After the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015 (Obergefell),
Christians began living in a Psalm 46 world.
We experience raging nations and
tottering kingdoms (Psalm 46:6) and
wait with longing for the healing voice
of God to melt this chaos. As evangelical
Christians, we are called to be
the hands, feet, and voice of Jesus. But
what can we say? What dare we say?
This is a personal reality for me.
We live now in the world I helped create.
Jesus Christ drew me to Himself
in 1999. I broke up with my partner
because I was convicted that living
as a lesbian was a sin and so put me
outside of the kingdom of God, but my
heart was a mess. I never called my
partner my “wife” because I and others
of my queer generation rejected all
things “heteronormative,” including
the binary distinctions between male
and female. We believed that lesbianism
was a cleaner and more moral path
than heterosexuality because it could
never result in unplanned pregnancy
and rarely ran the risk of an STD. It may
surprise some readers, but conversion
to Christ did not initially change my
attraction for other women.
“The Lord’s light
illumined my sin through the law and
illumined my hope through Jesus and
the gospel.”
What conversion did change immediately
was my mind. Indeed, I was not
converted out of homosexuality; I was
converted out of unbelief. Suddenly,
my mind was on fire for the Bible and
I could not read enough of it or enough
about it. During this time, I experienced
a small taste of what it means
when David declares in Psalm 27:1,
“The Lord is my light and my salvation;
” The Light that the
whom shall I fear?
gospel gave me was ruinous; it ruined
me for the life I loved. The Lord’s light
illumined my sin through the law and
illumined my hope through Jesus and
the gospel. The gospel destroyed me
before the Lord built me back up.
During this time, I joined the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian
Church, met weekly with my pastor’s wife for discipleship,
and developed real friendships with other believers
in my church. Through these friends and the discipling of
my pastor’s wife, I learned how to repent of sin in a holistic
way. I began to see that my desires for women were not a
reflection of my true identity in Christ, but rather a distortion
of my true identity resulting from Adam’s fall.
But if I was a true believer, why did my flesh crave what
God abhorred? One quotation from John Owen really helped.
The Puritan Owen said, “You cannot mortify a specific lust
that is troubling you unless you are seeking to obey the Lord
from the heart in all areas.” I realized that focusing exclusively
on my sin of identity—the kind of sin that denies my
vital role as God’s image bearer and collapses how I feel with
who I am—was not what God was calling me to do.
I realized that Christ bled as much for my sins of pride and
lying as for my lust. Over time, my union with Christ started
to grow. Union with Christ is that Holy Spirit–driven, eternal,
unbreakable, and irreplaceable bond that God plants in
our hearts at the moment of our conversion
(1 Corinthians 6:17 and
Romans 6:3–11). It thrives as we seek God’s grace to supply all of our needs. And then
I noticed it: union with Christ challenged
my identity as a lesbian. Bear
with me as I explain something that
should be helpful to anyone you know
struggling with these issues.
Psalm 73:22 expressed what it was
like for me to wake up to my sin in
this area of my life. When the veil of
deception lifts, suddenly you behold
what you could not see before: “I was
” I was a beast in the
so foolish and ignorant; I was like a
beast before You.
language of Psalm 73:22.
At that time, I was surrounded by
other female couples who had decade-long
monogamous relationships.
These were dear old friends with
whom I had shared vacations and holidays
and traditions. We were family,
as I understood it then. I knew them
and their households and children
well. I loved them and couldn’t imagine
life without them. The thought
that they would have to break up their
families to come to Christ seemed so
unfair. The safety and stability of their
households seemed to prove that some
people are just better off if left to what
the Bible calls sin.
I cried out to God to help me understand
how this could be—how could I
see my own appetites and identity as
something that degraded me and made
me a beast, and at the same time, see
others in the lesbian community in a
favorable light, beautiful in their family-like love? I asked God to let me come
face-to-face with His Word on this.
This prayer brought me to the gospels
and the disciples and the holy love
that they displayed for the Lord Jesus
Christ and for each other. This was real
love. This love didn’t cause others to
sin. This love so cherishes God and the
person you love that you sacrifice all
unholy desires that could separate your
loved one from the God who made her.
Sacrifice is a bloody word, and all of
this felt like a real death to the “me”
I once was. Could my friends who
identified as lesbian experience this
kind of love, too? It hit me hard: my
dearest friends would actually love
each other more if they were sisters in
Christ instead of—what they currently
were—girlfriend-lovers.
This made me call out to God to make
me a godly woman, because I realized
that I was taking for granted the privilege
of this new blood-bought life. My
new desire to be a godly woman bled
into a new desire to be a godly wife, to
become a helper in all aspects of life
to a godly man. And a few years later,
I met my husband, Kent Butterfield, a
pastor. We have been joyfully married
for 15 years. My role as Kent’s helper
and the mother of our four children is
my daily witness that we serve a God
who loves and transforms His people.
