Category Archives: Church Discipline

The troubling trail to Gay Affirmation

Plenty of rational people remain befuddled at how we got to the point of having same-sex marriage imposed upon the country. It still “doesn’t make sense”. Past articles here have been written about some of the delusions in the pop culture of our time that have led us into this “Twilight Zone” type of existence. The process of mental erosion and manipulation has really been a long one and is too involved to chronicle in depth or in one post, but here are some of the major tools that were used to put us where we are today. Hopefully it will be instructive as these tactics will continue to be used on this and other subjects.

Trick 1: Emotionalism

The average person is not taught formal logic, argumentation, or philosophy to a meaningful degree. That leaves the door wide open for Trick 1. Emotionalism defies logic and other rational processes which is why rational people are so perplexed when they find someone immersed in it.

A typical scenario is this: a parent has a child who suddenly announces that he/she is “gay” and the emotional heartstrings begin to be played. The parent doesn’t want to think of their precious child as a sinner under God’s condemnation for engaging in homosexual acts so the line is drawn: choose the child or choose the Church. It has caused division in homes and churches because the parent’s or parents’ emotional attachment to the child is greater than their commitment to Scripture.

Similarly, a homosexual person who goes to a church and has a bad experience sets the stage for another emotional tug. This experience is used to indict the whole of the church as being mean to homosexuals in general. This move can then be used to justify shifting the focus to “bad church people” while ignoring church doctrine on the matter and their own bad behavior. Furthermore, we are not allowed to be reminded that other churches and church people are “good” to homosexuals. That card never gets played. Instead, people insulate and comfort themselves with a self-justifying cocoon padded with sympathizers.

The emotional attachment we have to people, be they friends or family, or our instinctive affection for simple common courtesy or an extension of love and care to a person cannot be allowed to outweigh what Scripture actually says and what historical Church doctrine has been. The call to Christ is a call to the crucifixion of one’s self to the lusts of the flesh and to a conformity to Christ. The things that mean the most to us, friends and family, and the things that tempt us have to be killed and killed again in this conformation process. Jesus knew the cost of following him was high in this regard. He knew that opposition and persecution would be found in governmental authorities and in our closest associations.

For I have come to turn
“‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” – Matthew 10:35-38

The real test of fidelity to Jesus is when you have to confront your family members. That is a test that all too many people have not wanted to endure. Scripture takes a back seat to worldly, emotional attachment. The modern atheist movement has benefited greatly by playing upon the “emotional problem of suffering” and the homosexual movement has also had great success by appealing to frail, human emotions.

Trick 2: Narrowly Focus

By narrowly focusing on one thing, people on the margins can be swayed to an otherwise illogical position. How often have you heard someone say, “It’s about equality” when they were advocating for same-sex marriage? It was a common refrain. Equality is a buzzword with an emotional ring to it. It appeals to our sense of fair play. Never mind the fact that a male/female pairing is not the same as a male/male or female/female pairing in gender or procreative activity or any number of other factors. That observation is never allowed. If it is raised then it is mocked and dismissed before the focus is shifted to inheritance or benefits or the objector is bullied with accusations of being a bigoted, unfair homophobe or some other baseless charge.

Another example deconstructs marriage to focus on one element. “It’s about love.” Really? It is as if “love” were the only prerequisite for a marriage. What about the fact that all cultures throughout history have recognized that marriage was fundamentally a male/female bonding with the general intent to produce children? The male/female component absolutely must be dismissed by homosexual advocates because it would automatically rule them out by definition. So it is ignored. The same is done for procreation because that would also immediately rule out homosexuals. After all, how can you deny two people who love each other and want to commit to a lifelong, monogamous relationship the “right” to do that? You can’t unless you want to be labeled as a bigoted, unfair homophobe again.

“Monogamy” is another canard trotted out, as in the paragraph above. Again, marriage is skinned down to nothing but love and monogamy. Why? Because these are ideal goals of marriage which appeal to heterosexuals in our culture. It puts them on empathetic grounds with the poor, struggling homosexual couple who just want to be like the heterosexuals but, by some stroke of bad luck, they can’t be. On the surface, it seems that homosexuals can love and be monogamous, too, just like heterosexual couples. The truth of the matter, though, is that most of the men aren’t and the women are not as faithful as their heterosexual counterparts. Again, the attempt is to match a simplistic aspect of marriage to something that homosexuals could possibly achieve.

