You Do Not Have the Right to Remain Silent
Matthew 28:20:
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
1 Timothy 2:4:
Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
Acts 20:20:
And how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught you publickly, and from house to house,
Acts 20:27:
For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.
We are commanded to preach the entire gospel, not just the part of it that denominational people are used to. God doesn’t just want us to be saved; He wants us to come to a full knowledge of our covenant. He didn’t make all His wonderful new covenant promises and statements so that mankind could ignore them and never benefit from them. Jesus didn’t endure pain in His body so that people could stay sick until they get to heaven.
In particular, we are OBLIGATED by Scripture to preach divine healing. The fact some people will call you an evil cultist does not change that. The fact that some people will say that you and what you do are “of the devil” does not change that. You do not have the right to remain silent. Jesus doesn’t want you to hold back about anything He did for all of us. When we encounter sick people, we need to tell them the good news about healing and then heal them in the name of Jesus. (See YOU Can Do Miracles if you don’t like that terminology.)
Jesus and His followers preached the truth in places where it didn’t go over well. (Thank God, other places were more receptive.) While at some point they could “dust off their feet” and move on, they still had an obligation to tell everyone the good news. We do not have the right to “pre-dust-off our feet” by assuming that someone doesn’t want to hear the truth anyway, including the truth about divine healing. God’s fairness demands that people be offered a chance to hear the truth. It is up to them if they receive it or reject it.
It is improper to think, “I’m not going to preach divine healing to that man. He’s Baptist and he already has his mind set against divine healing.” If you think about it, that is no different than thinking, “I’m not going to preach the cross and resurrection to that Muslim man. He already has his mind set against Jesus.”
When Jesus said to go tell everyone the good news (Mark 16:15-18), He meant EVERYONE, and He meant the good news in total, not just a “D- Gospel” that tells people how to meet minimum requirements to go to heaven. It is our duty to get the full gospel out publicly and boldly. It is between the hearers and God what they do with it. If anyone rejects the message, you still get a reward in heaven for proclaiming it, as heaven doesn’t hold you accountable for what people do with what you preach.
Are You Guilty of Anti-LGBT Hate Speech?
Hate speech is a hot topic today, and I will throw in my two cents that Christians are regularly involved in a pernicious form of hate speech when it comes to LGBT people.
Hmmm...what could it be? Am I concerned that Christians just try to annoy and "bait" LGBT people with slurs, insults and deliberately nasty language that just alienates them?
Some of this certainly goes on, and I am as against it as the LGBT people themselves. We are called to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). Even when we're right, we have no business proclaiming the truth in hate. We should respect everyone's dignity as a person even if we completely disagree with his beliefs.
So avoiding this kind of hate speech means that we don't use terms that dehumanize other people (like calling them animal names), we don't use nasty slurs as opposed to Biblical terminology, and we don't promote violence or hatred toward anyone. We certainly don't go to military funerals and try to bait people into attacking us so that we can sue them to get money to fund our hate group with a Christian-sounding name. But this kind of thing is very rare even though it gets a lot of press when it happens that makes Christians in general look bad.
I realize that preachers can say certain harsh things as “applause lines” in church services in front of sympathetic crowds, but I think a helpful guideline is to make sure that the way you say things is the way you would want to present the message to an LGBT person who was in the house. Would your speech point him to Jesus or drive him away?
But personal “digs” against LGBT people are not the biggest form of anti-LGBT hate speech that concerns me. You might breathe a sigh of relief that you would never stoop to the levels above and figure that you are not guilty of hate speech. But you could be guilty of a sinister and far more common form of hate speech.
The Bigger Hate Speech Problem
The most problematic form of hate speech among Christians is no speech. We don't want to rock any boats or take any heat, so we cower and clam up. This has two horrible consequences. We don't share the plan of salvation so that people can be saved and we don't proclaim the Biblical warning to people of the consequences of certain lifestyles (Romans 1:26-27) so that they can shun them in the first place.
We MUST present Christ's gospel – the real one – to the LGBT community. Jesus died for them as much as He died for the rest of us. The gospel is love speech, not hate speech. They can know Jesus, go to heaven and be set free.
But just saying that they can be set free is distorted as being "hate speech" by people who disagree with the Bible. If it's in the Bible, written by a God who is love, it is NOT hate speech. God doesn't hate anyone and neither should we. He so loved the world that He sent His son to save us (John 3:16).
The LGBT person's greatest problem is not a lifestyle issue; it's a not knowing Jesus and being on the way to hell issue. It is the same greatest issue that a "straight" sinner has. There is a lot more heterosexual sin going on than homosexual sin, as God has restricted intimacy to a biological man married to a biological woman. Avoiding sharing the gospel with someone because you know the person is LGBT is to deny that person the right to hear the salvation message that Jesus ordered us to proclaim to everyone. If you DON'T share the gospel with an LGBT person, you HATE that person. It is pure hate to just let someone march into hell and say nothing. It is the same if you decline to share the gospel with someone because of that person's Muslim attire. Christ died for that person and needs to be told the truth. No speech is hate speech.
