Memories Pizza Refuses To Cater Gay Wedding; Right or Wrong? A Christian Perspective.
You’ve already heard this story, right? The story about the little pizza place that said they would refuse to cater a gay wedding based on religious grounds. Well, I’ll just throw this right out there…. I do not agree with them. There, I said it. And now, of course, here are my thoughts and opinions on the matter.
The biggest questions I have are these: Do the owner’s of Memories Pizza check the morality of everyone that walks through their door? If they have catered other events, did they check with those people to insure they met all their religious standards? Obviously, you can see where I’m going with this line of questioning.
The bottom line is this: Just because you cater a gay wedding does not mean you agree with their sexual orientation, nor does it mean you have sinned if you do cater it. And after all, Jesus ate with prostitutes and sinners! And I suspect that if they offered him money, he took that too!
“While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” ~Matthew 9:10-13 (NIV)
I don’t agree with homosexuality, nor believe in gay marriage, but that doesn’t mean I would turn my back on them or even avoid them. (If you’ve read any of my blogs, you already know that I have spoken at length about homosexuality, and have gay friends myself. If you haven’t, you can check them out here and here.) And if an occasion arose for me to minister to anyone at the wedding, I certainly would have! But to turn them down outright just because the owners did not agree with them being gay or believe in a gay marriage was just wrong.
Now, that all being said, I will add one more thought to this whole thing; I believe that any business should be able to turn anyone away for any reason. I know most of you wouldn’t go as far as to agree with that and some might call me ‘racist’ just for saying it. But nothing could be further from the truth. I say that because when you enter a privately-owned business, that’s just it… you are inside an establishment owned by an individual(s) and it is private. That individual(s) should have the right to choose not to serve someone for any reason. If they choose to discriminate, I ASSURE YOU, they won’t be open long! The local community will see to that. But my point is that they should still HAVE THAT RIGHT.
Furthermore, we have discrimination still going on today. It never left. If this little pizza parlor in Indiana had been Muslim-owned, and they refused to cater due to their religious reasons, this story would never have been told. Their refusal would have been happily accepted. But the devil has seen to it that Christians are hated for, well…. just being Christian. While Muslims, who also do NOT agree with homosexuality, are not held to the same standard as Christians. According to the WikiIslam: “The Islamic views on homosexuality are formed from the writings of the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad‘s Sunnah. It is not only a sin, but a crime under Islamic law.” The punishment is, most often, varying forms of death. DEATH. Death for being gay. YES, that is the TRUTH of what Islamic Law says! And yet Islam is accepted but Christianity is no longer tolerated, even though we Christians LOVE all sinners and wish none of them death. Yes friends, that is the world today.
I got a little off on a tangent there, but I think I made all my points. You’ve heard the saying widely spoken among Christians to “love the sinner and hate the sin.” Well, that is still true today. You can love someone and still disagree with their actions. There is no reason to not have gay friends and love gay family members. To be friends with or love a sinner doesn’t mean you agree with their actions. And of course, remember that none of us are free from sin.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” ~Romans 3:23
The Answer To Each And Every Question is JESUS
As soon as I woke up this morning, I knew the Lord wanted me to write this post! This is something my husband and I discussed (again) recently. Politics and Religion. Now, if you think that I’ve blogged about this before, then you are right. You can read that post here.
The Lord has been wanting me to reiterate what I already said, so here goes. In the news as of late, there is all kinds of political talk, contraception and abortion talk, socialism and I could go on and on.
But you don’t have to argue your point about the evils of abortion; you don’t have to argue your point about how wrong and hurtful bringing socialism into our country will be; and you don’t even have to argue your point about how evil, it is to attack, rape and murder people because your religion allows for it (ya Islam says it’s okay.)
The Lord has told me that every breath you spend trying to argue or convince someone to see your side… to see that you speak the truth… are ALL wasted breaths.
Each and every thing, whether it’s viewed as political, societal, economical, etc. is still ALL ABOUT THE SAME THING; RELIGION.
We ARE, in fact, in a religious war. It’s NOT a race war… it’s NOT a war of cultures… But it IS a war of beliefs, what we commonly and generically call ‘religion’.
The Lord said that you need not concern yourselves with trying to change any person or group of persons from the way they are thinking. Without the Lord in their lives, they are open to each and every evil work the devil will use them for. So all your arguing or gentle persuasion of truth will have ZERO effect on them, and will probably have the opposite effect of enraging their demons to the point of anger or worse.
