<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
		>
<channel>
	<title>Comments on: Two thoughts &#8220;Does God send all Gay people to Hell&#8221; &amp; &#8220;Wake up Church!&#8221;</title>
	<atom:link href="http://urbanreformation.com/two-thoughts-does-god-send-all-gay-people-to-hell-wake-up-church.htm/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://urbanreformation.com/two-thoughts-does-god-send-all-gay-people-to-hell-wake-up-church.htm</link>
	<description>Reaching the Lost in the Urban Core</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:23:38 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2</generator>
	<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
	<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
		<item>
		<title>By: Bill Burke</title>
		<link>http://urbanreformation.com/two-thoughts-does-god-send-all-gay-people-to-hell-wake-up-church.htm/comment-page-1#comment-62</link>
		<dc:creator>Bill Burke</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:21:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://urbanreformation.com/?p=172#comment-62</guid>
		<description>Having done a study on Saturday morning at the Anchor House South entitled &quot;Limits of God&#039;s Forgiveness - What are they?&quot; that used the glorious testimonies of two men that God saved from the seeming epitome of a depraved homosexual life, one within 5 days of his death, I would attest that there is ever the potential for one to be saved who is willing to come to Him on His terms (to repent and believe the gospel Mk. 1:15) and by His grace in His time. 

The 2 testimonies are from John MacArthur&#039;s series on God&#039;s View of Homesexuality http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/90-69
and http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/90-70 are as follows:

From Part 1:
Some months ago I was standing in my office and I was looking at the little spindle that contains the messages that come in by phone and I noticed one that said, &quot;A young man has called and asked that you come to the hospital to see him, he&#039;s dying.&quot;  And so I decided to go immediately and I went down to Riverside Drive to the small hospital located there and went in the door and asked the person at the desk what room he was in.  And I walked down the hall and turned into the room and took a look at this man in bed, a man I didn&#039;t know, but I could take one look at him and tell he was dying of AIDS.  He was just about skin and bones, gaunt with hallow eyes and sunken cheeks, almost lifeless.  And as I saw him, my attention moved to another man who was lying kind of casually across a small sofa that was in the hospital room, and I said to him, &quot;My name is John MacArthur,&quot; at which point this man hastily exited the room and said, &quot;I&#039;ll leave you alone.&quot;

I walked over to the bedside, knowing what I was about to hear.  I took hold of his hand and he said to me, &quot;I&#039;m dying, I have not long to live, I have AIDS and cancer is eating my body at a rapid rate.&quot; And then he burst into tears and said, &quot;But I&#039;m afraid to die because I know I&#039;m going to go to hell.&quot;  He said, &quot;I&#039;ve lived a sinful, sorted, homosexual life for I think 26 years.&quot; And then he went on to tell me, I said, &quot;Tell me about yourself,&quot; and he told me about a Christian mother and a Christian father.  He told me about being raised in a Christian home.  He told me about attending two years of Bible college.  He told me about all the rebellion in his heart and the beginnings of that homosexual sin and how eventually it blew him right out of the Bible college into 26 years of the most gross kind of living in the mainstream of the rabid homosexual community.  He said, &quot;Now I&#039;m dying and I know I&#039;m going to go to hell.&quot;

I said, &quot;Tell me about homosexuality.  Tell me about it.  Tell me how you view it.  Tell me what you think of it.&quot;

And as he sobbed and cried he said, &quot;It is sin, I&#039;ve always known it&#039;s sin, I hate it, God hates it and it damns men.&quot;  And he said it over and over about I suppose about a half a dozen ways, just as a cathartic to his own soul, the confession felt good.

And I said, &quot;David, do you understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ?&quot;  And he said yes.  I said, &quot;Tell me the gospel.&quot;  And he reiterated to me unhesitatingly how Christ was God incarnate, born and died and rose again for our salvation and the efficacy of His death on the cross as a substitute for sinners and he knew it well and he understood that salvation was by grace through faith and only God could save out of His own mercy the one who willingly believed and was eager to turn from his sin.  I said, &quot;Are you willing to turn from your sin to repent, cry out for God and ask Him for salvation?&quot;  

He said, &quot;Yes, yes, yes!&quot;  So I said, &quot;Well, salvation is a gift that only God can give, let me pray for you and ask God to give it to you.&quot;  And so I began to pour out my heart and as I was holding his hand and praying, he was squeezing my hand tightly, the emotion of his heart coming out through the hand.  And I pleaded with the Lord to be gracious and save him and to forgive him all this life of horrendous iniquity and deliver him.  And I prayed for quite a long time, after which he burst into prayer, a sobbing kind of prayer, and confessed his sin again, probably a half a dozen times to the Lord, and pleaded to the Lord to be merciful and to forgive him for the way in which he had blasphemed His name and rejected the gospel and lived in sin.

