At its heart, Pride Month is a month of deception. LGBT activists are deceiving people into believing pride is a virtue, that sexuality determines identity, and that LGBT activities are family friendly. There is nothing further from the truth. Only Jesus can give identity, direction, and purpose to a world of sexual confusion. 

We’re approaching the final week of ‘Pride Month’ — a growing shibboleth of our secular age. Corporate firms are one-upping each another to virtue signal how woke and inclusive they are. Retail stores are parading the rainbow flag to boost sales.
From a Biblical perspective, there are remarkable parallels between Pride Month and idol worship under King Nebuchadnezzar II. Just as the Babylonians were mandated to worship the golden image, LGBT activists demand that we pledge allegiance to the rainbow flag. While the stakes aren’t as high as they were under Nebuchadnezzar, there are real risks involved in refusing to bow the knee.
If my suspicion is correct, most Australians are not particularly concerned about Pride Month. In fact, many are beginning to feel uncomfortable with how politicised and intolerant the LGBT movement has become. In response, many people have flocked to culture warriors like Jordan Peterson for answers.
While figures like Peterson are insightful and worth listening to, their answers are ultimately psychological rather than spiritual. They don’t acknowledge that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only truth that sets people free. It is only the grace of God in the person and work of Jesus that gives answers and hope to a world lost in sexual confusion.
What follows are three of the lies paraded during Pride Month, along with the gospel answers Jesus provides.

Sexuality = Identity

Pride Month declares that you can find your identity by looking inward. It is proclaimed that you can discover your identity by exploring your sexuality. The modern self is defined by sexuality. This explains the insistence within the LGBT movement of identifying people as ‘gay,’ ‘trans,’ ‘lesbian,’ and so on.
The great tragedy in such thinking is its reductionism. It shrinks a person from being an intelligently designed, unique, and beautiful image-bearer of God to the mere product of sexual instincts (cf. Gen. 2:17). Is there anything more animalistic than reducing a person to the sum of their sexual desires?
Contrary to Pride Month, our identity is not self-generated; it is given to us by our Maker. The Bible makes clear that humans were created to magnify the glory, beauty, and majesty of our Creator. Indeed, there is no other creation in the universe that was made imago dei. Furthermore, the good news of the gospel liberates us to find our identity in Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, as the Westminster Confession of Faith 15.5 states, Biblical repentance is for specific sins. In an age when national repentance is used as a smokescreen for our own guilt, we must face the reality of our rebellion against the Creator. We must name our sins, yet not be named by them. This is especially relevant in a time when identifying some believers as ‘gay Christians’ has become commonplace.
There is nothing more enslaving to a child of God than to identify them by their sin. Any adjective placed before ‘Christian’ — whether it be ‘same-sex attracted,’ ‘anxious,’ or ‘adulterous’ — enslaves a believer and legitimises their sin. It denies their identity as a child of God, freed from the bondage of passions.
There is nothing more liberating than for a Christian to know their sin has been dealt with fully and completely. To be a Christian is to have one’s life hidden with Christ in God, and to be defined not by our sin, but by His perfection and glory (Col. 3:3).

Pride = Virtue

Arguably the chief lie of Pride Month is that pride is something to be celebrated. According to God, pride is a vice to be restrained. Pride is not something to be paraded; it’s the parent of all other sins. It’s the cesspool from which all other wickedness flows (Gen. 3:6). Pride not only destroys a person’s relationship with God; it ultimately consumes the person themselves (Prov. 16:18).
In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis wrote this of pride:
“It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the completely anti-God state of mind” (Book III, 8.)
Puritan Jonathan Edwards spoke of pride in these terms:
“Pride is a person having too high an opinion of himself. Pride is the first sin that ever entered into the universe, and the last sin that is rooted out.”
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Striving for contentment is honorable and good. But we should not allow striving for contentment to prevent us from seeking to better our situation through either work or asking for help. Help doesn’t necessarily equate with finances, either. I’m terrible about asking for any form of help. Many of my friends have expressed a similar struggle. Yet we’re often met with obstacles that we struggle to overcome on our own. Try as we may, we can’t escape the fact that God designed us to be interdependent.

