Tom Short

I'm ba-ack!  Trying to start blogging again, pray I keep it up.

Tom Short spoke at church today. Always love hearing him speak. I love Scripture-based sermons, don't get me wrong. But the occasional, strictly application sermons (while still 100% Biblical, mind you) are refreshing. Tom, as you might know, is a campus, open air preacher, whose goal is to engage young people in open discussions about faith, God, creation, etc. his sermon today was on the top questions he gets asked on campus. Of course, one of the number one questions is about gay marriage. I'm not going to stir the debate, but I liked a few of his points. His main point of the whole sermon was that people ask the questions, sure, but they typically have a point behind the question. The real issue, as it were. The point behind this one (typically) is that Christians are hateful bigots. We try to deny love or rights or whatever to people who believe counter to our beliefs. And that's exactly the point. We didn't come up with this. This is *God's* truth. He is the one who determines what's right and what's wrong, not us. If there is no God, sure, we can say this is right or this is wrong, however we decide (and however aligns with our desires, we wouldn't call it wrong if we wanted to do it). But there is a God and He is clear. Homosexuality is wrong. Tom follows up to say, this in no way allows for us to hate homosexuals. Christ died for ALL, so we must love all. But love does not accept sin in any form. Love the sinner but hate the sin. The more you love someone, the more you'll hate their sin. Tom's illustration today was a high school friend of his who wanted to start doing drugs. Tom vehemently tried to convince him not to, not because Tom wanted to deny his rights or didn't want him to follow his desires, but because drugs are wrong. There were others around Tom doing drugs and he didn't care. But his friend, whom he loved, that was a different story. 

I guess the moral is, look past the question to the heart behind the question. Convincing someone that gay marriage is wrong will do nothing to convince them that there is a God and He decides what's right and wrong.  And love the sinner, but hate the sin.