So this guy took a very hard stance toward a guy who was wrapped up in unrepentant sexual sin. He confronted him on his sinfulness and he didn’t pull any punches doing it. There wasn’t much dialogue or discussion. He just came down really hard on the guy. This was Pat Robertson-blaming-tsunamis-on-sin type of hard. He passionately informed the sexual deviant that because of his actions there would be deep and dark consequences and that people would even die because of his sexual sin.
Now what if I told you that the guy who heard all of this immediately stopped eating. We are talking deep an dark depression. He fell into self-loathing and spent day and night consumed with tears. He was fine before his encounter with the hard-nosed prophet, but now he’s suicidal. It’s so bad that whenever some bad news comes to his door step the messengers are afraid to tell him. The guy seemed suicidal before this bad news. This will certainly put him over the edge.
That guys a jerk, right? I mean if your counsel leads the counselee to become borderline suicidal and overcome with grief day and night, you’ve problem blown it somewhere along the way. Perhaps a bit more discussion and dialogue and a little less condemnatory rhetoric would have been a bit more helpful.
But what if I told you I just described for you the prophet Nathan and his encounter with King David? Nathan didn’t mince any words about David’s adultery with Bathsheba or his murder of Uriah. What David did was clearly wrong and he told him this.
When we read this story in our Bible we don’t blame the feelings of depression, self-loathing, etc. on Nathan the prophet. Ever. We lay them at the feet of David. We love Psalm 51 because it’s such a beautiful picture of repentance and the cleansing that the Lord provides. But there is deep and profound brokenness that undergirds this passage. And that’s actually the key to David’s repentance.
About that Nashville Statement
I’m making this point because of some of the responses I saw yesterday about the Nashville Statement. The statement is one crafted to affirm what we believe the Bible says about biblical sexuality. One of the most heavily critiqued articles in the document is article 10:
WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.
WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.
We are being told that such a statement is insensitive, shuts down dialogue, and will end up harming several LGBTQ people of faith. You cannot speak so strongly against an issue like this, they say. To do so is going to leave several people hurting and feeling condemned and maybe even suicidal and unaccepted.
But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the position of those of us who would sign the Nashville Statement. It is not our desire for people to feel unnecessary shame. Nor is it our desire for people to experience hopelessness. But that does not mean we do not believe that sin carries with it consequences or even that a David like feeling of shame and deep remorse is not appropriate.
We really do believe that homosexuality is not morally neutral. As such we believe it carries with it consequences. That brokenness you feel when someone shines the light upon your sinfulness, as Nathan did with David, isn’t the fault of the guy with the light. It’s the consequence of living in rebellion. This is true whether the sin is heterosexual, homosexual, or cheating on your taxes.
You can call that insensitive and bigoted all you want. But the truth of the matter is that if we really do love people, and we really do believe this isn’t a morally neutral issue that is just an academic exercise in hermeneutics, then we must take the loving role of Nathan the prophet. Yes, we do this in the context of relationship. Yes, we love people as Jesus did, no matter what sin they are wrapped up in. But none of those things is mutually exclusive to believing that something sets you outside of Christian faithfulness and it needs to be called out and repented of.
So I’m willing to take the risk of Nathan and call the king of our culture (self) to repentance.
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This article is a horrifying thing to read from a brother in Christ, not least because of how high it comes on Google when looking for commentary on Article X.
Choosing one example from the old covenant to try and defend a schismatic and hate-filled proclamation, imagining that there’s a parallel between murder and fully loving, consensual and committed relationship or of people whose dysphoria with the sex of their body only ONLY finds relief in transition, or at least that’s according to essentially every medical and psychiatric professional.
How does Christ respond to sin and sinners? Even when he calls us to sin no more, he does so with mercy and love. Christ, who is Love, who put an end to sin and thus to life under the law, who told us the law was made for the good of man and not the reverse, and that was regarding one of the Ten Commandments, is the Cornerstone of the Church, the Groom. The Nashville Statement would rather see his church in ruins, and it seems to me and many Christians progressive, liberal and conservative, would also see it not founded on that Cornerstone.
I don’t want to have arrogance but I beg you to pray, to speak to LGBT people inside and outside the church, to see the fruit of the Holy Spirit in LGBT Christians and in those who follow God’s lead in accepting and affirming them, to read the scriptures and consider what it says qualifies one as a Christian and how Article X adds to that in a way that the Bible does not suggest or require, to ponder the fact that the New Testament has three times as many verses forbidding blood sausage as it does homosexuality and yet there’s no city in Tennessee where people are drafting a statement saying to agree to disagree on blood in food is to no longer be a Christian.
amen,thank you the light of the real church shines through the dark times. we must pray for dreamers also.carry on wayward sons
see above