When Two Lesbians Walk Into a Church Seeking Trouble
JOHN BURKE, charismanews
(iStock photo)
“Let’s just go for fun! We’ll see how much we can push their buttons,” Amy teased her girlfriend, who didn’t like the idea of hanging around a bunch of Christians.
“Come on,” Amy insisted. “I hear their motto is ‘Come as you are.’ I just want to prove that they’re ‘come as you are ... unless you’re gay.'”
Amy had been in a nine-year lesbian relationship that had broken up, leaving her wondering why her deepest longings could never be satisfied. She and Rachel had just started hanging out when they decided to attend one Sunday morning.
“I came on a mission to shock people,” Amy admits. “Rachel and I would hold hands in front of people, but instead of the disgusted looks of contempt we expected, people met eyes with us and treated us like real people. So we started coming to church weekly. We kept moving closer to the front each week, trying to get a reaction so that we’d be rejected sooner rather than later. When we couldn’t shock people, we stopped trying and started learning."
“Not long after that, Rachel and I stopped seeing each other, but I kept coming to church because I was searching for something,” Amy admits. “I definitely wasn’t looking to change. It wasn’t my lesbian lifestyle that I was bringing to God, but I wondered if God had answers to my deeper longings. Problem was, I didn’t trust God at all!
“The more I listened and learned about the teachings of Jesus, the more I started to actually believe that God really did love me. I heard more and more about being His masterpiece, and in time, I actually started to believe it. The more I believed God actually could see something of value in me, the more I trusted Him.”
Over time, Amy slowly opened her heart and struggles to Christ.
“It took several years, but as I moved closer and closer to Christ, He gently took me on a very surprising journey," she says. "First, I found out my father had nine affairs while I was growing up—a secret that rocked my world. Jesus began to show me how the roots of my sexual issues tie together with my dad’s—I was just like him, using people to find comfort, life and love outside of God.”
Amy continued to grow in her knowledge of the Scriptures, falling more and more in love with the Lord. The following year, God had another surprise for her: “I went to the seminar called ‘To Be Told,’ hosted at Gateway. I wanted to see how God could put closure to my brokenness, but what He showed me shocked me.”
“As Dan Allender was telling a story of a bully," Amy recalls, "I suddenly had a flashback of getting off the school bus. I lived down the street from Jimmy, a boy who had bullied me all year. But this particular day, Jimmy acted nice to me as I got off the bus.
“He apologized for being so mean, and he invited me to come to his house.”
That day in the seminar, all else faded to black as this vivid nightmare crept back to life. Amy saw herself walking through Jimmy’s front door, noticing all the shades pulled down. Startled, she spied two teenage boys eyeing her with a ravenous look as the door slammed shut. Her screams never escaped the evil darkness that enveloped that house. They pinned her down and raped her.
She was only 9!
Amy swam in a pool of tears as the seminar continued. Others were oblivious to her divine epiphany. She realized the Lord had been drawing her near to strengthen her for this revelation—to show her the source of so much sexual struggle hidden for years beneath layers of protective mud.
“After that, I realized God knows more about me than I know about myself,” Amy recalls, “and He wants to bring healing to these wounds, so I fully gave Him my heart and body—everything. As I continued to seek intimacy with Him, the lesbian struggles fell away. I’m not saying that’s how God works with everyone, but it’s how He’s healing me. The more I focus on God’s intimate love for me and try to see His masterpiece emerge, the less I want anything to get in the way of His work in me.”
Seven years later, Amy leads our ministry to help people find healing and wholeness from all kinds of sexual and relational struggles. She’s helping others become God’s restored masterpiece.
Jesus Is Never Shocked
Do you realize that Jesus is not shocked by the shocking things people do? Jesus knew Zacchaeus had robbed people blind and profited off much unethical behavior, yet Jesus was not shocked. He did not offer Zach correction, but relationship: “Come down, Zacchaeus. I’m staying at your house tonight.” (See Luke 19:5.) That shocked everyone! Yet relationship changed Zacchaeus.
