What to Say to Those Who Are Gay – Part 1

David J. Mullins: Hey podcast listeners. Thanks for streaming today’s podcast from Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory is a nonprofit ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress. Our mission is to pierce the darkness with the light of God’s word through the most effective media available, like this podcast. To support Pathway to Victory, go to ptv.org/donate or follow the link in our show notes. Now, here’s today’s podcast from Pathway to Victory.
Dr. Robert Jeffress: Hi, this is Robert Jeffress, and I’m glad to study God’s word with you every day on this Bible teaching program. On today’s edition of Pathway to Victory.
David J. Mullins: The argument goes this way: If indeed I have been wired to be a homosexual, if it is genetic, then how in the world could God condemn me for the way that he made me? Such a myth deserves both a biological and a theological response. Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor Dr. Robert Jeffress. Few topics stir up more conflict in our culture today than the subject of homosexuality. Sadly, a growing number of Christians have embraced ideas about it that simply don’t line up with scripture. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress examines some of the most common myths about homosexuality. But first, let’s take a moment to hear some important ministry updates.
Dr. Robert Jeffress: Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. Before we start today’s study in Romans 1, let me speak to your heart for a moment. Nearly all of us have someone we dearly love. Maybe a son, a daughter, a brother, a lifelong friend, who has chosen a homosexual lifestyle that grieves us. What do we do? How do we love them well and still hold to the truth? Today’s message is called "What to Say to Those Who Are Gay." Very few programs will even touch this subject anymore, but Pathway to Victory will continue to do so well into the future, and just as we have for 30 years. On this 30th milestone of ministry, I also turned 70. In my quiet times with the Lord, I’ve identified seven life lessons that God has emblazoned on my heart. They’re the kind of lessons I want to pass along to our loyal listeners and friends in ministry. Today, when you give a generous gift to support Pathway to Victory, I’m going to send you this brand-new book called *Seven Lessons from My 70 Years*. We’ll say more about this exclusive offer later in the program. Right now, let’s open our Bibles and consider the message God placed on my heart. I titled the message, "What to Say to Those Who Are Gay." What does the word of God have to say about the subject of homosexuality? We began looking at that last week, and we saw that God’s word does not stutter or stammer. God’s word is very clear: homosexuality is a perversion. It is a twisting, it is a distortion of God’s plan for sexuality. An increasing number of not just non-Christians but Christians are embracing homosexuality as a viable lifestyle choice. Why is that? How can Christians especially afford to condone what God has so clearly condemned? The answer is many people, believers and unbelievers alike, have bought into what I call seven myths about homosexuality. Last time, we began looking at the first two of those myths. Remember myth number one? It’s the myth that the only prohibitions against homosexuality are in the Old Testament and therefore not applicable today. The New Testament has a great deal to say about homosexuality as well. Myth number two, and we continue to hear it, is that Jesus never condemned homosexuality. If Jesus in his three years of teaching never condemned homosexuality, why should we speak against it? Jesus never expressly prohibited incest, or bestiality, or necrophilia, or any other kind of sexual perversion. Why didn’t he speak out against those sins? The reason is very clear. In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus told us, he demonstrated God’s pattern for human sexuality. He said, "For this reason, a man shall leave his mother and father and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." God said, "Here’s my plan for sexuality: one man with one woman in a marriage relationship." The problem with same-sex marriage is this: anytime you counterfeit something, you devalue it. The reason the government doesn’t allow you to make your own currency at home is if you make your own money, you devalue the real currency. You make it less valuable. It’s the same thing with marriage. If we say to people, "Okay, marriage is whatever you want it to be," then you have devalued marriage. If you say it doesn’t matter whether it’s a man and woman, or if it’s two men or two women, or one man with three women, or one man with his favorite pet, marriage is whatever you want it to be, whatever floats your boat—go ahead and do that. What you do is you devalue marriage. The problem is not with a lot of gays going out and getting married. It’s what it does to the heterosexual rate of marriage. Countries that have legalized same-sex marriages have seen the heterosexual rate of marriage plummet dramatically. The result is children all over the world are being born out of wedlock in countries that have legalized same-sex marriages. For example, in Scandinavia, marriage is dying. For 10 years, they have allowed homosexual marriage or the equivalent thereof in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not coincidentally, the marriage rate has plummeted in those countries. Today, 60% of firstborn children in Denmark are born out of wedlock. