Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

[In Wil’s January 28 sermon, he referred to Rosaria Butterfield’s 2023 book, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age. The lies are: Homosexuality is Normal, Being a Spiritual Person is Kinder than being a Biblical Christian, Feminism is Good for the World and for the Church, Transgenderism is Normal, and Modesty is an Outdated Burden that Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back. Here are some excerpts to ponder. I found especially helpful her discussion of the difference between acceptance and approval (p. 279 and following). Page numbers are in brackets.]

What exactly does it mean to be made in God’s image? An image of yourself is what you see when you stand in front of a mirror. God is the object in the biblical creation account, and we are the reflection. Therefore, to reflect God’s image accurately, we need to look at him through the mirror of the word of God illuminated through the Holy Spirit. [28]

Homosexual orientation, a nineteenth-century Freudian invention (Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939), is an unbiblical category of personhood and an antagonist to the creation ordinance because it redefines sinful desire as something that defines who you are rather than how you feel. Lie #1 claims that the word of God doesn’t apply to homosexual orientation because homosexual orientation represents a person’s core truth…. We must ponder why God’s attribute of immutability has been embraced by the LGBTQ+ movement as an attribute of homosexual orientation…. When we hear “homosexual orientation is fixed and immutable—it never changes,” this is only imaginable in a world that has already exchanged the worship of the Creator for the worship of the creature, of God for an idol. “Gay Christians” … teach that you can’t repent of who you are, how you feel, or even what you desire. They believe that homosexual orientation is morally neutral, separate from one’s sin nature, cannot be repented of, and rarely changes over a person’s lifetime. This is a lie. [32]

“Coming out of the closet” and describing yourself by sin will never help you to repent from it, flee from it, and be delivered from it…. The idea that you should always “come out” and share with everyone your sinful desires happened because homosexual desire was transformed from sin (which demands repentance) to a morally neutral category of personhood (LGBTQ+), which demands affirmation and celebration…. All atheistic paradigms of personhood hate the very people they claim to love by denying them soul care. [44]

[After telling of how a pastor’s family invited her to dinner and shared Psalm 113 in evening devotions] And so it was that Psalm 113 changed my life. I looked into its mirror, and I saw how short I had fallen from God’s will. God used the offense of God’s word for the good of my soul…. Instead of lesbianism being who I was, I now understood it as both a lack of righteousness and a willful transgressive action. I was no victim. I was no “sexual minority” needing a voice in the church. I needed to grow in sanctification—just like everyone else in the church. I learned that we repent of sin by hating it, killing it, turning from it. But we also “add” the virtue of God’s word. It is light that changes darkness. The Bible calls us to mortify (kill) and vivify (enliven). I realized that Christians are given a new nature, yet we have sin patterns that we need to kill, to be sure. [63-64]

[In interacting with the pastor’s family, Butterfield realized that she did not know any women who were homemakers] Mothering was a fascinating job, not terribly unlike being a research professor: you must do one thing at a time well, and you must have flexibility and good humor as you carry on. [65]

[Puritan pastor] Thomas Watson say[s] that in the life of a true Christian, while we cannot “see” faith (and therefore we cannot see into the heart of others), we can see repentance. And if we don’t see repentance, we have no reason to believe that there is faith. [89]

When I sin or desire to sin, as a new creation in Christ I am now acting against my new nature. Sexual sin is a bear because of the body memories that it leaves in its wake, but body memories are part of my biography, not my new nature in Christ…. It exerts the same kind of temptation that the Israelites experienced in wanting to return to Egypt in the wilderness. [91-92]

Psalm 51 reveals that the Christian must fight even unchosen sin. [96]

Genuine Christians repent of all sin (including the sin that feels natural and good) because they trust Jesus more than they trust themselves. [104]

(Wil quoted this passage) It all comes down to this: Do you trust your feelings, or do you trust the word of God? Do you perceive your feelings through the word of God, or do you perceive the word of God through your feelings? Do your feelings know you best, or does the God who made you? [106]

[Jesus asks an invalid,] “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). Let that linger for a moment. Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made well on Jesus’s terms or your own? Does the Christian who calls himself gay want to be made well on God’s terms?… For the man to be healed, he needed to embrace the terms that Jesus was going to set. [111]

The mature Christian life is one of constant fleeing to the throne of grace for mercy, grace, and forgiveness of our sins. [114]

