What Is Our Stance on LGBTQI+?

Maybe for some of us, we might think, “The Bible says not to be sexually immoral.  But that was back then.  We’ve progressed as a culture.  We’ve got more protection.  We’ve got medicine.  We understand stuff better today than they did back then.  Love is love, and it doesn’t matter who you’re with or how many you’re with.”

1 Thessalonians 4:7 says…

7 For God has not called us to impurity but to live in holiness.

One of the biggest questions we get is, “What is HCC’s stance on LGBTQI+?”  Well, we stand with God on this.  Again, sexual immorality is any sexual gratification outside the marriage between a man and a woman.  God calls us to wholesomeness.  He calls us to purity.

So, here’s our response.  Romans chapter 1 says…

24 Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie… 26 For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.

These words I underlined in the text – impurity, degraded, disgraceful, unnatural, lust, penalty, error – these are not positive words.  These aren’t words that describe a lifestyle approved by God. But a lot of people ask, “Why is it a sin?”  Well, why does God say lying is a sin?  Or sleeping with your neighbor’s wife?  Or slander, gossip, murder, lust, coveting? It’s because God loves you.  God doesn’t hate you.  God is a loving father who wants what’s best for his children.

We do the same thing with our kids.  We give them rules to follow, not because we hate them, but because we love them and want what’s best for them.  Why do we tell them to look both ways before crossing the street?  We don’t want them to get hit by a bus.

We might not like the rules.  We might not understand why we’ve got these kinds of rules.  But they’re there to protect us.

So, if you’re a believer who struggles with homosexual temptations, and you’ve even labeled yourself as L, G, B, T, Q, I, or +, the only label that matters is “I am a child of God.” And just so we’re clear, you’re definitely welcome here.  We all love Jesus.  And we’re all trying to get to the same place.  We’re all followers of Jesus dealing with real issues in our lives and trying to find real hope in Jesus.