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Milo Goes Straight: Should We Believe Him?
The Gatekeepers ^ | 12th March 2021 | Denise McAllister

Posted on 03/12/2021 4:47:55 PM PST by Ennis85

When I first heard the news about Milo Yiannopoulos repenting of his homosexual lifestyle, I was overjoyed because I have been praying for Milo to turn from his sin and find freedom in Christ. I also know he's been struggling with this for a long time. While I often pray generally for the lost to be saved and for Christians to turn from habitual sins, I leave it to the Holy Spirit to impress upon me the need to fervently pray for specific people when it comes to sin and salvation. Typically, I've met them, and once I got to know Milo personally, I knew I needed to pray for him. I saw in him a joyful spirit beneath layers of struggle, pain, and sin, and I wanted him to be free of it—just as, in the past, I’ve wanted to be free of particular sins myself. Like Milo, I can relate to the bondage of sexual sins. They’re not the same as his, but they’re just as blinding, just as indefatigable in their addictive oppression, and just as subversive in their damage to the spirit. It is a joy to be free of them.

When I read Milo's testimony and public confession of sorts, I thanked God for the answered prayer, but I knew I still needed to pray. Milo is in the public spotlight. He’s known for his impish mischief and provocative displays to incite change by shaking up the status quo. He’s prone to attention-seeking—even he would admit that—and likes to light the world on fire. It’s not a surprise that he laughingly said in the interview about his decision: “I hope people will support and pray for me, if for no other reason than they share my delight at the prospect of Milo Yiannopoulos furiously and indignantly railing against homosexuals for sins of the flesh.”

I’ll certainly do more than that, though I have to share with you, that when I was praying for Milo to turn from his sin, one of my prayers was, “Even if it takes simply working your will through his desire to make trouble and poke the anthill of homosexual pride, make a real change in him. Plant the seeds and let the soil be good.” You can imagine how I chuckled when I read my own words in Milo’s interview.

My prayers for him, however, were and are more than that. I pray that his mind be renewed by the transforming power of God’s Spirit, that his heart is made clean, that he be freed from the bondage of lust and disorder, and that he humble himself before his Savior in service for His Glory. I also pray that the seeds planted in his heart will bear much fruit, and that he will be used by Christ as a shining testimony in a dark and dismal world. We need his brilliance in the war against Christianity (and there is one, trust me).

Turning from sin, growing in the Lord—all of the works of sanctification that come from faith in Christ—take time. The darker your sins, often the harder it is to change. Not always. Sometimes we experience a Road to Damascus transformation, but that’s not the typical way. Milo explained his own journey quite beautifully:

The best metaphor I know is that of a flower blooming — of nature’s Epiphany — an image I know Caryll Houselander was fond of. I think it was Houselander who said, “Whatever is loving in man and whatever is lovable in man is Christ in man.” I take this to mean that the more love and the less lust in us, the more we cease to obscure Christ and instead reveal Him, in whose image we are made. I don’t mean to suggest it’s been easy, just simple: Our Lord endured worse than any of us and promised us that we have to take up a heavy cross each day. Ronald Knox says the Via Crucis shows us the 3 ways we can carry our cross: With bitterness, like the unrepentant thief; with grim resignation, like the repentant thief who said it was what he deserved; or with love, like the Lord, who never minimized suffering but said it would, in God’s time, redeem us.

I know many of you who have read Milo’s testimony are conflicted. Unbelievers are simply confused and critical, calling his announcement "bizzare." We should expect the world not to be open to this kind of change—or even to understand it. But what about Christians? I’ve talked to several people about Milo’s announcement, and I’ve encountered different responses. There are the skeptics who don’t believe him for a second and think this is just a publicity ploy, and even if there’s some measure of sincerity, it simply won’t last because…well…it’s Milo. Others seem almost angry, resentful, and a little—how shall I say it?—grumbly about his announcement. I couldn’t help but think of the Older Brother’s response to the return of the Prodigal Son.

