This We Believe: Sexuality & Gender

Open up your Bibles, open up your heart for what God wants to do this morning.

Let's give it up for Pastor John.

Thank you.

Good morning, Zion.

Wow, we got a full house today.

Love it.

Give someone a high five next to you.

Just tell them that they look good.

Now, now the person that you neglected, tell them that they look pretty good too.

Summertime is in full swing.

Let's put our hands together and welcome our Zion online family, those that are streaming live right now.

Hey, we love you.

You're part of the fam.

And um, man, I'm so excited to preach and teach from God's Word today.

Uh, I do want to encourage you.

I think this is gonna be a message where you want to take notes.

And so I want to invite you to lean in.

We're in our This We Believe series where we're unpacking core essential truths of our faith and some theological distinctives that we hold dear as a church, uh, diving into some cultural hot topics today.

And one of the reasons why I want to invite you to lean in and take notes today is because I really think that this topic can be one of the most divisive conversations in culture.

It can be one of those hot topics that uh at times creates such a dividing line between people.

Today we're talking about sexuality and gender.

Aren't you glad you came to church today?

Someone is.

We have a high school student that is pretty jazzed, that he's at church today.

Um but I know jazzed.

Who says jazzed?

Love that.

I'm 41 and you say things like that.

But I know when I talk about uh introducing a topic like this, like the room can tighten up a little bit because we we all have different experiences with this conversation.

Um, so many of us we enter this room carrying different stories.

Uh for some of us, this just feels like a cultural conversation or maybe a political conversation.

Uh, for others, it's it's deeply personal.

You may be a parent that's trying to understand how to walk with a child that you love that's navigating uh confusion and questions.

You might be someone in here that's carrying shame, guilt, and regret from stuff that uh has happened in your past or decisions that you've made or struggles in your present.

And uh man, I just want to honor that and just pause for a moment.

I want to recognize that.

Um, but some of us might simply be wondering what does the Bible actually say around sexuality and gender and how do we live it out without losing the heart of Jesus?

That's where I want to begin because this isn't a political rally here today.

Uh, this is a church.

Um, I'm not interested in just generating applause by attacking people who aren't in the room.

We're gonna open up God's word and we're gonna humbly listen to the voice of our Heavenly Father.

We're gonna allow Jesus to pastor us.

And so let's let's dive in.

Um, today I I want to begin this conversation by um holding this up.

What do I have in my hand here today?

This is a not a trick question.

And in a mirror, when I hold this up to myself, um, I see I see what I look like.

I see that I didn't put sunscreen on yesterday at the beach with my kids.

I see that I've got this gnarly like scratch on my nose because one of my boys jumped on my neck on Friday at a pool and my my nose connected with the with the floor of a pool.

That's cool.

Um that's fun.

Fun being a dad.

Um but as I I hold this up, I see what I look like.

Um, but a mirror can't tell me my purpose.

Um, I I can look at this mirror and you can look at this mirror, and you can see if you still have some of your breakfasts in your teeth this morning as you walked into church.

You can see what you look like.

You can even see on your face some emotions that you might be feeling internally.

But a mirror cannot reveal your identity.

A mirror cannot tell you your ultimate purpose.

A mirror can show you what you look like and perhaps even define some things that you feel about yourself, but ultimately a mirror can only reflect my image, but it cannot reflect my identity.

And I bring this up because this is the central question of the conversation that we're having today.

Who has the authority to tell me who I am and what my body is for?

Because our culture, our world is constantly telling us to look within.

Saying, hey, put a mirror up to yourself and look deep within to define who you are.

Your desires reveal your identity.

How you feel determines who you are, right?

Be your authentic self.

And so somehow, somehow, you got to look deep within a mirror and look inside yourself to try to define yourself.

To try to tell yourself what it means to be who you are, what your body is for.

Um, it all emerges from a cultural understanding that assumes that the truest version of me is somewhere deep inside me, waiting to be discovered.

And that freedom comes when I express that inner self outwardly.

See, this way of thinking has become so normal and natural that we rarely even stop to examine it.

It's just simply the water that we swim in.

