Theology in the Raw - 803: Is God Anti-Gay: Sam Allberry

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

My friend #SamAllberry joins me to talk about the perennial question: "Is God Anti-Gay?" Many people think he is, that the Christian God has it out for gay people. But, as someone who experiences #samesexattraction and who also loves the Christian God with all his heart, Sam begs to differ. In this conversation, we talk about some pushbacks to the traditional sexual ethic, what the church can do better, the meaning of the term #gay, and how teenage Christians who experience #SSA should think through identity. Check out Sam's book "Is God Anti-Gay?" Watch this conversation on YouTube. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. My guest on today's show is Sam Alberry. Sam Alberry, I think many of you know who he is. He is a Christian. He's a pastor. He's a speaker. He's an apologist. He's an author of an incredible book called Is God Anti-Gay? Is God Anti-Gay? How would you answer that? God anti-gay. Is God anti-gay? How would you answer that? Is God anti-gay? Do the scriptures reveal a God who is anti-gay? What does anti-gay mean? Sam Alberry is amazing. He's super thoughtful. I've gotten to know him over the years. We shared a meal just last spring, right when COVID was starting to crash down on us. Me and Sam were out at actually a British pub, which is funny because he's British. We were at a British pub in Nashville, Tennessee, and we finally got to connect. And he is just an amazing individual. I just have so much respect for Sam. In the spectrum of the sexuality evangelical conversation, he would lean more conservative. And so some people who I also respect think he's too conservative. And I don't know. I just love Sam. I love his perspective. I appreciate his wisdom.

And I love talking to him. He's just super humble, super gracious, super honest, super raw, super real. He's a perfect fit for this podcast. I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation. So please welcome to Theology in the Raw, back to Theology in the Raw for the second time, the one and only Sam Albury. All right. Hey, friends. I am here with my friend, Sam Aldary. Sam is a pastor, a regular speaker, an amazing writer. He's spoken all around the world on the topic of sexuality, and he's become a friend over the years. Sam, thanks so much for venturing onto my YouTube channel. Well, I was looking for something else and just stumbled into it. So that's good to be with you. That's awesome. So let's begin with the question. And this question, I mean, it's probably one of the top searched questions on the internet. Is the Bible anti-gay? What would you say about that? Yeah, it's a great question. And no one-syllable

answer will quite do justice to what we have in the Bible. So the best answer I can give is to say if there's no hope for gay people, there's no hope for anyone. So all of us in the Bible are put in the same boat. We're all fallen. We're all broken. That includes in our sexuality. And all of us in the Bible are put in the same boat. We're all fallen. We're all broken. That includes in our sexuality. And all of us have this amazing offer of life in Jesus extended to us. So that's the short version. Yeah. Now you are same-sex attracted.

I mean, so you're coming at this very much. There could be a desire for you to not see the Bible that way. And I know a lot of people wrestle with that. They do go to the scriptures and maybe because of their own story, there might be a temptation to say, I don't know, is there a different way to read the text of scripture? But you, as many people know, do hold to a so-called traditional sexual ethic definition of marriage. Can you walk us through your own specifically or theological journey? Like, was there a time when you were arrested with the scriptures, when you wanted to see it differently, when you did see it as being kind of like offensive to your own kind of story? Or tell us about that journey.

Yeah, it really... I became a Christian when I turned 18. I was already aware at that point, obviously, of my own sexual kind of feelings and the shape of them. When I became a Christian, what happened was I'd heard the message of the gospel, and I became so overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of Jesus that I felt I can completely trust this guy with my entire life and I will do a far worse job of running my life than he will. So let's just follow him. I didn't at that point know what he taught on any of these things. I hadn't studied that far, had no idea. But I knew that whatever Jesus said,

it would be okay because it was Jesus. And I knew he would be good. So I think that conviction and confidence in the goodness of Jesus has steadied me and held me ever since. It meant when I then did begin to see some of the hard things the Bible does have to say about human sexuality, I didn't find it offensive. I found it hard and challenging and convicting and humbling. But I don't think I ever really resented it because I don't think I ever really resented it because I knew that any words Jesus had for me would be good words. And I also knew that he he wasn't treating me any differently than he was treating any other disciple. He says to all of us, you've got to deny yourself and take up your cross. So it didn't feel like I was kind of getting a worse deal than everybody else was.

