In case you are having a hard time drowning out all life’s noise and worry, I would encourage you to take a look at this list of songs which walk through the Gospel story and offer hope and assurance in exactly the areas where we all feel hard-pressed right now.

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5 Lies Men Believe about Their Roles in the Family

Imagine you’re sitting across the table from a church friend. You’ve known him since he began attending the church a few years ago, and for the last several months, he’s been a part of the small group you lead. He shares with you over coffee that his marriage isn’t great. His wife, in his words, is controlling, demanding, and constantly critical of him. “I’m extremely angry,” he shares. “To be honest, I go back and forth between angry outbursts and withdrawing to daydream about what life would be like if I never married her. She drives me crazy.” Here’s a different scenario. You’re a women’s ministry leader in your church, and a young woman tells you she’s been hurt by another member—a friend of hers and yours. But when she opens up about the offense, you struggle to track with her. The accusations are vague, and it becomes evident she’s reading offenses into what seem to you benign comments. One more hypothetical. A few single thirtysomethings in your church request to meet with the elders to discuss “problematic” developments. During the meeting, they share that they’re offended by how the pastor has, in three consecutive sermons, applied the text to marriage and parenting but never once to singleness. Additionally, the church is planning a marriage-focused Sunday school class in the fall, without offering a corresponding class on singleness. They demand a “listening session” where the elders hear them share what it’s like to be a single in the church. To Validate or Not to Validate? Each of these cases is unique. But each raises questions: How should you respond to the feelings (angry, hurt, offended) being expressed? Should you validate or challenge them? If you’re a pastor, you face these questions all the time. On the one hand, in an effort to show grace, you want to validate the feelings of those who confide in you. On the other hand, in an effort to pursue truth, you want to redirect or steer them away from misleading emotions—and the potential sins and idols they reveal. How should you respond in delicate situations like this? Contemporary Leaning: Validate! The solution in contemporary culture is simple: We should always validate feelings. This is an important tenet in modern therapy: “Validation helps (people) feel heard and understood, reducing feelings of isolation and promoting emotional healing.” “Validating someone shows you understand their feelings and point of view, even when you disagree.” “Validation helps a person feel cared for and supported. Yet, too often a person can feel that their inner experiences are judged and denied. This can lead to low self-worth or feelings of shame.” Validation isn’t without biblical support. One could argue, for example, that the psalms—with the language they give to anger, grief, betrayal, and doubt—are a divine validation of our emotions. Or consider Job’s story. He lost everything, and in response, a torrent of anger, outrage, pain, confusion, and depression poured out of his mouth. His friends, at first, sat silently, mourning with him, letting him grieve and “process”: “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great” (Job 2:13). But the moment they began to correct his response, they fell into sin. Better Response Does the spirit of the age, then, align with biblical wisdom, or should we be wary of the rush to validate? What’s a biblically wise approach to responding to emotions and knowing when—and when not—to validate them? Here are three recommendations that might help as you assess the right response. 1. Differentiate between acknowledgment and validation. It’s unhelpful to validate some emotional responses. James said, as one example, that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). But it’s also unhelpful to pretend people aren’t feeling something they’re feeling. We should learn to recognize what those around us are feeling first, before rushing to affirm or correct. We can be emotionally perceptive without being enslaved to emotions. Acknowledging the reality of emotions is different from evaluating their health or helpfulness. We can help people feel heard and loved without affirming them in their sin or idolatry. Acknowledging the reality of emotions is different from evaluating their health or helpfulness. For example, to the young woman in scenario 2, you might say, “It sounds like you’re feeling hurt. I’m sorry about that. Can I ask you why her words were so hurtful to you?” This lets her know you’re there for her while opening the door to further discussion that may shed light on the illegitimacy of those feelings—or may reveal that your initial suspicions were off and the friend’s comments were indeed unkind. 2. See feelings as a thermometer rather than a thermostat. A thermometer tells you what the temperature is; a thermostat directs the temperature. As a counselor friend of mine said, “Emotions are helpful information.” In the case of the husband in scenario 1, his anger is an important revelation. It’s good to know he feels angry. But the fact of his anger is one thing. What actions will he take in response? If he puts that anger in the driver’s seat, he’s going to make bad decisions that worsen, not improve, his marital problems. He needs to learn to submit his anger to the Lord. You should consider asking him what God asks Jonah: “Do you do well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:9). More helpful than validating others’ emotions is helping them respond to those emotions and—if necessary—redirect them. 3. Practice situational wisdom. Proverbs 26:4–5 (CSB) gives apparently contradictory advice: “Don’t answer a fool according to his foolishness or you’ll be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his foolishness or he’ll become wise in his own eyes.” But it’s not a contradiction when we grasp the underlying assumption: Wisdom is situational. We’ll answer a fool differently depending on the situation. As a counselor friend of mine said, ‘Emotions are helpful information.’ In scenario 3 above, your wisest move might be to give the frustrated single members the hearing they desire—if you know them to be mature, humble people who have been committed to your church and demonstrated submission to Scripture over time. On the other hand, your wisest move might be to correct them clearly and directly, even at the risk of their departure from the church, if you know this is just another round of immature antics from chronically angry folks known to regularly stir up trouble and division. Tread Lightly These steps won’t make everything easy or every decision straightforward. It’s possible to handle a situation with the utmost love, care, and wisdom and still get accused of spiritual abuse and gaslighting. Sadly, in our cultural moment—when helping others “feel cared for and supported” is seen as the highest good—anything short of full validation of feelings can be interpreted as being cruel or abusive. You might also try to act wisely but misstep. Sanctification and soul care are messy work. But we’re instruments in the hands of the Redeemer, who uses us to extend grace and peace to one another. Let’s seek him in prayer, and lean on his wisdom, as we traverse the sometimes difficult terrain of emotional life.

