Description
THE UNTOUCHABLES SERMON SERIES
HOMOSEXUALITY
DECEMBER 13, 1998
ED YOUNG
I know that many of you have walked into today’s service with a myriad of mindsets regarding the topic. Some of you are secretly hoping that I will unleash holy hatred on the homosexual community. You kind of want me to abuse them, point them out and banish them to the uttermost, darkest and hellish areas of the supernatural. I know some of you are secretly thinking along those lines.
Others here, because of a gay friend or a family member, are sort of poised to pounce on any word that I say. You want to selectively listen, to take something out of context and to quickly conclude as you leave Fellowship Church that the God of the Bible, Christians and this church are homophobic, hard-hearted and intolerant. You want to do that. Others here are apathetic. You don’t really care that much about the issue. You want some information on it and are not really sure where you stand.
I know there are a percentage here who are involved in the homosexual lifestyle. I want you to know something from my heart. I know when you walked into the doors of this worship center that you knew what subject matter was on the plate, yet you showed up. I know it took a lot of courage and I really respect that. I want you to know something; in fact, I want every group here to know something. You are outrageously loved by the God of the universe. Isn’t that wonderful news? We are loved so much we can’t really comprehend it. In fact, we would blow a fuse if we could realize the depth and the breadth of the love that God has for us. However, part of love is hearing and articulating the truth. The Bible says to speak the truth in love. And the truth is not always pleasant, fun or an easy thing. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it challenges. Sometimes it confronts. So I want to confront you and challenge you, no matter what group you find yourself in, to take your prejudices and your presuppositions and put them aside. Back burner them right now. And I am going to ask you to open up your heart, your mind and your hands to God and to hear what He has to say about this issue which He talks about so frequently in His book.
So as we prepare to listen and to do business with God, let us pray together. God, right now, as we open Your book I ask that you would open our lives. I ask, Lord that you would deposit your truth in our lives and also I ask that because of this service, we will never, ever look at our lives, at walking with you, or relationships the same way as before. I thank you now for what is going to happen as a result of this time together. For Christ’s sake, Amen.
If you just mention the word homosexuality, people get tense. Look around right now. Sadly, what we know about homosexuality comes from slang terms or off-color jokes. Most of us don’t know the truth about it. I lovingly and firmly refuse to accept the fact that homosexuality falls in line with God’s model and God’s math of sex. God says it time and time again in His word. Sexual intercourse is for one woman and one man in the context of a mutually satisfying, lifelong commitment called marriage. In other words, homosexuality is a sin.
Seven times in the Bible it is called a sin, four in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament. I cannot accept the fact, biblically speaking, that homosexuality is a normal, status quo way to go. A lot of us here have trusted Christ. And when we have made this decision to trust Christ, we also trust Him relationally, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. And we trust His wisdom concerning sexuality. So I want us to ask and answer some popular questions about homosexuality. To do this we are going to use the same grid that we used last weekend when I began this easy series called THE UNTOUCHABLES. Last weekend we talked about racism, now homosexuality and we will wrap up next weekend with abortion. Easy preaching, easy teaching.
Let’s start with the first question. Why? Why would someone engage in homosexual activity? That is a very important question. In all of my research over the years of my ministry and over the last several weeks, I have pinpointed several major influences. Researchers cite these influences time and time again in books, articles and interviews. Here is why a lot of people choose the homosexual lifestyle.
