Was Chris Broussard Right?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - On April 29th, NBA star Jason Collins

00:00:07.800 | announced that he is gay,

00:00:09.480 | and in doing so, he became the first openly gay

00:00:11.640 | professional athlete in American team sports,

00:00:13.520 | at least male team sports.

00:00:15.400 | Collins also claims to be a Christian.

00:00:18.160 | In response to the announcement,

00:00:19.520 | ESPN analyst Chris Broussard responded by saying this.

00:00:23.720 | - Personally, I don't believe that you can live

00:00:27.080 | an openly homosexual lifestyle or an openly,

00:00:31.360 | like premarital sex between heterosexuals.

00:00:34.240 | If you're openly living that type of lifestyle,

00:00:37.440 | then the Bible says you know them by their fruits.

00:00:40.520 | It says that, you know, that's a sin.

00:00:43.320 | And if you're openly living in unrepentant sin,

00:00:46.200 | whatever it may be, not just homosexuality,

00:00:49.000 | adultery, fornication,

00:00:51.000 | premarital sex between heterosexuals,

00:00:52.920 | whatever it may be,

00:00:54.360 | I believe that's walking in open rebellion

00:00:57.480 | to God and to Jesus Christ.

00:00:59.280 | So I would not characterize that person as a Christian

00:01:02.120 | 'cause I don't think the Bible

00:01:03.720 | would characterize him as a Christian.

00:01:05.680 | - ESPN, of course, backed away from Broussard's statement,

00:01:08.120 | apologized and called it a distraction

00:01:10.520 | to Collins' announcement.

00:01:11.960 | And soon thereafter, Broussard got called things like

00:01:14.520 | unkind, hateful, abusive, intolerant, and bigot

00:01:18.340 | for what he said on air.

00:01:19.680 | But the foundational question to begin with,

00:01:21.640 | Pastor John, is this one.

00:01:22.920 | Is Broussard right in what he said?

00:01:25.480 | - I listened to the excerpt.

00:01:29.000 | I didn't hear the whole program.

00:01:31.480 | And my answer is yes, he's right.

00:01:35.800 | And I think he would agree with a few clarifying comments.

00:01:40.800 | So let me expand the simple yes answer

00:01:44.800 | just so that people can hear my heart

00:01:48.240 | and I think his heart behind that

00:01:49.640 | and a richer, fuller biblical understanding.

00:01:54.640 | All brokenness is owing to sin,

00:01:59.920 | but it's not a sin to be broken.

00:02:04.040 | When I say all brokenness is owing to sin,

00:02:07.480 | I mean all brokenness is owing to putting other treasures

00:02:12.480 | where God's supreme worth belongs.

00:02:17.000 | And it doesn't mean that you did that.

00:02:18.600 | Somebody else might have done it and then affected you.

00:02:21.800 | So for example, it's not a sin to be an amputee,

00:02:26.580 | but you may have lost your leg

00:02:30.320 | because someone sinned against you.

00:02:33.280 | Or it might have been your own sin.

00:02:35.000 | You might have been planting a terrorist bomb

00:02:37.160 | and the thing went off early, blew your legs off.

00:02:39.120 | It doesn't mean that the absence of your legs

00:02:43.000 | for the rest of your life is sinful,

00:02:46.400 | that it's a sin to have no leg.

00:02:48.480 | Even though sin may have been at the root

00:02:50.920 | of why the leg is gone.

00:02:53.560 | And when sin came into the world through Adam and Eve,

00:02:55.960 | everything broke, everything broke.

00:02:58.720 | I'm broken and everybody else is broken

00:03:01.200 | and our desires are all broken.

00:03:04.200 | The sexual ones and the covetous ones

00:03:06.960 | and the proud ones and the anger ones,

00:03:09.360 | we're all a bunch of broken people,

00:03:12.800 | especially when it comes to our emotions.

00:03:16.080 | Now, that means that same sex desires

00:03:20.200 | are among those broken desires,

00:03:24.240 | among those brokennesses.