Some, and I’d put myself in this camp, are overjoyed but are still wise enough to know that we know a tree by its fruit. So we offer praise and watch. But even as we wait to see whether fruit does bloom, whether that flower does continue to open, we celebrate that the one who was lost has been found again and rejoice with the angels as Christ carries him home. If the seed is false or falls on rocky ground, then time will tell. But as for me and my family—we will praise the Lord at this testimony of faith in Christ. If it’s discovered to be false or ineffectual, our celebration is not in vain nor will I be disenchanted with the Christian message, for our hope is in God alone—not in man who is prone to wander.

And man is prone to wander, so it is unkind and ungracious to expect a man to be at the end of his journey when he is only at the beginning. He might not make the same choices we would in dealing with sin, and we might want to see more “growth” at any given time, but it is not helpful to heap burdens on a tender reed. We must let God do the work.

Even as others doubt Milo's sincerity, I am encouraged by his focus on spiritual helps in his repentance. He said in the interview, “Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” He's calling sin, sin, and dealing with it as such. As a Protestant, I might not agree with all of his theology, but he's moving in the right direction. He's looking for help within the church and for spiritual remedies. I applaud him for that.

I do, however, have to add a few thoughts as a sister in Christ that I hope will help him in his journey. Milo was raised Catholic, so it is not surprising that he has turned to his Catholic faith for help and restoration. Even while he was engaged in sin, he believed in the teachings of the Church and said so publicly. This teaching of faith and repentance, of purity in Christ, of freedom from lust, weighed on his conscience and led him to seek change.

The method of change he has embraced is commonly practiced within the Catholic Church and even among some Protestants—the choice of celibacy. In some instances this is a temporary period of purging with an eye toward reintegration into normalcy, a forsaking of the act of sin because he's not married (not to a woman anyway) and so can't engage in sex without sinning. In others, it's permanent—the notion that a person who has lived with same-sex attractions is a “homosexual” by nature, but he shouldn’t act on that nature. Or even if he's not a homosexual by nature, he will always be bound by these innate attractions. The message to such people, therefore, is: You will never truly be free from your attractions to the same sex, but you should at least be celibate and never have sex or sexual intimacy again. Live your life as a monk, try to curb your impulses and your thoughts, and don’t sin.”

I believe this teaching is contrary to the promise of Christ that we can be set free from sin and live a new life in his Spirit according to our original design. This promise, of course, doesn’t mean that we will be completely free of sin in this life—that won’t happen until we’re in heaven. It also doesn’t mean that we won’t have to continually fight and guard against our sin—especially if they’re addictive in nature—for a very long time.

But, even in this, there can be freedom to live a life that is not only the repression of our desires, but a renewal of those desires. We can, not only turn away from something, we can turn toward something. Some people think they'll never be free of their sinful desires and will have to live a life of repression—it seems that Milo feels this way about himself. But I believe Christ offers more hope than that. He promises to make us new so we can bear fruit. He says if we ask this of him—to have sin pruned away so fruit can blossom—he is faithful to answer those prayers. It might take a long time. We might feel like change will never come—but this is our hope, especially when it has to do with how we're made.

The Scripture is clear that God made us male and female, and sex and erotic love are only designed to be between a man and a woman in marriage. Our bodies are designed for spousal love. All else is sin. So our “nature” is not homosexual or any other kind of sexuality that fails to conform to God’s purposes. Any lust or act outside of God’s joyful design for men and women is disorder. Fleeting attractions—the impulses of sexual instinct and desire—do not define our sexuality. God does, and he's told us what that design is. We can even agree that sexual impulses are not sins in themselves—because they're immediate and not acted on or transformed into lust. But even these do not define our sexual identity or calling.

