James Merritt - Gender Reveal
Well, in 2008, a mother named Jenna did what many expectant mothers do. So she had an ultrasound to discover the gender of her unborn baby. But after she discovered the baby's sex, she decided to do something at the time that was novel, no one had ever done it before. She decided that, 'cause she found out, you know, she knew what the sex of the child was gonna be, so she threw a party and she invited a lot of her friends and relatives and neighbors to come and they were going to have this party and they were anticipating, you know, what was the sex of the baby going to be, and so she had a tall cake and she made two incisions and when she lifted the slice that revealed pink icing instead of blue.
Of course, all of her friends erupted in celebration that, you know, she's going to have a baby girl. Well, Jenna wrote about that event on her blog, it went viral, and that's why many people today have what's called a gender reveal party. Many of you probably have attended one. It's still kind of a clever way a couple has of announcing whether a baby's gonna be a boy or a girl. Now, that was in 2008. 14 years later, we now know that this gender reveal party has become controversial. Matter of fact, we're now being told it's a bad idea. Because now we're being told that there's a difference between sex and gender. And we're told that gender is a social construct, has nothing to do with biology, biological characteristics, and that our gender identity cannot be determined physically or medically.
So in other words, it doesn't matter when you look in the mirror, it doesn't matter if you see sexual reproductive organs or not, it's not the gender that you're looking at, it is the sex. Even Jenna has now said she publicly regrets ever starting the trend of gender reveal parties. But the truth of the matter is, the underlying assumption of a gender reveal party reflects a view that frankly has been held from time immemorial until just a few years ago. And that idea was gender and sex are connected, that you cannot separate the two. So the reason you can have a gender reveal party to begin with is because with ultrasound imaging you don't need to wait to assign the sex of a baby at birth, you already know what it is, it's already defined because that body's organized one way or the other for sexual reproduction.
And for all of human history, until the last few years, it was just accepted. Everybody agreed, yeah, gender and sex are synonymous. But now today you've got academicians, politicians, activists, cultural leads, and here's what they're telling you. Oh, you've had it all wrong. For thousands of years, we missed it. For thousands of years, we've been misinformed. Sex and gender are not synonymous. Let me give you an example. Deanna Adkins, a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine, the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care, recently made a claim, before I put it up there, you're not gonna believe this is an educated woman. This is a PhD. And I want you to read, listen carefully to what this person said.
"It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female". In other words, you can do every test you can imagine, physically and medically and biologically and scientifically, and she says that's all irrelevant. It has nothing to do with your gender. In other words, let me tell you in three words what we're being taught today. Psychology trumps biology. Let that just filter in for a minute. Psychology trumps biology.
So now a transgendered boy is not a biological girl who just identifies as a boy, and a transgendered girl's not just a biological boy that identifies as a girl. Now the thinking is they actually are what they think they are. They actually are what they feel they are and they should be treated that way accordingly. But of course not everybody's going along with that. By the way, read my lips, I'm not going along with that. And I don't think a lot of parents are going along with that.
In a book called "Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World," Robert Curry makes a case and I think he's right. You know, there is a war going on in America today. There's a war against Christianity. There's a war against the Church. There's a war against traditional morality. There's a war against traditional marriage. But let me tell you one of the biggest wars we got going on in America, it's a war against plain common sense. And this is what he said, quote. "Examples of the war on common sense are now everywhere in public life. How about the denial of the plain fact that humans are either male or female? Today, academic and cultural elites as well as government officials insist that gender identity is more than biology. They say there are many genders and one website tells me," are you ready for this? "There are 63 genders".
Can you imagine? 63 genders. Listen, you don't think this is real? So today, after I had my meeting with the Lord earlier this morning, I always run to the Wall Street Journal and see what the headlines are. You're not gonna believe this, this morning in the Wall Street Journal. Virgin, Atlantic, Jet Blue, several other airlines have now announced they're going to gender neutral uniforms. So males can now wear dresses, females can wear suits, males can wear lipstick, they can wear jewelry, they can bring pocketbooks. They're going to total gender style. I'm not making this stuff up. That's why we are in a series we're calling "Facing the Truth" and we're dealing with some of the most difficult controversial topics of our day.
