Gender, Bigfoot, and Leprechauns
The idea that gender is a made-up social construct is gaining widespread acceptance. But is that the most helpful conclusion? Does the idea of gender need be thrown out and left behind, or just seen with new lenses?
Transcript
Well, good morning. My name's Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. Grab a Bible and flip to Matthew chapter 19. That's where we'll be starting today. It's going to be on page 534.
If your Bible is one of the blue and white ones on the road. If you don't own a Bible, steal the one you're holding. Grab one of these and take it with you. We'll give you permission to steal. We'll absolve you of that. It's our gift to you.
We want you to have a Bible. If you are part of our church family and you've already taken five of those, just leave the one you're using here. Okay, so anyway, we're in our second week of our Theology of Sex series. We're just trying to have a better, more robust view of gender and sexuality, of masculinity and femininity. And so we're just taking some time to actually see what the Bible says about all these things because they're major cultural issues for us. So today we're going to pick up and start talking about gender specifically.
Let me recap for us what we talked about last week. So as we started this last week, what we said was that humans were created in the image of God. That God created everything and then he kind of pauses and then creates humanity in his image to mirror him, to show all of the rest of creation what he's like. Like a little bit of a self-portrait. Like humanity exists in relation to God and is designed to image him to the world. Therefore, all humans have dignity and value and work and purpose just by the nature of our creation, the nature of our design.
The problem is, our fundamental problem on earth is that we who are designed to worship God and exist in a relationship with him have swapped him out for other things. And what we talked mostly last week was that humans, because we are made in the image of God, are the easiest created things to put in the place of God because we hold the most promise. It's easier to believe that another person will fill you up, will give you satisfaction, will bring you fulfillment. It's easier to believe that romance and relationship and love and sex can fit in that and fill that void than it is for us to believe money can go there or success.
I mean we chase after all these other things, but the easiest one, because we were made in the image of God, the easiest thing to replace him with is each other and ourselves. And that this pour the fabric of creation and ultimately leads to destruction, pain, because we were designed to exist in a relationship with him. Am I cutting in and out? Okay, so do I need to cut this off and just talk really loudly? Alright, this is going to get on my... Okay, we're going to try to fix that, I think.
So I will try to talk loudly and rapidly so that I will not cut in and out. I will just talk like this the rest of the time, so be paying attention and make sure you stay focused because this is how we're going to go. Now we're in Matthew chapter 19. So here's what we're doing. We're going to have to cover a lot of ground today as we walk through this because we've got a lot of things to say for us to even be able to have the discussion we need to have. So we're in Matthew chapter 19.
We looked at last week at how we've swapped God out for other things. We were created to worship him, to find our joy and fulfillment in him. And that ultimately Jesus came to swap places back with us. Where we had swapped ourselves out for God. Jesus, who is God, swapped himself out for us. Where when we made the exchange, we got death and sin and pain and destruction.
Jesus made the exchange on our behalf and took our death and sin and pain and destruction so that we could be welcomed back in. And that's the foundation of everything else we say. We have to understand that God pursues us, created us, and loves us enough to go to the cross. Matthew chapter 19 verse 3 is where we're going to pick up. It says, And the Pharisees came to him, him as Jesus, and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? Okay, so the Pharisees were a group of religious leaders.
And they asked Jesus a bunch of questions on a consistent basis because they're trying to trip him up, trap him, prove that he's wrong, show that he's ignorant, get people to quit following him. And they were well educated, knew the Bible really well, and so they're asking him this question to kind of trick him. They're going to have a discussion about divorce, but Jesus is going to say some very helpful things to us as we look at gender today. The Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? He answered, have you not read? Which is just a great way to answer Pharisees because they would have memorized the Old Testament.
So I think he does that just to bother them, which just makes me like Jesus a little more. But that may be some of my own sinfulness. But he's like, oh, I thought y'all don't read? Okay, I'll catch you up since you don't know. Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. So Jesus reiterates and reaffirms what we saw last week where it says God created male and female in his image. Jesus says there is from the beginning male and female. That there is a gender binary. That you are male or female.