If you're a self-proclaimed LGBT person, I don't hate you. I love you enough to tell you the truth. It is not my purpose to drive you away angry, but rather to you introduce you the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who LOVES you so much that He paid for all your sins on a cross and then rose from the dead so that He can now live inside you and make you a new person if you ask Him to.
The Battle of AI
If you think it's wrong to warn anyone, as God does, that engaging in practices the Bible calls sinful has serious consequences, I invite you to go to your favorite artificial intelligence platform and ask it to do some research for you. I'm not being lazy by not doing it myself -- I've actually done it -- but if I cite studies and statistics, you can accuse me of cherry-picking ones that help my cause. Besides, I'd have to keep revising the stats with new versions of this book, which I'm not going to do. It will mean more to you when you see the results of your own AI investigation.
Ask your favorite AI bot questions like the following the following (you can substitute "lesbian" or "bisexual" or "transgender" for "gay" below to get similar results and sometimes more shocking ones) -- feel free to just cut and paste these or come up with your own questions worded however you want:
What is the difference in the suicide rate between gay and straight people?
What is the difference in the average number of lifetime partners between gay and straight people?
What is the difference in the prevalence of substance abuse between gay and straight people?
What is the difference in the prevalence of major depression between gay and straight people?
What is the difference in the prevalence of arthritis/cancer/asthma/hepatitis/hypertension/etc. between gay and straight people?
What is the difference in the prevalence of HIV diagnoses between gay and straight people?
What is the difference in the prevalence of eating disorders between gay and straight people?
The conclusion -- using YOUR data that YOU and your AI bot looked up -- is that anti-Biblical lifestyles lead to serious problems of various kinds. Anything the Bible calls sin has negative consequences. God loves you enough to warn you and so do I.
Tobacco companies are required to warn people that their products cause diseases. Why? Is it because we require them to "hate" people by telling them the negative consequences? Are we trying to lower the smokers' self-esteem as human beings and make them feel bad? No, we are doing people a service by warning them against the harmful effects of doing a particular thing. Such warnings are love, not hate.
The Live Wire
My wife was driving down one of our local mountain roads when a tree fell on a power line, snapping it and causing a live wire to flail around in the air like a deadly snake. She was in an open convertible and it missed her head by only a foot or two. She was able to back out to safety, and the first thing she did was go up the road trying to stop traffic, which meant she was putting herself at risk to try to save other people's lives. She got some nasty reactions! But was she exercising hate or love? NO SPEECH would have been the ultimate in HATE SPEECH at that moment. You HATE people if you just let them barrel ahead and get hurt or killed.
Likewise, I know some people will hate me for putting out a Biblical warning, but I'm doing it to save other people's lives, not to irritate and annoy them.
A Secret to Share with You
I'll let you in on a secret I've learned from personal experience. The LGBT crowd will actually respect someone who stands up more than a coward who clams up. After all, they are the ones giving up vacation time to "stack" public hearings when an issue that affects them is on the line. Sadly, they can be more passionate about what they promote than many Christians are with the gospel.
After denouncing so-called "gay marriage" in a large public debate forum, one of the organizers on the LGBT side saw me afterward and said, "I don't agree with a word you said, but that was a [expletive deleted] good speech you gave! I wish we had someone to argue our side who is as articulate as you are."
We didn't call each other names. We didn't exchange slurs, threats or hate speech. We respected each other as human beings despite being completely at odds on the issue. I assure you, my speech was as passionate as passionate gets! I quoted a lot of Bible verses about homosexuality. It is POSSBILE to argue a viewpoint zealously without tearing into people in a mean way. You CAN have a debate without "ad hominem" attacks. You keep it about the issue. I’m not saying you won’t encounter some mean LGBT people, but there are some mean Christians, too.
Satan hates the Bible, of course, so he tries to build a case that the Bible itself is hate speech. But he's a liar.
I encountered a certain openly gay man doing street ministry and we had a long talk. He disagreed with my position, but he himself said, "You don't hate me, do you?" I assured him that neither God nor I hated him. I spoke the truth in love about how a Savior had come and paid for all his sins. He thought my message would be that God hated him for what he was doing. He heard instead that Someone loved him enough to die for him. Without him even being converted, when he saw me on the street after that, he would actually tell people to go over and take my gospel tracts -- not because he agreed with them, but because he liked me as a person.
Satan can argue issues, but he can't match pure love that should come from the hearts of Christians. There definitely IS a place for public debate and Christians should be engaged in it. But on a one-on-one basis, I think we'll LOVE more people into the kingdom than ARGUE them into the kingdom. We can do that without any compromise of what we believe. These folks all knew where the Bible and I stood on the issues. We HAVE TO present the Word because faith comes by hearing the Word (Romans 10:17), not by just being loved. But if you don't know how to show people God's love, there will be no one to listen when you want to present them with the Word that can transform their lives.