Acceptance

At Sojourn, we want to be a place of acceptance. We want anyone to feel welcome. It's all over the place for us, on our website, on our invitations, in every bit of literature we have. And we seriously mean anybody. It's very important to us.

This morning, we talked about accepting a group of people that is nearly shunned from the church.

Gays and Lesbians.

It seems pretty obvious that the gay community is a battlefield of the church (when I say church, I mean it in a very general sense.) People seem to think that homosexuality is a war on Christianity. People feel like every action of gays and lesbians is an attack on the Christian faith.

We know that's completely not true. We know that homosexuality has nothing to do with attacking Christianity. But how do we feel about homosexuals?

We love them. We genuinely love them. It's not something we just say. "Oh, we love everybody, including homosexuals." No. That's so fake and stupid. We don't want to just say it, we want to prove it. We want to prove to everyone that we truly love and care about everybody. Whether the person in homosexual or heterosexual, young or old, an alcoholic or been sober their whole life, struggling with porn or never seen a naked person before. We seriously don't give a rip what you choose to do in your life. We still love you.

Now, that doesn't mean that we will agree with it or that we think it's permissible. The Bible speaks about homosexuality just like it does about me as a married man having sex with someone other than my wife. And I'll go ahead and tell you that there is no difference whatsoever between someone who has an affair and someone who is homosexual. There is no difference between being an alcoholic and being stuck in pornography.

So, as the Backstreet Boys say, we don't care who you are, where you're from, or what you did. It really doesn't matter. We want people to feel loved by us, so that they can know that God loves them. That's the goal. We don't love people just to love them. We love them so that they can know that God loves them. Then that love will begin to change them.

So I challenge you, who do you need to love?