This past month, much news in our world has focused on questions relating to what our identity is. Who are we? How do we define who we are? Is it based on what we do or desire? Many headlines in the news focus on gender identity. There's always been confusion on the roles of genders, but now there's confusion even on the reality of gender, male and female, as the facts of biology really are being replaced by feelings of identity, what you perceive yourself to be, Pronouns you wanna be referred to as, in which even locker room you wanna go to is now become a defining issue. This issue is really the new version of I think, therefore I am. Gender confusion issues are only going to continue to keep growing on the news in focus of this. If you signed up for an account on Facebook in the year 2014 or 2015, you may have noticed when it came to gender, there wasn't just male or female. There were actually over 50 different choices available for gender. And actually it started with 51, they went up to 56, they went up to 58, and then finally they just made it custom where you can type your own. In news headlines, and that just gives you an illustration of the confusion out there, in news headlines what used to be the universal practice of having people go to a bathroom of their biological gender is now seen and labeled as discrimination in our world. States or schools that try to keep separate restrooms, changing rooms, even keeping separate shower rooms, people from biological gender in separate shower rooms is now under, as you know, great political pressure to let anyone go wherever they want based on whatever they want to identify themselves as, perceived gender. And the U.S. Department of Education and a high U.S. court, the Fourth Circuit so far, agrees. And ironically, and I think even irrationally at times in our world, those who are defending women's rights don't include in them the rights of even privacy of vulnerable girls from males and sensitive places. And making laws for the confused others can abuse, and in some places already have. And not hurting feelings of a few may hurt more than intended and this really we can trace this back take it away from the classroom go back to the womb and there are gender selection abortions taking place around the world and in this country more than people want to admit some people will kill their unborn baby if it is the wrong gender from their perspective wanting a boy often instead of a girl that God formed in the womb and In other cases, children in junior high and younger can decide if they are the wrong gender that God made them. a different way than they want to be perceived. And so they get to select the gender they want to be after birth, not the boy or girl God made them. And in some cases, even children are encouraged to be on hormone-altering drugs or to get operations to change the way that God created them because they perceive that they are not that. This is our world and its confusion about identity. If we were to go back just three years, the American Psychiatric Association referred to this phenomena as gender identity disorder, and now it's called gender dysphoria, a distress over the sex of their birth, and the treatments include hormone suppression, hormone therapy, or surgeries. And maybe some hearing this are confused about some of these things. People we will interact with will need compassion and will also need Clarity and we all need to know what to think and how to speak biblically To what is going on in our world and to look beyond? Politics which is what we're gonna do today. We're not gonna focus on politics. We need to look beyond that to people to real people Who need love and truth? the beginning of the Bible says that in the beginning God created in his own image male and female. But we understand that's Genesis 1. In Genesis 3, sin entered this world. Things are not the way they were originally designed to be since then in many cases. And with it, people have wanted in many ways to recreate themselves in the image desired instead of the original design. That's not just true in one area of life, but that's true of sex perception, and it's also true of sexual preference, that people in our world make their identity, whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, as an identity. There are people who, a growing number of people, who want to be identified as a gay Christian, as a gay Christian, as their identity, as to how they want to introduce themselves. Rosaria Butterfield Wrote on this in fact let me let me give you some resources, and then I want to move into our our text here But I've got a slide here if we can pull it up with some some resources For further study, and then we're gonna really focus on the scriptures here today, but Rosaria Butterfield one of these authors is She was a leader in the LGBT community at Syracuse University. She was doing pioneer studies in queer theory and various things, and the Lord got a hold of her life, and she's written a follow-up book to her testimony called, Openness, Unhindered Sexual Identity and Union with Christ. But Kevin DeYoung on the subject of homosexuality has a book called, What Does the Bible Really Teach About Homosexuality? And then Tim Chester, has a book, You Can Change, God's Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions, which takes the principles of scripture we're going to look at here today and it really applies them to any area of life because we need to understand the principles here apply to