Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality

Your desire for sexual relationships with other women needs to be transformed, so that nonsexual relationships with men and women in the body of Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit become life-giving to you.”

We are pleased because we are pleasing.”1 Relationships of love show both partners that they are lovable.

The greatest joys and experiences God has for us are not found in marriage, for if they were, surely God would not do away with marriage in heaven. But since he has already told us he is doing away with it, we, too, can realize that the greatest things God has to give us are not to be found in marriage at all.

God doesn’t want anyone to try to redirect their desire for community to himself. God is spirit. Instead, I think God wants people to experience his love through their experience of human community—specifically, the church. God created us physical-spiritual beings with deep longings for intimacy with other physical-spiritual beings. We’re not meant

“Origen, the great Christian theologian of the early church, believed that our souls existed with God before we were born. What if he were right? I don’t believe he was, but imagine for a moment if he were. Imagine yourself standing in the presence of God, looking down from heaven on the earthly life you’re about to be born into, and God says to yo

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense know very little about badness. Th

The remedy for loneliness—if there is such a thing this side of God’s future—is to learn, over and over again, to do this: to feel God’s keeping presence embodied in the human members of the community of faith, the church.

“Jesus is the model of the fulfilled human being,” biblical scholar Walter Moberly writes. “The Gospels portray a compelling and attractive person, who engages seriously with people and is good company at a party. Yet all the evidence is that he lived as a sexual celibate.”24 It may come as a surprise in our age of personal gratification that Jesus