didn't feel like I was kind of getting a worse deal than everybody else was. So as I kind of grew in my understanding of what the Bible says, it always, to me, has been clear. I never kind of felt as though there was ambiguity in what the Bible says on these things. And challenging, and challenging, difficult, at times really confounding, but I've always trusted that it's good. So the wrestle has been in living it more than it's been in accepting it, I think. I want to come back to that. I get that a lot. I know a lot of people who are wrestling with their sexuality. I often hear people say that the biggest question to have in life is not, is it true? Because when you look at the scripture, again, I don't think it's that unclear despite some people's opinions, but is it livable? What does this look like practically in the day-to-day, the year-to-year when I'm

seven years old? What does this look like for me? And I think those are really, really good pastoral questions. I want to come back to that. But what do you think? Because you also speak, you are an apologist. Would you describe yourself that way? I mean, you do find yourself in context where you're having to defend a point of view. What are some major pushbacks you hear from, let's just say, inside maybe the church or people, let's just say broadly, you know, Christianity, what are some of the main pushbacks to the traditional view that you see that you encounter often and how would you respond to some of those?

Yeah, I think one of the ones is what you've just said is, is this actually livable? Is this going to be good for people? I think that's probably the main one. And it's normally put in a far more negative kind of form. You know, isn't this Christian sexual ethic harmful? Isn't it responsible for, you know, gay teenagers feeling suicidal? I think that is the most significant question I get. And I hear that from within the church and outside the church.

So that's not a uniquely non-Christian question. That's something troubling many believers as well. So that would be one. How do you respond to that? I'm curious because I get that. I would say that's probably the number one question that i get too um yeah it's it's a really it's a really important question um so my my response would be i think part of the response is and it will depend on the context and who's asking it and where they're at and if they're in you know distress

as they're asking it all these things will frame how we answer it in terms of our tone but part of my answer is that the moment our culture says that your sexuality is the most central and defining thing about you and that fulfilling your sexuality is the highest virtue in life, you are raising the stakes incredibly high. You are making sexual fulfillment a life or death matter. You are making it the be all and end all. And part of the liberation of the Christian message on this isn't so much where the boundaries are placed for sexual behavior, but in the way that sexual fulfillment is so dethroned by the gospel of Jesus Christ, it just doesn't matter to the same extent. It's not nothing. Our sexuality is deep, it's significant, it's so personal. But actually, I think the gospel helps us put it in a much healthier sense of perspective and proportion. And so we don't make this one aspect of our humanness the kind of big defining aspect that everything else about our well-being and happiness ends up being contingent on.

So part of me wants to point the question back and say, actually, I think it's our secular culture that has a lot of blood on its hands. We're not the ones who are saying this is the life and death issue. So that's part of it. that's part of it but i i think i'd then want to walk into some of the things jesus says about who he is and where true satisfaction is found i love that the woman of the well in john 4 um you know something within us that needs quenching or jesus being the bread of life and promising to give us true satisfaction so that's the sort of area I would probably go and try to explain that. I've often found too with the harmful question, that the traditional sexual ethic is harmful to anybody who is gay

or attracted to the same sex and trying to follow Jesus. Oftentimes when I have somebody maybe tease that out, they start describing a scenario where a parent, parents find out their kid's gay. So they kick him out of the house or they drag him to like reparative therapy and force him to go through stuff. And they end up really quickly not describing the traditional sexual ethic, but abuses to maybe Christians who might also hold to a sexual ethic, but they're doing things that aren't necessarily directly from their sexual ethic. It's more out of maybe a fear or just a twisted kind of application of the sexual ethic. It'd be like Christians reading the Bible and then going and committing genocide because they kind of misread the book of Joshua. It's

like, well, that doesn't mean we ripped Joshua out of the whatever, but like, it means we need to understand it better and say, that's a poor application of something that happened in a unique time in history in the old Testament. So. Yeah, that's really good. That's, that's a really good point because undoubtedly Christians have been harmful in various times and places. And we need to acknowledge that. And as you say, show the difference between that and authentic Christianity. So you do you hear stories of parents disowning kids or bullying going on, those sorts of things. None of those things are Christian. I feel like I hear about Westboro Baptist Church less than I used to.

