Our sermon this evening is taken from Genesis, chapter 5, and specifically verses 1 and 2, which will reiterate a very familiar theme to us. Now, as you know, we've been going through in the evenings, point by point, the Nashville statement, the statement that was issued mostly by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood on important topics of human sexuality, topics that are much debated and controversial, topics that used to be simple orthodox Christianity, but which unfortunately no longer are. And they produced a very clear statement which was then signed off on by a number of biblical scholars across the spectrum, including men like J.I. Packer, Francis Chan, L. Mohler, Ligon Duncan, and so on. So it was a long list of evangelical scholars representing many different perspectives. but all of whom came together to support a statement that affirmed what the Bible says about spirituality. But we haven't wanted to assume that what the Nashville Statement said was biblical. What we are doing then is going and looking at the Bible first and then referencing the Nashville Statement to determine whether or not what it says is true. But before we go once again to the Word of God and look at what it has to say about human sexuality, let's please turn to God himself and ask for his help. Please join me. Sovereign Lord, today I hope and I pray that you will help me to speak. You have been very, very good to me in the past, O Lord, in giving me liberty to declare what your word says to your people. And I pray, Lord, that today you would give me the strength that I need. I know, Lord, that much of what I say will go right against what society is commonly saying, but I pray, Lord, that you would give me, and indeed all of your people, the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to stand for what your Word says is the truth, rather than inventing new truths and confusing issues. I pray, Lord, that you would humble us beneath the Word, and that you would help all of us to submit our own preferences, our own desires to it. Help us, O Lord. to be meek. And I pray, Lord, that when we discuss these things with others, that we would be gentle and respectful. We need to be forceful in declaring the truth and not backing down, not compromising, as we discussed this morning. But we need also, O Lord, to be able to convey these things in a manner that does not make the offense us. We know the Gospel will offend by itself, but we pray, Lord, that we would not add to it unnecessarily. We pray these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Genesis chapter five and verses one and two, I remind you, this is the word of the Lord. This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them, male and female, and blessed them and called them mankind in the day they were created. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. In 1975, and I know most of the kids here aren't old enough to remember this, I barely remember the furor that occurred or the upswelling that occurred in 75 and 76 when these things happened. But in 1975, at the Pan American Games, Bruce Jenner won the gold medal for the decathlon. And the next year, in 1976, he repeated that feat, winning the gold medal for the decathlon at the Montreal Olympics and setting several world records in the meantime. Then in 2015, Bruce Jenner won Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year Award. Now, what happened between 1976 and 2015? How did the male decathlete, Bruce Jenner, Every kid raised in the 1970s, or at least most of them, remembers from the iconic Wheaties box image where he's crossing the finish line, you remember hair flying, hands up, and so on, with the red, white, and blue uniform. It was 1976, the Bicentennial, patriotism was all over the place. But if you remember that Wheaties box, you were around at the time, how did he go from being that man, the decathlete, to the female celebrity, Caitlyn Jenner, who suddenly started racking up award after award, and who suddenly is being referred to with feminine pronouns, she instead of he, by everyone who doesn't want to be labeled with a harmful epithet by the media. In fact, today, if you ask Siri or Alexa, I tried this myself at home, about Bruce Jenner, both devices will correct you and tell you it is Caitlyn Marie Jenner, not Bruce Jenner that you're looking for information about. In Jenner's personal case, he told Diane Sawyer in 2015, after his transition that was from Bruce to Caitlyn, that he had always struggled with gender dysphoria since his youth. Well, what is gender dysphoria? This term that we hear a lot these days, but I never used to hear it before. Well, gender dysphoria is defined as a psychological condition marked by significant emotional distress and impairment in life functioning caused by a lack of congruence between gender identity and biological sex assigned at birth. complicated verbiage, but let me try to simplify it. In other words, because he was born with male genitalia, Bruce Jenner was regarded as male. But in his mind, he always felt he was female, and he claimed that this created psychological distress throughout his life. In the past, however, when it came to society, gender dysphoria, as it's now referred to, was considered a psychological aberration. In other words, when somebody biologically male