Sproul: It’s a serious thing that we have to face today because if you express disapproval
of any form of behavior in the culture, you’re likely to be accused of indulging in hate
speech.
And even homophobia, the word itself suggests fear of those who have a particular sexual
orientation.
I don’t think it has anything to do with fear.
I think it has to do with whether this is a behavioral pattern that is acceptable to
God.
And if we preach what the Bible teaches, then we — that must mean that we hate people
who are into this thing.
That’s really a silly inference from it.
And I have homosexual friends, people who are homosexual whom I love, and they are my
neighbors.
And if they — and they know very well that I don’t think that God approves of their
behavior.
But they understand that my coming to that conclusion has nothing to do with how I feel
about them as people.
I can love them as much as I love people who are not involved in that kind of activity.
And so to say that somebody who expresses disapproval of a particular condition is engaged
in hate speech or homophobic, that’s just slanderous.
And, but I think we’re increasing — we’re seeing increasingly that trajectory in the
culture, and I see within a very short period of time, preachers being called on the carpet
and threatened with the loss of their IRS exemption and so on if they speak against
homosexual behavior or gay marriage, you know?
And, you know, the story already about people who will not bake cakes for same-sex marriages
or provide flowers for same-sex marriages, have had significant consequences that they’ve
had to pay.
And I see the day coming, and it may be within the next two weeks, where if somebody comes
to St. Andrews and they want me to perform a same sex marriage, I’m going to tell them
no.
I can’t.
And if the government says you must or you go to jail, then I hope that my friends will
visit me in jail.
Moore: There are a lot of people when they say that you’re being homophobic, what they’re
trying to do is to just shut you down, and not to have further conversation.
There are a lot of people though that when you’re evangelizing them and they say as
you’re witnessing to them, we think you’re homophobic, you have to understand the mindset
that they have often.
The mindset is that if you reject this part of their lives as being morally wrong before
God, they see this as part of their essential identity.
So what they hear you saying is I not only am saying that you are a sinner, I am saying
that you are something less than human and repulsive because I am denying something that
is at the core of who you are.
We ought not to take offense at that.
We ought to say this tells us what our project is in sharing the gospel.
Part of what we’re sharing is that this self-identity is wrong, this understanding
of who I am is wrong, and this understanding of that someone — some of the people that
we’re talking to think if the gospel is addressing this part of my life, then the
gospel has no right to interrogate that.
We got to expose that with the light of the gospel.
There are some people also who are saying that they are somehow beyond the reach of
the blood of Christ because they can’t imagine what it would look like for them to be redeemed.
That also needs to be exposed with the light of the gospel.
So I think that when we’re accused of being homophobic or bigoted or narrow, our first
thought shouldn’t be: how wrong you are about me.
Our first thought to be how wrong you are about you, and how wrong all of us are apart
from the Word of God in the light of the gospel.
And so we don’t give up on those people and we don’t pull back, we keep pressing
forward with the gospel and with the witness that we have.