Before I tell you what the texts say, let me tell you whom I am writing to. Not to a debating society, and not to a culture war. I am writing to a person — perhaps a person who has known since childhood that this question is not theoretical for you, who has typed it into a search bar at two in the morning, bracing for either a sneer from one direction or a shrug from the other. You will get neither here. You are not an issue. You are a soul God made, and you deserve two things from a pastor: the truth, and your dignity. I intend to give you both, because they were never actually in competition.
What the texts say
The Bible addresses homosexual practice in a handful of places, and I will not pretend they are obscure. The law of Moses prohibits it plainly (Leviticus 18:22). Paul, writing to Rome, describes same-sex relations — both male and female — as contrary to the Creator’s design (Romans 1:26–27), in a passage whose larger point is that the whole human race, religious people very much included, has turned from God. And writing to Corinth, he includes it in a list of the lifestyles that do not inherit the kingdom:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 6:9–10
Read the whole list before you read any one line of it. Same-sex practice stands in a column with heterosexual sin, with greed, with drunkenness, with the sharp tongue and the sharp business deal. Paul is not isolating one group of people for special condemnation; he is leveling the entire room. Underneath the specific texts sits the positive teaching they all assume: Jesus, asked about marriage, went back to the beginning — he which made them at the beginning made them male and female (Matthew 19:4–5) — and grounded marriage in that design. The historic church has read these texts the same way for two thousand years, and I will not tell you they have quietly come to mean something else. They have not. The teaching is what it appears to be.
Some readers will want to know about the revisionist arguments — that Paul meant only exploitation, or temple prostitution, or did not know of committed same-sex love. I have read those arguments with care, because a pastor owes that to the people asking. I find they require the texts to mean less than they say, and they require Jesus’ male-and-female foundation for marriage to mean nothing in particular. I cannot, with a straight face before God, read Scripture that way. If you conclude I am wrong, you will at least know I told you my honest reading rather than the comfortable one.
The verse the church keeps forgetting
But Paul’s sentence to Corinth does not stop where the quoters usually stop. The very next verse may be the most hopeful line in the whole discussion, and it is astonishing how seldom it gets read aloud:
And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:11
And such were some of you. There were people in the church at Corinth, baptized and beloved and breaking bread on Sunday, who had come out of every lifestyle on that list — this one included. Paul does not write to them as outsiders on probation. He writes: washed, sanctified, justified. The door these texts describe is not a wall with one group of people on the wrong side of it. It is a door that every kind of sinner has already walked through, and the church is the room full of the ones who did. The same gospel, the same cross, the same grace — there is no separate, smaller salvation for you. There is only the one, and it is enormous. If no one has ever explained that gospel to you plainly, it is the best news you will ever hear, and I have laid it out in What Is the Gospel? and How to Be Saved.
Where the church has sinned against you
Now I must say something to you on behalf of my own house, and I will not dress it up. The church has often handled this subject — and the people it concerns — with a cruelty that Scripture nowhere licenses. Jokes from pulpits. Parents coached to shun their children. The quiet decision that this sin, alone among all sins, makes a person a punchline rather than a neighbor. Christians who would never dream of picketing a gluttons’ convention found energy to be vicious here, and called the viciousness faithfulness.
That was sin. Not a misunderstanding, not a tone problem — sin, the kind the Bible calls reviling, and you may notice that reviling appears in Paul’s Corinthian list a few words after the sins the revilers were so exercised about. If you have been on the receiving end of that, I am sorry, and I do not say so as a public-relations gesture. The mockery you endured did not come from the Lord Jesus. He was famous — notorious, actually — for the company He kept and the gentleness He kept it with. The religious officials of His day criticized Him for it constantly, which tells you whose side of that argument He was on. I have written more about the church’s failures in Why Are Christians Such Hypocrites?, and if part of your road now involves forgiving people who hurt you in God’s name, How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You Deeply was written with you in mind too.
The costly call is for all of us
Here is the place where I will not soften the truth, because softened truth is just a slower lie. For the Christian who experiences same-sex attraction, historic Christian faith calls for the same thing it calls for in every unmarried believer: chastity. That is a real cost. It may mean carrying a longing that does not get the ending the movies promise. I will not pat you on the head and tell you it is a small thing. It is not a small thing.
But hear this carefully: it is not a special sentence handed down to you alone. It is the shape that one universal command takes in one life. Jesus put the universal command this way:
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. Matthew 16:24
Any man. Every Christian, without exception, eventually stands at a place where following Jesus costs the very thing the self most wants to keep. For one believer it is ambition; she turns down the career that would have owned her. For another it is money, and the open hand bleeds a little every time. For the widower it is the loneliness he did not choose; for the unhappily married, faithfulness through years that feel like drought; for the single woman who longed for children, a grief she carries to church every Mother’s Day. The cross is not a boutique item issued to one demographic. It is the uniform. A church that demands self-denial from its gay members while demanding nothing of anyone else is not too strict — it is too lax, ninety-five percent of the time, and dishonest the rest. The call of Christ flattens that hypocrisy: every disciple surrenders the self somewhere, and every disciple gets the same exchange, which Jesus stated in the next breath — lose your life for His sake, and find it (Matthew 16:25).
And no one carries it alone, or was ever meant to. The unmarried believer is not a problem the church stores in the lobby; singleness is honored in Scripture as a high calling — Paul, who was single, got downright enthusiastic about it (1 Corinthians 7:32), and I have written about that in Dating, Singleness, and Choosing a Spouse. A church worth the name will be family to you in deed and not in slogan: a place at tables, names that know your name, the verses at identity in Christ made flesh in actual people.
An open door
Maybe you have read this far and you are not persuaded, or not ready, or simply tired — tired of being discussed, tired of bracing. Let me leave you with the only invitation that has ever mattered, in the words of the Lord Himself:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. Matthew 11:28–29
All ye. Not “all ye who have sorted yourselves out first.” You do not clean up to come to Christ; you come to Christ, and He does the washing — that is what but ye are washed meant. Bring Him the whole tangle: the attraction you did not ask for, the wounds the church gave you, the questions you cannot resolve, the hope you are half-afraid to feel. He has never once turned away a person who came.
The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. Psalm 34:18
If you want to talk to a person rather than a page, you can write to me — I read what comes in. If you would rather start quietly, the Gospel of John is where I would begin, and you can leave a burden at our prayer requests page any hour of the night. It is read, and it is prayed over — you included. Especially you.