I think three or four years ago, people would often point to Westboro Baptist Church as the kind of the example of this is where Christian extremism takes you. And maybe they're just less on the radar these days, but I always used to say that what those guys are extreme about isn't Christian. Right. If there really was such a thing as Christian extremism, it would be wonderful. If we were extreme about giving grace to others and loving our enemies and showing mercy and caring for the poor, that would be wonderful. Right, right, right. What are some other, just one more, like another question, pushback you often get when you're talking about this?

I mean, one of the questions is if it's someone who has some biblical literacy, there may be a question based on, you know, does the Bible actually say that? Have we misunderstood it? So there's a whole raft of questions that would come under that kind of banner. Another one would be, why does God care about this? Why does God care who I sleep with? Another one would be, why does God care about this? Why does God care who I sleep with? Given the state of the world right now, surely he has bigger things to care about than what we do with our genitals in the privacy of our own bedrooms.

So that would be another one. I hear that one a lot, actually, at the moment. How do you respond to that? Again, I will say that God cares about who we sleep with because he cares about who's doing the sleeping. And it's good news that God cares about us. And. If anything, the Me Too movement has shown us that what we what we do with our genitals and the privacy of our own bedrooms actually can be very destructive on other people. And if we care about it enough to try and, you know, have a whole cultural movement and change on the issue, then clearly it really does matter as an issue. It's not just a physical thing. It's far, far more than that. And therefore God should care about it. And it's good news for us that he does. And my favorite passage on this, I mean, it's so challenging, but I find it so

dignifying is where Jesus talks about adultery in the Sermon on the Mount. And if you commit adultery, and if you look at someone with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart. That's challenging when you think about the person doing the looking, but it's also very reassuring and dignifying when you think about the person who's being looked at, that Jesus regards them as having a dignity so precious to him that even if someone violates it in the privacy of their own mind,

that's an issue for Jesus. So I always say to people, you will not find anyone on the planet more challenging when it comes to human sexuality than Jesus, but you will also not find someone more dignifying as well. Yeah. than Jesus, but you will also not find someone more dignifying as well. So, yeah. It's interesting that those two kind of push what you said earlier or summarize what you summarized earlier with some pushbacks.

And then this recent one, they kind of cancel each other out. Cause one says sexuality is everything. It's so core to my existence. Right. So, okay. So it's a big deal. And then people say, why does God care about what i do it's like wait a minute do you want is this a significant part of your life or not because if it is a significant part of life as some people make it out to be way more than maybe god would be then of course god cares about what you do with it otherwise he's not a loving god and so yeah we're not consistent no and we all have inconsistencies you you know, but I think especially in this conversation, I do see quite a few come up.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I've learned more and more, too. I mean, how, let's just say, broadly speaking, sexual relationships, how societally impactful they are. We saw, you know, you see it like the roman empire when sexual relationships just kind of had no kind of guard whales that was one of the things that caused the crumbling of the very roman empire from the inside out and we've seen this um this is something camille paglia a feminist lesbian scholar is pointed out that when the when the sexual fabric of society kind of starts to crumble so goes society as well so you can't just say that our that human sexual expression is kind of

irrelevant to society as a whole it's a very it is a very public it's not just what we do in our bedrooms it just doesn't work that way um yeah and i've only just thought of this but we you know you look at all the kind of gossipy celebrity magazines um they're not you know that they seem to be all about who's sleeping with who it's it's not about who's who's buddies with who who's friends with who it's always you know who's who's sleeping with someone else so apparently we care we care about who they sleep with right enough to buy whole magazines kind of telling us all about it or claiming to so yeah we're not consistent what would you say i i hear this a lot i'm a i hear this accusation a lot towards people like yourself

who hold to a traditional sexual ethic while experiencing some level of same-sex attraction um how would you respond to the internalized homophobia accusation oh poor sam you know he has just been brainwashed by the conservative evangelical church. And he has this internal hatred of, you know, being same sex attracted. How do you respond? I, well, I've got my own thoughts, but I, I'm, I don't get that personally. I'm curious how you would respond to that. I'm sure you get it. No one has ever actually said that to my face. I'm sure many people have said it behind my back, but curiously, I've never had someone actually say that to my face in a kind of either in a one-on-one conversation or in a kind of more public context so I don't have a sort of

