The Bible teaches that God is perfectly beneficent and good. Any deviation from God’s law and will is therefore by definition sinful. Since homosexuality deviates from the heterosexual ideal and norm in the Bible and is in various passages associated with ungodliness and idolatry, I as a gay teenager and converted Christian firmly believed that homosexuality was sinful and that my duty, security and happiness was to suppress my sexuality and desire for a partner in life.

Driven by love and devotion to Jesus, I strove to fill my time with joyful, meaningful and cathartic activities that would protect me from sentimentalism, loneliness and lust. My initial energy and optimism came from a genuine faith in God, trusting that He would provide all that I needed to be happy and healthy as a celibate gay man.

Notwithstanding this positive and optimistic outlook, my mental health began to deteriorate as the years passed. I surrounded myself with lovely people that I truly connected with on a platonic level, and yet I felt increasingly lonely and isolated. I developed severe depression and anxiety. And finally, for the first time ever in my life, I became suicidal.

This was my wake-up call. It was at this point that I knew I had to make a decision. Was I on the right track? Was I lost? Was this God’s will? Should I continue my course? Who am I and what are my values? I read the apostle Paul’s words that the fruit that God’s Spirit brings forth in our lives is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22). I also read Jesus’ words that we shall know what is true and false by the fruits (Matthew 7:15-20). If I was doing God’s will and following God’s Spirit, then why was I not bearing good fruit? Why was I struggling with anger, depression, anxiety, and despair? Where did I go wrong?

If I was doing God’s will and following God’s Spirit, then why was I not bearing good fruit?

Recognizing a pattern. As I agonizingly pondered my Christian journey, retracing my every step, a pattern emerged before me. As a newly converted Christian, I had repeatedly fallen from faith and love into an anxious state of obsessing over my own failures and sin. My conversion was powerful and sudden, and in my newfound devotion to God I made strenuous efforts to please Him. All I wanted was to go to Heaven and be with Jesus. I didn’t want to miss out on God’s presence and blessing in this life either. I obsessed over my shortcomings and sin in order to fix them so that nothing would get in between me and God.

An imperceptible fall. Being a theology student, I recognized in the history of the Christian Church this pattern of falling from the positive dynamic of grace, faith, and love into the negative dynamic of law, fear, and works—a danger that the apostle Paul warned against in his writings, and which the Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther later accused the Catholic Church of having done. Also Ellen White, a Christian writer who first inspired my faith in God, had warned against this. I’d been reminded again and again about God’s forgiveness and grace for my shortcomings, finding back to the assurance of God’s acceptance. This would refuel my love and devotion to God and also rekindle my efforts to please God and stop sinning, which again would make me obsess over my failures. It was a cycle. And I realized that this cycle had been going on repeat for years. It had been such an emotional roller coaster between heaven and hell that I at this point began to wonder if I was suffering from some underlying mental issue. Was I mentally ill? What was wrong with me? Why was I stuck in this loop? Where was God’s salvation that I so firmly believed in?

Transactional love. Now, at the lowest that I’d ever been, I knew there was no way back to these exhausting cycles. My existence couldn’t afford the emotional torture of a new cycle of hope and despair; of trying to please God and then disappointing Him. I was completely burned out. And so, the only meaning that I could make of my seemingly meaningless, hopeless situation was the lesson of acceptance. I came to the conclusion that if God hadn’t left me, He was teaching me once and for all to rest. To stop working. To stop trying to fix myself and be holy enough. To stop trying to earn His acceptance by pretending to be someone or something I really wasn’t. I knew in my heart that I was gay. Deep down in my heart I longed for a partner. While celibacy came naturally to me in my teens, deep down I now knew that my performance of singleness and “holiness” no longer was genuine. I did it because I wanted to get something in return: God’s love and acceptance. It was transactional and essentially selfish. And thus, peace and happiness eluded me, because deep down I didn’t actually believe that I was accepted by God for who I truly was right now: A gay man who couldn’t bear the thought of living my life alone.

So I finally decided to let go of my celibacy performance. I let go of using spirituality as a way to suppress my loneliness and earn God’s favor. Would God really accept me now?

This is when I rediscovered the meaning of the Gospel. I understood that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross on my behalf ensures that I even now as a sinner who is unable to meet the standards as expressed in God’s law can be forgiven and accepted by God and live authentically, joyfully and without fear. John the Apostle wrote:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

1 John 1:9, ESV

If I acknowledge my sinfulness before God, He will take care of my holiness and salvation. Salvation is through faith in Jesus promised to me as God’s free gift if I acknowledge my need to be forgiven and saved. Believing and resting fully in that God’s salvation is free is the very thing that transforms me and enables me to truly love God and grow organically into the person that God wants me to be. This, I saw, is the secret of how God through our faith transforms the heart and makes us holy.

Knowing God. This is how I learned for myself what it really means to be a Christian, and what it means for me as a gay Christian. Some gay Christians (like myself) have, at the peril of their own health, striven to suppress or change their sexual orientation in order to be accepted by God. Other gay Christians go to unreasonably great lengths in their efforts to prove from the Bible or from science that homosexuality is unproblematic and not sinful. In reality, both categories of gay Christians are striving to uphold and prove their own righteousness and sinlessness—as if they could earn or make themselves deserving of God’s love and acceptance. They operate with a human, transactional and selfish kind of love. They seem to be completely ignorant of the hopeless sinfulness and selfishness of human nature, and ignorant of God’s holiness and the holiness of His law that required that His own Son who created us should die for our sins if we were to go free.

My understanding is that we’ll never know God, find true peace and grow as Christians if we refuse to accept and confess that we are desperately in need of divine forgiveness and help. We must acknowledge this in order to receive God’s peace and acceptance. People who are often viewed as the “sinners” of society because of their more conspicuous weaknesses or flaws might have an advantage spiritually, because their brokenness, which is more difficult to hide, can help them learn the lesson of humility, faith and mercy in a way that other more widely accepted, hidden sins cannot. In any case, God’s acceptance is received through faith, meaning that we don’t deserve it and cannot earn it but only can receive it through confession and faith (Ephesians 2:8-10; Romans 3:28; 1 John 1:9).

And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

Romans 4:5, ESV

This is my testimony. What is yours? Feel free to share in the comment section below!