WARNING THIS IS 1 OF 3 MATURE POST: IF EASILY OFFENDED BY HONEST THOUGHTS ON SEXUALITY THEN PLEASE DON’T READ THIS.

My spiritual journey with God can best be described as wrestling. I am by nature a skeptic. It is hard for me to believe in a invisible being called God that is a Sovereign Lord. That belief goes against my nature and my culture. The virtue of our society is that we are our own lords and anything goes as long as its “consensual” and “no body gets hurt”. Sovereignty implies submission and the idea of submission goes against my very nature. I love music and it has been a great influence on my spiritual journey particularly in my late teens and early 20s. I really fell in love with the raw honesty of Jennifer Knapp’s music at a time I nearly walked away from the Church. She spoke in her music about struggles with a sovereign God. I’ve struggled too.

She is a incredible talent that has passionately spoken about her struggles with faith. Her music has spoken to me for years. It likely will for years to come. I was surprised in how Jennifer Knapp has responded to her coming out the closet. Some within the Church do not know what to do with her. Especially when you read the lyrics of her music before her hiatus. To these Christians she sounds like “one of us” i.e. conservative Christians but her actions is like “one of them” i.e. non-Christian. Homosexuality is often seen as one of the worse if not the worst of sins in the Church and there are few within conservative Christianity that believe the two can co-exist within the same person. What got to me is her lack of struggle.

Here are her words from Christianity Today.

But if you remove the social problem that homosexuality brings to the church—and the debate as to whether or not it should be called a “struggle,” because there are proponents on both sides—you remove the notion that I am living my life with a great deal of joy. It never occurred to me that I was in something that should be labeled as a “struggle.”

Where I and Jennifer part ways is on the idea of struggle.

Here is my confession. I am continually coming out of the closet of being a heterosexual sinner. I have struggled with God and my sexual desires from my earliest of memories throughout my 20s. Jennifer’s response does not bother me in the least in that she admits to homosexual desires. The difference is that she isn’t seeing it as a struggle. We differ greatly in how we have responded in coming out of our different respective closets. She says she isn’t struggling. Her lack of struggle bothers me.

God in the Old Testament proved himself to people in struggle. They proved that they were following him by their struggles. God showed himself to Jacob by struggling with Jacob. Jacob’s entire life was one of struggle. He knew God was real because he struggled with God. In the New Testament we see believers who struggled with their former homosexual praxis. The Scriptures teach that the lives of the saints of God are to be examples for how we struggle with God. I can not find one saint of God who did not struggle and for a majority of believers their internal struggle in both testaments where struggles with sexuality. It is a safe bet that we are going to and should struggle with God in our sexuality.

In my next post I’m going to talk about struggling with sex, the purpose of sex, and what God has to say to sinners like Jennifer Knapp and sinners like me about sex.

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