Clarity in the Midst of Confusion

Today's program contains portions from the following episodes:

"When Culture Rejects God's Design"

"Your Gender and Sexuality Tell a Story"

"Sexuality as a Mission Field"

"When a Loved One Rejects God's Design"

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Dannah Gresh: You don’t have to look far to find headlines that, frankly, make me sad.

• "The Case for Saying ‘Pregnant People’ and Other Gender-Inclusive Phrases"
• "High School Transgender Runner Sparks Outrage after Blowing away Competition"
• "Wedding Fashion Goes Beyond the Binary"

It seems that confusion rules the day, especially when it comes to what it means to be a man or a woman. Today we’re going to look to God’s Word to try to bring some clarity to the discussion.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend! I’m Dannah Gresh.

I’m sure you’re aware that for some years now, June has been called “Pride Month.” It’s heartbreaking to witness the conflict and confusion surrounding the topics of gender and sexuality. There are times when I just don’t know what to say or how to say it. Do you feel that too?

Maybe for you it’s not a hypothetical question: “What would I do if . . .?” Maybe right now you have a loved one who is struggling in this area, or maybe you’re struggling yourself.

As the leader for True Girl (a ministry for mom and their seven-to-twelve-year-old girls), I'm deeply burdened for how it's affecting that age group. There's research that really does indicate that even a decade or so ago there was hardly any girls struggling with gender dysphoria, now it is predominantly a female issue.

Girls are confused, and they need us to not be. We need to be competently grounded in God's Word.

When someone is involved in sexual sin or confusion, I think we can start to feel even more hopeless. “Can God really save someone who is that stuck in sin?” The answer is yes! Nobody is too lost for God’s grace to reach them. As long as they’re still alive, there’s always hope. 

And thankfully, we don’t have to be confused about the truth, because the Bible is very clear. So we’re going to take some time to see what God’s Word says and to help you know how to respond.

At a recent True Woman conference, we spent some time on this topic. We’re going to hear parts of that today, from some women who have experience in this area—Mary Kassian, Juli Slattery, and Rosaria Butterfield.

To get started, we’ll hear from Juli Slattery. She takes a look at why things have gotten so bad.

Dr. Juli Slattery: We live in a day and age where our culture is bombarding the youngest of children with messages that create sexual confusion and brokenness. I know that many of you as parents and as grandparents, you’re looking at what’s happening in our world and you’re asking, “How did this happen!? How did we get here!?”

How did we get to a place where it’s normal for an eight-year-old to be exposed to pornography and to where pornography is considered the most popular form of sex education?”

How did we get to a place where we’re not disturbed by the fact that approximately 25 percent of girls and 20 percent of boys will be sexually abused before they reach their eighteenth birthday?

How did we get there? How did we get to a world where we’re saddened—but no longer shocked—when we see headlines of another Christian leader who has been exposed as having been sexually abusive. What happened?!

Even as I mention those statistics, I know that for some of you, this is your story. This is your pain. You or someone you love is walking through some of these very things. You say, “We're in deep trouble! How did we get here?”

I’ve heard so many of you say—those of you who are like me, aging—we’re like, “Man, I’m so glad I don’t have kids in this generation.” But some of you do, and some of you have grandchildren in this generation. And even if you don’t, our heart has to break for what we’re seeing!

Now, has there always been sexual brokenness of every kind? Yes, there has, but we’ve never seen it accelerated the way it is today. We no longer know how to define what’s even healthy. There’s no agreed-upon marker of what wholeness actually looks like.

Friends, we live in a day and age where we worship humanity, where we have become our own god! We live in a culture that consistently tells you what you deserve: “Live your best life! You do you. If that works for you, fine!” This is everywhere.

It’s in our advertising slogans, it’s in our songs, it’s in our television or streaming shows, it’s in our movies. It’s in our water! “It’s all about you!” What we have to realize, ladies, is that the idolatry of every culture will seep into the church, and we will begin mixing our worship of God with the idolatry of our culture. And friends, this is really the case for us today.

The answer’s not found by looking inward, it’s found by looking upward! And so, we have to realize that we live in this culture that doesn’t primarily have a problem with sexuality. We have a problem with worship. We don’t know God!

Dannah: Did you catch that? This is a worship problem! The sexuality and gender issues that dominate our culture today didn’t start fifty years ago or a hundred years ago. They started thousands of years ago in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve chose to believe the serpent’s lies and worship themselves (by doing what they wanted to do) rather than God. Every sin since then is a logical outworking of that attitude.