Jesus knew that the Samaritan woman at the well had been married and divorced five times. He knew about her current “hookup” and how sexually entangled she was with the guy she was living with. (See John 4.) Jesus was not repulsed. (Samaritans of Jesus’ day were treated by the religious community like gay people often get treated by some of today’s Christian community.) None of this kept Jesus away or kept Him from offering her living water. Maybe Jesus wants Christ-followers who will be less like the Pharisees and more like Him—unshockable.
Luke tells of a time Simon the Pharisee invited Jesus to dinner. Jesus and His disciples went and “reclined at the table” (Luke 7:36) along with Simon’s religious friends, who were skeptical about Jesus’ true identity—mainly because He showed more love for “sinners” than love for the Law of Moses. (Jesus had just made it clear this wasn’t true; He came to fulfill the intent of the Law of Moses.) They invited Jesus there to judge Him, not learn from Him.
Middle Eastern dining style consisted of a 1-foot-high table with pillows on the floor for seating, with people sitting usually with feet stretched out to the side or behind them. As the meal proceeded, an immoral woman crashed the party. She sheepishly made her way over to stand behind Jesus. Luke makes sure we know she had “lived a sinful life” (v. 37). She did not just have a few slip-ups, but rather had made a life out of her sexual deviancies, and everyone knew it! Her mud was public knowledge. Her whole life, she had felt judged and condemned by the religious establishment, so to go into the house of her tormentors took enormous courage.
Yet there she stood ... because Jesus was there! Somehow word on the street had traveled to her through the crowd she hung out with—there’s hope in Jesus for the muddiest human. Hearing He had come near, an unstoppable force welling up from within had drawn her to His feet. As she stood in His presence, hope burst through the dam of all that pain that had driven her mudslinging behavior—she started to cry. Her tears accidentally landed on Jesus’ dirty feet (that His host had not shown the common courtesy to wash).
The tension in the room mounted; everyone’s shoulders tightened as she fell to her knees behind Jesus, bent down and wiped His wet, dirty feet with her hair. She took out a bottle of oil mixed with perfume, took the oil in her hands and gently stroked His feet with the oil—kissing them as she anointed Him with the perfume.
Jesus just sat there, never flinching, eyes fixed on the Pharisees, watching them react in shock and disbelief—flames of contempt shooting out of their merciless eyes.
Simon could stand it no more. This outrageous scene had proven his point. He muttered to himself and his “more respectable” guests, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner” (v. 39).
In other words, if Jesus were truly a prophet, He would know about her scandalous sexual sin, and He would be shocked. But Jesus did know and was not shocked!
Now, you have to realize this was a controversial situation. Imagine a known prostitute coming up to your pastor, kissing his feet and rubbing oil on them after the Sunday service. It would be his last Sunday at most churches if he didn’t put an end to it fast! What was Jesus thinking? Why didn’t this shock Jesus like it would all of us?
Jesus looks at the heart. It’s about the heart. Jesus confronted the unloving hearts of His host and friends while this woman demonstrated a heart overflowing with love. Jesus said, “Simon, I have something to tell you” (v. 40).
“Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii [a whole lot of money], and the other fifty [one tenth as much]. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said. (The only thing Simon had judged correctly that day!)
Then He turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little” (Luke 7:41–47)
It’s all about love! Don’t miss this very critical point Jesus makes to us all: If you truly recognize how much it cost God to forgive you, it will flood your heart with love for God and others who need more of the same.
It’s all about love! Not a love that ignores the mud and the damage that destroys God’s Masterpiece, but a love that recognizes how much loving mercy God has given a messed-up person like me!
That great love brings grace and truth together to give hope to a broken world in need of forgiveness and restoration.
Note: The previous article was excerpted from Mud and the Masterpiece: Seeing Yourself and Others Through the Eyes of Jesus by John Burke.
Can you recognize any heresies that might be occurring in your church? (Lightstock)
For a pastor, the way to deal with bad theology in his church is always to preach the Word.
Just hang in there, year after year, teaching and preaching God’s unchanging truth. The changes in your people will come as you remain faithful.
The word orthodox means “right thinking.” Straight shooting. Sound doctrine. Solid reasoning.