But this is a different world than the one I found
myself in back in 1999. Today, the worldview of sexual
orientation has moved from a nineteenth-century
pseudo-scientific invention to an idol, a civil
right. And the gospel is on a collision course with it.
According to the worldview of LGBT rights, sexual orientation
determines what it means to be human. We see
this worldview embedded in the Obergefell decision, where
sexual orientation was appended to the Fourteenth Amendment,
made analogous to race, and declared by five unelected
supreme court justices to be immutable.
“The United States in Obergefell found at last a name for
the gay soul—that name is neither monster, nor eunuch, nor
homosexual. That name is husband,” declared gay-identifying
journalist and social commentator Jonathan Rauch after the
court decision. This worldview began with Sigmund Freud in
the 1800s. It took hold because it appealed to the idea that
all people are entitled to sexual autonomy. In the words of
Michel Foucault, French historian of ideas who died of AIDS
in 1984, after Freud “the homosexual was a new species.”
This idea—that a gay soul or a person who experiences
unchosen same-sex attraction is a separate species—directly
conflicts with the Bible’s definition of personhood, found in
Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in His own image, in the
” Here we see that personhood
image of God He created him; male and female He created
them.
has three dimensions: it is God-created,
gender-differentiated for the purpose
of the covenant of marriage, and created
for eternity. But in the late 1800s,
human sexuality moved from a practice
(what a person does) to an identity
(who a person is).
And with this move, a new worldview
replaced what the Bible says it
means to be human. Indeed, sexual
orientation went from a pseudo-scientific
creation to immortal truth in
just one hundred years, wiping away
the biblical doctrines of sin, grace, creation,
and redemption.
Because I am married to a man now,
I have been told by advocates of LGBT
rights that I was never really a lesbian.
That I am—and was—simply a confused
bisexual. These criticisms are important
because they show that differences in
this area, like all the other big questions
in life, always come down to worldview
and our view of God’s Word.
I have shed tears over what I will
write next. If I was lesbian enough to
go to hell for my unrepentant sin, or if
I had been fornicator enough to be cast
into hell for heterosexual sin, then I
am still lesbian and fornicator enough
to share with you what it means for
me to submit my desires to Christ
each day so that, by his grace alone, I
can be obedient to Him. Each day I cry
out to Him for the further redemption
of both my body and soul, and by His
grace I grow in Christlikeness, as God
conforms me in the image of His Son,
doing a work that no human can do.
It’s the same for all of us.
You see, God never asked me about
my identity as a lesbian. God called
me into obedience, repentance, and
new life in Christ. His Word asked me
whether I am reflecting God’s created
order: either by fidelity in marriage or
chastity in singleness. Both are vital
reflections of God’s created order.
Each generation must defend the gospel of Jesus
Christ anew, as the truth of God’s Word is
attacked at different pressure points at different
times. The church has faced great battles in theology
over the centuries when people introduce unbiblical
categories and imprecise language emerges. Today’s attack
on God’s Word begins by attacking and rewriting what the
Bible says about sexuality.
The new threat is against the truth of Genesis 1:27. Being
born male and female has ethical responsibilities attached to
it. The origin (or ontology) of our essential humanity is found
in the biological sexes that God has given us. Our image-bearing
and eternal soul has a body with one of two sexes.
The sexual revolution of our day has made a strange distinction.
It defines sexual orientation as who you want to go
to bed with, and it defines gender identity as who you want to
go to bed as. It exalts these desires as proof of personhood.
As far as we know, some people in every generation have
struggled with unchosen homosexual desires. And the Bible
graciously explains that this is an impact of Adam’s original
sin on some of us. How original sin distorts us does not create
separate categories of humanity.
The good news of the gospel is that
Jesus Christ both forgives sins and bestows upon us the power to obey and follow Him.
Christians know that it takes grace to love what God
loves. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ both
forgives sins and bestows upon us the power to obey and
follow Him. The Christian doctrine of sin indicates that this
transformation is very hard, especially with intractable,
indwelling, sexual sin.
Christians today must live in the Jesus paradox—loving
unbelievers well enough that we take the risk of speaking
the truth. We must love the sinner and hate our own sin.
And we need to be good listeners to people who oppose us,
ready to share at all times, imparting grace with biblical fluency
to our neighbors and family members. As believers in
Jesus Christ and followers of His Word, we always need to
remember that His truth is eternal and unchanging, it can
be measured and known, and it must be reckoned with.
That combination of love, humility, and awareness of
our need for God’s grace enables us to share God’s message
in a way He can use to draw others—even people who identify
as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered—into His
kingdom.
Editor’s note: This article was first published in Answers magazine with the title “Unhindered Gospel: Sexual Orientation Is No Exception.”
outspoken lesbian activist until she received Christ in 1999. She is now a full-time mother and
pastor’s wife, and author of Openness Unhindered and Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely
Convert.
https://answersingenesis.org/family/homosexuality/journey-from-homosexual-lifestyle-to-christ/
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