Legalize Gay Marriage? Sure. Embrace It? No.

Currently the Supreme Court is debating a case which has been called “the Roe vs. Wade of marriage” and which concerns Ohio’s ban on gay marriage. If Ohio’s ban is lifted, this may lead to federal legalization of gay marriage in all 50 states.

Fine. Do it.

If our society is at this point, making it legal or illegal won’t make a difference in the level of immorality. The root of the problem is in society, not in the laws. As Christians, we really need to wake up and realize that we can’t legislate godly lifestyles. So if that’s what our society wants, then that’s their vote; legalize it.

Would I support that decision, as a Christian? No, for a variety of reasons. The homosexual lifestyle is incredibly damaging to health. Children raised by gay or lesbian couples miss out on having a mom or a dad. Worst of all, rebelling against God’s design invites God’s judgment. Romans 1 talks about this:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them…For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another…Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another… Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice.”

Seems harsh? Well, yes. Truth isn’t always easy to swallow. What this passage (which I recommend you read in full) is describing is what it looks like when humans reject God; God says, “Okay!” and they get what they think they want, which is life devoid of God, his design, and his goodness. Sometimes the worst consequence God can give us is letting us go our own sinful way.

Does this mean it’s time to get our signs and join Westboro in hateful demonstrations? Good heavens, NO! God doesn’t like giving out judgment, but his just nature demands that punishment be dealt out for sins. He is sad when people choose selfishness instead of him, but because he loves us and respects our free will, he’s not going to force his goodness on people who don’t want it.

So how can we, as Christ’s ambassadors, respond to homosexuality?

We’ve got a few options:

- Join Westboro picketers (see above)

- Completely avoid the topic, and rightfully earn the label “homophobe”

- Embrace homosexuality in the church

- Address the issue with grace and truth

Avoiding the issue is immature and cowardly, while embracing homosexuality as acceptable disregards the truth and, when you consider the consequences, not very loving. But finding the balance of grace and truth can be difficult for many.

A story may help here.

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At dawn Jesus appeared again in front of the church, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The seminary professors and fundamentalists brought in a woman caught in homosexual behavior. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of sodomy. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the concrete with some chalk. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

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Well, what do you think?

“Hey, she just took that one passage of debatable reliability out of John and changed a few words to make it more modern.”

Or perhaps you’re thinking I’m a heretic for making the issue Jesus dealt with homosexuality instead of adultery. I shall counter that with the fact that both call for the death penalty in the Mosaic Law, and both are sexual sins. The point is that while Jesus let her go, he told her at the end to leave her life of sin. He didn’t tell her that what she did was okay, he just made it clear that she wouldn’t be condemned for it. Jesus showed the adulteress mercy and called her to make different choices. He gave her a chance for repentance and redemption.

We don’t need to condemn sinners, fortunately, or we’d be too busy pointing fingers at each other; condemnation is God’s job. However, as Christians, we are to be the salt of the earth, and part of that duty is to exhort sinners to repent. We certainly should vote no on legalizing gay marriage, if that is our conviction, but we must recognize that if the votes are cast and the majority says yes, there’s a bigger problem that runs deeper than our state legislatures. Let us therefore go out and make disciples, and be a city on a hill shining with the hope that comes from the Lord.

Thoughts on Godly Romance, Part 4: Back to the Source

High school sweethearts, ready for prom!

Part 1: Courtship? More Like Legalism!
Part 2: Dealing With the Reality of Sin
Part 3: Putting Romance In Its Place

Amazed at how extreme Umstattd’s post was, I dusted off my copy of Harris’ infamous book and reread it. I am now under the impression that Umstattd and his circle of courters read mainly the title and skimmed a few pages in the book, then promptly left most of it unread, because nowhere in the entire 230-page book does Joshua Harris advocate no dating, or dating only in groups or with chaperones. In fact, at the very beginning (on page 13), he makes two things abundantly clear:

“1. I do not believe that dating is sinful. Some people have sinned as a result of dating, but I don’t think anyone can accurately say that dating in and of itself is a sinful activity.”

“2. Rejecting typical dating does not mean you’ll never spend time alone with a guy or a girl. There’s a difference between the act of going on a date and dating as a way of thinking about and approaching romantic relationships…I won’t say that it’s never appropriate to spend time alone with someone. At the right time in a relationship, if the motive is clear and the setting avoids temptation, going on a date can be healthy.”

Joshua Harris does not advocate an impractical theory of how to go from zero to married happily ever after; rather, he approaches romance with God’s design of marriage in mind. God didn’t make men and women for recreational relationships. (Tweet this.) The world may not know that, but Christians do (at least, they should). As a result, the way we handle romantic pursuits should reflect sobriety and respect for the other person as well as for God and his commands. This is not to say that Christian romance is full of dour-faced theologians who regard one another coolly; rather, it lacks the flippancy and selfishness that is all too common in the world’s cheap knockoff of romance. The latter is full of broken hearts and confusion, but the former should be filled with joy. I shall go so far as to say that kind of joy can only thrive in a relationship that begins with soberly placing it under the submission of Christ. (Tweet this.)

