Today we are talking about Identity and Gender and Sexuality, and the thing I want to just say up front is that while gender and sexuality are issues that are hotly debated in our society and culture today that these are not just issues to be solved, we are talking about people…

For example, Preston Sprinkle tells the story of Eric Borges in his book, “People to be Loved.”

Eric was raised in a conservative Christian home and after confiding in his parents that he was gay, they performed an exorcism on him and told him that he was disgusting, perverted, unnatural, and damned to hell.  They eventually kicked him out of the house.

Aside from the experience he had at home, he was physically, mentally, verbally, and emotionally assaulted at school.  People didn’t call him by his name.  Instead they just referred to him as “Faggot.”  Eric began to have chronic migraines, debilitating depression, suicidal thoughts, and a whole host of other mental and physical issues.  Eventually, Eric killed himself.

And this is just one person’s story out of thousands of people who have similar stories related to gender and sexuality struggles in their lives…

And so again, when we are talking about gender and sexuality we are not just talking about issues, we are talking about people.  People who were created in the image of God and have value in this world.  We are talking about kids, teenagers, and adults who as they begin to experience something different about them are confused and anxious and often feel like they have no safe place to turn out of fear for being bullied and/or losing friends, family, or their church.

We are talking about parents too…parents who when their teenager or adult son or daughter come out to them as gay or another gender are sometimes just as confused and anxious about what to do…and often don’t feel like they have anyone to turn to out of fear they might lose their friends or their church family too…And so, again we are talking about much more than an issue…we are talking about people…

People who are struggling with their identity and who they are and how they fit in this world…People who matter to God, who are precious to Him and have value and worth in His sight.  And so I hope that as we talk about this today that we will lead with compassion and grace as we look to God’s word & seek His truth for us as His people, His creation.

But when we talk about gender and sexuality today, we are living in a day and age where there is so much terminology that is being thrown around that it’s hard to keep up…now adays there is a difference in the way people talk about gender and biological sex…it used to be synonymous but over time, gender has come to refer to an internal feeling or sense of oneself.

And that has led to terms like transgender gender dysphoria, nonbinary gender or sometimes referred to as gender-fluid, pangender, or nonconforming…things that are probably familiar to our teens but for many of us have no idea what they mean.  So we have all of this new gender terminology but of course there are all kinds of discussions around sexuality as well and terms like homosexual, gay, queer, lesbian, and on and on.

And so as you can see, with all of these terms that are so prevalent in our culture today, these are identity issues.  People who are wrestling with who they are and how they identify themselves to the world, which is exactly what we’ve been talking about all summer…and what we’ve been saying is that we are not what other people say we are, we are not what we do, we are not what we feel is true about ourselves, or even what WE think about ourselves but rather we are WHO GOD SAYS WE ARE!  We are His creation, and the Creator gives definition to the creation…

So look at Genesis 1:27 for example…

27 God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Okay, so mankind is the only part of God’s creation that is made in His image.  Nothing else that He created was made in His image…just human beings.  So what is it that separates us from other creation?

Now, we’ve been using some diagrams all throughout this series to show as Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 that we are made up of a spirit, soul, and a body. 

And when you look around at creation, you can see a lot of God’s creation that has a body of course right?  Animals, birds, insects, etc have bodies just like we do. 

But I also think you could make the argument that some of God’s creation have souls has well.  (the Greek word Paul used for “soul” was psyche which we get our word “psychology” from and is a reference to our mind, thoughts, feelings…our personality). 

And I think we can make a case that animals (or at least some) have a soul.  I mean monkeys, apes, dogs for ex we can see displaying intelligence and thoughts and feelings…

But the one area that separates us from all other creation is that we have a spirit…

We are spiritual beings who were created to be in a spiritual union w/God whom would manifest His divine presence in the world through us.

Now that doesn’t mean of course that our souls and bodies are not important and that we separate our spirit as the important part of us and our bodies and souls as unimportant or even worse as evil as some people throughout history have done…No, because if God is going to manifest Himself through human beings, then our souls and bodies become the component by which He does that as this diagram shows…

So back to Genesis 1:27…God creates Adam as a male who He shared a spiritual union with to manifest Himself through Adam as a male which was not chosen by Adam but by God as His Creator.

And God also created Eve as a female who He also shared a spiritual union with to manifest Himself through her as a female which also was not chosen by her but by God as her Creator.

