“There is a war raging between good and evil in our world, and though we might prefer the conflict to be fought somewhere else, we don’t get to pick the times in which we live. The front lines today are battles over sex, gender, and identity. We must be ready for a fight in precisely these places. Don’t underestimate the power of your opponent. The devil wants us to join him in his rebellion against God. He wants to make us cowards and traitors. He wants us to believe the myth of our own autonomy. He wants us to raise the white flag and side with the enemy—the enemy without or the enemy within, it doesn’t matter to him.”

― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

If you’re familiar with Rosaria Butterfield, you know she’s a former lesbian and tenured professor at Syracuse University who has quite a transformational story once she met Christ. Today, she’s speaks and thinks clearly on the topics we face today.

In her book, she begins with the rationalization of homosexuality that has crept within the church and so it’s good to remember God’s plan for human flourishing found throughout the words of Scripture beginning in the beginning. In the verses below Jesus addressed the Pharisees’ question of the day on sexual immorality by appealing to the creation of men and women in Genesis.

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Matthew 19:3-6

Last week we were talking with a small group of friends on the general topic of how our culture has rationalized sexual sin over the last fifty years or so. We’ve seen it in print, television and in today’s electronic age grow in acceptance, but God’s plan from the beginning is defined by the sexual binary of men and women. Even is some inside the church have tried to undermine the truth, Scripture is clear on the topic.

And so we shouldn’t raise the white flag, we should pray and stand faithful.