all of us. But here's what Rosaria wrote in her books in kind of tracing the history of this. Sexuality moved from a verb. In former literature, it was a verb, it was practice, and it moved to noun, to people. And with this grammatical move, a new concept of humanity was born. This is actually very recent in history. The idea that we are oriented or framed by our sexual desires. and that self-representation and identity rooted now in sexual orientation and not in the purposes of God for His image bearers." And what we're going to see in our study here today is that a Christian's identity is not in gender or even any of these other things they want to put it in. Our identity is in Jesus. and it's in our relationship to Him. That is our fundamental identity and how we should be identified. Our identity is not the gender we perceive or the sex that we are attracted to. Our identity is in Christ and our relationship to Him. Christ. So how are we to look at the news and focus of the gospel, the good news? To a world in much growing gender confusion comes God's word in gospel clarity. And God gives us in 1 Corinthians 6 hope for any sinful tendency or any temptations. If there are hope for the people who are described here, there's hope for you no matter what you're going through. The world is changing around us. Genders are changing around us. But my hope today is not dependent on laws changing. My hope is dependent on the life-changing power of the cross that we just sang about. That's where our hope needs to be. And we've had several studies now in 1 Corinthians on gospel implications at the start of each month. This is going to be part eight in that series as we come to the table to remember the cross and reflect on it for all of life. We have seen the gospel speak to every issue that was being faced in the Corinthian culture, which in many cases is not that different than ours, as we'll see again. And we've seen the gospel speak to each of those issues in God's providence and in God's timing. The next section for this next study is very timely. for what the church faces in our times as well. We live in a rapidly changing world, but we have an unchanging word that gives us unchanging hope in the gospel. Our hope needs to be built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. That is the solid rock that we can stand on, even when everything else around us seems to be sinking sand. In this passage, 1 Corinthians 6, focusing on verses 9 through 11, and again, we're not looking at everything we could look at, but looking at some implications of the gospel. One of the clearest ones in this passage is that all who reject Jesus' righteousness, all who live in unrighteous sin in any form, including sexual sin, as well as unrepentant greed and gossip and other sins like that, they are warned that sin can keep them from God. But any sin, any sin we repent of, Jesus can save us from. Look with me at 1 Corinthians 6 verse 9. Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, those who sin with their speech, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were, such were some of you. He's writing to this church in Corinth. Some of you were each and every one of these things. Such were some of you, past tense, but you were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified. in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. That one word has a lot of hope in it, were, not are, were, such were some of you. And that should give any of us hope, no matter what it is that is our particular struggle, that that does not need to define us. Our identity is not in sexuality or sin in general, it is in our salvation in Christ. So the first point I want us to see is the gospel gives hope for all sin. The gospel gives hope for all sin. All of us know people in this list or will in the future and all of us are in this list in one way or another. All of us have sinned in our hearts. That's why I'm including in our study here, and I didn't get these in our bulletin, but you can change God's transforming power for our sinful behavior and negative emotions. But all of us are in this list. All of us have sinned. And remember, sin in our hearts, Jesus also says is as serious to him as sin outwardly. All of us have sinned somewhere in verse nine. Most of us in lust in some way. All of us in idolatry. which is putting something above God, which we do in our hearts even if we don't have statues in our homes. And in verse 10, all of us in some way have taken what is not ours. All of us in some way have coveted what is not ours, what hasn't been given to us. All of us have spoken evil of others at times. All of us have manipulated things to our benefit at times. We need to recognize this is part of our portrait as well, but verse 11 gives hope for all. the homosexual as well as the person who is hurtful in their words, the covetous as well as the curious into areas where they shouldn't be curious, and the confused about gender, the sins that we might see as wretched as well as the sins we see as respectable, which are not really respectable to God, as Jerry Bridges has told us. All of those things, there is hope for us if we accept God's diagnosis and solution, which is faith and repentance. God is love. And because of that, He speaks the truth in love. He doesn't avoid it for man's definition of love. Some people will say, if you want to even talk about these things, well, Jesus was only about grace. But the Bible actually says, the beginning of John's gospel