And so their identity was found in God and who He said they were and God was expressing Himself in them and through them until sin entered the world and broke everything…

And as we’ve been talking about throughout this series, the most important thing that was broken was the union with God…God as a holy and perfect being could no longer be in the presence of sin and Adam and Even were removed from His presence and experienced a spiritual death…as this diagram shows…

They were no longer able to draw on God as their Life Source and have Him manifesting Himself through them…they were on their own, having to find their own meaning, their own purpose, their own significance, and identity.

And they and everyone one of us born after this have had to do the same thing because of indwelling sin.  So with no life and identity at the very core of our beings, the only place we are left to look for life and identity is our souls and our bodies, right? 

And we’ve talked about this all throughout the series…we try to find it in our minds, what we think, or in our emotions by what we feel, or we try to find it in our bodies by what we experience or what we accomplish…

And some of us try to find it in our sexuality and our gender.  And that can look very different for each one of us…

For some of us it can mean we look to culture to see what defines the ultimate man or the ultimate woman and we work and we work to look like them, talk like them, act like them, and do “manly or womanly” things and we forge our identity around what culture says to be a man or a woman.  In other words, we are forming an identity around culturally accepted gender roles, looks, and behaviors.

For others of us it can be the opposite and we are looking to form our identity around the opposite of what culture has said to be manly or womanly…and we work to look like, act like, and talk like the opposite of our biological sex and we identify as another gender…

And that can come for some from a very deep rooted sense of feeling and thinking that they are in fact another gender trapped in the wrong body… and again b/c we are separated from God in our spirit where identity is found, we are having to rely on our feelings and our thoughts and our bodies to bring us that identity and try to find the life that we are missing because of our spiritual death.

But of course, it’s not just gender that we look for identity in as a result of the fall, some of us look to sexuality.  We identify ourselves as homosexual or we identity ourselves as bisexual or pansexual…again looking for something to identity us through what we are feeling or what we are thinking about ourselves or in our actions associated with sexual behaviors…

And so apart from God and our spiritual union with Him, we try to find life and identity in so many ways in this world…which is eventually what the apostle Paul was getting at in Romans 1… he says this in v. 25

25 They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself…

We all as sinners looked to creation in some way to find life and meaning and identity instead of finding it in God since we are separated from Him…And in this chapter of Romans Paul is being all inclusive of how we are all in the same boat…how we are all sinners and points out all kinds of outward behaviors that come from looking for life in our flesh instead of in our Creator himself…He mentions this in v. 29

29 Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. 30 They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning, and they disobey their parents.

So again, ALL kinds of ways we act out and behave as a result of sin in our lives and being separated from God and having to try to find life and meaning and purpose and an identity outside of God Himself as our Creator.  We try to find it in creation.  And we should notice again, we can ALL find ourselves in this passage somewhere…

BUT…for our discussion today I skipped over a couple of verses that I want to go back and read…Paul also says…

26 …Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. 27 And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.

So again, one of the ways people have tried to find life in the creation as opposed to the Creator is through same sex relations.  Now again, I will say it again, because I have noticed that we as Christians try to isolate these verses, that Paul listed a number of things…all kinds of ways we try to find life in the creation instead of the Creator…same sex relations is just one of them.

Paul’s point in this and all throughout the first few chapters of Romans is to show that we are all separated from God because of sin in our lives and to show us our need for Jesus.

10 “No one is righteous—not even one”…21 But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago. 22 We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are.

So the good news is that even though we were sinners and lost without God, He made a way through the death and resurrection of Jesus to have our sins forgiven and to be made right with Him again…to be joined back into a spiritual union with Him the way it was in the garden! 

And when we receive this gift of salvation by faith, we are completely forgiven for our sin and joined back into a spiritual union with Him where He begins to manifest Himself in us and through us with the created souls and bodies that He gave us…through our maleness and our femaleness as we talked about in Genesis.

And so what I want you to see is that salvation brings things back to the created order found in Genesis…

We have Life and meaning and purpose in the Creator now instead of having to find it in the creation…

We draw our identity from our Creator and not from the creation.

We are who He says we are and function in the way He created us to be as He works in us and through us as us (like we talked about last week)… but again that will be through the created order, and we see that (the creation order) being referred back to in Scripture to validate that…

In Matthew 19, Jesus was asked about divorce and the law and in His answer to them He didn’t point them back to the law but all the way back to the created order of things…look at what He said in v4…

4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’  5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

And so Jesus in His answer quotes from the creation account in Genesis. He quotes Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24…

And of course His main point is to show them that divorce is not part of God’s original design for marriage and that they couldn’t just divorce their wives for any reason…

BUT in his answer we do see that Jesus validates the created order of gender and sexuality being that of male and female and that a marriage union was also created to be between that of a man and a woman.

