Rosaria Butterfield's Testimony

how do I tell you about my conversion to Christ without making it sound like an alien abduction or a train wreck the truth be told it felt a little of both the language normally used to describe this odd miracle simply does not work for me I did not read one of those tacky self-help books with a thin coating of Christian themes examine my life against the tenets of the Bible you know the way one might hold up one car insurance policy against all others and cleanly and logically make a decision for Christ while I did make choices along the path of this journey they never felt logical risk-free or even sane neither did I feel like some victim of an emotional earthquake and collapse gracefully into the arms of my Savior you know like some holy and sanctified Scarlett O'Hara not my style having been claimed by Christ's irresistible Grace heretical as it might seem Christ and Christianity seemed imminently resistible my Christian life unfolded as I was just living my life my normal life in the normal course of my life questions emerged that simply exceeded my secular feminist worldview and those questions sat dormant until I met a most unlikely friend a Christian pastor had this Christian pastor not both shared but also lived out the gospel as my neighbor and my friend for years and years over and over again not in some used car salesman way but in an organic spontaneous and compassionate way those questions might still be lodged in the crevices of my mind and I might at least not as yet have met the most unlikely of friends Jesus Christ himself I had a normal childhood somehow when I'm going to talk to a bunch of counselor about homosexuality I just have to start there nothing in the backstory I was raised in the Catholic faith I'm named after the Rosary right it's a great name if you're an our Presbyterian pastor's wife right it's a think of it like an icebreaker and I attended predominantly liberal Catholic schools my liberal Catholic all-girl high school discipled me in the life skills that I use today I learned there to read deeply and well to diagram a sentence before I even dared to interpret it and to look out for the unloved and the unnatural adolescence in college I met my first boyfriend and it was a very heady experience and at the same time an undercurrent of longing inserted itself into my intense friendships with women and I just didn't make much of this at first from the age of 22 until 28 I continued to date men and at the same time experience a sense of longing and connection that just toppled over the edges for my women friends it actually took me almost a decade of this for me to realize that I actually kept falling in love with women this repetitious sensibility rooted and grew I simply preferred the company of women and then finally in my late twenties enhanced in part by feminist philosophy and LGBT political advocacy my homosocial preference morphed into homosexuality that shift was subtle not startling my lesbian identity and my love for my LGBT community developed and sync with my lesbian sexual practice and life finally came together for me and made sense once I met my first lesbian lover I was hooked I studied Freud I cheered that the DSM had long since removed homosexuality from its list of disorders thus rendering homosexuality in the eyes of the world and the Academy normal with no prohibitions or constraints by the time I had graduated from Ohio State with my PhD in English literature and critical theory I left the Buckeye State with my first lesbian partner we moved to New York for me to begin a tenure-track position in the English department at Syracuse University my life is a lesbian seemed normal I considered it an enlightened chosen path lesbian sexuality seemed like a cleaner and a more moral sexual practice always preferring symmetry to a symmetry I was sure I had found my real self what happened to my Catholic training I believed now that it was anti intellectual and superstitious the name Jesus which had rolled off my tongue and a little girl's prayer and then rolled off my back in college now made me recoil in anger as a professor of English and women's studies I tired of students who believed that knowing Jesus meant knowing little else Christian seemed like bad readers to me ironic given I thought that the Bible they believed the Bible was the true truth Christian's used the Bible in the way that Marxists call vulgar to end the conversation rather than to deepen it but the most frustrating thing to me about Christians was that they simply would not leave consenting adults alone I cared about morality and justice and compassion as a 19th century scholar fervent for the worldviews of Freud Hegel Marx and Darwin I strove to stand with the disempowered and my life at this time was happy and meaningful and full my next bein partner and I shared many vital interests AIDS activism children's health and literacy golden retriever rescue our Unitarian Universalist Church just to name a few it was hard to argue that she and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers my friends and I simply never had a gay agenda and when Christians accuse me of this I would say that my gay agenda involved really scary things like feeding the poor housing the homeless and teaching reading to the illiterate the LGBT community values hospitality and applies it with skill and sacrifice and integrity and indeed I honed the hospitality gifts that I use today as a pastor's wife in my queer community after my tenure book was written I began writing another book because I'm compulsive in that way and this one was on the religious right and their politics of hatred against people like me to do this I began reading the Bible while looking out for some Bible scholar to help me wade through this complex book I took note that the Bible was an engaging literary display of almost every genre and chope and type it had edgy poetry deep and complex philosophy and compelling narrative stories it also embodied a worldview that I hated sin repentance sodom and gomorrah I thought that was absurd at this time the Promise Keepers came to town it's you who's laughing they parked their little circus at the University and I was on this war against stupid you know and so I wrote an article I published it in the local