Words for Those Lost in Sexual Darkness
Words for Those Lost in Sexual Darkness
By Laurie Higgins
I write often about homosexuality and “trans”-cultism because there are no more serious threats to fundamental speech rights and religious liberty than the efforts to use public education, the law, Big Business, Big Tech, the mainstream news media, and the arts to normalize homosexuality and gender confusion.
In addition, individuals and families are being incalculably harmed by the corrosive lies of “LGB” and “T” activism. Parents’ rights to oversee their children’s moral education and medical care are being undermined and even stripped by “LGB” and “T” activists and their collaborators. And the temporal and eternal lives of individuals who experience same sex attraction and/or gender dysphoria are being destroyed.
My professional goals center on exposing the specious arguments and rhetoric, goals, and consequences of the unchecked movement to normalize homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation in the hope that clarity will result in greater cultural participation by conservatives. I hope to generate a sense of urgency and obligation that will lead conservatives to overcome their fears in order to protect both individuals and society.
All decent people should feel righteous anger when teachers tell children that homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation are deserving of respect and affirmation. We do not embody the love of Christ when we remain silent while body- and soul-destroying lies are affirmed to and in children and teens.
The lies of activists must be exposed, but in so doing, we must not lose sight of the suffering of those who experience disordered sexual attraction to persons of the same sex or who feel unrelenting discomfort with their biological sex. They do not choose their feelings, and they often suffer in shame, fear, and silence as most of us do when we experience disordered, sinful impulses.
With most or many other sins, our culture affirms the truth that is written on our hearts. Our mothers, fathers, teachers, storytellers, pastors, priests, and political leaders in their diverse cultural roles affirm many moral truths. But something very different happens today with regard to sexual sin.
With sexual sin, our depraved, carrion-devouring culture swoops down and offers the bleakly deterministic lie that homoerotic desire and cross-sex identification are inborn traits akin to skin color. They tell children and teens that acting on those desires is not only morally good but also essential to fulfillment. They tell children and teens that refusal to act on such impulses is an act of futility that will result in utterly unfulfilled, lonely lives or suicide. And they tell young, confused people that anyone who dissents from those claims hates them.
And those claims are touted as the “loving” response.
Well, there are other claims–claims that offer hope for a life defined by real love and real peace. It is a peace that passes all understanding and derives from knowing that sacrificing our desires to God’s will pleases a good, holy, just, and merciful God.
God offered up his perfect son for our sins. Jesus died a horrific death on the cross to pay the penalty for the sins of all who trust in him. Those who experience homosexual attraction or gender dysphoria are no different from those who experience all manner of other sinful impulses: While God may not remove every last vestige of sinful impulses, he will give believers the power to refuse to act on them.
A personal relationship with God does not free us from all sinful impulses, but it does free us from bondage to sin. Full and absolute freedom from the experience of sinful impulses will not come until the end of history. The persistence and seeming intractability of sinful impulses do not mean that the impulses are gifts from God. It means that sin grips the heart of fallen man.
Jeff Mirus, founder of Christendom College and Trinity Communications, implores Christians to reject “an ethos rooted in a deep fear of the judgment of the world.” Instead, we “need to consistently apply Christ’s light and Christ’s truth in order to rescue souls from the overpowering snare that has been fashioned for us out of the dominant contemporary blend of mistakes, lies and temptations regarding sex.”
Our friends and loved ones should be told that joy and peace come from choosing to live a life that pleases the creator of the universe. What an amazing idea. We humans have the capacity to please the omniscient, omnipotent, eternally existing creator of all creation. Never hearing that truth is tragic.
And our dear friends and loved ones who may never experience heterosexual attraction deserve to be told that a celibate life lived in submission to God is not a lonely, unfulfilled life. They too can have rich, intimate, deeply loving relationships within the body of Christ. They can have deep, loving, chaste same-sex friendships that can help restore the brokenness in their pasts. They can serve as surrogate aunts, uncles, grandmas, and grandpas for children who too are experiencing brokenness and loss. They deserve to be told that they are loved—not because of their sin–but, like the rest of us, despite it.
Our depraved world swims along the surface of a world so deep and wondrous, it is beyond imagining. And our fallen, depraved world that has no eyes to see or ears to hear beyond this all-too-consuming temporal life, chatters cacophonously, filling the hearts and minds of people with beguiling lies that lead to eternal separation from a good and holy God. If we truly love our friends and family members lost in sexual darkness, we must tell them the truth, no matter what the personal cost to us, always remembering that our salvation came at the greatest cost of all.