a rehearsed kind of way of thinking about it but I mean one response would be to marvel that they're able to know what's been going on in my kind of interior psychology over the last 25 years. I think I would give them a bit of credit by saying, yeah, there are desires I have actually that I hate. actually that I hate. And I worry about anybody who doesn't have any hatred for any of their kind of desires, lusts, whatever. Those people tend to end up being on Netflix documentaries. So all of us have some kind of, wherever we draw the boundaries in life, all of us have some kind of wherever we draw the boundaries in life, all of us have some kind of internal breaking mechanism, which kind of says, hang on, that's whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That was that was way too far. We need to kind of we need to not go there. We need to not think about that.

But yeah, it's only fundamentally harmful if sexual, full sexual self-expression that's unfettered is our ultimate good. And again, I don't know people who will actually go that far and say that. We all have this sense that we do need to edit something of our own internal sexual desires um so yeah i'll probably say something like that um yeah no that's good yeah i often see like uh you know in the wake of the sexual revolution and the 60s and onward like where we've been encouraged to explore our sexuality find freedom less like said, editing, less guardrails. But then I ask the question, so how's – and we've been doing that really well, sometimes even inside the church. Where has that gotten us?

Sex trafficking is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The porn epidemic is an epidemic. Sex outside of marriage leads to, guess what um sex outside of marriage leads to guess what children outside of marriage and we know nobody questions that that's not good for um you know unfortunately you know single parents or kids that are orphaned or whatever i mean on and on and on um even to sexual dysfunction even from christians who are just even wrestling with porn and just the damage and destruction that that has. So yeah, I don't know if there's a great sociological, just sociological argument to be made that more sexual freedom leads to more human flourishing. Like I think that we've tried that experiment and I think there's objective evidence, I think,

to say that maybe some guardrails, you know, are good for society. Yeah. Ed Shaw, who I know you know, dear brother and friend, he is way better read than I am. And I know Ed has said on numerous occasions that reading secular literature by gay writers, one of the kind of themes he sees a lot these days is why are we all so unhappy? We've ostensibly got the thing we were asking for. Why are we so unhappy? So I think part of the answer is, as you say, how's it going?

As you say, how's it going? Are people demonstrably psychologically healthier because of all these sexual freedoms that are being granted and all the rest of it? So, yeah, poor, miserable Sam, perhaps. But there's a lot of gay writers saying that they are kind of poor, miserable them. writers saying that they are kind of poor, miserable them. So it's, it's not, it's a, it's an accusation that has some legitimacy in more than one direction. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I forgot to mention this. This is a Sam's book is God anti-gay, um, subtitle. You probably can't see the subtitle. Uh, well, there it is right there. Um, is God anti-gay and other questions about homosexuality, the Bible and same sexraction. This book came out in 2013. This is a while ago. What I love- It's an old book.

This was, I feel like, in the kind of renewed wave of church discussions in this conversation. There's been, as you know, an academic conversation happening for three decades, since 1980, i think was a turning point when a lot of scholars were kind of revisiting what does the bible say about homosexuality in particular um but i would say around i think in the wake of wesley hill's book i think his came out in 2008 2009 and then that began the last 12 years or so, some really helpful books coming out. This book is unique in that, I mean, I kid you not, it is 85 pages. Because some books I have on my shelf here all around, they could be three, four, 500 pages. Some are really tough to get through. And this is, I think, the shortest, most concise guide I've ever read. And the thing is, even though it's really short, it feels like it's not short because you missed a lot of stuff.

