You are not the enemy.
Those in the church who have treated you as though you are the enemy do not understand the Bible, which says that if we say we love God but do not love our brother we lie and the truth is not in us (1 John 4:20). And you are our brother, our sister, our neighbor (Luke 10:25-37).
Does the Bible say that sex is only between a husband and wife? It does. I’m sorry, it just does. I didn’t write it. As a Christian, I am compelled to follow Biblical teaching and not substitute my own opinions for those of God.
This website was written for Bible-believing Christians, and any criticism of any sexual behavior within its pages is intended only for the church and for all born-again Christians who engage in sexual behaviors that are inconsistent with Biblical teaching.
You in the LGBTQ+ community are living consistently with your deeply held beliefs. Many of us in the church have not been living sexually consistent with our deeply held beliefs. It is not the church’s place to make you live according to our beliefs, especially given we haven’t been living by them very well ourselves.
At any rate, while I have your attention, I ask you to trust me on a personal level for just one moment and commune with me. Look into my eyes, tell me from your heart . . .
- Who are you?
- In whom is your identity rooted?
Moses asked God: “What is Your Name?” The answer came:
- “I Am.”
Moses was asking the Identity Question. But how could God explain to a human Moses, a created being, His identity as a Being who has always existed from eternity past? God just is! And what goes along with this is that His identity is rooted in Himself. God is the only being who has an identity rooted in Himself. All the rest of us have derivative identities. We understand our identities by our connections to others. If we depend on someone else for our existence, we depend on someone else for our identity. Having never been created, God does not derive His identity from anybody else.
Identity issues in our society have largely focused on sexual/gender identity; however, our true identities are not rooted in sex or sexuality but in belovedness, a thing for which all of us of all genders long–and which all of us can have!
Which brings you and me to the question of Love.
The most important question facing humanity is not “What is truth?”–but “What is Love and how can I find it? . . . Who will love me for who I am?”
How can I judge you for seeking that which all humans have sought throughout all of human history? I do not. Rather, I rejoice that I have found it at the deepest level in my relationship with Christ.
Unfortunately, the wells of human belovedness of any orientation are too shallow for our own human hearts. They are storage tanks with bottoms. There is only one bottomless well that springs up on its own without limit. Only He who has Eternal Self Identity can be Love. Belovedness erupts from Him spontaneously.
And that belovedness from Him extends to you. His heart leaps for you. You are everything to Him!
No matter what you have done or how you feel about God, you are His beloved. There are billions and billions of people on this planet, and each one individually is His Favorite. You are His favorite. I am His favorite. That person over there is His favorite. God is the only One who can love like that.
If you were the only person ever to live, Jesus would still have died just for you. And the devil is furious about this because the very least of us has something he can never have–belovedness from God. So he does everything he can to steer all humans away from the source of eternal belovedness. The devil’s sole purpose in life is to make the true God seem scary and thus scare all of us away from the true belovedness that each of us can have both on this earth and eternally. The devil is real and he’s been around for thousands of years and he knows what makes us tick and he is an expert at what he does. He is the one who is truly scary, but he’s an expert at making God look like the scary one.
The devil loves to influence people to hurt other people—especially to do it in the name of God, or to do it in the role of fatherhood or other authority—and he most loves to do it to children. Then the devil pours his fiery lies into those raw wounds. That happened to me. I was one of those children. I was gang-raped at the age of four, kicked out of the house at age seven, and bullied and mocked all the way through high school. Though I was straight, I was called a sissy and a queer and I was beaten up a lot. As an adult, I am still struggling with many of those wounds.
But I don’t blame God for them. Because God gave people free will, He can’t stop people from wounding other people, but He weeps every time they do it. All of us have done things that wounded other people, and none of those things we did, or the things that were done to us, were God’s will. The devil is an expert at using broken human relationships to make us afraid that God is out to hurt us as well. That is why all humans are at risk of the eternal loss of belovedness.
God designed us for intimacy with each other, but only as it flows from our unshakable intimacy with Him. All of human existence takes place within a massive battle in spiritual realms against that type of intimacy. Trust me, dark forces are real–even Hollywood believes that!
You in the LGBTQ+ Political Movement understand one truth correctly: Love is worth fighting for.
In fact, nothing else truly is.
But eternal belovedness is not to be found in human relationships of any kind. Taking your identity from anyone other than God will ultimately lead to the despair of emptiness. No matter how close you are to your partner, ultimately each of us is alone. Our only true hope is in the eternal love of God. Only the human relationships that flow from each person’s connectedness to God–to the source of ultimate belovedness–can bring ultimate fulfillment of our human love needs.
And that means accepting Him on His terms, even if He has different sexual rules than you would want Him to. While I can’t explain why you would be born with an orientation He cannot bless in its fulfillment, I do trust Him that He is good and He does have a loving reason for His guidelines on human sexuality. And that He will work all things out for you if you trust Him in every aspect of your life.
I asked you who you are. Now I will tell you who I am. In the midst of the battle, I am a man Loved by Jesus. Intimately known by Him and intimately connected to Him. He always Delights in me. I am Unswervingly Beloved. My Identity is rooted in Him.
Once you grasp that God completely delights in the You of who you Are, and decide to surrender to that Love, for the first time in your life your heart will be completely safe. Peace–true, deep, quiet, unflinching, bottomless, peace–is Love. And that is the love my heart aches for you to soak in.
Sincerely,
Doug Haskins
Citizen,
Kingdom of Heaven