I say this simply because it’s what I’ve experienced. I read I Kissed Dating Goodbye in middle school. Being a middle schooler, I took an imbalanced interpretation of it similar to Umstattd’s, though by high school I was concerned with other things and mostly forgot about it. When a good guy friend asked me out at the end of our junior year, I said no initially, and then proceeded to grill him. For weeks. I asked him what he believed about God, about the Bible, about marriage, about courtship, about family, about career, about his character. I had figured that by that point, our friendship was strong enough to withstand such a thing, though looking back I’m surprised I didn’t scare him off. I tend to be pretty blunt, especially with questions like those. Anyway, we’ve been dating for a couple of years now with the intent of marriage and all is, for the most part, well.

In I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris identifies what he calls “the seven habits of highly defective dating.” I agree with what he says, and I shall share my own experience in dealing with each of them:

“1. Dating leads to intimacy but not necessarily commitment.”

Shortly before my dear friend ever asked me out, I’d decided I was done giving my heart away to guys who didn’t reciprocate my feelings. What does giving your heart away look like? You might think it’s only when you’re spending all your conversations gushing about your feelings, but it’s much simpler and subtler than that. I spent a great deal of time in my early teens obsessing over my crushes. I thought about them all the time, hyperanalyzed anything and everything they said to me, and wrote stupid letters explaining how I felt. Unfortunately, a few of those actually got delivered (I think).

So by the time my junior year was starting to wrap up, I realized how much emotional energy I was wasting and decided that whoever I might end up dating had to make the first move AND had to be of godly character. He also had to have the intent of finding out whether or not we were fit to be married to each other in dating; I didn’t think dating for fun would be conducive to guarding my heart. So when my dear friend broached the area of romance, I made sure he had the goal of marriage in mind before I agreed to date him.

“2. Dating tends to skip the ‘friendship’ stage of a relationship.”

I had no problem there; we became good friends over the course of a year, having many things in common and having most of our classes together every day. Personally, I’m not sure how you can find anyone dateable until after you know a few things about their personality and character.

“3. Dating often mistakes a physical relationship for love.”

Which is why at the very beginning we agreed on a hands-off approach until we were married. Now that we’re further on and progressing in our relationship, we’ve determined that kisses are ok when we’re engaged.

This is important because of brain chemistry. When you start a new relationship, your brain goes into infatuation mode for about 12-18 months. During this time, you see the person through rose-colored glasses. If you ramp up physical involvement early on, your judgment becomes even more clouded and those rose-colored glasses start filtering out red flags.

“4. Dating often isolates a couple from other vital relationships.”

This had the opposite effect for me; I became good friends with some of the people my sweetheart knew and my current friendships got stronger, partly because dating this particular fellow helped me realize that I’d learned some unhealthy relationship dynamics while I was growing up. I also found his mother a delightful Christian lady who has been a positive influence in my life. Regarding my own parents, they chose not to get too involved; when asking my dad if I was allowed to date or not, he said, “I don’t care; do whatever you want.” (That made me realize that I was an adult who was directly accountable to God. Then I realized what it meant to fear the Lord.)

Anyway, all this had to do with intentionality. If I had only dated him so that I might have a shot at fulfilling my hopes for a fairytale, I would have focused entirely on him and everything else would have been irrelevant to me. However, I wanted to know more about his character, so I got to know his family and friends, to see what sort of people he hung out with. I asked his mom how he treated her, and whether or not he was the same person at home that he was at school.

“5. Dating, in many cases, distracts young adults from their primary responsibility of preparing for their future.”

I would say that, marriage being part of most people’s adulthood, finding a suitable spouse is an important part of preparing for that future.

That being said, it was the prospect of marriage that made me, a college dropout, wake up and realize, “Agh! I need to get a job!” Weddings are expensive, and so is the cost of living apart from your parents.

“6. Dating can cause discontentment with God’s gift of singleness.”

Hm. We are created to have a lifelong companion in marriage; as I’ve gotten older and college and the working life has brought distance to many of my friendships, I find myself grateful that God offers us such a gift. At the same time, there is much freedom to be had in singleness. I can serve others more freely because I don’t have a husband to be home for or a family to take care of. Knowing that there may be only two or three years left before I marry has got me in service mode: I’ve only got a limited amount of time that I can freely give without the priority of a spouse, so I’ve launched myself into serving my church’s youth group. I can stay late nights cleaning up after a bunch of teenagers because I don’t have a husband who would like to see me after a hard day of work; likewise, I can go on mission trips easily because I don’t have a family who will sorely miss my presence for practical and social reasons.

“7. Dating creates an artificial environment for evaluating another person’s character.”

Again, we were friends before we considered each other romantically, so we never had the issue of putting on our best face when around the other person. I have also observed that homeschooled kids are more vulnerable and wear their heart on their sleeve, while public schoolers, due to the harsher social environment they live in, are much harder to get to know because they are so used to putting up a protective barrier between themselves and others. As former homeschoolers, my sweetheart and I are pretty open about how we think and feel about things.

I have a wonderful relationship with my high school sweetheart and couldn’t ask God for anything more. However, the reason for our strong relationship is not because we read books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye and applied its message religiously to our lives, but because we looked to the Creator of romance for guidance. When you submit yourself to Christ’s lordship and seek to please him in the way you live your life, you reap the blessings of obedience. (Tweet this.)