Dead in Sin… but Alive in Christ
Jesus is our Rescuer. And, according to the Bible, He rescues from sin and death. Jesus jumps into the sea of sin and death and hauls our lifeless bodies to the shore. Then, He leans low, and breathes new life into us: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved” (Eph. 2:4-5).
Because we live in a culture obsessed with self-esteem, the concept of sin is disagreeable. The popular message of the day is that happiness and contentment comes not in change, but in simply accepting who you are. The perceived fallacies and character flaws are really not flaws at all; they’re simply preferences and everyone’s preferences are okay. The world will finally be the great place it can be when we all accept that we are different, and that one person’s differences don’t mean they’re more right than any other.
That’s not what the Bible teaches.
Instead, we find a much more pessimistic view of humanity in the pages of the book that tells us our true stories. We all, regardless of our economic situation, nation of origin, or situational upbringing are dead in our sin and transgression.
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath” (Eph. 2:1-3).
Imagine yourself stranded at sea. There is no boat in sight; no piece of driftwood to hold you up. Just you and the water. Sure, you’ve had some swim lessons, but you’re no fool – you know that in this vast ocean there is only so long you can tread water.
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Transformation of a Transgender Teen
One in five Gen Z Americans now identify as LGBT+, double the number of millennials (one in 10) and quadruple the number of Gen X Americans (about one in 20). A surprising number of them—40 percent of Gen Z and millennials—also identify as religious. Increasingly, Christian pastors, youth pastors, and parents are fielding questions and declarations from young people examining their own gender or sexual orientation.
Eva was in a church luncheon when she got an email from her 12-year-old daughter Grace. (Their names have been changed.)
“Mom and Dad, I need to tell you I’m not actually a girl,” she read. “My pronouns are they/them.”
Eva couldn’t breathe. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She hadn’t seen this coming—in fact, a few months before, Grace had shared on social media her belief that God created people male and female.
Back then, Eva was sure that statement was going to earn Grace—who attended a progressive public school—some social problems. Instead, it seemed to blow over right away.
“I would’ve gotten bullied,” said Grace, who is now 16. “Instead, they decided to reeducate me. I got invited to groups where all they wanted to talk about was the transgender stuff. Over the course of a few months, I decided I was going to be agender. And then I ended up deciding I was a boy.”
Grace was experiencing what is often called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” in which friendship groups begin to experience similar gender questions at the same time. One in five Gen Z Americans now identify as LGBT+, double the number of millennials (one in 10) and quadruple the number of Gen X Americans (about one in 20).
A surprising number of them—40 percent of Gen Z and millennials—also identify as religious. Increasingly, Christian pastors, youth pastors, and parents are fielding questions and declarations from young people examining their own gender or sexual orientation.
“Martin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of justice,” said Falls Church Anglican rector Sam Ferguson, who has spent time with multiple transitioning young adults and their families. “The Bible also envisions the long arc of redemption, which aims at the resurrection of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the beginning. Our Creator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chromosome, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemption, not against it.”
That takes patience, Eva and her husband Seth found. (His name has also been changed.) For more than two years, they prayed for Grace. They searched the Scriptures. They built their relationships with her. They drew boundaries around how she could express herself. They took her to counseling and to church. They started homeschooling her. They asked her questions.
Basically, they played the long game. And when she was 15, Grace desisted—that is, recognized her body is female and switched her identity back.
These days, Eva and Grace often talk with other families whose children are transitioning.
“The church is the only place that has the freedom to address this, because the activism around this has been so powerful and well-funded,” Eva said. “When I think about where we were three years ago, and where we are now—God doesn’t waste anything.”
‘Ended Up Deciding I Was a Boy’
In many ways, it’s surprising that someone like Grace would struggle with gender identity. Her mom and dad love Jesus and each other. She’s got a couple of siblings, a strong church family, and a sharp mind. For as long as she can remember, she’s believed in God.
When Grace was 12, she logged onto a social networking site called DeviantArt. “At first, I was posting artwork with my friends, but eventually the ‘gay is good’ message became unavoidable,” she said.
She’d never heard of someone being transgender before. “I was like, ‘What is this?’ and they were like, ‘Oh, there are guys who are actually girls, and girls who are actually guys, and some people are actually neither.’”
Grace asked her mom about it, and Eva explained they didn’t agree with those categories of thinking. Grace, who is on the autism spectrum and thinks in black and white, told her online friends she didn’t agree with them.
They didn’t fight her or bully her. Instead, she was invited to the Gender & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club at her school. Eva thinks she was targeted, and that’s not a crazy idea. Teachers in California have shared recruiting tactics, including “stalking” students’ Google searches or conversations for any indication they might be open to joining the faculty-advised, student-led clubs.
Grace began going to the weekly unsupervised lunchtime meetings, listening to other kids from her middle school and high school talk about sex, gender, and how they felt uncomfortable in their bodies.
