What does the Bible say about homosexuality?

Many gay and lesbian people emailed me having read The Shock of Your Life and each email was essentially the same: ‘I want to become a Christian, but I dare not get involved in church because I know they’ll reject me because I’m gay. I can’t stop being gay, so I’m stuck. Can you help?’ In this post we take a look at what the Bible has to say about being homosexual.

The idea that homosexual people aren’t welcome in the Christian church is created partly by the media, who often give the impression that Christians basically get their kicks by persecuting homosexuals at any and every opportunity. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. The church is actually a place where people of every race, language, background and sexual orientation are accepted equally because God loves people unconditionally. He loves gay and straight people just the same.

However, if we choose to follow Christ, we are choosing to live the way God wants us to live. God has good reasons for wanting us to enjoy sex only inside a marriage relationship. It’s not that God is obsessively angry about homosexual sex. In fact it’s hardly mentioned in the Bible. The big deal is that God says that any sex outside marriage is wrong. For example, when the apostle Paul wrote to a church in a city where homosexuality was widespread, he said:

Now getting down to the questions you asked in your letter to me. First, is it a good thing to have sexual relations? Certainly – but only within a certain context. It’s good for a man to have a wife, and for a woman to have a husband. Sexual drives are strong, but marriage is strong enough to contain them and provide for a balanced and fulfilling life in a world of sexual disorder. (The Message – 1 Corinthians

7:1–3)

Contrary to popular belief, the Bible does not condemn anyone for being homosexual. You might just as well say that the Bible condemns people for being heterosexual. It’s what we do with our sexual urges that matters, and in this respect, gay and straight people are in the same boat.

The real issue is that for the homosexual, a straight marriage doesn’t just seem like a dim and distant future hope; it looks like an out and out impossibility. It feels no more appealing than offering a straight teenager the dream of a gay marriage one day.

It’s also true that on the few occasions when the act of homosexual sex is mentioned in the Bible it is clearly described as unnatural and wrong (e.g. Romans 1:24–27).

At this point it is tempting to quote all those homosexual people we know who, having become Christians, have found to their delight (and sometimes surprise) a totally fulfilling sexual life within a straight marriage. These people can honestly say that they are not in denial or repressed. They do not feel that anyone’s forced them into anything, but they have felt God transform them as people. One result of being born again for them has been a genuine change in the direction of their sexual desires. But typically these stories just make us feel worse, and occasionally angry.

‘Maybe they weren’t really gay in the first place’ or ‘I can’t change who I am, and why should I have to change anyway?’ are understandable reactions.

In this short note I can’t do justice to this huge subject that is so personal to so many people. But I can offer this encouragement. When becoming a Christian, what we receive is not so much a system of rules that rule out certain types of people, but a person. We enter a relationship with Jesus. Jesus is for us, not against us. When Jesus encountered someone who’d done something that was considered to be sexually sinful, he managed to leave her feeling accepted and empowered (John 8:1–11). Seeing as he’d never sinned himself, Jesus was the one person who could have given her a hard time, but he was the one person who didn’t. This is the God who loves us more than anyone else ever has or ever will. Jesus left her with hope, and he does the same today for everyone who comes to him.