other, and movements that are pushing for changes in society. There is no doubt in my mind that many, many folks who struggle with sexual identity issues in our culture are fine and wonderful folks. They have no interest in turning the world upside down. They just want to be left alone. They just want to be able to live the way that they want to live, and all of that sort of thing. And those are the kind of people that we can embrace in the kind of biblical love that we have just been talking about. But that's very different from a movement, because a movement tries to bring about changes in society, that ultimately mean the exclusion of Christians, and that ultimately end up turning the world upside down. And much as the gay movement would like to deny it, there is very good evidence that they do have an agenda, and that agenda is being pushed relentlessly upon us to the point where increasingly our freedom is being limited. Let me read you an article that appeared in 1987 in a magazine called Gay Community News. It was subsequently read into the congressional record of the United States Congress. It's by a fellow by the name of Michael Swift. And as you listen to this, remember this is 1987, and the gay movement justifies this as just being a fantasy rant, and therefore not to be taken seriously, but you listen to what it says, and then compare it to where we find ourselves today. We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sport arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunk houses, in your truck stops, in your all-male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us. Goes on to say all laws banning homosexual activity will be revoked. Instead, legislation shall be passed which engenders love between men. All homosexuals must stand together as brothers. We must be united artistically, philosophically, socially, politically, and financially. We will triumph only when we present a common face to the vicious heterosexual enemy. The family unit, spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy, and violence will be abolished. The family unit which only dampens imagination and curbs free will must be eliminated. Perfect boys will be conceived and grown in the genetic laboratory. They will be bonded together in a communal setting under the control and instruction of homosexual savants. All churches who condemn us will be closed. Only our gods are handsome. Our only gods are handsome young men. We adhere to a cult of beauty, moral, and aesthetic. All that is ugly and vulgar and banal will be annihilated since we are alienated from middle class heterosexual conventions. We are free to live our lives according to the dictates of the pure imagination. For us too much is not enough. The article ends with this tremble heteroswine when we appear before you without our masks. That is a homosexual manifesto written in 1987. And as I said, a lot of people will say that is just the extreme rantings of an individual and maybe they are, but notice the degree to which our society has been to that spirit since that day. So yes, we must embrace in biblical love homosexual brothers and sisters or anybody who struggles with gender identity issues. But at the same time, we must take our stand against movements that are anti-gospel, that are anti-god and that relish in taking us places where God does not want the world to go. And that is why when these things get institutionalized, it is so incredibly tragic and serious. One more quick example before we move on with this. One of the leading homosexual activists in the United States a number of years ago was a fellow by the name of Frank Kameny. And Frank Kameny wrote in a published letter of 2008 these words. He said, let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions by whatever definition by more and more consenting adults. If bestiality with consenting animals provides happiness to some people, let them pursue their happiness. This is Americanism in action. This is 2008, but here's the tragedy. In 2009, he was invited into the White House with 249 other gay activists and he was centered out with praise by President Obama. With these words, we're proud of you, Frank, and we're grateful to you for your leadership. Weep, my friends, weep. Because if this gets elevated as normalcy, then judgment cannot be far behind. So love the sitter, but hate the sin that stands behind it and hate the movement that tries to turn our whole world upside down. So what does love demand? It demands, first of all, that we understand the horizontal dimension has to be subject to the vertical dimension, our love for our neighbor conditioned by our love for God. Secondly, we need to understand or distinguish between individuals and the movement. But then thirdly, we need to understand the pain of those who struggle with sexual identity issues. And this is where the rubber really hits the road. We must understand people's pain. Now, I've said before, when it comes to the Christian community's reaction to people who struggle with these issues, we tend to divide broadly speaking into two extremes. On the one hand, there are those of us who take seriously the command to love and in failing to submit horizontal love to the vertical dimension, we embrace people uncritically. That is where the movement in many churches, including I'm starting to worry our own denomination. That concerns me profoundly. The other extreme is I don't want anything to do with it. I want to bury my head in the sand. I don't know anybody who lives that way. I don't want to hear what other people are into. And we hide ourselves from what is happening. Neither extreme is very helpful, is it? If I uncritically embrace the sinner without calling him to repentance, I'm not doing him a service, as we've talked about a few moments ago. And if I just bury my head in the sand, that doesn't make