The truth is that we live in a culture of competing stories.

You're gonna see it on the screen.

There's really two stories in our culture.

It's the story of self and it's the gospel story.

See, the story of self says look within yourself, and the gospel, God's word, says look to your creator.

The the story of self asks me to discover and construct an identity on my own.

But the gospel allows me to receive an identity from a God who completely knows me, who loves me, and created me.

See, the story of self gives my desires the responsibility of directing my life.

This has to be the thing to tell me who I am, where I should be going with the desires that I have inside of me.

But the gospel invites me to bring those desires to the love and the truth and the grace of Jesus Christ and allow him to redeem those desires and transform me from the inside out.

And ultimately, the story of self leaves me dependent upon affirmation from others.

Because ultimately, as I have constructed this definition of myself, I now have to defend my definition with other people, and I have to have their affirmation in order for me to feel healthy, happy, and whole.

But the story of the gospel says what?

I need forgiveness, I need redemption, I need the love of Christ, I need the possibility of genuine transformation, and it is only found in the good news of Jesus Christ.

Just want to begin the message with a little bit of that.

Because there's such an exhausting burden in trying to construct your own identity.

Think about this.

Beneath this whole mantra of create yourself, define yourself, or redefine your identity, think about this.

You have to do all these things.

You've got to discover yourself, you've got to name yourself, you got to defend yourself, and then you gotta persuade everyone around you to validate the self that you've created.

That's why Jesus says, No, I didn't come to give you a heavier burden.

I came to give you a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light.

I came to give you life and life to the full.

I came to give you security in your identity.

Jesus says, No, you're known by God, you're loved by God, you're created by God, and you can receive your life from Him.

But if we're honest, this conversation has become increasingly personal to so many of us.

Because Gallup's latest data estimates that 9% of American adults identify as LGBTQ.

And among adults under 30, that number is 23%, nearly one in four.

This number shows us that this isn't some distant reality or statistic.

This is a personal conversation.

These are sons, these are daughters, brothers, sisters, friends, loved ones, coworkers, people that we love and people that God loves.

And this message is for every one of us because every person has a body.

All of us have desires, and every person has experienced in some form or some way the tension between your desires and my desires not matching up with God's design.

This is a conversation for all of us.

So to understand who we are, what our bodies are made for, we got to begin where scripture begins with the God who created us.

There's really three movements in the scripture that helps us have biblical handles for sexuality and gender.

And the first movement is this is that you are created by God, and because of that, your body has meaning.

Genesis 1.27 says, so God created, pause.

You are not an accident, you are not a mistake, you are not the summation of a random event that happened billions of years ago, where a single cell turned into some amoeba that suddenly decided to have the cognitive ability to grow arms, legs, mind, and a mouth, and then now you have to define and redefine who you are because no one created you.

You're just random, you're accidental.

No, the Bible begins with the simple truth: you are created by God.

And because of that, human beings are created in his own image, Genesis 1.27 says, In the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them.

Notice where the biblical story begins.

It begins with the goodness of God and the goodness of his creation.

Catch this.

Before Genesis tells us anything about human rebellion, it tells us about human dignity.

God formed humanity in his image and gave our lives value, purpose, and meaning.

What this means is that every single human has infinite value and worth in God's eyes.

It means that your value isn't determined by your sexuality, your gender experience, your past, your behavior, your appearance, your politics, or whether you agree with me today.

Every person bears the image of God.

And because of that, this conviction has to shape the way that Christians speak, respond, and behave.

We never have permission to dehumanize or demean anyone who carries the image of their creator.

But Genesis also tells us very clearly that God created humanity, male and female.

Male and female share equal dignity, equal value, and equal access to God, but they are also meaningfully different.

If you're like, man, I don't know if they're different.

Like if you're not married, talk to someone who's married.

We're different.

But we see it most clearly, not in a subjective idea, but in God's embodied design.

A man can become a father, a woman can become a mother, and together their difference makes the one flesh union and the creation of life possible.

Men and women are not interchangeable, they are deeply interdependent.

This is what the Bible teaches.

