The Door, the Wound, and the Covenant

I still remember a night at a men’s shelter where I was teaching. Afterward, a young man came up to me in tears and said, “I’m gay… I’ll never get into Heaven.” And instead of jumping straight into a theological argument, I leaned back and asked him, “Before we talk about Heaven… can we talk about how you got here?”


He told me he’d been in foster care. Sexually abused. Molested. When he aged out and ended up on the streets, a gay man took him in—fed him, sheltered him… and that became the only “love” he’d ever known. That story broke something in me. Because in that moment, what I learned wasn’t “change the Bible.” What I learned was this: Yeshua sees the heart. He sees the whole story. He sees layers that a church crowd will never see.


And here’s what we don’t have the right to do: play God with people’s final judgment (Romans 14:4; James 4:12).


But here’s what we do have the right to do: live and teach what Scripture calls sound, and love people without condemnation (John 1:14; Ephesians 4:15). That’s far harder for believers than most want to admit.


Does that mean you accept the sin? Absolutely not (Romans 6:1–2).


Does it mean you condemn the sinner? Absolutely not (John 3:17).


If we can’t hold those together, we’re not ready to speak on this topic at all.


Now… with that posture in place, we can actually talk about inclusion, marriage, ordination, and what the church is.


The church is for believers… but what is a believer?


The modern church is confused here, and that confusion is killing everything downstream.


A believer is not a person without sin. That’s fantasy (1 John 1:8–10). Scripture doesn’t describe believers as sinless; it describes them as repenting, submitting, and enduring (Luke 9:23; Hebrews 10:36).


A believer is someone who has turned toward the God of Israel and toward Messiah… and who is willing to be shaped over time by the Word of God and the covenant community (Acts 2:42; 2 Timothy 3:16–17).


So we need a clean distinction that protects both grace and holiness:


Struggling is not the same as refusing.


Falling is not the same as insisting.


Weakness is not the same as defiance.


A believer will stumble… but a believer won’t demand that the community bless the stumble as holy (1 Corinthians 6:9–11; Titus 2:11–14).


That’s why Scripture contains processes for correction and restoration (Matthew 18:15–17; Galatians 6:1–2; James 5:19–20). And that’s why Paul draws a firm line between how we relate to the world and how we handle the claimed-insider who insists on defying covenant boundaries (1 Corinthians 5:9–13).


So here’s the principle we have to recover:


The assembly can welcome anyone to come hear, learn, wrestle, and seek God…


but membership, affirmation, and leadership are covenant categories for those who will submit to covenant formation.


That’s not harsh. That’s how a living body survives.


A quick correction: the church should not be built to cater to unbelief


Let me say this cleanly, because we’ve inverted it in the West:


The church is not “a place built for unbelievers to feel comfortable.”


The church is the gathered people of God, built to equip the saints.


Paul doesn’t say Messiah gave leaders to entertain the outsider. He says Messiah gave shepherding gifts “to equip the saints for the work of ministry… to mature the body” (Ephesians 4:11–16). That means the assembly is designed to produce growth, stability, and discernment, not spiritual consumerism.


Yes—outsiders may enter, listen, be convicted, and turn (1 Corinthians 14:24–25). Praise God. But the meeting isn’t structured around keeping unbelief unchallenged. The Word is proclaimed to form believers into a holy people (2 Timothy 4:2; Titus 2:1).


The real church is community… not a crowd around a stage


This needs to be said plainly because we’ve normalized the opposite:


The “real church” is not a weekly audience gathered around one elevated man.


The church is a body—a community where every member is called to love, serve, carry burdens, and grow (1 Corinthians 12; Romans 12:4–10).


And the shepherd is not above the sheep.


A true shepherd serves the flock. He bleeds for it. He watches for wolves. He models humility. He does not build a personal empire out of God’s people (Mark 10:42–45; John 13:14–15; 1 Peter 5:1–4).


When a church forgets that, everything gets distorted: correction becomes control, truth becomes branding, and the flock becomes a customer base.


Why this is the fault line right now


This issue has become the most visible driver of fracture in modern denominational life because it forces institutions to answer one question they’ve avoided:


Who has authority… Scripture, or the spirit of the age?


That’s why disputes over LGBTQ inclusion in marriage and ordination keep triggering schisms, disaffiliations, and severed ties across networks and denominations. [ref: PBS] [ref: Religion News]


It’s not primarily political. It’s ecclesiology. ...