Being a 12-year-old girl, Grace felt uncomfortable in her body too. She also didn’t like the tights, short shorts, and crop tops that other middle school girls were wearing.
“I believe strongly in modesty,” she said. “I started to associate womanhood with being sexualized. I wasn’t even really thinking male vs. female, but non-sexual vs. sexual.”
She thought maybe she was agender, which means not identifying with either sex. But as time went on, Grace realized she’d prefer to be male. After all, she’d love to be as tall and strong as her brother. And it seemed like all she needed was some testosterone.
“Nobody in the GSA club had gotten prescription hormones yet because we were all fairly young,” she said. “Nobody knew about all the side effects of giving girls testosterone—the bone demineralization, increased rate of cancer, heart attacks, and vaginal atrophy.”
Instead, what everyone talked about was the drama of coming out.
Coming Out
National Coming Out Day is October 11, and it has expanded to include National Coming Out Week and even National Coming Out Month.
“All my friends on social media and I were going around with each other, dramatizing coming out,” Grace said. “I made it way more dramatic than it had to be. I emailed my parents with my announcement and my pronouns.”
She’d already asked to cut her hair short and quit wearing skirts, but that was all the warning Seth and Eva had.
“It was a nightmare,” Eva said. “I’ve never suffered from anxiety before, but the first two weeks [after Grace’s announcement] I didn’t eat or sleep.” She couldn’t believe this was happening—didn’t kids who identified as transgender come from broken families or abusive childhoods?
Eva took Grace to the school counselor, to the pediatrician, to the principal. “They all tell you you have to affirm or your child will commit suicide,” Eva said. “But my background is in education and psychology, and I knew that didn’t make sense. I could think of 15 reasons [other than being transgender] why a young girl might do this.”
It took two weeks before she found her first ray of hope. “It was a blog run by liberals, but it had all kinds of gender-critical resources,” she said. “I found it in the middle of the night, and I just started crying. I was like, I’m not crazy.”
Theology of Gender
That website was a confirmation of what Eva already knew.
“My husband and I talked it through,” she said. “What do we know about God? We know he created us male and female. Are there true transgender people? Well, if there are, they’d be in the Bible. What about eunuchs? Jesus is certainly aware of bodily brokenness—he acknowledges people born as eunuchs in Matthew 19:12—but two distinct sexes are his good design. . . . So if we believe God is sovereign and doesn’t make mistakes, what does this mean for us?”
She couldn’t find many Christian resources—and while there are some now, they’re still few and far between (and not always allowed on Amazon). Her pastors weren’t able to help much, either. “The church helped us find a therapist, which was huge,” Eva said. “But otherwise, we did not get much support. . . . No one at the church had any guidance for us at all. I understand that, because this was all out of left field for everyone. But instead of feeling like we were working together to figure this out, I felt mostly abandoned and ignored.”
Although many Christians know someone who is struggling with gender identity, few churches are well-equipped with policies, counseling, or a deep theology of identity. The transgender movement is both young—entering the mainstream around 2015 when Bruce Jenner announced his transition to Caitlyn—and constantly evolving. Even more confusing, the transgender questions and assumptions are different from the homosexual ones.
The question isn’t “Whom do I love?” but rather “What does it mean to be human?” said Mike McGarry, founder of Youth Pastor Theologian. “The gender identity conversation is really about the created order, and turning it upside down.”
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Freedom and Obligation
True love is transformative. No, we can’t love perfectly while here on this earth. But it will make a big difference in how we live our lives. Law-keeping is far inferior to walking in love. And that is why walking in God’s pure love while firmly maintaining our hold on grace is our aim. And someday, we are completely confident our bodies will be redeemed and “we will be like Him because we will see Him as He is.”
