desired and loved...
I sat recently with a young man who explained to me over breakfast how much he hated himself. He shared how his same-sex attraction made him reprehensible to God and to himself. “God despises me”, he said simply.
He shared how he had prayed and tried over and over to be rid of these desires. And yet the desires remained.
What an incredible privilege to be able to say honestly to Him that our Father (we are both believers) loves him. That our Father was pursuing him. That our Father wanted a real relationship with him. That our Father delighted in him, enjoyed him and liked him.
He simply stared back at me.
He had a comeback for all of my statements, a reason why I was wrong. As my eyes filled up with tears, he said, “You really believe that God likes me?”
He’d grown up in church. His parents were believers, and he’d attended youth group all his days. And yet, somehow, He had come to believe that His sin was unforgivable, his wound was incurable.
He needed desperately to be told and to believe that he was loved. Simply loved.
This statement from Wes Hill that I recently read reminded me of my friend’s need to understand that he was loved: Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that living a Christian life is practice in perceiving yourself as loved. “The life of the Christian community,” Williams says, “has as its rationale—if not invariably its practical reality—the task of teaching us to so order our relations [with one another] that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.” What this implies, I think, is that such a task is never finished, in this life anyway. We are each of us all the time either helping or hindering those we love—and those we don’t love for that matter—to see themselves as gifts, as occasions of joy, as desired and loved simply because they are themselves.
I would like to think that, in the Church, we would also be helping people to see that they are desired and loved. But I know that this is often not the case. I think that part of the problem is that we are shaky in our understanding of the basic doctrines of the faith like salvation, forgiveness, and election.
Scripture seems clear to me about a couple of things:
God offers to forgive all my sin when I accept Jesus as my substitute and recognize Him as the boss of my life.
God loves every single person.
He (my friend) was a beloved son of the King of the universe.
And yet he was consumed with shame over attractions he had not chosen, desiring love from a God that he believed hated him and planning to keep his shameful secret “to the grave.”(I hated to point out that in sharing with me his secret technically wasn’t going to the grave. So I didn’t.)
He hated himself and believed that he needed to hide because he was certain that God hated him.
What about you? Do you believe that God delights in you? Do you believe that God delights in the people around you? Do you believe that God hates some people because of their sin? And where did you come by what you believe?
When will we put our foot down and insist that our churches teach sound doctrine about sexuality and gender?
The vast majority of LGBTQ churched young adults carry the belief that God hates them because of their desires. Churched teens and young adults are somehow coming to believe this within our walls.
They don’t think that God hates people stealing by cheating on their taxes.
They don’t think that God hates fat people for the sin of gluttony.
They obviously don’t think that God is that concerned about porn, because it’s rampant.
How often can I get drunk on Friday before God hates me?
Or what about gossip?
Understanding my point?
Yes, God judges sin. Yes, God hates sin and its effects.
But we, His image-bearers, are also greatly loved and desired by Him.
Let’s resolve that we will see this corrected on our watch.
That we will ensure, as adults in the evangelical church, that we teach sound doctrine. That we will entrust it to faithful men and women younger than us to be passed along.
In a couple days, I will sit again across the table from this young man. I feel privileged to get to share a meal, and hopefully also get to communicate how much God delights over him. My prayer is that as he comes to believe that I like him, he will see God’s love reflected through that.