People say we cannot judge them because they are sinners without realizing that our endeavors to call them to repentance are not about the sin. It’s about the lifestyle that results if you continue in sin. Sin is at its core simply missing the mark, but if you persist, you are not missing the mark, but you are deciding to go somewhere else, to follow someone else’s commandments. Sin is situational; lifestyle is about choices that we make about what we do with information we gain and challenges we face. You deny Christ essentially by remaining in your sin, and that’s why we go out to rescue them. And they deny Christ in one of three ways. They can first deny Christ by refusing to turn to Him and remaining in their sin. Secondly, they can deny Christ by persisting so long that they believe that Christ cannot save them, which denies His power and divinity. Finally, they deny Christ because they are trying to redefine the terms of our mortal probation, and that is usually the reason why we reach out to reclaim them.
Much of the aberrant and abhorrent doctrine preaches that fallen man is the natural state of man. It is not The nature of man is as a son or daughter of the Almighty God. God is not fallen, and so a fallen state is not our natural state. It is a state to which we are subject and towards which we are drawn because of the conditions of the crucible in which the human experiment occurs. From abortion to promiscuity to drug use to LGBTQ doctrine, all of these deny the Christ because they deny the relationship between God and man and render the man unrescuable by the atoning sacrifice of the savior because they cannot or will not feel after Him. They are past feeling when they persist in these lifestyles. Men are not animals, even when they behave like them, but some natural behaviors are animalistic and establish enmity between man and his Father God.
The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not their sin. It was that those cities embraced a lifestyle, a lifestyle that justified the natural and instinctual urges of the mortal man so that it denied the very definition of who man was and why God would want to redeem him. When men came to Lot and his family, they demanded pleasures, and they had neither shame nor hesitation in so demanding it. That is why pornography, pedophilia and the LGBTQ movements must be condemned by every Christian. They destroy shame and see no fault in demanding the pleasures and preferences of the flesh on the auspice that man is simply a beast, that he was “born that way”. If he was born that way, then he CANNOT overcome it, and God would not create a man who could not follow His commandments. The lifestyle of Sodom is what drove God to destroy them Himself. Lot could not even find 10 people who were repentant, who were inclined to consider that man might elevate himself, not out of pride but out of recognition of his true eternal identity.
Men and women were created in the image of God, after the manner of His body and put here to glorify Him. The baser animal instincts glorify master Mahan who seeketh that all men might be miserable like he is. His enmity towards God leads him to a desire to deny Christ access to as many souls as he can possibly steal like a player denies another a successful shot in the championship. Make no mistake. They are playing for keeps, and he seeks to drag all men DOWN. The unrighteous lifestyles decried by prophets and scripture and the faithful do not elevate anyone. Notches in your belt from the number of people you bed might be a stat in which you can rise, but it is not a stat that improves anyone it touches. Contrariwise, the gospel of Christ is preached as the “good news” because it shows that any man who turns toward Christ and allows Him to save them can be saved. Christ comes to uplift and lift up as He was lifted up. Lasciviousness and licentiousness always ultimately drag civilizations down. Just as in Noah’s time, we are approaching a time when men follow the admonition of Cain and take what they like, who sin not only because they drag down and kill their brothers but because they are destroying the souls of God’s children. You cannot long offend a God and expect to live.
In America, we see an ever increasing effort to embrace the lifestyle of Sodom, passing such laws to not only protect but to ensconce animalistic behaviors. This cannot long endure before our nation, and the civilization of which it is currently the keystone, collapses under the weight of our own unrighteousness. It is not sin that we are decrying, for we all have them, but the notion that legalization is license for licentiousness. Making a thing legal does not make it moral any more than banning a thing renders it immoral. Men who do this are simply essentially begging the rocks (or stone tablets as they were known in antiquity since that is the medium on which laws were published to the masses) to fall upon them and hide them from the presence of God.
The common thread of all civilization collapse came when those countries legalized and rendered as mainstream a lifestyle which is contrary to the true identity and destiny of man. Gender is an eternal characteristic. Fidelity and chastity is an eternal requirement. Temperance is an eternal practice. The innocence of children is an eternal responsibility. Modesty is an eternal attitude. Every nation that abandons these things is punished by God. Even when that nation was ruled by a king anointed by God Himself. Saul, David and Solomon in turn all essentially allowed a lifestyle among their people that denied Christ by denying Him access to people to save their souls, telling a man that whatsoever he did was no crime and leading the way with their own lifestyle that embraced sin over the Savior.
As Christians we cannot accept such lifestyles that deny the nature of man, his identity and his relationship to his Creator. We can love the people, pray for the people, reach out to rescue the people who persist in these notions, but we can never allow them to direct the dogma of the church. It is not our dogma to change. It is Christ’s. We cannot deny Christ by rewriting His teachings, His laws, His words, and His requirements to satiate our own selfish and self-serving sociopathy. Church leaders who say to embrace and tolerate and ensconce their lifestyle are no longer in service of the Master Jesus of Nazareth. And for God sake, we should not incorporate their practices into the sacraments and services of the church. TO them we say, “come and worship with us and repent as we all must of our sins as well”, but we cannot allow them to set the standard for what Christ’s church does. It is His church, and I will not deny Him that leadership.
