“I have same-sex attraction. What do I do with it?”
MAY 17, 2024
Steve Brown:
I have same sex attraction. What do I do with it? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.
Matthew Porter:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus in the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life’s hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there’s a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So, here’s seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth to answer your questions.
Steve Brown:
Hey, thank you Matthew. Hey Pete.
Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. How you doing? Happy Friday.
Steve Brown:
I’m doing good. You doing well?
Pete Alwinson:
I am, believe it or not, you know.
Steve Brown:
Listen, you guys, go to the website I told you about, and I keep saying you never listen. It’s ForgeTruth.com how’s that new book coming along?
Pete Alwinson:
It’s not coming fast, like yours. You’re the writer.
Steve Brown:
Well, I’m putting off ending it as long as I can, because I got some other issues to deal with. So, it’s funny how creativity can get destroyed when you’re not dealing with truth. So, but you work on yours and I’ll work on mine. And we’ll tell everybody about it. Meanwhile, get Like Father Like Son. That’s a life changing book that Pete wrote. You can get it at Amazon or Key Life or a lot of other places. And as you know, Pete comes in and we answer questions on Friday. You can get your question answered by just writing it down and sending it to
Key Life Network
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or if you’re in Canada, it’s
Key Life Canada
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Or you can e-mail it to [email protected] or you can pick up the phone and dial 1-800-KEY-LIFE, follow instructions, and sometimes we put your voice on the air. And listen, if you can help us financially, please do. I promise we’ll be faithful with your gift. We’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. And those are organizations that oversee our books to make sure that we’re ethical. And, we would be anyway, but we’ll be faithful with your gift. So, if you can, be as generous as you can, and we’ll use it in the lives of a lot of people. And if you can’t, we get that too. Do say a prayer for this ministry. Pete, speaking of prayer, you pray for us, and we’ll get to these questions.
Pete Alwinson:
You got it. Let’s pray. Oh Lord, we come to you. What a joy it is to stop and to remember that we are the deeply beloved and redeemed children of the Most High God. Thank you that you love us. Thank you Lord Jesus, that you did everything necessary in your life in obeying the law perfectly and then taking our curse perfectly on the cross for our sin, not yours. We honor you. We praise you. We ask that you continue to be the king of our life, lead us and guide us every day of our life. And Lord, at the end of this week, we know we need you. And more than we can ever imagine with our addictions and our struggles with sin and the many things that keep pulling us away, the idols that we resurrect in our own lives. By your Spirit, show us our need for you and draw us into your presence. Even this week-end as we go to worship, we pray for all of our leaders who will do great things to lead us into your presence. And now, use this Q&A time we pray, take us that next step as we follow you. In your holy name we pray. Amen.
Steve Brown:
If you were listening, I said, you can pick up the phone when you have a question. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, and then once you’ve recorded your question, we sometimes put it on the air. Like this.
Caller 1:
I’ve been a celibate gay man for the past 10 years. And celibate because I know that God does not want me to be gay. He prefers me to be straight. And knowing that being homosexual is not of God. So, how do I turn off the attraction towards other men?
Steve Brown:
That’s a first, I’m so sorry. That’s hard. That’s a hard road to hoe. There was, there’s a book called Prayers by a French priest. And one of the, it was written long before people were doing those kind of prayers, the colloquial prayers. And one of the, I can’t think of his name right now, well, at any rate, one of the prayers is this priest walks through a park and families are playing there and children are laughing. And he goes back to his room and he knows that he’ll never have any of that. And it’s the saddest prayer you’ve ever read. He prays.
Lord, I’m so lonely. And I can’t fix this, and I don’t know what to do.
And I suspect that the same prayer, or a similar prayer is one that our friend who just asked the question asked. That’s a hard place to be.
Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, it is. And I appreciate you calling in and giving us, telling us. And I think that that’s part of the deal. I think having some brothers and sisters in Christ in a church group that you can be honest with. And who can pray for you because you can’t do that alone. One other thing too, is that I think there’s a lot of people who are in a similar category, but you might be surprised, like, I think there’s men who have not been able to be physically with their wives for years. Or women that have not been able to be with their husbands physically for years. And they’re putting down those desires, or for alcohol, strong desires, or you name it. There’s a lot of strong desires, and this is part of the big battle of the Christian life.
Steve Brown:
Yes, it really is. It really is.
Pete Alwinson:
And so, there are people that are battling with you, maybe not on the same issue, although there are other brothers that struggle. And I commend you for the position you’ve taken, because I don’t think there’s any other position you could take. Just ask God to continue to renew your heart and mind. And ask that he would remove it. I think we can’t ask those requests.