But at the same time, we shouldn't confuse their differences with cultural stereotypes.

And here's what I mean by that: a man isn't less male because he's gentle, he's creative, he's kind, he's emotionally expressive, and a woman isn't less female because she's strong, direct, athletic, ambitious, or a leader.

I want to pause here because this is what culture has done over the years.

Culture says, You're made this way, man, you're made this way, woman, so it must mean you are blank.

Nope.

God says, I made you male and female, and within your divine design, you have a divinely ordered purpose.

And Genesis teaches us something our culture increasingly struggles to uh believe that our bodies carry meaning.

Your body carries so much meaning, purpose because of how it is designed.

Living here in Orange County, so many of us, when we recognize a surfboard, we can kind of easily understand its design, its purpose, its meaning, whether it's a longboard or a short board.

A surfboard shape tells you something about its purpose, down to the details, the rocker, its fins, its rails, the volume, they aren't random details.

They reveal what the board was shaped to do.

You could take a beautiful custom board and hang it on a wall, and it might look incredible, but the shaper designed it for water.

And when that specific kind of board meets a specific kind of wave, every detail of the shaper's design comes alive.

The design allows the board to do what it was created to do, and our bodies are infinitely more valuable than anything a human could shape or create.

But this principle helps us understand something important.

Design carries meaning.

God did not create souls and then place them in meaningless biological packaging, he created embodied people.

And our bodies are a part of his good creation and part of the story that he's writing in our lives.

And sexuality asked this question: what is my body for?

In other words, how should sexual desire be expressed?

Where does sexual intimacy belong?

What did God create sex to accomplish?

Well, gender asks this question: what does my body mean?

Does my body reveal something meaningful about who God created me to be?

Is being male or female something that I receive as part of God's creation or something that I define according to my internal experience?

See, one question concerns the purpose of the body, the other concerns the meaning of the body, but eventually they return to this same issue.

Here it is.

Who has the authority to define us?

Scripture teaches that these answers are received from the God who created us.

And we at Zion Church, we hold true to what Scripture teaches from cover to cover that biological sex is a God-ordained reality.

God created humanity, male and female, and our bodies aren't ours to redefine, but rather to be received and faithfully stewarded.

We also believe that sexual intimacy is designed to exist within the holy covenant of marriage between one man and one woman.

And any sexual expression outside of that covenant falls short of God's design, whether it involves adultery, pornography, sex outside of marriage, or same-sex sexual behavior.

God's design is to be received and stewarded.

It's like the person who shaped the board.

They understand why every detail is there.

Our creator understands the design for our bodies.

I just want you to know God's design is not an obstacle to freedom, it's a pathway to flourishing.

Every boundary that God installs in design and creation comes with a blessing attached to it.

Any prohibition you read in the scripture is attached to a powerful promise from God.

He loves us, he made us, he created us, and he knows what's best for us.

Amen.

And we can trust him.

But many of us, man, we hear this about God's design, and maybe we can generally agree, but we still wonder why does my experience feel so different?

Why is there a tension in what I hear about God's design and the struggles I have in my own life across the board?

Why does it feel like I keep having these thoughts, these feelings, these emotions, these attractions, this cross that I feel like I have to bear my entire life?

See, scripture doesn't ignore that tension.

It actually takes us from the goodness of creation into the brokenness of the fall.

See, the first movement that scripture tells us is that your body has meaning and it was created by God is good.

But the second thing that we have to recognize is that we are broken and our desires need discipleship.

David says in Psalm 51, verse 5, Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

Psalms 51:5

Parents was small humans.

This is like instant, like David is validating your daily experience.

We know our toddlers are sinful at birth.

But David is saying there is something innate inside of me that I recognize is not just because of a list of bad choices I've made through life.

There's something, there are desires, there's a war within me that I experienced from the time I was conceived in my mother's womb.

A few days ago, Taryn was taking our four boys on a little trip down to the beach.

Before they got to the beach, they stopped in an area, there was grass and there were sprinklers, and like she had a great idea of taking the boys to run around in the sprinklers, and so they go and they were having fun, and then she looked out of the corner of her eye, and Bo, our three-year-old, had taken one of those sprinkler jets and had turned it towards a family of five walking on the sidewalk.

