Gay Girl, Good God
The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been
by Jackie Hill Perry
A Book Review
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
“I used to be a lesbian.”
In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could?
At age nineteen, Jackie came face-to-face with what it meant to be made new. And not in a church, or through contact with Christians. God broke in and turned her heart toward Him right in her own bedroom in light of His gospel.
Read in order to understand. Read in order to hope. Or read in order, like Jackie, to be made new.
GREAT QUOTES:
We must place our ultimate identity not in who we are, but in who we know God to be.
God isn’t calling gay people to be straight. You’d think He was by listening to the ways Christians try to encourage same-sex-attracted (SSA) people within, or outside, their local churches. They dangle the possibility of heterosexual marriage above their heads, point to it like it’s heaven on a string, something to grab and get whole with. And though it’s usually well-meaning, it’s very dangerous. Why? Because it puts more emphasis on marriage as the goal of the Christian life than knowing Jesus.
For the unbeliever that is SSA, God is not mainly calling them to be straight; He’s calling them to Himself. To know Christ, love Christ, serve Christ, honor Christ, and exalt Christ, forever.
When an SSA Christian pursues heterosexuality as the goal instead of Christ, they will ultimately find themselves merely replacing one idol for the other.
Their identity as image-bearers, and not their sexual impulses, is the primary identifier that many SSA men and women desperately need to hear from the pulpits and the pews.
If it will be that earthly marriage will not last into eternity, then we cannot preach a “gospel” that makes it out to be something worth dying for. Earthly marriage is momentary; the church’s marriage to Christ is forever.
Christ has simply come to make us right with God. And in making us right with God, He is satisfying us in God. Our sexuality is not our soul, marriage is not heaven, and singleness is not hell. So may we all preach the news that is good for a reason. For it proclaims to the world that Jesus has come so that all sinners, same-sex-attracted and opposite-sex-attracted, can be forgiven of their sins to love God and enjoy Him forever.
The crucified life is the life set on enduring until the end when once and for all, the cross is replaced with a crown.