says grace and truth comes through Jesus. People need kindness. And it's God's kindness in Romans 2 verse 4 that leads us to repentance. It's his kindness that leads to repentance, he says, even in the context of some of these very same sins. The end of Romans 1 goes into Romans 2 and it says it's the kindness of God that leads to repentance. Here's what Kevin DeYoung says, Love is throwing arms around the prodigal son when he sees his sin, comes to his senses and heads for home. The God we worship is a God of love which makes every one of our sexual sins, or any of these other sins here, changeable, redeemable, and wondrously forgivable. And then he quotes Jean Lloyd, a former lesbian, who puts it this way, "...continue to love me, but it isn't mercy to affirm same-sex acts. Don't compromise truth, she pleads. Help me to live in harmony with it." as we look at this passage here. in verse nine we really see a world in the first century that's not that different from the twenty-first century starts with sexual immorality that wouldn't that's a general term to include fornication and some of your versions have premarital relations they would include incest or lesbian intimacy really any sex outside of before marriage especially the the greek word pornos is still used in our day for visual immorality with the eye that is also very serious in God's eyes. And Jesus spoke in Matthew 5 28 of how unrepentant lust also can send someone to hell. So this is the term that is used in scripture in verse 9, idolaters. is in a context where the other words in the verse include sexual sin and in the context of Corinth where idolatry and immorality were often linked with temple prostitutes. The idolatry in verse 9 may be especially related to We need a little bit of context here about Corinth. Corinth was really, it had a reputation as the sin city of the Roman Empire. Its immoral nightlife was a temptation to, there were many travelers who would come through there, men away from families on business trips, and you can imagine the temptations there, and it was all over town. Archeology has found this, rows and rows of places for sin to be indulged in. Maybe some of them rationalize, you know, what happens in Corinth stays in Corinth. I don't know. But we know the motto to Corinthianize actually is a motto preserved in history. It became a phrase for immorality and drunken debauchery. Here's what one of my former pastors, Phil Johnson, explains. Corinth was situated at a strategic place between two key seaports. It was a resort town, always crowded and always busy, always filled with travelers. The city was filled with brothels. You can see them to this day, row after row, in the ruins. Corinth was, he says, to the first century Mediterranean culture, what Las Vegas is to our culture today, except that their chief attractions were temples for sin rather than casinos. That was some other context of idolatry related to immorality, but this is relevant to our day as well in any city or small community. Because an idol is, in scripture, anything we elevate above God, anything that is more important to us than God. And in our culture, even in the religious realm, sexuality is more important to many than God and what His word has to say. A former homosexual said in her testimony that really idolatry, as she looked back on it, idolatry was the key issue for her more than her sexual sin. And again, she's not talking about having statues in her homes, but what she really prized and idolized. And so, idolatry can include those things. And in verse 9, Paul moves from idolatry to adultery in any form. which is a term specifically for sexual sin by a married person. And so in this verse both premarital as well as extramarital relations are included in verse 9. And heterosexual as well as homosexual sin are both there. In fact, if you have the ESV, the footnote at the end of verse nine explains this. The two Greek terms, some of your Bibles have two different terms. There's two Greek terms. It's translated by this phrase, refer to the passive and active partners in consensual homosexual acts. And that note makes clear that he's not just talking about attractions here, he's actually talking about acting out those desires. He's not just talking about certain forms of this type of sin, but including between consensual, or we might even say committed partners, as is being said today. There is abundant Greek evidence for the interpretation of those words and those types of relationships that were in the first century as well. If you have the NIV, it has practicing homosexuals in the second term, but the first term isn't limited to prostitution or to abusive or exploitative activity. The most recent scholarly study of these terms in Greek literature concludes after giving massive pages of evidence, which really is not that edifying to read, but here's the summary. Primary sources leave no alternative but to understand Paul is addressing primarily adult homosexual behavior with these two terms. Those, one of the terms emphasizes behavior as well as one of the terms emphasizes or includes orientation and includes men living as women in the Greek culture and in the Greek language. One of the translations I looked at, an old Bible translation, has men who make women of themselves. And the Old Testament law already knew about this and it forbade men and women from doing that. Robert Gagnon's massive scholarly standard, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, says the Greek word