Several years ago, a young man experiencing same-sex attraction asked me for counsel. He’d heard a sermon at his church that, while not affirming homosexual sex, described those identifying as LGBTQ+ as if they’re a category of people, as a matter of being. He was anxious to know if, as a professing Christian, he should accept that he’s LGBTQ+ and join the LGBTQ+ community. I sympathized with him; young people are inundated with confusing messages pertaining to sexuality. I explained to him that he’s a man created in God’s image. As one raised to new life in Christ, he should let that direct his sexual desires and conduct. Thus, his sexual desire for men neither defines nor governs him. As he listened, his distress and anxiety diminished. The burdens our society had imposed on him, unwittingly affirmed by his church, were lifted, and he left our time grateful and hopeful, with a path forward in Christ. Dramatic shifts in our culture’s understanding of sexuality and identity have been promoted, despite their harms, as an unmitigated good. So it’s intriguing when a champion of the LGBTQ+ movement recognizes the damage the ideology has caused. That’s what makes Ronan McCrea’s book The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom important. According to McCrea, professor of constitutional and European law at University College London, “the Gay Rights Revolution” achieved a “comprehensive and decisive” triumph (5). While he celebrates that triumph, McCrea worries it’s imperiled. He’s especially concerned that the movement’s excesses will lead to its self-destruction. Yet he fails to recognize that what he sees as internal threats are the inescapable consequences of the sexual revolution. Illiberalism and Intolerance It’s no surprise McCrea sees anything that might encroach on sexual autonomy as a threat to the gay rights revolution. Thus, he argues, “Gay freedom will be particularly vulnerable to any broader cultural changes that move society in a more conservative direction” (37). The sexual revolution’s steep costs—especially to young women—are leading to the loss of “fulfillment of people’s plans in terms of family and children” (76). While expressing some sympathy, McCrea explains away much of this dissatisfaction, claiming that “some people just prefer order and conformity to freedom and experimentation” (77). While suspicion of conservatives is to be expected, one of McCrea’s concerns is intolerance coming from the LGBTQ+ movement. For example, he warns against the “increasing tendency to require active validation of homosexuality” (83). He notes that such demands “run counter to some of the liberal principles that gay-rights advocates relied on to get their movement off the ground” (84). There’s internal conflict within McCrea’s perspective. For example, he considers any opposition to imposing sexual and gender ideology through curriculum in schools a “worrying sign” (64). The gay rights revolution claimed “the classical liberal claim of a right to be left alone” (83), yet the movement that had same-sex marriage as its ultimate goal could never accept a “live and let live” approach. McCrea advocates for space for peaceful coexistence, yet the terms of that coexistence seem tenuous. Demolition of Sex Reality McCrea also worries about the denial of male-female sex differences. Yet he fails to recognize that arguments for same-sex marriage result in the conclusion that sex differences don’t matter. The demand for the recognition of same-sex marriage, which was at the heart of the gay rights movement, was empowered by the insistence that defining marriage as only a male-female union is morally defective. The majority opinion in the Obergefell v. Hodges case declares that defining marriage as the joining of a man and a woman is “demeaning” and “hurtful,” imposes “stigma and injury,” deprives gay and lesbian people of dignity, diminishes their personhood, and “works a grave and continuing harm” to them. Inherent to the arguments for same-sex marriage is eliminating from public acceptance those who don’t affirm it. As activist and journalist Jonathan Rauch acknowledges, same-sex marriage is the ultimate assault on “the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation . . . the blow that completes the most destructive demolition work of the sexual revolution” (35). With same-sex marriage’s demolition of sexual difference, the malice attributed to the recognition of the male-female bond is extended to the categories of “male” and “female” themselves. The sex binary is considered an oppressive social construct to be liberated from, beginning at the youngest age. Yet rejecting the reality of sex is a bridge too far for McCrea, who is troubled by the “transformation of the LGB movement to the LGBTQ+ movement” (91). He goes so far as to reject LGBTQ+ (let alone LGBTQIA+) as a meaningful category. McCrea warns his allies against demanding “fundamental changes to categories as basic as male and female” because accepting those demands “involves radical change to basic social structures” (96). Though commendable, McCrea’s desire to uphold the reality of sex evades the substance and the logic of his own convictions. By decreeing the “equality” of same-sex marriage, Obergefell required male-female and same-sex relationships to be considered the same in every way. There’s no room for a sex binary within that worldview. From its inception, same-sex marriage rejected our sexed bodies, with their definition and limitations. The goodness and beauty of male and female in God’s image, coming together in life-giving, one-flesh union, imaging the relationship between Christ and his church, had to be diminished and finally effaced. Unconstrained Excess At the heart of the gay rights revolution is the idea that “people should be able to do whatever they [want] with their bodies” (114). Yet McCrea is concerned about the effects of the excesses of male homosexuality and its attendant harms, including higher levels of STDs, loneliness, mental health struggles, and addictions. McCrea describes “sex among gay men” as “free-wheeling, anything goes,” with “venues such as saunas or ‘dark rooms’ in which men . . . engage in sex with large numbers of partners” (113, 115). From its inception, same-sex marriage rejected our sexed bodies, with their definition and limitations. It’s at this point of the argument that the internal conflicts of McCrea’s worldview are most apparent. Despite such awfulness, McCrea insists there’s “nothing morally wrong with consenting adults engaging in whatever and however many sexual acts they want” (130). Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the ability to resist and order desires is “fundamental to a flourishing human life” (131). Furthermore, he realizes that “every society in the world has needed rules and guardrails to help us manage our chaotic sexual desires” (158). Though he recognizes the need for change, the change he offers is merely the willingness to endure “at least some sexual frustration” since “sex is too powerful to be cost-free” (160). He proposes social disapproval of sexual overindulgence “not necessarily [as] immoral but low prestige behavior that is [not] good for you” (168). As it turns out, the social structures and boundaries that the sexual revolution tore down were needed for human flourishing. Nevertheless, McCrea is unwilling to go where his insights regarding true freedom lead. He doesn’t seem to recognize that it is impossible to unravel the sexual revolution’s effects without beginning a new revolution that affirms God’s design for human sexuality. Toward a New Beginning The End of the Gay Rights Revolution is a heartfelt attempt by an insider to honestly assess the movement. Yet as he points toward sexual autonomy as an essential good, McCrea demonstrates why unfettered freedom can never be the lodestar for personal and societal well-being. He worries about external backlash, but the evidence shows that the problems come from within the movement itself. Restraining desire is necessary for an ordered life. McCrea’s willingness to consider such restraint opens up possibilities for him and all. While he regards sexual desire for men as inviolable and definitive of identity and personhood, it’s not. It directly conflicts with personhood as a male image-bearer of God. Such is the nature of all sin in its degradation of our image-bearing humanity. As it turns out, the social structures and boundaries that the sexual revolution tore down were needed for human flourishing. That’s why sin cannot be tamed but instead must be renounced, regardless of duration or intensity. The young man whose experience opens this review embodies the hope and invitation extended to all: to be washed, sanctified, and “justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). When God spoke the world into existence, he wove a moral order into the created order. Thus, sex is good because it’s God’s gift to humanity, to be received and enjoyed within the covenantal marital union of man and woman. As McCrea unwittingly shows us, pursuing sexual satisfaction outside those boundaries leads to uncontainable chaos and destruction. The “end” of which McCrea writes is a dead one. The only way out is through the One who raises the dead. In his death on the cross, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, bore our chaotic, self-indulgent, and destructive desires to raise us with him into the freedom of God’s children. And in obeying him, we know the truth, and the truth sets us free (John 8:31–32).