According to a recent Gallup poll, in 2022, 7.2% of U.S. adults identified as LGBT. Of those, 58% identified as bisexual, 20% as gay, 13% as lesbian, and 9% as transgender. If you look at Millennials, my age group, the total number jumps from 7% to 11% identifying as LGBT. When asking Gen Z, your generation, it jumps up to nearly 20% identifying as LGBT. In case you’re not a math major, that’s nearly 1 in 5 people in your generation who identify somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
The issues of gender and sexuality, more than nearly any other issue, have come to be one of the church’s greatest existential struggles today. Assumptions like “there are only 2 genders” and “marriage should be between a man and a woman,” are no longer taken for granted.
It’s also an issue where we’ve seen one of the strongest turnarounds in public opinion. In 1996, 27 years ago, support for same-sex marriage was at 27%. This year, 2023, it’s at 71%.
We are now at a point where a Christian understanding of gender and sexuality has become the minority position.
My point in bringing up these stats is not to create alarm, fear, anxiety, or anything close to that. You are on a college campus, so these numbers probably don’t shock you. Rather, it’s to show that we have one of the greatest opportunities for evangelism in an area where the world is in crisis and confusion and the Bible offers hope.
The Bible paints a beautiful picture of a good God making a good creation with humanity imaging him through our maleness and femaleness, and the institution of marriage serving as an icon that points to the relationship between Christ and his Church.
Not only that, but we also have a gospel that answers the questions surrounding the brokenness of our world and provides a solution for a wayward humanity separated from God. As John 3:16-17 proclaim,
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
That’s good news that’s worth sharing, Amen?
Now before I dive any deeper on evangelism to the LGBT community, I want to share some of my own story and how I came to talk about these issues.
My Story
Like many of you, I grew up in a Christian home. I’m grateful for that heritage, and the Lord used it to build a good foundation in my life.
I gave my life to the Lord when I was in 6th grade. I had made many professions of faith prior to that, but a series of circumstances led me to make a profession of faith in front of my peers that led to genuine transformation in my life.
Shortly thereafter, my life took a turn I didn’t expect… I began to struggle with same-sex attractions. Being raised in a Christian home and being raised in a very conservative area, I had always grown up with the idea that I would marry a woman and have a family one day. But lo and behold, this seemed to throw a big wrench in those plans—and not only those plans, but many other plans I had for my life, like my plan to feel normal and be able to relate to my peers on important things like how we feel about the opposite sex, or my plan to not struggle with any major sin that might feel shameful or could ruin my reputation if people found out—you know, basic stuff like that.
Middle school was rough. I didn’t know even what was happening to me, let alone why I had these attractions or what to do about it. It wasn’t something I felt safe talking about with anyone. Homosexuality had a lot of shame attached to it. I was the straight-A, good Christian kid that no one would suspect was struggling with something like this. And I wasn’t going to lose that reputation if I could help it.
Thankfully, God is sovereign over my life and not me. In high school, God brought some key friends and mentors into my life that I was able to open up to and receive the grace and truth that Jesus embodied. In essence, the answer they gave me was the answer that Jesus gave in John 8:11 to the woman caught in adultery, where he says, “Neither do I condemn you, but go and sin no more.” Being able to read those words in high school was life-changing for me because it echoed the desires of my own heart. I wanted to serve God with all my heart, but it felt impossible with this temptation hanging around my neck.
But throughout my life, God has taught me so much, not by answering my countless prayers to have the temptation removed—many times with tears crying myself to sleep—but by being able to persevere through the temptation. As Romans 5 tells us,
We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Though my life certainly hasn’t felt easy, I have more hope now than I ever have, not because I have a wife, 2 ½ kids, and a white picket fence (though that’s certainly not off the table), but because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ my Savior.
Throughout my life, much to my chagrin, God has continued to put me in situations where he has called me to be vulnerable, to share my story, and to proclaim the truth of the gospel and the truth of what God’s Word says about gender and sexuality.
Today, I can look back and genuinely say, “Thank you, God,” not for the presence of sin, but for the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome sin; not for the many times I have stumbled, but for every time I’ve stumble before his throne of grace, and not for a supposed identity rooted in sin that the world would want to push on me, but for an identity rooted in Christ that offers me salvation and freedom.
As Galatians 2:20 says,
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
False Gospels
So, now that you know a bit about me and why I’m so passionate about these issues, let’s move on to talk about how we evangelize to the LGBT community.
Today, I only have one main point: if you want to reach your LGBT neighbor, proclaim the same gospel to them as you would to anyone else. Why?
