Remember, the goal of my writing on sexuality is not to demean women and promote male privilege. Every brash woman and effeminate man who hates Baylyblog never stops repeating these accusations, but they couldn't be further from the truth. Manhood is not privilege, but its opposite: responsibility. As Christ died for His Bride the Church, so man takes up his own cross and dies for the mother of his children, his lover, his bride.
The story of marriage is man dying so woman may give life and nurture it. Where that story is not told, marriage doesn't exist. It's not a private story for Christians. It's the timeless, transcultural story of sex written by God in the very DNA of His universe. To preach and live this story is to preach and live the Gospel.
Among the perishing, this Gospel witness is the stench of death. This is why worldlings outside and inside the church never stop scorning, mocking, hissing, and shaming those who try to be faithful witnesses to God's holy heterosexuality.
There can be no middle ground on sexuality, although many of us are frantic...
to fashion one.
For decades, now, the church in North America has been desperate in her efforts to carve out a place halfway between God and the world on all matters sexual; a place where we can be sort-of kind-of Biblical, and yet avoid the hatred and shaming of rebels against God's manhood and womanhood...
Sometimes we even have the bodacity1 to call our halfway-covenants "contextualized Gospel witness," but they're the very opposite. Gospel witnesses die so others may live. Look at Jesus. Look at the Apostle Paul.
Nor are our compromises compassionate. The man of Christian compassion doesn't whisper half-truths to sinners who are perishing so he may live undisturbed in his private Christianity.
The church right now is selling some glittering baubles and trinkets. We've been finding the sweet spot of plausible deniability in all matters sexual for several generations, now. We've been placating the feminists for decades. We promote women to leadership and authority everywhere and always, only drawing the line at the senior pastor who preaches to us Sunday morning. Also for decades, we've avoided knowing about or disciplining the fornication of our children. We remarry almost anyone, and if one of our pastors has a conscience issue, he's relieved to be able to send the couple to another pastor of the church who doesn't feel the same way. We speak highly of woman's calling and motherhood, but no one exhorts any particular woman of our congregation to stop raising her children in day care. She has a profession, after all.
During the past decades of our culture's sexual revolution, we have established a trajectory of compromise. It's no surprise, then, that we are meeting the homosexualist juggernaut now turning its focus to the recalcitrant church with the same sort of mincing words and lilting compromises we use to avoid taking up our crosses at every prior point of revolt. The flags of truce we run up the pole are a rainbow of colors:
And now that we've all swallowed the gay Christian movement, we have the zoophile Christian movement to look forward to:
You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination. Also you shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it, nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it; it is a perversion. Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. (Leviticus 18:22-24)
May our Heavenly Father cleanse us from our fear so we may teach transgressors His ways.
* * *
The one who is taught the word is to share all good things with the one who teaches him. (Galatians 6:6)
Tim serves Clearnote Church, Bloomington, Indiana. He and Mary Lee have five children and big lots of grandchildren.
Want to get in touch? Send Tim an email!
