The Christian identity, a relationship with Jesus Christ, requires that one forsake himself, and take up his cross, and follow Him. However, gay progressive Christians are instead, placing themselves before God.
Crystal Cheatham, who had grown up attending and singing at a Seventh-day Adventist church, was about to graduate from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan when she was warned that she couldn’t be gay and Christian. However, instead of listening to both the Word of God and her Church elders she defied the authority of Scripture and proceeded to pull other believers down the very same path;
“When I came out, I was told by ministers so far above me that I couldn’t be an out lesbian and also be on the stage as a leader, and it crushed me. It crushed me so hard,” she said. “I felt like I was at an impasse at the road in my life and I had to decide between this love for my God and my personal identity.”
At that impasse, according to scripture, Christians are to deny themselves and follow Jesus Christ. However, some progressive Christians are not recognizing the authority that is the eternal Word of God, and therein lies the problem.
Now an activist and writer, Cheatham has set out to create a digital space for LGBTQ people to explore their own spiritual practice without having to surrender any part of their identity. She is leading the effort to create Our Bible, an app set to release this fall that plans to offer at least 20 Bibles and more than 300 devotional readings, meditation exercises, articles and podcasts for LGBTQ Christians and others who feel marginalized by mainstream Christianity.
According to the 2014 Religious Landscape Study by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 35,000 people who identified as LGB and found that 48 percent of them identified as Christian, with the largest portions of that group identifying as Protestant (29 percent) and Catholic (17 percent).
As a Christian, we are to die to our own self and ego, to take up the Cross and give our entire being to following the one and only, the great I Am. To act like we come before Christ is a great sin, spiritual change must take place; if not, then God says what will happen in Revelation 3:16 – “Therefore because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, it will come to pass, that I shall spew thee out of my mouth.”
The spiritual change in reference is derived from both Repentance and the gift of the Holy Spirit, but there is a deeper problem that persists; Christians are not taking the Word of God literally, and therein lies another problem. Because some Christians forsake the authority of the Word of God, they are not recognizing or even experiencing His Word, rather they are pushing the outward appearance, and good works without having a changed heart.
Fewer than one in four Americans now believe that the Word of God, the Bible, is the literal Word of God. That number is similar to the 26% who view it as “a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.”
The disbelief is record breaking according to the Gallup-polls four-decade trend that biblical literalism has not surpassed biblical skepticism. Even further, about half of Americans — a proportion largely unchanged over the years — fall in the middle, saying the Bible is the inspired word of God but that not all of it should be taken literally.
The Gallup poll showcases that only 24% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God.
To believe that the Bible is not the literal Word of God, gives man power over the Word to manipulate it, derive false meanings, and in some cases act like the Bible is a book of mythological tales. Mans interpretation of scripture is the heart of the confusion on so many topics that are made clear in the Bible, one of those Biblical truths that gets increasingly bent is gender.
In Christianity, there are two genders, a man, and a woman, lest we forget that, we have forgotten He who created the world, in Christianity, according to the Word of God there is only one way people can be married; one man and one woman. Nothing more and nothing less, any alteration to that is blasphemy as it adds to Scripture and destroys the authority of the Word.
Prayer is needed to combat the confusion society tries to place over the hearts and emotions of everyone, as well as the ideological confusion of gender in culture.