In this episode, Noah interviews Pastor Jack and Becky Sytsema on being in a mixed orientation marriage where Becky is straight and Jack is not.
The unresolved tension that will never go away for gay / SSA Christians
What I love about Wesley is his ruthless honesty. He essentially spends all of chapter 5 making sure the reader understands he is not presenting a quick fix to the emotional ache that gay / SSA people feel. He wants to make sure gay / SSA Christians, as well as pastors looking for the magic bullet solution to all of this, understand that there is no magic bullet. He wants to make sure people understand if they walk down the path of kinship / covenantal friendship, they will meet pain and disappointment. This is not a good sales pitch! But it is real and it is honest. Us pastors hate this. We want a systematic theology that fixes everything. We want the right answer that grounds us in Scripture and that gives everyone warm fuzzies.
Another Path for Gay / SSA Christians: Friendships that Go Deeper than Family or Romance
What you have to love and appreciate about Wesley and his writing is that he is dealing with real issues for real people. I find it is so easy for heterosexual married pastors to come up with cookie cutter sermons and treatises on what the Bible says on homosexuality that are just preaching to the choir. They are really only intended to help biblically conservative, heterosexual Christians feel good about their biblical position on a sin that they don’t struggle with at all. These teachings have little-to-no intention of actually helping gay / same-sex attracted Christians who are held in a daily chokehold by their same-sex attraction, something they have little-to-no control over. These church leaders give them very little in the way of options or action steps, which is why so many end up turning away from the Church and pursuing gay sexual relationships and/or keep things bottled up inside with no one to help them as they struggle down paths of deep depression and suicide.
Another Path for Gay Christians: Friendship as a Lost Vow
Wesley Hill is a gay, celibate Christian. While I can’t speak for all people in all places, his 2010 book Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality was groundbreaking in my corner of biblically conservative evangelicalism. In a topic that had become bifurcated into only two camps, Wesley presented a third camp: Christians […]
Strength Is Found in Numbers: Pastor Noah’s Freedom Story (Part 3 of 3)
I was hooked on porn as a Bible college student.
I fell back into it in the first years of my marriage.
I wanted to flee marriage and pursue a life of promiscuity.
As I clung to God through failure, his grace carried me through. He took me into paths of freedom. I had a story to share and I began sharing it…
…But here’s the thing: no matter how much freedom you experience in your sexual purity, Satan will never stop attacking you with temptation. When one type of temptation doesn’t work anymore, he just morphs and shifts to another. With the greatest temptation of all being that you no longer need to share your temptations and struggles with others.
Noah’s New Book from Zondervan, coming in July 2021
BIG NEWS: I signed a contract with Zondervan to publish a new, updated book for men on how our identity in Christ brings us freedom from the pressure of the oversexualized world that we all live in.
The book will be available in July 2021. Book pre-sale will begin in November 2020.
Thank you to so many of you who have supported my writing efforts over the years, I am deeply grateful. If you’d like to receive an email on key points in the publishing process that you can support and/or help spread the news, please sign up below and be sure to click the checkbox at the bottom.