So they said to him, why then, this is verse 7, did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and send her away? He said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery. So he's answering their divorce question.
We're going to keep moving because we're not talking about that today. We're looking at gender specifically, what he says about that. So the disciples said to him, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry. So the disciples jump in this conversation and they're like, wait, you've got to stay married forever? Probably should just not get married then. So just so you all know, their culture was a little closer to ours than we think.
So his basic response in the context is, eunuchs were people who were physically unable to have sex. They were physically unable to not have the sexual organs capable of having sex. So he says there are several types of eunuchs. We would refer to this as intersex now. Those who have been born this way. Those who have been made this way by men.
They would have captured men and castrated them to let them guard female chambers at this time. Those who have been made so by men. Or those who have chosen to be so. So they didn't physically do this to themselves, but chose to be so for the sake of the kingdom. So his basic answer in the context is, if you can't handle marriage or don't want to get married, you can be celibate for any number of reasons.
You can live your life without ever having sex for any number of reasons. But what's helpful for us is that in this conversation, Jesus, who is God on earth, confirms God at the beginning made them male and female. And he addresses there are some who are born without male or female reproductive organs. There are some who are born where it's not clear what they are, male or female. And those individuals would be intersex. And one of the arguments that's made against gender today in our culture is that because some people, so it's a small percentage of the population, it is very rare, because some people are born intersex, then gender must be fluid.
It must be on a sliding scale. And here Jesus gives us actually a helpful response to that, which is, no, there are two genders, male and female, and there are some born this way. And we take exception for those, and we care for them, we love them, and they are individuals that we know and care about. But it's an exception that proves the rule. It's not one that breaks the rule. Now, if everyone is thoroughly uncomfortable, we're going to talk about gender today.
Before we get into all of that, I've got a few things just to lay the groundwork for us and to kind of address some different people in the room so that we know where we stand. If you're in the room today and you identify as gay, if you identify as bisexual or transgender or bigender or any number of the current ways to identify yourself, I just want to say you are welcome here. We are glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. You are welcome to be a part of our church. You are welcome to be involved here.
We are not against you. You're not an issue to us. You are a person loved by God, and you are welcome here. To our more conservative friends in the room, any amount of pride and superiority that you hold when it comes to the issue of gender, any amount of today that you just feel like some of the things we're talking about are just unhelpful, we shouldn't even have to talk about them. I just want to encourage you to remember that the gospel eliminates pride and superiority, that the standard by which we are judged is Jesus and his holiness, not any other thing gets to be brought into the discussion as to what makes us special or good or okay.
And just a life tip, as a Christian who wants to be a missionary to our culture, you can't be a missionary and be dismissive, and saying things like God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, or I wish I was transgender and then I could go into ladies' locker rooms, are not helpful at all. So I would ask you to listen today with a bit of humility and grace as we walk through this, and hopefully grow in our understanding of how God cares for and loves all of us, even in the midst of some of this gender discussion. For our more liberal friends here today, I just would encourage you to hold on to some of that same humility and grace as some of the things we talk about today may seem asinine or barbaric or completely ignorant as we try to unpack what scripture says, that you would just approach it with the same humility and grace we just asked of our conservative friends, and that really you would just try to, as we try to gracefully say, here's what the Bible says, not a whole lot of rhetoric, not a whole lot of shouting, not a whole lot of personal arguments, but here's what scripture says how we ought to approach this, if you would just try to hear and consider the other side of what our culture is saying. Now, I feel a little bit trapped as we get started, because there's no way that I can say everything correctly.
Terms have changed very quickly, and people in the room are going to be all over the place with, biology determines everything, if this is how you were born, then go with it, or it doesn't matter how you were born, it's how you feel, or all of gender is fluid, and so as I go through, if I say something offensive, our goal is to not be offensive for the sake of being offensive. We have said that some of this series might be offensive, and that's just as we unpack the Bible, it offends us. As we talk about what scripture says, it doesn't always agree with our culture. But we're not trying to be offensive for the sake of some pop and zing, so if I say something offensive, just give me some grace.