newspaper it was 1997 the article generated many rejoinders so many that I kept a Xerox box remember those days on each side of my desk one for hate mail and one for fan mail I could still do that today only it all comes on email one letter that I received simply defiled my filing system it was from Ken Smith the pastor of the syracuse reformed Presbyterian Church it was a kind and enquiring letter Ken did not art did not argue with my article rather he gently invited me to examine the presuppositions that undergirded it in his letter he shared his love for the Bible his concern that college students were not reading the Bible as part of our literature curriculum and he described Jesus as someone who entered into history not someone who emerged from it I thought that was insane I believed that people proceed from history and are shaped for good or for ill by the culture that molds them but I didn't know what to do with his article so I threw it away I mean in the recycling bin of course don't think I'm a bad person what do you think of me and later that night I found myself on my hands and knees fishing it out of the department's recycling bin and putting it back on my desk where it stared at me for a week confronting me with the world view divided that demanded a response especially if I was going to write a book on this subject you see as a postmodern intellectual I operated from a historical materialist worldview but Christianity is a supernatural one and if I was going to understand how this book the Bible got so many people off track and how this man Jesus persuaded so many people to follow him Ken's letter showed me that I needed to understand Christianity as a supernatural idea at this point in my life the category of the supernatural was simply reserved for Stephen King novels and he was a big donor to the English department at Syracuse so we were taught never to bite the hand that feeds us and where you can tuck one of those juicy ones into your 19th century curriculum why you must do it at this time I was also deeply suspicious of both the motives and the worldview that Christians espoused oh I had seen plenty of Bible verses on placards at gay pride marches that Christians who protested against me and mocked me at gay pride day were happy that I and everyone I loved was going to hell is as clear as the sky is blue but you see Ken's letter did not mock it actually engaged and from his letter can really seem to me to be palpably different from those Christians who hid behind placards at Gay Pride Day and so when he invited me to dinner at his house to discuss these matters more fully I accepted my motives at the time were perfectly clear surely this would be good for my research but something else actually happened Ken and his wife Flo and I became friends they entered my world they met my friends we did book exchanges we talked openly about sexuality and politics and they did not act as if such conversations were polluting them they did not treat me like a blank slate and when we ate together ken prayed in a way that I had never heard before his prayers were intimate and vulnerable he repented of his sin in front of me he thanked God for all things Ken's God was holy and firm yet full of mercy and at my first meal at their home Canon Floy omitted two important steps in the rulebook of how Christians should deal with a heathen like me you know everybody knows the rulebook I knew the rulebook and I wondered if I was chopped liver you know number one they did not share the gospel with me imagine that they took the risk that I was going to get back in my little truck and drive a mile home and I wasn't going to get hit by a train and die they took that risk people and number two they did not invite me to church and because of these omissions to the Christian rulebook as I had come to understand it I felt that when Ken extended his hand to me and friendship it was safe for me to close mine in his you see I wasn't Ken's project I was Ken's neighbor this was not friendship evangelism this was friendship that letter that Ken wrote to me initiated two years of bringing the church to me from Kenan Floyd's dining room table I started meeting with Kenan Floy regularly reading the Bible in earnest with pen and hand and notebook and lap at this time I met a man at the Smith's house who had a long history in sexual sin but who had become a follower of this Godman Jesus and he encouraged me to dig deeply into the Bible you know I was not raised in an evangelical tuition and so I really just did not know how to read the Bible I didn't know that you're supposed to just open it up and put your finger down and play roulette with the vs. and and find a verse and make it a mantra I mean I just I was ignorance I was ignorant so I actually started to read the Bible the way I was trained to read a book that's what I did right out like a book crazy examining along with reading it many times through examining its textual Authority its authorship its canonicity and its internal hermeneutics I can't emphasize enough how important this is research professors read about five hours a day hundreds of pages it's just part of what research professors do and you know the Lord used that I was a heathen reading the Bible but that's a lot of time to spend with the Bible I read the way a glutton devours and slowly in overtime the Bible started to take on a life and a meaning that startled me some of my well-worn paradigms no longer stuck and I had to at least ponder the hermeneutical claim that this book was different from all the others because it was inspired by a holy God and inherently true and trustworthy and this led me to go through the presuppositional truth claims you know Marxists are presuppositionalist presuppositionalist stew so I had a bit of a paradigm for this and I went through the presuppositional truth claims just to check the math of the meaning here and the logic claims go like this number one if this book was written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit then its admonitions about sin were not what I had thought them to be applied cultural phobia indeed prior to reading the Bible for myself I believe that that is culturally what the category of sin was applied cultural phobia the way a culture applies its phobia and fear and attaches it to