Let’s stand back a sec and review what the Christian story is about. God created everything (Genesis) and it was good; all creation interrelated in perfection. Brokenness (sin) entered the world through human transgression, and with that brokenness came hierarchy (man over woman, master over slave) and relational loneliness and despair. God, as He always does, moved first to heal the wound. He revealed His specific will to one people (the Jews). They continually repeated the first humans’ error: rebellion against God’s revealed will.
Much time later, a singular man came to earth, one that God had told his people would come. The man did not relax the moral law of the First Testament… rather, he made it even more stringent. Before, it was the act that mattered. Jesus said adultery and even murder were matters of the heart and we were guilty.
If that’s where matters ended, we’d have merely been twice as condemned in God’s eyes as before Jesus came. But that was not where it ended, rather it is where it began. The Law convicted us all — 100% of us — as falling short, as being rebels against God’s Love. Yet this singular man had not come to condemn the world, but to save it. Through the mystery of suffering on the cross for our transgressions, then rising from the dead, his true identity was revealed: God-Man, Savior, Messiah, Only Son of the Heavenly Father. And through Him, through his footwashing example, we discovered what Grace truly was.
All of this involves obedience to God, even as we admit we will fail. How much do we love Jesus? “If you love me you will obey my commands.” Dear God, you know I do not love you always. Not by that measure. Yes, he will forgive us. But he will not accept lawlessness on our parts. We cannot hope to persistently, habitually, and without regard to his Word do as we please, yet inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
Homosexuality, like all things, is ultimately a matter of relational obedience to Jesus Christ rooted in the Word and in the work of the Holy Spirit in us to conform us to Christ’s image. It hurts, dang it! But *all* true discipleship involves the cross. If we haven’t experienced suffering as believers, we probably don’t know much about believing. A quick prayer won’t put you in heaven. A relationship with a Holy God who is Eternal and Uncreated — thus outside of even the Universe — yet so Personal as to number the hairs of your head… this relationship requires throwing ourselves at the feet of the Beloved with tears. How we have wronged Him!
It is like the Rembrandt painting of the crucifixion, where among those elevating the cross is depicted Rembrandt himself. WE did that. Is it too much to ask that we lay down anything — and of course it will be those things we love the most — in order to embrace The Beloved? It is not too much, yet we — I, certainly — stand convicted by these words.