I'm not trying to be other than, hopefully, all of us will be a little bit offended by Jesus and by the cross. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to hop in. God, I pray that in the midst of this, you would give us all some humility, all some grace as we approach you. You'd help us to grow today. You'd help us to grow in our love for each other and our love for you, and ultimately our love and our understanding of the cross and what that provides for us. In Jesus' name, amen.
Facebook has started offering three options when it comes to gender. So there's male, female, and custom. If you start typing into the custom box, there are 56 other options that it will autofill, or you can write whatever you want. Some of the other options, I'm going to read a few of them, are agender. This is people who don't identify as any gender. Bigender, this is someone who identifies as male and female at different times.
Pangender, this is someone who identifies as a third gender with some combination of male and female aspects. And there's 53 other ones. This is taught at the University of South Carolina like this, that gender is on a sliding scale. The poster person for this lately has been Bruce, now Caitlyn Jenner, who publicly announced that he was a female in a male's body and went through gender reassignment surgery last year. Won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from the ESPYs. Won Woman of the Year.
And that was even some of what helped us know this was really helpful for us to discuss because when he won Woman of the Year, our culture really didn't know how to react. It was a little bit of like, is this good for women? Is this, how does this work? Should we be excited? We should celebrate? Like there was just a little bit of confusion.
But this is kind of how we've begun to approach gender. That it's on a sliding scale. There's not really two set ones. And I think before we even get into this conversation, one of the questions that comes up is, why does it matter? Like why does God care? If I'm not hurting anybody, if I'm just doing my own thing, if people are just minding their own business, like why does he care?
Why is he stepping in? Why does it even matter? Can't we just all kind of do what we want? We're going to continue discussing that argument in a second. But I think to help us out as we get started, I'm going to try to help you know why God steps in and why he cares.
You may not appreciate the answer to this, but this is why. When it comes to anybody stepping in on any issue with a friend, family member, anybody, there's really two main sliders, two main categories that gauge how much we're going to step in. And they are knowledge and love. So knowledge of the situation, of the circumstance, of the decision, of how it's going to play out, and love for the person making the decision. So your friend comes and says, hey, I'm trying to figure out what kind of Job to get.
Okay? You love your friend, but you don't know what kind of Job they should get. So you're going to help them because you love them, but you're not going to be like, you should be a plumber. Like you're not going to come really aggressively after one type of Job unless you know them really well, have a good, like you're just going to be like, hey, well, what do you like? You're going to try to help them figure it out. Let's say you have a lot of knowledge, but no real love for the person.
So let's say I'm walking into Walmart and a guy comes up to me and says, hey, I'm thinking about dropping out of school and doing drugs. Okay. First of all, nice to meet you, sir. Second of all, I have a lot of knowledge. I feel like I've got a pretty good knowledge of how that's going to play out for him, but I don't know him. I don't really love him.
So my response would be, uh, don't do it. Like if you're taking votes of people in Walmart's parking lot, put me down for a no, but I'm not going to follow him. I'm not going to have an intervention. I'm not going to go to his house and try to find his, his stash and throw it down the track. Like he's not, he's not my brother or something like the amount of aggression I'm going to have. I'll have some knowledge, but I'm not, I don't love him.
Maybe I should, maybe I should work on that. Mostly I'd be like, dude, I'm going into Walmart. Put me down for a no. Don't do it. I got stuff to get. Um, God, if you read scripture, if you just read cover to, to the, from, from one end to the other, and you're not a theology student, you're just reading it.
Two main things are going to jump out. Story after story, poem after poem, letter after letter. God is absolutely in control of everything. He is the king of the universe who created, holds everything in his hand. He is all knowing and all powerful. And he loves you.
He loves you individually. Absolutely loves you. So when we say, why can't he just leave us alone? We're asking, can't he be just loving or just powerful, but not both? That's what we're asking. And if you get just powerful, just knowledgeable, then he looks at us and sees that we're making some huge mistakes, that we've swapped him out for other things, that ultimately that leads to our own harm and destruction.