We think of heresy as something the bad guys do, the “spiritual gift” of cults and the aberration of the rebellious. After all, aren’t all heretics nuts?
(We interrupt to recommend a book. A half-century ago, Walter Nigg wrote The Heretics to establish that the great heresies in church history were the result of some pretty smart people with real grievances, and not nuts. Reading it was life-changing for me. I checked alibris.com and amazon.com just now. A used copy or two is available, and new reprints are expensive. However, this is a great investment, and the book will be a keeper.)
As Walt Kelly’s comic-strip possum Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
There is enough heresy inside the walls of your church to start 12 new cults by breakfast.
In a half-century and more of churchmanship—pastoring, assistant pastoring and denominational involvement—I have seen these heresies, or beggars riding in kings’ chariots, as the saying goes:
1. “If you are having trouble in your Christian life, clearly it’s because you are not saved.” You struggle with temptations, with disciplining yourself to a daily time of prayer and the Word, with controlling your temper, and a thousand other things. Obviously, you have never been saved.
The solution is for you to this time, get it right. So, you go through all those spiritual contortions—praying, seeking, crying, pleading and performing autopsies on yourself—hoping that this time it takes. You ask the pastor to rebaptize you because you think, “If I was not saved before, it was not real baptism.”
Right thinking—orthodoxy—says it would help a great deal if you knew the Word. Christians struggle with temptation. They war against wickedness in high places. They fight a never-ending battle to conform their desires to the mind of Christ. Anyone teaching otherwise is a deceiver.
Background: In my first church following seminary, a congregation that ran 140 when I arrived and 240 when I left three-and-a-half years later, we baptized an average of 60 people a year. Impressive? It was, until you checked to see whose baptisms those were. Some were the same people every year, trying to “get it right this time.” As the young and inexperienced pastor, I went along with it, even knowing it was wrong.
2. “If our church is struggling and always having a hard time keeping our head above the water, it’s the pastor’s fault.” Year after year, we have a hard time making the budget, there is constant dissension among the congregation, and we can’t seem to agree on anything. Clearly, if we had a good preacher, we could be like that wonderful church across town.
Their solution: Fire this preacher and find one that fits.
Right thinking (orthodoxy) says these people should get their eyes off the preacher and ask, “Lord, is it I?” Meanwhile, let the pastor keep preaching the Scriptures.
Background: Been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it.
3. “A steady diet of prophecy—conferences, classes, sermons—will produce a great and godly church.” These people get tired of studies in Ephesians and classes on soul winning. They grow impatient with ministries to the children of prisoners and clamor for prophecy experts to get our minds off the problems of today and spread out their charts and tell us about the grand tomorrow that is coming for us and people like us.
Their solution is to find a pastor that will pull this off. Naturally, his views will need to jive with the official ones of the church leaders as well as the denomination.
Right thinking suggests 1) there is no church in the New Testament that did that, 2) only a few books of the New Testament devote much space to prophecy, 3) good and godly Christians disagree on prophecy interpretations and 4) churches in the past have committed 10,000 errors trying to identify antichrists, the abomination of desolation, and the time calendar. Let them proceed with care.
Background: I have had a few church members through the years who clamored for me to preach prophecy and bring in those prophetic powerhouses. When I refused, they became bitter and antagonistic. Likewise, I’ve seen good, solid churches taken over by new pastors who had gone to seed on prophecy. Other than illustrating that “knowledge puffs up” (1 Cor. 8:1), a quarter of a century later, I see no good that came from it. In fact, such an emphasis could have even been destructive to the extent it diverted the Lord’s workers from their God-given work in their church and community.
Question: Isn’t prophecy in the Bible? It sure is. The problem is pastors and churches that major on something the Bible does not. Furthermore, teaching this subject is a field of landmines all waiting to maim the unwary and naive. Let the teachers proceed with caution.
4) “Getting people saved is more important than discipling them. At least they’re going to heaven.” This thinking says if we can just get people to pray the sinner’s prayer, we have rescued them from hell.
Right thinking says, “Show me that in the Word.” Jesus did not send His people to get people to pray a loaded prayer but to make disciples of all nations.
