 Hey, thank you. Good morning. I sure appreciate getting a chance to talk with you about the challenge we're facing today as believers when we know and love people who identify as lesbian or as gay or as transgendered and we are wanting to show grace and we are wanting to speak truth and we are very aware of all of the political and the cultural controversy surrounding it and in the midst of all of that, we are so often asking ourselves, how do I respond to a culture which is at a dizzying speed revising all definitions of normality? I'd like to talk about that response in context of my own story. I would like to talk about the impact these issues have had on me and I'd particularly like to talk about what members of the body of Christ did for me to help me walk in truth and grow. I love the way the psalmist puts it in Psalm 107 too. You know the verse very well. Give thanks to the Lord. Why? For he is good. And his mercies endure forever. I like that. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so. When we speak of the goodness of God, we are saying our own so. Like I was so messed up or life can get so weird and God is so good. I'd like to talk about my own so this morning and I'd like to talk about it in relation to how we as believers stand for grace and truth. Just a few months ago, we had Pride Month the month of June when there was national celebration of homosexuality. The messaging was everywhere. TV ads, department stores, billboards, talk shows. And the message seemed to be two-fold. Gay is good and if you don't agree, something's wrong with you. In fact, it seems every week somebody new is coming out of the closet and declaring themselves to be lesbian or gay. And the pressure on the church is becoming relentless. Now that's one side of the story. There's a whole other side to the story we don't hear often. It's something Paul alluded to when he wrote to the Corinthian church around AD 53. And in 1 Corinthians 6, 9 to 11, Paul said, don't kid yourselves. There are certain behaviors that exempt people from entering into the kingdom of God. Adultery, idolatry, fornication, prostitution, homosexuality. And then he said to the church, and such were past tense, some of you. So what was he saying? Even then, within the body of Christ, there were people who had repented of all of these sins, homosexuality included, and now they were in communion with God and with all of the saints in the church. So this idea of people leaving LGBT behind, why, that's nothing new. It's at least as old as AD 53, AD 54. There have always been, and there always will be, people who realize two things. First, they will realize, oh my gosh, I am attracted to the same sex. I am what people call gay. But then at some point they will also realize, oh my gosh, this isn't what God intended. This isn't what I was created for. That happens because their lives were interrupted. And that is a concept I love, God the Interruptor. In fact, one of my favorite phrases in all the Bible is, but God, but God. And that shows up in both testaments where there will be a description of something bleak. Israel blew it again, but God. Or Saul of Tarsus was persecuting the church. But God, God the Interruptor. We talk about Jehovah Jireh, the Lord who provides. Or Jehovah Rafa, the Lord who heals. I like to think about Jehovah interrupt us. The Lord who interrupts us. Because if you look at scripture, what is it if not a history of God looking on humanity and saying we interrupt this program to say? And what does he say? Well, I'll tell you what he never says. He never says, hi, I just wanna tell you, everything's great the way it is. Don't change anything. Keep the status quo. I love everything you're doing. That is never the way it works. What happens when God interrupts an individual or a group? He says in essence, you've settled for less than what I have. I wanna call you out. I wanna bring you into more. I wanna make you into something else. I wanna rename you. I wanna reclaim you. I am interrupting your life to make it what I always intended it to be. In fact, wow, I love the way Paul phrased that to the Ephesians when he said, according as he has chosen us in him, what before the foundation of the world? Which means that before anything which is created was created, God looked at you and said, yeah, I'm going to see that you are born and then I'm gonna pursue you and I'm gonna interrupt you and I'm gonna give you the faith and the conviction to come to me and believe the promises of my son and I will make you mine. That is the God who interrupts. Yeah. We've all been interrupted, haven't we? That's how it all happened. That's one of the reasons we're never strangers to each other because we know we share one thing if we share nothing else we share this. At some point in our lives God interrupted us, placed his spirit within us. Jesus introduced himself to us, gave us the faith to believe his promises and something happened to us and there we are, members of the same body. That began for me when I was 16 years old as they say at the beginning of Star Wars a long time ago in a four-way galaxy. I'm 64 now so you know what I mean. Back in 1971 at the age of 16 I was already a terrible mess. I had survived routine molestation as a boy. I had developed a drug habit which began when I was 12. I was taking LSD, methadrine, barbiturates and hash heesh on a weekly basis, getting drunk as often as I could and by the time I was 16 I had also identified myself as