The first influencer is environmental. It goes something like this. Let’s say that a young guy was born into a family that is out of balance and out of whack. There is a mismatch going on. Let’s just say for illustrative purposes that the mother takes the reins of the family team. Let’s just say that she becomes the domineering and controlling coach. She has got the whistle around her neck and she is all over this little boy. Dad is distant. Dad is over there in the bleachers. He is off the playing field. This little guy wants to exhibit his masculinity, he wants to see what being a man is all about but coach mom will not let him. She is on top of him, screaming at him, yelling at him and one day this little guy just yells for masculinity. He yells for affection. He turns to his father and say, “Dad, I want to love you. Dad, I want to know you. Dad, show me what it means to be a man.” But his cries fall on deaf ears because his mom is yelling and screaming and dominating him to such a degree that the dad can never hear him. You bring a little guy into a situation like this and you have vulnerability going on and you open the door for homosexuality. I read this past week that most gay men and women go back to the mismatch in the family dynamics that were destructive and led to their lifestyle choice. Environmental, that is a major influencer of homosexuality.
Now the next influencer that I want to talk about is the most popular, especially with the gay activists and the media spin-doctors. It is the genetic influencer. Homosexuals say, “I was born this way, let me live this way. I cannot change. Genetics, I was just born this way like blue eyes or brown eyes, left handed or right handed. I just have this gay gene.” Friends, there is no conclusive, medical evidence that supports this. Granted, there could be some genetic disposition going on in certain cases but there is no such thing as a genetic gene.
Dr. Geoffrey Satanover from MIT and Harvard says this. “What the majority of respected scientists now believe is that homosexuality is attributable to a combination of psychological, social and biological factors.” These researchers, especially Satanover, brings up basketball to illustrate the point of how ludicrous it is to say that there is a gay gene. Satanover says, “Well, what if you said there was a basketball gene. You won’t find one. You will have some predisposition toward height and muscularity and toward quickness and toward a vertical jump, but just because you have this predisposition does not mean that you are forced to become a basketball player. It is a choice.” Let’s say there was a gay gene. You aren’t forced to engage in the homosexual lifestyle. It is a choice. Let’s say you are predisposed to chronic headaches or PMS. Would that give you a license to engage in socially unacceptable behavior? Well, I just don’t have a choice.
What if I was predisposed to anger and alcoholism? What if I said to myself that I have just got to rage at everybody I see and I have got to drink a fifth a day? I don’t have a choice. I have just got to do it. Interwoven and given to human beings is the freedom of choice. Yet this is a very popular excuse. It is an excuse for the homosexual community to ease its guilt and remove responsibility. It sounds really good. And it sounds good for a lot of sinfulness. This condition, like racism, is not genetic, it is sinetic.
The third influencer that I want to hit is one that I would say is the most prominent as far as causing and leading someone into the gay lifestyle. It is the experiential influencer. Take what we talked about already. Take the other influencers. Then take a young man or a young woman testing the waters of puberty, testing their masculinity or femininity. Put into the mix an abusive same-sex parent. Put into the mix a trusted friend or relative. Put into the mix a homosexual act and then you have that yearning and burning desire for masculine or feminine affection. Then you have the desire for the person to leave the out of balance family dynamic and you have got someone whose sexuality is up for grabs. Read the reports. Talk to the people as I have. And they will tell you that this experiential influencer is the major cause. One study that I read said that 85% of gays say it was the early childhood experience that led them into the gay lifestyle.
Why do people engage in homosexual activity? I touched on three influencers. Now, let’s go a little deeper and answer another question. What activities do homosexuals engage in? What activities do they practice? You are not going to hear this from the gay activists or the media spin-doctors because they want us to believe that homosexuals live a monogamous, happy life that mirrors the lifestyle of the heterosexual community. But that is not true.
A Bellin-Wineburg study states that 2% of homosexuals would be called relatively monogamous. We are talking about 98% being promiscuous, and I mean promiscuous. Have you seen the side screens? It is estimated that 43% of gay men have sex with over 500 or more different partners, 75% with over 100 or more partners. Now the Bellin-Weinberg study was a study on human sexuality done by two people who were not Christ-followers. This is not biased stuff here. They found that 28% estimated over 1,000 partners. Oftentimes people will say that lesbians are not as prolific, but they found that 41% of lesbians admitted to having sex with 10 to 500 lifetime partners. So what we are talking about here is disturbing stuff.