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Galatia to address some very important issues which they had forgotten—Christian freedom chief among them. Along with that, he also laid out some obligations of the Christian life. As Joy and I consider the celebration of the birth of our nation and our freedom in a few days, we are reminded anew of the above letter, written in 49 AD, just prior to the Jerusalem Council. (Acts 15) The theme of the book was, in one word, FREEDOM! And in two words, CHRISTIAN FREEDOM specifically. The Apostle’s exasperation with the Galatian church is clear and unbridled. He was also furious at the false teachers who had come in and led them away from their grace and freedom. They had initially embraced the true gospel of grace, but later on, when he was not there with them, they allowed themselves to be, in the words of Paul, “bewitched” by these false teachers to go back under the law and leave their grace behind. In order to bring them back to the freedom of the gospel, he asked a few rhetorical questions:
Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?Galatians 3:2b
The obvious answer is “by the hearing of faith.” He has been abundantly clear throughout his teaching that no one can be justified, made righteous before God, by the “works of the law.” His next question demonstrates the bankruptcy of the deception to which they had yielded:
Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?Galatians 3:3
The balance of the chapter is spent reminding them that all the law can do is demonstrate to us our desperate condition and that without the freeing gospel of Christ, it will leave us in despair. The law chains and imprisons us—no one could ever or would ever be able to keep it. But faith in Christ’s work—His keeping of the whole law perfectly throughout His life—sets us free. How were the Galatians deceived into giving up their freedom? The false teachers crept in and manipulated them through fear and guilt and made demands on them which sounded “right” to these Christian’s confused minds. They put the heavy weight of the law right back on these Christian’s shoulders. Paul spends chapters three and four on the history of faith and the basis of freedom. He then reminds them of two very important things. The first is Freedom:
For freedom, Christ has set us free…Galatians 5:1a
Why did Christ set us free? To enjoy freedom and to enjoy Him—to experience our spiritual walk with Him without the terrible guilt and shame that human attempts at law-keeping inevitably brings. All down through church history, beginning with the Galatians, many Christians have been deceived and persuaded to give up the freedom bought for them by the Savior. It is certainly happening in our day as well. People are deceived into giving up their grace and returning to the black hole of law-keeping and law-keeping failure that blights the soul. We see it in groups like Gwen Shamblin’s Remnant Fellowship, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons – and even in quite a few evangelical churches—brought in by people bearing the false teachings of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, for example, or with a whole host of other law-based killjoys that prey on the church. BTW, killjoy is an excellent moniker for these false teachers because putting people back under the weight of the law kills joy for certain.
The second thing Paul reminded them of is obligations. At first, that might sound contradictory, but once we understand the obligations they make perfect sense. The first is the commitment to or defense of freedom:
…stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.Galatians 5:1b
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The Constitutional Fidelity of Loving and Dobbs
Written by David R. Upham |
Thursday, June 15, 2023
In Dobbs, the Court once again has looked back to our tradition, our laws, our Constitution, and found therein a reserved right of the states to protect prenatal life. Dobbs is in full harmony with Loving. Like Loving, Dobbs is a recovery and vindication of our republic—a great victory for constitutional truth, justice, and the American way.Our national Supreme Court has set aside the so-called “right” to abortion established in Roe v. Wade (1973) in favor of the states’ reserved authority to protect prenatal life. The Court’s decision proceeded from this syllogism:
(1) The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment protects only the rights enumerated in the Constitution or otherwise “deeply rooted” in our “Nation’s history and traditions”;
(2) the right to abortion is not such a right;
(3) therefore, contra Roe, the Amendment does not secure any right to abortion.
According to the dissent and many commentators, the Court’s reasoning threatens various unenumerated and innovative rights. Indeed, Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, specifically questioned the putative constitutional rights of contraception, nonmarital sexual activity, and same-sex “marriage.” These putative rights do, indeed, seem foreign to our Constitution and were only recently acknowledged by some of our laws.
The dissenters, however, mentioned the right of interracial marriage, first endorsed by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967). According to Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, the right of interracial marriage, like the abortion right, is not deeply rooted in our traditions. Indeed, laws banning such marriage once prevailed as widely as anti-abortion laws did; therefore, just as the new right of interracial marriage was vindicated in Loving, so was the new right of abortion six years later in Roe: “The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion.” By this account, Loving, like Roe, was evolutionary, and anti-traditional.
But the Dobbs dissenters are wrong, egregiously so. Their opinion reflects a widespread and serious misunderstanding of our nation’s history.
The right of American citizens to intermarry, regardless of race, is, indeed, deeply rooted in our traditions of freedom and citizenship, and is, for this reason, consistent with the original intent and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. To be sure, bans on interracial marriage, of course, were once widespread in some parts of our county.
But such laws were never our American tradition. They were not original but innovative. It was not until 1691, nearly a century after Jamestown, that Virginia became the first colony to ban such marriages. Moreover, these laws were never universal. At Independence, only about half the states retained such laws—and nearly all were south of the Mason-Dixon line.
When our political ancestors first migrated to America, they brought with them the English common law—a general customary law recognized in England at the time. This original law recognized three principles.
First, that law secured extensive liberty, including a broad freedom to marry. The ease with which the common law allowed marriages gave rise to what we still call “common law marriage”: a marriage that happens simply by the unofficiated and even unwitnessed private agreement to live as husband and wife. The “consent of the parties is all that is required,” as James Kent later explained. Under this law, racial barriers to marriage were unknown.
Second, the law recognized broad birthright membership: All persons born under English jurisdiction were English subjects. Here too, the law recognized no racial discrimination.
Third, that law incorporated or reflected the complementary principles of legal “due process” and “equal protection,” both of which aimed to secure, to all persons, the rights of life, liberty, and property against lawless violence. Here too, these principles involved no racial discrimination whatsoever.
This protection extended to all living human beings—even before birth.
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