So this is one example of the New Testament referring back to the created order and it being relevant to His mission in and through us today…but let me just mention one more and it goes back to the same passage we were looking at in Romans 1. 

We didn’t talk about it, but commentators note over and over again that the way Paul wrote what he did there points us back to the creation account in Genesis over and over again. 

Look at what Dr. Preston Sprinkle from the Center for Faith, Sexuality, & Gender writes:

Paul salts his argument with many allusions to the Creation account in Gen. 1-2. For instance, Paul refers to God as “the Creator” in Ro. 1:25, which points the reader back to Genesis. Earlier Paul said that God has been revealing himself “ever since the creation of the world” (1:20). Again, this alerts the reader to Gen. 1-2. Paul also uses gender specific terms to describe men and women, that is “males” (arsen) and “females” (theleiai) in Ro. 1:26-27. These two terms were first paired in the Greek translation of Gen. 1:27, a passage that highlights the different genders of humanity: “God created man, according to the image of God he created him male (arsen) and female (thelu) he created them” (Gen. 1:27)…

What’s the point? It seems that Paul draws attention to God’s creation of humans into different biological sexes. Therefore, Paul considers same-sex relations to be a departure from God’s intention in creation…The same-sex acts in 1:26-27 violate gender boundaries, which goes against the way they were created as males and females.

So again, just like Jesus referred back to the creation account to show relevance for today, Paul does the same thing.  When Jesus restores us spiritually at the moment we put our faith in Him for salvation, He restores us to the created order of things and the way He will manifest Himself to the world through us as either single males and females or through a marriage union of 1 man and 1 woman.

Now some of you right now are going, “See, I told you so!” and it’s settled in your mind, but others of you are going, “Well, I see what you are saying about what the bible communicates about this, but then why do I (if it relates to you) or others have such strong struggles and feelings associated with gender identity or things like same-sex attraction?”

And so I want to say a few things about this…

First, I think some of us need to see that this is possible.  In other words, for some of us as Christians we think that it is not possible for a true Christian to experience same-sex attraction or to have gender identity struggles…

But listen, we hear this all the time from people who are Christians and talk about how they have prayed and prayed and prayed that God would take away their confusion about their gender and prayed and prayed and prayed that God would take away their same-sex attraction…and it’s real.

And so let me show you something we talked about earlier this summer.  I showed you this diagram once…

This diagram shows how before Christ we are spiritually dead because of sin being a part of our nature (at the spirit level and running all the way through our souls and bodies)…

But then I showed you this diagram…

And this diagram shows how after we put our faith in Jesus for salvation He comes to live in us through the Spirit and we are in union with Him and have a new nature and are no longer sinners but saints…we not longer have a sin nature…but we do still have indwelling sin.

Our bodies and souls will still experience the effects of sin in this world until Jesus comes back and we are given new heavenly bodies and will be with him forever.

So, indwelling sin will still have an effect on the way we feel and the way we think and what we experience in our bodies.  It’s possible to feel gender confusion about your identity…it’s possible to sometimes feel confusion about your sexuality or experience same-sex attraction…

BUT LISTEN, YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU FEEL OR WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT YOURSELF, YOU ARE WHO GOD SAYS YOU ARE AND WHO HE CREATED (at birth) & RECREATED (in Christ) YOU TO BE.

This is why we are told by Paul to renew our minds to the truth.  We must know the truth then first about our gender and sexual identity in Christ and when we feel otherwise to renew our minds to the truth that this is not in fact who we are.

And I need to point out then that to experience those thoughts and feelings of gender confusion or sexual identity is NOT SIN…the sin is acting upon those feelings.  But I will also say this…that there is no sin that is too far out of the reach of God’s forgiveness through Jesus.  So even if you have stepped into sin in these areas, please know how much God still loves you and cares about you and offers forgiveness to you through Christ!

And if you do struggle with this, please find someone in the church you can talk to and share your struggles with and don’t hold them in or go out into the world to find truth…because only God as Creator can define ultimate truth

But listen, what I just said to those who struggle with this, has application for those of us in the church who don’t struggle with this particular area…

Because if people are going to feel like they can actually come to us and talk about these struggles we have to create a safe place for them to do so! 

And in the church overall that has not always been the case…we have created a cultures in our churches of judgement and guilt/shame where teens and adults in the church have felt all alone and couldn’t bring these things up to talk about and end up having to go outside the church for their answers and acceptance.  

We as the church have to be prepared for these conversations.  We have to lead with grace and mercy and help carry each other’s burdens as we look to Christ to lead us and guide us through the mess…

Let’s be that kind of church together…