Sunday 01 • 13 • 19

Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed and its fruit. You shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. This is the book of the generations of Adam when God created man. He made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them and He blessed them and named them man when they were created. — Genesis 1:26-31; 5:1-2

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you join me in praying together? Father, pray that the words of my mouth, the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. Lord, you are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. We pray these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

So glad to see you all here this morning. I have to confess last Sunday was the highest attendance we've ever had at CTK by about 75 people, and I expected maybe a dozen of people to be back. And that's because we're in week two of a series on gender and gender identity. This is a really difficult topic for our culture right now, and it is very much part of what's happening in terms of cultural conversation in the news.

I won't repeat everything I said last week. I gave a number of caveats last week, but I'll give this one again this morning. I'm going to talk about a lot of things within which there's a lot of disagreement in our culture. And I want to give you permission to sit here and think this morning and to not necessarily have to agree with everything I say.

But it's really important in a cultural moment where people don't know how to talk anymore. We just get on social media and shout at each other. We tune in to things that we want to hear. It's really important as a community that we learn how to have conversations of consequence, and we learn how to disagree agreeably and agree to disagree.

So I want to encourage you in processing this not to just leave in the middle and to stick around for the whole series. This is sort of a big unit we're doing together. And I ask you to think and participate and engage. We have community groups. We're having a forum on gender in February. There'll be lots of opportunity for you to talk as well. So I want to encourage you in that.

The Cultural Moment

Let me start here today. Maybe you just noticed it, but something's new. I think a lot of people woke up to this in 2015 when Diane Sawyer did a really famous interview with former Olympic star Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, who's transitioned fully and prefers to go by female pronouns and express her gender identity as female.

Then maybe you saw this over the last year: a number of the major news media outlets have done feature stories on gender. Time Magazine said that we've arrived at the transgender tipping point. National Geographic, which is hardly on the cutting edge of sensational material, had a special issue this past year called the gender revolution. New York State just passed a law that now on your birth certificate, you can choose not male or female, but X for the gender of your child. Some of you have children who've come home from school and talked about people in their class who want to use different pronouns to identify themselves.

Regardless, I want to welcome you to the gender revolution. And just like in the 1960s when the sexual revolution crashed like a tidal wave on this country, we are right now in this moment in the midst of an enormous shift in our culture—in our language, way of talking and thinking. And it feels like a tidal wave to some.

But this is not sudden. This is not actually all that revolutionary. This has been going on for a while. I think it's The Economist magazine from this past year, 2018, that nails the issue behind the issue, nails the question behind all the questions. The cover story for The Economist was, "Who decides your gender?" I think that is a great question.

And I think it's actually the question that we need to talk about and think about this morning. Who decides? Who determines who you are? Who determines personhood? Who determines how you express yourself? So here's where we're going today. Here's my sermon outline if you take notes. The only two options: the tragic winner, and our greatest hope. I'm going to give a nod to this. A lot of my material comes from a book by Rosaria Butterfield called Openness Unhindered. I'm not going to cite her at every place, but I just want you to know that if you want to read further on this.

The Only Two Options

First, we have one statement about personhood and identity that comes from God, and we read this in Genesis chapter one and it's repeated again in Genesis chapter five. This statement from verses 26 through 27, the definitive statement on human beings.

Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created him. — Genesis 1:26-27

This is the definitive statement on human personhood. Male and female equally image bearers of God. This is repeated. Part of our call to worship this morning was from Psalm chapter eight, which says:

Who is man that you're mindful of him? What are human beings? God has made them a little lower than the angels, crowned them with glory and honor. — Psalm 8

Now, you may not realize this, but this opening statement in the Bible is the highest statement of human personhood in any religious system, in any philosophical system in the world. It says you are intentionally designed by the God of the universe. You are not a walking fish. You're not a cosmic accident. This isn't random, and you're not random. In fact, your very soul bears the fingerprints of God Almighty. He designed you, and He values you, and He rejoices over how He's made you. This is an incredible statement on human personhood. You are the very pinnacle of His creation. You are made in His image. And why? For His glory. For His glory.