And I've already said, look, there are people that would tell me, there's some of you who'd say, "Pastor, I wouldn't do this. I'd leave this alone". And there are pastors, and I'm not saying I'm better than they are, but you know, there are pastors too, they just don't touch these subjects. But I'll be honest. You say, "Well, why are you talking about it"? Because I'm a pastor. I am a preacher of the Word of God. I'm up here to tell you the truth. Not my truth, not your truth, not their truth, but God's truth. And I can't not skip the issue, I can't do that.
And as Dr. Erwin Lutzer, one of my favorite authors, said, and he's so right, listen to this. "The church has always been tempted to dull the sharp edges of the Christian faith, to abandon hard truths in the face of culture and the religious pressure. Passing a vibrant faith to the next generation is always a challenge".
Brother, is that ever true. "Especially without the support of the government, the courts, the media, and public schools that insist we simply flow with the raging river of cultural opinion". Well, I don't pastor everybody's church, I pastor this church. And we're not every church, we're our church. And our church cannot just float down the raging river of cultural opinion when that current runs counter to the Word of God. So we're gonna face the truth, not because, as we've already been told, the truth will set you free. So today we are dealing with this phenomenon that we're going to call transgenderism.
Now here's another amazing thing about this whole deal, it's mind boggling. It's a very small phenomenon. Do you know what percent of people in America today claim to be or claim to have transgender feelings? You ready for this? Somewhere between 0.3 and 0.6%. You talk about common sense, the tail wags the dog. Only in America. The tail wags the dog. And it's really becoming the determining factor in many areas of our lives. So I probably have studied harder and studied more and read more about this sermon than maybe any sermon I've done in the last 20 years. Because to be honest, it is a relatively new phenomenon. I wanted to make sure I got my facts straight and I wanted to make sure I was telling the right thing.
And so, as I did my study, I've determined that there are three things we have to consider as we talk about this issue, and part of the purpose of this message is to help those of us who are followers of Jesus and those of us who believe the Bible is true, the Word of God, to understand not only what we believe about what we believe, but why we believe it and how do we defend it. So I want you to write down three words there. Just three words. And if you'll keep these three words in mind, you can talk to anybody, including a transgendered person, about this issue. You can do it with compassion, you can do it with grace, but they'll know that you know what you're talking about.
Okay, here's the three words I want you to write down. Write down the word feelings. Write down the word facts, or fact. And write down the word faith. And we're gonna talk about the transgender issue from those three standpoints. Feelings, fact, and faith. In other words, if you're gonna talk about this intelligently, you gotta talk about transgenderism and psychology, transgenderism and biology, transgenderism and theology. Now, with all that said, let's take a deep breath and let's jump in. First of all, let's consider the psychological feelings. I think that's fair. Because whenever you talk about an issue like this, listen, the most important thing you could do is do it with compassion, do it with grace.
Let me just say something about people that are dealing with this transgender issue. I don't think you're crazy. I don't think you're lying. I don't think you're making it up. I don't think any of those things at all. And I wanna be honest, that while many people who identify as transgender experience, it is very difficult and it's very serious. And so I just wanna make an admission upfront. I agree and I understand that what we call gender dysphoria, it's a real deal. It's real and people do struggle with it. Now, if you don't know what the term gender dysphoria means, here's what it means. It refers to the desire to identify something other than your biological sex and the resulting distress from that desire.
A matter of fact, some who experience this gender dysphoria may experience the distress of their desire so great that they want to transition, which means they literally want to surgically change their body to reflect the appearance of the opposite sex. Now, when preparing this sermon, you won't believe this, as I was right in the middle of preparing this sermon, I got an email from a person who lives in Eugene, Oregon where my publisher is. I'd heard this person, she's a man who transgendered into a woman, and I heard her on a podcast. She claims to be a believer and I'm gonna be honest, I think she is a believer. She says she loves Jesus.
I really believe from her testimony I think she does know Jesus. But I listened to her on the podcast. Well, the same guy that had her about three weeks later had me on. And I don't know how the subject came up, she was listening to the podcast when I was on. And so this guy asked, we were talking about this whole transgender issue, and so out of the blue I get an email from this person that says, "Hey, would you talk to me? I'd like to talk to you". She'd reached out to several pastors and authors, they wouldn't deal with her. And she told me that, she says, "Look, if you won't deal with me, I get it 'cause nobody else will". I said, "Absolutely, be glad to talk to you. Jesus will talk to you, I'll talk to you".
