Elephant 3: Antihomosexual

The #1 negative opinion associated with the church and Christians is antihomosexual. I spoke on this 2 weeks ago. The perception is that we not only hate the sin but we hate the sinner too. I know that we say the opposite but as always, actions speak louder than words. It seems that being gay is the one thing that we want people to denounce and give up before they come to Christ. We have had 2 gay couples attend our church. One of them came for 2 or 3 weeks and then decided that this was not for them. The other couple received Christ and God changed their lives. One of the ladies is now married and is raising a family. The other young lady followed the Lord in baptism and then shortly after that, moved away. I don't know how she is living her life now but I do know that she is living it with Christ. I also feel that all four of these people felt love and acceptance from our church instead of fear and judgment. This allowed time for God to do His perfect work. I think we need to change four things if we are to change the way we are perceived in this area. 1) Compassion must replace fear. If "perfect love casts out fear" as it says in 1 John, then I must assume that fear casts out love. We fear their "agenda", we fear their "disease", we fear their influence, we fear their presence and because we fear, we cannot reach out in love. Love is the most powerful force in the universe and as the bumper sticker on Joe's car says, "Love Wins." 2) Embrace should replace stance. We seem to have a need to make sure that they know that we think it is wrong. Our job is not to convince them that their wrong or to change their minds but to represent a loving Christ and an irresistible Gospel. 3) This leads me to think that we need to trade winning arguments for winning hearts. Enough said. 4) We must not associate political victories with spiritual victories. This is a hard one and some of you won't agree with this but the more we want to legislate homosexuality the further we push the gay community from the Gospel. God did not call us to fight political battles but to fight for the hearts of men and women. Jesus asked what have we profited if we gain the whole world yet lose our own souls. Would He also say what have we profited if we win our political battles yet lose the souls of men? I will talk more about this on the next elephant.