I mean, obviously, I'm sure you could have gone way deeper into many things, but you were just so concise. Like you just hit the big points on this question, is God anti-gay, which is a very relevant question. So, yeah. There's a very relevant question. So, um, yeah, there's a, there's a reason for that. I mean, the, a, the publisher wanted it to be short as part of a series on various questions that people ask. Um, this is, this is too important a topic simply to be left to books that people won't finish reading. So I wanted there to be something and obviously as you said that there's been so many wonderful books that have come out since then yours is one

i highly recommend um but i didn't want this to be a book that would intimidate anybody um because as you know there this is something people wrestle with in their younger teenage years and even earlier than that and so it needed to be something that wouldn't scare people off um so yeah it's gotten great feedback i remember i mean every time i look it seems like a lot of people are very aware of it and reading in it's been helpful for so many uh people so'm, I'm deeply grateful to Gordon and he's, he's in on the private joke that he and I have, which is that writing that book was an ordeal. Um, I just thought I'm never, I'm never going to get to the finish line. I'm never going to pull this

off. It's too personal and painful to write about. Um, and I was, I was also aware of, you know, to write about. Yeah. And I was also aware of, you know, how's this going to read to my non-Christian, very secular minded friends and family around me? How's it going to read to the 14 year old youth group Christian who's struggling with their own sexuality? So the fact that it even got published, I think, is just a sign of God's grace. And if it's been useful to people, then I know that's not down to my ingenuity, but to God's kindness, because it was a battle to write.

Yeah, I bet. I mean, it's harder to write something so concise without missing anything than it is to just... I wrote a normal length book basically and then had to edit it down so as you say 85 pages yeah um you mentioned earlier you know it's the the biggest question you get is not um necessarily about biblical passages but practically what does this look like for somebody who um for whatever reason, is attracted to the same sex and they're trying to follow Jesus in that? What would you say, just if I can just get personal, like what would have been maybe the biggest challenges in your own life? I mean, you're not just a Christian.

You're a pastor. You're a leader. You're a speaker. I mean, man, I bet you probably face a lot of challenges. What would be some maybe unique challenges that you've had to face over the years? Yeah. Um, and some of these will be comments of others as well. I think that one of the significant challenges was trying to figure out that the appropriate ways of finding intimacy and community and friendship and what that should

look like and what is the healthy version of that look like. That's been a significant challenge. I've had to do a lot of thinking about that, not just thinking about what the Bible says, but thinking about how I'm wired and where the pitfalls are and all those sorts of things. So that's been challenging. And as life has become a little more itinerant in my ministry, that's become even more important because you've got to have that kind of community in which you're anchored and that kind of thing so I think the other thing particularly being someone who speaks on this is part of my message is that this is this is not my identity and therefore trying to trying to honor that whilst not having it take over the entirety of my ministries okay, that's a significant challenge.

I want to be thinking and writing and speaking about other things just for my insanity. If I only thought about this one issue, I think it would just get me out of proportion. So I've always tried to be anchored in local church ministry. I feel my deepest calling is to be a pastor and i hope what i do on this issue is a is an expression of that that's that's how i see it um and that that's helped as well it's nice to be in a church family that that just knows me as sam and isn't thinking oh that's sam you, same-sex attracted guy or whatever. And where I can just teach the Bible and rummage around in God's word and just that focus to it.

I love the British phrases, man, rummage around in God's word. That's only something a Brit would say. That's so good. You guys have that way of just those picturesque phrases. I love it. On the identity piece, I mean, I know – and this is something I know evangelicals have debated. And I've enjoyed the conversation because I think both sides are saying something valuable, particularly surrounding the word gay. And you – it's not your preferred term.

Can you speak into, and I just had, I had Greg Coles on a couple of weeks ago and he's comfortable with the term for various reasons. And from your perspective, what would be some reasons why you don't find the specific term gay helpful to describe your own journey or identity? Yeah. Thank you. It's in, in my experience, a word gay tends to, to mean much more than the shape of your sexual attractions. It tends to speak to, again, it's an identity word for so many people that this is not something that describes me.

It's something that defines me and it's, it carries so much baggage with it that is that is beyond simply i happen to be attracted to other men so i've been hesitant to use it simply because i don't want to unwittingly communicate a whole load of things that are not true and particularly i i don't believe that my, the pattern of my own sexual attractions is a matter of ontology. And I think that the language of being gay kind of steps into that space. So those would be my main concerns. So I'm very cautious about that, very hesitant. There have been maybe two or three times that I can think

of in my life where I've used the term, and that's almost always because I've been in a kind of missional context where that's just the only term available. And then I had to immediately caveat it. I did something with the BBC a few years ago, and again, they weren't going to understand the whole same-sex attraction. That may have changed now. I think some of these other terms are becoming a little more mainstream, but that's my main hesitancy. I don't want to launch a theological airstrike on every single Christian

