The Tender Gender Mender

[HKHaugan]

The Tender Gender Mender

Who told you who and what you are?  Who or what gave them the right?  What goes on inside us that determines the identity we want others to see whenever we are with them?  Take gender issues for instance.  Suppose we have someone in our family or among friends having doubts about who they are as men and women?  How do we react to people who make astounding claims about what they presume they really are?  Facebook offers over fifty gender definitions.  Famous personalities may think they are trans-gendered or tend to lean more to one side than the other.  Our emotionality seems crisscrossed from time to time. Waiting in the wings like vultures are those who prey on this confusion ready to feed on those insecurities and define who you are for their own agenda. There are cries all around us that say because men have emotions at all, that is our feminine side coming out.  Or it may be for women who feel they are being put down and take on so-called male behavior to counter that perception since they are living in a 'man's world.'  

How are we supposed to read our natural attraction to other people regardless of their gender?   Does all mutual attraction and affection have to be sexualized?  Do we have to succumb to that kind of pressurized thinking?  Is there a way to sort out distorted male and female self-concepts that have been shaped by youthful experimentation, parental avoidance, predatory adults and past experience?  A lot of questions out there, aren't there? 

How about dealing with them spiritually?  Let's approach this as disciples of Jesus have done for almost 2000 years. 

As disciples of Jesus, we know that the answer can never arrive from within because of our imperfections coming from sin---our aloneness, our fear and our pride.  We need an external source of authority, the Creator's definition found in His Word, the real defining authority.  Genesis 5:1-2 says very plainly, “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them.  And when they were created, He called them ‘man.’”

As disciples of Jesus, we know that there are two spiritual authorities in direct conflict vying for our obedience.  They are the world’s shifty attitudes overseen by the devil and eternal spiritual reality revealed and ruled by God.  The secular world offers multiple distractions of social, psychological, religious and philosophical systems claiming to have the answers.  Sexual identity is defined physically.  So, do whatever makes you feel good.  

With God, it's plain and simple.  His authority is Scripture.  In it we find He created two physical bodies in which persons exist, male and female. 

The question then is not about sexuality but rather about who and what we choose to define the physical use of our male and female bodies.

What the secular world does with the body is to declare it as our final authority thus making the body the master of the heart, the mind and the spirit.  When the body rules, it is the mind that reasons, justifies, then rationalizes desire.  The heart becomes just an emotional machine and the spirit a motivator to feel and satisfy the body. 

What God does with the body is seen in Jesus.  He uses it as a vehicle for spiritual expression to show who He is and who His Father is.  When God rules, the mind thinks like Jesus as Scripture reveals.  The heart is the relational center trusting Jesus as Lord in the choices and decisions we make.  The Holy Spirit inspires faith for our spirit to follow where the mind and heart of Jesus lead. What does Jesus have to say about being a man and a woman and how should they choose to manage those differences?   As the popular expressions say, “It ain't rocket science” and “It's certainly not brain surgery.” 

Again, we operate on this repeated principle, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  Why? Because that's how Jesus came to the world to bring us His mind, His Heart and His Spirit.  He was God the Son who arrived in our neighborhood to live a human experience, a human experience that was spiritually perfect obeying the will of His perfect Father, the Father and Creator of all humanity, the Tender Gender Mender.