This past week, Ben (our CM) was out of town so Large Group took a different form. Five of us got up between songs and shared what we had been learning in the past year or couple months. It varied from a full testimony to the minutest of realizations about God. The following are notes (expanded for readability) that I used for my talk.
This is what I’ve been learning my whole life but especially the past couple weeks.
I grew up in the Church.
I get bored of saying that. I don’t have an exciting testimony. I haven’t turned from some egregiously sinful lifestyle or been liberated from a terrible home life. I have parents who love me, took me to church, sent me to Christian schools, so I was saturated in the Gospel.
And then I read Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill. I would describe this book as a personal memoir by Wesley Hill in which he explains his life as a Homosexual and as a Christian and how he has struggled to reconcile the two. He has and continues to walk the line between embracing who he is and following what he believes Jesus says is the most fulfilling lifestyle for him. In reading this book I discovered that Wesley Hill knew to a much greater extent than I ever had (and maybe ever will) what it meant to take up his cross daily and follow Jesus. Literally, I had no idea what that meant for me. I work in ministry. That means I wake up ready to work for God. What is my cross?
So my first realization was this- I think I’m a pretty good person. Jesus barely had to die for me. In fact, he was only “mostly dead” for me. What do I do wrong? I get upset sometimes when I don’t get my way, or I don’t get credit for something I did, when people don’t know who I am. And then I read Galatians 6:19-21 “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
Notice murder isn’t listed this time. Nor even homosexuality. It’s not to say that murder or homosexuality isn’t addressed elsewhere explicitly, but for now, right here, God isn’t addressing those things. Listed here are things I do. Reading Washed and Waiting made me realize, I am jealous almost constantly. If I don’t get my way, I have a flash of anger, and then it may be gone, but that is fits of anger. How often do I compare my life to another’s and then resent that it is not mine? Often.
Then I became overwhelmed by how many of these things I am. I sin. I sin in a way that grieves God and isolates me from fellowship. These aren’t the fruit of the Spirit.
What I am trying to learn now is how to live with these sins or temptations. And Wesley Hill knows what it’s like very vividly to resist temptation day after day. I started reading his book and replacing his temptation with my own temptations to be angry, or jealous, or simply discontent. My cross began to loom over me.
Let me quote a paragraph from pg. 118 [with my translation as to how it applies to me].
For we homosexual Christians [or me, a struggling sinner], committing ourselves to the church and looking for the presence of the risen Jesus in the human faces of our fellow believers, pursuing intimacy with this community, refusing to hold friends of the same sex [or friends I envy] at arm’s length in the midst of our confusing loneliness, doesn’t always –or ever often– remove or lessen the loneliness; it merely changes the battleground. Instead of fighting loneliness alone in a car on an empty driveway or an apartment bedroom on Easter nights, we’re on the phone with a fellow Christian. Instead of staring at a TV screen late into the night [no translation needed], we’re at a church potluck, helping our married friends keep an eye on their kids. In the end, as the Indigo Girls lyric has it, “We’re better off for all that we let in” –including all the pain we let into our lives when we open up our souls to the fellowship of the church. That pain is better than the pain of isolation.
I think sin isolates us. Literally sometimes. So right now, I have a friend I text every time I am tempted to feel certain ways, and it’s awkward and embracing. But that’s the stuff that if it goes unchecked, can do a lot of damage by making me think, I don’t really sin. Therefore, Jesus isn’t that great. But I am trying to change my battle ground to one where I can see my temptations, tell a friend, sit through it, and realize just how important and gracious my salvation is.
Lavished in Grace 