So we got into very respectful communication, back and forth conversation. And as I told you, I really believe this person has a relationship with Jesus. In fact, here's what she told me. She said, "If I had not transitioned, I would've killed myself. If I had not transitioned, I would've committed suicide. I could not live with myself anymore. It was unbearable, psychological torture". And I said to her, I said, "Look, I don't discount that, I really want you to know. I believe that the struggle was very, very real". So in this correspondence, this person attempted to make the point that as a transgender Christian she believes that, you know, that a lot of transgender Christians desire to be in the will of God. They just believe that the biological sex that the Creator gave them at conception doesn't correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth.
As a matter of fact, she even made the further point and tried to convince me, "I did this because the Spirit of God led me to do this". Now, full disclosure, I told her toward the end of our long, kinda about three week extended email correspondence, I said, "I wanna say something to you as a pastor". I said, "I finally figured something out". I said, "I believe you're a believer and I'll tell you why I believe you're a believer, because you're still struggling with this issue". And I said, "Let me tell you what you're trying to do. You're not trying to convince me you're right. You're trying to convince you that you're right. You're not trying to convince me you did the right thing. You're trying to convince you that you did the right thing".
But I felt so much compassion for this person and their experience, my heart broke as I listened to her story and all this person had been through. So I just wanna be very clear right up front. The question I'm addressing right now is not, are these feelings real? Are these people crazy? Have these people just lost their marbles? It's not that at all. They are real, I acknowledge that they're real and I hurt for them. The question is not that, here is the question. What should they do with those feelings? That's the question. I know you have the feelings, but what do you do? So I wanna put it to you this way. Is the is of our emotional or mental state equal to the ought of God's design? In other words, let me make it easy. Should psychology trump biology or theology? Should psychology be the driving force? Should my feelings dictate how I live?
Now keep in mind the underlying assumption of this entire debate is real simple. Sex is one thing, gender's another thing. Sex and gender are not anonymous, what we all used to believe, they're completely separate. So here's what we're being told, this is what your kids are being taught. Sex refers only to the biological and the anatomical features that show obvious differences between men and women. Bone structure, DNA, hormones, sexual organs, genitalia, et cetera, that's sex. Gender, however, is a subjective psychological feeling of being one sex or the other. Or to put it another way, you may see your body as male, or you may see your body as female, but you may identify as the opposite gender. Yeah, I see I'm a male on the outside, but I'm a female on the inside. I see I'm a female on the outside, but I'm a male on the inside.
Now I'm gonna be, again, we're just being honest. Don't wanna be insensitive, just telling the truth. There are two problems with that position. Number one, great question. Why should feeling, if you're a woman, for example, why should feeling like a man make somebody a man? And it's a legitimate question, let me tell you why. Why is this the one area that I know of and the only area I know of where psychology trumps biology? For example, our feelings don't dictate our height. I can go down to Atlanta and walk into the Atlanta Hawk's office and say, "You need to pay me $5 million a year to be your center".
Well, first of all, you're too old. No, no, no. I know I look old, but I feel like I'm 20. Yeah, but we need, we need a seven-foot guy. Well, I'm six feet, but I feel like I'm seven. We don't do that with height. We don't do that with age. Look, I feel, honest, really, I feel as good today as I felt when I was 40. I got news for you, I'm not 40. I feel like maybe some days I'm seven feet tall but I'm a foot shorter. I may get up in the morning and feel like I'm an Australian. I'm not, I'm an American. I may feel like I'm a martian, but I'm a human. One author put it this way. "The challenge for activists is to explain why a person's real sex is determined by an inner gender identity but age and height and race and species are not".
Valid question, why is this the only area where we finally accepted, hey, psychology trumps biology, feelings trump facts. Let me give you another example. What about a girl, this will hit home with some of you, what about a girl with anorexia nervosa and she absolutely believes she's obese? So what are we supposed to do, tell her she's overweight? We're supposed to call her fat even though she's not? Or what about a person with what's called body integrity identity disorder? You know what that means? There are people who believe they are disabled and they can't walk. They're not disabled and they can walk but they just don't believe that they can. So what are we supposed to do, put 'em in a wheelchair?