language categories in order to keep certain people of war apart from the center of the culture and on the margins and allow the elevation of others but if God is good then his goodness is unrestrained by time and it anticipates and guards against the ill treatment of people and I noticed something about reading the Bible that I never noticed that a gay pride march with the placards I noticed that as I read the Bible that its admonitions about sin we're almost always offered by offers of grace and this struck me as odd you mean the God of the Bible deals differently with people when people deal differently with him that was perplexing to me and the number two if God is the creator of all things and if the Bible has his seal of truth and power well then the Bible actually had the right to interrogate me in my life and my culture and not the other way around you see even as a postmodern reader I understood the idea that authority can depend only on that which is higher than itself I was a professor after all if your paper was due on Thursday and you gave it to me the following Monday it was not going to go well for you who is higher than God I wondered well my friends knew I was reading the Bible first the Dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and with it any prohibitions about sexuality and immorality but I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament the ceremonial law the judicial law and the moral law and it seemed to me that you actually could not dispense with the entire Old Testament without violating a rule about canonicity know creating canons within canons and in fact I had just gone over this rule in my graduate seminar in queer theory because you know what some rules about hermeneutics are somewhat Universal and so it really made me wonder if the chapel Dean ought not sit in my graduate class in queer theory so he could get his hermeneutics figure it out I don't know it's just a question the chapel Dean's position is what we call a hermeneutic of convenience where you conform the text to fit your experience and not a hermeneutic of integrity where the text gets a chance to fulfill its mission even a reader-response critics knows that each text has a kind of internal mission and that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or Frankenstein each text has an internal mission and everybody knows that the internal mission of the Bible is to transform the nature of humanity that is why even unbelievers know it's a dangerous text everybody knows that it's not even an open secret and so I was truly puzzled that the chapel Dean seemed to have such little kind of academic understanding of the book that he had studied longer than I but the next thing that happened was more impactful for me because it was a dear friend next at a dinner gathering that my partner and I were hosting my transgendered friends I'll call her Jill cornered me in the kitchen she put her large hand over mine and she said Rosario this Bible reading is changing you I felt exposed she was right and she always was she was one of my wisest and dearest friends but what if it's true I asked what if Jesus is a real and risen Lord what if we are all in trouble you know I think maybe sometimes people don't know that's what gay rights activists talk about in the kitchen because they do because everybody does because we have souls that will last forever Jill sat down and exhale deeply her eyes looked wise they always did and she said Rosario I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years I prayed that God would heal me but he didn't if you want I will pray for you well this encounter gave me a kind of secret tacit permission to keep reading the Bible I mean after all my dear friends I had also read it cover-to-cover many times and had routed around in its deep crevices for purpose and help but the bomb she dropped also enraged me who is this Jesus who heals some but not others no peace and social justice activist wants some unequal opportunity God and at the same time something deep inside me recoiled at the word heal I did not need healing I believe that gay is good and even the Bible didn't say I needed healing the Bible said I needed to repent of sin quite frankly I didn't like either of these terms so I rejected both the idea that I needed healing and the idea that I needed saving from my sin and the next day when I returned home from work I found two large milk crates spilling over with theological books Jill's books she was giving them to me in Calvin's Institute's and Jill's handwriting was a warning watch Romans 1 [Applause] let's open up to Romans 1 do you think it's interesting that Ken Smith didn't hit me over the head with Romans 1 but notes in a margin from a friend so Romans 1 21 to 27 for even though they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonoured among them for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed for ever amen and for this reason God gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural I found the verb clauses and their order here to be particularly arresting did not honor God did not give thanks engaged in futile speculations became fools exchanged the incorruptible for the corruptible then God gives us over to our lusts and when we look at the world through our lusts we dishonor our bodies and we worship the world these verses seem to provide a haunting literary echo to Genesis 3 where Eve's desire to live independently of God's authority made perfect sense to me if I were Eve I would have done the same thing and at the same time the seemingly innocent sin intriguingly attributed to Adam because of headship served as the leverage for the whole world to come tumbling down fierce and fast bloody and brilliant the two Biblical frames now one in Genesis and one in Romans stood out as bookends of my life but not just my life that's the rub if the Bible is as its internal testimony purports an eternal frame relevant for and responding to the needs of all of humanity then Genesis 3 in Romans 1 stood out as the table of contents of what ails the world indeed Romans 1 does not end by highlighting homosexuality as a discrete and separate matter in the way that we discuss it today instead this passage finds its crescendo in how one sin homosexuality in this case seems to morph into other