The media will try to portray homosexuals as some guys or girls holding hands walking down Main Street in bright clothing and that’s it. But that is not really the case. Granted, there are some monogamous homosexuals. But at the most it is a little over 2%.
Right now I want to prepare you for something. We need to know what deviant behavior homosexuals are involved in. I am not going to tell you, but I am going to allow a physician to tell you. This physician has studied homosexual activity for the last 20 years. This video I showed about four years ago. It is extremely, extremely graphic but you need to know what goes on in actuality. This is Dr. Stanley Montief as he talks about some of the homosexual acts that are practiced.
“One hundred percent of homosexuals engage in fellatio which is either insertive or receptive oral sex. About 93% engage in rectal sex, which is anal intercourse. And, of course, the rectum was not built for intercourse and so when you carry out anal intercourse you manage to tear the rectum because the sphincters are expanded in many instances. It is not a healthy activity. And it is because you tear the rectum that there is such a high incidence of disease in these cases.
About 92% of the homosexuals engage in something called rimming. Rimming is simply licking in and around your partner’s anus. It involved actually placing your tongue into the anus. You couldn’t do this without some ingestion of feces. Then you have something called fisting. Fisting involved about 47% of homosexuals. It involved taking your fist and your arm and inserting it into a man’s rectum so that he would have sexual pleasure and you would have pleasure by inflicting this upon him.
Then 29% engaged in something called golden showers. What are golden showers? A man lays on the ground naked and other men stand around him and urinate on him. Then there is something called scat. About 17% of homosexuals engaged in that. That was actively eating human feces or rubbing feces on your skin or rolling around on the floor on feces which is called mud rolling.”
Disturbing activity, to say the least. And against the backdrop of what you just heard, I want to talk to you about the published activities and the propaganda and the agenda of gay activists. We need to know what they are doing and what demands they are trying to place on our society, our world, our government and even the local church.
Again, look to the side screens. The first demand is that the sex lives of homosexuals and heterosexuals are similar and conventional. Now I ask you, the acts described by Dr. Monteif, would you call those similar and conventional sexual acts? I don’t think so. A second demand is for homosexuals to be able to marry and adopt children and become established as families. I pose to you, Fellowship Church, how do you think it would be for little boys and little girls to grow up in homes that are practicing the things you have just heard. Yet they are trying to force this agenda in our public school system and they are trying to force hiring quotas even on local churches.
Let me hit one more of these demands. Homosexuals want to be awarded full minority status. I don’t think that there is a person here who wants to deny anybody his or her basic civil rights. But think about this. They are saying that they should be awarded full minority status due to sexual behavior. If that were the case, why don’t we have minority status for adulterers, sado-masochists, or rapists. It is ludicrous, deceiving, demanding. But we are talking about a well-organized and affluent political ship.
So that brings us to the third major question. What should our response be to all of this? What should we do? I want to speak first of all to those here who are involved in the homosexual lifestyle. Here is the great news. Three words. You can change. I will say it one more time. You can change. God can transform you, He can remake you, He can renew you. You can change.
The Bible says in I Corinthians 6:9-11 some powerful and life-changing words. It says, “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor the drunkards nor the slanderers nor the swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God…” I love this next line, “…And that is what some of you were.” The Apostle Paul was saying, you were idolaters, you were adulterers, you were thieves, you were slanderers, you were homosexuals. That’s right, the Corinthian Christians, that colossal group of moral foul-ups who made up this church, used to be all those things. They were, but, Paul continues, “You were washed and you were sanctified and you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God.” If it was just a genetic thing, no one could change. Yet, thousands of lesbians, thousands of gay men leave the lifestyle, turn to Christ, get washed and sanctified and justified. They marry and never get involved in the lifestyle again.