Now, what does that image consist in? Theologians have debated this. Is the image of God who you are? Is it a statement of ontological being—something that every person just is—or is it a statement of what you do? Is it about activities that you do that reflect God into the world? The answer is yes. It encompasses both of those things.

Think about a copy machine. By its very name, it tells you both what it is and what it's for. It tells you a statement of ontological being—it is a machine that copies. But it also tells you about its function, what it is to do. It is to make copies, and it is most doing what it's made to do when it's copying copies. That's the constitution and purpose. And that's true with you too.

You have a constitution—a statement about who you are, an ontological statement of being. You are made in God's image and likeness. Every person. Martin Luther King Junior said it this way: "There are no gradations in the image of God." Every person. Gendered. Different races. Different capacities, different struggles. All of us are made and bear the fingerprints of God Almighty on us.

But it also means what we're for—that we are here to show forth God's glory in this world. God has uniquely designed every one of you to do that. It's an incredible statement. But I want you to think about that for a second because packed into the Bible's answer for this, packed into these first verses here in Genesis, is a statement about how we receive that. That is a statement that God makes over us and that we receive. He designs us, and so He has the right to define who we are. We receive this identity—these three big words that define so much of who you are: image of God, image bearer. We receive those.

Now that's really different from the world that we live in right now. In fact, it's the opposite. Our culture says that we are entering into an era of liquid identity—that we don't think of gender as a biologically fixed thing or categorically binary. Instead, the generation coming up is growing up in a world where we think of gender as a spectrum, and people are somewhere on that spectrum. You determine who you are by discovering your core identity and then projecting that to the world. That's really different. Determining your gender identity is no longer understood as some kind of biological endeavor.

It's now a social psychological endeavor that you do by this inward search and asking questions: What do I think and feel about who I think I am? That's where this comes from. How do I feel about what I've been labeled? How do I express that?

So let me ask this question: Is that something to be celebrated or is that something for concern? See, I want us to think about how we got to this point. Those two worldviews—that gender is something that you discover inside yourself, or there's a statement that God makes over you of who you are—those are two radically different ideas. And how do we get here? A lot of this goes back to language. There's an old Marxist saying that says, if you change the language, you change the logic. And that's at root behind so much of what's happening and the discussions and actually a lot of the upheaval in our culture around gender right now. Change the language, you change the logic.

So let's think about this, and I'm going to get into some weeds. So just hang with me. You all are smart people. You can hang with this. Okay? Prior to the nineteenth century, regardless of faith background, it was a universal agreed upon thing that your gender was determined that the beginning end of this was decided when the doctor picked you up by your ankles, smacked you on the backside, and said it's a blank. Right? That statement was sort of the beginning and the ending of that. But something has changed, and I want to point to two particular aspects, movements in our culture that have changed. First is Sigmund Freud, and the second is the sexual revolution.

Historical Influences on Gender Understanding

Sigmund Freud, the twentieth century saw the rise of Freudian studies really permeating all of culture. Sigmund Freud, psychotherapist who did a lot to understand sex and gender, and yet he was working within a movement. He was himself influenced and very much the child of German Romanticism. Now you may not care about German Romanticism. This may have been a history class you had at one point. But let me remind you about a couple things you need to know about German Romanticism.

German Romanticism is a thought movement that basically says your identity is what you experience. You are defined by your experiences. In fact, that's not just how you express yourself, but it's how you know what you know. And there's no other thing from outside of you—whether it's this book or another worldview or system—that should determine that. So if you hear people say things like, "Hey, that's your truth. This is my truth," that is a German Romanticism statement. Or if you hear teenagers say, "Hey, you do you, I do me"—they may not know it, but they're very much German romantics at that moment. Right? They're tapping into something that goes way back to German Romanticism that Freud very much defines, and it helped kind of define what is gender.