said that they were female and identified themselves as female and dressed as female and used female names, society said there is something psychologically wrong with that person. Society said you think you're female, but everything biological about you says you're male right down to the chromosomal level. Therefore, you are male. What you are doing is pretending to be female, but you aren't, and you need help. It wasn't really too different, really, from somebody who thought that they were a cat. Merely thinking you're a cat didn't change your species, it didn't make you into a cat. But a more radical and far-reaching shift has taken place in society since 1976. Now, according to society, if formerly male Bruce Jenner says he is in fact female Caitlyn Marie Jenner, a woman, then he is. and it is the people who say that he isn't a woman and who keep using the pronoun he, like I do, who are wrong and hateful. Those are the people who probably need help. So when Jenner told Diane Sawyer in 2015, for all intents and purposes, I am a woman, society stood up, they applauded, and they said truth. And this is because, at this point, society has separated gender, that is the male-female division in the species according to roles, from sex, that is the male-female division of the species according to reproductive functions. That's how they define it. You are, they tell us, whatever you think you are. And because of something called now gender fluidity, in which your gender shifts from time to time, that can also be subject to change at will. Someone can be male one day and female the next and then male again and so on all over the place. But even in that description, when I say somebody can be male and then they can be female and then they can be male again, I'm actually being anachronistic and potentially harming or triggering people who might be listening because male and female aren't supposed to be used anymore in polite society. The media or academia, in order to describe people, now use different terms. They don't want to imply that sex is binary and that it only consists of two options, male or female. In fact, these days, when somebody identifies as the gender conforming to their biological sex at birth, they are supposed to be referred to as cisgender male or cisgender female. And incidentally, if you're wondering where the CIS comes from, apparently it has nothing to do with crime scene investigators, CSI or whatever. CIS comes from the Latin derived prefix cis, meaning on this side of, which means the opposite of trans, meaning across from or on the other side of, therefore, Calling someone cisgender is simply the opposite of transgender. And what they're trying to do by using cisgender is to norm the term transgender. But even those terms are becoming outmoded as more and more genders are being discovered by society every day. At present, when you sign up for Facebook, for instance, you have 71 options for gender, including agender, androgynous, bigender, cisgender female, cisgender male, cisgender man, cisgender woman, female to male, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender questioning, gender variant, gender queer, are intersex, and that's just a very small sampling of the varieties of gender that you can select for yourself. And it just keeps getting more confused and confusing every day with more and more genders being added at this point on an almost hourly basis, and with nothing whatsoever fixed or objective about human identity any longer. In fact, I mean, going back to something I referred to before, now if you think you're a cat, You're a cat. So that a Norwegian woman named Nano proclaimed that she knew at the age of 16 that she was a cat, claiming, I realized I was a cat when I was 16. When doctors and psychologists found out what was the thing with me, under my birth, there was a genetic defect. I was born the wrong species. And as modern people, when we hear this, we're supposed to be uber sensitive and take her seriously and affirm her cat-ness. No play on Hunger Games, of course. But, brothers and sisters, stepping back, as God tells us, That's not the case. God, as 1 Corinthians 14.33 says, is not the author of confusion. He did not create a world that is this messed up. The Bible, as we have seen in prior sermons, only acknowledges two genders, male and female. And they exist because of God's intention. And not only that, we are told in the Bible that male and female are important, very important, that God gave them to us for a reason, because only males and females together can reproduce. And also, because only males and females together in the marriage bond can express that one flesh union that God intended to be a picture of the believer's relationship to Jesus Christ. Only these two genders together, male and female, also are helpers suitable for one another. And only these genders together represent a full-orbed idea of the image of God represented in humankind. And therefore, our own self-conception, and that's a word that we're going to see that the Nashville Statement uses. Self-conception means the idea or mental image one has of oneself. Our own self-conception should, in fact, accurately reflect the way God created us. In fact, part of becoming Christian is that process of ending our rebellion against God and stopping the process