Christian and Homosexuality: My Story

So, I have shared my testimony with various people who battle with the understanding of homosexuality and its context within Christianity.  We might as well go public with this.  Some of these details I have not even shared with my parents… Surprise, Mom and Dad! Hehe

The need for a personal perspective on homosexuality and Christianity is evident in the huge chasm that exists in all of the Facebook arguments: On the one side we have the devout Christians quoting Scriptures.  They are labelled as judgmental, intolerant and unloving.  On the other side we have the pro-gay community labelled as sinners, idolaters and immoral.

I believe this blog will be a bridge between the two divisions.  Why? Because I have been at both sides of the spectrum. 

My first sexual experience was with primary school friends.  We were four boys: one was nine and two were elev years old. I was ten.  When the pants went down, I knew something wasn’t right, so I stayed in the corner.  Then the teasing began: “What are you so afraid of? Why don’t you join us? Are you a moffie?” Looking back, I laugh at the irony of this accusation! Hehe!  Defying logic, I proved that I was not a moffie by joining in.  Without going into too much detail, something went wrong and the next day at school, I became the scapegoat.

The teasing was devastating.  I was the only one of the four in my grade.  I felt uncomfortable playing with the guys during breaks, because every now and then a comment would sting.  After hanging out with the girls for a while, the same remarks would come.  And so, I often spent breaks alone, walking around the same buildings hoping for the next class to start so that everyone would have something else to focus on for a while.

I was so glad I had the option to go to another high school!  It was an opportunity to make a new start.  In Grade 9 a lot of the guys in the hostel started forming relationships with girls.  I wanted to follow the trend and also prove to myself that I can be straight and get a girlfriend.  But for some reason, the first three girls I persued told me “no”.  Strike one, two, three… that was it!  I never did like baseball anyways and decided to sit on the relationship bench for a while.

This failure only tensed my insecurity even further.  What if I was gay?  What if all the remarks people hurled at me were true?

When I turned to the Bible for answers it was clear to see that God’s model for sexual practice is reserved for the framework of the heterosexual marriage.  I felt like filth…  Intense guilt and self-loathing motivated me to pursue spiritual perfectionism, but, even a quick scan of the Ten Commandments will judge any person as a failure.

I wasn’t until later in my life that I realised that this is the whole point of the Ten Commandments: It shows us that we are all immoral and that we have transgressed God’s laws.  Paul provides this perspective in Romans 7:7, “Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet”” (ESV).  

My approach to God’s law was totally wrong!  I thought that I had to muster enough self-discipline and strength to live up to the Holy standards of God’s law, but that is not the purpose of God’s law!  It rather shows us that we cannot live up to those expectations and that there is something inherently wrong with us.  This is called the sinful nature.

We as humans basically have this “sinful nature” as an auto-pilot to our lives. We are born into sin.  Even though we want to do the right thing, we end up doing the wrong thing.  Once a pilot has set an airplane on auto-pilot, the craft will continue in the designated direction no matter how hard the controls are turned and twisted and how many buttons are pushed. 

I also experienced this: even though I knew that having lustful thoughts in my mind about guys or girls are wrong, my mind seemed to wander in that direction no matter how hard I tried to steer away from that.  Paul experiences this same tug-of-war in Romans 7:21-25.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

(NIV)

I did not want to be gay, but my body was experiencing forces in that direction.  At this point most of us experience unnecessary guilt.  Being tempted with sin is not sin.  The writer of Hebrews mentions that Jesus was “tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15, NIV).

It took me a while that there is a difference between my sinful nature… and… me.

I understand the perspective of the gay community: when we feel something inside of us, like the urge to be with someone of the same sex, we think we will be denying our “true” self if we resist this impulse.  This is probably the most important question I had to answer: who is the real me?  Which parts of me were designed and which parts were distorted?

The Bible provides the guidelines for this answer.  I was not made to sin.  I was made to be holy just like God is holy (Leviticus 11:45, 1 Peter 1:16).  The parts in me that want to obey God is the real me, the real Kobus.  The parts in me that want to sin, is the flesh, the sinful nature.