in verse 9 includes males who play the role of females. And he cites ancient sources including a type of transgenderism, even from a first century Jew living the same time as Paul named Philo, twice uses this word for men who cultivate femininity. And I won't even go into all the details, but some of them even surgically attempting to translate themselves or transform themselves into women, deliberately taking steps. And even in the Old Testament days of Moses, this sin of trying to remove masculinity by emasculation was known and warned about in Holy Scripture, but within five years of Paul writing this just to put this in the context of their Roman Empire culture. There was a young man who was surgically attempted to be made like a girl and it was actually dressed like a bride with veil and everything and he was involved in a public same-sex wedding to the Emperor Nero. This is within just a few years of when Paul writes this. We need to understand 21st century did not invent some of these things. First century Rome was into these sort of things deeper than us. We may have a president who four years ago said he evolved his view on these things, but when Paul was writing this, they had an emperor over the whole empire who was personally involved in more than one wedding like that. We need to recognize this isn't new. Our culture is not advancing. We're going backwards to Nero. But what is the solution? I don't wanna get any more into the, I think we can see the problem. We can see the confusion in the world around us. What is the solution? What would you say, Paul, if you were living in a culture like that, which he was, what would you say, Paul, is the solution? What we as a church need to focus on. Go to chapter one and we have his answer. It wasn't that political protests were unknown in their day. Political protests were known. There were groups among the Jews called zealots who were trying to be... I believe political activism was the key. But what do you recommend, Paul, when you've got a guy like Nero leading gay pride parades in Rome? What would you recommend, Paul, we do? Or Paul, if the world that we live in rejects our message or thinks our message is folly, if they think it's foolish, which they did in Paul's day. What would you say, Paul, by the inspiration of God? This is what Paul says, 1 Corinthians 1 verse 18, knowing that this is foolish to the world, but he says, the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it, that's the word of the cross, is the power of God. What is the power of God, Paul? The word of the cross, that there's no other thing in scripture that is called this, the power of God. It's not politics, it is preaching. Paul says in chapter 2 verse 2, preaching, this is what he determined to make preeminent and above everything else, preaching Christ and Him crucified. Chapter 2 verse 2. Paul resolved as he goes into the heart of this pagan perverted city that he is going to be determined to know nothing more than and nothing above Christ and Him crucified. Paul was determined to keep the cross central because that's where the power of God is. Paul was well aware that sexual desires can be powerful in man. But he knows from his own life that the gospel is the power of God. And when Paul writes of these things in the book of Timothy, he describes this same list of very similar sins But he says after that, I am the chief of sinners. Paul didn't see them as the chief of sinners. He saw himself as the chief of sinners. And Paul's argument is if the gospel could save someone like me, then there's hope for these other people as well. Paul began his letter to the Romans a very similar way. Chapter one to the pagan Roman empire talks more about these very types of sins, but then right in the heart of that chapter, Paul says this, I am eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome for I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. That is where the power is. And so we see the gospel gives hope for all sin. But then secondly, we need to also see Christ gives a new identity in him. This is one of the powerful things about the gospel. Christ gives us in salvation a new identity in him. Chapter six, verse 11 says of these lifestyles such were some of you, but you were washed. People in this church he's writing to had been saved and had been washed of all of those lifestyles he had just read. And not all of them were involved in all of them, but some of them were involved in each of those. And Christ had redeemed their past. And Christ had replaced it with a new identity in him. And the arms of Christ and His church are open to any who turn from any sin in faith. That was true of the Corinthian church. It should be true of every gospel church. Verse 11 says, they once were those people, but in Christ it's no longer who they are. The New English translation says it this way, some of you once lived this way. You once lived This way, this was your former lifestyle. These were your former lifestyles, he's saying. And that's a helpful translation. You once lived this way. Paul's not saying that you're no longer tempted in any of these ways. We could go through the list, and I think in each of these cases, there are often temptations that go along, especially with someone who's been living these ways. But he says, you don't live in them. That's how you once lived. You don't live in them anymore. You aren't defined by these things. And this is an important word for our world as we think about our own identity. And