In a 2016 article in the Journal of American Physicians and Support Surgeons, this is out of a journal article. I didn't know this, this is mind-boggling. Some people are so distressed, even though they have perfectly healthy bodies, they will ask a doctor to either amputate a healthy limb or sever their spinal cord. Should the doctor do that because that's what they feel? Michelle Cretella, who is the president of the American College of Pediatricians, she said this, expert. "A person's belief that he is something or someone he is not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. At worst, it's delusion. Just because a person thinks or feels something does not make it so".
Can I just stop? That's not just a medical opinion, ladies and gentlemen, that's just common sense. You are not what you feel. And one of the most serious implications in this debate involves very young children who show signs of gender dysphoria. Now we've got people telling us, you know what? We ought to allow parents of these young children to give them puberty blockers. Or body transforming surgeries as young as four or five years old. Let's just look at the science. Science tells us the vast majority of children will eventually re-identify with their birth sex after puberty without any chemical or medical intervention.
Listen to this. 88% of girls, if you just leave them alone, and 98% of boys will eventually accept their biological reality and they're going to live mentally and physically healthy lives. And by the way, transitioning treatment has not been shown to reduce the extraordinary high rate of suicide attempts among transgendered people. This is one reason why I really love and care for these people, because the suicide rate of transgendered people is 41% compared to 4.6% of the general population. So you say, well what about, what about people who've had transition? What if they've had the surgery? They're still 19 times more likely on average to die by suicide.
So my point in all this is, let's start with compassion. I acknowledge the feelings are real. I don't discount them, I don't dismiss them, I don't ridicule them. All I'm simply saying is there is no other area of life where we let feelings become the tail that wags the dog. Why should we let it be in this area alone? So we have to consider feelings, but we gotta consider more than feelings, because there's something else we have to consider. We've considered the psychological feelings. Now this is the hard part for a lot of people, 'cause let's just leave the Bible out of it for a minute. Let's confirm the biological facts. Let's consider the feelings, we get that, but now let's confirm the biological facts.
So we're gonna come back to this in a moment, but I want you to listen and ponder just one verse in the Bible. You probably know it, read it many times. Genesis 1:27, here's what God said. "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them". And then he added these words. "Male and female he created them". It's almost like our Father, it's almost like our Creator knew this was coming down the pike. So he says, "Let's just get something out of the way from the very beginning. I created two genders. Not three and certainly not 63. I created male and I created female".
Now, this is God's Word talking. And that's important. For some of you, that's not a big deal. But for those who claim to be followers of Jesus and we live our lives according to what the Bible says, it's a big deal. But whether you accept the biblical narrative or not, again, common sense tells us, now this is just common sense, just track with me, common sense tells us at some point a man, that is a male, had to unite with a woman, that is a female, to produce another male or another female. That's just a biological fact. In other words, it took a binary gendered pair to produce a human either male or female. That's just simple biology, that's biology 101.
So, from the very beginning, male and female organisms, from the very beginning, first man and first woman, they had different biological parts that functionally synchronized for reproduction through sexual union. So the sex of a person, whether it's male or female, God says, "Here's how you can tell a man". Let me look in the mirror. If you've got certain sexual organs, you're a male. If you've got certain sexual organs, you are a female. And that's why a male and a female can perform sexually reproductive acts, which guess what? Not only produces a male or a female, it distinguishes a male from a female.
Now what I just said to you, are you ready for this? What I just told you is what that brilliant Duke professor said is an outdated view of biological sex. Can you help me, Rhonda? Are you kidding me? Are you really being serious? It's an outdated view of biological sex. No, it's not an outdated view. It is the only reasonable view of biological sex. That's why I don't care what anybody says. If somebody asks you, "Can you define a man or define a woman"? And you can't answer that question, you need therapy, you need help. I can identify a man. I can identify a woman. That's why I married a woman, I know the difference.