This man, by all intents and purposes, an absolutely inveterate homosexual who has sinned in ways that are beyond description.  And he&#039;s crying out for mercy.  After his prayer was over, there was a peace and a calm that came over his heart.  And as he opened his eyes and kind of wiped away his tears, a smile broke across his face and he was looking at the wall and he kept staring at the wall with a little smile on his face.  And I said, &quot;What are you looking at?&quot;  He said, &quot;I&#039;m looking at the calendar because I want to remember the day of my new beginning.&quot;  And then he went on to reiterate that he...that he sensed that God had saved him, that he accepted by faith the fact that if he had trusted Christ God would save him in His mercy.  And he believed in that moment that he was converted.

I think it was in a day or so from then that Lance Quinn took over a copy of The Gospel According to Jesus so that he could read it and fully understand and be sure that his faith was real. And within five days from the day that I had prayed with him, he was gone, dead.  But I said to him that day by the bed, I said, &quot;Now that you&#039;ve become a Christian, what&#039;s going to be different?&quot;  He said, &quot;My whole life is going to be different.&quot;  He said, &quot;The first thing is my whole life is filled with people who live in a homosexual world.  The fellow who was in here when you came in is my lover.  My male nurse here is a homosexual and the AIDS Association has sent me an AIDS worker to be with me in these days who is also a homosexual.  Everybody in my life is a homosexual.&quot;  And he said, &quot;Now I have the responsibility to tell them all of the sin that they&#039;re engaged in and call them all to come to Christ.&quot;  God gave him five days to do that and then he was gone.

… All that said, God says being a transvestite is an abomination, being a transsexual is an abomination, being a homosexual is an abomination, aiding and abetting any of that stuff is abominable to God and there&#039;s blood guiltiness associated with all of it.  And the penalty is death and God will judge the nation that tolerates it and God will destroy the people that do it.  Having said all of that, I go right back to where we started and remind you of this wonderful truth, this sin in all its categories and in all its extremes is forgivable.  Does that tell you something about God&#039;s grace?  Does that tell you how gracious our God is?  Does that tell you something about the death of Christ who in His own body bore those very sins?  God is a God of mercy and grace.  And if you will come to Him in your sin, He is willing to forgive.


From Part 2:
Some Sunday nights back, a young man named Robert was baptized in the water here.  And he came into the water and he told a wonderful testimony.  He said, &quot;I have AIDS,&quot; and he said, &quot;I&#039;ve been a homosexual for years and I said to someone I want deliverance from this life.  Where can I go?  Where can I go and find help?&quot;  And he said, &quot;Someone told me to go to Grace Community Church and I could find help there.  He said, &quot;I walked into this church on a Sunday morning.  I had never been here,&quot; he sat right out over there.  And he said, &quot;I was desperate, I wanted deliverance from my sin and its consequence, death.&quot;  And he said, &quot;John got up, as he does every Sunday, and read a Psalm.&quot; And he said, &quot;This is what he read.&quot;  And he recited it, Psalm 107, &quot;They wandered in the wilderness in a desert region.  They didn&#039;t find a way to an inhabited city.  They were hungry and thirsty.  Their soul fainted within them.  Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, He delivered them out of their distresses.  He led them also by a straight way to go to an inhabited city.  Let them give thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness, and for His wonders to the sons of men!  For He has satisfied the thirsty soul, and the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.  There were those who dwelt in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in misery and chains, because they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.  Therefore He humbled their heart with labor; they stumbled and there was none to help.  Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble; He saved them out of their distresses.  He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their chains apart.  Let them give thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness and for his wonders to the sons of men.&quot; 

He stood in these waters and recited that verbatim.  And he said, &quot;When I heard you read that, I knew I had come to the right place and that my chains could be broken and I could be set free.&quot;  And that morning, that first Sunday, that first time he had ever come here, he gave his life to Jesus Christ and was wonderfully saved and later entered the waters of baptism to confess that sin and that transformation to you.  And I said to him privately, &quot;What are you going to do with the days of life that God gives you?&quot;  Well he told me, he said, &quot;The Gay Pride Parade is coming down the street near where I live, I&#039;ve been in the mainstream of this whole thing.&quot;  And he said, &quot;All of my former friends are going to be stopping by to greet me because they know I&#039;m so ill and I&#039;m going to give everyone of them the gospel of Christ.&quot;  And I know he did and he&#039;s dying and yet he&#039;s ready because he knows he&#039;s going to meet Christ.  That&#039;s the good news, isn&#039;t it?