They were not amused, they were like, Oh, that's cute.

They were like very annoyed, as as I would be.

I I did not take Bo to our front yard and go, hey buddy, here's how you're gonna like annoy someone, and it's gonna be really cool and it's gonna be fun.

Take the sprinkler and do it this way.

Like, I didn't, I didn't tell, I didn't tell him how to do this.

We he never saw me do this.

He's just naughty.

And he likes to do things that are uh maybe not right, not a great choice, that have a a consequence to them.

And I'm not using my three-year-old's story to to unpack the entire doctrine of original sin.

And Bo, please forgive me for using you like when you're later in life and you're never gonna watch this, but even if you do, I love you.

But here's here's the big idea.

David's confessing something deeper.

He's saying there is a fallen condition that is present at the very beginning of life.

And one of the hardest biblical truths for modern people in our culture, our day, our age is to accept that we are not born morally neutral.

See, we're not, scripture teaches that we are not born good, and somehow through religion we can become gooder.

Scripture teaches that we are born sinners in need of a savior.

I know that's hard to accept, but it is the truth of God's word.

And it is the thing that's the dividing line in this conversation.

Because we are born bearing God's image, but also needing God's redemption.

That's the tension.

Paul places that reality within the larger human story in Romans chapter 5, verse 12.

Romans 5:12

He says, Sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned.

What he's saying.

Is that that man, we possess extraordinary dignity, but we need deep redemption.

Romans 7, Paul goes on to say that there is this war within me where I want to do what's good and I want to do what's right, but man, my flesh keeps getting in the way, and I keep doing what I don't want to do, and what I want to do, I don't do, and what I would it's just wrestle.

Have you ever read it?

It's like he's like, I cannot, who will rescue me from this body of death?

But thanks be to Christ Jesus, he has given me the power to break free from my sinful desires to do what he wants me to do.

But the point is, is there is a war within, there's a tension.

Sin affects the way that we think, what we desire, how we relate to others, how we use our bodies, and even how we interpret ourselves.

I want you to imagine trying to navigate with a compass while holding a magnet beside it.

The compass needle is really moving.

You're not like imagining the reading, but something is pulling it away from true north.

It's one way to understand our desires after the fall.

Our feelings are real experiences, but they don't always point us towards what's true or good.

Sin has introduced competing desires, and there are these forces within the human heart, and all of us know what that feels like.

We've all wanted things that would harm us.

We've experienced appetites demanding immediate satisfaction.

We've been certain that getting what we wanted would make us happy, only to discover that it's made us emptier than ever.

Here's the truth: our desires need a reference point beyond themselves.

We need a true north.

That's why Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 22 put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires.

Ephesians 4:22

Be made new in the attitude of your minds.

See, Paul calls them deceitful desires because they are desires that promise freedom but lead to bondage.

See, it's this is why the phrase, I was born this way, it isn't enough to define whether a desire is right or wrong.

Because the Bible doesn't require us to determine exactly where every desire came from before asking where that desire will lead and whether it agrees with God's design.

The truth is that some desires that many of us have, we feel like we've had them forever.

They've been with us for as long as we can remember.

Others are shaped by experiences, wounds, habits, relationships, or repeated exposure through life.

See, oftentimes we can't neatly separate those influences.

But all of us were born into a fallen condition, and all of us possess inclinations that require the transforming work of Jesus.

Hear me.

A feeling can be deep without being definitive.

This is critical to understand.

This isn't to dismiss what anyone in the room is feeling or what any of our loved ones are feeling.

Mature discipleship pays attention to what we feel.

We bring it into the light, we name it honestly, we explore it carefully in Christian community, and we invite trusted people to walk with us through it.

But hear me, a desire can be real without being righteous.

Feelings are meaningful messengers, but they are terrible masters.

And a desire requires our attention, but it never deserves the throne.

I want to pause for a moment though and make an important pastoral distinction here because experiencing temptation is not the same thing as choosing sin.

Experiencing same-sex attraction doesn't place someone outside of the grace of God.