the movement go away. It just means that one day I'm gonna wake up and I'm gonna discover that all my freedom is gone and I don't know where it went. Because remember, for evil to triumph, all that has to happen is good men and women not to do anything. So the happy medium lies in the middle where we try to understand what the struggle is that drives this movement forward. Because while it is true that there are those who just flaunt their sexuality and they just want everybody to know whatever it is that they're doing, fact of the matter is that many, many people who struggle with these issues live in deep pain and deep shame. And for us to uncritically embrace them isn't helping them to get better, but to ignore them or to reject them just moves them into the arms of those who will accept them wholeheartedly. Instead, we need to try to understand what is the pain, what is the pain that a person feels when they feel different from everybody else? Because people do. What drives people to become who they are and can we step into their shoes and shoulder their burden with them and help them to move forward? Which of course raises the whole question, where does all this trouble come from? The movement would say homosexuality and gender identity issues are just a normal variant of human sexuality. Some people love the opposite sex and some people love the same sex and it's all equal and we ought to just live and live. That's where society finds itself today and very smart people are trying to find a multitude of good reasons why that ought to be true. As Christian believers bound to scripture, I don't think that's an option for us because scripture says that when God created everything, it was good and God created as male and female. We've talked about this before. There is an order to the created order and heterosexuality is the overall theme of scripture and scripture never makes allowances for anything short of that. So why is the world in such a mess and why is this such a powerful movement you can't turn on the television today without being confronted by it? It's everywhere. Well, Romans one, as you know, and we won't take the time to exposit it, but Romans one describes for us the process where a society moves in that direction. It always begins with a willful rejection of God's authority. When I willfully reject God's authority, I now become subject to satanic deception. My mind gets darkened. My heart's affections begin to change. I now begin to draw life from people around me as opposed to from God. And now what happens eventually if I persist, God gives me over and he gives me over to homosexuality because ultimately speaking homosexuality, painful as it is, the rejection, you cannot possibly rebel more against God than rejecting what he made you to be. We need to understand that. Doesn't ease the pain. Doesn't mean that people do it willfully. I'm just saying that as the rain falls on the just and on the unjust in a fallen world, in a fallen world, bad things happen and we end up being messed up. Now more recent research is giving us more insight into the particular dynamics of how gender identity is shaped. We know that before a baby is born, babies initially lean towards the feminine. Then about eight or 12 weeks into gestation, if it's a boy, there is a flood of testosterone that floods the baby and then there is a subsequent second flood and each of these floods differentiates the boy from the girl. The first flood produces male sex organs so that physically he becomes a male and the second flood rewires the brain so that he leans towards the masculine. Now you can appreciate that that is a very precise process and when things go wrong, however they go wrong, it can make a mess of who you are internally. And then of course you have situations and circumstances beyond that once you are born that begin to shape who you are. I just watched a documentary by a guy who went undercover in a gay bar and he interviewed the people in that particular gay bar to find out what made them what they are and virtually every one of them, and this isn't necessarily true across the board, but virtually every one of them had been sexually abused and virtually everyone had not bonded in a proper way with one of their parents. So those are complex and dynamic issues. If you go back to this for just a moment, if this is sort of the average of what it is to be a male and if this is the average of what it is to be feminine, then let's say the natural spread lies here. When you get to the really far extremes, at what point are you getting into brokenness? And I would argue biblically speaking that brokenness is widespread in the human race. So people use that argument, of course, to say we're born that way and you can't expect me to be different. Two points that I want to make in this before we move on and that is this. Brokenness is brokenness. We're all broken to one degree or another. You don't have to feel gay to feel like you don't belong. You don't have to have gender issues to feel like, you know, my sister when she grew up in our family, she didn't think she belonged and I know all kinds of people who grew up in families wondering were they born into the wrong family or how did I get here? Brokenness is widespread across the board. It is by no means restricted to people who suffer from sexual identity issues. There's tons and tons of people who are broken, who feel broken from when they were born and if they weren't broken before they were born, they felt broken as life went on because their mother wasn't there or their father wasn't there or their brother beat them up or Lord knows whatever all happens in a sinful world. Brokenness is universal. Please understand that with me. But secondly, flowing out of that, and this is really important, is brokenness is no justification for sin. Brokenness is no justification