52 - Facing Fears vs Playing With Fire Part 2
This is the second part of a series comparing and contrasting the different ministry approaches of the two founders of Revoice - Nate Collins, who was recently interviewed by Preston Sprinkle, and Stephen Moss, who has left Revoice and joined the staff of Harvest USA. (His article is on page 4.) Here we will continue to review the insights shared by Moss, who noted several ways in which seeing himself as a “gay Christian” was holding him back from growing in Christ and in his relationships with others.
Moss wrote about having been turned down after asking a woman he was good friends with to date him.
I Had Walled off Avenues of God’s Work
…“Seriously, I’m done,” I said. “This was God’s sign that I shouldn’t get married.” I had pulled myself off the market. Obviously, marrying a woman would never work for me because I was too gay. I had just been running from the truth: God wanted me single.
God does call some of us to lifelong singleness. And, in retrospect, taking a step back was a good decision for me at the time. I was desperate to be fixed, to be normal, and what better ticket to normalcy for a Christian dude than a Christian wife?
But I wasn’t just hitting pause. I was putting my heart into a deep freeze. I wasn’t just surrendering my desire for marriage to God. I was killing that desire, so it couldn’t hurt me anymore, and signing God’s name on the execution order. I wasn’t opposed to getting married, in principle, but I had no idea what that would even look like. The unknown was too terrifying.
I told myself that I was just being honest and realistic about the exclusive nature of my same-sex desires. Could God change those desires? Could he lead me into a godly marriage? Sure, he could do anything. But would God do it? As I made those desires more central to my identity, that seemed less likely.[1]
Let’s read this again: “I wasn’t just hitting pause. I was putting my heart into a deep freeze. I wasn’t just surrendering my desire for marriage to God. I was killing that desire, so it couldn’t hurt me anymore, and signing God’s name on the execution order. …The unknown was too terrifying.”
How those words resonate with me! It’s difficult to take risks with your heart – to put yourself out there and ask someone you’re interested in to take the chance of pursuing a relationship with you. It is easy to forget this is true for everyone, and it is easier for many people to avoid facing the fear of the unknown. When we accept the explanation offered by the ideology of sexual orientation, we can conclude that “…marrying a woman would never work for me because I was too gay.” Instead of praying for courage and putting our whole life into His hands, we can wall ourselves off from the work of the Holy Spirit.
There are often obstacles of fear to be overcome in trusting the Lord with how He sees us and how He wants us to relate to others. The culture has fed us a steady stream of lies about finding fulfillment in pursuing whatever sexual desires come to mind. We’re told it is dangerous to say no to “who we truly are.” Yet dying to self in following Jesus is the key to life! (Matthew 10:39, Matthew 16:25, Luke 9:23, Galatians 2:20) Moss internally debated how deep his repentance needed to go, concerned he would find self-loathing on the other side:
This was the first time I had confessed my sexual desires for other men—not the lusts I’d indulged or the acts I’d committed, but the unbidden, unchosen desires themselves.
I had always confessed those sins which felt willful and intentional; but for years, I held tightly to that part of me from which sprung the inclinations that oriented me toward men. This wasn’t about simply recognizing God’s beauty reflected in the form of another man, but rather, the part of me that, prior to my awareness or consent, received that man’s beauty as something to desire.
I believed this part of me was my sexual orientation. I believed this made me gay, and for the previous five years, I had identified as such. But something hadn’t been sitting right. The Lord was slowly and painfully working on my heart. I was starting to wonder if even my precognitive inclinations towards that which God had forbidden could be anything other than sinful. But if that was true, I thought, surely it could only lead me to shame, self-loathing, and obsessive5 introspection. I might as well throw myself into the sea. I couldn’t win.
But now, on this cool June morning, I heard the Spirit say, “You’re right, Stephen. You can’t win—not on your own. But I am with you.”
And so, I gave in. I released my grip and repented. And instead of shame, it was freedom that came flooding in. This release was only the beginning. In the following months, God started showing me the sinful patterns that had developed in my life when I bundled up my sinful desires with what it meant to be “me.”[2]
This led to a windfall of painfully recognizing where he was off track (see the previous edition of R4R). With each step, Jesus was building Stephen into the new man He had created him to be. And this brought him into a new freedom – to talk with Jesus about his insecurities and fears and press forward into healthy relationships with others:
Freedom to Love
Two years later, I was sitting in a local brewery with a group of young adults from my new church. I’d considered not going, dreading the awkwardness of small talk. What if they were all married? What if I was dressed differently than the other guys or we didn’t have any common interests? Did they know I struggled with same-sex desires? Should I tell them?
What if I found myself attracted to one of the guys there? Jesus wasn’t going to let me stay home, though. He had been reminding me constantly that he was the only one who got to define me, and, in union with him, I was most truly myself. Rooted in him, I had nothing to hide or prove.
His Spirit had been fixing my desires increasingly on him, leading me to the grace of repentance when they strayed, and I’d been finding more in common with fellow believers who couldn’t be more different than me on the surface.
As I sat at the table with these men and women, my church family, I felt a new freedom to love and be loved as this new self—uniquely created, rooted in Christ, and disentangled from my sinful desires. And as I noticed the beautiful young woman sitting across the table from me, I felt freedom to wonder what new and unexpected desires God might stir up in my heart.[3]
Now Moss is married and has a daughter with another on the way. Of course, it would be wrong to assume that the Lord will bring everyone who repents in this way into a marriage with children. Still, we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit and grow in mature, life-giving relationships.
In the next edition of R4R, we will review the ways in which Collins and Revoice aim to shape the church’s culture, in contrast to the Wesleyan model.
[3] Ibid.
