When a Loved One Rejects God’s Design

Rosaria Butterfield: It is really an honor to be here with you today. This is a tough topic, and sometimes clarity is a hard thing because it has some hard edges.

But my topic today is when a loved one has rejected God’s plan for sexuality and gender. I want to frame my talk today with a few points.

The first one I want to start out with is just an honest clarifying reaction about how we got to where we are and where exactly are we?

We are now in a culture that has codified or written into law the three exchanges that you see in Romans 1. That means that we need to think about what’s going on differently than we did even five years ago. I know for some people, you’re wondering, Is the world really different? Or are we just getting older? Well, both.

So, in Romans 1, the end of Romans 1, we see three exchanges, and even the word “exchange” is even in the actual language.

Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged . . . (vv. 21–22).

Okay, what are the three exchanges?

The first one is, “the truth of God for the lies [of the world]” (v. 25).

The second one is the worship of the Creator. “We exchange the worship of the Creator for the worship of creation,” and specifically, we exchange the worship of God for the worship of man (see v. 25).

And then the third exchange, which we see at the very end, is an exchange of natural sexuality, which is a fruitful sexuality, for a debased and barren sexuality (see vv. 26–27). So we have moved from heterosexuality to homosexuality.

Now, how did they become codified into law? Well, two words: Obergefell and Bostock.

Obergefell v. Hodges was the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage in all fifty states.

And the Bostock case came up around during COVID, so sometimes people haven’t really paid as close attention to it as we’d ought. That is the case that actually established LGBTQ as a civil rights problem.

When I lived as a lesbian, I would have said that you harmed me if I went to buy a pizza, and you didn’t sell me a pizza because I was gay, and that was very bad. It would be very material. I didn’t get my pizza.

But today, there’s a totally different ethos around harm. It’s because of a particular clause that was inserted into the Obergefell case. It’s called “the dignitary harm clause.”

And that clause basically says that hurting someone’s dignity is a form of discriminating against their civil rights.

So if you’ve wondered, Why all of a sudden all the stickers and the pronouns and flags, and why does everybody have to agree with that? Well, that’s the dignitary harm clause at work.

Carl Trueman and his work does a wonderful job of explaining this in terms of expressive individualism. So, your feelings are not just feelings. They’re an extension of yourself. They’re like an arm or a leg. And when people don’t affirm them, it’s almost like they’ve chopped off your arm, or they chopped off your leg. And so, it’s a very strange world that we’re in, but here is where we are.

So the question is, how do we move forward?

I want to introduce a couple of principles: 

• The first is knowing the difference between acceptance and approval.
• The second is knowing the difference between private and public.

So, acceptance means “living within reality and not in fantasy.” If your daughter calls herself a lesbian, I think it’s really important to just accept that. That is reality for her, and you need to accept it. In fact, it’s the first step in seeing the person that you love in the sin pattern in which she is trapped.

But acceptance does not include believing her interpretation of how she got here or even what it means.

Acceptance does not include believing that your son named Rex is really your daughter named Matilda.

Acceptance does not include being manipulated by the therapist who says, “If you don’t call him or her by the new pronouns, you are a cause of suicide.” Acceptance rejects that because acceptance does not lose sight of Jesus even as it works with the current situation as it appears to be.

Now, approval is very different. Approval means you give the whole situation a blessing. Approval means more than loving your daughter in her sin.

It means calling her sin by another name. Maybe you call it grace. Maybe you call it blessing. Maybe you call it illness. But it tends to compartmentalize your Christian life.

Approval means denying Christ. That means denying hope and denying your responsibility to carry the cross that your age and your status require.

It means getting Luke 14:26–27 wrong. (That’s that hard parable where Jesus talks about hating your mother and your father.) Of course, hate in that context means “love less.” But it is very important, if you are loving your prodigal, that you love your prodigal less than you love Jesus.

For a Christian to approve of sin is itself a sin. You will not be able to help the person you love if you are stuck in this place. And this place is simply this: you want to be able to stay connected to your prodigal without becoming indoctrinated by the mass hysteria around her and around you.

So I would say that acceptance and approval is the fine line that a Christian who loves someone trapped by these lies must navigate.

Now, I learned that acceptance is a great kindness, even without approval. And I learned this from Ken and Floy Smith decades ago when they told me that they could accept me as a lesbian, but their acceptance did not mean approval.

This was 1997, and I really took no offense to that. There are other things to be offended by. The gospel was actually profoundly more offensive than Ken and Floy saying this. I actually appreciated the honesty behind these words.

And while acceptance is not approval, it’s actually a great kindness. Acceptance means dealing protectively and gently with the person who is lost.

And I learned from the Smiths that acceptance involves listening, caring for, praying with, and sharing God’s Word over and over again.

Now, one of the real challenges that today’s culture poses presses on this acceptance/approval difference is that back in 1997, there was no social media. I was not sitting down with a pastor who was going to potentially do a Twitter rant about what we just talked about. That wasn’t even possible. That’s because that culture knew that private was private, and public was public.

I would like to encourage women that we embrace that. Exhibitionism has replaced modesty to our great harm and detriment.

So, to have a good relationship with your prodigal, or just anyone who is lost and that you want to witness to, you may want to take a very, very good look at your social media. You want to make sure that people do not become gratuitously offended or hurt by that.