If the Bible is false, flawed, semitrue, or just true in the red letters, then none of it is true. If you aren’t convinced of that, then the minute the Bible crosses you, that part you will declare an ancient bias and no longer binding. [116]

[When biblical truth first appealed to her] At this point in my life, there was no room to believe it, because I already believed other things, and those other things left no room for Jesus. My complex belief system was important to me. I wasn’t a blank slate open to God’s word. I was filled to the brim with chaos and sin and anxiety and people who looked up to me…. I realized that my own feminist worldview was more than just a set of ideas. It was a religion. [147-149]

We must deal with sin at its first occurrence because the second will always be worse. [155]

[Calvin’s Institutes 1.1.2] “Because nothing appears within or around us that has not been contaminated by great immorality, what is a little less vile pleases us as a thing most pure—so long as we confine our minds within the limits of human corruption.” [157]

When feminism is the interpretative tool for reading Scripture, the powerful, supernatural word of God shrinks into an easily manipulated tool of sociology, revealing power plays and oppressors and offering no hope beyond its creation of new possibilities and new words to express one’s never-ending hurt. [178]

We need to ask the question, If the biblical account of creation cannot be trusted to teach us about what makes women distinct, where ought we to go for this insight? This is where the usefulness of feminism as a gospel frame crumbles in the foolishness that it is. It wants an essential and distinct women’s voice at the same time that it rejects a biblical origin for what makes a woman distinct. [187]

Transgenderism will be the final nail in the coffin of feminism. Why? Because you cannot defend the civil rights of a woman if you don’t know what she is. [191]

Real love confronts the lie that suffering people can’t help but envy others. Real love does not envy (1 Cor. 13:4). [202]

We live in a culture that ascribes truth to feelings and perceptions, and it fears hurting people’s feelings more than encouraging them to permanently mutilate their bodies. [213]

[Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughs in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment] reminds us that the real question is not “What do I need?” but rather, “What is my duty?” Burroughs asks it like this: “What is the duty of the circumstances that God has put me in?” [244]

[Reflecting again on her first experience of sharing a meal in a Christian home] This night became for me a mirror. I looked into it and saw ugly things in myself and lovely things in God’s family. The first had to do with diversity—an important word in my lesbian community. While I proclaimed the value of diversity, the reality was that I had spent the past decade around people just like me—white, thirty-something, humanities PhDs in lesbian relationships. The mirror of this night was dramatic irony at its best. It was at my first experience of a Christian family feast, held at the straight, white, male pastor’s house, where I found myself in the most diverse crowd I had inhabited in years, maybe a lifetime. Men, women, children of every age. [251]

Our social media–saturated world encourages Christian women to replace modesty with exhibitionism.  [258]

The difference between acceptance and approval: Acceptance means living in reality and not fantasy. If your daughter calls herself a lesbian, you need to accept that. If your son Rex calls himself Mathilda, you need to accept this. He really is living in such a dangerous state of delusion and deception. That is reality right now. Acceptance is an important step in seeing the person you love in the sin pattern in which he is trapped. Acceptance, however, does not include believing his interpretation of how he got here or what it means. Acceptance does not include believing that Rex really is Mathilda. Acceptance does not include being manipulated by the therapist who asks, “Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?” Acceptance does not lose sight of Jesus and the cross he calls us to bear. Approval means that you give the whole situation a blessing. Approval means more than loving your daughter in her sin. It means calling her sin by another name (“grace,” “blessing,” or “illness”) and compartmentalizing and shrinking your Christian life in the process. [279]

While acceptance is not approval, acceptance is a great kindness. Acceptance means dealing protectively and gently with the person who is lost. [283]

Don’t give your prodigal reasons to run. And don’t take responsibility for your prodigal’s decision if she does run. [283]

[Speaking to parents of a prodigal child] You must get to a faithful church for the sake of your own soul. You need more help than you think. You are more vulnerable than you believe. Church is not a social club; it’s training for war. Like it or not, the theater of this spiritual war is your home and your heart and your family. [284]

Have you read Christopher Yuan and Angela Yuan (son and mother cowriting team) in their memoir of faith, Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son’s Journey to God. A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope? If not, please do. This book is our most faithful trail guide for accepting and loving, but not approving of, your beloved prodigal. [285]