The Lord told me specifically that once they find their way to Jesus, their evil ‘beliefs’ in abortion, socialism, etc. will all CHANGE by default.
The ONLY ways you can help those types of people is to pray for them to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior or help bring them to Jesus yourself. But whatever the route, they need the Lord!
Until they find their way to the Lord, you will NOT be able to change their minds. Their minds are so clouded by the devil’s deceit and lies, only Jesus’ light will be able to penetrate it so they can see TRUTH.
I urge you all to pray DAILY for those on the planet that do not yet know Jesus. It is the only way we will have a good future for our children!
If My Sins Are Paid For, Then Why Not Just Sin All I Want?
I have been having an extremely difficult time lately with something. One member of our family stood up for another family member’s evil, sinful ways by saying that her sins ‘have been PAID for.’ End of story. Nothing further to discuss. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, this got me to thinking… if our sins are paid for, then why not just sin all we want? God may not like it but Jesus ALREADY paid for them, right? When I became born-again, I was saved. I have eternal life through Christ Jesus and I will be in Heaven one day. That’s it and that’s all. Regardless of what I do from now until the time of my mortal death, I WILL be in Heaven. That is all true.
The family member who stood up for evil, did nothing to condemn it, now SHARES in this sin as well. That same person claims to understand this, but how could you understand it and yet still go along with it because now YOU TOO are GUILTY and will be held responsible of the same sin! Why…. WHY… would you claim to understand that and yet not speak up to what you have seen and heard? I am actually MORE worried about the person covering up the sin than the person committing it.
“Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.” ~LEVITICUS 19:17 (NIV)
“If anyone sins because they do not speak up when they hear a public charge to testify regarding something they have seen or learned about, they will be held responsible.” ~LEVITICUS 5:1 (NIV)
Now, I know we ALL sin. But those of us with a true intimate relationship with the Lord, who LOVE the Lord and honestly WANT to live up to his expectations of us, wouldn’t purposefully go about sinning. It’s just not in our born-again nature to do that.
The family member that actually did the sinning, commits evil acts so often, that if you asked me to name just a couple nice things she has done to help others, I could honestly not tell you even one. Her evil ways are born out of extreme selfishness and everything she does has a self-serving basis. She claims to love the Lord and that the things she does is only because she wants to be ‘happy’, and the Lord wants her to be happy, right? (She has actually said this while engaged in an affair with another man, while married to her second husband.) What she cannot grasp is that if you do things out of sheer selfishness… if you do things that hurt others… you can and never will be ‘happy’ and will never know ‘peace’. That completely goes against spiritual law. You will not receive peace and happiness from sin… you cannot receive something good by doing something evil.
The Lord helped me understand the true problem with this woman. She is born-again. She claims to love the Lord. But she is ‘on the fence.’ She can be good or she can be evil but she CANNOT BE BOTH. Until she CHOOSES A SIDE, she will NEVER have peace and NEVER be happy.
Here’s how the Lord explained it to me:
GOOD: If you are engaged in a loving and intimate relationship with the Lord, then He is all you need to find peace and happiness. If you are looking anywhere but to the Lord for help in being happy, you will fail. Only through the Lord will you succeed.
EVIL: And if you are not born-again and do not know the Lord, then you are on the other side of the fence. Evil will be dominant in your life and those who seek to keep you in the dark will probably offer you tokens of happiness to keep you there. The devil will bring you wealth or whatever else you desire to keep you away from the Lord. He will make you believe that you have ALL you need to be happy and therefore, you need nothing else. You will never seek the Lord because you don’t feel you need Him. These forms of happiness might make your life on Earth easier but you will never know eternal life. The devil’s job is to deceive and he is really good at it.
Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.” ROMANS 8:5-8
SO…. WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Politics and Religion… Hypocrisy and Integrity
My grandfather used to say “don’t talk about religion or politics unless you WANT to start a fight with somebody.” I talk about religion all the time and my husband talks politics all the time, so I guess we’ve got the taboo topics well covered. You already know we are Christian, the title of the blog gives that away, but we are also Conservative. You might think the title gives that away too, but you can’t be really be sure. I’ll talk more about that later…
I have, for years now, seen my husband talking in political forums on the Internet, and fighting with others about his political beliefs. I also have been telling him, for years, that it’s a waste of his time. All it does is get him worked up, angry and upset, over nothing. He hasn’t ‘converted’ anyone to his way of thinking. Everyone just fights and tries to get others to change to his/her point of view, and none do. All he did was hurt himself by letting the devil get under his skin to the point of anger.