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. People are saying, "If marriage is whatever you say it is, why even bother to go out and get married?" What we’re seeing is children born out of wedlock causing a destabilization of society. Wherever you destroy the family and you have children born out of wedlock, it destabilizes society as a whole. In America, a child is seven times more likely to end up in poverty if it is born out of wedlock than in a marriage relationship. Did you know that 70% of the prison population today consists of people who were born out of wedlock? Whatever destabilizes the family destabilizes a nation. That’s why we are against same-sex marriage, not because of homosexuals, but what it does to the value of marriage in general. God’s word is clear. God’s word says marriage is reserved for a man and a woman. That’s the clear teaching of scripture, which leads to a third myth about homosexuality, and that is the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality is based on a misunderstanding of the text. A non-Christian doesn’t care what the Bible says. A professing Christian who claims to be homosexual has a big problem. He has to somehow reconcile his homosexual choices with the clear teaching of the word of God. When your behavior comes into conflict or collision with the Bible, what do you do? Well, you reinterpret the Bible. That’s exactly what homosexual apologists are doing, homosexual theologians. They’re saying, "Well, we’ve just misinterpreted the Bible all these years." There are three specific passages that they try to reinterpret or misinterpret. Turn in your Bibles to Genesis 19. The classic story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. You know the story. God sent two angels in the form of men to visit the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they stayed with Lot, the nephew of Abraham. They were coming to look at the city, to judge it before they destroyed it. Here they are staying with Lot, they’re in Lot’s house. Verse four of Genesis 19: "Before they lay down, the men of Sodom surrounded the city, both young and old, all the people from every quarter." And they called to Lot and said to him, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we might know them," the King James Version says. They were not interested in just having a social mixer with them. The text here says, "So that we might have sex with them." That’s what the New American Standard says, "So that we might have relations with them." In other words, "Lot, you bring those two men out who have just come to your house because we want to rape them. We want to have sex with them." That’s what the text is talking about. Verse six says, "But Lot went out to them at the doorway and shut the door behind them and said, 'Please, brothers, do not act wickedly. You don’t know who these men are.'" Verse 12: "Then these angelic visitors said to Lot, 'Whom else have you had in your home? A son-in-law, your sons, your daughters, whomever you have in the city, bring them out of the place, for we are about to destroy this place because their outcry has become so great before the Lord that the Lord has sent us to destroy it.'" To reinterpret this text, homosexuals will say, "Well, what was being condemned here by God was not homosexuality but homosexual rape." And therefore, what God really hates is rape, not homosexuality. When you go back to verse four, you find how pervasive homosexuality was. It is among both the young and the old, all the people from every quarter. They came to commit homosexual acts against these two angelic visitors. We know from extra-biblical sources, historical sources, like Josephus and Philo and others, that the city of Sodom was known predominantly for homosexuality. Even today, what do we call the homosexual practice, the homosexual sex act? We call it sodomy, from the city of Sodom. It is a complete fanciful twisting of the text to say homosexuality was not the primary reason that God destroyed the city. Ezekiel mentions other reasons: their rebellion, their failure to take care of the poor. But he said above all, it was their rebellion against God’s law that caused him to destroy the city. Another passage that homosexuals have to reinterpret are the abomination passages found in the book of Leviticus. For example, here are two of them. Leviticus 18:22: "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination." Leviticus 20 verse 13: "If a man lies with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." Now, that’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? How do you get around those? The homosexual apologist will say, "Well, what’s being condemned here is homosexuality when it is a part of idol worship. If homosexuality is a part of idol worship, it’s the idolatry that’s an abomination; that’s what is being condemned." The only problem with that interpretation is when you look at other passages in the Bible, God terms certain sins as an abomination that have nothing to do with idolatry. In Proverbs six, he says lying and pride are abominations before the Lord. Those have nothing to do with idolatry; they are detestable in God’s sight in and of themselves. It is with homosexuality. Turn back to Romans 1. Here’s another passage