Most of our lives are sinful

Sin is a misunderstood concept. People think of sin as bad actions. Murder, rape, abuse, that kind of thing. In fact that is not right at all. According to the Bible (the same source that says homosexuality is a sin) it is rebellion against God.

Essentially sin is a rejection of God and a failure to live, think and be like him. The Bible says “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. In other words, sin is falling short of God. Being less than God.

The old testament was full of examples of how people fell short of God. God introduced all kinds of rules with the purpose of demonstrating how far from God we are. These rules, these ‘sins’, existed to show the gulf between us and God. A gulf that nobody could cross.

Of course that didn’t stop people trying. People tried and then claimed to be better. Better because they didn’t do something or because they did do something else.

When Jesus came along, this ‘holier than you’ attitude really angered him. He saw that people had missed the point, so drove home the point by making those rules utterly impossible for anybody to achieve. Where the ten commandments talked about not murdering, Jesus taught we shouldn’t even be angry at somebody in our hearts. That is obviously not something anybody could achieve throughout their life.

The whole point was to say; it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t reach God’s standards. But God knows that and loves us anyway.

So from God’s perspective homosexuality is an irrelevance. We make up this arbitrary scale that homosexuality is worse than adultery but not as bad as murder. Sure, some ‘sin’ have bigger consequences on other people and so could be considered more serious. But on that scale homosexuality rates fairly low. The truth is that from God’s perfect perspective, none of us are any different. We are all equally far below him and yet he loves us all utterly and completely.

Now some will struggle with the idea of homosexuality being ‘wrong’ on any level. After all it is what many have built their self identity around. To be honest I don’t think it is my place to say whether it is wrong or not. But what I can say with some confidence is that the Bible suggests the entire human condition is fundamentally flawed. Even something as ‘good’ as committing ones life to a charity has the potential to be wrong if the motivation is not right.

God looks at the heart, not the action. What He considers sin is a rebellious heart. It’s our motivations that matter in his eyes.

Somebody’s sexuality has nothing to do whether they go to heaven or not. It shouldn’t effect how they should be treated and certainly should not stop them becoming a christian if they choose.

My point here is that homosexuality is no different to any other part of the human condition. You can choose to reject the idea that the human condition is broken. I can accept that. But please don’t feel that homosexuality is especially worse in anyway.

~.www.ccel.org~