gay. In 1971 which was a very controversial thing to do. It was a secret identification. I certainly didn't come out of the closet and declare myself I could have gotten you killed in those days but I did go out on weekends to the Hollywood area to meet up with adult men and I became very promiscuous but had a bit of a double life going on because I also was a member of my high school fraternity, dated girls and one girl in particular started showing up with football games we'd have at the park across from our school and she would watch us and eventually she asked me out to a backwards dance. I was very flattered, she was beautiful, one of our homecoming princesses. So I took her to the dance, we had a great time, I dropped her off, I said I would love to see you again, she said that's great, I'd like to see you too because I want to invite you to my church and I said church which I knew nothing about, I mean I was not raised Christian but I was pretty sure church is a place that you went if you were very old or very ugly, it was one of the two. And here's this babe asking me to church so for that reason alone I thought I'm intrigued, sure, let's go. That Sunday we drove from Long Beach out to a little building in Costa Mesa called Calvary Chapel where a man named Chuck Smith was preaching to a bursting at the seams building chock full of newly saved hippies who I thought were acting like maniacs but I was very attracted. In those days if you're familiar with the history of the Jesus movement, my word, you had to get there an hour early if you wanted to sit in a pew otherwise you sat on the floor. And as a non-believer to walk into Calvary Chapel in those days was to walk into a force, not knowing necessarily what it was but you felt that it was tangible. The fervor, the love, the sense of awe in the presence of God. And I was hungry for whatever it was they had and when Chuck took to the pulpit he explained to me what they had and this was the first time I had ever heard the gospel of Jesus Christ explained plainly and what happened to me is what probably happened to you as well, conviction. I became very aware I fall so short of what God intends me to be. I need this Jesus but ah, there's the rub he is going to require of me. Because I heard Chuck say very plainly if you want to come to Jesus and follow him you will take up your cross and follow him and I didn't like that concept. And I wrestled for weeks under conviction realizing that means I will have to abandon being gay, I will have to abandon the porn, abandon the sex, abandon the dope, abandon the booze, abandon this licentious way of living. Am I really ready to give up what has brought me so much pleasure and medicated so much of my emotional pain for this unseen God but the conviction of the spirit became relentless and finally I did say yes after I spoke with this girl and who had been sweet enough to take me to church was continuing to see me. We seemed to like each other a lot but I had to explain to her finally there is something going on that you don't know about. I said I'm gay. And she said no you're not. You play football. Well it was 1971 so you know. I said thank you for clearing that up. She said okay you got your problems I got mine but you still need Jesus. Within another week I was born again. The Lord drew me. I said yes. Oh, oh now everybody who's been a part of anything I guess has to be careful because you talk about the revival of your time like it's the good old days and that's what we have to get back to and so forth and that's not true, that's not true. There's always something new God is doing. Those days were something. We lived in expectancy. We were sure the Lord was coming back Tuesday before lunch. So get moving and we did. I mean ministries boom evangelism boom and I was all over the map. I mean I was full of zeal. I abandoned the poor and I put away all sexual activity. I put down the dope. I put down the booze. I even quit smoking which for me was like growing a third eyeball. It was very hard to kick that habit but I did. And I was on fire in church five, six times a week evangelizing anything that breathed and came near me and if it tried to get away from me I would grab it and bring it back on fire. But like many a believer I wrestled with secret temptations and I waited for those temptations to go away. I said, God if I belong to you remove all of these feelings from me that I don't want to have. See I didn't know enough of the word by then to know that the struggle between the flesh and the spirit according to Galatians is biblically guaranteed. So Paul said the spirit wars against the flesh the flesh wars against the spirit. Why? This is the fallen nature we carry around. It no longer owns us but what did we do with it? We reckon it dead. We crucify it. We resist it. We don't yield to it because it no longer has power over us but important there is a difference between the presence of sin and the power of sin. The presence of sin is guaranteed. Sin is in the environment. It's in our flesh. It's in the world. Satan seduces us towards it. Sin is present. But Paul told the Roman sin shall no longer have dominion over you. There was the difference. I felt that the presence of sin meant that somehow I was still failing God. And so I did what so many believers foolishly do. I kept it to myself. I never admitted to anyone I had temptations. I never asked for prayer. I never brought it into the light. I kept pushing it down saying please God