But of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about specific sins. Mary Kassian started addressing these kinds of topics as a young woman during the feminist movement, a precursor to today’s gender and sexuality confusion. Here she is, speaking to a room full of hundreds of women, talking about a question she had when she was younger.

Mary Kassian: Is femaleness good? Is it good?

You see, because it took me a long time to shift in my mind to the idea that not only is it right that I am a woman—I never questioned that because I always believed that God is God, and so He has authority over my life. And so, if He created me to be a woman, if I was born a woman, then obviously He had something to say about that. And what He says in His Word, I just had a firm belief that God’s Word is true, and God’s Word is right.

But it took me a long time to move from the conviction that God’s design for womanhood is right to the conviction that God’s design for womanhood is not only right, but it is also good and beautiful. It’s beautiful. It’s astonishing, and it’s spectacular. I’m not talking about pink frilly dresses. I’m talking about something that goes far deeper—who we are, identity-wise, at a very deep level.

Each one of you in this room, and each one of you listening, have received a gift. You have received an exceedingly precious gift of God. He has knit you together in your mother’s womb, piece by piece.

And even though we live in a culture and a time when it isn’t always easy to be a woman, when we see women degraded and abused and oppressed, and when we see people downtrodden because of their gender, and when we see just the horrendous things that happen because of the presence of sin in our world; even still, God wants us to be thankful for the gift of sexuality and gender. It is His gift to us, and He wants us to be thankful, glorify Him, recognize His authority and appreciate the beauty.

Dannah: Again, that’s Mary Kassian. 

 I think the simplest explanation comes from Scripture itself, Genesis 1, verse 27. You’re familiar with it. It reads:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Then verse 31:

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

Short and sweet.

But maybe you’re thinking, Okay, Dannah, I understand that. But I can’t just tell my confused friend five times a day, "God made male and female, so they’re good.” So, let’s turn to how you and I can respond.

First, your children. Your little, innocent girls and boys. You probably don’t need me to convince you that they’re in danger of being brainwashed into believing all sorts of lies. They are being told they need to select their pronouns in kindergarten. I don't think I even knew what a pronoun was when I was in kindergarten. How can they go into something as confusing as deciding which pronoun they are?

You cannot phone this in. You've got to fill them with the truth before they hear the lies. The truth is more powerful than a lie.

So, here's what I would do if you have young children. I would start to tell them if they are girls, "It's great to be a girl!" And I would start to tell your boys, "It's great to be a boy!" Something just as simple as that starts to build a foundation.

Then, when they are really young but old enough to understand what you are reading to them in the Bible, turn to Genesis 1:27. Say, "Look, God created us to be like Him, to reflect who He is." One of the important parts of that is that "He chose for you to be a boy, or He chose for you to be a girl. He created you that way."

There are so many things about us that are kind of God-like. Like, our language proficiency or our creativity or our intellect, or being able to defy gravity and fly. But the one thing that God says matters is maleness and femaleness. You're not robbing your children of any innocence to tell them that . . . and you need to tell them that—over and over. 

Well, the need for an abundance of truth doesn’t go away as a child grows up—as they are teens and need more detailed information. Juli Slattery says that this is one area where the church and Christians in general have failed. She says we should practice what she calls “sexual discipleship.” That sounds strange, but it’s important. Let's listen.

Juli: We have to be able to talk openly about sex—about all sexual issues. We have adopted through tradition this idea that Christians should not talk about sex. 

Let me just say, that may be a Christian tradition, but it’s not a biblical one. When we read God’s Word, He was not shy to talk about every sexual issue. As a matter of fact, we now know that modern translators translated the Song of Solomon in a way that kind of played down the actual language that was used. They were too embarrassed to put it in the Scripture. It’s not just Song of Solomon, it’s all throughout Scripture. We read graphic examples of sexual brokenness and trauma and hurt and redemption. So, we have to break the silence.

We can answer the right question. If you ask it the right way, we know how to respond because we heard somebody talk about it or we read a book. But we’re not fluent in biblical sexuality. 

So you’ve gotten caught off guard by your kids, by your grandkids, by your co-workers, by your culture. We do not know what to say. God is calling us to do better than the culture in discipleship around sexuality. It is our place not just to do a sermon series, or not just to read one book on sexuality, but to become fluent in reclaiming the territory of biblical sexuality.

