Posted on 02/27/2011 8:24:18 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Though many Christians are going to try to deny "the obvious," evangelical leader Dr. Albert Mohler believes gay marriage is going to become normalized.
"I think it's clear that something like same-sex marriage is going to become normalized, legalized and recognized in the culture. It's time for Christians to start thinking about how we're going to deal with that," he said Friday on the Focus on the Family radio program.
Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was speaking in response to the Obama administration's decision this week to stop defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act – federal law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman – in the courts.
Conservative groups and Christians have criticized Obama for going against his duty as president to defend the law.
"When a president takes oath of office, he's upholding ... defending the laws of the United States of America," said Mohler, who also noted that DOMA had passed as a bipartisan effort.
"The White House has clearly made a calculation that it can do this now with far less political risk than it could even two years ago."
Though Obama has always expressed his desire to repeal DOMA, his personal view on marriage had been traditional.
While on the campaign trail, running as the Democratic presidential nominee, Obama asserted his belief that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. He added, while being interviewed by Pastor Rick Warren, that "for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. God's in the mix."
Recently, however, he has stated that his views on gay marriage are "evolving."
The Obama administration has been pro-gay since taking office two years ago and Mohler noted that there has been a long trajectory on the issue of gay marriage pointing to this day.
With the Justice Department now pulling its defense of DOMA, pending legal challenges against the federal law will likely result with the nullification of DOMA, Mohler predicted.
"You can say, the cards are pretty much stacked against DOMA," he illustrated.
He warned that when Christians feel threatened, they have to be careful not to lash out with a predictable response.
The Southern Baptist made it clear that he was not saying that they are giving up. Marriage is still an institution Christians need to save, particularly in their own community. But Christians also need to start learning how to deal with the shifting culture and even face the fact that they may lose a few from their flock.
"I think we're going to be surprised and heartbroken over how many people are going to capitulate to the spirit of the age," he noted. "We're going to find now that there may not be as many of us as we thought."
Nevertheless, Christians must be prepared to make marriage one of the many topics where parents have to have "the talk."
"It's interesting now that the world is so morally upside down that when we talk about marriage we have to make a distinction between natural marriage – heterosexual marriage – and this new thing that people are calling marriage," Mohler said.
"We have to prepare our children to be in a context in which they're going to be in a playground with children who have two dads or two moms or who knows what kind of combination will come."
Ultimately, the worldview or the belief that God designed marriage to be between a man and a woman only makes sense if one understands the Gospel, Mohler pointed out, which raises a critical point:
"This whole situation reminds us that we are, first of all, to be Gospel people who are fellow sinners ... saved by grace, with the responsibility to share the Gospel with others."
Sure sounds like it to me. The article is all about how christians need to conform to the "new reality".
Moeller isn’t saying Christians should accept gay marriage. He’s saying the heathen world is going to accept it as normal and he’s right. He’s also right in saying we as Christians should prepare for how we are going to deal with this to insure our Churches and especially our children are not infected with the spirit of acceptance of this worldly perversion. Just as God warned the Jews to resist the idols and false religions of those around them so too are we called to resist and not succomb to the unholy spirit of this world we are just visitors in. And now that unholy spirit seems to include gay marriage.
No. The church needs to be the church, and get off its tin can and win people to Christ. That is how society is changed. There is no other way.
The Bible is clear about homosexuality. It’s an abomination and a sin. Those Christians who feel otherwise will face judgment for what they did in perverting Gods commandment.
How about NO, I will not recognize fake marriage, even if it allowed by the state. -J.S.
“We have to prepare our children to be in a context in which they’re going to be in a playground with children who have two dads or two moms or who knows what kind of combination will come.”
Wrong! Should be, “We have to prepare our children to be in a context in which they’re going to be in a playground with children IN BONDAGE TO ADULTS PRETENDING TO BE two dads or two moms or who knows what kind of combination will come.”
As Christians we deal with it the same way we are dealing with abortion. We oppose it, consider it a crime, march in the streets, push for changes in the law and elect our representatives accordingly.
"Dealing" with it implies compromise.
Repudiating it should be all that's offered.
I pray you're right on the first account and hope you're wrong on the second. Unfortunately, I too believe some, if not many, churches will be willing to do so.
I know you won't believe this, but a complete moral/ethical meltdown will be every bit as devastating to society, and possibly longer lasting, as a financial meltdown.
Perhaps not your church, but of course, Catholics get civil divorces - all the time. It's just not recognized by the church until an "annulment" is granted - divorce by another name.
Amen. We can never give up. And our fight is more than winnable.
God also tolerated Sodom and Gomorrah's depravity until the putrid stench of disgusting homosexual practices became too much for Him to bear. He would have honored His word to Abraham by giving those cities another chance to repent if He could have found ten righteous men in the two cities. But He couldn't, and as He promised He destroyed both cities and everyone in them except eight members of righteous Lot's family. And unless the American people stop our liberal government's dismantling of every legal restraint on moral depravity in order to gain the backing of a tiny but very influential and wealthy minority, His judgment will eventually fall on us as it did on those two cities.