if I really belong to you relieve me of all sexual sinful temptations so that I can really serve you. And after about six years I said, all right then forget it. I'm sick of this. I still have feelings I don't wanna have. And I've prayed and I've studied and I've fasted and I've done everything I thought I was supposed to do to make them all go away and I still feel temptation. And I'm tired of the struggle. And so I did something I think a lot of people again foolishly do. I gave myself permission. Now this to me is such an important concept. Have you ever noticed how sometimes we talk about sin as though it's an accident? Like I slipped. I fell. I all of a sudden found myself like I was walking down the street and fornication mugged me. It wasn't my fault. It just happened. Yeah, yeah. No. No, I made a decision. Now I had been a struggler. A struggler. A struggler is someone who realizes there is a sinful temptation and they are struggling against it. Now when you're struggling you're not yielding. If a man is using pornography he's not struggling with pornography. He's transgressing. He is using pornography. If you want to punch somebody out and you punch somebody out you're not struggling with punching somebody out. You are in fact punching somebody out. To struggle is to be tempted and to say no and experience the discomfort and the oh flesh versus spirit. I had been a struggler. I finally had enough of that. I gave myself permission to use pornography. Now that was in 1978, seven years after I'd been born again. At that time there was no internet but there were things that they called adult bookstore. Ridiculous name. They're not adults. They're very childish. They should be called childish bookstores but here's what's chilling to me though. Not what I did, which was terrible. It was unclean. It was rebellious. It was all wrong. What's chilling is how easy it was to do it. Didn't take anything. Just a simple decision. You know a lot of people look at what happened to King David when he saw Bathsheba and made the decision and they speculate and I guess there's a lot we can speculate. He should have been at war with Israel. Maybe he was middle aged and having some kind of a crisis in those ones. That all may be true. I'm not sure that it is because I know from personal experience there doesn't have to be a backstory to our sin. All it takes is the capacity to make a decision free will and the wrong decision being made and that's all I had to do. Gave myself permission. Walked into the adult bookstore, gorged on the unclean imagery, poisoned my mind and in that darkened frame of mind I kept giving myself permission. Like somebody who says I will only have one Twinkie and they wind up eating 23. I said since I've gotten into porn I like my friend's wife. I started going out with her behind his back. We had an affair that ended in a pregnancy. She aborted our child. I thought I've crossed all the lines. I hereby give myself permission to go to gay bars. And that's when I became what I often call a moderate. Now I know this lifestyle doesn't sound very moderate. I don't mean that. But a moderate lesbian woman or gay man is one who doesn't have a political agenda. Isn't all aggressive and in your face and making demands. It's just somebody who's saying I'm gay. I wanna live my life. I'm not gonna do you any harm. This is just who I am. And I believe that's the case with most people who identify as lesbian or gay. They're friends of ours, neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, family members. They are in sin. As many people we know are in many different types of sin. Most of them are non-believers. And because they are non-believers, what is our goal with a non-believer? Whether they're gay or straight or anything in between, we want them saved. Goodness sakes, the problem with someone who's involved in homosexuality generally is not that they're homosexual, is that they're unsaved. That's the root issue. So just as Jesus evangelized a woman who was involved in sexual sin by focusing on who he was and what he promised, so we give the gospel to those who are what we would call moderate. And that's when I said gay is no longer the secret I will keep. It is now my primary identifying characteristic. Hi, I'm Joe, I'm gay. That was a primary identifying characteristic of mine. For about a year. And then after a year of going to gay bars, trying different relationships with men, living out that life, I realized, hmm, I miss something. I miss church, I miss fellowship, I miss communion with other believers, but I'm not ready to give up homosexuality. What do I do? And that's when somebody came to me and said, well, you don't have to make a choice. There's a church in the area where you can be both openly gay and openly Christian. And now I was intrigued. And that fall, I visited what was called the Metropolitan Community Church. That was just about the only religious organization in America at that time, which preached that homosexuality and Christianity could be compatible. And when I walked into that church, not sure whether or not it really could be a Christian place, I was rather delighted to see, oh my gosh, the choir is singing an anthem by gospel artist, I know. And the worship choruses they're singing are choruses I sang at Calvary Chapel. And the people here are lifting their hands. And honestly, if it wasn't for the fact that plenty of them were couples of the same-sex holding hands, I wouldn't have known I