these are natural questions that every young person, every old person, every person wants to know. What is my identity? Who am I? Is who I am determined by what I do or is it something deeper? And I think this also speaks to those who I don't doubt their sincerity, but those who think it's a helpful way to refer to themselves as a gay Christian, or those who want to make sexuality their identity, we need to understand that's not our identity in Scripture. Even for non-Christians, identity is not a preferred sex. Identity is not found first in one's feelings, but it's found in the fact that we are all, whether we recognize it or not, we are all created. in the image of God. 07.21 Every person is still created in the image of God 07.21 whether they acknowledge Him or not. 07.21 And because of that there is inherent dignity. 07.21 There is worth in God's image. 07.21 And everyone deserves our respect and dignity in those things. 07.21 But we understand in Christ our identity. 07.21 That's true of every person. 07.21 James says we're not even to speak evil 07.21 of people who are created in the image of God. But our identity in Christ goes deeper than that image. There's an image of Christ that is also given to us. It's who we are in Christ that is our identity, not what we do or did. Back at the end of this chapter it says we were bought with a price. That's where worth comes from ultimately. It comes from the worthy sacrifice of Christ. Not us inherently, but as a result of that, we've been bought with a price. We belong to Christ. And it says there at the end of the chapter, verses 18 and 19, and in the end of the chapter, you are not your own. Your body is the Lord's. We need to understand that as well in our world that thinks we own things or we own ourselves. It's not ours to change or to do whatever we want with the body of a Christian, Paul says, is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And so the question isn't how do I perceive myself in verse 20, it's how do I glorify God with my body? And that could be a whole other study. Maybe we'll come back to that in a future message. But we need to put this in the storyline of scripture again. God made man and woman in his image. Male and female, he created them. But in Genesis 3, sin entered the world. And so the way things are now are not the way that they were originally created. And as Satan came into the world, he asked this question, did God really say, Did God really say, and he's implying that there is a better way than the one that God had commanded. And it's the same question, even in Christian circles, broadly speaking, the same old questions and insinuations are arising about relationships, the reality of our identity and man and woman and what God really said in his commands, comparing that with our enlightened knowledge of good and evil. And one of the results right in Genesis 3 of Adam and Eve's sin in Genesis 3.16 is God said to the woman that her desire would be, and I think the best way to understand that, her desire would be to usurp the role or the place of the man. And so the confusion or the corruption of roles of male and female really has its roots back then. It's been around since the fall into sin. In fact, if you go to the next chapter, there's already a man who is exploiting and abusing his, and he's got two wives and he's killing people for wounding him. You keep going and there's violence as you go into chapter six. There's homosexuality in chapter 18. There's incest in chapter 19. That's all just the opening chapters of human history. Since man's fall into sin, desires have fallen with them. Things are not always the way they should be. In fact, they naturally are not. It's just a matter of how that looks for different people. But gender roles began to be corrupted there and confused, but that still is not the essence of our personality or identity. Even a non-believer, bearing God's image is their fundamental identity. Our identity comes from our designer, not our desires. Let me say that again. Our identity comes from our designer, our creator, not our desires. And for gender-confused young people, here's what the American College of Pediatrics says. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait, XY and XX chromosomes. Sense of oneself as male or female is a sociological and psychological concept. But here's what they say, and this is important. As high as 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. And so of those who are confused in that way, as high as 98% of them, without any sort of radical treatment or intervention, who are confused about these things, eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. And they go on to say that of those who then take these radical steps and have cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, they are 20 times more likely after doing that to commit suicide. These are secular studies. And they say even in Sweden, which is one of the most LGBT-affirming countries. And this is what they... The American College of Pediatrics argues that it is actually medical malpractice to condition children into believing a lifetime of chemical or surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful. And by the way, one of the authors of that statement was someone who had done many of these surgeries. Actually, he was the psychiatrist-in-chief at Hopkins University when they used to do these surgeries, and they stopped doing them as they saw the implications and the... the things that followed