“Lifelong” is another adjective often used to achieve the same goal. To hear them tell it, homosexual advocates want that lifelong, committed relationship that heterosexuals have. The reality is that very, very few of them aspire to or achieve this. I discuss that in more detail in another article, but the upshot is that the vast majority of same-sex relationships do not last very long at all. An average of five years would probably be a rather charitable number overstating the reality.

Trick 3: Screw-up Scripture

Since most people do not spend a lot of time studying Scripture and the higher scholarship related to it, they are, again, easy targets for this Trick. Activists like to pretend that there is some legitimate debate going on in the biblical academic world regarding what the Bible teaches or the Church has historically taught. The reality is something rather different. There are a handful of people with some level of academic credentials that try to make waves, mostly for public consumption in attempts to muddy the waters for the uninformed. The mainstream of biblical academics realizes that the Bible is firmly against homosexuality and tomes like Robert Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice really have settled the issue for all but the most die-hard supporters. While there are some unorthodox supporters in the higher halls of academia, most of the weakness is found among the laity and the pastoral class where scholarship is not always as highly valued as personal relationships (see Trick 1: Emotionalism above).

By confusing people they attempt to de-legitimatize Scriptural authority. A very fine example of this deceptive approach is this article with the subtitle, “Christians need to accept that Jesus was sometimes wrong—in fact, he might even want us to.” Oddly enough, the author acknowledges that Jesus would disapprove of homosexuality, but he then goes on to build a faulty argument as to why Jesus was wrong for us today! The mental gymnastics people will go through to condone what the Bible clearly condemns is stunning. But the uninformed youngster today might well read this and think that it is a wonderful, open-minded, contemporary, relevant, and scholarly approach to Scripture. In reality, it is simply leading people astray and causing division in the Church – which is the main objective.

Trick 4: Go Fix Your Own Sins First

The first time I was told that the church needed to go solve all its other sin problems before it got around to homosexuality I was dumbfounded. The absolute illogic of it was beyond comprehension. However, it was not a plot aimed at the logical person. It was aimed at the guilt-ridden person. People who feel inherently guilty because they recognize their own sinfulness can be convinced that they should not condemn anyone else’s sin until they fix their own personal “sin problem”.

Nowhere in Scripture do you find such a concept or statement. Everyone is sinful and everyone must repent and then control themselves so that they don’t fall back into their old ways of sin. And, like it or not, we are required to hold each other accountable for our sin. That is a brief description of what Scripture actually teaches.

The goal of this approach is to disarm people and remove them from the battlefront. A person who is sidelined by guilt will be at least tolerant of and perhaps become accepting of homosexuality.

Trick 5: False Portraits

Presenting a false portrait of homosexual life is crucial to gaining acceptance, especially among the young. The brief outline of homosexual life that I gave in my previous article tells us that it is an unstable, dysfunctional, and unhappy life. But you would never know that through TV and movie portrayals. They don’t talk about the drug abuse, the physical abuse, the cheap and tawdry sex, or the mental anguish. Sure, the heterosexual community has such problems as well but within the homosexual community they are multiplied many times over – especially for the men! The typical movie or TV portrayal will be a positive, funny, likable, and intelligent image which has the intention or result of leaving the viewer with only good feelings regarding the homosexual character. It does not show the man drinking because he is distressed or going home to a boyfriend or picking up a stranger at a gay bar for quick sexual satisfaction. The seedy side may make a few appearances on obscure cable channels but it does not make mainstream broadcasts or movies as a rule.