of defining ourselves rebelliously according to our own will and knowing ourselves as God created us. Calvin puts it so very well in the beginning of the Institutes when he says this, our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, It is not easy to determine which of the two proceeds and gives birth to the other." He goes on to say later, on the other hand, it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. Unless we know God, we don't know ourselves. We're not able to accurately reflect on our own nature. So if we ask the question, and we should be asking the question, brothers and sisters, why is there such confusion about human sexuality and about issues like gender? Why are we no longer defining people according to the two sexes that God created, male and female? The answer is not to be found simply in some sort of social shift or evolution or Anything like that. The answer is to be found in the fact that we are losing our knowledge of God. We no longer look to his revelation in scripture to help us to understand God. We've redefined him. And worse than that, we are no longer looking to his revelation to help us to know ourselves. A process that Calvin talked about of looking at God and then looking into ourselves to find out who we are is no longer going on because we have put ourselves in the place of God. And fallible and fallen men have become the measure of all things. We no longer know ourselves as we really are. We've grown content instead to tell ourselves fairy tales, to make up myths, and then insist that everyone believe them. We have become fools, and we insist, in fact, that our foolishness is wisdom. But the Bible tells us that that is the natural result of idolatry. It shouldn't surprise us that when we lose the true knowledge of God that's to be found in His Word and we begin creating idols, that we would go through this this loss of knowledge, loss of true knowledge. It's one of the noetic effects of the Fall. If you'll turn with me to Romans 1, 18 through 25, we'll see what the Word of God says about this process of losing our true knowledge of things, including ourselves. Starting in Romans 118, we read this, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. It's not that we have no way of knowing the truth or we don't know the truth or our conscience doesn't inform us. We know these things, but we suppress them. We push them away. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. Even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. professing to be wise, they became fools, and if that isn't the theme verse for our age, I don't know what is, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness in the lust of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. And then, as Romans 1, 18-32 goes on, it talks about all of the sexual confusion that that has brought in, and we're seeing that played out. We've lost our knowledge of God, and so we have lost our knowledge of ourselves. And that is why the Nashville Statement is right to go back to the true standard that tells us about the nature of the universe, that tells us about God, and that tells us about ourselves, and that is the Word of God. The Nashville Statement is seeking, perhaps too late, to bring us back to a definition of sexuality that's grounded in reality instead of grounded in human fairy tale making. And this is the section of the Nashville Statement that we're going to be looking at tonight, the Nashville Statement Section 5. It states in Article 5, we affirm that the differences between male and female reproductive structures are integral to God's design for self-conception as male or female. We deny that physical anomalies or psychological conditions nullify the God-appointed link between biological sex and self-conception as male or female. Now, one brief note. You'll note that although everything that we have seen or said from the Bible today is reflected in that particular statement, there is something that we haven't discussed, and that is the mention of physical anomalies in the denial section. that physical anomalies or psychological conditions nullify the God-appointed link between biological sex and self-conceptions as male and female. What are they talking about when they're talking about physical anomalies? Well, that would be people who were born without definably male or female genitalia, what used to be called hermaphrodites, or people who were born with sexual anomalies, either of the hormonal or physical types. People who were born without enough male hormones, or not enough female hormones, or no ovaries where we would expect them, or gonads where we wouldn't expect them. But I have to tell you, brothers and sisters, people in that category represent less than 0.05% of the population. And the statement rightly points out that exceptions of that kind, of more widespread but still incredibly rare psychological dysphoria, do not nullify the God-appointed link between biological sex and self-conception. Let me give you an example. In saying that because there are anomalies, we should eliminate the link that God has created between biological sex and how we should conceive of ourselves, that's rather like saying that because some people are born into the world without legs, we should stop defining ourselves as bipeds. It's a ridiculous ridiculous