Last summer, back when we could gather in large auditoriums, about 2,200 APJ listeners gathered together in one room in Nashville. It was a wonderful time together, and there we recorded a handful of live episodes, including the following one intended for evangelical believers on a very perplexing trend that resurfaces every June.

Here's the clip. So-called same-sex marriage has never been more popular in America, and whatever garners cultural popularity seeps into the church, you know this. According to the Pew Research Center, among white evangelicals in America, 29% now "favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally." 29% of white American evangelicals.

That's up from 11% just 15 years ago. So that's a long and steady increase in a rise in affirmation among white evangelicals in America, up from 11% to 29% affirming of same-sex, so-called same-sex marriage in 15 years. Bill, who is here with us this morning, asks, "Hello, Pastor John.

As the LGBT movement strives to become mainstream, I've watched more and more believers give into the culture by posting rainbow-colored affirmations on social media, hanging rainbow flags outside their homes, and even attending pride rallies in my city. I want to believe the best, but I am perplexed. How should we respond to fellow believers who make such affirmations?" How you respond directly depends on your relationship, but let me hold that for a minute.

Like it might be your wife, right? It might be your son. Like your wife decides so-called gay marriage is okay. Now what? Or your child does. So how you do relationships depends on the relationship that exists. Let's back up from there. The first response should be to go to the Bible and solidify what God says about homosexuality and the practice of it.

And what he says in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10 is that those who do such things will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And there are other texts that are significantly powerful as well. That's terrifying. And then the second thing you should do after solidifying that that's in the Bible is decide whether you're going to believe the Bible.

That's no small thing today. You know, Desiring God, we stepped back recently to ask what are we really about? What are our 10 big things that we would like to see true in 10 years? And you know what the first one is? You were part of it. The first one is we would like to be known as a ministry in 10 years that is unashamed of everything in the Bible.

So we say it like that. Probably nobody would have thought to say it like that 50 years ago. They probably would have said 50 years ago, "We want to be known as standing for what's in the Bible," or something like that, which is great. But the reason that feels like the way it needs to be said is because the people who are caving on social issues like this one are caving because they're ashamed of what the Bible says.

They're embarrassed by it. It looks to the world like hate speech or like Neanderthal ethics. And if you don't have your roots very deep in God, very deep in the Bible so that what the world presses in on is not controlling you, you're going to cave. And so the second response is not just know what's in the book, but get on your face, you know, like Billy Graham up in the hills of California wondering if he could preach this whole book and just saying, "God, either I can or I can't.

If I can, I will. If I can't, I won't. I'm not a waffler. I'm not going to hang in the middle here and try to pretend I'm a Christian saying the Bible is true and then go off and just tell what the world tells." So that's a big crisis that all of you in this room will or should have had, and I hope you come out on the side of courage that, "I want to stand with this book." And then the question arrives, "Okay, I've got my position.

I love it. I believe God loves us. I believe God loves people who wrestle with homosexuality, and I want to be a loving person. Now what will love look like?" Because I believe, like I said last night, that singing in the jail and loving the jailor – and he may be a gay jailor – that's what you're called to do.

That's what it is to be a Christian, is to trust God, sing in the prison, and love the jailor no matter what. And what will love look like? And you don't listen to the world. To let the world tell you what love is, you go to the Bible. What does love do?

You know, I just read this morning in Devotion – let me show you. It says, "Those who hate a rebuke don't love themselves." That's a lousy paraphrase, but the idea was that if you hate knowledge, you hate yourself. Well, most people don't think that way. Most people think, "No, I'm loving myself if I avoid rebukes.

If I tell my wife, 'Stop rebuking me like that! I'm not feeling built up!'" She would have every right to say, "Read your Bible." So what love is, is defined by God, not by the world. And love will surely try to keep people out of hell. If you don't believe in hell, you might as well close up your book.

Love will do anything biblically to keep people out of hell. And that means telling the truth with love, with warnings, with pleadings, with prayers. So now we're at the point of relationships, and that's probably where the rubber meets the road. So if you're married, and this happens, one spouse begins to just be swayed by some very foolish things, and she or he may decide, "No, I think the loving thing is to attend that marriage and to support them and to affirm the rightness of that so-called gay marriage." What do you do?

And the clearest answer is, you do not divorce. So there you are in a relationship till death do us part with somebody who believes a doctrine that sends people to hell, which will make things very awkward. And there's nothing you can do about it except pray, have one or two good, knock-down, drag-out levels of theological argument, and then look at each other and say, "We've got to make this work, honey," and then you work it out.

Then you move out from there to your kids. That'll happen too. What do you do? What do you do if they're teenagers? What do you do if they're grownups? And the answer is, you have those conversations. You have them as peacefully and as level-headedly and as prayerfully and as tenderly and wisely as you can, and then you find ways to relate.

This would apply to close friendships as well, I think, adult children. You find ways to relate that do not treat the issue as though it were a small thing, but you don't pester. You find ways to navigate the relationships that rejoice in what is truly good and are seriously sad and what is truly sad, and they know where you stand, and you know where they stand, and if they're willing, you do things together in a loving way.

They're your kids. What can you do? Or church member. Your pastor, church member, affirms so-called gay marriage. Now what? Well, that'll depend on your documents, won't it? I mean, get yourself sued, which is okay if you're doing the right thing, but you need to have in place documents that say what membership involves in these regards.

We had to… There was nothing in our documents 40 years ago that helped us navigate these things, but now there are, so that's another one. And so in general, the answer is love will look different in different situations. Excommunication from the church is not unloving. Don't ever let anybody tell you that church discipline is an unloving thing.

So adjust the form of love to the particularity of the relationship and stand your ground. Thank you, Pastor Jon. Thank you, Pastor Jon. That was the final excerpt from our APJ Live session recorded in Nashville last summer. I look forward to doing this again someday. Maybe we'll do this again when we can all gather in one place.

Thank you for listening. If you want new episodes to this podcast delivered to you, subscribe to Ask Pastor Jon in your favorite podcast app in Spotify or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel. To find other episodes in our archive or to submit a question to us, do that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJon.

Well, Jesus told us to bind and loose, but is this practice relevant for the church today? We'll find out when we return on Friday. We'll see you then.