Trick 6: The Tolerance Shell Game

This was a good one. Cry out for tolerance then engage in intolerant behavior. Much like the guilt in Trick 4, this had the effect of causing churches to be more accommodating to homosexuals. It led to the ordination of people with same-sex attraction who were not acting upon that attraction. It seemed so reasonable, compassionate, and tolerant. After all, don’t we all struggle with sin that we don’t act upon? Sure! Churches began to liberalize even more in order to “welcome” homosexuals into their midst. Then somewhere along the way we began to see calls for ordaining practicing homosexual ministers, affirming homosexual couples, and then talking about conducting homosexual marriages. Any appeal to Scriptural authority was painted as bigotry, homophobia, “on the wrong side of history”, and so forth per Trick 3. Emotional appeals were ladled out as in Trick 1. Talk of equality, love and other narrowly focused parallels were tossed into the mix as per Trick 2 in order to “flood the zone” and here we are. We have same-sex marriage, practicing homosexuals ordained into the clergy, general confusion about Scripture among the uneducated and uncaring, and division within the church and the country. I’m reminded of Aesop’s fable of the Farmer and the Snake.

ONE WINTER a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion on it, and taking it up, placed it in his bosom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and resuming its natural instincts, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.

Aesop’s Fables. Translated by George Fyler Townsend. Chicago; Belford. Clarke & Co. 1887.

And so it has been with the “tolerance” of homosexuals in the church. There was not an attitude of gratitude. They seized upon the opportunity afforded to them and continued their push for normalization. If one could not see beforehand that the goal was to change the church not to fit in and learn to abide by its doctrines, certainly it is clear now that this was and still is the ultimate goal for the activists. The “scoundrel” came in among us feigning calls for mercy and pity in order to waylay the merciful, kind, and unsuspecting. They played our Christian charity against us. It was a crafty move worthy of the serpent of Genesis 3.

Personal Reflection

Homosexual advocacy has arguably had its greatest success by circumventing the critical thinkers and appealing to forms of emotion and deception. Young people, who are often either not interested in such topics or haven’t had the education or maturity to think them through, are soft targets for these forms of manipulation for gay affirmation.

When I was in my young twenties and the topic of homosexual marriage was raised I was opposed to it on religious grounds and on the grounds of gender non-complementarity. Beyond that I was pretty much indifferent. It seemed like a silly idea. Nobody would ever really want to do such a thing and certainly the country would not tolerate it. It was ridiculous and laughable. At that time I really did not recognize the harm involved in homosexuality to the homosexual person nor did I think in terms of children, adoption, benefits, or other public policy matters. Even the idea that it would be an assault on religious freedoms never crossed my mind. I would probably have been very “live and let live” on the subject then. But as it has developed over my lifetime, my personal experiences with being married and raising four children, my religious education, my experiences with homosexual friends and family, my awareness of public policy implications, my observations on history, and so forth my positions have matured which has hardened my opposition to anything affirming homosexuality. Maturity has its benefits. How young people today will shape up remains to be seen. We can certainly learn some lessons from history in order to be more aware of the Tricks and better set to counteract them.

Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

If there is one portion of Scripture that is en vogue today it is, “Judge not”. It is the one phrase that both the perverts and the softhearted Christians can agree upon.

Over the years of my education and ministry I’ve heard this said many times. Softhearted Christians and those attempting to be charitable to others will refuse to pronounce a sin as a sin out of a misguided fear of “judging” and thus coming under God’s judgment. I’ve heard this said most recently about the subject of homosexuality and same-sex marriage issues. People are genuinely afraid to identify these as sins because of this text. Of course, the people who revel in perversity love to reinforce this idea when you confront them and say, “Who are you the judge me? The Bible says ‘Judge not’!” With such a rant the poor softhearted Christian is bullied and ashamed to the point of withdrawing from the fight.

Matthew 7:1-5

There is a great meme going around social media which illustratesjudge-not how people read this verse. “Judge not” is the only part of the passage that isn’t scribbled over. Without that larger context it is easy to misunderstand this two-word text. The context in Matthew is very clearly about being a hypocritical judge of someone else’s sin. The comparison is between a “speck” in someone else’s eye versus a “board” in your own eye. The self-righteous, hypocritical person is quick to judge the smallest sin another person has while ignoring the major sin problem he has. Know anyone like that? If you do, I’m sure that you don’t like them very much.

