Finding Your Way in a Sexually Confused Culture

I have to admit I am not the most enjoyable person to go hiking with…at least not on the way up. My wife, Bonnie, enjoys hiking up through the forest and I…. well, I really enjoy Bonnie. Sometimes, we will take our boys and head up into the woods for a hike, but the whole time I am overly aware that we might be in a bear's living room. I am constantly scanning through the forest, trying to be watchful and protective of my family. There’s a part of this that is noble, but I'll admit that there’s another part that is just plain anxiety.

What’s interesting is once we get to the top and start to head back down, after taking in the sights, I am a lot easier to deal with. Once I start to see key landmarks that I saw on the way up I start to have a more relaxed demeanour. This is because I know we’ve been here before and am familiar with the landscape.

There is no question that the landscape of our culture when it comes to sexuality and identity is disorienting and confusing. Who would’ve thought it would be offensive to ask, “What is a woman?” Or that an idea such as “men can have periods” would be celebrated as “brilliant progressive thought”? Yet, here we are. It can be easy in the moments when we are confronted with these blatantly illogical and unscientific claims to feel overwhelmed and filled with anxiety thinking, “We’ve never been here before!”.

However, truth be told, as the church we have been here before. Time and time again throughout history. It's evident that throughout the Biblical narrative the people of God have faced a system of ideas around sexuality and identity that were in bold-face opposition to God’s design. 

Sure, the lies have led to different expressions, but they are all built around the same deceptions. Whether it is the drag queen shows on evening television or the brothels and bath houses of ancient Pompeii, the same deceptive temptation put forth by Satan to Adam & Eve in the garden remains, “you will be like God, knowing good & evil”. Throughout history, humanity has repeatedly tries to become the definer of what is right and what is wrong. 

Paul speaks of it in Romans 1 when he says that humanity trades “…the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”  All of the perversion and immorality we are seeing in our day comes back to humanity choosing to be the ones who decide what is good and what is evil for themselves. 

Here is where some good news comes in: it was in a similarly immoral, idolatrous and sexually-broken culture that Jesus decided to plant His church. The Apostles and Jesus-followers pioneered a counter-cultural movement that called people out of the broken sinful system of this world into the righteousness, peace and joy of God’s kingdom. 

The key point to remember is that it was counter-cultural, not sub-cultural. When something is subcultural it will still move with the rest of the overarching culture when it shifts. The movement of the Church was built on the reality of who Jesus is in His life, death and resurrection and therefore called people out of the Roman way or the Greek way to become The Way.

The message of the early church was never “love is love” or “live your truth”. It was a message of repentance from dead works and a new life in Jesus. (Hebrews 9:14). 

Whether it was heterosexual, homosexual, or transgendered sin the message was the same: if you come to Jesus in repentance and faith, you are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). It is vitally important that we don’t abandon this truth in this time we are in. If we drift from this reality we surrender the high ground we have in Jesus and become caught up in the same flood of perversion that this world is in. 

I understand that historically we haven’t always done this well. At times there have been movements that have taken an angry, hard-hearted approach towards people who are still made in God's image, even if they are participating in behaviour that corrupts or damages that image within them. 

That being said, just because truth has been abused in the past doesn’t mean we abandon it. Just because there has been bad teaching in church history doesn’t mean we stop teaching. Rather, we must start teaching the truth with the right heart and approach. Just because people have not shown the patience and gracious heart of Jesus in the past doesn’t mean we forsake truth and God's moral design. We must be diligent to carry both realities because this is the way of Jesus.

There is a pressure within culture today to be affirming of all sorts of sexually broken behaviour. We must realize that the context in which the term “affirmation” is being used is not in the vocabulary of Jesus nor His lifestyle and pattern. Contrary to what you may have thought in your life, Jesus didn’t affirm our sin in order to love us. 

Jesus took our sins on himself and faced judgment and a brutal death in order to allow His love to move toward us. Paul unpacks this beautiful truth in Romans 3 where he shows how God passed over our former sins, putting them onto Jesus for us to become justified before Him. This brings in the qualities of God's omniscience and his unbound existence outside of time that can be difficult for the human mind to understand, but this is the good news.

Jesus didn’t affirm our brokenness to make us whole. He stepped into our brokenness with patience and restraint, taking upon Himself our sinful brokenness, and then called us to a new way of living.

We see historically that as the church held to this truth, even though imperfectly, God moved by His Spirit, rescuing the lost and broken and bringing them into His family. It was in this community, built around the finished work of Jesus that people became whole. I believe with all my heart that if we do what they did, we will see what they saw. It will require courage to bravely speak and live the unpopular truth, but it will be the means by which God by His Spirit heals our land. (2 Chronicles 7:14) 

We must not forsake love, patience and kindness, but neither can we forsake the truth; it's the high ground of healing.