It's just not enough to get him off the couch. I've figured it out. Doesn't love us. Most of us aren't asking for that. Most of us want the opposite. We want him to love us, but not tell us what to do, not have any knowledge.
We want him to just come alongside of us and say, hey man, I care about you. Whatever you want to do. Do you think that'll make you happy? Go for it. We want him to kind of stand behind us and go. That's kind of what we want.
So the reason God cares, and the reason he's going to step in, and the reason he's going to wade into stuff we don't want him to talk about, is because he's both. The Bible's clear on that. If you want some other version of a God, you're not going to find that one in scripture. He's going to be both powerful and loving, which means that we get both the creator and the cross, where he steps in to love us, to rescue us, to bring us back to himself. Okay. Now, we've got to go, we've got to set gender aside, and go, go look at some philosophy, look at some ideology of our culture, before we can even get to gender, because we've got to understand that there's something really underneath, and behind the whole gender debate, and that is called what Robert Bella, he's a sociologist, calls expressive individualism.
You didn't know you were going to learn something today. Just bring that up in a conversation later this week. People are like, man, I don't know this person was smart. They'll be like, yeah, I'll take two tacos, because I was just, and just mumble it, you know, like, if we're talking about expressive individualism, just say it like that on the phone, people will be like, wow, smart. Here's what expressive individualism is. Here's the argument.
Look inside of you. That's where you'll find your purpose, your meaning, your value. That's how you'll know. Look at your dreams, look at your desires, look at your hope. That's what will define you, what will give you purpose and value. We look inwardly, and then we express ourselves.
That's expressive individualism, and it is all over the place. We have different words for it. We have, follow your heart, you do you, and just, just follow your dreams. Be true to yourself. Who cares what other people think? You just be yourself.
James Harden commercial starts off, it's real cinematic, there's a little voiceover by Harden, and he says, man, real talk, be who you are. Do what you feel, always. Because those that mind don't matter, and those that matter don't mind at all. And it cuts to him doing all these awesome athletic things, and when it's over, you're like, yeah, bump the haters, I'm going to be a professional athlete. Or play Xbox. New York Times article said, people must be allowed to be themselves, however they define themselves, and they owe the world no explanation of it, or excuse for it.
This is in pretty much every Disney movie ever. Cinderella, we talked about her last week. Her song, one of the songs she sings is, a dream is a wish your heart makes. No matter how your heart is dreaming, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true. The Little Mermaid, the point of The Little Mermaid is, follow your dreams no matter what, and then you'll be happy. Which is funny, because the point of the book, The Little Mermaid, is some of your dreams are really destructive, and you should listen to your dad.
Um, Tinkerbell the movie, she says, I want to be free to be who I am. Kung Fu Panda, doesn't matter that he's a fat, unathletic panda, he finds out at the end, that the secret ingredient was in him all along. The real, the real dragon scroll of life, is a mirror. Just look inside yourself. And some of you are like, hey bro, Kung Fu Panda's DreamWorks, not Disney. Good point, Disney owns DreamWorks.
Um, Frozen. Frozen. Uh, if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna pick on Poe, I love Poe. If I'm gonna pick on Poe, I also gotta pick on Elsa. You know the part in Frozen, where Elsa loses her mind, goes up on that mountain, makes that giant creepy castle sing into herself, and that big monster, and everybody's like, yay! You know what I'm talking about?
Uh, in that song, where she's completely lost it, she sings, uh, time to see what I can do, test the limits, and break through, no right, no wrong, no rules for me, I'm free. That's expressive individualism. No right, no wrong, no rules for me, I'm free. And it's not just Disney, it's all over the place. Jesse Jay has a song called, Who You Are. Dreaming is believing, sometimes it's hard to follow your heart, tears don't mean you're losing, everybody's bruising, just be true to who you are.
The New Radicals, this whole world can fall apart, you'll be okay, follow your heart. Josh Groban, believe in what your heart is saying, hear the melody that's playing, believe in what you feel inside, and give your dreams the wings to fly, you have everything you need, if you just relief. It's hard to read that, not choke up. Um, how many movies do we watch that have this idea? Just look inside yourself, you were the answer the whole time. Dorothy, you had the shoes on the whole time, it's been you the whole time.
