The church's response to homosexuality (Part 5)

If the church's challenge regarding homosexuality is increasingly to speak the truth courageously, its companion challenge for a long time has been to speak and relate lovingly.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., addressed this two-fold challenge in a May 30 blog post. In part, he wrote:

True compassion demands speaking the truth in love – and there is the problem. Far too often, our courage is more evident than our compassion. In far too many cases, the options seem reduced to these – liberal churches preaching love without truth, and conservative churches preaching truth without love.

Evangelical Christians must ask ourselves some very hard questions, but the hardest may be this: Why is it that we have been so ineffective in reaching persons trapped in this particular pattern of sin? . . .

I believe that we are failing the test of compassion. If the first requirement of compassion is that we tell the truth, the second requirement must surely be that we reach out to homosexuals with the Gospel. This means that we must develop caring ministries to make that concern concrete, and learn how to help homosexuals escape the powerful bonds of that sin – even as we help others to escape their own bonds by grace.

If we are really a Gospel people; if we really love homosexuals as other sinners; then we must reach out to them with a sincerity that makes that love tangible. We have not even approached that requirement until we are ready to say to homosexuals, “We want you to know the fullness of God’s plan for you, to know the forgiveness of sins and the mercy of God, to receive the salvation that comes by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to know the healing God works in sinners saved by grace, and to join us as fellow disciples of Jesus Christ, living out our obedience and growing in grace together.”

It seems to me this kind of merciful, compassionate love toward practicing homosexuals and those struggling with same-sex attraction includes:

-- Lovingly seeing them as fellow image bearers of God.

-- Lovingly recognizing them as fellow sinners against God.

-- Lovingly realizing they, like us, need the gospel of God.

-- Lovingly befriending them and welcoming them into our lives.

-- Lovingly caring for and serving them.

-- Lovingly sharing the good news of Christ's redeeming work with them over the long haul.

-- Lovingly walking with them through the struggles of following Christ after their conversion.

We can do this because of the power of the gospel in our own lives to make us new creatures who exist to glorify God as we are used by Him in a "ministry of reconciliation" to beg others to "be reconciled to God" through Jesus (II Cor. 5:17-20).