Neither do they keep us from moving in a positive way into God’s design and purpose for us in relation to the opposite sex. In other words, God didn’t make people one way—a homosexual—and then tell them not to act according to the way he supposedly made them. This would make God a bit of a sadist as he forces people to forsake the very thing he designed them to do. We are all certainly born in sin, but God didn’t make us that way. He made us in his image NOT to sin. We are born sinners, not because God designed us as sinners, but because we inherited our sin nature from Adam. Yet, even this fallen state does not negate or replace our divine design as male and female to only be in a sexual relationship with the opposite sex in marriage.

This means that the person who has lived a life of same-sex relationships can be fully free and redeemed of that life to be what God designed him to be. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5:17,“Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” Also in Romans 6:6: "Our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin."

This is true even as the man who has put his faith in Jesus struggles to overcome addiction of lust that pushes into his thoughts—thoughts he, like everyone struggling with habitual sins, must daily take captive to Christ so he is transformed. As John Paul II said, "Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins." He did not come to leave us languishing in sin or merely repressing it—he came to change us, to make us new, to set us free of sin.

That freedom and redemption in the sexual relationship involves developing a relationship with the opposite sex with the goal of marriage—God's design for the joy of sexual love. The only exclusion to this is if a man or a woman is specifically called to celibacy to serve God, to be “married” to Christ, and to find fulfillment of those desires in the spiritual union with God.

Celibacy should never be a recourse for those who think they’ll “always be gay” but they simply can’t act on it. Celibacy might be necessary for a time to learn self-control and to stop the addictive behavior. The man who is “addicted to sex” in habitual sin might have to abstain from all intimacy with a woman in order to realign his mind toward God’s purposes. But, unless he is called to serve God as a celibate, he has natural sexual desires that need to be met, that need to be released. The way those needs are met is in the sexual embrace of a wife.

As John Paul II wrote, "Christian revelation recognizes two specific ways of realizing the vocation of the human person, in its entirety, to love: marriage and virginity or celibacy. Either one is in its own proper form an actuation of the most profound truth about man, of his being 'created in the image of God.'" Because our bodies are designed with "spousal meaning"—that the two become one—"there can be formed the love that commits man to marriage for the whole duration of his life, but there can be formed also the love that commits man for his whole life to continence 'for the kingdom of heaven.'" It is up to the individual to discern which is his gift.

That’s a long way of saying that my prayer for Milo is that he know his calling from God and conform to it. If it is celibacy for a time to learn self-control and to manage his desires, then that’s good, but it’s a short-term plan. The long-term goal is freedom from lust and attractions to men so he can develop sexual attractions for women and want to be married one day. If, however, God is calling him to actual celibacy, then I hope he discerns that and trusts God in that endeavor.

One thing I can't stress enough: Repression alone will not satisfy the soul if it has not been called to true celibacy. Repression leads to frustration as our authentic sexual selves in need of sex are denied and pent up. The tragic outcome of that is often “falling off the wagon”—usually in a big way—and giving up that change can ever happen. It can even lead to giving up on faith in God altogether.

I hope you can celebrate with me this announcement by Milo and not be a bitter older brother or an unmoved skeptic who won’t be open to God's working even when humans have mixed motives. I hope you pray that he will be surrounded by people who support him and help him. The road will be hard, and he will need a lot of grace and love. As he walks that road, I hope the seeds of faith, repentance, and hope take root deep in Milo’s soul and that he will be used for the glory of God and find peace and happiness—and maybe even discover the joys of a wife.


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Society
KEYWORDS: gay; homosexuality; milo; miloyiannopoulos
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1 posted on 03/12/2021 4:47:55 PM PST by Ennis85
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To: Ennis85

Like any formerly avowed, activist homosexual, he’ll bear the burden of overwhelming proof to convince most people. I wish him well. It would be quite a powerful demonstration of the power of God if true, and a deadly strike to the Homo agenda.


2 posted on 03/12/2021 4:51:41 PM PST by fwdude (Pass up too many hills to die on, and you will eventually fall off the edge of the world.)
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To: fwdude

No.


