Edit: Warning::: I've decided that the following post smacks of arrogance on my part. I'm not going to change it to cover my butt, but keep in mind that I've repented of my attitude problems on this post. Other posts from me on this thread SHOULD be much more rational. Thanks for your mercy and understanding.
Woah... this is a topic near to my heart so I'm gonna have to watch my soapboxing.
Whups, looks like I'm already standing up on top of it. Sorry
Homosexuality and Abortion and profanity and a host of other things are WRONG. The Bible says so. But many Christians don't even know WHY they are wrong.
Oh boy, my forum toon just flagged /rant. I guess I'm in a rant zone.
/rant:
1. A LOT of Christians run around making statements like "Being Gay is EVIL!!!" but they don't spend the time thinking it through to see why God would think that things like that are wrong. FYI just to clue you in if you haven't caught it yet, homosexuality is wrong because it is
Sex outside of marriage. That's right, it is no different than heterosexual promiscuity in God's eyes. The punishments for homosexuality perscribed in the Bible parallel those for a person who is having sex outside of marriage.
2.
Our aversion to hypocrisy prolly comes from the fact that we have a habit of being hypocritical about this sort of thing. We're willing to accept the people around us who shack up and then come to church, but the only time we aren't shooting at gays is when we're reloading. The difference? Promiscuity is a "weekness," but homosexuality makes me squeemish. It's different cuz it is something I wouldn't do myself, so it should be abolished. Meantime, shacking up is something I could see myself doing (but for the grace of God) and so I'm much more tolerant of it.
3. Oh yeah,
Jesus said that whenever you look with lust at a woman (or a man,) you are being promiscuous with him or her in your mind. So I guess that we're all a little bit to blame of promiscuity... and therefore all the other sins of the flesh.
4. Yes, I'm being offensive on purpose... but what I'm trying to say is that
WE ALL NEED JESUS. When Snake_Six* says "We should hold them to God's standards," I think "OH BOY, I sincerly hope not!" God's standards are pure holiness 100% of the time, without any failing. God's punishment is an eternity of separation from him. OUCH. Thankfully God is a God of love and mercy and caring, who longs to dispense with the standards and instead treat us as his children.
Truth is, guys and ladies, every single one of us deserves Hell just as much as the gays, the lesbians, and the scared teenagers who kill their own offspring. It is ONLY by the tremendous awesome mercy of God that ANY of us are called the sons and daughters of God. Trying to hold others to out to the wrath of God that he specifically saved us from being hit by is kind of a mean sicko perversion of what God did for us.
5.
There is absolutely no way (humanly) for us to know where a person stands with God. We CAN NOT point fingers at gays and say "You are going to Hell." Only God can decide that; it is His right and no one else's. The only way that we can make a call on someone's spiritual position in salvation is through the internal prompting of the Holy Spirit. Yes, we MUST follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in such matters, and so I'm not making a value judgement on other Christians based on their reaction to sins.
/rant off: So, if we can't make value judgements or tell people that they are doing things that could very potentially end in eternal separation from God (read: Hell,) what CAN we do?
Well, basically we can lead them by love. The Bible says that it is the Love of God that leads to repentence. We can stop condemning them and instead show them so much love that they can't help but be overwealmed. We shouldn't blindly act in opposition to their problems (aka riotting outside abortion clinics,) but rather we should think outside their box and come up with revolutionary new ways to bless people with God's love.
I guess this is really easy to say, so let me think of an example that half of y'all will get, and the other half may not. Lol. Cuz it's a WoW example.
In World of Warcraft, we don't have as much problems with sexual orientation as we do with GREED. Greed is everywhere... people are in the game to get the best loot fastest, even if it means burning relationships and backstabbing friends (and even spouses! )
When TF began to host our own runs, we were faced with the issue of having to build a loot system that was bulletproof and yet showed God's love. The obvious way to build a loot system would to build it in such a way that Greed would have no way to get loots away from us... you know, the one loot per person per reset rule, or something of the sort.
But you know what? That is simply responding to the problem with a nice solution -- but keeping the game in the problem's court.
Our response was to put in place a system that is actually NOT greed-proof. If you are lucky and greedy enough, under our system, you can make off with a lot of loot. And people have in fact tried to do so. After a little while, however, the fact that we are cheerfully allowing greedy people to walk off with our loot starts to get to them. They start asking us whether or not we're upset by their actions. They're astounded when we aren't. We let them come back to our runs and do it again, although they often don't do it again when they come back -- they're too amazed that we aren't even greedy when they are... You get what I'm saying? We don't judge, we don't compensate... we try avoid the problem altogether, circumvent it, and apply a huge layer of love.
Of course, this is all on a good day when we're all focussing on God and not on WoW... but once again, judgement is God's. But the proof is in the pudding: we've had greedy people nip their greed issues in the bud and start acting like they were never greedy at all. We didn't take them aside and tell them that they were jerks, or rail against their sin nature. We just let them have their way until they realized that ours was better.
Anyhow... sorry for the soapbox rant, like I said, this issue is near and dear to me. I realize that this is also an area where we all need to pray and seek God's advice, and also to educate ourselves on what God says and what the sinners are going through.
In Christ,
Neirai the (chronically) Forgiven
*Snake_Six, my brother. Please forgive me for the harsh tone that I used when talking about your comment. I do not mean to sound like I think you are a bad Christian or something. Rather, I simply think that your statement is not an accurate reflection of truth and therefore I felt the need to oppose it. However, like a true hypocrite I am not aware of whether or not it came to you by the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore I say, please do not count my actions as those of an enemy, but rather as those as a fellow worker who simply wishes to point out some additional information that you may have missed. Again, my words are not cannonical scripture, so please take with a grain of prayer.