The first reason is that those who identify as LGBT have the same fundamental spiritual needs as the rest of us. We all need Jesus. We all need the simple truth of repenting and turning away from our sins towards the lordship of Christ. The gospel doesn’t need to be catered to them.
The second reason is that there is no other gospel than the one we receive from Scripture. Whenever we try to add to the gospel or take away parts of the gospel, it no longer is the gospel but a manmade invention.
Proclaiming the same gospel sounds easy enough in theory, but it’s a lot harder in practice. For decades, some Christians have proclaimed a number of false gospels to the LGBT community—whether it’s a false gospel that comes with double standards for the LGBT community or a false gospel that seeks to compromise on the truth of Scripture. And my goal today will be to expose what those false gospels are so that your love for the LGBT community will grow, and your evangelism to that group will be more effective.
Consequences of False Gospels
In Galatians 1, Paul talks about the consequences of preaching a false gospel. In that letter, he is writing to churches that are dealing with a group of people called Judaizers, who said that in addition to believing in Jesus as the Messiah, you still needed to keep some parts of the Mosaic law like circumcision. Paul’s response to this false gospel is one of the harshest we see in Scripture:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:6-9)
There is no other gospel than the one we have received from Jesus and his apostles which has been faithfully transmitted through God’s Word over the last 2000 years. To preach a different gospel—Paul says, “Let him be accursed.” Those are strong words. I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I want.
What are the reasons we might be tempted to preach a false gospel? Paul tells us in verse 10:
For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
Ultimately, we preach false gospels out of a desire to please man rather than God.
So, out of a desire to please the world around us and seem more loving and accepting, we might be tempted to preach a watered-down gospel without repentance and a turning away from sin, changing the definition of what sin is, or omitting the hellish consequences of unbelief.
Or, out of a desire to please our fellow church members and preserve their comfortability, we might be tempted to preach a gospel of works that puts burdens on the LGBT person that we wouldn’t put on anyone else.
There are a lot of false gospels we can preach and the church has preached. I’m going to touch on 5 of them today.
False Gospel #1: Homosexuality and transgenderism are the greatest sins
Very few Christians, if any, would explicitly say this, but if the topic of sin comes up, LGBTQ seems to be their favorite punching bag. If a church preaches a passage like 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 where it explicitly mentions homosexuality in a list of other sins, the only one that seems to get attention is homosexuality. Or, even if the other sins are discussed, there seems to be a particular kind of animosity towards homosexuality.
This isn’t to say that churches shouldn’t talk about homosexuality. We absolutely should. But the way we talk about this issue often communicates more than the words we use.
If we aren’t addressing sin generally or the sins in our own lives with the same level of intensity we try to address it in other’s lives, then we’ve completely missed the point of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and tax collector in Luke 18:9-14. To refresh your memory, Jesus tells us that,
Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
Applying this to the LGBTQ conversation is paramount. Even if we don’t say it out loud, if we believe in our hearts that we are better than someone who identifies as LGBT, that will affect how we evangelize to them.
This isn’t to say that all sin is the same or equally bad, but it is to say that all sin, great or small, falls short of God’s perfect standard, equally separating us from God, making us equally needy for his grace, mercy, and salvation through the gospel.
False Gospel #2: Homosexuality and transgenderism are their greatest sins
When we are evangelizing to the LGBTQ community, that identity or sin can seem to be so totalizing about who they are, that it becomes difficult to look past. In conversation, we (or even they) might feel tempted to want to focus solely on topics related to gender or sexuality.
So long as it depends on you, don’t lean in that direction. When possible, keep the conversation focused on the core of the gospel message, not their sexuality or gender identity, realizing that their primary need is having a relationship with Christ.
Remember that they are whole people. Even if they define themselves by their sexuality or gender identity, you don’t have to treat them that way. There are far more important things about them that you can talk about—their hobbies, their beliefs, their likes and dislikes, their classes, their goals and dreams. Humanize them by getting to know those other parts and showing that you care about them as whole people, not projects that you are trying to “fix.”
Learn to look past the exterior sin towards their need for Christ and gospel transformation.
We have to remember that people’s “greatest” sins are not the particular ways sin manifests itself but, in our unbelief, pride, and rebellion towards God.
Christopher Yuan, who lived as a gay man for many years before becoming a Christian, writes in his book Holy Sexuality and the Gospel that even after many years of illicit sex and drug use and drug dealing, “My biggest sin wasn’t same-sex sexual behavior; my biggest sin was unbelief. What I needed more than anything else, through God’s gift of grace, was faith to believe and follow Jesus.”