Luke 6:37-38

In Luke’s gospel there is less context to the saying. It is preceded by a call to love your enemies, be merciful as God is merciful, then this warning not to be overly judgmental is then followed by a call to be like the “teacher”, and then the same “speck of sawdust” passage as in Matthew. In short, all of it is a perspective on proper behavior: be like God, be like Jesus.

Paranoid Friends

My paranoid friends are so traumatized by the recognition that they have sin in their lives that they do not want to be perceived as being hypocritical so they don’t want to even acknowledge that someone else has sinned. This is born, in part, out of the contemporary idea that “all sin is equal” in that it separates the person from God. While it is true that any sin would separate a person from the holiness which is God, it is not true that all sin is equal in God’s sight. Even the Bible has hierarchies of sin. We know this because the punishments vary. Some sins require a small sacrifice, others a larger sacrifice, and others can only be properly punished by execution. See the difference?

Everyone struggles with some residual guilt over their past sins. People also struggle with guilt over their present temptations. When this guilt inhibits the ability to recognize and confront obvious sin in others then it becomes problematic. To reverse the image Jesus paints for us above, imagine that the person with the “speck” sees the person with the “plank” in the eye but doesn’t say anything. Would that be in keeping with Jesus’ desire? No. The converse of Jesus’ command not to be a hypocritical judge of others is not to refrain from judgment but to do it properly: mercifully, compassionately.

Commands to Judge

The New Testament commands us to judge actions – especially those of our fellow Christians. The Apostle Paul makes it clear that those within the church are to make judgments about the sins of other church members. He himself had no problem in passing judgment on a man guilty of incest in the Corinthian church even though he had only been told about the situation and wasn’t there while it was going on. He wrote, “. . . I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this” (1 Cor. 5:3). So Paul saw no conflict with anything Jesus said about “judge not” and his ability and duty to “judge”. Neither did he see a conflict in telling the Corinthian church members that they should be judging as well. He rhetorically asks, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?” (1 Cor. 5:12). The answer is “Yes, you are to judge the people inside the church.”

In fact, Jesus gives us directions on how to properly judge people within the church. We are not to do it hypocritically or with harsh condemnation, but lovingly and with consideration. See Matthew 18:15 “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over” (NIV). Notice that this text makes us all responsible for helping to keep our fellow church members in line. Doing this with responsibility and a compassion for the other person helps to build the bonds of trust and holiness in the church. It makes the church a self-policing entity and that cuts down on a lot of problems within the church as everyone is focused on doing what is good and right as well as helping others to do what is good and right.

What God has already judged

Judging what is right and wrong is much easier when you realize that God has already told us much about what He has judged as right and wrong. We don’t have to question whether fornication, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution, greed, theft, slander, malice, and so forth are wrong. They are. To say so is not to be judgmental in the least. It is simply pointing out what God has already judged to be wrong.

Getting It Right

The Message is a paraphrase of the Bible and it has this for Matthew 7:1-5. “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.”

When judging is done the proper way it brings health and healing to the person involved. That is, if the person is of the proper mindset to accept gentle correction. There is never a guarantee how a rebuke will be received but it does not relieve us of the responsibility to judge.
pingomatic

Heresy, apostasy, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage

There is a purge going on in the Church and it is one that we should acknowledge, embrace, and encourage. No issue has divided the church as clearly as the issue of homosexual acceptance and its manifestation in same-sex marriage. This purge has been mostly a one-way affair in that theologically liberal denominations such as the PCUSA (my former denomination) have been stacking the political structure so as to favor liberalization trends.

Bad Moves

The PCUSA is not the only offender as it has been a popular trend among mainline denominations. This trend has caused people to leave for more traditional churches or for existing congregations to simply acknowledge the political realities of their denomination and affiliate with another denomination or start their own conservative branch. The PCUSA has lost 47% of its membership since 1967 and this article lists the decline and increase of other denominations. Being a minister in the Restoration Movement I’m always interested in the Christian Church, Church of Christ, and Disciples of Christ churches. The Disciples have been trending liberal for years and have suffered a 67% decline since 1965 (these figures are as of 2012).