that. But here's what Al Mohler in their article title is, Gender Ideology Harms Children. Here's what Al Mohler comments, Pastorally, Christians should be heartbroken over anyone of any age who experiences what's described here as gender dysphoria. They deserve our care and concern. Indeed, the Christian worldview demands it, but we also have to understand that the care and concern and compassion must be based in truth. And as the Bible and the biblical worldview make abundantly clear, we do not love people by telling them something other than the truth. These doctors, he says, have spoken the truth. But more important than that, Jesus, as the great physician says of his gospel truth, if you abide in my truth, he says, the truth will set you free. And then he says, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave of sin. But he says, if the Son, if Jesus sets you free, you will be truly free. Free. Free even from these very sins that Corinthians is talking about. And again, not free from temptation. The drunkard at times in this list will still be drawn to drink and the other sins in the list are similar. But the truth of Christ frees us from slavery to sin. He breaks the power of canceled sin. He sets the prisoner free. And once the prisoner has been set free, he doesn't go around and introduce himself as a prisoner anymore. Even if all those years in prison still have an effect on him, that's not his identity anymore as a prisoner. He's been set free. And so taking drunkenness, for example, from verse 10, those with that inclination still or that temptation still are not drunkard Christians as their identity. They're not to introduce themselves. Hi, I am Joe drunkard Christian. That's not who they are. And it doesn't say, verse 11, doesn't say that's what some of you are, these sins. It's not you are alcoholics who have been sober X amount of time. That's the way our world often thinks. It doesn't say once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. That's not what this is saying here. The good news of what Jesus is saying here as he inspired this passage is that we are not defined by past sin. We are defined by a person who saves from sin and who even saves from addictive, enslaving, outward sin, and who also can save us from inward sins like greed in this list. In verse 10, we're saying every bitter thought, every evil deed, that's the power of the cross on that level. And for any past sexual sins or any of these sins here a believer repents of, there is no scarlet letter to be worn among God's people in perpetual shame. The Lord says this, though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow, he says to those who repent. Come, let us reason together. That's the washing of verse 11 by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you surrender your sinful ways to Jesus, to his Lordship over all of life, not just sexually, but inwardly as well, your sins are washed away by his blood. If you repent at the foot of the cross, you lose all your guilty stains, amen? Dark is the stain, the song says, that we cannot hide. What can avail to wash it away? Look, there is flowing a crimson tide, whiter than snow, you can be today. Grace, grace, God's grace, grace that can pardon and cleanse within. Marvelous grace, infinite grace, grace that is greater than all our sin. See, in Christ, God does not see us as the wickedness of verses nine through 10, if we are in Christ. He sees us as the washed in his son. In verse 11, the forgiven, the cleansed of our former lifestyles. And the end of the verse mentions the Holy Spirit. And so this is probably the washing of regeneration by the Holy Spirit that Paul talks about in other places. God's giving us new life so that we can be born again to a new lifestyle with a new master. Even those who might wanna change their identity, Christ actually in a greater way than they are even seeking can change our identity. Not just outwardly, but inwardly. He can totally transform us. Verse 11, such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified. That's the changing aspect that regeneration comes with sanctification. You could say with new life comes new living. He washes us so we can walk as sanctified, as set apart, as different than the world, and different than we were before by God's grace. God's forgiving us and saving us also involves a changing us that begins at conversion. And for some, That change can be radical, and it can be in a short amount of time, whether drunkenness or in sexual sins. I read the testimony this week of Jackie Hill Perry, who said she had same-sex attraction as a five-year-old because of some of the things that were going on in her life, and it never went away from her childhood into her young adulthood. But she is now a saved Christian wife and mother, and reformed rapper. You have to decide if all those are good things, but I think they are. Or in Ron Sittlau's case, his early life was filled with promiscuous gay sin, but he is now a husband, a father, and a pastor. But the story isn't the same for all of those who Christ has saved. For others, like Sam Alberry, change for him wasn't living as a heterosexual spouse or losing all same-sex attractions. In his case, the change meant a grace for him to remain single and to not act out those desires that he would confess he still battles with. Sam Albury is a faithful pastor who has embraced a life of hope-filled celibacy and is able, I think uniquely, to minister to some who have been saved out of