We need to point people to Jesus first before we try and help them through all the manifestations of their sin. The church has been great at saying, “Just come as you are and hear the gospel,” but less good at living that out with the LGBT community. Instead, what the LGBT community often hears is, “Come hear the gospel after you’ve managed to clean yourself up a bit. You make us uncomfortable the way you are now.”
In essence, this is proclaiming a works-based righteousness that says we have to achieve a certain level of righteousness, purity, moral improvement, or conformity before God will accept us. This gets the gospel exactly backward.
We shouldn’t use a double standard for homosexuality or transgenderism that we wouldn’t use for heterosexual sins or any other sins.
False Gospel #3: Prosperity Gospel of Heterosexuality
When we are evangelizing, we also need to be clear about the expectations for what happens if they do become a Christian.
Unfortunately, many churches have erred in preaching a prosperity gospel of heterosexuality, which essentially goes like this: “If you believe in Jesus, pray, read the Bible, go to church, do all the Christian things, God will free you from homosexuality and from your homosexual desires and will make you heterosexual. Then you can have a spouse, sexual intimacy, a family, and everything you’ve ever wanted.” There’s a lot to unpack in that.
First, while we certainly affirm that God frees us from sin and slavery to sin through Christ (Romans 6), what we don’t want to promise is that God will free us from temptation. Many churches have promoted the idea that belief in Jesus will guarantee that temptation towards homosexuality or transgenderism will cease. What other sin struggle do we do that with? We don’t tell a thief, “If you believe in Jesus, you won’t have a desire to steal again.” We don’t tell someone addicted to heterosexual pornography, “If you believe in Jesus, then you won’t want to look at porn anymore.” Why would we do the same thing with LGBT temptations?
In essence, what this does is put our own expectations upon the Holy Spirit’s sanctification instead of allowing God to work things out in his own timing. What’s worse, is that what is often implied by this line of thinking is that if your desires don’t change, you must be unrepentant, you must not be trying hard enough, or even you might not be truly saved. Sadly, that’s what some churches have taught.
While I do not in the slightest way want to downplay the power of God to bring about complete freedom from temptation in that area—and I know several people who have a story like that—the truth is that a lot people, including myself, continue to struggle with these temptations even while following Christ.
At the same time, if you are a Christian, you won’t stay the same. God loves us as we are and welcomes us as we are, but he doesn’t leave us as we are. From my own experience, I can say that I certainly don’t struggle with my same-sex attractions in the same way I did when I was 15, 20, or 25. I’ve grown and matured and have more freedom from it now than I ever have, but the Lord’s work is not done. Philippians 1:6 reminds us that, “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Sanctification is a process. God begins his good work in us and continues it throughout our lives, but it won’t be complete until the day when Christ returns.
Second, not only does this prosperity gospel of heterosexuality get the timing of sanctification wrong, it also gets the target of sanctification wrong. Nowhere in Scripture does God say, “Be heterosexual, as I am heterosexual.” What does he say? He says, “Be holy, as I am holy.” While heterosexuality is God’s pattern for sexual expression, mere heterosexuality is not enough. There are plenty of sinful expressions of heterosexuality which God calls every single one of us to put to death and repent of just as strongly as we would homosexuality or other sexual sin. As Christopher Yuan says, God calls us to holy sexuality, not just heterosexuality.
Lastly, this prosperity gospel upholds other lies of the enemy:
- Like singleness being a curse or disease that needs to be remedied, as opposed to a gift and responsibility that God gives for service to one another and to his people, much as Paul and Jesus modeled in their unmarried lives.
- It upholds the lie that romance and sexual intimacy are the end-all-be-all of every form of intimacy, and downplays the goodness and depth of intimacy that is possible in friendship and other relationships.
- It puts undue pressure on marriage and your spouse to meet every need and gives false hope that all sexual struggles will cease once you are married.
Such lies need to be eradicated. If you tell someone to leave their life of sin and come to Christ, you need to have a good understanding of what the gospel entails for the Christian life—not making false promises but offering the same hope that the gospel offers to everyone.
False Gospel #4: There’s nothing wrong with homosexuality or transgenderism
In evangelizing to the LGBT community, Christians might also feel the temptation to compromise on what the Bible teaches on homosexuality and transgenderism. This can take a couple of forms:
The first is to flat-out reject what Scripture says about these issues and adopt what is often labeled an “affirming” position. This essentially says that Scripture supports monogamous same-sex relationships in the same way it would support monogamous opposite-sex relationships. With transgenderism, this might look like affirming the adoption of an identity or pronouns that are different than a person’s biological sex or encouraging someone to undergo social, hormonal, or surgical transition.
To say it straightforwardly, such positions leave people in their sin. While we should be cautious in making outright judgments, Scripture repeatedly warns that being unrepentant about sin is often a sign of unbelief and should serve as a warning to any Christian in unrepentant sin (Hebrews 10:26-31, 1 John 3:8-10).