sins and finds its impetus in original sin so read on with me please being filled with all unrighteousness wickedness greed evil full of envy murder strife deceit malice they are gossips slanderers haters of god insolent arrogant boastful inventors of evil disobedient to parents without understanding untrustworthy unloving unmerciful and although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death they not only do the same but also give hearty approval to those who practice them that last line grabbed me by the throat give hearty approval to those who practice them it told me that if we cannot receive a blessing from God we will demand it from men as the faculty advisor to many LGBT groups on campus this got my attention but I also took note of the theological diagnosis homosexuality in the Bible is that not the endpoint of the problem for God or for the world homosexuality is not the unpardonable sin but it is presented here as one step in the journey away from God's protection and blessing homosexuality then seems consequential not causal indeed according to Romans 1 homosexuality from God's point of view is an identity rooted ethical outworking of this original sin therefore it seemed solidly biblical to say indeed we are born this way because truth be told we are all born distorted by original sin in one way or another but by failing to rigorously relinquish my identity to God's story and failing to understand that the fall rendered rendered even my deepest and most primal feelings untrustworthy and untrue I had actually added to my ledger of original sin by creating for myself a category of personhood that God could did not you see God has one category of personhood we are male and female image bearers of a holy God and we have souls that will last forever I had taught studied read and lived a very different notion of homosexuality and for the first time in my life I wondered if I was wrong this stopped me in my tracks somehow it was easier to hate the Bible but keep reading it when it just squared off against me but now that it was getting under my skin it became a foe of a different and a more menacing kind and I so I did the only responsible thing why I tried to toss the Bible and its teachings in the trash my life was on the line I really tried but you see Ken at this point had become my friend and he encouraged me to keep reading and only because I trusted him did I do that as I read and reread the Bible I kept catching my wings in its daily embrace I was fighting the idea that the Bible is inspired and inerrant that is that its meaning and purpose has a holy and supernatural authority that has protected it over the years of its canonicity and that it is the repository of truth how could a smart cookie like me embrace such things I didn't even believe in truth I was a postmodernist I believed in truth claims I believed that the reader constructed the text that a texts meaning found its power only in the readers interpretation of it without the reader a book is just paper and glue I told my students over and over again how dare this one book lay claim to a birthright and progeny totally different to all the others that this book was supernatural was becoming more and more evident to me and my hermeneutical bag of tricks had no system of containment for it as I was reading and discussing these things with Ken he pointed out to me that Jesus is them as the Word made flesh and that knowing Jesus demands embracing the Jesus of the Bible the whole Bible not the Jesus of my imagination the whole Bible even those places that took my life captive and after years and years of this having read the Bible through you know about seven times at this point something happened the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I it overflowed into my world and I fought against it with all my might and then one Sunday morning two years after I first met Kenan Floyd and two years after I thought I was reading the Bible for my research I left the bed that I shared with my lesbian lover and an hour later I sat in a pew at the Syracuse reformed Presbyterian Church I say this not to be lurid but to remind us that we simply never know the treacherous path that some people take to arrive in the pew that we share Lord's Day after Lord's Day conspicuous of my appearance I reminded myself that I came there to meet God not to fit in the first sermon that I heard Ken preach was intended for children ken started to talk about the narrow gate and the wide gate and immediately my mind started to drift away and I don't remember hearing much more of the sermon my mind was drifting to last year's gay pride march wide as it was with people like me I've never felt more uncomfortable in my life than I did the first day sitting in that church everybody looks so weird to me everybody dressed so bizarrely to me and I I longed to be with my people I missed my people and as my mind was wandering to last year's gay pride march I realized that those people make me feel safe and loved I longed to be with the people I valued his family but that did make me wonder why couldn't I pay attention to the sermon you know just a question why did my mind keep traveling to the wide path I kept going back to church to hear more sermons I've made friendships with people in the church by this time and I appreciated the way that they talked about the sermons throughout the week how the Word of God dwelt in them and how they referenced it in the details of their days you know English professors by training love cross-referencing we will do almost anything to hear anybody quote an original text you know just it just feels so good but you know I muddled over this in my mind cross-referencing the Bible with your life places you inside God's story it places you inside God's ontology is this safe is this deadly I sure know it would be deadly for me what are these people doing I pondered these matters ken was preaching through the Gospel of Matthew at the time with its bewildering cast of characters and problems unsuspecting folks separated unto the gospel seeds choked by the world feeding thousands with some poor and nameless kids bread and fish I always felt so sorry for that guy I mean I know he hates but still no and then Jesus is cutting questions who impetuous Peter do you still lack