In the sermon on the mount, Jesus disagrees with you.
Matthew 5:27-28
27 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
That’s pretty clear. And the door is left wide open to redemption. I doubt Jesus only meant heterosexual lust.
Christ did not say that attraction to women was a sin.
He said that committing acts based on that attraction - even in the mind - was a sin.
Feeling attracted to a person/gender isn’t inherently sinful.
Acting out - including fantasizing - is.
Again, if BEING TEMPTED is a sin, no human can ever be saved - because Christ himself was tempted, and yet he never sinned.
That’s true but temptation is not the same as sin. If one is tempted, for whatever reasons, to entertain homosexual thoughts (much less actually do them) it’s not a sin unless one actually does “entertain” such thoughts. Note the word “entertain” there. If one continues to think about a sin, enjoying the thought of it, much less acting on it, then this is a sin as you described (that is the intent of Jesus’ words there)
It’s important to realize, or else there’s a danger of scrupulosity here, that tempting thoughts come from the Devil. It’s when we cooperate with such thoughts, by entertaining them and making them our own that’s when we sin. It’s not healthy to believe every time one has a tempting thought one has sinned.
Now I suppose one could get into legalism here and ask, “well how long is it until a temptation becomes a thought of your own?”
That’s ultimately between a person and God but suffice it to say, the moment a tempting thought enters the mind is not sin. If that were so, there would never be any such thing as “repentance”, because we would always be in a state of sin no matter how many times we said “sorry”. We would never actually be turning away from sin, which is what “repentance” means.
As long as one immediately dismisses a tempting thought, or fights it with prayer, then it’s not a sin, as long as one doesn’t start to make plans to act upon it.
DesertRhino, maybe we canthink of it this way:
A temptation is unwilled and unwelcome. You expel it, resist it, run around the block a couple time, go mop the floor, take a cold shower. You don't nuture it, explore it mentally or put it on a continuous loop!
If you dally with it, it becomes an "interior act" --- that's what Jesus was talking about. A sinful thought that you permitted to run its video in your head.
Somebody said, "A bird may come and perch on your head, but you flick it away. You don't let it build a nest there."