The result is that instead of truth being something that's outside of you, that you receive that explains who you are, now it's you look inside of you to figure that out. Now add this to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The sexual revolution of the 1960s basically said we're no longer just human beings, we are sexual beings. And we began to define ourselves by the objects of our desire. And the objects of our desire become—we understand ourselves as like, we are sexual beings, and what we desire should not be questioned, should not be challenged.

So think about this. Step back for a second and think about where we're sitting this morning on this whole historic survey real quick. Because it's a gigantic shift. It's a gigantic shift from God gives us this statement of image bearer that says, "This is who you are. This is what you're made for," and you receive it. To now being in a place where I decide who I am, I figure that out by this interior search within me based on my experiences, and I project that into the world. Those two things could not be more different.

See, the potter and the clay have changed positions. The potter before defined what the clay was. Now the clay is saying, "This is who I am, and this is actually how I want to define the potter." So who determines your identity? Me or God? Me. I discover that by my experience and desires. Again, change the language, change the logic.

Now, along comes Michel Foucault, who's really the philosophical founder of the postmodernism, postmodern way of looking at linguistics. It's all about power. He died in the 1980s. He was a gay activist. And he had a seminal work that was called The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. And this is what he says. He's talking about his own experiences as a gay man in the United States. He says, "Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed, this is in the early twentieth century, from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, hermaphrodism of the soul."

The hermaphrodite has been a temporary aberration. The homosexual is now its own species. He's describing what's happened in the 1970s with the beginning of the gender identity movement. So what was he saying? I know that's kind of thick for us this morning, but what is he saying?

Homosexuality used to be an adjective or a verb. It used to be something that you did. Now it's been transposed into what you are. It's a noun. And he's like, yeah, we won. Because if you change the language, you change the logic. When you change language, verbs and adjectives into nouns, you create a new sense of meaning and identity in the world.

The same thing has happened with gender. A few years ago, transgender was a verb. So we would have said years ago, Caitlyn Jenner is transgendered. That's a verb. Now we'd say, Caitlyn Jenner is a transgender. Again, it's a noun.

See, some of you are like, so what? I know I'm an English major, so you're like, why do you care? We're picking apart words. Let's think about this. You all went through elementary school, right? And your mama told you things like sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt you, right? Words will never hurt me. You all know she's wrong. Words have power. Words have immense power. How we talk very much determines how we think. It's very much about logic.

So the categories of sexual orientation and now gender identity move people into a new species. And let's think about that. Wouldn't we think it was cruel as a church to define someone by their sin patterns? You know, if you struggled with overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, what if we said you are a gluttony Christian? I mean, that would be viewed as cruel. How dare we define someone by a fallen pattern of relating to food? We would view that as horrible. And yet it's very much celebrated in our culture to define someone according to a pattern of fallen sexuality or fallen gender identity. Do we really want to do that? We're creating a new species of person that we're defining around patterns of fallenness.

Language Becoming Law

What's happening now is that this language is now law. And 2015 was a landmark year for gender identity and sexual orientation in this country. 2015 saw the passing of Obergefell versus Hodges, a very famous court case, a landmark case, and it gave same-sex couples the right to marry.

Now I don't know what you think about that. You may think, well, okay, we gave gay couples the right to civil union. But a lot more happened with that than maybe a lot of people realized. Because when the Supreme Court ruled in that way, they actually created and defined a new category of person called gay people, and those persons are in very much in need of civil rights. That's what the outcome of that Supreme Court case was.

But later in the year, President Obama went one step further and signed into law the Equality Act in November 2015, which extends Title IX protections to those including gender identity under the law. So the Supreme Court decision did a lot more than just create civil union. It identified new categories of personhood. Change the language, you change the logic.

Jonathan Rausch, who's a gay journalist, wrote a memoir called Denial: My Twenty-Five Years Without a Soul, and he rightly identifies this. He says, "The gay soul was born after Obergefell." He writes, "They have found at last a name for my soul. It's not monster or eunuch, nor indeed homosexual, it is husband." And he is making a theological statement in that moment, using the language of soul. Like, this is who I am, and I've discovered this, and this is a big deal.