One day recently, I was just standing in the kitchen and he had just commented on someone’s post in the forum, and I was suddenly hit with the truth. I said, “the Lord just informed me that you are wasting your time because it’s not really about politics, it’s really about religion.” The Lord basically said that if you can bring someone to Jesus, thus changing their religious views, then their politics will change too. He wanted me to remind my husband, yet again, that his time is better spent talking about the Lord with others, than talking about their politics. And it makes perfect sense considering you’d be hard-pressed to find an atheist or buddhist, etc. that has a Conservative way of thinking because they are not Christian.
Now, before a bunch of you start writing me and proving me wrong, I admit that everything has variables. There are always some that ‘don’t fit the mold’ and I acknowledge that. BUT… and this is a BIG BUT… Hypocrisy plays a huge role here as well. Let me explain…
I know some people who claim to be Christian and also say they are Democrats. Sounds like they ‘don’t fit the mold’ of the Conservative Christian,right? Well, that is, until you go deeper and find out that they rarely attend church, they don’t talk about the Bible at home or even read it. And if you ask them questions about the Bible, you’ll find they don’t really know it at all, and couldn’t tell you the last time they actually sat down to read it! I was raised ‘Christian’ but I knew less than 1% of what the Bible was actually about, we never went to church, never talked about the Lord at home, etc. Some say just believing in Jesus and God makes you a Christian, but I say, No.. it really doesn’t. So now those ‘Christian Democrats’ I just mentioned, don’t appear very Christian at all. If you aren’t ‘practicing’, then what are you really? Can I just ‘say’ I am a Christian and be one without doing anything else? Nope. I can ‘say’ I am a man but if I’m sitting here, a woman just like God made me, then I am NOT a man at all. Just SAYING something doesn’t make it so; Your ACTIONS have to back it up. Just like those that say they are on the side of a certain political party, but they never vote. Can I just say I am a Conservative, but I never vote in any elections or share my Conservative opinions with others? I don’t think so. If you are not actively participating in your chosen Religion or Political party, then what are you really?
Answer: a HYPOCRITE. The more I think on it, the more I think Jesus would say these types of people fall into the category of hypocrite because they are not practicing what they preach. The very definition of hypocrisy tells us that it is a DECEPTION or LIE. And in Matthew 23, we see several examples of what Jesus thought of hypocrites:
Matthew 23:13 – “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.”
Matthew 23:14 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”
Matthew 23:23 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”
Matthew 23:27 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”
Jesus, clearly and plainly, pointed out to them the many ways they were hypocrites, and in the process, showed us all the EVIL of it. These are also clear examples of a lack of INTEGRITY. If one is a constant flip-flopper on your morals, ideals, opinions, etc. then they lack integrity. If you’ve been reading your BIBLE, you know then that integrity is spoken of often as being something that is GODLY:
Proverbs 11:3 “The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.”
Proverbs 20:7 “The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.”
Proverbs 19:1 “Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity, than he that is perverse in his lips, and is a fool.”
The true point I am trying to make is that even some people who claim to be Christian are not really Christian. You have to talk about the Lord, read your Bible, speak with others about the Lord, have an intimate relationship with the Lord, and do godly things to be a true Christian. Just saying you are one and doing nothing else but praying once in awhile, does not make you a true Christian. It does, however, make you a hypocrite.
The same is to be said of politics. If you say you are for a certain political party but you never vote, do not speak to others about your opinions, and just basically don’t get involved at all, then what are you really? Your actions have to back up your beliefs or you are nothing more than a hypocrite.
What the Lord was telling me, in essence, is that true Christians don’t have to be convinced to be for any certain political party. Once they are brought into a true intimate relationship with the Lord and true godly living… they will change their political thinking automatically.
The Devil Wants Your Children…
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. We had not lived through wars as our parents and grandparents had. It was a prosperous time, where spending money on unnecessary items was socially expected, if not required, of you. The ‘free-love’ generation was behind us and sex before marriage was largely acceptable, homosexuals were coming out, and drugs were an accepted type of ‘fun’. The women’s movement was also behind us and women were now ‘expected’ to work. During the 80s, the stay-at-home mom’s were looked down upon, and it was expected that you would have a career. Today, stay-at-home moms are now revered for their ‘sacrifice’ of raising children instead of having a career (what a huge deception on the devils’ part!) When I think about how different life was 50 years ago, I see that we have indeed come so far… but instead of getting ahead, we’ve actually gone far off track.