that has to be misinterpreted if somebody says they’re homosexual but accepts the Bible. Look at verse 26 of Romans chapter one. "For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also men abandoned the natural function of women and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving the due penalty in their own persons." People will take this verse and they will say, "Well, what is being talked about again is idolatry. And so what Paul is really condemning is homosexuality only when it is a part of idol worship." The context here is idolatry. Paul is talking about people who receive the knowledge of the true God, they reject the knowledge of the true God, and they replace it with a false god. That’s the context. Notice what Paul says in verse 27 about that relationship to homosexuality. Paul is not saying homosexuality is wrong because it is a part of idol worship. Paul is making the point in verse 27 that people who reject the knowledge of the true God and replace it with a false god, their punishment is homosexuality. Homosexuality is the punishment for rejecting the knowledge of the true God. They have received in their own persons the due penalty of their error. Look at verse 28. If homosexuality is only wrong when it’s practiced with idolatry, look at the other sins that are only wrong if they’re a part of idol worship. Verse 28: "And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper." He’s already talked about homosexuality, but he lists some more sins. Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossips. Whenever you rebel against me, I’m going to give you over to a depraved mind to commit all kinds of unspeakable acts. Homosexuality, gossip, slander, murder. Are we willing to say murder is only wrong if it’s a part of idolatry? Are we willing to say that envy and strife and gossip and slander—that those things are only wrong when they’re practiced in context with idolatry? Of course not. Paul says all of these things are sins, and they are the result of rebelling against God. Whenever we come to something in the Bible we don’t like, we can always say, "Well, that’s just one person’s interpretation." There are some things in the Bible, most things in the Bible, that are very, very clear. Here’s a good rule for interpreting the Bible: When the plain sense makes good sense, seek no other sense. God’s word is plain: homosexuality is a sin. A fourth myth that you’ve heard often is that science has proved that people are born gay. The argument goes this way: "If indeed I have been wired to be a homosexual, if it is genetic, then how in the world could God condemn me for the way that he made me?" Such a myth deserves both a biological and a theological response. Has indeed science proved that people are born gay? People who say that usually point to one of three studies that supposedly prove a genetic link to homosexuality. These are three well-known studies that have been highly discredited. Let me go through them real quickly with you. The first study is by Dr. Simon LeVay in 1991. Dr. LeVay examined the brains of 35 men who had died. 19 of them were homosexuals who had died of AIDS. 16 were supposedly heterosexual, though five of those 16 had died of AIDS, calling into question their sexuality as well. In the hypothalamus region of the brain, that part of the brain among the homosexual men was smaller than that of the heterosexual men. Therefore, Dr. LeVay said that proves a genetic link to homosexuality. There are a lot of problems with that study. It’s never been replicated since then. There’s no proof of causation. If indeed the brain size in those who died of AIDS is smaller than those who didn’t, that doesn’t tell us whether homosexuality is the result of brain size or if it’s the cause of the smaller brain size, especially when you introduce the disease of AIDS. Another problem with this study is Dr. LeVay’s own attitude. He was hardly objective. He told *Newsweek* magazine that when Dr. LeVay’s homosexual lover died, he was determined to prove that there was a genetic link to homosexuality. One doctor, Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, said, "My freshman biology students know enough to sink Dr. LeVay’s study." A second widely reported study is that of the Bailey and Pillard study of twins. In this sampling of 110 homosexual men who had identical twins, it was discovered that 52% of those homosexual men had twin brothers who were also homosexual, therefore supposedly showing a genetic link. The problem with that study is it doesn’t account for the nearly 50% who weren’t homosexual. Not only that, all of these twins had been raised in the same household. If they had been separated at birth, it might have more credence to it. The fact that they were all raised in the same environment brings up the question of was it nature or was it nurture that was responsible for their homosexuality. Also, the fact is that all 110 were recruited from the homosexual community, which calls into question the legitimacy of the sample. The third study is that of the supposedly "gay gene" that was discovered in July of 1993 by Dr. Dean Hamer. He discovered genetic markers on the X chromosome of 33 of 40 non-identical homosexual twin brothers, supposedly proving the link to homosexuality. Again, a number of problems with this. The study’s never been replicated since then. Such a marker doesn’t automatically prove causation. For