Noah interviews Laurie Krieg about her new book An Impossible Marriage: What Our Mixed-Orientation Marriage Has Taught Us About Love and the Gospel, that she co-wrote with her husband Matt.
Psalm 16 Devotional – Ending the Never-ending Chase
This is a perfect picture of the alcoholic, so thirsty for a drink that satisfies, yet never does. Barbossa’s plight always reminded me of my previous porn addiction: wanting something that satisfied, but always being left empty. Tasting the wine in my mouth, but it emptying out onto my feet. The only way to keep the wine inside of me was to keep drinking more and more and more of it. Our culture feeds us this lie about sex all the time, with people having sex before marriage with regularly, yet continuing to come up empty, in loneliness and despair, masking it all by chasing the next hit with even more abandon than the last. In the Pirates clip, the crew-mates reaction to Barbossa’s wine is telling. They are all staring silently at what is one of the most tragic sights imaginable, then when he looks at them they all laugh as loud as they can! If they can make his tragedy cool and popular and desirable and normal, it will mask how sunk they really are.
The unresolved tension that will never go away for gay / SSA Christians
What I love about Wesley is his ruthless honesty. He essentially spends all of chapter 5 making sure the reader understands he is not presenting a quick fix to the emotional ache that gay / SSA people feel. He wants to make sure gay / SSA Christians, as well as pastors looking for the magic bullet solution to all of this, understand that there is no magic bullet. He wants to make sure people understand if they walk down the path of kinship / covenantal friendship, they will meet pain and disappointment. This is not a good sales pitch! But it is real and it is honest. Us pastors hate this. We want a systematic theology that fixes everything. We want the right answer that grounds us in Scripture and that gives everyone warm fuzzies.
Another Path for Gay / SSA Christians: Friendships that Go Deeper than Family or Romance
What you have to love and appreciate about Wesley and his writing is that he is dealing with real issues for real people. I find it is so easy for heterosexual married pastors to come up with cookie cutter sermons and treatises on what the Bible says on homosexuality that are just preaching to the choir. They are really only intended to help biblically conservative, heterosexual Christians feel good about their biblical position on a sin that they don’t struggle with at all. These teachings have little-to-no intention of actually helping gay / same-sex attracted Christians who are held in a daily chokehold by their same-sex attraction, something they have little-to-no control over. These church leaders give them very little in the way of options or action steps, which is why so many end up turning away from the Church and pursuing gay sexual relationships and/or keep things bottled up inside with no one to help them as they struggle down paths of deep depression and suicide.
Another Path for Gay Christians: Friendship as a Lost Vow
Wesley Hill is a gay, celibate Christian. While I can’t speak for all people in all places, his 2010 book Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality was groundbreaking in my corner of biblically conservative evangelicalism. In a topic that had become bifurcated into only two camps, Wesley presented a third camp: Christians […]
Is Masturbation a Sin?
“Is masturbation a sin?”
I intentionally did not address this question when I wrote my book for men on sexual purity. My reason was not from fear of talking about controversial or sensitive subjects, it was because I didn’t want those who disagree to tune me and the rest of my message out. I thought it would be an unnecessary distraction. Because whenever you talk about masturbation, no matter your stance, people will disagree.