COM Newsletter - February 2023
“LOVE IS IN THE AIR”
The year was 1977, and a new song by John Paul Young out of Australia hit the music charts. In the United States, it peaked at No. 7 on the pop chart and spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. The song plays at 122 beats per minute, a typical 1970s disco rhythm.
As a young ballroom and disco dancer and instructor, I found “Love Is in the Air” to be one of my favorite dance songs but never paid close attention to the lyrics. As is so typical of “love songs,” this song was more about infatuation, puppy love, and perhaps even lust than about genuine self-sacrificing love that leads to lifelong commitment. The beat and the rhythm drives home the stimulating feeling and passion of what I call cheap love.
Well, it’s February, and everywhere we go we see that “Love is in the air” once again, and on the market shelves… This is the month of Valentine’s Day, and the merchant world is capitalizing on love through the sale of decorations, greeting cards, chocolates, flowers, balloons, just to name a few items. Hollywood is capitalizing on love through television programs and movies. But we should not be surprised, for the world is all about merchandising in one way or another.
What really saddens me, however, is the merchandising of “cheap love and cheap grace” within the Christian world. God’s love is portrayed much like the commercialized love. Messages of “love and acceptance” abound throughout the church. “God loves you the way you are,” we hear. “He loves you and accepts you just the way you are.” “Why! He made you this way…!”
As much as one might like to believe this message, it is not biblical. True, God is love, and God does love you even though enemies and strangers, but not the way you are, but rather in spite of the way you are… This is why His word says “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind…” He loves you where He finds you, but He loves you too much to leave you there. Too often we don’t even realize our true state of being.
Years ago, while on a speaking tour in Ukraine, I was visiting with a very humble elderly couple in ministry. Their son had gone to Poland for seminary training where he found life was so much better than life in Ukraine. He wrote back to his parents, “Mom and Dad, you are so fortunate to not know how unfortunate you really are.” And that’s the way we tend to be in our fallen, sinful, carnal state of being. Too many Christians want to be saved comfortably in their sins rather than from their sins, not realizing how truly unfortunate they really are. This is very readily seen in the LGBT+ community.
In the beginning, God created mankind in His image. Through sin that image has been greatly diminished in His children. Like any proud Papa, God loves to see Himself in His children, and it hurts His heart to see that image so tarnished and even destroyed by the ravages of the wages and consequences of sin.
God’s love is that of a Father who teaches, reproves, corrects, and instructs His children that they may grow to be like Him in personality and character. His love also requires Him at times to warn and even punish His children in order to guide them in the right path to eternal life. His love is that of a Father who is not willing that any of His children should perish, but that they all might come to repentance, turning back into the path that leads to quality of life and length of days, even eternal life with Himself.
May we each one daily submit ourselves to His loving guidance and direction, loving Him in return and trusting that He truly knows what is best, having only our joy, health, happiness, and fulfillment at heart.
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Q&A
Question: I have been married for 14 years and have two beautiful boys. My husband came out of a homosexual background. He became a born-again Christian, left that life behind, and married me. I ignorantly believed that because he was a Christian he was completely healed of all homosexual feelings. I was very wrong. Throughout our marriage he has had to continually fight those feelings. He has been unfaithful to me more than once in our marriage, but each time I have forgiven him and taken him back, believing that divorce was never an option. Every time I took him back I believed that our marriage became stronger as I felt we had to work harder than most to keep our love alive.
However, I have now recently discovered that he has been living a double life for a year. He has now filed for divorce, as he believes that he is gay and cannot continue living a lie. I still love him dearly and am heartbroken to think that he is not only walking away from me and from his boys, but, ultimately, he is walking away from God.
I am really struggling to come to terms with the fact that I know that he is saved; yet he is not able to walk in victory in this area. I am still prepared to forgive him and to take him back as I love him and have seen the potential in him to be used by the Lord.
I have so enjoyed your testimony and wisdom on the subject of homosexuality as it has given me new hope. I almost came to a place of doubting that a person could ever overcome this. I would like to know what I as a wife or even friend to my husband can do in order to help him.
Reply: My heart aches for you in this situation. My! What a patient, loving, and lovable Christian you must have been to hang in there for so long, knowing your husband’s past and present double life.
I must first inquire regarding your statement of “the fact that I know that he is saved, yet he is not able to walk in victory in this area.” From what, in fact, is your husband saved? Jesus came to save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). Homosexuality is a sin issue, is it not? Unless your husband has overcome his homosexual lust and behavior, by God’s grace, he has not been saved from sin. Does that make sense?
Is there yet hope for him to be saved from his sins? Yes, of course! An emphatic “yes”! The theme of our ministry is that nothing is impossible with God, for He is mighty to save, the whosoevers, from whatsoever, even to the uttermost. The problem, however, is this: God says in Jeremiah 3, “Only acknowledge thine iniquity ... and I will heal your backsliding” (verses 14, 22).
Before the Lord can help him overcome, your husband must come to the place where he can acknowledge that what he is dealing with is a sin issue—not an acceptable, alternative lifestyle, not a genetic inheritance of gay tendencies, but a sin issue. He must then come to believe that Jesus can and will save him personally from this sin issue, then he will be one of the elect and chosen of God, His peculiar treasure. He will come out from the world, by God’s grace, and separate himself from every unclean thought and unholy practice.
Grace, by the way, is that divine influence working upon the heart and then reflecting in the life, according to the Greek dictionary. In other words, grace is divine, omnipotent strength to overcome any and all temptation. Jesus promised that “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
It is not enough for you to want victory for your husband. Your husband must himself want this victory, and want it badly enough to “seek... first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). Perhaps you can convince him that temptation is not sin, that his orientation is determined by the direction he chooses for his life, not the direction that Satan, through temptation, chooses for him. Perhaps he would be encouraged by the text of Scripture where Paul advises us to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5).
You see, so many gay people have been conditioned to believe that if they are ever tempted homosexually that they are homosexual, and that there is no hope of ever changing. But Jesus was tempted in all points like as your husband, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). Who would dare say Jesus was homosexual? Jesus suffered being tempted (Hebrews 2:18). Jesus resisted unto blood being tempted, striving against sin (Hebrews 12:4). Yet, He chose to lay down His life rather than yield to that temptation. So the nature of one's temptation does not define who he is as a person; his choice of direction makes that definition.
Joseph, in Potiphar’s house, resisted that almost overwhelming temptation of Potiphar’s wife by responding, “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9). He put the thoughts and feelings of God ahead of his own powerful urges, tendencies, and temptations, then he fled from the scene of the temptation. Joseph submitted himself to God, resisted the devil, and then fled from the scene in accordance with our counsel in James 4:7. This has been my own practice in the face of homosexual temptation. And it works!
If your husband is open to your communication, you might want to share this with him. Try to encourage him also to go through the comingoutministries.org website before he dives headlong into this world of self-destruction and degradation. I do know whereof I speak as I lived in this same world for 16 years.
My heart goes out to you and your family. Love your husband unconditionally, and pray without ceasing that the Lord will give him no rest, day or night, until he makes an entire surrender of his will to Jesus. Pray that the Lord will do whatever it takes to bring him to the foot of the cross. But also remember that your husband has the freedom of choice, which God Himself will not violate.
Victor
Q&A text taken from:
Author: “Victor J. Adamson”
(Ron Woolsey)
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