We have to reclaim the biblical narrative of sexuality. Now, what do I mean by the biblical narrative? A narrative is what explains the why. 

All of us growing up—and if you have had little children you know this—around the age of three we start asking the question “why?”. We ask why about everything. So little kids say, “Mommy, why do I have to eat broccoli? It’s yucky!” “Why do I have to go to bed before the sun goes down?” As our kids get older, their whys get bigger. “Mom, why can’t I drive the car?” “Mom, why can’t I go to the party?” And what do we do when we’re really tired and we don’t want to deal with the why questions? We all know. What do we say? “Because I said so!” That’s it. What happens when you’re raising your kids if you always just respond with, “Because I said so”? Your children never grow. They never mature. They never learn to think for themselves.

There are a lot of why questions about sexuality in the Christian faith. Why would God say it’s wrong for two women to get married if they love each other? Why would God say that sex is reserved for marriage? You know what? Unfortunately, what we’ve done over and over again in the Christian church is say, “Because God says so.” Does He say so? Yes, He does. But He also created us as people who want to know the why. 

I’ve learned over the last decade of studying the Scripture that there is an answer to the why question related to biblical sexuality . . . and it’s a story. The Bible is really a story that reveals God, and all of creation reveals God. Everything God created He created for the purpose of revealing Himself. God has created us as sexual people because through our sexuality He is revealing to us the nature of how He loves with covenant love. The narrative explains the “why.” It gives purpose to even the spiritual battle around our sexuality.

Dannah: That’s so encouraging! We need to hear that truth. I think there are a lot of Christians who believe that male and female as God created us is right and good, but they don’t understand why.

Meanwhile, there are still so many people who are confused, hurting, and stuck in harmful, destructive patterns. Maybe one of them is a part of your life. When someone you love—a friend, a child, another relative—decides to rebel against God in this way, what can you do?

Here’s Juli Slattery with some reminders.

Juli: I think our response is three-fold. First of all, we have to have compassion. I think it’s tempting in our day and age to respond to what’s happening with anger, and to respond to what’s happening with fear. But God’s response, when He looked over Jerusalem, was compassion. He cried over them. And this is something we have to be really careful about.

Friend, the LGBT community is not your enemy. Even those who are involved in creating pornography, they are not your enemy. The Enemy is our enemy.

Dannah: But having compassion doesn’t mean giving in to the world’s ideas.

Juli: Sisters, we have to be very careful not to gut the gospel of its offense, because when we gut it of its offense, we also gut it of its power. We will have a form of godliness, but denying its power. So we need God to give us the courage, not only to be moved by compassion, but also to speak the truth without compromising it.

Dannah: Along the same lines, Rosaria Butterfield says we need to practice acceptance but not approval. Rosaria herself lived in the confusion of a homosexual lifestyle. Here she is.

Rosaria Butterfield: 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.

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.

Accepting your prodigal means not telling her lies.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dannah: That was Rosaria Butterfield. She understands the difference between accepting a person and approving of their sin. 

Do you know what’s just as important as the way you interact with your loved one? Prayer.

If you’re a parent or grandparent with a prodigal son or daughter or grandchild, you can pour out your heart to the Lord on behalf of this person who is far from home. 

Let me tell you about a devotional from Revive Our Hearts that is designed to help you pray for a prodigal who's not walking with the Lord. It’s called While You Wait for Your Prodigal. Each day for a month you’ll find a passage of Scripture to read, some comments to think about, and a sample prayer. And there’s space for you to write out your own thoughts and prayer, too. 

Again, the 30-day prayer devotional is called While You Wait for Your Prodigal. It’s our thank-you gift to you for your donation of any amount to help support Revive Our Hearts. 

We’re listener-supported. That means we depend on the support of friends just like you to continue bringing this program as well as reaching women all around the world with the message of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. So we’d love to hear from you.

To make a donation and request the devotional book on praying for your prodigal, head to ReviveOurHearts.com. 

Next weekend is Father’s Day, and I hope you’ll join us here on Revive Our Hearts Weekend. We’re gonna look at why dads are so vital in the lives of women. We live in a day when fathers take a bad rap. It’s all part of some of the gender confusion we’ve heard about today. Being a strong dad is not the most popular role for a man these days. But God’s Word has some good things to say about fatherhood and how a good father can have a very positive impact on a woman. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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