was in a gay church. I would have thought I'm in a Bible-believing church where people love the Lord. And this to me is a very important point. Virtually every person I knew in that church over the years, everyone who identified as a gay Christian and belonged to the gay church, we were all formers. Former Southern Baptist, former Calvary Chapel, former Assembly of God, former Lutheran, former Foursquare, we had all been born again in Bible-believing churches. We had all wrestled privately with homosexual temptations. And frequently, we had not heard too many answers within the churches to what to do with such a struggle. So we started looking for answers from the world and we did exactly what David said a man is blessed if he does not do, he does not walk in the Council of the Ungodly. I walked in the Council of the Ungodly. And when I started listening to secular psychologist and secular sociologist telling me that homosexuality was normal, I thought that's just what I wanna hear. And then when I walked into a church where they said gay and God are compatible, that too is exactly what I wanted to hear. And that was the first time I heard the pro-gay interpretation of the scripture and began identifying myself as a gay Christian, a gay religious believer. If you know someone who identifies as a gay Christian or a lesbian Christian, you will probably find that they believe the basics of the Bible. They simply believe that we have misinterpreted what the Bible says about homosexuality. And I found that to be a very convenient interpretation of the Bible. Because as you know, if you choke the Bible hard enough, you can make it say whatever you want it to say. My gosh, I remember just a few years back, I had a couple come into my office and they said, Joe, God has shown us, it's okay for us to smoke marijuana. Because he told Adam and Eve, take every herb of the field. So all we're doing is fulfilling Genesis. I thought that's wonderfully convenient. It is so often true that when we are in a rebellious frame of mind, we are susceptible to deception. I don't believe deception is an accident. I believe it happens to Christians. I believe Christians can be deceived. But I believe deception happens when we are already in a darkened or a rebellious frame of mind by which we are saying, I want what I want. And in that frame of mind, we are very susceptible to believing not what is true, but what we hope to be true. And what made it especially easy for me to hold on to that untruth was the fact that I really had been born again. And that I was among other people who really had been born again. And we still liked to talk about the Bible. In fact, over the years, I eventually joined the staff of that church and was on a regular basis preaching and teaching with the gay church. And most of what I preached and taught had nothing to do with homosexuality. It was expository Bible teaching. And because of all that, it was easy for me to say, if we love the Bible, if we believe the basic truths of Christianity, we must be right with God, rather than admitting the fact that you can be born again and be wrong. You can be born again and yet be carnal, backslidden, lukewarm, deceived, wrong. My goodness, when Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, that place was a mess. People getting drunk at communion, suing each other, wildly divided. Yet he didn't tell them, you're not saved, he said, you may be saved, but you are so wrong. So I held on to my identity as a gay Christian and tried so hard to make myself believe that the Bible would condone what I was saying. And as I did that, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I know what was happening. What I had learned under Chuck Smith's teaching, what I had studied in the word of God, plus the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the testimony of my own conscience, all of them were telling me, Joe, you are wrong. Now, what do you do when the Holy Spirit is convicting you and your conscience is testifying against you? You make a decision. I will listen and respond or I will block it out. I chose to block. Now, when you're choosing to block out the conviction of the spirit in your own conscience, the last thing you want is anybody saying anything to you that comes into agreement with what the Holy Spirit in your conscience are trying to convict you of. And so whenever a Christian would come to me and say, Joe, are you sure what you're doing is right? Joe, are you sure this is okay in God's sight? I would either respond with la la la la la la la la, which was convenient or I would argue and I would have my answers in place and I would appear very confident and then when they left, I would go back to my apartment, pull out a six pack and get drunk because I had to kill the discomfort I was feeling. A man who is not convinced he is right but is trying to convince himself he is right can become a very angry man. And that is when I went from being a religious gay person to becoming a militant gay person, a militant gay person. A militant gay individual has a two-fold agenda. The agenda to normalize homosexuality convince everyone it is normal and the agenda to silence anyone who objects to that normalization. That is the heart and soul of the modern gay rights movement to normalize homosexuality and silence anybody who objects to that normalization. That's why we're feeling tensions between the church and the culture over this particular issue because what happened over