Gender identity has undergone the same revolution in the way we talk about language.

The DSM and Changing Terminology

There's a psychiatric manual called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's used by clinicians and psychiatrists to diagnose psychiatric illnesses. For years, people who have struggled with—this is what it says—on my birth certificate, I don't feel like this. According to the DSM, older versions of the DSM, that was labeled as sexual perversion. You may not like that language, but it was viewed as, okay, this is something that needs intervention. It's a pathology that needs some treatment.

Round four of the DSM, DSM-IV, came out years ago and says, no, no, we're changing the language from sexual perversion to gender identity disorder. But it still has the language there of disorder, right—something that's wrong that needs to be ordered.

Well, in 2013, the new DSM comes out with gender dysphoria as the language. Now that is a very neutral term. And what is dysphoria? Nobody really knows what that word means. It rhymes with euphoria, which sounds good, right, like happy.

So it's sort of this neutral term. And again, I want to show you what's now in question: this whole language of "assigned gender." As if when you were a baby, just born, and the doctor picks you up by your feet and slaps your butt and says, "It's a blank"—she wasn't wearing her glasses that day and maybe made a mistake. See, now it's not an internal pathology. Now it's something that looks like this is its own thing. And that's separate, and that's okay.

But here's what I want you to see: those two changes—and you may really disagree with me about this, okay? We're okay to disagree. But sexual orientation and gender identity are on a collision course with this. They are on a radical collision course with this.

And you may say, "I don't see that." Well, they're on a collision course in this way: either we have identity because God says, "This is who you are," and it's an incredible statement of personhood, or you say, "I have identity based on what I find here inside of me. What I discover. What I think I am, and I project that to the world."

And I'm sorry to say this, but those are binaries. It's either one or the other. You can't say, "Well, God says, but I also say." It's either I receive this from God or I discover this on my own.

The Tragic Winner

Now, here's where we're going with this: there is a tragic winner to that. And it's clearly not this. It's clearly not God's word. The tragic winner is that gender identity is, in our culture right now, clearly the winner. Hands up, ding ding ding—you know, it's won. Right? Gender identity is the reigning ideology of our day.

And I say tragic because it is a tragedy that you define yourself by what you feel. Now that may feel like winning, but it's really losing. And I want to show you this.

See, how many of us have craved Moose Tracks or pizza late at night, eaten way too much of it, and regretted it the next day? Well, lots of us. This has happened over and over. Or I've had too much to drink. I've had too much to eat. Right? And you're like, "I'm never going to do that again"—and you do, right? Like, you do those things.

Or how many people—let's talk about your friends, not you, okay?—have gotten a tattoo at one point in your life which was really meaningful, and later on you're like, "Why did I think that was a good idea? That was the dumbest thing I could ever put on my body. I don't like him anymore. I don't like her anymore. I don't even know what that thing means. It looks weird."

Like, we're just talking ice cream and ink, right? But here's the question that's never asked. But far too often in the gender identity discussion, here's the question that's never addressed: Which self gets to choose? Right. Which self are we talking about? Which self do I trust to define my gender or what I'm about or my identity?

Is it my Monday self or my Tuesday self? Is it my 2015 self or my 2019 self? Is it my family self or my friend self? Is it my work self or my home self? You know, it's not just that there are all these voices out in the culture that are confusing and saying lots of things. I don't know about you, but I got lots of voices inside of me that are saying lots of different things all the time.

I think you are too fickle, changeable, moody. And what we don't see—what's hidden in this whole throwing off of outside voices—like this word, right? Like what God says, that defines who I am? What we miss in that is actually we're now not enslaved to this bad book anymore. We're enslaved to the ideology of self.

And man, that is dangerous. That is scary. To define yourself by how you feel is incredibly tragic. And the devastation will come out more and more over the next few decades as we see people who in a moment make a decision about hormone therapy or about surgery—and those are unchangeable.