understanding well one Lord stay pastor Ken just stopped there turned his steel blue eyes on the congregation held us in this long pause I mean long pause like the kind that makes you wonder if he's having a heart attack right I mean he's old he stepped out in front of the pulpit left his notes and he said this congregation did Christ ever say this to you do you still lack understanding and this startled me because this was my question I knew there was something I wasn't getting and I'm a you know pretty sharp cookie I wasn't getting it and I realized that that question was for me do I still lack understanding and then I wondered who is speaking here that old man behind the pulpit or the god man before the foundations of the world there was something about the hermeneutic of preaching that completely disarmed me and sheathe be told it still does the image that crashed like waves in a raging sea of me and everyone I loved suffering in Hell vomited into my consciousness and gripped me in its teeth not because we called ourselves gay but because we are proud we want it to be autonomous we rejected the Bible's interpretive authority over our sexuality our sexual identity and our sexual practice it was our hearts and our minds first and our bodies and identities followed I got it I heard it finally and I counted the costs and I ran in the other direction because I still did not like the terms of this and you see this was my crucible and it is my crucible if the Bible is true I was dead and if the Bible is false you're staring at the biggest fool on earth but God's promises rolled in like another round of waves into my world and one lord's day ken was preaching on John 7:17 if anyone wills to do God's will he shall know concerning the doctrine you see this first exposed the quicksand in which my feets were stuck I was a thinker I was paid to read books and write about them and tell you what to think of them and I expected that in my life and that in all areas of my life understanding came before obedience not the other way around I wanted God to show me on my terms why homosexuality was a sin I wanted to be the judge not the one being judged perhaps I thought like even the guard and I wanted to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that I could become and replace God then I wondered had and I are already done this hadn't we all if my consciousness fell and Adam's sin as the Bible purports no wonder I couldn't think my way out of this quandary this wasn't a game of thinking and the matching of wits could my heart echo God's call for obedience that was the question could I will to do God's will just this once you see the stakes were so very high because they always are but this verse promised understanding after obedience and I wrestled with the question did I really want to understand homosexuality from God's point of view or did I just want to argue with him I pray that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood starting with my sexuality was too scary it was too impossible so I started with Jesus I prayed that God would be to reveal his son and me I prayed that I would be a vessel of Jesus and then I moved to gender and I don't know why but I had a driving somewhat oxymoronic desire to make biblical sense of my place in this world as a woman defined and covered by God and so I prayed that night that God would make me a godly woman and then I laughed out loud in my unbelief at the insanity of this prayer because it was really insane I prayed that God would give me the faith to repent of my sin at its root and what is the root of my sin you know I did not then and I don't now think that my sexual lust for women was actually the root of my sin you know according to the Bible homosexuality is a fruit of a much larger issue remember it's an ethical outworking of a state of mind and a practical outworking of original sin and so really I left my first night of prayer just simply pondering this could original sin be for real I mean I've been studying and teaching creation myths my whole life but like you're telling me this is true and could it really distort me like this he's my sexual desire for women a reflection of the real me which is what I had thought or a distortion of it through original sin it was just a question but how in the world is one repent of a sin that doesn't feel like a sin at all but rather a normal not bothering another soul kind of life how would I come to this place what is the root of the sin of sexual identity is that the sex or the identity or both I was a jumble of emotions but I continued to pray that the Lord would just help me to see my life from his point of view and the next morning when I looked in the mirror guess what I looked exactly the same but when I looked in the mirror of the Bible I wondered this am i lesbian am i an atheist am i the master of my own destiny am i exempt from blame because what I do in bed is self contained and does not affect anyone but my lover or has this all been a case of mistaken identity if Jesus could split the world asunder divide the soul and the spirit judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart could he make my true identity prevail Who am I who will God have me to be I still felt like a lesbian in my body in my heart that is I felt my real identity but what is my true identity you see the Bible makes clear that the real and the true have a troubled relationship this side of eternity for many people in the Bible their true identity and calling comes after only after a long struggle with God with wilderness with dreams and hopes and plans dashed and destroyed the Bible makes clear that my future and my calling will always echo an attribute of God and obedience constrains it mirrors suffering as every selection implies a sacrifice so what is bigger my lesbian identity or God's authority over me and his holy sovereignty over the world and who is this Jesus anyway did I know him did I still lack understanding could I trust him and then one ordinary day I came to Jesus there are no altar calls in a reformed Presbyterian Church so there's no no fanfare no manipulation you know the guy who's back of the head I stared at who got a haircut every six weeks he had no idea that the heavens had just moved mountains right behind him we were singing from psalm 119 line 