And is anybody, by the way, is anybody, listen to this, anybody that breeds dogs or cattle, if they have a problem identifying male and female members, ask somebody, "Hey, can you guys tell a bull from a cow"? Just ask 'em. And by the way, ask them, now, how important is it that you bring males and females together? I'll tell you what they'll tell you. "If I bring a male and a male together and a female and female together, I'm not gonna live long and my family's not gonna eat, I'm gonna starve to death. So yeah, I do know the difference and I know why there is a difference". You don't get any argument at all. Well, why is it different in the animal world, why would it be different from the female? It's the same situation for the human race.
Now that's important because the ability for male and female to be husband and wife and mother and dad is not just a matter of sex, it is a matter of gender. And oh, by the way, while we're on gender, let's just talk about the word gender for just a moment. By the way, I did my homework. Let's just talk about the word gender for a moment. Let's talk about the etymology of that word. You may not know this but the root of the word gender is, guess what? Gen, G-E-N, that's the root of the word gender. You know what the word gen gives us? It gives us the word generate, which means to produce or to beget. It gives us the noun generation, which refers to offspring or kin.
So if I say to you, do you have ancestors? You'd say yes, you just talked about gender. Do you have hope that you'll be an ancestor of someone down the road someday? Yes, you just talked about gender, it refers to offspring. So when we're talking about gender or you're talking about genealogy or you're talking about generate or you're talking about genes or you're talking about genetics or you're talking about genital, you're talking about gender. And it's been well said, quote, "The radical separation of the concept and word sex from the concept and word gender suggested by some authors is artificial indeed". Because you just keep coming back to this fact that hits you right in the face. And here's the fact. Biology, not psychology, determines gender reality and gender identity. I'm gonna say that one more time. Biology, not psychology, determines gender identity and gender reality.
So we have to be really clear. When you mention genetics, do you hear the word gen? Yeah, I hear that. In other words, one's genetic identity and makeup, here's the point, your genetic identity and makeup are still those of your birth sex regardless of any transgender surgery that you have. So let me give you an example. So a man decides, "I'm gonna become a woman," and has the necessary surgery to try to make that happen. I said try to make that happen. Or a woman says, "I feel like a man," she has the requisite surgery to try to become a man. Here's the dirty little secret. Give that person a DNA test. Give that person a chromosome test and here's what you'll find.
You can do surgery until there's no surgery left. You'll still be what you were born at birth. You don't change. You may try to change the outward appearance, you may try to change that, but here's the truth nobody wants to admit. You give any person that test and you'll find those two things, the DNA and the chromosomes, they're unchangeable, and a transgendered woman, guess what, is still a male, and a transgendered female, guess what, a male is still a female. Several doctors, this is not from me, all this is footnoted, several doctors have noted this. "Sexual identity is observed at birth and except in rare cases matches the genetic structure. It is written on every cell of the body and can be determined through DNA testing. It cannot be changed. Calling men who have had sexual reassignment surgery women does not change their genetic structure, it does not make them genetic women".
So you call yourself a duck, but if you're a dog, you're not a duck. I'm not being funny, I'm not trying to be condescending, I'm just simply making a fact. The sex you are born with is the gender you will always have. Matter of fact, Dr. Paul McHugh, who was a psychiatrist in chief at a little university you may have heard of called John Hopkins for 26 years, said this. "Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex of which they identify".
So in other words, as the Princeton University philosopher and professor Robert George says, quote, "Changing sex is a metaphysical impossibility because it is a biological impossibility". In other words, here's the truth, we're facing the truth. You can change what you look like on the outside. You cannot change what you really are on the inside. The sex that God gave you at birth is the gender that God gave you at birth. So biology, not psychology, determines gender reality and gender identity. I'm gonna say that again. Biology, not psychology, determines gender reality and gender identity.
Now, we talked about the feelings and we've talked about the facts. I defy anybody to dispute anything I've said, come see me, email me, write me, whatever, give me a call, would love to talk to you. But what about those of us who are followers of Jesus? And what about those of us who made up our mind a long time ago? You know what, it doesn't matter even what medical science says or what doctors say. I wanna know in any issue, what does God say? God's the one who created all this stuff to begin with, so what does God say? So just as we consider the psychological feelings and just like we confirm the biological facts, now let's confess the theological faith. Because for followers of Jesus, the truth of God's Word has to trump everything because at the end of the day, regardless of what psychology or even biology says, what I wanna know is, well, what does theology say? What does God's Word teach?
