My daughter has remarkable ears. Sometimes, when I speak to her, she cannot hear. Other times, when I whisper to my husband at the other end of the apartment, she calls out, “Wait, did that really happen?”
What I most want my child to hear from me is the good news of the gospel: that by faith, she can receive the true, good, and beautiful work of Jesus Christ on her behalf, which he accomplished through his death and resurrection, offering her forgiveness of sin and eternal life. I want her to hear that following Jesus means every part of her life can be transformed and made holy by him. And I want her to know that this good news is for everyone: that Jesus crosses every boundary in his determination to seek and save the lost.
The way I talk about LGBT+ questions in front of her can subvert or reinforce any of these truths about the gospel, and this will be the same for the children in your life as well.
So let’s consider three approaches to discussing LGBT+ questions and how they might each affect how our children understand the gospel.
Us/Them
Sometimes Christians, who rightly believe that the Bible calls any sex outside of male-female marriage sinful, talk as if folks who identify as LGBT+ are uniquely hostile to God and are therefore our enemies who must be fought or shunned rather than loved. In reality, all our non-Christian neighbors who don’t follow Jesus are trapped in ideologies that don’t love them but rather seek to eat them whole. Like us, they’re made in God’s image, but right now, they’re blinded and enslaved—just as I was before I put my trust in Jesus. I believed life was to be found in following my same-sex sexual and romantic desires. But Jesus called me to himself, forgave my sin, and transferred me from darkness to light (Col. 1:12–14).
Too much “us/them” language can make it seem as if Jesus’s work wouldn’t be appealing to people who identify as LGB or T, or that our first responsibility toward them is to tell them they need to change their practices rather than to tell them the gospel. We might even implicitly communicate that Jesus didn’t come for those people. But Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost. In reality, apart from Christ, our happily married, heterosexual neighbors are just as lost as those in our community who live under the rainbow flag.
Apart from Christ, our happily married, heterosexual neighbors are just as lost as those in our community who live under the rainbow flag.
Us/them language can also communicate to our kids who experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria that they don’t belong in God’s family. While those who struggle with pornography addiction or premarital sex can find help to say no to sin, others worry that even mentioning their draw to same-sex sin will get them shunned. They may worry that unless they can rid themselves of these feelings, they cannot be accepted by God or his people. They may think the gospel just isn’t for them, or, if they believe in Jesus and yet their temptations don’t disappear, that the gospel doesn’t “work” for them.
These aren’t just hypothetical examples—I’ve heard them all from friends. But while Jesus saves us from sin’s penalty and gives us his Spirit to help us fight against sinful desires of all kinds, we don’t have a promise he’ll remove temptation. Ongoing struggle against sin is a hallmark of the Christian life. By God’s grace, we can expect to see progress. But we won’t be perfected until Jesus comes again.
Silence
Rather than opting for us/them language, some of us may struggle to know what to say at all, so we end up saying nothing to our kids. This can be motivated by good: we don’t want to misrepresent God like those who hold up signs saying “God hates gays.” But if we say nothing, we can also undermine how our children understand the gospel.
On the one hand, we could unintentionally communicate that God doesn’t care about our sexuality. If we never tell our children that God says a clear “no” to same-sex sexual relationships, we could leave them to conclude that Christians can just follow their hearts. We may unintentionally signal that the gospel is a ticket to heaven that has no relevance to our holiness here. If they’ve heard at school or in the neighborhood that same-sex relationships are good, and they’ve heard nothing from us, they may assume we agree.
On the other hand, our silence could accidentally communicate that sexuality is too shameful to discuss. They might conclude that God wants nothing to do with it because it’s dirty, or that God isn’t interested in saving their friends who identify as LGBT+. Maybe Jesus’s work isn’t for everyone. Again, we’d never teach this. But in the silence, our kids can be left to wonder and reach terrible conclusions that don’t reflect the gospel.
So how can we talk to the children in our lives in ways that underline the gospel rather than undermine it?
Hope
Speaking with hope communicates both the grace and truth of Jesus Christ in conversations around sexuality and gender. Hope can recognize there’s a real, powerful, and stark difference between how a Christian must live and how people in the world live, while also holding out the truth that this difference is available to anyone who puts his or her faith in Jesus. Hope can proclaim that while we’ll all be fighting against sin for as long as we remain in this earthly body, Jesus can and will work holy progress in us.
Hope can see a rainbow flag in our neighborhood and, instead of complaining about what the world is coming to, pray that God would rescue and heal the person who put it up. Hope can speak the truth of God’s high standard for sexuality and communicate the Bible’s teaching that Christian marriage is a picture of the love that Jesus has for us (Eph. 5:22–33)—a much greater love story than anything our kids will hear at school or via Disney films.
Hope can see a rainbow flag in our neighborhood and, instead of complaining about what the world is coming to, pray that God would rescue and heal the person who put it up.
Hope is communicated when we speak the truth about God’s vision for sexuality and the truth that we were just as lost as any of our neighbors before Jesus found us. Hope will tell our kids that they can be in the world but not of it, on mission with Jesus to pursue holy living, no matter the cost, holding out the message of forgiveness and eternal life to all.
Hope can press forward knowing that Jesus’s death and resurrection is good news for everyone. So even if some of our neighbors are stubbornly opposed to God now, we should always hold out the gospel’s truth, beauty, and goodness. We know it can break through the hardest hearts and cross the strongest boundaries.
This is what I want my daughter to hear, whether I’m talking to her or in front of her—or even in a whisper on the other side of the apartment. Because the Bible’s teaching on our sexuality is ultimately about the gospel message of Jesus’s unending love for us. And that gospel gives us everlasting, unbelievable, life-changing, prison-breaking hope.
The Gospel Coalition