2. Love them enough to tell them the truth.
People often ask me, “What if your son declares that he’s gay one day?” I cannot imagine a human being I love more than my son. But if I love him, I will tell him what God’s Word says, plainly. If I fail to do that, I am not loving him. And I hope I can teach him, like his daddy, to come to the feet of Jesus, broken and repentant—both of us broken men who need a Savior, repentant toward a wickedness in our hearts that we have no way of overcoming. If he was born with a proclivity toward same-sex behavior and I was born with a proclivity toward anger, pride, deceit and unfaithfulness … well, we both need to be born again.
And if he and I don’t agree about this issue? Well, then I’ll do what Jesus did. I won’t judge him. I won’t send him away. I’ll keep bringing him close. But I’ll continue to tell him the truth, to warn him that the Bible says a day of judgment is coming. The righteous Judge will return and hold us all to account.
When we push someone away after speaking the truth, we have failed to represent our Savior’s love. But if we dare say “peace, peace” when there is no peace, we have failed in our responsibility to be faithful heralds of God’s Word.
3. Show them a greater love.
Our sexual desires go down to our very core. They are so deep that it’s easy to want to define ourselves by them. But we need to realize that sex isn’t the answer to our soul’s desire; it’s the question. We’re all thirsty and starving for love. But the love that we need isn’t the love of another human being; it’s the love of God.
We are all captives to sin, and only the love of God sets us free. There is a beautiful illustration of this in John 8. A woman caught in the act of adultery is brought to Jesus, and what does he say? “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
I’ve always been amazed at the order in which He put those two statements. Most of us would have put change before acceptance: Clean up your act and come back when you’ve gotten your life together. But Jesus knew she would never have the power to change until she had felt the weight of his acceptance. God’s acceptance is the power that liberates us from sin. It is not the reward for us having liberated ourselves.
That means I don’t just tell the girl who has lost her virginity about the dangers of venereal disease or the shamefulness of sleeping around. I tell her that there is a God who says to her, as he did to the women caught in adultery, “I never stopped loving you. Never. Not in your darkest moment or darkest desire. On the cross I took everything about you that made you unacceptable and died for it. The rocks of justice were pummeled into my body instead of yours.”
The only way we will ever break the stronghold of idolatry is by seeing that there is a Father whose attention is better and whose love is more steadfast than the arms of any lover. After all, Jesus’ last words on the cross were not, “Go fix yourself,” but, “It is finished!”
Only the weightiness of God’s acceptance can empower us to forsake idolatry. Our message is not simply, “Stop sexual sin.” Our message is, “Behold the grace of your God!”