for sin. Read a little piece in the paper this past week? Immigrants from Iran. The man was very abusive to his wife and to his children, had gone to court and the judge had sentenced him to a very lenient term because the judge was taking into consideration the culture from which he came. The case was appealed and upon the appeal, the appeal judge lengthened his prison term, had him re-arrested because he said, doesn't matter what your culture considers normal, in this culture, this is wrong behavior and we're going to punish you for it. So let's turn the picture around a little bit. Let's suppose that you're born with a tendency to have anger tantrums. Some of you have children. No? That have thrown anger tantrums. Do you tolerate it as normal? What if you're a grown up and you have so much murder in your heart that you want to kill the next person you meet? Or let's suppose that you're born a kleptomaniac, you have a desire to steal shiny things like the crows do. What about it? What happens if you give into that impulse? I can tell you what's gonna happen. Somebody's gonna arrest you, put you in jail because if you can't control yourself, society has to control you for the protection of the rest of the world, isn't that true? So brokenness is no excuse for sinful behavior. Yes, people are born with certain tendencies towards certain kind of behaviors. We all are, but as we'll see in a moment, we all need Jesus to put that to death so that we can live God's way. Brokenness is no justification for sin and we need to understand that, well, here's why that is so important because the movement as we are describing it, what they hold up is the awful horror of I have same-sex attractions and now you want me to go through life without having sex. You hear this argument all the time. Well, the reality is that there's lots of people that go through life biblically speaking without sex. Difficult, though, that may be. If that is what God ordains, then we submit ourselves to God's authority because at the end of the day, God is going to judge us by whether we have been faithful to Him, yes or no. And if that sounds restrictive and narrow, then we need to understand that God is restrictive and narrow only out of love because the failure to abide by what He has for us will utterly lead to disaster both in time and in eternity. All right, one more point and that's of course the important one that we need to get to and that is this. We need to point people to Jesus because here is the scripture passage that more than any other in scripture puts to death the lie that people's sexual identity cannot change. Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanders nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Notice again two things. The first is all sins are equally serious. Well, let me finish the passage and that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. Notice two things, first of all, all sins are equal before God. Notice who God calls wicked, the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, homosexual offenders. If you read the literature on this then you will find a lot of controversy about what these two terms mean. But good biblical scholarship agrees that this is an accurate translation, male prostitutes, homosexual offenders. The sexual sins list is at the head of the list as it is so often, both because it has so much power generationally and because it does so much damage. But it doesn't stop there. The passage goes on, nor thieves nor the greedy, drunkards, slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Paul, as you know, loves lists. And you know why he loves lists? I think it is because he knows the human heart and he knows our tendency is to call certain things sins that we see in other people's lives but gladly ignore the things in our own lives that God also calls sin. And so he always rattles off the list and why does he rattle off the list? Because he wants to make sure that we understand sin is sin. So notice again that if we do not walk in repentance before God, seek his grace and his help to abandon any of these sins, we will not see the kingdom of God. And I don't care how many churches or bishops or friends you get to say that it's okay, it's God who makes the call. None of this, says the book of Revelation, is going to get into the holy city because God will not share himself with unrepentant sin. Let's be clear about that. And never compromise because that is the heart of deception. But there's a second thing to notice, obviously, and that is this, Jesus is bigger than it all. Or as Valerie loves to say around here, is there is nothing bigger than Jesus. And I love this verse, that is what some of you are. But you are washed, you are sanctified, you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. You know what that means? That means it doesn't matter what you've been into or what has driven you into it, when you get on your knees before Jesus and you confess it, then the Bible says you are, first of all, you are washed. Then the Bible says you are justified. You know what that means? It's like God doesn't see anything that you've done or anything that you are that is crooked. In Christ, you are righteous before God, as holy as you're ever gonna be. And then he says you are sanctified. That means set apart. The Holy Spirit comes along, applies the saving work of Jesus to your life, and he changes you from the inside out, and he will present you one day before God without any wrinkle or blemish or spot. That's the gospel that we need to preach, and that is the hope that we need to give to the nations of the world. That is who God is. [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:41:50.940; remove through 00:41:57.000] [audience applauding] [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:41:57.000; resume after this marked segment]