Sam Allberry - Is God anti-gay?: And other questions about homosexuality, the Bible and same-sex attraction

I first began to properly understand something of my sexuality around the same time that I began to understand Jesus Christ.

I was in my final weeks of high school. Exams were coming to an end and we were all looking forward to the prospect of a long, study-free summer. It had been a hectic final few months. A couple of uncomfortable home truths were sinking in. The first was that it is quite hard to prepare for exams when you havent paid much attention in class. Revising is much harder when you havent done much vising.

The other home truth was even more uncomfortable. I had always been someone who formed close friendships, but I was now beginning to realise there was something a bit more than that going on. Though Id had a couple of girlfriends, Id never felt the same kind of bond as I had with one or two of my close male friends. As the long summer began and there was less going on to distract me, the truth began to bite. The words began to form in my mind: I think Im gay.

This was not a welcome development. I wanted to be like everyone else, and to be into what everyone else was into. I wanted to have feelings for girls like my friends had. And yet, instead of having feelings for girls with my friends, I was finding myself having feelings for my friends.

It was during this same period that I got to know some Christians for the first time. I was working Saturday afternoons in a local Christian-run coffee shop, and this was the first time Id ever really got to know Christians my own age. They became fast friends and when, after exams were over and I had nothing else to do, they invited me to their church youth group, I decided to go along. I liked these guys and was interested to know more about what they believed. The message of Jesus, it turned out, was quite different to what I had imagined

When Jesus began his public ministry, he made the following announcement, and it takes us right to the heart of his message:

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. The time has come, he said. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!
Mark 1 v 14- 15

Jesus says the kingdom of God has come near. Whatever God had planned to do to put right the wrongs of this world, right then was when he was doing it. It was all about to kick off.

And the response Jesus looks for is repentance and faith .

Repentance means turning around, to change course. The implication is pretty clear and a little uncomfortable: were not heading in the right direction. Were like the elderly man I read about recently in our local newspaper: in a moment of confusion in the middle of the night, hed ended up driving a mile or so on the wrong side of the motorway. Thankfully at that hour there was hardly anything coming the other way; if it had happened when the commuters were up, it might have been a very different story.

Jesus is claiming that were heading in the wrong direction, and that the rush hour of Gods purposes is heading toward us. We need to change direction and line up with what God is doing. And that means believing the gospel : the announcement that, through Jesus death and resurrection, we can be put right with God; that we are being offered a fresh start to begin to live as God always meant us to. This is his message.

And its his message for all people. When Jesus burst onto the scene, he didnt subdivide humanity into categories and give each one a separate message. One for the introverts; another for the extroverts. One (with logical charts and bullet points) for left-brain types, and one (with different colours and ambient music) for the right-brain folk.

Gods message for gay people is the same as his message for everyone. Repent and believe. It is the same invitation to find fullness of life in God, the same offer of forgiveness and deep, wonderful, life-changing love.

It was this message I first heard at my friends church, the message I have tried to live in the light of in the years since. Through it all, as someone who lives with homosexuality, I have found biblical Christianity to be a wonderful source of comfort and joy. Gods word to me on this issue at times feels confusing and difficult. But it is nevertheless deeply and profoundly good. The gospel of Jesus is wonderful news for someone who experiences same-sex attraction.

I used the term same-sex attraction just then because an immediate challenge is how I describe myself. In western culture today the obvious term for someone with homosexual feelings is gay. But in my experience this often refers to far more than someones sexual orientation. It has come to describe an identity and a lifestyle.

When someone says theyre gay, or for that matter, lesbian or bisexual, they normally mean that, as well as being attracted to someone of the same gender, their sexual preference is one of the fundamental ways in which they see themselves. And its for this reason that I tend to avoid using the term. It sounds clunky to describe myself as someone who experiences same-sex attraction. But describing myself like this is a way for me to recognize that the kind of sexual attractions I experience are not fundamental to my identity. They are part of what I feel but are not who I am in a fundamental sense. I am far more than my sexuality.

Take another kind of appetite. I love meat. A plate without a slab of animal on it just doesnt feel right to me. But my love for meat does not mean I would want someone to think that carnivore was the primary category through which to understand me. It is part of the picture, but does not get to the heart of who I am. So I prefer to talk in terms of being someone who experiences homosexual feelings, or same-sex attraction (SSA for short in what follows).

And as someone in this situation, what Jesus calls me to do is exactly what he calls anyone to do. Take another well-known saying of Jesus:

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Mark 8 v 34

It is the same for us allwhoever. I am to deny myself, take up my cross and follow him. Every Christian is called to costly sacrifice. Denying yourself does not mean tweaking your behaviour here and there. It is saying No to your deepest sense of who you are, for the sake of Christ. To take up a cross is to declare your life (as you have known it) forfeit. It is laying down your life for the very reason that your life, it turns out, is not yours at all. It belongs to Jesus. He made it. And through his death he has bought it.