56 this is mine because forever all thy precepts I preserve after I sing these words I check them in the Bible just to make sure the Psalter didn't have some wacky misprint in it and the Bible made things worse for me it used a helping verb yes that's right if Rosaria ever wrote an evangelistic treatise it would be how helping verbs in the Bible can bring you to Christ don't laugh these are important to me so the Bible used the helping verb and it noted the verse like this this has become mine and there was something about that helping verb that made something shift in me you see two weight bearing walls just collapsed at once that first wall came crashing down because I had actually just sung condemnation unto myself and I was actually in tune enough with the Holy Spirit to feel his convicting rebuke you see this Bible was not mine oh I had read it plenty of times but I had scorned it and cursed it and despised it and taught thousands of college students to do the same but I had been reading and rereading this book and that use of that helping verb here has and has become really troubled me 2 years of laborious reading embodies the helping verb has it shows process and journey pilgrimage and danger but I was not in Christ and therefore could not possibly keep these precepts God's law not in word or heart change or deed and here was the shattering of the second wall I had read the Bible many times through I saw for myself that it has a holy author I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of 66 books with a unified biblical revelation I heard for myself that the phrase this is mine came out of my mouth and congregational singing I was attesting to this one simple truth that the line of communication that got ordained for his people required this wrestling with Scripture and that I truly wanted to both hear God's voice breathed into my life and I wanted God to hear my prayers the fog burned away the whole Bible each jot and each tittle was my open highway to a holy God my hands let go of the wheel of self-invention I came to Jesus alone open handed and naked I had no dignity upon which to stand as an advocate for peace and social justice I had thought I was on the side of kindness integrity and care it was thus a crushing revelation to discover it it was Jesus I had been persecuting the whole time not just some historical figure named Jesus but my Jesus my prophet my priest my king my Savior my redeemer my friend that Jesus of course there's only one thing to do when you meet the Living God you must Rafal on your face and repents of your sins and I could only touch one sin at this point pride my life was filled with pride and so I repented of my pride the pride that led me to believe that I could invent my own rules for faith in life and sexual autonomy the pride that said that I was entitled to live separately from God the pride that led me to believe that self-worth was self invented repentance is bittersweet business repentance is not just some conversion exercise it is the posture of a Christian repentance is our daily fruit our hour washing our minute-by-minute wake up call our reminder of God's creation Jesus's blood and the Holy Spirit's comfort repentance is the only no shame solution to a renewed Christian conscience because it proves only the obvious that God was right all along conversion was a train wreck I did not want to lose everything that I had to gain Christ but I simply had to softly the voice of God saying a sanguine love song into the rubble of my world and I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death he could make right my world I drank from the means of grace that God provides Bible reading prayer psalm singing fellowship of the saints and then later church membership in the Lord's Supper I took respite in private peace and then Christian community God radically changes people from the heart and the proof of conversion is a heart changed by Jesus we do not look to ourselves to see if we measure up we do not use our personal feelings as proof of gospel life we do not look to ourselves because we don't measure up Jesus measures up for us and that's the point so what about homosexuality did I ever get some special telegram from the Holy Spirit as to why it's a sin did I ever feel that unnaturalness that Romans 1 outlines or as a friend put it to me once Rosaria when did they yuck factor about your homosexual sex finally hit you upside the head if he asked me those kinds of questions you end up in a book [Applause] I just don't get out much so I have to work with the material that comes my way well that's actually not what happened the sinfulness of my sexual sin unfolded for me in the authority of the Bible alone in the growing sweetness of my union with Christ and in the sanctification that this very slowly birds you see at a certain point in my life I knew that I had to turn the wheel over to God I was a little bit like an Alzheimer's Alzheimer's patients who in a flashing moment of mental lucidity signs over his rights to his able-minded caregiver in that same way a believer signs over his rights of interpretation to the God of the Bible I learned in that crucible that I was not to love or cherish anything that God calls sin even if my flesh craves it psalm 66:18 puts it this way if I cherished iniquity in my heart the Lord would not have listened and the verb to note is cherished when we cherish sin we are separated from a holy God when you defend your right to a particular sin you are cherishing it isaiah 59:1 and two declares this behold the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save or his ear dull that it cannot hear but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God when we cherish sin we build a wall between us and our maker we are deceived to believe that our sin is not our sin we call God a liar and we use our personal feelings as proof and all our personal feelings prove is that original sin and the deceptiveness of sin are inseparable as first John 1:10 puts it if we say we have not sinned we make him a liar and his word is not in us indeed homosexuality is a sin but so too I believe is homophobia and homophobia is the fear and loathing of people who identify as less being gay bisexual and transgendered and the wholesale writing off of their souls but that still