“No sin is too deep or too difficult for God. What he begins in our union with Christ shall continue until we are fully in his holy likeness, but in every believer sanctification is underway. No sin gets a pass. A person who supposes he can be a Christian with lifelong lust for a person of the same sex has deluded himself. He should tremble at the deceit gripping his mind and flee to Christ. “Christian homosexuals” are playing with fire – hellfire. Hebrews 12 reminds Christians that our God is a consuming fire. The Lord is a fire that purifies or a fire that destroys.”
(David H. Linden – Aquila Report) The heart is an incubator of sin, thus the heart producing sin is as sinful as the sin it produces. The lust often called same-sex attraction (SSA) is simply homosexual sin in the heart. These days it is not cricket to call it an abomination, even though the Lord does.
His name is Jesus, because he saves his people from their sin. The Lord does not save people in sin but from it, reaching into the depths of a sinner’s heart. In every person who has trusted in Jesus Christ, the Spirit tackles sin of every kind. The Savior so reorients the heart that it is impossible for a converted sinner to live and think as he once did.
Conversion includes more than forgiveness. Every new believer receives the Spirit as a gift from God who goes to work to destroy our sinful nature and write God’s law on our hearts, even leading us to walk according to it. So no one can be gay and Christian without an unrelenting battle. The Holy Spirit does not quit, and he does not seek to reform our old nature. In his patient way and at his sovereign pace, he produces holiness with the goal of full likeness to Christ in every son and daughter God has adopted. Without exception, this deliverance begins in this life. If the Lord lets sin sit comfortably in anyone, it is proof that such a person has never been admitted into the family of God. If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons (Hebrews 12:8).
In the Presbyterian Church in America we lack full agreement whether same-sex attraction is deadly sin. There are many who profess to be homosexual Christians who think that same-sex lust may persist for a lifetime without relief, and that that is not so bad as long as the person is celibate. There is such little apparent need of repentance in homosexual circles that the need to renounce this sin is muted (ever hear of a call to repent of SSA at a Revoice conference?)
Instead, “homosexual Christians” are announcing when they should be renouncing. What is expected of those who oppose this movement is that we should, in good Christian charity, simply leave things alone, for there is no real sin being committed. It is only desire, and we all have temptations, don’t we? The testimony of gays who have the PCA’s ear is that this desire is permanent, and they do not want us to leave out that science agrees.[i] Supposedly, God has salvation and change from this sin on hold – if indeed it can even be called sin at all.
Meanwhile the Scriptures keep sounding away on the natural condition of our hearts: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person …” (Matthew 15:19,20). We are to put off our former manner of life, which is corrupt through deceitful desires, including sexual appetite for those of the same gender. And in its place we are to be renewed by putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22-24). Such a change of heart is the promise of the gospel. Holiness comes to us graciously when we believe in Christ and thereby enter a new life to love God from the heart.
Sexual immorality, in fact any impurity, must not even be named among us. In the “opinion” of the apostle, no one who is sexually impure has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ. Let no Revoice conference deceive you with empty words; because of such impurities the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Don’t join them in darkness; we are light in the Lord (see Ephesians 5:3-8). Though none can say, “I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin” (Proverbs 20:9), God loves purity of heart (Proverbs 22:11) and urges us to keep our hearts with all diligence (Proverbs 4:23), while all along he fosters purity in us.
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