And God's judgment could very well come in the guise of Islamic jihad. According to several articles published in the well respected Claremont Institute's journals,(www.Claremont_Institute.org) detonation of a single mid-size nuclear explosive device 180 to 300 miles above mid-America would create a massive electro-magnetic pulse that would destroy practically every electric grid, electronic instrument, and electromechanical device in north America. Our cars, trucks, trains, and aircraft wouldn't run, our electronic communications systems would stop functioning, electronic medical equipment would stop working, transportation and distribution of food and fuels would stop dead it's tracks, gas and diesel pumps wouldn't pump, etc, etc. And most important, our electronics-dependent air, sea, and land based defense systems would be put out of service, thereby rendering us virtually incapable of defending ourselves against the murderous violence and destruction that millions of fanatical jihadists are eager to inflict on us even at the cost of their lives. All that would be required to wreak that kind of death and destruction on America is an apparently innocent commercial freighter sailing 200 miles or so offshore carrying a mid-range missile armed with a relatively small nuclear explosive device. Death and destruction on that almost unimaginable scale would be a very high price to pay just to satisfy the depraved sexual appetite of perhaps one or two percent of America's population.
My serious, horrific guess is that they will begin attacking age-of-consent laws in order to access new "meat" legally. It's already been reduced to 15 in Marxistchusetts. Don't think they won't try, at first, to export this abominable practice into other states and then to push for a national "age of consent" level - for "civil rights" sake, of course.
"These people don’t stop. Once they reach a threshold, they immediately start pushing for the next one. They are never happy."
No, they don't. Judge Bork was painstakingly accurate in his prophetic book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, where he said that once a boundary is breached, there is no logical argument to deny the breaching of other set societal boundaries. We've allowed this breach by "not caring what people do behind closed doors." We used to, by maintaining laws against indecency and sodomy laws, and our societal censure against public affirmation of this perverse activity was fairly sound. But once these were swept away, there was nothing else to prevent the horrific onslaught of what we're seeing.
kingattax wrote:
“Christians Need to Prepare for Normalization of Gay Marriage”
No. those who support and sanction this perversion and abomination need to prepare for God’s judgement by repenting and seeking His forgiveness.
I agree! Submitting to this abomination(and Scripture calls it exactly that) amounts to bowing to Satan and denying the Word of God. Violence isn’t called for but avoidance and reproval of this blatant flaunting of Christianity certainly is. No violence is required to mark and avoid anyone who practices this vile lifestyle or anything that has to do with it.
Watch now! What is coming soon is making the Christian act of preaching the sinfullness of this lifestyle and these people unlawful and a “hate crime”. That would make it unlawful for ministers to preach the entire Word of God to their congregations. Anyone who allows a government or anyone else to prevent the preaching of the Bible is guilty of denyiing the Word of God. It’s that simple.
Many preachers have been dancing around the subject and avoiding it for decades. That’s why we find ourselves where we are today.
Hate the act and not the person? Proverbs 23:7 “As a man thinketh, so is he in his heart.”
Psalm 139:21 “Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD, and abhor those who rise up against you?”
Psalm 26:5 I abhor the assembly of evildoers and refuse to sit with the wicked.
He’s not surrendering. Did you read the whole thing? He’s warning us to prepare for persecution without being too alarmist about it.
I’ve been predicting this since 1995—when Newt Gingrich, fresh off the 1994 victory, started making nice with the gay Repubics. It told me that enough “conservatives” would go awol on the issue to permit it to go mainstream.
I don’t particularly like Mohler—I’m Catholic and he doesn’t seem to “get it” much of the time doctrinally, but on this issue he’s right-on.
The trend was established when the big corporations started instituting gay-friendly policies, basically because of the money available from childless gay consumers. That began the mainstreaming—IBM etc.
Mohler’s right: sodomy will be mainstreamed and all those who refuse to agree and bless it (it’s not about tolerance and never has been) will be penalized (first tax exemptions but then, for those who don’t cave at that, fines and then imprisonment in “sensitivity training centers”). My own Cardinal Archbishop basically predicted this would happen already 10 years ago and appealed to Catholics to be prepared to follow their bishops into prison.
Sorry, but while that may seem to be required by “free expression of religion,” you will wake up one day and see them forced to marry gay couples or pay a penalty, just as the innkeepers in Illinois recently or the photographer in New Mexico or the fertility physician in Los Angeles etc. were forced either to aid and abet sodomy or pay a fine or other penalty.
Gays are a protected class, which means refusing to do what they want is hateful, bigoted, discriminatory. They can and will pass laws that penalize such refusals. It will happen. Get out of fantasy-land and smell the coffee. It’s coming. They will first intimidate the fence-straddlers with minor measures,then bring out the big guns for those who continue to resist.
Yes, we can and will resist. They can’t force us. But they can and will make the price for resisting severe.
I've witnessed our decline firsthand; the growing rebellion among the young adults in the Church, the rise of "Christian contemporary" rock music, the transformation of churches from houses of worship to centers of entertainment (complete with gymnasiums, playgrounds and "campuses,") the "business/marketing" mentality becoming the all-engrossing concern of the highest levels of leadership. It's absolutely tragic, and it has been deadly.
Churches get a federal tax exemption, and the liberals will use that as a weapon against the church. The federal government, given the right combination of legislators, bureaucrats and judges, will bend the churches to their will.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.