This is happening with our middle schoolers. Like some of you all, you're already on a course in your life, right? You've decided kind of what you're doing for your work or who you're going to be with for long term or where you're going to live. But it's our middle schoolers and our high schoolers where this battle is raging hot right now.

And they come home from school. Ask your kids. This is live and this is a big deal, especially in Raleigh. This is the center point for this—a lot of this discussion in the country. You may not realize this. Raleigh is the epicenter for this.

See, they experience a world in which any hint of questioning your gender or your identity—people just rush in and celebrate that. Now, can I tell you about middle school Jeff Bradford? Like, I thought there was something radically wrong with me. I thought I had like an extra arm. I was deeply insecure.

And if somebody had rushed in and said, hey, this is who you are, I would have been like, okay. Right? This is what middle school life is like for many people. This is why Christians—and you're going to think I'm crazy—this is why Christians must oppose this whole enterprise of redefining personhood. Redefining how you know who you are in the name of loving our neighbor. Now I know you probably look at me like, "You're nuts." And I know that there are lots of people outside this community who would say, "That's crazy," but there's too much at stake. There's too much at stake.

This new language of sexual orientation and gender identity are category mistakes. And here's what I mean: the loss of personhood defined by God, the consignment of a person to a fallen sexual desire, the tragedy of defining yourself by what you feel. Look, if we want to really love our neighbors, we're going to have to do the very unpopular thing of sticking with this book and what it says. And that's radically unpopular and it's only going to become more so. I know what the gay community would say in response to this sermon. They would be like, "Hey, if this is what loving people looks like, we've had quite enough. Thanks very much, Christian people." But this is in the name of love and I want to show you this.

The Gospel as Our Hope

See, what is our hope? What is our only hope and the best thing we have to offer? It's this: the gospel. Remember that? Remember the gospel?

The gospel comes to us as good news of what God does, not about what you do. The gospel comes to us with good news of what God says about me apart from anything I do, anything I merit, anything I accomplish, apart from my ability to ruin it, apart from my ability to send it away. Nothing changes it. The gospel comes to me as good news no matter how I feel on a given day. It's always a word from God outside of you.

See, justification—like we sat last year in the book of Romans for months. I mean, some of you are like, "Can we please get out of Romans, right?" We sat in Romans because Romans is good news about justification. A word that God declares over you with a statement of identity that you can't change. And it's summarizing this: in Christ. In Christ, right? Apart from you that we receive. And man, we need that. We need a voice from outside of self, from outside of self that determines my identity and your identity. We need that so much.

If you've been a Christian longer than like a minute, you know this, right? Longer than a minute. Because how many of you have had days when you don't feel like God's real? You don't know if any of this stuff is true and you don't even know if you're a Christian. Anybody else? I said, anybody else? Right? I mean, all of us have those moments like, "I don't know. I'm so changeable." And what we need in those moments is not, "Hey, listen to your heart." That is not helpful. That is not helpful to me or you. It's listen to the truth outside of you about who you are.

What I need in those moments, what you need in those moments, is another believer who looks you in the eye and says, "Guess what? Nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. Still true today. Still true today as it was yesterday." Listening to your feelings, defining yourself by your feelings in those moments would be a tragedy. It would be a tragedy. Rather, what you need is a declaration outside of you that tells you who you are.

Archimedes—remember Archimedes? He was the mathematician who said this famously. He says, "If you can give me a fixed point in the universe, like a hard, heavy rock place, I can put a lever there, a fulcrum and a giant lever. I could pick up the whole earth." A point outside of the earth that can lift anything. And see, what we need is an Archimedean point for us in the morass of all of our sin and fear and condemnation and shame and guilt and all the things that you and I live in every day that tells us: this is who you are. This is who you are.