example, this marker on the genes might cause twin brothers to identify more with one another. It might cause them to engage in dangerous behavior. There are all kind of inclinations that this marker might delineate. In 1993, Dr. William Byne and Dr. Bruce Parsons, researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, reviewed all of the evidence for the biological causation of homosexuality, including Dr. LeVay’s, Doctors Bailey and Pillard, and they concluded in the *Archives of General Psychiatry* that, quote, "There is no evidence at the present to substantiate a biologic theory of sexual orientation." Science has not yet proved a genetic link to homosexuality. Suppose that at some future date such a genetic link is proved. My response to that would be: so what if there is a genetic link to homosexuality? The fact is there have been studies that have suggested there is a genetic link to alcoholism, a genetic link to violence. I was reading this week some suppose there’s a genetic link to adultery. Are we willing to excuse all of those behaviors on the basis of "my genes made me do it"? I don’t think so. When you think about it, doesn’t the Bible teach that all sin is inherited? All sin is genetic. We got it from our parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from their parents, and you trace it all the way back to Adam. Romans 5:12 says, "For what through one man, Adam, sin came into the world and death spread to all men because all sinned." We have all inherited the sin virus. I believe that sin virus manifests itself in different ways in different people. For some people, their genetic link to sin makes them inclined to alcoholism, or to violence, or to adultery, and quite possibly some people are inclined toward homosexuality. Regardless of the sin tendency you’ve inherited, Christ came to die for you so you don’t have to stay the same way you are. The Bible says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, behold all things have become new. No matter what you’ve inherited, no matter what pulls at you, you are not stuck. In Christ, you become a new creation. God is not finished with any of us. So don’t lose heart. Keep praying, keep loving, and keep trusting the one who makes all things new. For 30 years now, Pathway to Victory has been willing to walk into awkward spaces, boldly addressing the tender, uncomfortable subjects most programs tiptoe around. We preach biblical truth, even when it’s not politically correct. That’s been our heartbeat for three decades, and friend, we intend to continue for decades to come. We can’t do it alone. God fuels this ministry through people like you. Would you be willing to give a generous 30th-anniversary gift to Pathway to Victory? 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David J. Mullins: Today, when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory, you’re invited to request Dr. Jeffress’s brand-new book, *Seven Lessons from My 70 Years*. Call 866-999-2965, visit ptv.org, or text PTV to 78800. In celebration of 30 years of ministry, we’ve gathered Dr. Jeffress’s most requested messages from the past three decades into a complete teaching series called *Truth You Can Trust*. We’ll send it to you on DVD video and MP3 format audio disc as a thank you for your especially generous gift of $75 or more. One more time, call 866-999-2965 or make your request online at ptv.org. You could write to us if you’d like: P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. That’s P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I’m David J. Mullins, inviting you back next time for part two of the message, "What to Say to Those Who Are Gay." That’s Friday, here on Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. The Apostle Paul sailed these waters, walked these streets, and the church was never the same. I’m inviting you to follow in Paul’s footsteps on the Pathway to Victory Journeys of Paul cruise through the stunning Greek islands, into ancient Ephesus and many other destinations as well. This is purposeful travel at its finest. Set sail May 14, 2027. Call 888-280-6747 or visit ptv.org. You made it to the end of today’s podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we’re so glad you’re here. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. One of the most impactful ways you can give is by becoming a Pathway Partner. Your monthly gift will empower Pathway to Victory to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and help others become rooted more firmly in his word. To become a Pathway Partner, go to ptv.org/donate or you can follow the link in our show notes. We hope you’ve been blessed by today’s podcast from Pathway to Victory. Oh, and one last thing before we go: don’t forget to reserve your spot on the 2027 Journeys of Paul Mediterranean cruise. Cabin spots are going quickly. Just picture yourself aboard the beautiful Celebrity Infinity sailing roundtrip from Athens. Each day you’ll gather for biblical teaching, worship, and fellowship, and then you’ll step ashore to stand where Paul stood in Ephesus and walk the streets of Thessaloniki, where his letters still speak to the church today. Nine unforgettable nights with more biblical destinations along the way. Every meal prepared, every detail taken care of, plus the joy of traveling with like-minded believers. There’s also an optional pre-cruise extension in Athens. To book your spot, go to ptv.org.