A friend of mine who I met a decade ago was named Victor. Victor was affluent, articulate, young and a major leader in the gay community. One day Victor got washed. One day Victor bowed the knee to Christ. One day he was sanctified and justified and he left the gay community. And I watched Victor bring dozens and dozens of his friends from the gay community to the church and I watched him introduce them to Christ and I watched them leave the lifestyle. One day, though, Victor told me some disturbing news. He told me that he had AIDS and shortly thereafter Victor died. I believe that Victor is watching us right now from heaven. I believe that Victor is saying to a lot of people involved in the homosexual lifestyle, to a lot of people who are tempted by it, you can change. It works.
Did you check out the songs that we did today, those sing-alongs? Those sing-alongs were written by a homosexual man, Dennis Jernigen. He came out of the homosexual and into a personal relationship with the living Lord. You can talk all day about self-help groups. You can talk all day about trying to stop the temptation. You can talk all day about trying to leave the lifestyle but the only thing that works is being washed, being sanctified and being justified. We are going to help you, homosexuals. We are here to love you and we are here to encourage you. And I want us to stand with fellow strugglers. I don’t care if you are a liar. I don’t care if you are a thief. I don’t care if you are a homosexual. I don’t care if you are an adulterer. I don’t care if you are a fornicator. I want to stand with you. I am not too concerned about what you are involved in. I want to stand with you, introduce you to Christ and show you what this lifestyle change can do in your life.
Remember, the Christian life is an event followed by a process. But homosexuals, hey, you need help. You need help. H stands for hope. True hope is found in knowing God. E stands for encouragement. You’ll find encouragement here with fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. L stands for love. Once the love of God assaults you and overtakes you, then and only then will you see life the way Christ wants you to see it. And P stands for prayer. It is going to take prayer. And I will not broadbrush it. Homosexuals, it will take more courage, more prayer, more endurance than you have ever had in your life. This is going to be the most difficult obstacle you have ever crossed, but with the help of God you can do it.
And let me tell you why it is so difficult. There is nothing like sexual sin. Sexual sin is a multi-level and multi-faceted activity. Whether you are involved in sex outside of marriage with the opposite sex, whether you are involved in adultery, or homosexuality, it is a multi-faceted thing. And only a multi-faceted God can help you change. Only He can do the work.
Also you are going to need a local body of believers. You are going to need the church. You are going to need people to come along side you and support you. But I am going to tell you something. You can do it. Think about Victor. Think about Dennis. That is what I say to the homosexuals here. You can change. We love you. You matter to God, but we love you enough to speak the truth and to tell you how to make the step.
Now let me say a word to the Fellowship Church. What should we do? Unleash holy hatred to the homosexual community? No, that is not what Jesus did. Should we be kind of apathetic? Should we take things out of context? What should we do? We need to do two things. We need to connect and challenge. We need to connect, to build relationships with people who are involved in the gay lifestyle, around the neighborhood, at the workout facility, within this church, within every realm of life. And we need to build relationships and connect with love. I am talking about an outrageous amount of love. Can you do that? God tells you to do it. God tells me to do it. We are not to worry about what people are involved in, just to connect and love. And then we have got to challenge. We have got to say, lovingly and firmly, I love you but here is what the Bible says. This is not an acceptable alternative to God’s sexual math or life. You can’t make it work. It doesn’t fit with God’s agenda. So we have got to build those bridges and then we have got to challenge and confront.
We are not supposed to trade insult for insult, to call names and go back and forth. Christ never did that. We are never to do that. But I will say this. Sometimes you will have to take some accusations. Sometimes you will have to take people spreading false rumors about you. Sometimes you will have to take that. That is what happens when you connect and challenge. But if you hold true in love and stand on this Word, God is going to take care of you and He will show you what to do.
So the information has been given about this untouchable subject. I don’t know about you, but as I said last weekend, part of walking with Christ is asking the tough questions and being ready for the raw answers, then processing the information and living it out. Live it out. Do what the Bible says. And God will be glorified and many, many people that you’ll see will change. They will change.