Background: A pastor in our city printed the sinner’s prayer on a card that he handed out to all his members. They were charged to get friends and family, co-workers, anyone, to pray that prayer. Their goal was a thousand people a year. Meanwhile, their church continued along, running 25 each Sunday. What’s wrong with this picture?
Question: Isn’t it important to get people saved? You bet it is. But the goal is to bring them into the body as a disciple (learner) who will grow in Christ and become a worker in the kingdom. We are not sent to make friends or converts, not “likes” or supporters, but to make disciples! (See Matthew 28:18-20.)
5. “Doing evangelism wrong is better than nothing. After all, the unsaved can’t get any more lost than they already are.” This thinking says anything we do is better than nothing. Even the “Holy Ghost-shouting con men” of which revivalism in America has produced too many or the manipulative masters of emotions and purveyors of feel-good theology which have filled our church rolls with names but left the pews vacant—even these are better than nothing, according to this thinking. After all—and I have heard this said—“We can’t get the lost any more lost than they already are.”
Right thinking wonders about this, whether we would have done better to have left people to be lost than to mess them up but good for eternity. Perhaps they are far more unreachable now than had we not poisoned them against the real thing. Jesus spoke of people being made “twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (Matt. 23:15). The proselyte duped into a bad religious profession will hereafter be twice as hard to reach for Christ as his deceiver, who knew precisely he was teaching error.
Background: I once knew a lapsed Jehovah Witness who would drop by for counsel from time to time. She had grown disillusioned with the lies and false prophecies of her religion—she and a million others had bailed out after the leaders had prophesied 1975, I think, as the year of Christ’s return—but she would not attend any other church. She admitted to me that her former faith had poisoned her against all Christian churches.
Someone will give account before a holy God for this.
6. “If you are not speaking in tongues, you may not be saved and are definitely not mature or godly enough to be a leader in the church.” A few days ago, a man told me of a preacher saying to him, “If you do not speak in tongues, you will go to hell.” He answered, “Man, what Bible are you preaching from?” Good answer (as far as it went).
This kind of thinking exalts one spiritual gift (and a minor one at that) above all others and makes it the test of everything, something Scripture does not come close to doing. I suspect the culprit is the ingrown theology of such groups, as they close their system and study only what they themselves have said, then focus on minute interpretations of their own “revelations.” Such a system is fraught with error and dangerous to live with.
Orthodoxy—right thinking—says, “Teach the Word. Even the book of the Bible that speaks most about tongues-speaking (1 Corinthians) sets limits, establishes barriers, and gives guidelines to rein in this kind of maverick theology.”
7. “This is our church. You preachers come and go. Do not meddle with how we do things.” This kind of thinking is found primarily among small and fossilized churches, those one generation from dying. After all, this kind of thinking is what will kill a church quicker than Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid.
Right thinking opens the Bible to Matthew 16:18, where the Lord says, “I will build My church.” It’s His church and not mine, nor yours. And He builds it.
Pray the Lord does not cancel your franchise, church leader. If He does, only the spiritually aware will notice. The rest of the people will go right on as before, doing their little activities and playing their little games. The only difference is that God will be nowhere to be found and no lives will be changed as a result of worship or faith.
Teach the Word, Pastor
There is no error that the Word will not address in one way or the other. Seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Author of this book, to know the correct applications for your people.
Preach the Word from the pulpit, and teach it in your leadership classes, in deacons' meetings, in committee meetings, in groups large and small. Teach the Word to your youth and to your children. Teach it to old and young, newcomers and old-timers.
Never stop. Teach it with love and with full assurance that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).
Go into the ministry believing that God’s people do not need your most clever ideas, but to know the Word of God. They do not come to church starving to know how the latest schemes from the business world apply to them, but hungering to know God and His Word.
Teach and preach the Word with the full assurance that:
“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it” (Is. 55:10-11).
Dr. Joe McKeever writes from the vantage point of more than 60 years as a disciple of Jesus, more than 50 years preaching His gospel and more than 40 years of cartooning for every imaginable Christian publication.