In 1962, the devil successfully got prayer thrown out of schools, and almost immediately the shit started to hit the fan. As David Barton talks about in his book “America, To Pray? Or not to Pray?”, after prayer was removed from schools, there was a rise every year of teenage pregnancies to unwed mothers, alcohol consumption, pre-martial sex, violent crime.. and the list goes on. The late 60s saw the movement of free-love and feminism, and the start of recreational drug use. The serpent had once again tricked the females into thinking that sinning was the right thing to do.
As I grew up in the 70s and 80s, I unfortunately didn’t have a Christian upbringing. So when I was told not to do something, there was no scripture to back it up. I was led to believe that it was just my parents’ rules. I know now that obeying your parents is actually something that God wants you to do! (“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” Colossians 3:20) Instead, I learned about individuality and that if I didn’t subscribe to ‘their’ rules, I could make my own because I was simply different than them. As I got older, I had learned over the course of time what the Bible said about certain things that were sins. But all around me were people that lived much differently than what I was told the Bible said. Some of it came from television and movies too, but the people that were friends of my family and even my friend’s families lived that way. Partying on the weekends was okay, pre-marital sex was okay… I had zero role models for true Godly living!
Now it’s 2011 and not much has changed. In fact, it’s getting worse. The devil has learned that if he gets your children at an early age, he’ll have them for years, if not for their entire lives. He knows that since kids are subjected to, and give in to, peer pressure that there’s a good chance they will take their ideas and spread them like disease through their entire school or neighborhood. He knows this because he KNEW that prayer was working. Think about it… every day in schools across the entire country, millions of children each day were praising God. The devil saw the blessings it was having upon this country, and once he put a stop to it, he knew to replace it with his own disease to have the opposite effect. As I said in a previous blog, he is REALLY good at what he does.
Another great deception the devil has put on us regarding our children is the idea that we need to ‘let children be children’. I’ve even heard parents say they want their child to get to ‘be a kid for as long as he can.’ This type of thinking is exactly why I believe that childhood is extending well into the 20s now. Why? Because you simply cannot let your kids PLAY for literally years, and expect them to be adults and work-minded upon their 18th birthday. I know a 21 year old who just got his first job after playing video games in the 3+ years since high school ended. I’m sure some of you reading this know a few adult-kids as well! The one thing my parents knew was that hard work was required to earn a living. They promptly had me get a job as soon as I turned 16. Something very few parents actually ‘require’ of their children these days!
If you go back about a hundred years, not everyone even went to school. A lot had to help their fathers with his work or their mothers with her work. I’m sure that without televisions and video games, they still had a lot of playtime mixed in. But the point is that from an early age, they were taught that work was a necessary part of life. My grandmother grew up on a farm, and hard work is her middle name even at age 90! She and her sisters had to help run the family farm when they were younger. They also went off to school around age 13. My grandmother says they had to take the train to the closest town, stay in a boarding house for young girls during the week, and then take the train home on the weekends to help with the farm. If you ask her, she didn’t ‘miss out’ on childhood! In fact, she can tell you stories about the great fun they had on the farm when they weren’t working. The misconception that kids need to play to be kids, and not have to work, is a lie and deception from the devil, plain and simple.
The one thing that needs to happen to make some big changes is for Christians to actually read their Bibles! I know a lot of Christians that have no relationship with God, never pick up their Bible. When they say and do things they believe are Godly, and you ask them why they do and say those things, the only answer they have is ‘I’ve always done it that way’. They can give NO basis for it… cannot quote scripture to back it up. They can only act like a parrot repeating something someone else told them, who was repeating it from someone else, and so on! If you are not reading the Word, if you are not talking to God, having an intimate relationship with Him, and being thankful to Him, then you are absolutely not a true Christian! If you are not doing it, then HOW do you expect to teach your children properly?! How easy it is for them to be taken over by the devil for any evil work he would have them do.