various backgrounds and their past temptations have not all been erased. Here's what Rosaria Butterfield writes, The solution to all sin, she says, is Christ's atoning blood. In Christ, she says, we are new creatures. We are redeemed. We're no longer slaves to that that once defined us, although it likely still knows our names. She says, in my case, I am now a 52-year-old pastor's wife. But no matter how many years tick away, she says, I am and always will be, in some sense, a Rahab, a woman with a past. So what does a person like me do with such a past? Maybe your past is different, but there's things from your past memories or things that will continue to plague you. What does she say someone like me does with such a past I've not forgotten? Body memories know my name. Details intrude into my world unpredictably, like when I'm preparing the communion bread or homeschooling my children. She says, what do I do as those memories come back or even temptations come back? She says, I take each of them to the cross. I take them to the cross for prayer, for more repentance, for thanksgiving. She says, Christ redeems your struggle by giving you greater union with Him and a new identity of one who overcomes. Many who have struggled in this way don't feel that they chose these feelings at a certain time. And none of us can just choose by mere willpower to make whatever our temptations are go away. But in Christ, this is key, we can, by His Spirit, choose not to obey our feelings and our flesh. In Him we can and must choose to walk by faith, not by feelings. And we need to be willing to walk with those whose struggles are different than ours and who might even look radically different than we do. We all in our flesh have lusts, longings that we're not to live in. 2 Corinthians 5.15 says, Christ died for all so we would no longer live for ourselves. And he says, from now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. As a result of this, we don't regard people according to the flesh, that is their fleshly identities or labels, whatever acronyms they wanna do, any fleshly category. Therefore, it says, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new, what? A new creation. Some feel that they are created in sin, but we need to recognize in Christ there is a new creation that happens. There's a new identity. And he says this, verse 21, for our sake, God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. That's the power of the cross. Christ became sin for us so that we can become the righteousness of God in Him. That's what that last term in verse 11, being justified, means. It's declared righteous. You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified. In the original language, the strongest Greek word for contrast is actually for all three phrases, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified. It could not be more emphatic. This is your new identity, verse 11, not verses 9 through 10 anymore. We have new life, new living, and a new legal standing and identity in Him. This new creation brings new desires and new power to resist old desires as well. Even those who have undergone a surgical sex change are not beyond the soul-changing power of Jesus. Salvation is transferring from one domain to another. It's a more radical surgery on the inside. It is a spiritual circumcision of the heart. It is a spiritual cutting out of the old heart and replacing it with a new heart with new desires. And so let me close with the words of Owen Strand in an article, A Gospel Approach. To this, to people caught in such sin, there is hope. Christ crucified and risen for our salvation. Jesus takes our sin, our disorder, on himself. And this good news of grace promises to save our souls, but in saving our souls, it also reorders our sinful ways of thinking. We must approach the transgendered with conviction and compassion. He says we shouldn't just shake our fingers and tell them, make yourself right. as if we don't believe the gospel. That's not how the gospel works. We may not know all that led a person to adopt certain behaviors. We do know that there is a brokenness of sin, a brokenness that we have all experienced in different ways, and so we should approach people with compassion and conviction, speaking truth to them with warmth and love, because we are them in a sense, and they are us, sinners in need of grace. Some people believe as they're struggling that change will save them if they can just change things. And we can, in a sense, agree with that. But the change that we are thinking of is even greater, a greater change than they are thinking of. And it's not a distortion of the body. However deep the scalpel goes, he says, however powerful the hormone therapy, the change that saves is something much, much stronger. It is a transformation of the heart. and a promise of a resurrection body, a summons to submission and the acceptance of God's good design. And so let's praise God that His gospel gives hope to all. And it gives us a new identity to all in Christ. Because we are all but for the grace of God. Still somewhere in verses 9 through 10, but by the grace of God in verse 11, we have this new identity. Let's praise God for grace that is greater than all our sin. Amen? Let me pray. Our Lord Jesus, I pray that you would continue by the renewing of our minds to help us not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed and made more like you in this world. We pray that we would reflect Christ in his gospel. In his name we pray, amen.