situation. We're trying to now make the exceptions, which are incredibly rare, change the norm. But there's a bigger emphasis going on here, obviously. The key here is that there has been a push to overturn the way that the Word of God defines us, the way the Word of God defines humans and human sexuality and everything about humanity and the world and the universe. that has come in with our shift away from the Word of God. And it is beyond time. As I said earlier, I think the Nashville Statement is a great statement, a great creedal statement, answering many of the problems that we're having with human sexuality. But I think it may have come too late. I think, rather, when this push was just starting in the 1990s, that was the time to come out with a definitive statement that pushed back At this point, we are past the point where we need to be answering these things. The time has come and it's past time for us to stop seeking our identity. as creatures, making ourselves into our own creation, and rather to start accepting ourselves as God created us, to see ourselves as we really are. One of the keys to salvation is to have our eyes open to see ourselves as we truly are. For instance, you remember Peter, in the boat with Jesus, Christ tells him to cast in the net on the left side, and he does so. Even though they've been fishing for a while, they cast in the net, and before they'd caught nothing, suddenly the nets are full. And he recognizes there's only one person who can actually command fish to go into a net. And that's God himself. He's in the boat with God and suddenly he recognizes himself when he sees God for who he is. And he knows himself at that point in time to be a sinner. And so he falls to his knees and he says, go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. He saw the face of God and he saw reflected in it his own sinfulness. But it is Jesus' intention that Peter, sinful Peter, should be fundamentally changed and become not merely Peter the sinful fisherman, but Peter, the saved fisher of men, the man whom God would use to bring his gospel to a myriad of different people and who would become the chief speaker for the apostles. It's only when we see ourselves as we actually are, we see our sinful nature, we see our rebellion, our tendency to define ourselves not as God has made us, but as we pretend we are, that we actually begin to get to the point where we can close with God on the right terms, where we can humble ourselves and say, I know I am not righteous. I know I am not worthy of being in your presence, but Lord, You can make me righteous. You can save me from my sins. And therefore, turn to Him for the salvation that we so need. What we are doing at this point in time is we are attempting instead to norm our sins and to redefine God. And that will never lead us to salvation. The key to understanding humanity aright is to know God and then to know ourselves, and the key to doing that has to be the Scriptures, not the tales that we tell ourselves from day to day. So, brothers and sisters, as we go through the Nashville Statement, I hope you will be seeing that there is a greater agenda behind the push against the norms that God has given. It's a desire not only to change the way that we fundamentally think about people, but to change the way we fundamentally think about God and our need of Him. If the sexual immoralities and aberrations that are becoming commonplace in our society are not sins, then we don't need to be saved from them. And that's one of the things that the devil wants us to be convinced of, but don't listen to him. When it comes to defining who we are and to determining what real human sexuality consists of, then the Bible has to be our template. because it is only in knowing ourselves as God has created us that we understand our purpose, we understand how to be saved, and we understand how we can rightly represent the image of God in the midst of a fallen world. Let's go before the one who tells us the truth about ourselves. God our Father, I pray, Lord, that you would help us. to be clear about who we truly are. Lord, if we look into ourselves without you, we will see our great need of you. We will see how fallen we are, but we will also see reflected, Lord, in your scripture, the answer to our problem. As we look to the word of God, we see our great savior, Jesus Christ, the savior of mankind, the one who came to save us from our sins. He was born of a woman, born under the law for us. And by, Lord, humbling ourselves, letting go of our attempts to define ourselves, letting go of our attempts to save ourselves, and simply closing with Him, we may have forgiveness and freedom. Lord, we pray that you would give us that great gift of faith and that you would strengthen it day by day. Help us to persevere. Though all the world might confess lies about you, Lord, let us not join them. Let us instead continue to stand for the truth as we find it in your word. Thank you for carrying it down to us. Help us to be humble and gentle and respectful as we talk to other people about subjects like human sexuality, but let us not compromise. Let us be firm. Let us be enduring. Let us be willing to stand to the very end, Lord. And I do pray that You would do this for the glory of Your Son, our Savior, in whose name we pray, Jesus Christ. Amen.