3 posted on 03/12/2021 4:55:52 PM PST by tennmountainman ( Liberals Are Baby Killers.)
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To: fwdude

I tend to take people at their word unless I have a reason not to.


4 posted on 03/12/2021 4:56:04 PM PST by Fai Mao (Hillary Clinton =The Pig In A Pantsuit (The PIAPS))
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To: Ennis85

Paul said “but such were some of you.”

There are plenty of people who think homosexuality is undoable, but the Lord is bigger than any sin or circumstance.

Where Jabez called out to the Lord “If only you would enlarge my territory!” others might call out “Lord rescue me!” or even “Lord rescue me again!” (which is both plea and confession).

It works with heterosexual lust when said in faith.


5 posted on 03/12/2021 4:56:50 PM PST by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
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I wouldn’t bet on it sticking. I hope he finds peace and happiness.


6 posted on 03/12/2021 4:57:38 PM PST by bhl
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To: Fai Mao

Trust but verify would be a good position to take here.


7 posted on 03/12/2021 4:58:30 PM PST by fwdude (Pass up too many hills to die on, and you will eventually fall off the edge of the world.)
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To: tennmountainman

“No” what?


8 posted on 03/12/2021 4:59:06 PM PST by fwdude (Pass up too many hills to die on, and you will eventually fall off the edge of the world.)
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To: Ennis85

My only contention is him announcing it so soon. Big announcements often lead to big failures. He didn’t have to announce it. It would have been better for him to only announce it after he has been free for a number of years, imo.


9 posted on 03/12/2021 5:00:37 PM PST by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults. )
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To: bhl

I agree. It’s an uphill battle but I’ll be rooting for him.


10 posted on 03/12/2021 5:00:49 PM PST by Mr. N. Wolfe
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To: Ennis85

He has mentioned numerous times he was not happy with the gay lifestyle and wanted to go straight.


11 posted on 03/12/2021 5:01:14 PM PST by setter
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To: Ennis85

As long as it sends the homo mafia off the rails, I love it.


12 posted on 03/12/2021 5:01:16 PM PST by moehoward (.)
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To: Ennis85

No, he isn’t just gay, he’s flamboyantly gay.


13 posted on 03/12/2021 5:01:56 PM PST by Husker24
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To: Ennis85

I listened to Milo being interviewed by Jordan Peterson; I believe the interview was done in the last month or so. And while he did admit (more or less) that his homosexuality was not good, I didn’t pickup any sense of repentance.

Has he made a statement since then?


14 posted on 03/12/2021 5:02:10 PM PST by jonno (Having an opinion is not the same as having the answer...)
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To: jonno

The fact that he can admit that there is something wrong with being gay us a good first step.


15 posted on 03/12/2021 5:04:46 PM PST by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults. )
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To: fwdude; Ennis85

I don’t really care either way, but he’s a provocateur so I’d make a small wager he’s just taking a stab at the woke... pun intended.


16 posted on 03/12/2021 5:06:27 PM PST by monkeyshine (live and let live is dead)
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To: Ennis85

Don’t care one way or the other.

He’s tweaking the heck out of the Left, just like the #SuperStraight people are doing.


17 posted on 03/12/2021 5:07:09 PM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda esta)
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To: Ennis85

Wish him well on his journey


18 posted on 03/12/2021 5:07:38 PM PST by abigkahuna (How can you be at two places at once when you are nowhere at all?)
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To: Ennis85

I don’t know. There are certainly bisexual men who could be reasonably happy with only women but choose homosexuality for various reasons. Not sure if that’s the case with Milo but he’s said that a factor in his homosexuality was to piss off his mom or shock people. Then again, the guy is an admitted provocateur, this could be all about pissing off gay libs.


19 posted on 03/12/2021 5:11:21 PM PST by Win94
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To: Ennis85

Milo never claimed he went straight as in becoming attracted to women. He claims he is now living a chaste celibate life consecrated to Saint Joseph.


20 posted on 03/12/2021 5:11:30 PM PST by lastchance
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