What should our Christian response be to homosexuality?

People often say to me, “If homosexuality is wrong, why didn’t Jesus condemn it?” Well, He did, in a sense. In Matthew 19:5, Jesus said, “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” That’s God’s standard for human sexuality: one man with one woman for life. And any deviation from that is sin. Whether it is homosexuality, bestiality, incest, adultery—those are all sins, because they deviate from God’s standard. 

In 1 Corinthians 6:18, Paul said, “Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.” There is something worse about sexual sin because we commit it against our body. In verses 19–20, Paul continued, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.” When a Christian engages in sexual sin, it is as if they are carrying the Holy Spirit into that sexual immorality. The Bible says we’re to flee that kind of sin like no other.

Now, I think unbelievers have us on one thing here. That is, sometimes we adamantly preach against homosexuality. That’s one deviation from God’s standard, but it’s not the only one. We ought to be just as strong in our teaching about adultery and unbiblical divorces and remarriages. All those things are deviations from God’s perfect standard. And I believe whenever we speak about homosexuality we shouldn’t be angry or hateful. The Bible says God made us, He wired us, and He knows how we can find the greatest fulfillment in life. And we ought to preach God’s standard for our lives in a positive way, not in a hateful way.