Jason, sorry for the length, but hopefully it will serve a wonderful purpose by exposing some light on a difficult subject the His glory and honor and praise.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Having done a study on Saturday morning at the Anchor House South entitled &#8220;Limits of God&#8217;s Forgiveness &#8211; What are they?&#8221; that used the glorious testimonies of two men that God saved from the seeming epitome of a depraved homosexual life, one within 5 days of his death, I would attest that there is ever the potential for one to be saved who is willing to come to Him on His terms (to repent and believe the gospel <a href="http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?go=Go&amp;q=Mk.+1%3A15" title="ESV Mk 1:15" class="bibleref">Mk. 1:15</a>) and by His grace in His time. </p>
<p>The 2 testimonies are from John MacArthur&#8217;s series on God&#8217;s View of Homesexuality <a href="http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/90-69" rel="nofollow">http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/90-69</a><br />
and <a href="http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/90-70" rel="nofollow">http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/90-70</a> are as follows:</p>
<p>From Part 1:<br />
Some months ago I was standing in my office and I was looking at the little spindle that contains the messages that come in by phone and I noticed one that said, &#8220;A young man has called and asked that you come to the hospital to see him, he&#8217;s dying.&#8221;  And so I decided to go immediately and I went down to Riverside Drive to the small hospital located there and went in the door and asked the person at the desk what room he was in.  And I walked down the hall and turned into the room and took a look at this man in bed, a man I didn&#8217;t know, but I could take one look at him and tell he was dying of AIDS.  He was just about skin and bones, gaunt with hallow eyes and sunken cheeks, almost lifeless.  And as I saw him, my attention moved to another man who was lying kind of casually across a small sofa that was in the hospital room, and I said to him, &#8220;My name is John MacArthur,&#8221; at which point this man hastily exited the room and said, &#8220;I&#8217;ll leave you alone.&#8221;</p>
<p>I walked over to the bedside, knowing what I was about to hear.  I took hold of his hand and he said to me, &#8220;I&#8217;m dying, I have not long to live, I have AIDS and cancer is eating my body at a rapid rate.&#8221; And then he burst into tears and said, &#8220;But I&#8217;m afraid to die because I know I&#8217;m going to go to hell.&#8221;  He said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve lived a sinful, sorted, homosexual life for I think 26 years.&#8221; And then he went on to tell me, I said, &#8220;Tell me about yourself,&#8221; and he told me about a Christian mother and a Christian father.  He told me about being raised in a Christian home.  He told me about attending two years of Bible college.  He told me about all the rebellion in his heart and the beginnings of that homosexual sin and how eventually it blew him right out of the Bible college into 26 years of the most gross kind of living in the mainstream of the rabid homosexual community.  He said, &#8220;Now I&#8217;m dying and I know I&#8217;m going to go to hell.&#8221;</p>
<p>I said, &#8220;Tell me about homosexuality.  Tell me about it.  Tell me how you view it.  Tell me what you think of it.&#8221;</p>
<p>And as he sobbed and cried he said, &#8220;It is sin, I&#8217;ve always known it&#8217;s sin, I hate it, God hates it and it damns men.&#8221;  And he said it over and over about I suppose about a half a dozen ways, just as a cathartic to his own soul, the confession felt good.</p>
<p>And I said, &#8220;David, do you understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ?&#8221;  And he said yes.  I said, &#8220;Tell me the gospel.&#8221;  And he reiterated to me unhesitatingly how Christ was God incarnate, born and died and rose again for our salvation and the efficacy of His death on the cross as a substitute for sinners and he knew it well and he understood that salvation was by grace through faith and only God could save out of His own mercy the one who willingly believed and was eager to turn from his sin.  I said, &#8220;Are you willing to turn from your sin to repent, cry out for God and ask Him for salvation?&#8221;  </p>
<p>He said, &#8220;Yes, yes, yes!&#8221;  So I said, &#8220;Well, salvation is a gift that only God can give, let me pray for you and ask God to give it to you.&#8221;  And so I began to pour out my heart and as I was holding his hand and praying, he was squeezing my hand tightly, the emotion of his heart coming out through the hand.  And I pleaded with the Lord to be gracious and save him and to forgive him all this life of horrendous iniquity and deliver him.  And I prayed for quite a long time, after which he burst into prayer, a sobbing kind of prayer, and confessed his sin again, probably a half a dozen times to the Lord, and pleaded to the Lord to be merciful and to forgive him for the way in which he had blasphemed His name and rejected the gospel and lived in sin.</p>
<p>This man, by all intents and purposes, an absolutely inveterate homosexual who has sinned in ways that are beyond description.  And he&#8217;s crying out for mercy.  After his prayer was over, there was a peace and a calm that came over his heart.  And as he opened his eyes and kind of wiped away his tears, a smile broke across his face and he was looking at the wall and he kept staring at the wall with a little smile on his face.  And I said, &#8220;What are you looking at?&#8221;  He said, &#8220;I&#8217;m looking at the calendar because I want to remember the day of my new beginning.&#8221;  And then he went on to reiterate that he&#8230;that he sensed that God had saved him, that he accepted by faith the fact that if he had trusted Christ God would save him in His mercy.  And he believed in that moment that he was converted.</p>