who does use that term every single time they use it. I think particularly for those who come to faith within the kind of LGBT world, the most natural starting point will be to say, oh, I'm a gay Christian now. And I think that that's entirely understandable, but it wouldn't be my desired destination point for how that person thinks of themselves. I do find younger people, for right or wrong, seem to be a little more comfortable with it, whereas older, same-sex attracted Christians, typically the term does seem to carry more political, cultural, social,

at least in their own awareness. Yeah, it's harder for them to embrace. I just had a conversation with, oh gosh, I'm blanking on his name now, so I'm not going to butcher it. But a friend of mine who, you know, radical conversion, I mean knee deep in the LGBT community, radical non-Christian, you know, and real radical conversion, like overnight kind of thing. And for him, the term, he just could not separate gay from the entire web of, you know, his first 30 years of life or how old he was.

I think that's significant. My, my observation, and I wouldn't want to extend it beyond simply my observation is that the people I know who are most troubled by Christians using the language of being gay are people like the friend you just mentioned, who that was their world, that was their life, and they don't want, they're deeply troubled by other Christians kind of stepping into that language space. Yeah. Whereas the people I know who seem to be most eager to are people who never really were part of that world. Yeah.

I would say that's, in my experience, that's generally the case. And that's interesting. Yeah. So processing that. I suspect on the part of the person who's being converted out of that, there probably is some oversensitivity. But I wonder if at the same time, the people who are eager to kind of adopt that language who never were in that world, whether in their case, there may be some naivety. Yeah. I'm sure there's a bit of both.

Yeah. I'm interested. You mentioned in passing the missional context. of those yeah i'm interested you mentioned in passing the missional context that that is one area where you and i both encounter this idea um from the secular world that is has had this real skewed kind of westboro baptist only version of christianity so that simply to be gay meaning let's just say to be attracted if you're simply experiencing same-sex attraction, you categorically cannot be a Christian because God hates your very existence. So I found in some missional context like that, when somebody says, no, I am, and they'll use the word gay, and I'm sold out for Jesus. out for Jesus, sometimes missionally speaking, using the very term gay in that context can deconstruct somebody's assumptions about, you know, the impossibility of a same-sex

attracted gay person to become a Christian. Is that kind of what you're hinting at? Because I have found in some missional context, and maybe it's not even a permanent identity or whatever, but in certain contexts, it certainly does seem to have more power than to say, I wrestle with same-sex attraction, which isn't going to have the same missional kind of weight in communicating yeah i've only tended to use the term when i have felt that there is no other term available that that person would be remotely familiar with um and if it's a secular non-christian And if it's a secular non-Christian, I'm already an anomaly enough.

If I start using language they've never heard of, that's just going to throw them and confuse them even more. So yeah, those are the only times I think I've had to do that. It's when it's been the least worst. Yeah. Two more questions and we'll wrap things up. Number one, what are some things, some maybe changes in the church you would like to see and how they are approaching this conversation? I know that's a huge question and you're probably like, which church, what context, but just give a general kind of observation. Like what are some things you would like to see

done in the church as it's beginning to and continuing to engage this conversation? That's a great question. And certainly, and you will know this better than I, there have been some wonderful changes already. So let's celebrate what's already happened. And I've been speaking on this publicly for about, I don't know, seven years now, probably six, seven years. publicly for about, I don't know, seven years now, probably six, seven years. So I'm already sensing the change just from the types of questions I get asked when I visit churches. And by and large, that's a positive shift. People are more aware of this issue pastorally than they may have been five, 10 years ago. It was a political cultural war issue then. Now they're recognizing it's a pastoral

issue too. There are still significant swathes of the evangelical world that I think is not where it needs to be yet, and where this form of sexual sin seems to be treated very differently to other forms of sexual sin. So we've got to have consistency. And I still see some churches where, actually I visited one a few months ago, where you could be an adulterer, but you mustn't be gay. And I still see parts of the Christian world where a parent, if they were honest, would rather their child was heterosexual and ungodly than same-sex attracted and committed to the teaching of Jesus. Wow. That should not be.

