NOT SHOCKING Part 1

BUT STILL SAD 

"Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?"...

"...You are not your own; you were bought at a price."

I went visiting the "ex-gay" side of a blog sites Groups.  Of course there's very little "ex-", but a whole lot of gay.  Not shocking, not for me anyway, I knew that was the direction things were going.  You put a bunch of professed, "ex-gay" people together and you get "ex-ex-gay" people.   That surprises people, when they learn that "ex-gay" people struggling together doesn't work.  I'm surprised anyone could honestly be shocked "ex-gay" people can't help each other successfully.  Take a bunch of people who have no real understanding of healthy and life giving relationships, put them together, and you expect they learn how to relate in a godly way in relationship???   Talk about the stuff of fairy tales!!  It's the blind leading the blind.   In order to get truly "ex-d" out of gay, it takes a group of people made new born by God's own Spirit; a people infilled by the Holy Spirit constantly; people devoted to one another as community and family.  I think we used to call this group, "The Church of Jesus Christ."  That was the group God called to reach the sexually and relationally broken, including LGBT people.  Instead the Church has attempted to foist her call and God's purposes upon ill equipped groups like Exodus International.  Critics of Exodus International, as it turns out, were right in some of their criticisms.   Exodus got it wrong, because they allowed the Church to force them to become something they never should have become.   In the beginning Exodus was intended to be an advisory group to help churches reach and minister to people wishing to escape homosexuality.  The churches didn't want to be advised they wanted Exodus to take the aspiring "ex-gay" off their hands.  Exodus quickly became a dumping ground for the church's unwanted gay problem.   Do you know what happens when you get a bunch of religious people struggling against homosexuality, who come together to help one another "struggle" against their lusts?   You get a dating service for religious gay people.  The discerning gay person knows Exodus conferences are a literal smorgasbord for the sexual appetite.   Exodus is speed dating gay style.

  

In his exceptional book, Homosexuality And The Politics Of Truth, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover says that homosexuality is akin to Narcissistic Personality Disorder.   For me it made total sense.  Homosexuality is kind of the flip side of Narcissism.  instead of thinking too highly of themselves the homosexual has a very low opinion of himself.  In 2008 Sweden's twin registry, the largest in the world, was used to see if researchers could find a reason why some pairs of twins were both gay, but other pairs had only one gay twin.  Because of the, still too small, sample size the study isn't conclusive.  Still it seems the findings supported the earliest thinking about homosexuality; that homosexuality flows from trauma.   The Sweden Twin study showed that around 75% of the twins, in which one twin was gay and the other straight, the gay twin had endured some form of trauma(s) the other twin had not.   The trauma didn't have to be sexual in nature in order to be considered for the study.   We know trauma has adverse effects on adult humans.  Think of women traumatized by rape or spousal abuse.  One of my best friends, a wonderful Christian lady, who spent most of her life in abusive relationships, said, on the eve of her approaching marriage to a wonderful Christian man, "It didn't feel like love."  She was so accustomed to the drama and trauma, that when real relation; real love found her it didn't "feel" right.   It actually took my friend a little while for things to "feel" right.  She committed to the changes she needed to make in herself, trusted God to guide and enable her change, and then simply dove right in, never looking back.  Believe it or not the Bible actually addresses the matter.

"One who is full loathes honey from the comb,
    but to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet."

Proverbs 27:7

Scripture uses the most fascinating ways of telling the spiritual side of matters.  "Bitter", in Scripture most often means "poisonous".   Start the trauma in a person's life at a very early age, and by the time they reach puberty bitter/poison is not just their normal fare, but the preferred, all day everyday meal.  The United States Military used to have a term which actually became an official military term: F*U*B*A*R.  You've probably heard f.u.b.a.r., but did you know what it really means?  This is how it breaks down:  "F"***ed. "U"p. "B"eyond. "A"ll. "R"ecognition. 

When the Bible speaks of sexual immorality it says some very unusual things.

 For by means of a harlot
A man is reduced to a crust of bread;
And an adulteress will prey upon his precious life.

"A man is reduced to a crust of bread???"  Putting one's penis in a woman (or man for that matter), not your wife makes you into a  pastry??   Actually it isn't that far off from the understanding God lead me to in my walk to freedom from sexual immorality.   Trauma makes people feel "different"; "broken"; "dirty"; "separated"; "abnormal".   relationships aren't the safe and life giving places they once were, or never were to begin with.  Then there is the biggest secret no sexually broken person ever wants to face.  "I am worthless, dirty, hated, and worthless."  People settle for less than God gives, not because they are modern and happening.  People don't settle for homosexuality, or hooking up, or internet pron, or hooking, or stripping, because they highly value themselves.  The very center of the problem; the heart of it is, "No one could or would ever love me, so I'll take whatever I can get."   Sexually broken people start having relationships in their own minds rather than even attempting real relationships.  I know a great many people would say things like, "I know a lot of LGBT people, some are my closest friends, and they have great relationships, are happy and well adjusted adults."  No one is ever going to let you in on the secret, we didn't talk about it even among ourselves, so why would you honestly think anyone would let an outsider in.  As always its the dirty little secrets that keep us enslaved.   If  our secrets were known we could be set free, but nothing in our past will ever allow for that.

Honestly until I ministered to hookers I never saw my own struggle with sexual brokenness clearly.   When I first started meeting hookers they all pretty much said the same things, "I love my job, because I love sex and I love money."   But after you spend some time around hookers you start hearing stories about how bad men really are.   Funny, if you like having sex and earning money from these men, why do you hate them so much?   That's when we learn what is really going on underneath.  I think most of us could agree that we like money and sex, but the ugly secret of hooking is, "Absolutely NO ONE wants to be used, especially hookers."