New Creations
By Pamela Pearson Wong
March/April 2001 Family Voice

Little can surpass the joy of seeing individuals come to faith. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17. Jesus’ new beginning also applies to men and women caught in the sin of homosexuality.

Homosexuality can be terribly difficult to overcome. So, since 1974, ministries that help those who want to leave it have greatly increased. According to a ministry spokesman, they now comprise 121 groups in the United States and abroad, and 20,000 individuals who have come out of homosexuality. Many more men and women have changed with help from local churches.

Nothing angers the homosexual community more than experiences of deliverance, which refute the notion that homosexuality is unchangeable—an essential element of the “gay” agenda. If they truly are “born that way,” homosexuals can demand special civil rights. But God’s transforming power in the lives of former homosexuals will not be silenced, as the following testimonies demonstrate.

“I did not know it was wrong when he approached me. It … was an affirmation, of sorts,” she says. “So that was the beginning of the demonic stronghold, of the twisted perception of men and certainly of God. I had a built-in survival mechanism to protect myself against men.”

These traumas ushered Kim into sexual activity by age 15, then work as a stripper and teen prostitute.

“I took on the identity desperate for affection and affirmation from women,” she says.

Then, Kim decided to join the Navy. It would be a new start, she hoped. She stopped doing drugs and prostitution and, to avoid Sunday-morning infantry duty, even began attending church.

“I found myself weeping and not understanding why,” Kim recalls. “That started my journey slowly but surely toward Jesus Christ.”

She started reading the Bible, attending Bible study and seeking counsel from the Navy chaplain. But more experiences confirmed her perceptions of men. Sergeants offered to upgrade her rank in exchange for sexual favors—even the chaplain made sexual advances.

“I couldn’t relate to Jesus as man,” she says. “God the Father? No such thing.”

Kim took an early discharge from the military. At age 20, she answered a classified ad and moved to New York to become involved with an older woman. But “the Holy Spirit wasn’t letting go of me,” she says. Still seeking, she attended a church that presented the gospel message, and Kim received Christ as her Savior.

“Where,” she asks today, “was the attitude of helping the weak?”

Kim was disillusioned and discouraged. One hot summer night, she decided to go dancing—only dancing—in New York. “But Satan had other plans for me,” she recalls. That very night, she met an attractive woman who believed in God and didn’t drink.

“For the next 12 years, I was back in deeper bondage than ever before,” Kim recalls. “When you open the door for the enemy to take ground, he comes back even stronger. I had to stay intoxicated to avoid the conviction of the Holy Spirit.”

At first, Kim hesitated to share her struggles. Eventually, she opened up to a friendly, wise young woman who sat behind her on the first Sunday. “We became best friends,” she says. “I began to embrace the woman that God had made me. It was a glorious feeling.” As she shared her past with the church, she found support and love. Much to her amazement, she learned that several families who lived on the same street as she and her former partner had been praying for her for years.

Meanwhile, Kim tackled the painful, difficult issues of relating to men, God the Father, and Jesus as God and Man. She worked with a counselor at a New York ministry to homosexuals, LIFE (Living in Faith Eternally). Eventually she began to learn how to live as God intended. She began volunteering as a counselor for LIFE and sharing her testimony. She rejoiced in the privilege of leading her mother to Christ and continues to pray for her father.

God said yes—and brought her future husband to her doorstep. When she walked outside one afternoon, a man stood nearby. “Hello,” he greeted her. “The landlord says you’re a Christian.”

Kim and Bob became friends. He had lived close by for two years, but they had never met. They began attending church together, and he recommitted himself to Christ. After a few months, Kim told Bob of her past. Surprised, he still persevered. Last September, after bathing their relationship in prayer and undergoing premarital counseling, they were married in their church.

Kim has been on both sides now. So what advice does she offer Christians who desire to reach out to lesbians?

“We have to communicate that we love and care for the person first of all,” she says. “Lead her to Jesus, then expect Him to lead her out of immorality.”

“My life changed in literally one night,” Stephen says.

Because of alcoholism in his family, Stephen had sworn he’d never drink. But after that night, his drinking increased, and he got caught up in the homosexual bar scene. Deeply depressed, he left school. Life became a whirl of alcohol, cocaine and homosexual one-night stands. He lost an art business and became a cocaine dealer to support his habit.

Instead of a happy home life where the family shared together, Stephen has other memories. “I remember playing at a friend’s house and looking at his as the ideal family,” Stephen recalls. “He had a mother and a father, no one drank, they had supper together.

“The male relationship was lacking in my life,” he says simply.

As a result, Stephen felt rejected by men. Other children called him derogatory homosexual names. “After hearing that for many years, you kind of believe it,” he says. “I never thought I was attractive. I remember looking at other boys my age and thinking, ‘I wish I looked like that.’ … Then you take it a step further, where [the desire] becomes something you crave.” As a homosexual, Stephen finally experienced what he thought was love and acceptance from men.

In 1987, after a three-day drug and alcohol binge, Stephen looked into the mirror. The person looking back shocked him. Gaunt and spent from years of substance abuse, bulimia and immorality, he entered an inpatient recovery program. He emerged 25 pounds heavier and free from his addictions—except for one.

Before long, he was back in the gay bars, and he met a man. They began a three-year, live-in relationship. Now Stephen felt he had it all—a good job, stable relationship, nice home—and he was drug- and alcohol-free. He even attended church every Sunday.

“I saw my homosexuality for the first time as God saw it—sin,” Stephen recalls.

For months, he struggled with choosing God or homosexuality. He left his partner for a while and immersed himself in the homosexual culture of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he witnessed every form of perversion. He made his decision—and returned to his partner.

When he told Kathy of his choice, she again shared God’s Word with him. If he continued to reject the Holy Spirit’s tug, he could become a reprobate, she said. He wouldn’t have another chance to respond. That did it. Stephen bowed his head and, in January 1992, asked Jesus to become his Savior. He asked Him to free him from homosexuality forever.

Within two weeks, he had moved out of his partner’s home. “God was revealing things to me daily through the Bible,” he says. “It was amazing.”

Temptation did come. Soon after his salvation, Stephen met a man who tried to entice him back into the bar scene. “But, thank God, I really clung to His Word, and He protected me.”

Stephen became active in a church where, for the first time, he observed and learned about loving relationships between husbands and wives. Within a year, he was engaged to Irene. She had introduced Kathy to Christ and had prayed with her for Stephen’s salvation. Now happily married for seven years, he and Irene are parents to Chloe, 2½, and Blake, 6 months.

“It was God’s love that drew me,” says Stephen, who now ministers as a musical evangelist. “God loves the homosexual very much.” He refers to the death of Matthew Shepard, the homosexual college student who was tragically murdered in Wyoming in 1998. “You have fanatics, supposedly Christian, showing up at his funeral with signs that say: ‘He’s burning in hell.’ That’s something Jesus would never do. That wouldn’t draw me into the kingdom of God as a homosexual.

“It says in Romans 2:4, ‘The goodness of God leads you to repentance. ’ I have been with people who today are dead from the AIDS virus.

“God saved me from so much,” Stephen says. “It gives me greater love and thankfulness for Him all the time. It keeps me from even thinking of going back.”

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