Poe, just look in the mirror, you're ready. Like how many people, movies have we watched where someone says, don't you ever let anybody tell you who you're gonna be? Don't you let ever, let anybody tell you what you can and can't do. You be you, you fulfill your dreams, you look inside, you muster it out of yourself, you pick yourself up by your bootstraps, and you can live your dreams. The way you can tell who the bad guy in a movie is, is who's the person who doesn't believe in this, who's our, here's our hero, who doesn't believe in their dreams, who doesn't believe they can accomplish the goal.
And either by the end of the movie, that person will have realized they're wrong and joined the team, or they were the bad guy. So here's what we learn. If I believe something in my heart, and you don't want me to do it, you're an obstacle. You're an enemy. You're a hater. And a hater's gonna hate.
Hate, hate, hate, hate. I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. Alright, shake it off. Here's the problem with expressive individualism, and I don't know if we, I don't know if we saw it. I don't know if we saw it coming, but here's the problem. When we all, when we get all aboard the expressive individualism train, when everybody climbs on to this idea that whatever's inside of you is right, whatever's inside of you is true, the last stop on the expressive individualism train is insanity.
If we follow the logic out, the last stop is crazy town. We lose the ability to step in and say, no, no, no, this isn't okay. We lose the ability to step in and say, no, no, no, no, this isn't healthy, this isn't okay for you to do this, because we've already seeded the point with whatever you think is right, whatever you believe is right. And so we lose the ability, and that's where it's headed, because we've already made all the logical arguments and already agreed to all the presuppositions, so when we get there, all we can do is say, well, I guess that applies here too. There's a guy, his name is Stefanke Walsh.
He's a 52-year-old man. He has seven children, and he decided that he did not want to be a father anymore, husband anymore, but that what was real inside of him was that he was a six-year-old girl. So he left his family and has found an adoptive set of parents that are grandparent-ish age who have grandchildren, and he stays over at their house and plays and colors with their grandchildren. This is a picture of him. So, this is expressive individualism carried out, and you can get online and there are people celebrating that he's being true to himself because he's looked inside and there's nobody can tell him this is wrong.
When we used to would have stepped in and said, no, you have a family, you are a man, you have certain roles and responsibilities, you need to carry some weight, you need to lead, no, we have to now at this point say, well, all the logic holds if it's really who he is, if it's really what his heart says, if it's really what his desires are. There's a thing called body integrity identification disorder. This is where individuals believe that they should have been born disabled. So they believe that a certain arm shouldn't belong to them or their legs shouldn't. There are people who have cut off limbs.
There are people who, there's a lady who believes she should have been born blind, so she blinded herself for a while and then poured bleach in her eyes. And is now blind. Because she believed that that's who she was, that's how she was born. She knew that the real her was blind. And every time we've said, just follow your heart, you gotta be true to you, you just do you, we, we climbed on the train. We, we've agreed with the, the logical arguments of whatever you find in you is correct.
Uh, Rachel Dolezal, y'all remember her? Uh, last year, this was an interesting one for our culture. She was the head of the NAACP in, uh, Washington, Spokane, Washington. Um, the problem was that she had been telling people she was black and she was not. And so this was, this is her, this was real interesting, um, because it was just interesting to see how we reacted. Um, so, uh, it's cultural appropriation at its worst.
She's, she's basically saying all this culture and history that, that plays into making a people a people, she just kind of assumes it and says this is me now, this is my culture now, uh, this is a picture of her parents and, uh, her when she was growing up. So people had a problem. They were saying, well, you're not black. You can't just say I'm black. Uh, there was actually, she was on TV, uh, talking to a panel of, of black women who were discussing this with her and she said, why can't I have the right to identify how I identify and I'll give you the right? And one of the hosts responds, Rachel, Rachel, I think it's kind of hard because you're not black.