<p>I think it was in a day or so from then that Lance Quinn took over a copy of The Gospel According to Jesus so that he could read it and fully understand and be sure that his faith was real. And within five days from the day that I had prayed with him, he was gone, dead.  But I said to him that day by the bed, I said, &#8220;Now that you&#8217;ve become a Christian, what&#8217;s going to be different?&#8221;  He said, &#8220;My whole life is going to be different.&#8221;  He said, &#8220;The first thing is my whole life is filled with people who live in a homosexual world.  The fellow who was in here when you came in is my lover.  My male nurse here is a homosexual and the AIDS Association has sent me an AIDS worker to be with me in these days who is also a homosexual.  Everybody in my life is a homosexual.&#8221;  And he said, &#8220;Now I have the responsibility to tell them all of the sin that they&#8217;re engaged in and call them all to come to Christ.&#8221;  God gave him five days to do that and then he was gone.</p>
<p>… All that said, God says being a transvestite is an abomination, being a transsexual is an abomination, being a homosexual is an abomination, aiding and abetting any of that stuff is abominable to God and there&#8217;s blood guiltiness associated with all of it.  And the penalty is death and God will judge the nation that tolerates it and God will destroy the people that do it.  Having said all of that, I go right back to where we started and remind you of this wonderful truth, this sin in all its categories and in all its extremes is forgivable.  Does that tell you something about God&#8217;s grace?  Does that tell you how gracious our God is?  Does that tell you something about the death of Christ who in His own body bore those very sins?  God is a God of mercy and grace.  And if you will come to Him in your sin, He is willing to forgive.</p>
<p>From Part 2:<br />
Some Sunday nights back, a young man named Robert was baptized in the water here.  And he came into the water and he told a wonderful testimony.  He said, &#8220;I have AIDS,&#8221; and he said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve been a homosexual for years and I said to someone I want deliverance from this life.  Where can I go?  Where can I go and find help?&#8221;  And he said, &#8220;Someone told me to go to Grace Community Church and I could find help there.  He said, &#8220;I walked into this church on a Sunday morning.  I had never been here,&#8221; he sat right out over there.  And he said, &#8220;I was desperate, I wanted deliverance from my sin and its consequence, death.&#8221;  And he said, &#8220;John got up, as he does every Sunday, and read a Psalm.&#8221; And he said, &#8220;This is what he read.&#8221;  And he recited it, <a href="http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?go=Go&amp;q=Psalm+107" title="ESV Psalm 107" class="bibleref">Psalm 107</a>, &#8220;They wandered in the wilderness in a desert region.  They didn&#8217;t find a way to an inhabited city.  They were hungry and thirsty.  Their soul fainted within them.  Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, He delivered them out of their distresses.  He led them also by a straight way to go to an inhabited city.  Let them give thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness, and for His wonders to the sons of men!  For He has satisfied the thirsty soul, and the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.  There were those who dwelt in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in misery and chains, because they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.  Therefore He humbled their heart with labor; they stumbled and there was none to help.  Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble; He saved them out of their distresses.  He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their chains apart.  Let them give thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness and for his wonders to the sons of men.&#8221; </p>
<p>He stood in these waters and recited that verbatim.  And he said, &#8220;When I heard you read that, I knew I had come to the right place and that my chains could be broken and I could be set free.&#8221;  And that morning, that first Sunday, that first time he had ever come here, he gave his life to Jesus Christ and was wonderfully saved and later entered the waters of baptism to confess that sin and that transformation to you.  And I said to him privately, &#8220;What are you going to do with the days of life that God gives you?&#8221;  Well he told me, he said, &#8220;The Gay Pride Parade is coming down the street near where I live, I&#8217;ve been in the mainstream of this whole thing.&#8221;  And he said, &#8220;All of my former friends are going to be stopping by to greet me because they know I&#8217;m so ill and I&#8217;m going to give everyone of them the gospel of Christ.&#8221;  And I know he did and he&#8217;s dying and yet he&#8217;s ready because he knows he&#8217;s going to meet Christ.  That&#8217;s the good news, isn&#8217;t it?</p>
<p>Jason, sorry for the length, but hopefully it will serve a wonderful purpose by exposing some light on a difficult subject the His glory and honor and praise.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
	</item>
</channel>
</rss>
