Greetings;
I have enjoyed being home with a few windy rainy days, some fence repair, and just enjoying living at my house. I enjoyed preaching at Alife yesterday. I love my church family. I am looking forward to another week of being home. I will be doing some strategizing for the new year and seeking what is next.
I am continuing again today on the tough topic of iniquity. I believe we all have things in our lives that require the presence of God to bring healing and transformational change. These things are iniquities. They are not sin, but things in our lives that need a supernatural visitation of God. Without the supernatural power of God’s overcoming grace our iniquities make us vulnerable to accepting something that misses the true mark of destiny only found in God. Missing the mark is sin. When we accept our iniquities as the way we are meant to be, we open the door for a lifestyle of sin.
One such iniquity is the iniquity of homosexuality. I believe that God wants to give those who wrestle in this area the grace to overcome homosexuality. Not because He hates them for being homosexuals. It is because God knows that homosexuality cannot produce the fullness of life that they and their family truly need. We most often think we know what we need. It is based upon the desires of our own heart. It is possible to be innocent people with illegitimate desires. Illegitimate desires open a pathway for blind spots and deceptions in our lives. Being deceived doesn’t make someone bad, it makes them deceived. It makes them fall short of the true mark of destiny in life. It can affect them physically, emotionally by the soul, or by the spirit – even including a spiritual force that illegitimately inspires their souls. Choosing a path of self-desires opens the door to human wisdom that is earthly, sensual, and even demonic. It is based upon natural realities, human senses, and illegitimate spiritual forces.
God wants to give to us desires that have a better outcome than the desires that have been inherited or created within our hearts and minds by our natural world. I believe that God wants people who wrestle with homosexuality to overcome. Not to overcome so they can be loved, but to overcome because they are already loved. I will never condemn someone for having to face a vulnerability to the ways of homosexuality. Neither do I condone their embracing a homosexual lifestyle as God’s path of destiny. For this reason, I could not help someone take a further step into embracing a homosexual lifestyle. If two individuals of the same gender come to me and want me to marry them as a homosexual couple, I could not do that in faith because I believe it would be taking them a further step into bondage and away from their true destiny in Christ. Now, I need a miracle because I also have to realize that this person that identifies themselves as a homosexual is not less than me. They have the same value as me, they simply do not see truth in the same way that I see it. It is not my job to condemn them, shame them, or to judge them. As a leader in the church, it is my job to help them find their path of life in their relationship with God. They have to be obedient to the faith, not merely obedient to a belief system called Christianity. Faith comes by hearing God in our hearts. They have to be obedient to the voice of God in their hearts. This is why we have the written word. It tells us the things that could be in the heart of God and things that are in the heart of God. If we ask God for something that is not in His written word, we are asking for deception. We are asking for something He cannot be or for something He would not say. If we think it is something He can say, it doesn’t matter what He says; we are going to hear what we want to hear. I know Christian believers who are homosexuals. I know some who are married and others who want to be married. I know homosexuals who have prayed and asked God if they should get married. They are convinced that God spoke to them to get married. How is this possible? We are just dealing with the subject of homosexuality. We could take this into thousands of subjects. In 2 Corinthians chapter 11, Paul wrote to the Corinthian church. The Corinthian church was a very interesting church. Its primary problem was that it kept acting like the city of Corinth. It was a church that had members that acted like people in the world.
2 Corinthians 11:1 Oh, that you would bear with me in a little folly—and indeed you do bear with me. 2 For I am jealous for you with godly jealousy. For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. 3 But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. 4 For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted—you may well put up with it!
In these verses Paul was writing that believers should be in relationship with Jesus and not other things. He was concerned that they could be deceived as Eve was deceived. Eve was deceived by questioning what God had said. She was vulnerable to the tempters words; “Has God really said?” Her willingness to consider something God would not say made her vulnerable to fall for a deception according to what she thought He could say. The context was one of being deceived, not sin unto death. Does one know how they have been deceived? They don’t! It is deceptive! That is why it is called ‘deception’. The criteria for being deceived is receiving a different Jesus, a different spirit than the life-giving Spirit of God, and a different good news. Preaching another Jesus, is another God saves, another salvation, or another way to find life. It is receiving another means by which to be saved or receiving a different spirit which we did not receive that brought us the life of God. Deception involves a different means of salvation, a different spirit, and a different good news. If something other than a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit becomes a source of salvation, a motivation of our hearts, and a testimony of good news to our lives – it will result in deception. Choosing to embrace an iniquity as a legitimate reason to pursue a path of life that is contrary to God’s character, nature, way, power, or authority is an invitation to a different Jesus, a different spirit, and a different good news in your life. When we do this, we cannot hear what God is saying because we hear His words to our definitions and not His. We even begin to read His word in our language, and we become blind to His language. We choose to read His word according to our desires. We must approach God for who He is, and we must expect Him to change us to become like Him, not for Him to become like us.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
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