Well, again, is I told you, it's almost like God is so wise, he's so unbelievably wise. It's almost like before he even created male and female, he looked down the road and said, "Well, I know how the human race is gonna work". 'Cause, you know, we're experts at messing up everything God does right. You know that from the Garden of Eden. So God is almost like, God says, "Yep, I know. Even something as common sense as male, female, sex, gender, nope, they're gonna try to change the whole deal".
So the first reference to sex and gender is found in the very first chapter of the Bible that leads to the very first human being, so let's do what Jesus would do. We've seen this before with Jesus. Let's go back to the beginning and let's just start from the beginning. We're in Genesis 1:26. Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them".
Now you probably know that the Hebrew word for man in Genesis 1:27 is the word Adam. And even though Adam is the name for the first man, it often refers to all human beings. So God created in effect a male Adam and then he created a female Adam, he just gave this female a different name. So in other words, what God's telling us right up front is, "Look, sexuality's not an accident, it's an assignment, and I'm the one that makes the assignment. So I assigned you a sex and I assigned you a gender at birth". And it's even more than a matter of biology, this is why this is such a big deal. Sex and gender, here's what you read in the Bible. Sex and gender is such a big deal to God. God said at the beginning, "That's even what it means to be created in my image".
That's what it means. When you're created in the image of God, you're created male or female. So the sex that God gives us in the womb is his will for us as we bear his image. So when I was born, God said, "Now James, I want you to bear my image as a man". And then he looked at Sally and he said, "Sally, I want you to bear my image as a woman". So it says our biological sex is directly related to our bearing the image of God. So for me, this is the real big issue. Transgenderism is not just a matter of changing body parts. More than that. If that's all it was, we could move on down the road. But it's absolutely counter to the way God wants us to reflect his image to the world because here's the dirty little truth. Go read the Bible from Genesis all the way to Revelation and here's what you're going to find. The scripture simply does not hint of any other gender categories except male and female.
Now, this is where we've gotten in trouble in the church. We may express our masculinity in different ways and we've kind of fallen into kind of a, kind of a caricature, and we've all seen it, you know? You know, like, here's a good example. Grown men don't cry. No, grown men do cry. Matter of fact, if you don't cry, something's wrong with you, right? When Georgia won the National Championship, I cried, I'll just be honest with you. You knew I was gonna get that in there, right? But no, we've kind of got these caricatures, listen. Women, feminine women, some of 'em like to kickbox, and some of 'em like to play basketball or fast pitch softball or whatever it might be. And there are men that they like to write poetry and they like to play the violin.
Doesn't mean that they're less masculine or less feminine. But the point of the matter is however you express your masculinity and your femininity, gender is binary. In other words, when you read the Bible, gender's not fluid, it's fixed, and it's fixed in the womb, you're born one or the other. That's what it means to be created in the image of God. So again, this is just common sense now. Men and women are neither identical nor are they interchangeable. The human race has two genders, male and female, one or the other, not both. And that wasn't my idea, that was God's idea. It wasn't my design, that was God's design. It's not my desire, that's God's desire.
So plain and simply from beginning to end the Bible teaches there's a organic unity between biological sex and gender identity regardless of feelings. So whenever and wherever scripture mentions gender, it only names male and female. Yes, they differ in how they're male and how they express their masculinity, and they differ in being female and how they express their femininity. But there is no other sex or gender category in addition to male and female. And just being very honest and frank, for a believer, biology from the very beginning with the first human beings to theology throughout the entire Bible declares unequivocally that a person is a man or a woman even if their gender identity in their mind and their feelings suggest otherwise. That's just facing the truth. And it is more than just common sense, so let me just kind of sum it up and we'll finish.
So someone decides to exercise what I call gender rebellion and they reject biology, they reject theology, and they choose psychology, and they change their body. Here's the cold hard truth. They are no longer reflecting the image of God 'cause that was not God's plan. God's himself said, "I didn't create you in the image of God, male and male. I didn't create you in the image of God, female and female. I created you in the image of God, male and female". So when you transition, even you may be a believer, in that state, you're no longer reflecting the image of God because God created you to what he wanted to be from the womb and you're rejecting the image for your image.
