With a love for God and a love for what God has said and created, we can then bring a message of hope and life to people. This is the second great commandment. But how we love people is where things get tricky. I will develop this more fully, but at its core, love for neighbor must be a God-centered, truth-conveying, missions-minded love, because that’s what love is. But our pursuit of love will be the very point of opposition because the world’s conception of love is the unconditional acceptance, celebration and empowering of another’s self-expression. This means biblical love will be viewed as judgmental, intolerant, oppressive, bigoted, and discriminatory. Who is right? Who has the authority to make that determination? Only God can define what humanity is, what sexuality is, what marriage is—therefore he defines what love is.
If one steps outside of what God has created and has said about His creation, they do not come to another viable option, but instead they come to chaos. Those are the only options: Christ or chaos. Just like the prodigal son lived off his father’s money for quite a while, so also Sodom can hold things together on stolen capital and flaunt it while doing so. But the money will run out. Reality will come calling. In this sense we are the ones on the right side of history. When the sandy foundations of the sexual revolution begin to crumble, and people start stumbling our way in their brokenness, we must be there for them. We must be there with the same message we had at the beginning, with the same eyes of mercy, and the same readiness to show them what life in Christ is.
— Jason Lickey, Sharper Iron, Proclaiming the Truth in Sodom, November, 2, 2021
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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There is no getting people to understand other POVs, when they are determined to ignore ours. sigh
It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who believes you are either “with us or against us” and against means controlled by a powerful evil demi-deity. There’s no chance for understanding or dialogue.
I wonder what happens when the church itself is the source of the brokenness, with people stumbling away from it and finding enlightenment in atheism, agnosticism, or secular humanism. Or maybe people simply walk away from church with no brokenness or stumbling involved; that’s a hard truth for evangelicals to swallow, that one can be nonreligious and also not broken. Yet I have met many happy, healthy nonreligious people including a good number of ex-Christians. For every testimony there are ex-timonies, and for every conversion, deconversions. They happen.
The Church has been outed but it does not care! Black and white thinking is designed to prevent the stray into Reason. No matter how clear it becomes that the whole scheme is rotten, the ‘faithful’ plug their ears, pinch their noses against the reek and sing totally tone-deaf versions of Onward Christian Soldiers.