Being friends in grace & truth

It’s an uncomfortable subject for many Christians: homosexuality.

It seems that if we speak our convictions, we’re bigots. We feel that if we don’t, we’re cowards.

But what if there was a way for us, Christians, to befriend those who stand on the opposite side of the issue of homosexuality.

Glenn Stanton, Director of Family Formation Studies for Focus on the Family, has written an intriguing, thoughtful new book called  . 

Glenn Stanton joined Dr. Bill Maier Live! to talk about how Christians can navigate some of the dilemmas surrounding the issue of homosexual marriage.

Stanton tells Bill the first thing people need to understand is:

“Every one of us is stricken with a terminal illness called sin.”

Stanton also adds that we need to remind ourselves that everyone — even gays and lesbians — is loved by God.

Paraphrasing from Luke chapter 6, Stanton says,

“Christ calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves…(Christ) says ‘I don’t want you to just love your neighbor, I want you to love your enemies’. There’s no way to weasel out of this.”

But Stanton also adds that even though we must love our neighbors as well as our enemies, we shouldn’t befriend them with the sole intention of converting them to Christianity; we should love them because Christ first loved us.

But beyond the fact that we need to love our LGBT neighbors, there are some practical dilemmas Christians face in this ‘bold new world’:

Highlight: Open homosexuals in your church?

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and a research fellow at the Institute of Marriage and Family in Ottawa. He debates and lectures extensively on the issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and parenting at universities and churches around the world. Stanton served the George W. Bush administration for many years as a consultant on increasing fatherhood involvement in the Head Start program.