Steve Brown:
Oh, I agree. We had one, when I was a young pastor in the Boston area, and I didn’t, subsequent to that, I’ve dealt with it a lot, this issue. But very late at night, a man who had been nominated to be a leader in the church, came to the parsonage door. And he was crying and he said, I got to talk to you. And I said, okay, come in. And he did. He said, I can’t serve. I said, why can’t you serve? He said, because I’m gay or because I’m homosexual. He said, I don’t think that word was even used in that context. And I didn’t know anybody was, and I said, are you, does that mean you’re sleeping with guys? And he said, Oh no. In fact, he was married and had two children. And I said, look, I don’t know what to tell you, but it seems to me you’re not any different than I am. You know, lust is something we all deal with.
Pete Alwinson:
Right.
Steve Brown:
And I don’t see that yours is any different than mine in terms of the context of sin. But I’m going to check. And so, I did. I called some old guys, old pastor friends, Harold John Ockenga and a couple of others. And they told me I was right. That he struggles. We all struggle.
Pete Alwinson:
We all struggle with sin. I mean, materialism and all. I mean, but Satan wants to convince us that some sins are just unforgivable.
Steve Brown:
Unforgiveable, and they’re not.
Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.
Steve Brown:
And I, you know, and when we get off this broadcast, I’m going to pray for you, but I know it’s hard. And I, get some brothers who walk with you, who are honest, don’t get the uptight legalist because they’ll make you worse.
Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.
Steve Brown:
But get with some guys that really understand and they’ll walk with you. And then I would suggest, and I served on their board for a lot of years, and I trust these guys, you might want to contact Harvest USA. That’s Harvest USA, their headquarters are in Philadelphia, and you can Google it, and you can get a phone number or an address so you can talk to somebody there who can make a whole lot of difference. This is an e-mail. How was the Bible formed?
Pete Alwinson:
Wow. Well, that’s a big subject.
Steve Brown:
It was dropped out of the heaven and there was a lot of light and thunder and people picked it up and then opened it and said, this is from God.
Pete Alwinson:
There it was. Yeah. Boy, the old, you know, the story of the Old Testament and the story of the New Testament are similar in that it was given over time, except the New Testament, those books were more closely written time wise, compacted. But the godly people in Israel realized that there were authoritative spokesmen who spoke and then wrote down. And they collated those and kept them.
Steve Brown:
And the same thing in the New Testament.
Pete Alwinson:
Same with the New.
Steve Brown:
By the way, it’s a lot more technical than that. And Pete and I could go into that, but it would be wasted conversation. But it’s sort of miraculous the way this happened. It wasn’t actually decided by people.
Pete Alwinson:
Right.
Steve Brown:
It was decided by God and people nodded in that direction. I mean, everybody agreed when the New Testament came together. Hey, that’s it. And it’s closed.
Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.
Steve Brown:
And every, the Christians everywhere knew that, same with the Old Testament. And so, it was kind of God through a process revealing what he reveals in Scripture. And then having God’s people say they got it, that’s it. And then we have the Scriptures.
Pete Alwinson:
There were always even, you know, as we think of the New Testament times. There were always some who wrote their own, and the church said, no, that’s not the, that’s, and sometimes they’d use like Peter’s name or John’s name or whatever. And the early, and the church just said, no, it’s not. And there’s been all these conspiracy theories that have come out in recent years. The new atheists have brought up and they’ve said, look, you know, the early church controlled the narrative. No. The early church was just in agreement. And so, don’t listen to these conspiracy theories, but there always were false authors out there, but the early church knew who they were and didn’t put the books in.
Steve Brown:
No. And we’re very wise. Because that, well, the Holy Spirit was operating in that whole process and it was an interesting process.
Pete Alwinson:
But it’s a great subject. And there are some really good books. And I can see the cover of the book right now, but I can’t remember the name, but there are some good books to read on this.
Steve Brown:
Okay. Did Jesus commit suicide?
Pete Alwinson:
I love that question. I’ve never heard it before. Because he chose to die on the cross, did Jesus commit suicide? No.
Steve Brown:
No, he didn’t.
Pete Alwinson:
You know, and the reason we know this is Gethsemane, he didn’t want to do it, but he wanted to do it to reclaim.
Steve Brown:
And did the soldiers who died for our freedom in the wars that our nation has fought, did they commit suicide? Of course not. There is a difference and you know the difference. And if you don’t, go listen to somebody else. We’re out of here guys. But before we go, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.