Brady White

This week we heard from Brady White, who is the son of Joe White. Brady pastors a church at Disney World, which is pretty neat. The topic he spoke on was sexual brokenness. He did a lot of contrasting between what culture tells us is normal vs. what the Bible says. It is so interesting how what culture tells us is freedom - doing whatever you want - is actually slavery. It completely controls you and you become unable to get out of it. However, the church is in such a tricky situation because culture is so good at twisting the truth. They have made the church look like the bad guys. For example, culture says that true love is unconditional, blind acceptance. It doesn't matter what people are doing or what they believe because we love them no matter what. What is so hard is that culture makes that sound so good. I mean, to disagree with that definition of love, you must be judgmental and full of hate. Clearly, the church is in a tough spot. So what do we do? How does the church address those who are so deep in sexual brokenness or those who are gay? How do we show them the truth without coming off as hateful? The Bible says that Jesus was full of 100% grace AND 100% truth. Obviously these are incredibly difficult questions. However, for a start, we need to change our outlook.

Our current outlook seems to be:
-Us against the world
-judge those who struggle differently. If we are talking to someone with the same struggle as us, we can relate and are full of grace. However, if we run into someone with different struggles than us, we ask, "How can you do that? I would never do something like that." the best example of this was in class when a student mentioned that they knew someone who was a professing Christian but was gay. Brady responded by saying, "You want to hear something crazy? I know a bunch of professing Christians who gossip every day." You could hear a pin drop in the room after he said that because so many of us gossip. We see some sins as worse than others when in reality they are all the same.
-We think, lets change those broken people

Here is the Biblical outlook we need:
-Us for the world
-Accept those who struggle differently
-pointing our people to Jesus. We are all broken and therefore in the same boat.

Another way we can learn to love those who are hurting is to look at Jesus' example in scripture. In John 8:3-11 is the story of the woman who committed adultery. What Jesus does is so powerful and what we need to learn to do. He does not begin by telling her about all the people who she hurt in both her family and the family of the man she committed adultery with. He does not tell her how stupid her decision was. Here is what he does do:

1) He protects her from those who wanted to kill her, judge her, mock her, and condemn her.
2) He protects her from herself. He lets her know that she can move forward and not be torn apart by guilt and shame.
3) He does not condemn her.

If the church looked more like this, I think we would have a lot better reputation and would actually be place the broken came to for refuge. And if we do this, if we really care for them, then maybe they will be more interested in what we have to say. Because we do need to say something. We cannot let them continue in sin without saying anything. But how are we saying it and what is our motivation behind it?

That's all I've got.

Thanks for reading!