The Christian Vanguard

I often hear this line. "Homosexual attraction itself isn't sinful, but acting upon it is." This is incorrect. It is sinful to act upon homosexual desires, but so is having those desires. For one, it would be strange to say that it isn't sinful to desire something, but it is sinful to satisfy those desires. If it isn't sinful to desire my wife, why would it be sinful to have my wife? It isn't. If it isn't sinful to desire donating goods, why would actually donating goods be sinful? If an act is sinful, then so must the desire for that act. Scripture is clear on this. Romans 1 reads,  Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator ... For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also...

I have an anabaptist coworker, and we got the talking about Original Sin. After pointing out Romans 5 to him and how it talks about how Adam's sin lead to the condemnation of all people, he pointed to a verse in the OT that says we will not inherit the iniquities of our fathers (which I have dealt with before on my short 3 part series on Original Sin, which you can find here , here , and here ). I then pointed to other OT verses that seem to say the opposite, my point being that with the ambiguity in the OT, we should look to the NT for a clear interpretation. But it occurs to me now that perhaps that isn't even necessary. His response was that the OT verses I pointed out only show that we suffer sins consequences. Is this a good response? It is not. According to Romans 6:23, after its long emphasis on the fallen state of humanity, says that the wages of sin are death. In contrast, our reward in Jesus is eternal life, and because that contrast is being made, we know that dea...