the past four to five decades, the culture was influenced by institutions that influence the individuals. From the 60s through the 70s into the early 80s, the major influencing institutions, the psychiatric industry, the education industry, the entertainment industry, the news industry, all four of those pillars of influence shifted to a solidly pro-gay position. The culture under their influence largely shifted to a pro-gay position as well. Now the institutions that influence the culture and the culture itself shifted over here. Now those institutions and the culture are looking at the church and they're saying, okay, guys, your turn. You shift. And the church is largely saying, oh, we can't. We're not trying to start a fight. We're not picking a battle. The reason I believe the tension is escalating between the church and the culture over this issue is because the church is simply saying, we cannot in good conscience go where you want us to go. We are not imposing anything on you. You, however, are imposing something on us and we were saying we simply can't. And for that reason, the tension is escalating. I joined the forces that wanted to say to the church, you must change because I had sin in my life by which God was saying to me, Joe, you must change. And I was saying, no, I won't change. So everybody who was saying I should change, you must change. And that's when I started identifying as a militant, going to college campuses and debating Christians over this issue and marching in the parades and carrying the banner and saying basically, anybody who disagrees with me is a bigot. And from that position of gay militancy, I found a cause that I could support and be energized by and something about that felt very good indeed until about late 1983 and then something started to deteriorate. My confidence started to lessen. My energy started to sap and the weirdest thing was my life was going actually pretty well by then in the sense that I had a very good job I enjoyed. I loved my apartment. I had a very active social life. I was healthy. I was at that time had taken up serious bodybuilding and was pumping like crazy. And I know, like I said, a long time ago in a far away galaxy, but way back then, yeah, getting pretty buff, but waking up in the middle of the night hyperventilating or being at the office and all of a sudden starting to cry and thinking, what the heck is this? Am I having a nervous breakdown? I'm constantly walking in dread of something. And then in January of 1984, I got home after a workout and plopped down in front of the TV and turned to Christian television, which I still watched. And there I saw a buddy of mine I had known from many years earlier who was in ministry and he was testifying very honestly about his own struggle with alcohol. I never knew he had a problem with that, but he did. And he described how he secretly indulged his problem and then the problem grew when he started covering it up and then it finally started to overtake his life and he realized I have to bring it into the light and that's when I clicked off the TV and said, my gosh, wait a minute, I never brought it into the light. When I was a part of the Bible believing church, when I was with Calvary Chapel, I never said to anyone, would you please pray with me about these feelings I have and these temptations I have going on. I never trusted the church enough to be honest with the church. I was already so sure that my sin separated me from anybody else that nobody would understand me and so in that frame of mind, I had sat on all of my struggles and that's when I realized I was never as honest about this issue as he was about his. So I turned out the lights in my apartment and I knelt down and I prayed and I said, God, if I've been wrong all these years, I am finally ready to admit it and then the hard questions started coming. Just because I was loved by God, did that mean I was right with God? No, it didn't. Just because some Christians didn't handle this issue very well, did that mean that the whole church was wrong? No, it didn't. Was every objection to homosexuality really a statement of homophobia? No, it wasn't. And maybe most important, had I really been believing in what I was doing or had I been hoping to make myself believe in what I was doing? And then it all fell apart. And in the middle of the repentance and the tears and the softening of my own heart, I realized the great sin in my life and it wasn't being gay, it wasn't using porn, it wasn't being promiscuous, it was the great sin which happened in that moment in 1978 when I in essence made a God out of Joe Dallas. Once I had decided that my personal pleasure was more important to me than his will, once I had decided that I would give myself permission to do what I wanted to do, regardless of how he felt about it, that was when my heart hardened and I said, Joe is henceforth on the throne. And I gotta tell you, repenting of homosexuality that was instant, that was relatively simple, repenting of making the God of Joe Dallas, still working on that one, not so easy. That was when I became repentant, repentant. A person who struggles with same-sex attraction and is repentant is someone who walks into our church and says, I agree, you don't need to tell me it's a sin, I know it's a sin, I repent of that sin. Now what, where do I belong? What can I expect, what do I do? That's very much like Saul of Tarsus knocked off his high horse saying one of the most important things