Last week, the leaders of an influential church in San Francisco issued a letter to their congregation stating that, when receiving members into the church, they would “no longer discriminate based on sexual orientation and demand lifelong celibacy as a precondition for joining.” This means they would no longer hold the biblical position shared historically throughout the church that homosexuality is a matter for repentance (alongside many other aspects of our rebellion against God and our created nature). Their argument appears to lean heavily on their own understanding of what is good for people in their relationship to God. They write:
Our pastoral practice of demanding life-long “celibacy”, by which we meant that for the rest of your life you would not engage your sexual orientation in any way, was causing obvious harm and has not led to human flourishing… Imagine feeling this from your family or religious community: “If you stay, you must accept celibacy with no hope that you too might one day enjoy the fullness of intellectual, spiritual, emotional, psychological and physical companionship. If you pursue a lifelong partnership, you are rejected.” This is simply not working and people are being hurt.
I will confess, for myself and on behalf of God’s people (if I may), that we have not cared as we ought for the real sufferings of others. We censure those whose struggles seem foreign to us. We are blind to the damage done in our relationships by our hypocrisy. I have no right to condemn others for their sin, because I, too, am a sinner; knowing this has not stopped me from condemning others in my self-righteousness. Judging each other is the kind of thing sinners do, regularly. This is exactly why I need the grace of God that is found in Jesus Christ. I need the real forgiveness and transformation which are found in the Gospel. Every single one of us needs the exact same thing, to be rescued from ourselves by Jesus and refashioned into his image. Every one of us needs to repent and believe the Gospel.
Telling people to repent, to stop their specific rebellion as God has clearly defined it, is not the same thing as condemning them. Telling people to turn away from sexual sin to the living and true God is not the same thing as consigning them to a life of loneliness and misery, without hope of human flourishing. On the contrary, telling people to repent of sin, to realign their lives with God’s stated purpose, is the only way out of misery, the true path toward real human flourishing as God intends. Repentance means turning away from our self-generated vision of what is good for us, and turning toward God’s revealed purpose for our lives.
Apart from God’s revelation, we might not even know that we were in rebellion against God, let alone the actual specifics of what constitutes our rebellion. If we’re going to be saved from ourselves, if we’re going to turn away from sin to God, we need sin clearly defined for us. Homosexuality is not arbitrarily declared a sin—there is a reason why it is sinful. God clearly defines homosexuality as a distortion of his true intention for our sexuality, a distortion brought about by our sinful rebellion against God. In the creation of humanity, sexuality is intended to reflect the other-oriented love of the Trinity. When the Bible says that humanity was created in God’s image, the emphasis falls on the reality of two distinct sexes created for unity in their diversity. The other-ness is essential for the reflection of the image of God. The union of the two sexes in marriage is the basic relationship in society through which the image of God is reflected (and advanced through procreation). In marriage, someone who is a human person in one way is united to someone who is a human person in a fundamentally different way; a man gives himself entirely to the other (woman), not to the same (another man).
The very root of our problem as sinners is self-love, self-absorption, which goes straight against loving the other as we were created to do. In Romans 1, the ultimate result of this self-centered rebellion against God is utter self-absorption, the total inability to truly love the other, where even our most intimate sexual relationships are more like making love to a mirror image of ourselves than truly loving someone who is a person in a different way. Homosexuality is the extending of our self-love outward: my way of being a person, right there in front of me, loving me. (I don’t mean to express or condone hatred of those with homosexual desires or practices. Nor do I mean to suggest that homosexual relationships are absolutely void of any semblance or aspect of good relationships.)
Biblically, theologically, it makes sense that repenting of homosexuality would be severely difficult for self-absorbed people, for those who have bent their most intimate relationships around themselves so thoroughly, for those whose identities are deeply rooted in something that goes straight against their sexual nature as beings created in the image of the Triune God. It’s not hard to understand why there would be depression, addiction, and suicide. True repentance on any scale is impossible for those who disbelieve God’s love for them. The gravity of self-love (i.e., slavery to sin) is strong, and we cannot break free from it on our own. We are in desperate need of true love, and of becoming truly loving. Only in the love of the Triune God is true human flourishing found, which is freely available through the grace of Jesus Christ.
By his gracious love, overcoming your absolute and pervasive self-love, you can be in a relationship with him that brings about the complete renewal and reordering of your whole life in alignment with his good will. The only alternative to sinful self-centeredness is in turning to the one, true, living and Triune God. And if you’re doing that, you must turn away from sin; sin and God are mutually exclusive. Relationship with God, then, means pursuing holiness according to his revealed will. Homosexuality is one of the many aspects of our sinful self-centeredness, as God himself reveals it, that we must necessarily turn away from when we turn to him.
You should not view repentance as dashing your hopes for companionship and flourishing. You can only view it as such if you equate sin with flourishing, if you only allow for companionship according to your own definition. That’s like saying, “I will decide what is good for me, rather than trusting God in the matter.” But that’s the essence of our rebellion! True flourishing is not found in our autonomous rebellion against God, only in right relationship to him. We were made for profound companionship—for eternal communion—which, for sinners, only comes through repentance and faith.
For all Christians this means a massive, continual upheaval of everything in life, from the inside out. We love sin, and we hate God. The final result of salvation is a complete conversion; when we are like Jesus, we will love God and hate sin. That is not a natural process. It is not something we can manage on our own. We need to pray that God would make that change in our desires, that he would give us new hearts, that he would help us to live out of our new selves in Jesus Christ. We all need to pray, “God, I love myself too much, I love sin too much, and I cannot stop because I don’t really want to. My heart is broken, my desires are distorted, I love the wrong things, and I can’t fix that problem for myself. Please forgive me, and transform me into the likeness of your Son, who taught us to pray, ‘Your will be done.'”
The whole Christian life, then, is one of turning from sinful desires to Christlike ones, by God’s grace. Homosexuality is just one of those sinful desires. True repentance will mean trusting that God’s vision for your holy life (flourishing) is infinitely better than your autonomous plan. You can see from the Gospel that God is trustworthy—he gave his Son for you! So, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding… Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh, and refreshment to your bones” (Proverbs 3:5, 7-8).