leaves the question unanswered what is the sin of homosexuality the feeling the practice you see for me the root of my lesbianism was pride I did not want any man to have any authority over me or my body and that I came to learn is a sin for others the root may be lust or sexual addiction and some sins are harder to battle than others for God when we call sin sin and repent of it we honor God's Authority getting to a posture of repentance though is often its own battle as the flesh cries out for the forbidden object while the heart and mind owned by Jesus begged for deliverance and you know what people Christ is in us and he is for us in this battle because repentance is actually the threshold to God now for those in this room who struggle with homosexual desires this is a hard and a heavy cross to bear and I get it and I also know that if you're in Christ Jesus will carry the heavier part of this burden crosses are not curses please though to the Christians who do not struggle with gay or lesbian temptations do not add unbearable weight to this burden by thinking that the sin of homosexual practice is different from all the other sins in the world or that its solution is heterosexuality the solution to all sin is Christ's atoning blood [Applause] in Christ we are new creatures in Christ we have a new will heart and affections for God's Word in his will we are redeemed men and women who have been buried with Christ through baptism into death and we are no longer slaves to the sin that once defined us although likely it still knows our names and addresses much of my struggle with the indwelling sin of homosexuality was in really figuring out its expanse and in deciding whether I was going to agree with God's vocabulary and God's dictionary or argue instead from my own was my lesbian desire a reflection of Who I am or a distortion of Who I am was original sin for real if my lesbian feelings never went away did that mean that God did not hear my prayer or love me is the covenant of grace a bad deal for people who have gay or lesbian desires this was not an easier a linear process at a certain point in my journey I realized that the promises of sexual fulfillment on my own terms were actually the antithesis of what I had once fervently believed instead of Liberty my sexual sin was enslavement and then one day my lesbian desires and sensibilities became for me a dead and I saw it starkly seeing my sexual sin from God's point of view and I'm talking now about all of my sexual sin heterosexual and homosexual it was a little bit like what I imagine waking up in my own vomit would be like today I stand in a long line of godly women that would be the Mary Magdalene line the gospel came with grace but it demanded irreconcilable war and somewhere on this bloody battlefield my fledgling desire to become a godly woman covered by God hedged in by his word and will bled in to another one to become if the Lord willed the godly wife of a godly husband and then I noticed it union with the risen Christ meant that everything else was nailed to the cross I couldn't get my former life back if I wanted it at first I felt like a vampire you know looking in the mirror and there's nothing that comes back it was terrifying I also felt a little like I imagine an amputee feels but when I peered deep into the abyss of this terror I found only one thing peace peace and with peace I discovered that the gospel is always ahead of you home is always forward so what does a person like me do with her past the last I checked I have not been lobotomized I've not forgotten the flowing contours of my life body memories know my name details intrude into my world unpredictably like when I'm home schooling my children going over the order of operations at home school math or even needing the communion bread that I make every week I take each ancient token to the cross for prayer for more repentance and for Thanksgiving that God has simply always right about matters of sin and grace and my personal feelings don't arbitrate that I think about what it means to live within the story of the Bible and how repentance is a fruit of my new life in Christ and Paul's question in Romans 621 is when I asked myself almost daily what fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed the layers of my life in Christ always unfold in a double directional way forward and backward one step forward two steps back and I have come to understand that this is part of what it means to live on this side of the New Jerusalem it makes me long for my eternal home but bigger than this I have not forgotten the blood that Jesus surrendered this life where gospel faith paves the path of my yearning and my questions my doubts and my fears we're all aspects of my life even the afflictions trials and tragedies have meaning and purpose and grace Jesus gives us joy as the strongholds of sin are torn down when we live in the grace of obedience in Jesus suffering is redemptive and this includes the suffering that occurs when Christ gives us the faith to choose him over ourselves in Jesus joy in the Lord resides in Jesus we start to spread our new creatures wings in Jesus no matter what the sin of our past if we confess and repent of it calling sin what God calls sin a transgression against him an attack against his character and law we stand in the risen Christ hidden with God forever as daughters and sons of God wrapped in robes of righteousness even though we may struggle with many temptations and indwelling sin patterns over the course of this long journey we live as a Galatians 2:20 people a crucified people and when we do this we hear God's voice saying this to us this is my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased nothing affords me robes of righteousness it is Grace alone by faith alone but you know after the 2015 Supreme Court decision making gay marriage a constitutional right here is the question I am repeatedly asked why in the world that I have to give up my girlfriend for Christ didn't I just get the equation wrong you know over a decade ago why couldn't I have both I mean after all five unelected Supreme Court judges think that's okay Who am I to argue with that after all can't someone believe in Jesus and be gay well that's unpack this number one can someone struggle with homosexual desire and