In today’s society, I assume most of us love or know someone who is part of the LGBT community. I believe this is the reason most Christians and pastors don’t want to teach on the subject. The sin has become personal for so many, and the lines of what’s right and wrong—of what truth is—have become blurred.
I have watched many of my Christian friends struggle with this conflict in their hearts. But if you call Jesus your Lord and Savior and you believe in the Bible as the Word of God, you have to believe it in its entirety. Even the parts that are confusing, even the parts we don’t understand and the parts we have questions about. There are times our hearts can break over some of God’s truths, but we have to believe in His sovereignty. We cannot ignore Scripture.
Romans 1:26-27 says: “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
God is love and God is truth. And when we’re confused and don’t understand, that’s when He tells us to lean not on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5) but on His perfect and infinite wisdom.
There are people in the LGBT community whom I love with my whole heart, and I will never stop loving them, but they have been blinded by the lies of the world to believe what they’re doing is OK. And the church is failing to provide them with truth.
I’ll never forget watching a television interview with a very well-known pastor who was asked about homosexuality. And in that moment, he decided not to proclaim truth in the world of darkness because he wanted to give an answer that was pleasing to his viewers. He said, “I don’t speak about homosexuality because Jesus doesn’t talk about it or define it.”
But Jesus does talk about it. He defines what marriage is in Matthew 19:4-6: “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?’”
Unfortunately, in past generations, too many Christians were full of truth and hardness, without grace.
In Randy Alcorn’s book “The Grace and Truth Paradox,” he reminds us that Jesus Christ is 100 percent grace and 100 percent truth. You can’t have one without the other. John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
My generation is filled with love and grace, but they don’t proclaim truth. We cannot neglect the truths in God’s Word, because we then neglect to tell lost people about sin, and they won’t know the greatest love story of all, the Gospel, that Jesus died on the cross for our sin.
If Christians and churches are not doing this, how will the next generation know what’s right and wrong? According to a Barna study, only 24 percent of churched Generation Z Christians, ages 13-18, believe that homosexuality is wrong. If we’re not careful, by the next generation no one will think it’s wrong because they won’t know what God’s Word says about it.
In today’s world, almost every television show and every movie promotes the LGBT agenda. Hollywood, our government, our schools, and now even many churches, try to define truth based on their sinful human opinion. Generation Z can’t find their truth in Hollywood; truth can only be found in God’s Word and through those who unashamedly proclaim it.
The LGBT community, which claims to be a community of acceptance, has become very aggressive to Christians who dare to disagree with them. They label us hateful. I personally received hundreds of hate comments after watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One of the acts in the parade was two girls going to prom together and kissing at the end. When my little girl asked me why there were two girls together, I turned the television off and later tweeted about the incident.
We have to take a bold stand against what Satan is using to destroy a generation. The world tells us we can’t have an opposing view and love someone at the same time, but they are wrong. Acts 4:33 talks about us speaking truth and God’s grace falling upon us. The same grace that fell on me when I asked Jesus to come in my life can fall on people in the LGBT community.
I’ve had many friends who through the years have come out as being gay. My love for them has never stopped. My text messages on their birthdays have not stopped. My random texts telling them I love them continue.
I see the sin of homosexuality the same as I see my own sin. I’ve never treated my gay friends differently, because my sin nailed Jesus to the cross just as much as theirs. They are no different than anyone who has had sex before marriage, lived in adultery or any other sin. We as Christians have to be bold enough to proclaim God’s unpopular truth in a world that will come against us.
The lines between right and wrong cannot be blurred. Remember, Jesus calls us to be light in a dark world. Being a light doesn’t just mean love and kindness or love and grace. It means love and truth. Jesus couldn’t be one without the other. Neither can I and neither can you. If you love someone, you tell them the truth.
Cissie Graham Lynch is the daughter of Franklin and Jane Austin Graham.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version.