Every loving parent or grandparent wants to see his child embrace his gender design and calling to pursue godly manhood or womanhood. This episode explains some of the best ways we can help him or her to do so. If we want our kids to continually pursue godly manhood or womanhood as a life direction, we must devote ourselves to praying for God’s work in their heart. Only the heart driven commitment to put ourselves on the altar as a response to God’s love and mercy poured out for us on the cross can give us the energy to devote ourselves to showing the world godly manhood or womanhood. The JB Phillips paraphrase catches well truth that life-transforming power is the outcome of grasping God’s merciful love for us:
With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God re-mold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity (Rom 12:1-2).
Motivated by a heart-driven gratefulness to God for his mercy displayed in Romans 1-11, Christ-followers are to offer their bodies, including their gender and sexuality, to God. They do this by embracing the biblical view of male and female. We examined this grand design last week. Imparting such a view to our pre-teens and teens is a vital part of loving them well. However, as Paul makes clear in these 2 verses, our children will only embrace this view if they resist the intense cultural pressure trying to squeeze them into its mold into its view of gender and sexuality. This fractured view of sexual personhood, promoted by TSER world-wide through its Gender Unicorn graphic is that everyone has the right to determine his own 1) gender anatomy through sex change surgery or hormone treatments, 2) emotional/romantic attraction, which is separated from 3) physical attraction, i.e. sexual orientation, 4) gender identity, 5) gender role.
As our teens hear this view, proclaimed by loud voices heard through the social media every day, they are especially vulnerable to these ideas because one of the key developmental tasks for adolescence is breaking away from mom and dad to adopt their own identity—including their sexual identity. Adolescence is a time of asking, “Who am I?” “Where do I belong?” and “In what community do I fit?” As teens seek to understand their identity, you might say they are looking for a script to follow that explains who they are, why they feel the sexual attraction they do, and what their appropriate gender role should be. Let’s identify some of the harmful messages they are hearing today that can influence their identity script.
A. Destructive Messages About Their Sexual Orientation. Rich Yates describes his journey into the gay lifestyle, beginning with the soul-starved acceptance he felt from his high school music teacher:
Here was a man different from Dad or my brothers—he was gentle, soft-spoken, and warm towards me. He invited me into conversation. He told me of his world of teaching, ballet, music, and artist friends. I told him about my family, thoughts, hurts, and fears. He listened and encouraged me to confide in him. On a snowy evening, he escorted me to the Academy of Music to see Swan Lake. I was so excited. I had never been to the theater…After the ballet, my teacher called my parents and suggested that I stay with him for the night since the roads were unsafe. They agreed, not suspecting that he would unleash his lust on their son before dawn. He did. Sunrise witnessed my tear-stained face attempting to resume its self-protective mask of stoicism as my teacher cautioned me to keep our secret. He explained to me the “truth” that I was gay like him. He promised to help me but said I needed to keep our special relationship under cover. I didn’t believe I had a choice (David Longacre, Gay…And Such Were Some of Us)
Rich concluded at age fifteen that he must be a homosexual. But that never was his true sexual identity. He always was what his creator shaped him to be—a man. Being raped by a man fostered the growth in him of same-sex attraction that he did not want. Years later Rich would come to faith in Christ and discover an even fuller identity—that of being God’s son.
Another frequent experience today misleads adolescents into thinking their sexual orientation is to be gay—being sexually aroused by gay sex. Nearly every teen in America with a smart phone has come across gay pornography online. Because the nature of pornography is to addict, the teen will often return to the images. He doesn’t realize that nearly everyone is sexually aroused by seeing others in the act of having sex (even by observing mating animals!). Being sexually aroused by seeing gay sex can lead him to mistakenly think he is same-sex attracted. Even more deadly is actually engaging in experimental sex with the same gender. Our kids are hearing that they don’t know their true sexual orientation unless they first try gay sex. They do not realize that sexual arousal and release stamp the human brain with a hunger for the same experience of sex. Many college girls and guys, who never experienced same-sex attraction in the past but decide to experiment with it create in themselves same-sex attraction.
But experimentation is not the only pathway to same-sex attraction. Some of our children experience same-sex attraction from birth. Proponents of homosexual sex argue that since such people are born with same-sex attraction, same-sex sex is right for them. The biblical worldview does not deny that some people are born with same-sex attraction; but such attraction always comes from a fallen, sinful heart. Among Bible-believing Christians there is no ambiguity about the morality of homosexual sex or same sex attraction. Lev. 18:22 is clear You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
Christians trace same-sex attraction back to our race’s sinful fall in Adam, to the Doctrine of Original Sin. RC Sproul explains, “As a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, the entire human race fell, and our nature as human beings since the fall has been influenced by the power of evil. We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.” Every human being comes into this world made in God’s image with the law of God written on his heart, but also with a sinful nature. Paul tells us that from that sinful nature proceed, “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” Same-sex attraction, like all other forms of sexual brokenness, comes from our fallen, sinful heart. Just as some humans are more susceptible than others to the sin of selfish anger, jealousy, alcohol abuse, or heterosexual lust, others are more susceptible than others to the sin of same-sex lust. Same-sex lust can only come from a heart that is corrupted by sin.
Thinking clearly about this issue is imperative. The identity script that our SSA Christian kids need is that they belong in the Body of Christ with their peers who also have a sinful nature that makes them prone to sins like selfish anger, heterosexual lust, rebellion, bitterness, envy, etc. But that is not the message they are hearing. No matter what the source of SSA, same sex rape, getting sexually addicted to gay porn, experimenting with gay sex, or being same-sex attracted from birth, for most Christian kids the thought that they might be same-sex attracted is terrifying: These are some of the questions tearing them up inside:
- “Why do I feel attraction toward others of the same sex?”
- “What do my attractions mean?”
- “Who am I in light of what I am feeling?
- “How do I reconcile my same-sex attraction in light of my Christian faith?”
- “How can I be close to God when he doesn’t love me since I am SSA.
- “Why doesn’t God heal me? I’ve asked him to take away my SSA.”
- “Where can I find those who will love and accept me for who I am?”
If a Christian teen experiencing same-sex attraction gets no answers to the above questions about himself from his spiritual leaders, the “I’m Gay” identity script supplied by the LGBTQ movement is very likely to resonate with him. That scripts reads:
- Same-sex attractions reflect real differences between people, not just behavior choices.
- These attractions accurately signal who you are as a person.
- Your attractions reside at the core of your identity, your sense of self.
- If you are Gay (as the sexual orientation part of your identity), it makes sense to follow through and act on what you feel (your attractions)—because you are expressing and enjoying who you are.
When parents and churches don’t help teens with biblical explanations of same-sex attraction and related gender questions, Christian teens usually “buy into” the LGBTQ identity script. Here are some sobering words from a specialist working with Christian teens experiencing same sex attraction. Our research has shown that most youth who opt for the Gay-identity script, find it more emotionally compelling than the identity script they are receiving from their local church. A “Gay identity” provides meaning, purpose, and dignity to a person who would otherwise live in shame (Mark Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria) Christian parents and church leaders must provide teens who experience same-sex attraction an entirely different, biblical, identity script. Such a script recognizes same-sex attraction as one among the many sinful impulses Christians experience, reinforces the fact that he belongs, as all Christians do, in community with other believers, and emphasizes that his true identity in Christ is to be a beloved son or daughter of God.
Click here to continue to Part 2 of article.