be a faithful believer and follower Christ well yes you can struggle with anything struggling the right way can someone unrelentingly embrace homosexual lust deny it's a sin allow it to root and flourish as either a personal identity I am gay or a sexual practice this is who I'm sleeping with and then add Jesus to this equation and call it Christian no way why because the God who made you and takes care of you sets the terms of what selfhood means submitting to the God who made me required a radically different understanding about the nature of man and the nature of sin according to the Bible we find our identity either an atom or Christ and that is why Romans 8:13 says if you are living according to the flesh you must die but if you are living by the spirit you are putting to death or mortifying the deeds of the flesh and you will live Puritan John Owen put it this way grace changes the nature of man but nothing can change the nature of sin nothing can change the nature of sin and that is why it must be mortified sin is not only an enemy because you know what enemies can and often are reconciled sin is enmity and enmity against God cannot be reconciled and it is for this reason that God calls us to die to self Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me you see the Bible offers a completely different definition of personhood than that reflected by our culture embedded in the recent Supreme Court decision and reflected by all of those plan parent videos so the question is who is right the world's wisdom or the Bible's I bet my life on the God of the Bible and the matchless name of Jesus and whom all things consist and we only do this by God's grace alone but sometimes the choice that we have to make feels like a kind of death because it is it's the death of an identity that I once loved and cherished so you know the depth of our sin always exceeds the merit of our confession we never confess deep enough big enough or long enough but the gospel is always and still for us it is for all of us who've been the needs of Christ it is for those of us who struggle with homosexual desires and for those of us who struggle with other matters God's grace for us in Christ is sufficient for all of our various struggles and sins but some might be wondering now if this is fair if the terms of this life of faith and because the gift of eternal life in Christ are fair after all aren't Christians who struggle with homosexual desires the big losers in this game of friendship and community and intimacy and connection I mean after all isn't there a cheap gospel for singles and a plentiful gospel for those who are married the terms of this covenant are important to think through they give us spiritual things and they give us practical things the terms of this covenant give us union with Christ's a dynamic friendship that is imminence Ephesians 1:4 from before the foundations of the world transient Romans 6:3 2:11 joining the believer to Christ's death and resurrection and the shaping of identity that he merges from this and applicate Ori living with the kind company of the indwelling Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit it is union with Christ that fuels our daily battle against the original sin that distorts us the actual sin that distracts us and the indwelling sin that manipulates us but make no mistake this is war this is spiritual war and in this war we learned that our identity cannot be rooted in something that God calls sin even if we love it and have known it as our earliest identity language identity can only be rooted in what God has done and what God is doing but in addition to all of the spiritual gifts given to the believer the believer is also promised a new family in the church please turn with me to mark 10:28 231 Peter is speaking to Jesus here and Peter began to say to him behold to him Jesus behold we have left everything and followed you and Jesus said truly I say to you there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms for my sake and for the Gospels sake but that he will receive a hundred times as much now in the present age houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms along with persecutions and in the age to come eternal life please note what Jesus is saying here about how to love our lesbian and gay bisexual and transgendered friends who respond to the gospel in faith and obedience or anyone else for that matter who must lose everything in order to gain the kingdoms promises Jesus says that he expects that we will lose partners and children and houses in the process but he expects that and Jesus says that your new brothers and sisters in Christ will be your family and you will receive one hundred fold from them what you put on the altar and obedience People of God are you listening are you perhaps part of the problem have you only been sharing half of the gospel are you willing to share the gospel and offer with it a house key are you ready to open your homes and your hearts to your brothers and sisters who have left a family in the LGBT community for the Gospels sake if not why not from whom will this blessing of a new family come where does this hundredfold come from if not from the church if you know that the gospel costs everything but you believe with every fiber in your body that it's worth it then God intends this blessing to come from you we all need more grace but you simply cannot bypass repentance to get to grace repentance is the threshold to God as Puritan Thomas Watson says repentance makes way for solid comfort so that those who sow in tears will reap in joy as Psalm 126 5 says in my journey I learned that gender and sexuality are neither social constructs as I had believed nor are they exclusively New Testament inventions holy God established them 6,000 years ago and before the world's foundations creating Adam and Eve male and female and giving them souls that will last forever and that simple truth I learned is the root of identity of humanity of personhood and of purpose and by God's grace even when I was a complete mess he gave me a new family in the church and that made all the difference thank you

Channel: BJU Seminary

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Id: Eykv-3hvFvI

Length: 69min 40sec (4180 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2019