Another way this false gospel plays out is in compromising about different aspects of homosexuality or transgenderism. Maybe a Christian will agree that these issues are “sin” broadly speaking but will compromise in an area such as embracing an LGBTQ identity or desires. They might say, “As long as you don’t act on it, then you’re fine.”
However, such a position also leaves people in their sin by cutting short the sanctification process. As Jesus warns in the Sermon on the Mount, God isn’t merely concerned about whether or not you commit adultery, he is concerned about the lustful state of your heart that wants to commit adultery. And the same thing could be applied to LGBTQ issues. God isn’t only concerned about whether or not you merely act on it. He is also concerned with the state of your heart that wants to go in that direction in the first place.
Compromising on our sanctification like this will only set that person up for failure later on. Sin is not something to compromise with, bargain with, or foster in any part of our hearts. Our surrender to Christ must be total.
Jesus is clear.
If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (Matthew 16:24)
Paul is clear.
We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. (Romans 6:6)
Peter is clear.
As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy. (1 Peter 1:14-16)
The gospel is hard and demands everything from us, but the gospel is good because God is good and gives us far more than we can ask or imagine. He wants the Holy Spirit to do his good work to the very depths of our soul.
Rosaria Butterfield, who was a former lesbian and English professor at Syracuse University, said in a recent video, “The Lord Jesus Christ, who has ransomed your sin with every drop of his blood, did not make an ally to the sin he crushed on the cross.”
Neither should we compromise on what Scripture teaches nor on the depth that God seeks gospel transformation in our lives.
False Gospel #5: Being “Gay” or “Trans” is who they are
The final false gospel we need to reject in evangelism is one in which we let sexual orientation and gender identity define who we are and who they are. These categories do not define our personhood. Our feelings and our sexual desires do not make us different kinds of people. Those are categories invented by 19th-and-20th-century psychology and have no basis in Scripture. And yet, the church has uncritically used them because it’s the language of our culture.
This topic probably won’t come up in a normal evangelism conversation, but it is one that underlies nearly every conversation I’ve had with non-Christians (and even many Christians) about this issue, whether they identify as LGBT or not. And it comes up like this:
- “If this is who they are, why can’t we just accept them?”
- “If this is who they are, why can’t they just love who they want to love?”
- “If this is who they are, why can’t they act on their desires?”
- “If this is who they are, why not change their body or appearance.”
Most honest objections to the Bible’s approach to gender and sexuality have this assumption underneath it. So, in order to do good evangelism, we need to have a proper framework of gender and sexuality.
Scripture tells us in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” God creates humanity in his image to reflect his character and represent him on earth. Directly connected to the image of God is also being created male and female, rooted in our bodies. That is our identity, not our desires, not our feelings.
It is out of our identity as male and female, rooted in our bodies, which informs our understanding of the nature of marriage and the commands about gender and sexuality. This is what we see in Genesis 2:23-24,
Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Our sexual desires and how we feel about our gender cannot become untethered from how God made our bodies. They don’t exist as separate essences that we mix and match as we please. The way God made our bodies gives us our basic understanding of who we are and how we are to act sexually.
Don’t let sexual orientation and gender identity define who you are.
This kind of thinking can be especially dangerous for Christians because, in Christ, our sin no longer defines us. Romans 6:11, one of my favorite verses, says, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” In other words, in the way that we consider ourselves and think of ourselves, we must think of ourselves as being dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Sin no longer has any place in the identity of a Christian.
This is why I refuse to go by a label like “gay” or to say that I am a “gay Christian.” My sin doesn’t define who I am. Jesus does. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 makes this even clearer.
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Such “were” some of you. That applies to that whole list of sins. That is no longer who we are in Christ. And it is no longer who they are if they turn to the Lord.
Conclusion
In closing, we’ve talked a lot about false gospels, so I want to close by reading Ephesians 2:1-10, which is one of the clearest articulations of the gospel in Scripture.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
This is the gospel that we need to preach to everyone, including the LGBT community. We need to show them that the love they can have in Christ and in his church is better than the love that they have in the LGBT community. Truthfully, that is why many people turn from the church to that community – because they out-love us. The church needs to be a place where they can be welcomed, shown hospitality, shown warmth and affection, and find a place of belonging—one that doesn’t endorse sin or false identities but presents a clear picture of the gospel, trusting God, in his timing, to do his good work in their lives.
Don’t preach a watered-down gospel or a gospel with a double standard. Preach the same gospel to them as we do to ourselves and as we would to anyone else. For there is no other gospel.