00:03:26.140 | They are disordered.

00:03:28.120 | They are out of order from the way God designed us

00:03:31.920 | in the beginning for a man and a woman.

00:03:35.400 | A parallel in me or most of us, Tony,

00:03:37.920 | I think would be the desire for human praise.

00:03:42.380 | I think virtually all humans,

00:03:44.400 | as I read Jesus and his anger

00:03:47.080 | and his condemnation of hypocrisy of the Pharisees

00:03:50.460 | and how they love to stand on the street corner

00:03:52.440 | and get human praise,

00:03:54.080 | I think all of us are disordered

00:03:58.720 | in the way we crave human approval

00:04:02.340 | over against God's approval.

00:04:05.360 | So because of my sin,

00:04:08.400 | my desire for human praise is a disordered desire.

00:04:13.640 | And if I give way to this desire,

00:04:17.100 | just like if the person with same sex desires

00:04:21.220 | gives way to his desires,

00:04:23.360 | we both will be living in sin.

00:04:26.200 | Now, that's what Chris Broussard

00:04:27.840 | called living in open rebellion.

00:04:29.840 | If you look at your disordered desire and say,

00:04:32.960 | "I don't care.

00:04:33.880 | "I'm going to embrace that and I'm gonna walk into it.

00:04:37.120 | "I'm gonna make that my identity and my life.

00:04:39.240 | "I'm gonna live it out."

00:04:40.200 | If I did that with human praise,

00:04:42.200 | I'd be living in idolatry and living in sin.

00:04:44.800 | And if a person with same sex desires

00:04:46.720 | does that with his sexual desires,

00:04:48.240 | he's living in idolatry, he's living in sin.

00:04:50.520 | And both of us are told,

00:04:52.640 | this is the key text in the New Testament

00:04:54.720 | or one of the key texts, 1 Corinthians 6,

00:04:57.200 | that idolaters and adulterers

00:04:59.640 | and men who practice homosexuality and thieves

00:05:02.880 | will not inherit the kingdom of God.

00:05:05.280 | And you can see the kind of lineup there.

00:05:09.800 | Homosexuality as a practice

00:05:13.200 | is not in a class by itself in the New Testament.

00:05:16.800 | It's lined up along with things like thievery

00:05:20.680 | and greed and idolatry,

00:05:23.360 | which means more things can lead to destruction

00:05:27.560 | than just homosexual practice.

00:05:29.880 | So what I think he was getting at

00:05:33.080 | and that he was right is that the Bible teaches

00:05:37.200 | that if we embrace our disordered desires,

00:05:41.920 | whether we're like kleptomaniacs or pyromaniacs

00:05:46.120 | and we just love to start fires or love to start,

00:05:48.880 | anything that's broken in us,

00:05:51.040 | if we embrace that and just set every house on fire

00:05:53.680 | in the neighborhood, we're gonna be guilty.

00:05:56.120 | And if we embrace our heterosexual cravings

00:06:00.080 | for a woman besides our wives,

00:06:01.840 | we're gonna be living in sin.

00:06:03.400 | And so it is, I think, with homosexual desires.

00:06:06.200 | So yeah, I think he was right on.

00:06:08.640 | If we're gonna be faithful to the Bible,

00:06:10.600 | we're going to say that the embrace of our brokenness

00:06:15.360 | and the living out of a life of homosexual activity

00:06:19.840 | is going to be a living in rebellion against God.

00:06:22.680 | - Thank you, Pastor John,

00:06:24.600 | and thank you for listening to this podcast.

00:06:26.040 | Please email your questions to us

00:06:27.680 | at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

00:06:30.040 | At desiringgod.org, you'll find thousands

00:06:31.760 | of other free resources online from John Piper.

00:06:34.440 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:06:35.440 | Thanks for listening.

00:06:36.600 | (upbeat music)

00:06:39.180 | (upbeat music)

00:06:41.760 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Was Chris Broussard Right?

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