Experiencing something like gender dysphoria, this painful conflict between one's biological sex and an internal experience, man, it's it it's real for so many people.

It's it's profound, it feels like it's persistent, it's always there.

And that story deserves patience, compassion, thoughtful pastoral care, and a Christian community that's willing to walk with others towards Jesus over time.

But the question facing every disciple is the same: Who will lead my life?

Before we look around the room and try to decide who needs to hear this or someone out there, we need to ask ourselves that question.

The church needs to ask, who is spiritually forming us in our sexual formation?

Lust, pornography, adultery, secret fantasy, casual sex, emotional affairs, and much, much more has entered the modern church today.

And a national survey found that nearly three in four American teenagers have been exposed to online pornography intentionally or accidentally, and the average reported age of the first experience, the first exposure, was 12 years old.

By the time that many parents are just beginning to think about having that tough conversation with your child, the internet has been already transmitting these things for years in the face of our children.

We live in a sexualized culture, a culture that says feed your desires.

And the reality is that our children are being offered a vision of the body that separates sex from covenant, pleasure from responsibility, and desire from love.

They need more than just internet filters and one uncomfortable conversation.

They need a community of Christ, a body of believers, a new vision of the church that embodies what faithfulness and covenant and holiness and grace and honesty and safe places to navigate through these struggles and conversations looks like to all be transformed in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.

This is where the church comes in.

Because if the church will not discipline desire, the algorithm will.

We want Zion to be a place where struggles can be brought into the light with safety, with hope.

There's healing, there's restoration, a place where confession is met with grace, accountability is rooted in love, and nobody has to pretend that they're perfect here in any way in order to belong.

And this kind of place, it requires us to grab a hold of the third movement that the Bible teaches in this conversation on sexuality and gender.

Number one, you're created by God, and your body has far more meaning than many of us even understand.

Secondly, we all are broken because of the fallen world that we've inherited from our original parents.

And there's a sinful nature.

There is this thing called the flesh that's at war within us.

And our desires need discipleship, but thanks be to God.

There is hope because the third movement is that you were bought and you belong to Jesus.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 19, you are not your own.

1 Corinthians 6:19

You were bought at a price.

Therefore, honor God with your bodies.

You are not your own.

It might be one of the most offensive statements in our modern day culture.

What do you mean, I'm not my own?

Like I do me.

Like it's it's my body, it's my choice, it's my life, it's my authentic self, it's my truth.

It's my way.

And even in the church, we we we can agree with this and go, yeah, I'm bought by Jesus Christ, I'm not my own.

But then we got we got doors in the home of our soul that are closed off to God while others are open.

Some are open on Sunday in worship or during this message, but there are secret things, there is compromise, there is stuff where we go, nope, you can't have that.

That's my guilty pleasure, that's my show.

That's the stuff that I like to do to escape pain.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Like I'm gonna need control of my own life.

And and Jesus goes, I love you too much to just be savior of your sins.

I gotta be Lord of your life.

And being Lord means I have all authority, and all means all.

Like you weren't just half purchased, you were fully purchased.

And that's the most freeing place to be.

Isn't that constrictive?

What I'm not my own, I belong to Jesus.

Isn't that constrictive?

No, let me tell you, it is the most peace-filled, freeing, and victorious life you could ever live.

Why?

Why?

Because I don't have to carry the weight of creating myself, defining myself, being led by my desires, being filled with guilt and shame, trying to hide from other people.

Jesus has authority.

See, Christianity is not self-improvement, it's a transfer of ownership.

Belonging to Jesus is where freedom begins.

Jesus enters our human experience.

And I just want you to know, he's not saving us from afar and telling us to become something.

He actually became us.

And scripture says that he experienced every temptation that we experience as humans.

That means desires hit him as a temptation.

And it says that Jesus was perfect and he was blameless, but he experienced hunger and exhaustion.

He wept, he had physical pain, he was wounded, his blood was poured out, his body was placed in a grave.

He gave his body to redeem ours.

