What is the message being communicated by Christians and the church regarding homosexuality? In years past we might be quick to answer the question and our chance of accuracy would be fairly certain. Not so much today. The push to normalize homosexuality has caught many churches and Christians up in its net and seemingly dragged them along. The result is a Christian culture that is frayed at the ends with churches that have decided to abandon biblical teaching in favor of a cultural message.

The new message declares the Bible old, outdated, irrelevant for today’s culture, or even just plain wrong. Somehow pastors want their congregations to believe in the veracity and inerrancy of Scripture when it comes to the existence of heaven and hell, the creation of the world, salvation and eternity. But not about human sexuality.

Pastors want people to believe that God created man and woman, that He formed them from the dust of the earth and gave them life – but not that He knows what is best for them. It must be a weird sort of tension to try and affirm Genesis 1 -3 as biblical truth then relate Romans 1 as outdated and irrelevant.

While some professing Christians, like Matthew Vines, seek to accommodate Scripture to culture in order to make sin acceptable; others are refusing to compromise.

Jean Lloyd, writing at The Public Discourse, shares a glimpse of her story from a young teen struggling with same-sex attraction to an open lesbian, to a married mother in a heterosexual marriage. Looking back on her journey Lloyd shares seven things she wishes her pastor knew about her homosexuality that are, insightful, to say the least.

In the end Lloyd makes one simple plea on behalf of herself and others struggling with same-sex attractions:

“May I make two requests? Continue to love me, but remember that you cannot be more merciful than God. It isn’t mercy to affirm same-sex acts as good. Practice compassion according to the root meaning of ‘compassion’: Suffer with me. Don’t compromise truth; help me to live in harmony with it. I’m asking you to help me take up my cross and follow Jesus.”

Here is an abbreviated list of the seven things Lloyd would like for pastors to know:

1. I wish you knew that just because I didn’t choose this orientation, it doesn’t follow that I was “born this way” or that “God created me gay.” While genetics influences these traits, there is not a fixed predetermination. It is not hardwired like eye or skin color.[1]
2. I wish you knew a better way to help me honor my body by living in accord with the Creator’s design. I wasborn this way: female. God did create me a woman. Please don’t fall into the gnostic dualism that divides my spiritual life from the life I now live in my body.
3. I wish you knew that you aren’t helping me follow Jesus either by demanding that my attractions change or by not allowing them to change. No one can promise me that my attractions will change. Jesus certainly didn’t. But don’t deny me that possibility either.
4. I wish you knew a better way to define “change.” Over many years, my experience of same-sex attraction went from being a continual fire to an occasional flicker. A man who still experiences same-sex attraction but is happily married to a woman, where he saw no possibility of a heterosexual relationship before, has indeed changed.
5. I wish you knew that I should be credited with the same moral agency and responsibility as everyone else in the Christian community. If unmarried heterosexuals are called to celibacy and are presumed in Christ to have the power to live out His commands, then so should I be. To treat me according to a different standard is to lower my dignity before God. I too am called to be holy.
6. I wish you knew that God teaches more about homosexual conduct than “Don’t.” He does teach that, but the truth about the body, sex, and the design and telosof creation reveals so much more.
7. I wish you knew that it honors neither God, nor me, to apologize for His plan or design. I appreciate empathy for the pain my misdirected longings may cause, but God is not arbitrarily withholding something good from me. He is showing me what leads to life and human flourishing and is keeping me from that which will harm me.

Activists will no doubt decry Lloyd’s list and accuse her of being untrue to her “real” self while living a lie. But that accusation is nothing short of degrading and damaging to her dignity as it seeks to invalidate her experience as false. How can anyone call another person’s life experience false?

In the same way, telling people struggling with same-sex attraction that are seeking treatment that they have no right to seek such treatment is equally degrading to their dignity. Since when does anyone else get to determine what another human being has the right to seek treatment for? We don’t tell alcoholics or drug addicts they aren’t allowed to seek treatment. We don’t even tell people struggling with anger issues or poor spending habits they can’t seek treatment. Why are we so obsessed with telling people struggling with unwanted same-sex attractions that they are not allowed to seek treatment?

I wish I could put this list in the hands of every pastor and church in America. Lloyd’s message of “it’s not loving or merciful” to affirm homosexuality is sorely needed. We aren’t God, affirming what He has clearly rejected as sin is an attempt to play God. It never ends well for people that try to play God.