Uh, and then on the Today Show and an interview, she says, I am deaf, I definitely am not white. Nothing about my being white, nothing about being white describes who I am. I am more black than I am white. That's the accurate answer from my truth. So here, here becomes the question.
How? We've already agreed to all the logic of expressive individualism. How do we step in and look at Rachel and say, no. Realistically, we can't. Realistically, we've already all kind of joined on board with whatever's inside of you, whatever you believe, however you feel, is right. Uh, let me tell you a few quick reasons why expressive individualism just doesn't hold up.
It just isn't helpful. First of all, that's not how freedom works. So the idea that no right, no wrong, no rules for me, I'm free, that's not actually how freedom works. You have the freedom to get in your car and go see the Grand Canyon. And there's a reason you have the freedom to get in your car and go see the Grand Canyon. Because we have roads and rules about how those are made.
We have vehicles and rules about how those are made. We have rules about what kind of vehicles can be on the road. We have rules about what you gotta do at a stop sign and a stoplight. And we got people in shiny cars with blinky little lights that ride around and enforce those rules. That's actually what gives us the freedom to do that. It's not road warrior outside where everybody rides around in a dune buggy and kills people they see and plays the guitar on the front of their car.
Because the guys with the blinky lights stop that kind of activity. That's where we have freedom. Freedom is actually the right constraints. So if you take a fish in a little goldfish bowl and put him in a bigger one, he's got some more freedom maybe. It's a little more expanded. But if we just throw him out on the ground and say, run free!
He's not free anymore because he needed some constraints. Like water would have been helpful. So it's not how freedom works for us to just have no rules whatsoever. It also, it undercuts our ability to, it's not real. It's not in line with reality. So first of all, it doesn't work on real simple things.
Like I can't look at my wife and go, you know, baby, I was looking in my heart and deep down inside I'm not a person who changes diapers. And you don't want to be married to some faker, inauthentic. So I'm going to head back in here because I'm a guy who eats Cheetos and watches TV. It doesn't work. You can't say that to your boss. I just realized that this job doesn't really, this project you have me working on doesn't really line up with who I am so I'm not going to do it.
Okay, you're not going to do anything here with you not having a job anymore. It doesn't work on a bigger scale either because it just, it undercuts our ability to help people with real mental disorders because traditionally that's how we have been able to tell if someone has issues. Someone has mental issues is that they have thoughts that are not in line with reality. So if I told y'all I had to wrap this up pretty quick because I got a game tonight because I'm Cam Newton and I'm pretty important and they really need me there, that would be cute as long as I didn't keep saying that. But after a while you'd be like, bro, you're like two foot too short, woefully unathletic and you know, we're just going to stop there but there's a lot of problems with you saying you're Cam Newton and we need to help you because I would not be saying things in line with reality.
So when you can be whatever you want to be, just look inside yourself, it actually doesn't play out correctly. The only other, one of the other things is oversimplified. I 100% of the time, when you just say follow your heart, that's who you are, 100% of the time only want to eat cheeseburgers with bacon, steak with bacon, tacos with bacon, biscuits with bacon, like 100% of the time. I have never in my entire life thought, man, some kale would really hit the spot right now. Never happened. Not even like if I was having fever dreams would that nonsense flit across my brain.
But, I also want to live to be past 45. Would like to be able to chase my 10 month old son around the house without getting winded and passing out. I don't want to constantly sweat bacon grease. I said constantly, I'm being realistic. I have, which one's the real me? I have opposing desires, which one's the real me?
We, a lot of times we don't even know what we want or it changes. So to say that whatever you find in your heart is real, go for it, doesn't actually work out functionally. And here's the, as Christians, we should have immediately have some red flags rise up in our mind as we talk about this because what expressive individualism says is this, be you, look inside yourself, find yourself, express yourself, grab everything you can and follow your heart. Matthew 16, 24, Jesus says this, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. So, love yourself, grab all you can and follow your heart feels like the exact opposite of that.