And here's what breaks your heart. If you have already transgendered, I love you, our church loves you, we'd love to have you here, we wanna minister to you. But here's the truth. When you transgender, you're not moving closer to what God created you to be, you're moving further away from what God created you to be. That's the truth, so what do we do? That's the real big question for me now. So what do we do as a church with these transgender? We've had transgender people visit our church. So what what do you do with these people? What do you do? Well, we always do what Jesus would do for these people that have these feelings or even acted on these feelings and made radical changes to their bodies.
I'll tell you the number one responsibility we have as a church. You ready for this? We are to love everybody unconditionally. I don't care if they're gay. I don't care if they're transgender. I don't care if they're living an adulterous relationship. I don't care if they're exercising fornication. I don't care if a woman just had an abortion, I don't care. My number one job is to love them unconditionally. The number two job is to build a relationship with them, just like I did with this lady. Talk to them, offer them kindness, extend hospitality, show them the love of Jesus. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but after this long conversation I finally told this lady, I said, "Listen, I hope you understand we've got to move on. I've kind of said what I wanna say, you've got to say what you wanted say".
She texted me back. She said in effect, she said, "I'm saying this with tears in my eyes because you're one of the very few, in fact, you're only the second person other than the guy I was on the podcast with, you're only the second person that would even talk to me, that would even reach out to me, that would even have a conversation with me". Well, look, you know why I'm not patting myself on the back? I'm patting Jesus on the back, I'm just doing what Jesus would've done. Jesus ate with sinners, hung out with sinners, and we're all sinners. So we show them the love of Christ.
You say, wait a minute. So what if they're believers like this lady is, claims to be? We minister to them where they are with prayer and biblical truth. We need to guide them where they need to be. If they're nonbelievers, we present to them the gospel. They seek to transition their hearts so they be ready for that resurrected body that one day we're all going to have. Now, to wrap all this up. So I don't know about you, I am glad this series is over. It has not been easy. And I know that there are people who look at this church and they look at us and they look at this series without having listened to a word we've said. There goes those evangelical believers again taking their biblical shotgun and using what one pastor I heard unfortunately use these clobbered passages, which there's not a clobbered passage, it's just the way it may be used, and here they go again.
So I just wanna close with those who've been listening to this series, those who've been attending, those who will hear this series. The intention that I had from the very beginning is real simple. I wanna balance grace and truth. So the truth of the matter is, to sum it all up, it's sin to sleep with someone you're not married to. It's a sin. Marriage is strictly between a man and a woman. If it's not between a man and a woman, it's not a marriage. God is pro-life, born or unborn, and every conceived child has the same right to life that you and I have been given. And the sex we were born with is the gender that God wants us to have. That's not what I say. That's what God says.
Now that's the truth. But the grace part is whether you have or are sleeping with someone you're not married to, or whether you are in a homosexual relationship, or whether you have had an abortion, or whether you are or thinking about becoming truly, truly transgendered, here is the grace part. Grace is so amazing. Grace is so incredible. Grace is so big. Grace is so broad. Everybody's welcome, everybody's welcome to come and do the same thing I did as a 9-year-old boy, 'cause let me tell you something.
For those of us who are straight, and those of us who were virgins before we got married, and those of us who have never had an abortion, and those of us who have never been transgendered, let me give you a newsflash. It took as much of the grace of God to save us as it does to save them. And so our message to one and all is there's a God that loves you, there's a God that wants what is best for you, so much so he set his Son to die for you. And if you will give him your life and give him your heart, he can take you, whoever you are, wherever you are, and he can help you become what you need to be, what you ought to be and what you were born to be.
Would you just bow your head for just a moment, just heads bowed down, eyes closed just for a moment. We're gonna be super quick. If you don't know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, we'd like to tell you how to do that. Jesus died for your sins. He was buried and raised from the dead so that you might come to know Jesus, so that you might be saved, so that you might be redeemed. And I don't care who you are, where you are, what you have done, the grace of God is always available.