Do you want to understand your God-given authority? Do you really understand what Jesus’ death meant for you? Do you know that life and death are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21), and what that truly means? It’s never too late to learn the truth! I am a huge follower of Andrew Wommack. People either love him or hate him for the things he says. I happen to be on the love side. If you are lost in your Christianity, check out some of Andrews’ videos. They are FREE on his website. Andrew Wommack Ministries.
Where I Began…
To know how I got to where I am now, you must know from where I began. From my first blog, you know that I did not grow up knowing the Lord. My family would tell people they were ‘Christian’ but there was no reading the Bible in our home, no teaching us about anything having to do with Christianity. From other relatives, I learned that when my mother was young, her grandmother died and it was then she stopped believing in God. My father seemed to see Christians as the crazy, bible-thumpers some portray them to be. So we practiced all the holidays but I knew very little about the true meaning of those holidays.
As I grew up, I had the desire inside of me to learn about the Lord. The babysitter took us to Vacation Bible School and I loved it. However, I remember visiting friends’ churches and they didn’t feel good to me. I started thinking I was evil because I would go into a church and feel an overwhelming sense that I didn’t belong there. Once I became an adult, I started searching for whatever the ‘truth’ was. I read tons of new-age books. I tried a little of almost every belief system out there.
I’m not happy about the beliefs that I practiced before now, but I’m not ashamed either. The devil is a deceiver and well let’s be honest, he’s REALLY good at it! And and why shouldn’t he be, after having thousands of years to perfect it. The first non-Christian thing I tried was when I was about age 20. In a moment of anger toward the Lord, I told him that I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. I was tired of not understanding the Bible, not having answers to my questions. I told him to go and actually ‘felt’ him leave. Until that moment I didn’t realize how connected I actually was to him! I felt empty but my anger persisted. I started hearing another voice in my head that I KNEW was evil. I told it that if it could do ‘anything’ as it claimed, then have my ex-boyfriend appear in front of me. (I was driving in my car as I said that.) Moments later, a car pulled in front of me and at the next stop light I realized that it was indeed my X! I was shocked and scared! I returned home and repented to the Lord and he joined me again immediately.
After that I never again turned toward the darkside, but I still didn’t think that I knew ‘the truth’. I went to new-age workshops, I had past-life regressions (I was SURE that reincarnation was real!), I went to see a channeler, and the list goes on. I started reading every book I could get my hands on and that included the Bible. I believed in God, but thought that maybe Jesus was just a ‘prophet’. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know how much of the Bible was actually metaphor and how much was just plain facts. In my late 20s, I dated a preacher’s son and he was more screwed up than me. I don’t remember what denomination he came from, but let’s just say that having him in my life did more harm for my Christianity than good. During the time I dated him, I had given away all of my ‘sinful’ books (non-Christian) but after him, I had to buy more because I was still searching for the truth. And I thought that I had finally found it at about age 30 with “The Law of Attraction”.
I started reading what are called the ‘Seth books‘. A woman supposedly channeled an ‘entity’ named Seth a who answered lots of questions posed to him. I also really got into the Law of Attraction by reading the ‘Abraham‘ books. Here was again, another channeled entity and this one talked all about the Law of Attraction, among other things. Anyway, whatever was being said in those books got through to me. I was praying to God but trying to use the Law of Attraction at the same time. What a disaster! I would pray and believe that God would answer my prayers because I was using the ‘Law’ to try and make things happen.
I was deep into this crap for a long time. Then one day the devil overplayed his hand. I started noticing a pattern. I would spend weeks thinking happy thoughts about some changes I wanted to see in my life, but NOTHING happened. And then literally, the very second I thought something bad, it happened immediately. That voice in my head (that I know now was not the Lord) said, “see that! you did that! you made that happen because you thought something bad!” Then it hit me. I said, “that doesn’t make sense. I think good thoughts over and over for weeks upon weeks and get nothing, and I think one bad thought and BAM! bad thing happens fast as lightning!” Hmmm.. something smells fishy! I had finally begun to see the deceit in it all!
My boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, had waited patiently until this day when I told him that I think my beliefs are screwed up. I told him what happened and he explained to me about how the devil is a great deceiver. I knew it was the truth because things started happening in my life that told me I was on the right path. I could ‘feel’ the anger of the demons. I heard snake hissing sounds in my bedroom, and lots more bizarre things happening. I had found the truth I had been searching for and continue to this day to learn more and experience more from our Lord! I will have lots more details of that in upcoming blogs!
the11thhourworker 