Going boldly to the throne of grace requires daily repentance of your own sin, but this means not taking on your prodigal’s sin as your own. It means repenting of the sin of self-pity. Satan wants you to feel responsible that you have a prodigal child. He wants you to think that it is all your fault, and that God is punishing you. He wants you to look at other families and covet what they have. Nothing that comes from Satan is helpful or true—even half-truths are lies. If you have fallen into sins of covetousness, repent and ask God to help you love your calling as a prayer warrior for a prodigal. [285]

It is the church that holds the keys to the kingdom, not the HR department enforcing transgender pronouns. Things have changed—and we need to discern how those changes impact our lives. But the gospel hasn’t changed. God hasn’t changed. Here at the Butterfields’, the gospel still comes with a house key. [She then tells a story of a frank but gracious interaction with her gay neighbors about the Bible, vaccines, and spheres of authority.] [293]

How To Make Your Heart Content

[From The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs (1600-1646). Justin Perry of Covenant Life Church in Tampa quoted the third consideration in his talk this week at the Treasuring Christ Together Network’s pastors and wives retreat.]

CONSIDERATIONS TO CONTENT THE HEART IN ANY AFFLICTED CONDITION.

1) We should consider, in all our wants and inclinations to discontent, the greatness of the mercies that we have, and the meanness of the things we lack. The things we lack, if we are godly, are things of very small moment in comparison to the things we have, and the things we have are things of very great moment. … I will give you the example of a couple of godly men, meeting together, Anthony and Didymus: Didymus was blind, and yet a man of very excellent gifts and graces: Anthony asked him if he was not troubled at his want of sight. He confessed he was, ‘But’, he said, ‘should you be troubled at the want of what flies and dogs have, and not rather rejoice and be thankful that you have what angels have?’ God has given you those good things that make angels glorious; is not that enough for you, though you lack what a fly has? And so a Christian should reason the case with himself: what am I discontented for? I am discontented for want of what a dog may have, what a devil may have, what a reprobate may have; shall I be discontented for not having that, when God has given me what makes angels glorious? ‘Blessed be God,’ says the Apostle in Ephesians 1:3, ‘who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places.’ It may be you have not such great blessings in earthly places as some others have, but if the Lord has blessed you in heavenly places, that should content you. There are blessings in heaven, and he has set you here for the present, as it were in heaven, in a heavenly place. The consideration of the greatness of the mercies that we have, and the littleness of the things that God has denied us, is a very powerful consideration to work this grace of contentment. …

3) The consideration of the abundance of mercies that God bestows and we enjoy. It is a saying of Luther: ‘The sea of God’s mercies should swallow up all our particular afflictions.’ Name any affliction that is upon you: there is a sea of mercy to swallow it up. If you pour a pailful of water on the floor of your house, it makes a great show, but if you throw it into the sea, there is no sign of it. So, afflictions considered in themselves, we think are very great, but let them be considered with the sea of God’s mercies we enjoy, and then they are not so much, they are nothing in comparison. …

8) Before your conversion, before God wrought upon your souls, you were contented with the world without grace, though you had no interest in God nor Christ; why cannot you now be contented with grace and spiritual things without the world? If you yourselves were content with the world without grace, there is reason you should be content with grace without the world. Certainly there is infinitely more reason. You see that many men of the world have a kind of contentment; they do not murmur or repine with the world, though they have no interest in God and Christ. Then cannot you have as much contentment with God and Christ, without the world, as they can, with the world, without God and Christ? It is an infinite shame that this should be so.

9) Yea, consider, when God has given you such contentments you have not given him the glory. When God has let you have your heart’s desire, what have you done with your heart’s desire? You have not been any the better for it; it may be you have been worse many times. Therefore let that satisfy you-I meet with crosses, but when I had contentment and all things coming in, God got but little or no glory from me, and therefore let that be a means now to quiet me in my discontented thoughts.

10) Finally, consider all the experience that you have had of God’s doing good to you in the want of many comforts. When God crosses you, have you never had experience of abundance of good in afflictions? It is true, when ministers only tell men that God will work good out of their afflictions, they hear them speak, and think they speak like good men, but they feel little or no good; they feel nothing but pain. But when we cannot only say to you that God has said he will work good out of your afflictions, but we can say to you, that you yourselves have found it so by experience, that God has made former afflictions to be great benefits to you, and that you would not have been without them, or without the good that came by them for a world, such experiences will exceedingly quiet the heart and bring it to contentment. Therefore think thus with yourself: Lord, why may not this affliction work as great a good upon me as afflictions have done before?