(upbeat music) - On April 29th, NBA star Jason Collins announced that he is gay, and in doing so, he became the first openly gay professional athlete in American team sports, at least male team sports. Collins also claims to be a Christian. In response to the announcement, ESPN analyst Chris Broussard responded by saying this.

- Personally, I don't believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle or an openly, like premarital sex between heterosexuals. If you're openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits. It says that, you know, that's a sin. And if you're openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be, I believe that's walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ.

So I would not characterize that person as a Christian 'cause I don't think the Bible would characterize him as a Christian. - ESPN, of course, backed away from Broussard's statement, apologized and called it a distraction to Collins' announcement. And soon thereafter, Broussard got called things like unkind, hateful, abusive, intolerant, and bigot for what he said on air.

But the foundational question to begin with, Pastor John, is this one. Is Broussard right in what he said? - I listened to the excerpt. I didn't hear the whole program. And my answer is yes, he's right. And I think he would agree with a few clarifying comments. So let me expand the simple yes answer just so that people can hear my heart and I think his heart behind that and a richer, fuller biblical understanding.

All brokenness is owing to sin, but it's not a sin to be broken. When I say all brokenness is owing to sin, I mean all brokenness is owing to putting other treasures where God's supreme worth belongs. And it doesn't mean that you did that. Somebody else might have done it and then affected you.

So for example, it's not a sin to be an amputee, but you may have lost your leg because someone sinned against you. Or it might have been your own sin. You might have been planting a terrorist bomb and the thing went off early, blew your legs off. It doesn't mean that the absence of your legs for the rest of your life is sinful, that it's a sin to have no leg.

Even though sin may have been at the root of why the leg is gone. And when sin came into the world through Adam and Eve, everything broke, everything broke. I'm broken and everybody else is broken and our desires are all broken. The sexual ones and the covetous ones and the proud ones and the anger ones, we're all a bunch of broken people, especially when it comes to our emotions.

Now, that means that same sex desires are among those broken desires, among those brokennesses. They are disordered. They are out of order from the way God designed us in the beginning for a man and a woman. A parallel in me or most of us, Tony, I think would be the desire for human praise.

I think virtually all humans, as I read Jesus and his anger and his condemnation of hypocrisy of the Pharisees and how they love to stand on the street corner and get human praise, I think all of us are disordered in the way we crave human approval over against God's approval.

So because of my sin, my desire for human praise is a disordered desire. And if I give way to this desire, just like if the person with same sex desires gives way to his desires, we both will be living in sin. Now, that's what Chris Broussard called living in open rebellion.

If you look at your disordered desire and say, "I don't care. "I'm going to embrace that and I'm gonna walk into it. "I'm gonna make that my identity and my life. "I'm gonna live it out." If I did that with human praise, I'd be living in idolatry and living in sin.

And if a person with same sex desires does that with his sexual desires, he's living in idolatry, he's living in sin. And both of us are told, this is the key text in the New Testament or one of the key texts, 1 Corinthians 6, that idolaters and adulterers and men who practice homosexuality and thieves will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And you can see the kind of lineup there. Homosexuality as a practice is not in a class by itself in the New Testament. It's lined up along with things like thievery and greed and idolatry, which means more things can lead to destruction than just homosexual practice. So what I think he was getting at and that he was right is that the Bible teaches that if we embrace our disordered desires, whether we're like kleptomaniacs or pyromaniacs and we just love to start fires or love to start, anything that's broken in us, if we embrace that and just set every house on fire in the neighborhood, we're gonna be guilty.

And if we embrace our heterosexual cravings for a woman besides our wives, we're gonna be living in sin. And so it is, I think, with homosexual desires. So yeah, I think he was right on. If we're gonna be faithful to the Bible, we're going to say that the embrace of our brokenness and the living out of a life of homosexual activity is going to be a living in rebellion against God.

- Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At desiringgod.org, you'll find thousands of other free resources online from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)