That as a Christian, Jesus is actually going to say, no, looking inwardly isn't what helps you. Getting everything you possibly can isn't what satisfies you and following your heart won't lead you to life and satisfaction. Here's one of the reasons why this becomes such a deep-rooted, believed, harmful truth, harmful idea in our culture. What we read last week, Genesis 127, I want y'all to see something and I think this will help us understand why this becomes such a heated issue. So, God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.
Male and female, he created them. We were designed, we said last week, in the image of God so we automatically have worth and value. But it also means that woven in the very fabric of humanity, built into our actual design, is that we should get our purpose from our creator. We get our identity from our creator. We were made in his image so our identity is actually derivative. It comes from him.
As soon as we swap him out for sex and romance and self, we are designed to begin to get our identity from whatever it is we're worshiping. So as soon as sex goes there, we begin to get our identity from it. That's why in our culture, when someone has a sexual desire, we just come alongside of them and say, that's the real you. Because we've placed sex and romance and self in the spot where we're supposed to derive our identity. We're supposed to derive our purpose and our worth. That's why in our culture, like in our culture, like if we lived, if I lived a couple hundred years ago in some sort of tribal warfare setting and I just wanted to kill people all the time and anybody who disrespected me, I wanted to kill them.
People in my culture would come alongside me and say, that's the real you. Inside of you is a really brave warrior who murders people. They would completely affirm that because that's what we value. And now in our culture, if I want to kill people who disrespect me, suddenly I have problems and should go talk to somebody. But that's because our culture values something completely different.
And that's why when anybody has a sexual desire, we come alongside of them and say, that's the real you. Because we've begun to derive our identity from that. Okay. Galatians 24, Galatians 5, 24 says this, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and its desires. We do not derive our identity from our passions, from our desires. That is not the sum total of who we are.
Jesus has actually set us free from that. This brings us to the idea of gender. There's a massive push in our society to say that gender isn't actually a thing. To say that gender binary isn't real and gender is fluid. And the Christian's first response to anyone dealing with gender dysphoria, which is the clinical term for someone who believes that they were born in a man's body but they're truly a woman. Or that they don't identify with their body in any sort of sexual way or that they were born in a woman's body but they're truly a man.
Anyone dealing with gender dysphoria, the response from a Christian should first and foremost every single time be compassion. Not anger, not yelling, not fussing, like compassion. because can you imagine being 100% convinced that you were not supposed to be in the body you were in? To be born in a man's body but be 100% convinced that you were supposed to be a female, to begin taking hormonal changes that affect your physiology, to have a surgery that completely changes your physical appearance and then to discover that you still don't feel complete. You still don't feel whole. You still haven't found satisfaction.
If somebody, one of your friends, someone you know is dealing with this, our response is love and prayer and a lot of meals together and a lot of late nights talking. We don't have to encourage the behavior. We don't come alongside and say follow your heart but we, we're not mad. We have compassion. It's heartbreaking and as we begin to talk about this I want to read from a guy named Paul McHugh. He has a Catholic background but he's not an active practicing Christian.
Here's his title. That's the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. So he has four words before his like title. So it's University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. Johns Hopkins was the first university to begin doing gender reassignment surgery. The first hospital.
They began in the 60s. That's how far ahead of the game they were on this. So if you were born biologically male but felt inside like a woman they would perform gender reassignment surgery on you. This is a quote from him in a Wall Street Journal article. Policymakers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment, and prevention. I have witnessed a great deal of damage from sex reassignment.
The children transformed from their male constitution into female roles suffered prolonged distress and misery as they sensed their natural attitudes. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken. It does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes. So what he did was he went back to all those who were reassigned and he did a survey.
He sat down and talked with them. What he found was that almost all the males who had surgery now identified as lesbians because they were attracted to women as well as most children who struggled with gender identity confusion grew out of it. I'm going to read another quote of his. You won't hear it from those championing transgender equality but controlled follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London Portman Clinic 70-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings.
Johns Hopkins after doing several studies no longer does the surgery. They did it for about 20 years. There is a new study in Sweden from 2011. It's only one of its kind and scope and magnitude. It tracked 324 people for about 20 years who had had transgender surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties.