Philippians 4 has always struck me as a misunderstood chapter of the Bible. It’s likely that Phil 4:13 is the verse that stands out in your mind. After all, it’s emblazoned on everything from the home team’s high school football banners to athlete’s eye black to countless Instagram profiles. It’s used to encourage everyone from test-takers to Olympic athletes that, through Jesus, they can do all things.
But Philippians 4 has always been about contentment. In fact, Phil 4:13, the oft-quoted verse used to inspire a victor’s mindset, was actually Paul’s admission that he had learned how to be content in less-than-favorable circumstances. Paul wasn’t saying that, through Jesus, He could overcome any obstacle. He was saying that, through Jesus, he had learned how to be ok with plenty or with little, with victory or with a setback.
Contentment is More than Always Being Happy with what You Have
Lest we think that story ends there, Paul continued on: “Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles.” Paul then outlined how the church at Philippi had been a financial blessing in his ministry. In fact, they were the first church ever to support him and were willing to help him when no one else would. Now, Paul took the opportunity to thank them for a new financial gift they had sent to him that had left him “amply supplied” (4:18)
The message of Philippians 4 is far more nuanced than we like to make it.
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God devised prayer “as a means of enlisting us as participants in the work he has ordained, as part of the outworking of his sovereign rulership over all.” Our prayers do in fact make a difference. Yes, God is God, lacking nothing. Yet he has chosen to work through his people and their prayers. This is mind-boggling stuff. It is all about participation with God.

My title question is not a rhetorical nor a theoretical one. It is a very real question, and one that all believers should contemplate. Many matters come to mind here. Part of the issue has to do with the fact that if God is omniscient and knows all things, then why pray? He already knows everything about us and what we need. He gains no new information and insights from us when we engage in petitionary prayer.
So why pray? Zillions of great books have been written on prayer, many of which deal with these very sorts of questions. Here I want to look at just one volume, and only part of it deals directly with prayer. It has actually been out for a while now, but I recently revisited it. I refer to God’s Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith by Bruce Ware (Crossway, 2004).
You might recall that this author had previously penned God’s Lesser Glory (Crossway, 2004), in which he took to task the openness theologians who say, among other things, that God does not have exhaustive knowledge – certainly not exhaustive foreknowledge as is normally understood.
In God’s Greater Glory he looks further at some of these matters, especially focusing on the providence of God. Those wanting a helpful and thorough biblical and theological treatment of the issue of God’s sovereignty and how it ties in with human moral culpability and responsibility will find much of value here.
But even if you do not buy his theological stance on these issues, his closing chapters are both pastoral and practical. Thus Chapter 7 has to do with how all this ties in with prayer. And there we get the questions I already mentioned, such as: ‘If God already knows everything, why even bother to pray?’
He begins his chapter by reminding us of some basic biblical truths. While God made us and the world, he did not have to. He is complete and sufficient in himself. Indeed, the three persons of the Trinity have always enjoyed fellowship and community within the godhead. So God did not NEED to make man. As Ware writes:
God exists eternally independent of creation, possessing within himself, intrinsically and infinitely, every quality and perfection. All goodness is God’s goodness, and he possesses it in infinite measure. All beauty is God’s beauty, and he possesses it in infinite measure. All power and wisdom and every perfection or quality that exists, exists in God, who possesses each and every one infinitely and intrinsically. Therefore, God needs none of what he has made, and nothing external to God can contribute anything to him, for in principle nothing can be added to this One who possesses already every quality without measure. Instead, everything that exists external to God does so only because God has granted it existence and has filled it with any and every quality it possesses (Acts 17:24-25).
But God did create us. Not because he had to but because he wanted to. And Ware reminds us of this basic truth: while God is fully and perfectly self-sufficient and dependent on no one, we are fully dependent on God. Like a newborn baby, we are completely helpless and unable in the least to survive and thrive on our own. We owe everything to God.
Prayer
This is where the amazing biblical truths about prayer come into play. Although God is perfectly sovereign and complete in himself, he has chosen to use the prayers of his people for his purposes. Again, he need not have even created us, let alone deign to take into account and make use of our prayers.
And again, God knows all about us and all about our needs. As Jesus said about our need of daily bread and clothing, “your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (Matthew 6:32). So is prayer a waste of time then? Jesus did not think so.
Says Ware, “Clearly, Jesus doesn’t see a conflict between 1) our complete and total inability to inform God of anything, and 2) our prayers being meaningful, significant, and necessary.” He offers two major reasons why God has designed that his people pray. The first is this: he devised prayer “as a means to draw us into close and intimate fellowship with him.”
At this point let me interject with a quick personal story. Last night as I was looking at my Jilly dog, I thought that she too misses and is sad that Averil is gone. The trouble is, she cannot reason it through and properly process it all. She simply has a hole in her doggie soul.
But then I thought, ‘Am I really much different?’
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