As theological liberals have seized power their churches have been purged of conservatives as they flee the sinking ship of Politically Correct Theology. The liberal churches fail to recognize that their theology is built upon the shifting sands of public opinion and peer pressure. It is not founded upon historical, solid biblical truth. Thus, it has no staying power and no attractiveness to a world that seeks stability amidst the storms of life. PCT only offers acceptance to those who conform to the thought de jour. If the winds of PCT ever shift so that it becomes popular to to dis-affirm homosexuality then those churches are going to find themselves in turmoil again.

Bad Words

Apostasy. Heresy. Disfellowship. Excommunication. These are all dirty words for many in the church today. They inherently bear a concept of harsh judgment in them and our pop-culture tells us to “judge not” (which seems to be the only portion of the Bible that many of them both know and affirm). But since the beginning of the Church there have been lines of discipline that could not be crossed without repercussions. Sexual sins have been matters of discipline and even excommunication from the outset.

The Apostle Paul affirms that sexual sins will exclude a person from the Kingdom of Heaven (1 Cor. 6:9) and homosexual behavior is among those sins. He affirms that homosexual behavior is a fundamental rebellion against God; that it is a “sinful desire”; that it is a “degrading” of the human body; that it is a “shameful lust” and that the acts are “shameful acts” (Romans 1:18-32). In short, human beings who are in rebellion against God on the matter of homosexuality are under God’s wrath and condemnation (Romans 1:18). This is exactly where the liberal churches find themselves. They affirm what God condemns.

In the Corinthian church Paul had to confront “sexual immorality . . . of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate” (1 Cor. 5:1). This was a heterosexual sin. The perversity of it was that a man was sleeping with his father’s wife (that is, his step-mother). Was the church in Corinth outraged at this? No. They were proud. Paul tells them that they should have “gone into mourning” and put the man into a state of disfellowship. The hope would be that he would repent so “that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord”.

Paul’s teaching on how to handle sexual immorality may not have been clearly understood by the Corinthian church as 1 Cor. 5:9-10 may indicate. So Paul clearly states what he expects when it comes to sexual immorality within the church: “But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people” (1 Cor. 5:11, emphasis mine). In fact, Paul relies upon Scripture when he commands the church to “Expel the wicked person from among you” 1 Cor. 5:13 (cf. Deut. 13:5; 17:7; 19:19; 21:21; 22:21,24; 24:7).

Genesis sets forth God’s intentional creation of mankind as male and female with gender complementarity as the essential component. The union of husband and wife is for the purpose of reuniting the male with what was created from him so that the two can carry out the divine will of procreating, ruling, and subduing the earth. Jesus affirms this natural and customary form of marriage as well as limits it to only two participants in a lifelong and monogamous marriage.

Humanity crossed a line which had never been crossed before when it began wiping out male/female distinctions and deeming homosexuals as capable of being married. Not even the pagans had ever done such a thing in all of human history. But like the Corinthians, the liberal churches have crossed several lines that had never been crossed before in the church. They affirmed homosexuality; they approved of homosexual marriage; they ordained practicing homosexuals into their leadership.

Biblical Response

The liberal churches have been cutting off the conservatives for a long time. It is now time for the conservatives to turn the tables and do the same and even more, in accordance with Scripture. The lines of demarcation within the church are clear but they need to be made more distinct. It is time for all the independent churches and denominations that support biblical marriage to do what the Apostle Paul would have us do: disfellowship anyone who claims to be a believer but affirms homosexual practice and/or same-sex marriage. Those of us on the right side of the issue need to call this what it is: heresy. Those who support it have become rebels against God and arguably apostates since “. . . they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). They have created a cult of sexual perversion and masquerade it as an acceptable form of Christianity.

It is only through boldness and a firm stance on Scripture that the Church can distinguish itself from the culture around it. Those people who refuse proper instruction and sound doctrine on this issue need to be cut off from their respective congregations until such a time as they repent. Churches and denominations that affirm homosexual practice need to be told “No. You are not Christian anymore.” Associations with such groups need to be severed.It is time to shun those who have created this cult of sexual perversion. Paul’s advice is harsh and it is intended to be harsh in order that it might shock the sinner into repentance. “Expel the wicked from among you.” Let the Church be purged of its heretics.