Most shockingly their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population. Their suicide rate rose to almost 20 times the average. At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of transgendered sex change over the nature of the transgendered. Sex change is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women claiming that this is a civil rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.
Okay. I realize that that is hard to hear especially for compassionate people seeking to encourage and go along with our current cultural narrative. He does give an example that I think is helpful. One of the things he is saying is that the way we understand a mental disorder is when someone's thoughts are not in line thoughts and feelings are not in line with physical reality. And so one of the examples he gives is that if someone is anorexic they believe that they are overweight whether they are or are not and anorexic people can stand in front of a mirror and be very dangerously thin and believe that they are overweight and can look at you and say look at how fat I am and he says we don't come alongside them and say if that's what you believe follow your heart.
We don't come alongside of them and help them by encouraging them we come alongside them and help them by saying what you currently believe is in in line with reality. and that's what he says is not happening for those in the transgender community. If you don't feel at home in your body if you feel like an imposter in your own flesh if you feel like you don't quite fit let me tell you something that makes sense because in Christianity we have this understanding that we were designed to exist in a relationship with our creator and that's where we find fulfillment and joy and satisfaction and hope and when that relationship gets broken everything gets broken in us. We are no longer at home we are no longer at rest we no longer fit where we're supposed to we don't feel right anymore because we were designed to find our purpose and satisfaction and identity in God. So for someone who says I don't feel like I fit in this body the Christian response is that makes sense.
The theological term for that is estrangement that we were supposed to be in a relationship with God but that relationship is broken. Augustine says it this way you have made us for yourself oh Lord and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you. So for Christians we shouldn't be surprised by gender dysphoria at all. It's just an acute sense of what we all know to be true which is outside of God outside of Jesus stepping in on the cross we all of us are going to have to find something to fill the void something to make us feel okay. Truthfully those with gender dysphoria just have a more acute sense and they're doing what we're all doing which is looking for something to finish the sentence if I just had blank I'd be okay or if blank was just true about me I'd be finally complete. the problem is every time we fit something in that blank that isn't Jesus it ultimately doesn't satisfy it doesn't fill us up and it doesn't make us whole.
So we agree with the problem. You don't feel at home in your own skin. Yeah. All of us feel like something is lacking and something is empty and something is broken and something needs to be fixed but the answer is that Jesus came swap places with us on the cross to take away our shame and our guilt and to welcome us back into the relationship that we need to have with him. That he crosses that massive chasm between us and God to bridge the gap through his own blood to set us free. The band is going to come back up here and gender dysphoria is at its root a spiritual issue that comes from us worshiping something that ultimately isn't going to fix us.
So as our culture has placed self and romance and sexuality in this massive void caused by the absence of God we've begun to try to derive our identity from something that's not going to be able to give it to us and not going to be able to complete us and not going to be able to fill us up. But as Christians we understand that and we know the answer to that. Which is that Jesus Christ came to fix that problem through his own work and his own merit and his own blood and not our value or work or not anything else we can fill in the blank with. God I pray I pray that you would help us to love your good design.
God I pray that you would help us to see that you are all knowing and all loving and be able to trust you in that as we get to see you on the cross which proves that you're for us and you're for our good. I pray God that you would help us. That you would eradicate pride and superiority. That you would eradicate this desire to prove ourselves or to fill ourselves up or to find in us meaning and purpose. And God I pray that we would look to you to find meaning and purpose. I pray that instead of putting ourselves in that place we put you there.
Help us to trust you and follow you. help us to love all of our neighbors and all of our neighbors that currently struggle with gender dysphoria and gender issues that God we would be so overwhelmingly loving that it would be palpable. That they would feel so welcome because we who don't deserve to be welcome have been welcomed in through the cross. God fill us with your grace so that we can share it with others. We love you. We praise you in Jesus name. Amen.
Y'all stand listening. God bless you in mother stews in Jesus. We love you in the heart of Noah. Thank you in her. We love you in the heart of Gary, is in the heart of my little deum with people love started to move with America.
