This post is an excerpt from a longer article in the Assemblies of God Enrichment Journal. You can access the full article here.
What would Jesus do? The question is popular but dangerously hypothetical.
When we watch Jesus in the Gospels, we can ask a better question: What did Jesus do?
Jesus actively engaged the people of His culture, even those considered sexually immoral. Some of the more famous sexual deviants from the Bible were all associated with Jesus: Sinful Woman (Luke 7:36-50). Obviously, there was risk involved. His reputation was damaged by His social interactions.
We should realize our own vulnerabilities are exposed when we become too comfortable with those far from God.
Conversely, our pride is exposed when we hold ourselves as too holy to interact with them as well. As Jimmy Flynt (the brother of Hustler publisher and famous pornographer Larry Flynt) once said, “I thought all Christians hated me.” Our mission must reflect the same as Jesus’—seeking and saving the lost. In the course of that mission, we must be known as those who love people toward God and not those who hate people toward the world.
Jesus demonstrated relationships were the pathway to becoming salt and light to a sexually deviant world.
Christians offer hope to those who are trapped between two polarities. The first is a permissive, all embracing culture that defends the freedom of people to destroy themselves and others through pornography. The second is impulse to free the world from “dirty pictures” and all the people who look at them. We should choose the better way of engagement for Gospel transformation with Jesus.
The very purpose of His life was to release people from the power and the penalty of sin.
When considering the pornification of the American culture, one can easily become angry with those on the front edge of creating this phenomenon. The Hugh Hefners, the movie directors, the photographers, the investors and the actors all deserve a little angst. Right? Yet are they completely to blame?
The issue we then face is, “Who will love them if Christians decide to hate them?”