That is so warped. So we've got a long way to go, I'm sure. But overall, I'm encouraged more than I'm discouraged. There's definitely a lot more, a lot more conversations happening. I mean, you're speaking into it. I mean, the ministry I run is defined by the church wanting to have this conversation and we can't keep up with the demand. No, exactly.

And like you, my vision is for the church. The church is what's going to make the difference on this and the more and I know our heart is the same on this the more the church embodies grace and truth and is living

proof of the hundredfold promise Jesus gives us in Mark 10 that is what's going to win our world over on this more than political arguing and everything else and outrage on twitter right right outrage on twitter um last question i speak directly to let's just say a younger christian maybe they're a teenager um wrestling with they're experiencing same-sex attraction they're maybe scared to death to tell anybody maybe they stumbled upon this

youtube video because they're googling the title what would you say to that person who truly deep down doesn't want to follow jesus but is wondering what does the bible say about this does god hate me how what does my life even look like um yeah speak into that as a as a pastor yeah my my heart goes out because that the only reason that wasn't me was because I wasn't a Christian when I was, you know, before I was 18. But had I been, that would have been me. And I've experienced enough of that angst as a post-teenager to imagine what it must be like to experience it as someone who is a teenager. The most important thing is just that word of reassurance. And if there's no hope for gay people, there's no hope for anyone. If Jesus isn't good news for that person,

he's not good news for any of us. If that person is beyond the pale, if that person is too great a sinner, then none of us really can have any confidence that we're going to be okay. All of us are warped. All of us have that kind of darkness within that we do sense and recognize, and that the love of Christ is just too big and too good to let that be the thing that keeps you from the arms of Jesus. So don't let it disqualify you. You know, Jesus has died for bigger things than that. And the other thing is don't let it define you. Don't follow the culture script on this.

And there's so much more to you than simply your sexual desires. Those are not insignificant, but they are not the great key to who you are. Find out what that is through Jesus. I love the response of the woman at the well when she goes back to her own village. She says, come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did. back to her own village, she says, come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did. And that sense of we only really have our lives explained to us and made sense of to us when we come to Christ. Yeah.

That's a good word, Pastor Alberry. Where can people find you? You got samalberry.com, is that right? Yeah, I'm so negligent with that website that i hesitate to mention it but yeah there's some information about me that i work for ravi zacharias international ministry so you can find out about what i'm up to with there and i do a lot with the gospel coalition so a lot of my articles are there as well i feel like i i'm sorry i totally blanked on this.

Just a quick word about the passing of Ravi. I know he was a friend of yours, right? And obviously a leader, a mentor and the president of your organization. How, how have you responded to that? Yeah,

well, we, we, we mourn what we've lost and we rejoice at what he's gained. He has given us a wonderful legacy and example to follow. And I think the thing that Ravi most instilled in us on the team was, again, that posture of grace and truth. Behind every question there is a questioner and they don't try and win the argument at the expense of losing the person so we miss him terribly um but we we have so much that we can continue to learn from from his own example and the things

that he taught us. And for as long as God keeps opening the doors for us as a ministry to bring Christ to all these different places, we will continue to do that work. Yeah, man, he is just a master at being so brilliant, so gracious and kind. And what you said, you win people over by love and graciousness while maintaining theological, logical rigor, but you don't use that to beat people into the kingdom. It just doesn't work. And he just, he found that sweet spot that I don't know,

maybe Tim Keller, you know, but there's few people that can do that well. We need that more than ever because so much of the culture is you've got to own someone rather than serving them and honoring them and dignifying them. So, yeah. Again, the book is Is God Anti-Gay? If you haven't read it yet, please pick it up where books are sold. Sam, thanks so much for being on the show. Oh, it's so good to see you again. Thanks for having me.

You too. Sam, thanks so much for being on the show. Oh, it's so good to see you again. Thanks for having me. You too. Hey, friends, if you found this conversation helpful, encouraging, engaging, discomforting, if it helped push you towards Jesus in any possible way and you want to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in a raw support show for as little as five bucks a month.

If you can't support the show, please consider leaving a review. God bless you. and help funnel more people to these kinds of conversations, which I think are helpful to help people to think, to engage, to revisit their presuppositions, and to ultimately follow Jesus more faithfully, more honestly, with a biblical worldview. Okay, we will see you next time on Theology in a Raw. Thanks for listening to the show. Thank you.