This will encourage you. You can be a Christian and still drive a car! and have electricity in the house, not just in the barn! Those Amish are committed to their faith, but they draw lines that the Bible just doesn’t draw.

Is it the same with LGBTQ? Is that it, that we’re narrowly mean when we don’t make loving space for them, another non-biblical line that we’re foolish to draw? We hear that so much. The culture is changing so rapidly, and almost everyone has moved on to accepting people as they are, and that includes LGBTQ. 

But that just isn’t what the Bible teaches. If the Old Testament passages aren’t easy, certainly Romans 1 is crystal clear. It’s good that some admit that and then say that the Bible is wrong. Take a look at Kevin DeYoung, What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality? I think it covers it all.

This isn’t easy. People think that we don’t love gays, and we need to deal with that. Is it true that we’ve tolerated unbiblical divorce, so why not gays? If that’s right we need to change. If we’ve tolerated gossip, we have to change there too. Should we be thinking again about total depravity, that we believe that though sin is the way people are, it’s still blasphemous rebellion against God?

Wouldn’t it help if we were forthright about our own sins? if we confessed that we’ve looked down on gays while being understanding to people who got out of a hard marriage without a real biblical basis? You know, there could be a lot of good from being out of step with our culture: we’re being pushed to ask those questions about divorce and gossip and have better answers. Especially we could be a lot clearer about God’s love for sinners, all of them, not just our kind. It won’t be easy but we need to get on with it.

Could we clear the air so everyone can agree on what is the gospel and what just cultural accretions? This is an old question. Do you have to celebrate Easter, with forty days of Lent? Not really, the church thought this up but the Bible doesn’t tell us to. What about believing that Mary didn’t die but was caught up to heaven? Same answer. Grape juice, not wine in the Supper? Wearing a tie to go to church? a dress? The list goes on and on. Looking at all helps but not enough for LGBTQ. That’s harder, and looks close to hopeless. In this culture, how can we hope for people to hear us?

I read old books. Right now it’s G. C. Berkouwer’s A Half Century of Theology. Those old liberals he talks about, they were sneaky. The Bible teaches the virgin birth of Christ, they agreed, but then they said it’s just a theory. When the church accepted that, that’s when the formerly stalwart Presbyterian Church fell apart. We should have learned from that: just because we don’t yet understand what to do with some biblical teaching doesn’t mean we should junk it. (Just because our tiny culture doesn’t have room for something doesn’t mean much—just talk with believers from somewhere else in the world and you’ll be surprised, again and again. They’ll show you how that Bible piece works powerfully in their culture. Just do global theology!)

When old liberalism looked crude and unhelpful, a lot of work went into hi-tech ‘point of contact’ and ‘pre-understanding.’  How can we hear not our culture but the gospel itself, when that culture impacts us so much? That’s the old Barth vs Bultmann thing. Bultmann told us to define the gospel before we looked at the Bible so we’d know what to ignore in it. Barth was sure that if you did that you’d just rewind liberalism again, but worse. He helped us, but not with anything we could work with, but just this: what God tells us in the Bible is from a different world, so don’t even try to find that point of contact.

All that high-tech theology, but nothing that helps us. How can we possibly get through to anyone any more? Try this, try turning the whole question around. What if the issue isn’t, how can we get through? but rather, how can the Lord bring to us the people whom he’s set his heart upon? Not about how we can do the impossible, but how God already is doing it?

I get that from John Leonard’s blessed book Get Real (a WRF- endorsed book published by New Growth Press. It goes like this: ask the Lord to bring his seeking people to you! Sure, we’re called to reach out to everyone, but it’s more than OK that God brings some to you! The alternative can be just terrible. How could we ever get through to people whose whole mindset is against God? LGBTQ is just a sample, the world overflows with so many varieties of idolatry. 

Why did it take so long for us to know this, in practice not just in theory? We all confess, Reformed more vigorously, that humankind is dead is sin, that only the Holy Spirit can turn the mind and the heart around to know the truth, the truth of the gospel. We’ve said that, but then we started thinking that somehow this culture today is a lot harder than any before. (Was it really? Seventy years ago, when I began to think about the gospel, everything was much more ‘religious’—everybody went to church and said it was a good thing to do, but we didn’t hear about Jesus. Now I wonder, wasn’t that mushy religious culture at least as hard to overcome as where we are today?)

Memorizing some outline and dumping it on people doesn’t work, and most of us don’t try any more. Where’s the next Billy Graham? No, it’s clearly up to you and me, and it better happen soon—the church is aging into oblivion. Now we’re completely ready for the old reliable and best answer: nothing else works, so let’s pray. Just go beyond some general vague prayer for ‘revival.’ As John Leonard coaches us, pray for someone to come into your life who will know you’re a believer  (you let her know that) and who’s then going to ask you what that’s like? That has to be the way to go. If those culturally-sensitive brainy Barth and Bultmann couldn’t do it, that leaves the Lord, doesn’t it?

O Lord, I believe what you say, that you ask me to go and tell about Jesus. Lord, I know I’m not doing it. I don’t know how. Bring someone into my life who wants to know more about him, this week. In the name of Jesus who prays with me now.