Pastor John, what would you say to a man or to a woman who is considering a sex change operation? These are not amorphous folks. They're clearly and obviously genetically and physically a man or a woman. And he or she wants a gender change. What would you say to someone considering the transgender option?

Tony, the first thing I want to say is that anybody listening to this who's about to switch this off saying, "Goodnight, transgender. That is so irrelevant to me. I don't need to listen to this today." Give me a minute before you turn this off. Consider this. The cover of Time magazine for June 9, if you haven't seen it, has Laverne Cox, born a boy, now living with a different sexual identification, acting on TV in "The Orange is the New Black" as a woman, and featured as an admirable person, pictured as a woman, with a painful story, in the hope that we, the readers, would all affirm this way of life.

The article and the interview with Laverne are all about transgender experience, like it or not. This is, I'm saying to me and to us, like it or not. It is following right behind homosexual behavior in our culture in its aim to be mainstream and celebrated. Not to do so will be, as the interview makes crystal clear, to be seen as hung up with our own sexual insecurities and at worst, hateful.

So, it's relevant, really front burner relevant. And let me give you another couple of scenarios. What will you do, what will you say, either clergy or layman, if a family visits your church, whose 15-year-old son attends your youth group wearing a dress, long curly hair, painted fingernails, shaved legs, lipstick, claiming to be a girl.

Are your young people ready for that? Have they been taught anything about that? That will come. And by are they ready, I mean, do they have a biblical understanding of sexuality that may help them form a sound judgment about that? And do they have a good grasp of grace and truth so that they can have conviction and compassion in those relationships?

One more situation that I think we're all going to face sooner or later. What are you going to say, what will your counsel be to a 40-year-old man or woman who comes to you, has just received Christ as Savior, Lord, and treasure of their lives, and had a sex change surgery 20 years ago, and they are now living as a man born a woman or as a woman born a man.

What will repentance look like in that situation? So those are the questions that are right in front of us. And if people feel like it's not going to happen to me, I'm not going to have to deal with this, that's probably naive. If not you, your children probably will.

And so let me try to help a little bit here. Here's the main question we're facing. Is gender or sexual identity set by a preference of the individual or by a providence of God? Or to put it in another way, is my sex determined by my decision in my mind or by God's design in my nature?

That's the key question. We live in a day when individual autonomy, personal preference or choice, is considered by many to have priority over God's design. And that may be because they don't believe in God, or more often because they don't believe God has spoken with any kind of governing clarity on an issue.

Either way, individual preference outweighs God. The reality of my desires has weight. Most people feel they have weight in my life. God, He doesn't have any weight. For all practical purposes, He's inconsequential for our culture, whether He exists or not. Very few people today in our culture are trembling before God.

Even though the Creator told us the fear of the Lord is the beginning, the beginning of wisdom. In other words, we can't even get to first base. We can't even begin to be wise in sexual identity where there's no trembling before the living God. So an example of this amazing elevation of personal individual autonomy over God's designs in nature is the choice that parents are making.

Yes, this is happening. Parents are making today to use drugs to postpone puberty in their children so that their sons and daughters can make their own decisions about whether they want to grow up to be a man or a woman. So my question is, then, how shall we think biblically about these things?

Now, I'm just going to go to one place in the Bible to begin to lay a foundation that I think is absolutely essential. In Romans 1, 19 to 28, and the main thing to notice here is that the Bible draws a parallel between the way nature teaches truth about God and the way nature teaches truth about male and female sexuality.

And the point is this, nature is one of God's methods of revealing what we should prefer, what our choices should be. Preference or choice is guided by God's design in nature. It's not independent as though you can simply choose your own essence. Whom we should worship is not left to our preferences, and who we are sexually is not left to our preferences.

Both are dictated by God's revelation in nature. So look at the verse, verse 19, for example. "What can be known about God is plain, because God has shown it to them, for his indivisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." So, God's divine nature is revealed in physical, material things in the universe.

So much so that verse 20 says, "They are without excuse if they exchange the glory of God for the glory of the creature." In other words, it's clear in God's mind that what the universe, what material, physical universe teaches about God is clear enough about who he is and whom we should worship that we're without excuse if we don't.

Then, and this is the key thing for the transgender issue, then the text draws the parallel with human sexuality. Just as physical nature reveals the truth about God, so physical nature reveals truth about sexual identity. Verse 26, it goes like this, "Their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and their men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another." So, the one thing that I'm focusing on here is Paul's understanding of the role of nature, the material, physical reality of the universe and of our bodies.

And what he's saying is that the role nature has to reveal truth about God's identity as powerful and divine, it also has in revealing our identity as male and female. That's the basic gist of everything I'm saying from Romans 9, namely that the role nature has is to reveal truth about God's identity as powerful and divine and truth about our identity as male and female.

And it's so clear that we are without excuse if we don't see it. So, if a human looks at the world and chooses to worship a creature rather than the Creator, he's without excuse. And if a man looks at his own body and chooses to play the part of a woman, or a woman looks at her own body and chooses to play the part of a man, they are without excuse.

Because in both cases, in divine worship and human sexuality, God has given nature, cosmological and biological, God has given nature as the revelation of his will. Humans should worship God, males should act like men, females should act like women. Now, back to Laverne Cox for just a moment. He was born a boy and is now trying to live as a woman.

He would feel totally opposite from what I just said. In fact, he would be angry for me using the word "he." Folks, here's the quote. Folks want to believe that genitals and biology are like destiny. All these designations are based on a penis and then a vagina. And that's supposed to say all these different things about who people are.

When you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous. People need to be willing to let go of what they think they know about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. Because that doesn't necessarily mean anything inherently, close quote. To which I respond, "Well, right, right." And that's not my argument or Paul's argument.

The issue is not what nature says inherently, but what it says as God's revelation of his design for male and female. God is the wise, loving, purposeful creator and designer of human life. And as such, he's missing totally from Cox's interview and as far as I can tell from his life.

And that will make all the difference. So this is the foundation that I would lay from Romans 1. But Tony, the question, I haven't even gotten to the question, have I? You ask, what would I say to the person maybe who totally agrees with what I'm saying here and is caught in a strong sense of identity and desire that's contrary to their own anatomy?

And what would I say to them? And maybe we could take that up in our next episode. I just wanted to lay a foundation here exegetically in Romans 1 and set the cultural stage for folks. Wonderful. Yes, let's pick up on that tomorrow. There's so much to say. Thank you, Pastor John, for bringing this interview to our attention and for addressing it biblically.

Also related to this, on Monday, Pastor John published an article on the Verne Cox, which is titled "Genitalia are not destiny, but are they design?" You can find that post at DesiringGod.org/blog. Tomorrow we will hear from Pastor John on how he would personally counsel someone who was considering the transgender route.

I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow. Transcription by CastingWords © The Verne Cox, Jr.