you can say to God at a time like that, Lord, what would you have me to do? I knew what I had to do. I had to let the people in my life know what had just happened. I had to tell all my friends in the gay community, I have come to realize this is a sin, I can no longer be part of it, that went well. For obvious reasons, I lost most of my gay friends, relocated from Long Beach to Orange County because I knew if I stayed where I was, there were too many triggers, too many convenient places I could go back to, it would be too easy to fall back and default to that behavior. So I relocated, got back into fellowship at Calvary and Costa Mesa in 1984, found a good biblical counselor, I was all alone, but at least my life was back on track. And that was when I walked into the church and I realized, okay, I need to get into fellowship here, but this time we're gonna do it differently. I'm not gonna pretend I don't have problems, I'm gonna admit my problems. And so I had to say to the guys who invited me to join their softball team and join their Bible studies and come be with them over the weekend for their barbecues and join the worship community choir there at Calvary Chapel. When they invited me to all of that, I said, I would love to, but I need you to know something, I've just walked away from seven years of gay activism. I've had hundreds of partners, I probably have AIDS, I didn't, but at that time the test wasn't available, I figured I was a good candidate for AIDS. I said, I've got weird feelings that most of you guys cannot relate to. I've been places you would never think of going. I've got desires I wish I didn't have. I'm living obediently, I wanna do it right, but I cannot pretend that I am free of all weird wayward temptations and conflicts and I wanna have that upfront from the beginning and the redeemed of the Lord said, so? These guys were great. They said, gee, Joe, you have struggles. That's amazing. We can't relate to that. You have thoughts you wish you didn't have, desires you'd rather not have, fantasies and longings that you know you can't give into, but they're there otherwise. Wow, that's really weird. We can't imagine what that's like. You know what was so beautiful about that? They didn't go either extreme. They didn't reject me by saying, oh man, the sin that you've been involved in is too freaky. We don't want anything to do with you. They didn't go there and I wasn't really afraid they would. I duped it out with people like that before I could handle that. What I was afraid of was, oh, they're gonna patronize me. They're gonna make me their pet project. They're gonna treat me like I'm the elephant man coming to the church and I'm their little thing they're gonna work on. They didn't do that either. They basically said, okay, you got your stuff, we got ours. And they said in essence, we will ask no more of you and no less of you than we ask of ourselves. Get into the word daily. Develop your prayer life. Be in fellowship with us. Be honest with us and we'll be honest with you. Don't give in to the temptations you have and lean on us when you need somebody to lean on and we will lean on you when we have our temptations as well and let's seek God together and become the men we're meant to be. Wow. And that is the complicated secret to discipling someone who repents of homosexuality. You do it the way you disciple anybody else. That's all. Let me digress just for a moment by pointing out if current trends continue, ministries like mine are gonna be shut down. We serve people who want to repent of homosexuality. The state of California has already passed a resolution saying Christian leaders and counselors should not tell gays and lesbians they can change. That's only a hop skip and a jump from laws being passed saying counselors cannot tell gays and lesbians they can change. Which means that gays or lesbians who wanna change the last place they're gonna be able to go is gonna be the local church and you know what? That's fine with me. Cause that's where the real healing happens. I've often thought the body of Christ probably doesn't realize half the time it's own potential but what we can do for each other is amazing. Because while the sin of the flesh I had repented of there was still the damage to the soul that needed to be healed and through my interaction with the people at church that healing came. One thing we do for each other in the body of Christ through our love, through our respect, through our care of each other we challenge the lies that we have believed and I believe many of us have had lies put on us. Malestation puts lies on you. Rejection, abuse, weird things that happen that cause you to think things about yourself that really are not true. I'm unacceptable. I'm too weird, I'm too vile, I'm too loathsome and then you get into the body of Christ and through the interaction with other members of the body what happens? We are the agents used by God for healing. The soul is healed, the flesh is denied, the spirit grows, we're being sanctified. It happens and as that was happening I found to my own surprise that there was one young woman in particular that I kept finding myself more and more attracted to wanting to see more and more of, talking to more and more and finally realizing I don't just like her as a sister, I want her. I feel something for her. So I finally got the nerve to ask her out and then realized now what have I done? I'm gonna have to tell her the truth. I can't let the poor lady