The two highest and most powerful statements, the verdicts that a human being can receive, that we can hear, are these two statements: image bearer and in Christ. Two most powerful life-shaping, life-altering realities that we need spoken over us. This is where hope comes from and they're available. Let me say this really clear. They're available to all of us. All people, gay or straight, cisgender, gender fluid—the hope of the gospel is for all.

But look, if we say, "God, you don't have a right to tell me who I am," see, we not only cut out the legs from under the image bearer statement, but we cut the legs out from under the in Christ statement too. "You don't have a right to tell me who I am." Yeah. Praise God, He does. I need Him to.

See, what you and I most long to hear is that you're in. You're welcomed. You're a part. You're in Him, and nothing can change that. Maybe you're here this morning and you struggle with gender dysphoria.

Or you struggle with same sex attraction. You just feel completely missed and alienated by the sermon this morning. Maybe you're like, Man, this has been nothing but discouraging. Thanks, bald guy. Can I offer you a word of hope? Can I say this to you? Like, you may feel like, man, I feel like I was born this way. I feel like this is who I am. Don't you have anything good to say to me? Yeah, I do. Here's the hope.

See, original sin means that, yeah, maybe you were born this way. And it may be how you are, but it's not who you are. You know, in the eyes of God and His people, your gender dysphoria, your same sex attraction, that is not who you are. If you are in Christ, you are in Christ. And it may be how you are. Yes, sin has corrupted all kinds of parts of this world, including you and me. And you may have hard things to bear in your life, like crosses to bear with regard to gender and unwanted struggles over gender dysphoria or unwanted struggles over same sex attraction. You may have unwanted things to bear in your life that other Christians around you don't have to bear. You may go, like, that's not fair. But listen, if you are in Christ, you may have to bear that cross, but you are not bearing a curse. You are not bearing a curse. This is the good news. A word from beyond you, a word of identity for you. You are in Christ. Don't miss this. Don't miss the good news of this.

This is what all people need, not freedom to be myself. The Christian gospel says that myself, apart from God, is always sinful and broken and flawed and self-destructive. It's always those things. Rather, what we most need, what every person most needs is intervention. A God who shows up and doesn't let me just be as I am. Rather, an incredible gospel of incredible hope. A God who finds us just as we are and promises that He values us. You're made in My image, and you're covered in my fingerprints. I delight in how I made you and I place this seal of approval over your life in Christ. New identity that provides new hope, new comfort, new security, new life.

See, he will change you more and more into the image and likeness of his dear son whom he loves. This is great news. See, not a freedom to be just as you are—false gospel. That sounds really nice, but there's no hope in it. It is bankrupt. It is bankrupt.

See, the Lord identifies us according to these two categories: in Him or not in Him. And this is what we want for all people. We want every person to be in Christ. So we want everyone to know these four words: image bearer and in Christ.

Here, let me put this on you, and I'm going to put something on you this morning. These are hard things to talk about, and a lot of Christians would rather moonwalk out of the room like, I'm not wanting to engage in this conversation. But C. S. Lewis rightly puts the fate and future of the people around us on our own shoulders and responsibility. In his sermon, The Weight of Glory, he talks about the people around you as image bearers. And the question behind what I'm about to read is this: where are you helping people to move?

So he writes this:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, that is fellow image bearers, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may be one day a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long, we are in some degree helping one another to one or the other of these destinations. It's in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it's with all the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. It is immortals with whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit, immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. — C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

What he's saying is, look, are you helping people move toward what is the truth beyond all truth? The hope beyond all hope. See, the alternatives are clear. We either say, I'm who I define myself to be or receive a statement from God of the greatest hope. The stakes are high because we're either helping people move toward Him or away from Him.

People are dying right now under the delusion that truth is whatever you want it to be. People are lost because they think you can find yourself by looking inside. And the Gospel is too good just to let it be mediocre news by removing its offense and its power.

See, this is one of the reasons we exist as a church. We want every man, woman, and child in the greater Raleigh area to know these four words: image bearer and in Christ. Let's do nothing to remove the hope and the power of those words for us and for those around us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.