So I just want to tell you if you've spent years feeling ashamed of your body, confused by your body, trapped in your body, or angry at your body, remember this the body that you may be tempted to hate is a body that Jesus considered worth dying to redeem.

He doesn't just want to save your soul, he wants to restore what the enemy has tried to steal from you.

In your sexual past, in your present struggles and compromise and in secret sin, he wants to bring healing and restoration.

That's the way that we can honor God with our you literally can honor God with your body through the power of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling presence, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.

That's why in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, Paul says, Paul says, Some of you were this before this.

1 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

He describes a range of sins, including sexual immorality, adultery, same-sex behavior, greed, drunkenness, and deception.

And he says, and that's what some of you were.

But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Imagine hearing this letter read aloud in Corinth.

Because when Paul wrote letters to the early churches, they read the letter out loud to the entire community.

And as the letter was read aloud, all the people in this community they knew each other from the past.

They knew each other and the decisions in high school and the parties and the things that they experienced.

They knew about the lust and the compromise and the stuff that they had stepped into.

They knew about the behavior.

Paul reminds them something decisive has happened in their life.

They have been washed, they have been cleansed, they have been set apart, they have been set free.

Justified means that God looks at you just as if you never sinned.

They have been made righteous because they now belong to Jesus.

And this is the family of God.

We're all people with scars, hurts, wounds, struggles, decisions that we wish we would not have made, stuff we're carrying today.

There are those of us that are experiencing confusion about your identity or your body or people that you know that you love so deeply in your life that are struggling with these questions.

Grace doesn't affirm everything we desire.

Grace redeems everything we surrender.

And because this is true, the church should be the place to tell the truth about your struggle and the strongest place to receive help towards holiness.

So to the person today that's experiencing same-sex attraction and sincerely trying to follow Jesus, I want you to know that you are not disqualified from the family of God.

You are not a second-class Christian.

You can find healing and hope and redemption in the grace and the truth and the love of Jesus Christ.

He wants to walk with you to the person that is experiencing the pain of walking through this dynamic with a child.

Man, you may be tempted to try to have a quick reaction and fearing an outcome and living motivated by fear or anger or just affirming every decision.

Let me just tell you, conviction does not require cruelty, cruelty, and compassion doesn't require compromise.

You can love your child and walk through this stuff with your child with grace and truth and listen well and speak truth with humility and allow the patient love of Jesus to transform their lives.

If you're someone here that's experiencing sexual compromise, Jesus is calling you out of isolation.

Freedom happens when we step into the light.

That's the reason why we have Zion groups.

It's the reason why we have freedom sessions that you can book here at Zion Church, why we have prayer.

It's the reason why we say, hey, let's follow Jesus and do life together because the enemy loves isolation.

That is his playground.

But this is a battleground for your life, for your future, for your children.

And I'm telling you, sexual purity and holiness and faithfulness is a major key to revival in our culture.

And God wants Zion to be a place not of perfection, but of faithfulness and victory and security in our identity and modeling to the world around us what hope, healing, and freedom looks like.

For some of us, we've been holding a mirror our whole lives and just allowing this mirror to reveal my identity and define who I am and my decisions, my guilt, and my shame, has just said that this is my cross to bear.

And you've been looking within for far too long because God offers you a different story.

He made you, he designed you on purpose.

You are not an accident, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And there is an amazing calling and purpose for your life, and you have meaning, and your body was designed to worship God.

And whatever scars, whatever wounds you have, this story says Jesus can make it whole.

Jesus wants to heal you.

Jesus wants to redeem you.

Jesus wants to take you from the pit of sexual wounds or from the prison of sexual compromise.

And he wants to give you freedom and life and victory.

So would you pray with me all across this place?

And as you pray and close your eyes, would you just put your hands open, palms towards heaven to just simply receive the love, the grace, and the truth of your heavenly Father.

Holy Spirit, we thank you that you're here.

We thank you that you want to heal.

We thank you that you speak with love, conviction, and you give us a future, a hope to move forward in.

For some of us, there are some areas in our life that we need to confess.

There are there are areas that have been in the darkness that need to be brought to light.

And God is even revealing to you right now who you need to bring it to light to.