date me and not know where I've been. So on our second date I dumped it all on her and that went well too. She said, let's take our time, we did. We dated a year and a half before I proposed, a year and a half later. In 1987 we were married. She became my wife of 32 years. And counting, isn't the bride pretty? Yeah, that's what I call insane amazing grace. I mean, come on, after everything I've done I get that? No, there was any justice God would have given me Ursula the sea witch and said, okay, Joe, there, that's yours, that's what you deserve, but nope. What worked for me was a three-fold investment, a three-fold investment. The investments bringing change were an investment in my intimacy with God, investment in my allies and investment in the lifestyle of stewardship, investment in intimacy with God. Jesus said, you love me, keep my commandments. How do we love him? How do we know him? What I realized was I can't just make myself love him. I can't just decide, oh, okay, I'm gonna love him, but I could make myself know him. I could apply myself to reading the Word and hearing from him, praying and communing with him and what happens when you hear from somebody and commune with them, you know them. You can't know God without loving him. To know him is to love him. To love him is to obey him. Investing in intimacy with God. Investing in my allies, the author of Hebrews said, Hebrews 13.3, exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened in your hearts through the deceitfulness of sin, left alone, isolated. And we can be isolated even in church. We start kidding ourselves and making compromises, which is why we open ourselves up to mutual exhortation. And finally, a lifestyle of stewardship. I love the way Paul put this to the Thessalonians. First Thessalonians, four, three to four, I came to cling to practicing this when he said, this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from fornication, Greek word for general sexual sin, and that each of you learn to possess your vessel with honor. Learn to possess your vessel with honor, this body, this mind, and all that it contains, the emotions, the gifts, the responses, everything. Well, you're a manager of that. You're not the owner. Because Paul told the Corinthian church, you're not your own, you've been bought with a price, glorify God with your body and spirit. They are God's, but you are the manager, you've been entrusted with that vessel. You know what you and I have got? We've got a date with the judgment seat of Christ. We will stand before him and we will give an account for how we have managed these vessels he entrusted us with. So now when I'm tempted and I am, I would have to say in fairness, homosexuality does not really pose a temptation to me, but I'm never gonna say, oh, it never could. No, no, because I take Paul seriously when he said, if a man thinks he stands, let him take heed lest he fall. But there are plenty of other temptations, aren't there? You overcome one particular temptation and what do you find? A thousand other ones you have to deal with. But what I hope I've learned, what I still love learning, is that every temptation resisted becomes an act of worship. What did we do this morning? You know, we yielded our bodies, didn't we? Mouth, hands, mind, everything, we yielded it. Well, every urge I have to sin when I say no to that, I'm basically saying, Lord, I love you. I choose you. I crave this, but I choose you. And hereby, by conforming my body to your will, I worship you. Whereby sin resisted becomes an act of love rather than just an act of drudgery. My story, an ugly one in many ways, is very, very, very common. There are thousands of Christian women and men and young people sitting in our churches who silently wrestle with homosexual temptation. It is not a normal temptation. Most of us don't relate to it, but it exists nonetheless. So often when they sit on that temptation, they wonder, do I dare ever let anybody in my church know that I wrestle with this? What I am hoping is that we never succumb to the temptation to compromise on either grace or truth. When we compromise on grace, we become Phariseeical. Nobody will respond to us. When we compromise on truth, we are of no use to anybody because nobody gets nice into heaven. They get loved into heaven by those who will preach the truth. Our challenge as we prepare ourselves to meet the people who will walk out of the sins the culture is telling them to celebrate is to be prepared for them with real Christlikeness, our refusal to compromise and a commitment to love. God grant that we never compromise on that commitment. Let me pray with you before we close. We mean that Father, we ask you grant that we never compromise on that commitment. Look on us now, we pray and we agree together that you will pour your spirit out upon the lesbian and gay and transgendered population around the world. You love them, seek them out, roar over them like the lion of Judah and call them to yourself. Make them dissatisfied with what they've settled for. Make them hungry for more and give them the faith Lord Jesus to believe your promises. When you say that anyone who comes to you you will in no wise cast out as you receive them, Lord give us the chance to receive them, bless us with wisdom, bless us with grace, discernment and love that we can be to them what you need us to be that they too can come into your kingdom and become what you want them to be. We ask all this in Jesus' name, amen.