Sin tends to make more work for all of us, but sin also breeds paranoia. So, don’t give your prodigal reasons to run, and don’t take responsibility for your prodigal’s decision if she does run. That’s on her.

You are a praying parent or grandparent, and you’re praying for a lost child. But you’re also praying for a prayed-for child. A prayed-for child truly makes all the difference in the world.

So, I want to think about how we can apply this to just some of the questions that come into my website pretty regularly. And here are some of the big, just the big strokes from my website, I say, in the last two months or so.

The first is this: Parents, please do not think that just because your prodigal is an adult that you are no longer parenting.

You will be parenting your adult child until the day the Lord takes you home. You must become adept at pointing your adult child to the gospel as the only means of avoiding God’s ultimate judgment.

Number two: If your prodigal has declared war against reality and believes that she is non-binary, or with that a whole host of other words, ask her to define these new words.

Your daughter is now living in a dystopian world of science fiction. You never wanted to write the story anyway, so put the burden on her to explain. You don’t need to get a PhD in all of this new vocabulary. You actually get to be sanctified in your ignorance.

Number three: Know the biblical doctrine better than you have ever known it before.

Use biblical doctrine as a filter, a way to interpret some of these new words that you’re learning. That means be fully immersed in the Bible, but have a way of interpreting, of shaping and framing. Know how to interpret the minor passages according to the major passages.

And the way you do that is to just pick up a good book on systematic theology. My favorite is The Westminster Confession of Faith. You may have other ones. And make sure that you are in a faithful, biblical church. If you’re not, get to one fast. Take the Covenant of Church Membership, even though it may mean breaking friendships with your former church, you need to get to a faithful church for the sake of your own soul, but also for the power of your witness.

Of course, you know you need to pray, and you need to get all of your friends to pray as well. This is no time to be embarrassed. That’s what Satan wants you to be. You have no reason to be ashamed. You need to pray.

Then, you need to go boldly to the throne of grace. We need daily repentance of our own sin so that we can in fact throw someone over our shoulders and share the gospel in a useful way.

We need to repent of the sin of self-pity. 

• Satan wants you to feel responsible that you have a prodigal child. 
• He wants you to think this is all your fault and that God is punishing you.
• Satan wants you to look at other families and covet what they have. 

Nothing that comes from Satan is helpful or true—even half-truths are really just lies.

So, if you’ve fallen into the sin of coveteousness—coveting somebody else’s perfect family—repent and ask God to help you love your child more than you do now.

I talk to parents who tell me that they feel like an “accidental missionary.” They have a child who’s gone prodigal and entered into this strange LGBTQ world, and it is a strange world.

I will always feel something, I think responsible, I’m not sure what the word is, but the blood is on my hands. I wasn’t just the lesbian next door. I was an activist. I co-authored the university’s first policy for gay marriage. I helped build this machine.

You don’t need to feel responsible. I can and should, but you don’t need to. But you can’t lose a minute feeling sorry for yourself.

Yes, you’re an “accidental missionary.” You’re on this new mission field. You don’t have the language. They didn’t even give you a bottle of water. But you have the Lord Jesus Christ. You have your church. You have your praying sisters. Use all of those.

And, finally—and this is a hard one—acceptance. Accepting your prodigal means not telling her lies and not buying into her false theology. I know that that might mean a time of physical separation. But it does not matter how physically separated you are from your prodigal, you are never separated from the love of God or the throne of grace where you can flee there in an instance and pray for her.

God knows and loves your child better than you do, and that is a very big comfort.

What all of this really comes down to is Proverbs 29:25. “The fear of man lays a snare. But whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”

A snare is an instrument of execution from which you cannot extricate yourself. But fearing God is safe. It’s a refuge. It’s a shield.

It’s very tempting, very, very tempting to fear your prodigal and to get a little bit bullied into the idea that if you don’t concede some of these Christian ideas, that you are going to push her further away. And that is not true.

It’s a good question, though. I mean, how many of us, how many times have we abandoned our duties because we thought success could only come through disobedience? We need to remember God’s promises and how He cares for us when we follow them. We cannot fear our prodigals and be any good to them in the process.

We live in a world now where LGBTQ is really the idol of our day. And like it or not, we are standing against that idol. People who don’t worship the idol of the day are despised. But your prodigal’s insistence that LGBTQ is his life’s center reveals this idolatry.

It reveals that homosexuality, transgenderism, or any of the other signifiers of the alphabet soup, that’s really his religion. And that’s why he’s so touchy about you getting all of the vocabulary right.

There is a difference between worship and recognition. You do not need to take the bait. Your focus is on loving your prodigal well and praying.

And so, I leave you with a final thought that might be a hard one. We are not living in days of peace. People are getting fired from their jobs from not using preferred pronouns. It seems like the whole university system is standing against us. Certainly, we can see that the government’s school system is.

The temptation is to believe that somehow, if we would just compromise, that it will go easier for us—and it will not. In fact, part of how we got here is we probably all made all kinds of concessions and compromises over the last couple of decades that we ought not.

And so the good news is today is the day. Today is the day of salvation. I will be praying that today is the day of salvation for the prodigal that you have on your heart. But today is also the day that we are called to take hold of that plow and not let go.

So my prayer for you, dear Sister, is that you will persevere, that you will persevere in godliness and persevere in joy.

I thank God for you. I thank God that you are at this conference. I pray God’s every blessing upon you. Thank you.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.