Peter's Testimony

I realized I was attracted to same sex in my early 20's. To put it simply, I thought I was waiting for the right girl and one day I realized I was actually waiting for the right boy. I'm a Christian because firstly I found that following Jesus has transformed my life. It has made my life much more exciting and real. Secondly because I believe it's utterly credible that Jesus actually did rise from the dead and that is the most important thing ever happened in history.

We seem to have this strange idea in our culture that sexual orientation dictates what your sexual identity should be. When I began my journey, accepted my same sex attraction, I made the commitment to be single and I began to explore what it meant to be same sex attracted Christian and what my sexual identity was. I started reading the Bible and realized that the Bible doesn't talk about gay or straight people. It just talks about man and woman. So I realized I was constraining myself by calling myself gay. I was limiting what God could actually do. So I just dropped thinking of myself as gay or homosexual. I just started thinking of myself as a man and as a man when I read throughout the Bible, I was called to be either single or married. So I was going to stay single until God brought someone to my life.

What happened was not that I became less homosexual or more heterosexual. What happened was I just stopped thinking about being homosexual or heterosexual and suddenly one day I just found myself looking at a girl and thinking she was attractive in that kind of way. It wasn't that I was gone looking for it. One day I walked into my church and there was a lady tuning up her guitar on stage and she was just the most amazing woman I've ever seen and we started going out and now we're married and we got kids. It's incredible. I don't see myself as either straight or gay or ex-gay or half way in between. What I've realized is as a Christian, my sexual identity is in Christ and what Christ has called me to be, that is a man who is faithful in the use of his body sexually to Jesus.

People talk about you suppressing your sexuality. Well everybody suppresses their sexuality every single day. We walk down the street we see people we find attractive but we don't try to jump in bed with them. We constrain ourselves and it's no different who we're attracted to, we all suppress our sexuality.

What's convinced me that the Bible is pretty clear on saying no to same sex behavior and gay marriage is two things: first is by having look of what the individual word and verse and look what they mean in the Greek and Hebrew context and being convinced from that kind of point of view that actually the word means what we roughly think what they have always meant. But secondly looking at the big narrative of the Bible, how the Bible uses the marriage of man and woman to speak about the union of the church and Christ, to speak of Jesus' unfailing work in our individual life. I was so convicted by that model that I was changed spiritually.

The idea that the Bible talked about a different kind of homosexuality than we see today is utterly none sense. If you look at the kind of society that Paul and other writers of New Testament lived in, they actually had a myriad of different kind of homosexual relationship. Yes, some were not balanced very well. But some were kind of mutual sexual relationship. You have people having gay marriages in the first century. Throughout history we have known that there are people who are predominately attracted to same sex. The modern western social construct of gay relationship is actually nothing new. We've seen it throughout history.

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