I like defusing the gay debate by comparing it to theft.  When I am tempted to steal a person’s wallet, I have a choice to deny this impulse or to act on it and walk away.  Some people may argue that they were born with their homosexual orientation… and I agree!  We were born with a host of sinful passions: cheating, stealing, lying, laziness, pride, even hetero-sexual lust.  All of us are prone to some kind of sinful temptation.  We are just prone to different ones.

The theme of sexuality is, however, much more personal than most other temptations.  It lies so close to our identity that we confuse it with our core, with who we really are.

Now, what do I do with these desires if I want to please God?

The mistake I made is that I wanted to sort myself out.  I wanted to condition myself to stop being gay and to stop getting homosexual temptations.  At school I would pinch my left hand between my thumb and my index finger every time I felt attracted to a guy.  The skin later turned blue and I did not see any results.  Only later did I realise: I cannot fix myself.  It is like a doctor with two broken wrists trying to operate on himself.  My sinful nature cannot produce holiness.  It only produces more sin…

Out of my shame I actually closed my heart towards God.  I wanted to fix myself before I came into His holy presence.  What I did was actually to remove myself from the only person who could help me: the Holy One.  Only God who is holy could make us holy, “Keep my statutes and do them; I am the LORD who sanctifies you” (Leviticus 20:8, ESV).  Sanctifies means to purify or to make holy.  We cannot clean ourselves.  We need God to do that.  We need Jesus to wash our feet.

This is why Jesus came to earth.  He knew that we have given ourselves to the law of sin and death.  Our auto-pilot has become sin.  He needed to come and re-calibrate our core.  He needed to come and break this curse.  He needed to come and pay our penalties.

Paul describes how Jesus came to break this curse of sin over our lives (Romans 6:3-14).  We were slaves to sin.  Our fleshly bodies had to obey it.  At the Cross, Jesus died with all our sins on Him.  He took the curse upon Himself.  He took the punishment for our guilt.

3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with,[a] that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7 because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. 14 For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

I didn’t understand this when I was baptised in 2006.  Verse 3-4 says that I was baptised into the death of Jesus.  I identified with His death on the Cross for me.  Dying to the sinful nature.  And when I was raised from the water, I identified with His resurrection from the dead.  His death and resurrection broke the power of sin and death over my life so that I can have a new life.

I can not overcome the battle of sin in my life.  Jesus had to do that for me.  He had to be the Healer who operated on my broken wrists.  I can not overcome the battle of homosexuality in my life.  I am going to be tempted until the day that I die and without the power of the Cross, my auto-pilot will only go along with the ride.

The fact that I even have a choice to resist sin at all, is a miracle.  It is because of the victory of Jesus at the Cross. He enabled my auto-pilot settings to be removed so that I can steer away from the flight of destruction to my real home: heaven.

I was an arrogant Theology student.  Even after I completed my degree I had a sense of entitlement and moral pride.  I thought I was “good” and judged people who did not have enough discipline as me.  I even judged pastors and their preaching. During my Science degree had a major disagreement with a pastor’s point of view.  I took the matter to the dean of our church’s Bible School and we chatted around a coffee.  He is extremely well versed in the salvation debate, quoting arguments from Biblical text to the early church fathers like Augustine and Ignatius.  I cannot remember the exact point he wanted to make, but something hit me deeply… I realised, for the very first time in my life, that I did not deserve heaven.  I broke God’s laws and deserved His punishment…  I deserved hell…

Broken by my apparent pride and self-righteousness, I went home and humbly thanked God for forgiving me.  The Scriptures stayed the same, my arguments stood firm, but my attitude was that of brokenness before the holy and merciful One.

So, what do we make of all of this?

1. We all have a sense of what is right and wrong
2. We are all born with a sinful nature
3. We are unable to resist the sinful nature out of our own strength
4. We then do what is wrong instead of doing what we know is right
5. Jesus came to break this power of sin over our lives
6. He redeemed us to be able to choose what is right
7. We can appropriate this salvation by accepting His death at the Cross, repenting from our ways, being baptised and following His statutes
8. As we become holy as He is holy, we become more like our true selves
9. We grow to be more like Jesus and more intimate with Him