Scripture-rooted guidance for honest next steps with Jesus
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A support route for the believer who is carrying same-sex attraction, gender confusion, or an identity organized around desire — and who wants to know where the gospel locates them. The anchor is Colossians 3:3: your life is hid with Christ in God.
Support for Identity and Sexuality
You did not choose what you are attracted to. You did not choose the body you were born into. You did not choose the years of confusion that preceded this moment. The gospel does not ask you to pretend otherwise. It makes a different and more radical claim: your life is hid with Christ in God. That sentence does not make the experience disappear. It says the experience is not the last word about who you are.
First anchor
Genesis 1:27 says you were created male and female in the image of God — meaning your existence comes from outside yourself. You did not choose the conditions of your creation. The gospel extends that logic: you did not choose your redemption either. Both are received. Modern identity formation tells you to look inward at your desires and build outward from what you find. The gospel runs the opposite direction — it names you from outside, from what God has done in Christ, and invites you to receive that name as more fundamental than anything you find when you look inward.
Critical clarifier
The Holy Spirit has brought genuine, sometimes profound transformation of same-sex attraction for many believers — transformation that goes beyond behavior into desire itself. That testimony is real and should not be erased. At the same time, the gospel does not guarantee the removal of every unwanted desire in this life. For some believers, attraction changes significantly over time through sanctification, prayer, and community. For others, the cross they carry is longer. What the gospel secures in every case is not a particular outcome of desire, but a located identity — hidden in Christ, which is more stable than any feeling or its absence. Honesty about what you actually carry is not faithlessness. It is the beginning of trusting God with the real situation rather than a managed version of it.
Next move
Your life is hid with Christ in God. That sentence is the beginning and the end. Below are the paths and places that can walk with you as you learn what it means.
Your life is hid with Christ in God
Anchor Scripture
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
First move
Do not abstract it. Do not call it 'my struggle' if you mean same-sex attraction. Do not call it 'questions' if you mean genuine gender dysphoria. The act of naming precisely — 'Lord, I am attracted to men and I do not know what to do with it' — is not a concession. It is the beginning of honesty that makes prayer possible. God is not surprised. He knew before you did.
Before you had a name for what you were experiencing, God had already named you. The gospel does not begin with what you feel or what you are attracted to or how your body has developed — it begins with what God has done. You are hid with Christ in God. That is not a comfort offered around the edges of your identity. It is the claim that your identity was never yours to construct in the first place. The same-sex attraction is real. The gender confusion is real. The years of carrying something you did not ask for and did not know how to hold are real. But you are not primarily that. You are a child of God whose life is hidden in the risen Christ, and that location cannot be moved by desire, orientation, or the weight of what you have experienced.
“For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”
A practice for this week
“For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” This sentence does not suppress the experience. It establishes the theological geography — where are you located? You are hid with Christ in God. The attraction, the confusion, the history: none of these have the same address. The exercise is not to feel differently but to be told differently, from outside, by the God who named you before you had language for what you were carrying.
Foundations
These foundations address the theological grounding for identity and sexuality — that the gospel claims your identity from outside your desires, that Scripture names same-sex attraction and immediately names redemption, and that the distinction between temptation and sin has always been part of the tradition.
What the gospel claims
Genesis 1:27 says you were created male and female in the image of God — meaning your existence comes from outside yourself. You did not choose the conditions of your creation. The gospel extends that logic: you did not choose your redemption either. Both are received. Modern identity formation tells you to look inward at your desires and build outward from what you find. The gospel runs the opposite direction — it names you from outside, from what God has done in Christ, and invites you to receive that name as more fundamental than anything you find when you look inward.
What Scripture says plainly
Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 names same-sex practice among the behaviors that exclude from the kingdom, and then immediately writes: 'and such were some of you.' The 'were' is the gospel. Some in the Corinthian church had been caught in exactly this. That verse is not only a warning — it is a testimony. The call to holiness is real, and so is the grace that makes it possible. The attraction does not disqualify you from grace; the gospel is large enough to hold you while you carry it.
What the tradition has discovered
The church has always distinguished between temptation and sin — the pull itself is not the transgression. Jesus was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Many believers throughout history have carried same-sex attraction as a lifelong cross and found that the Lord was present in the carrying. That is not a counsel of despair. It is the shape of every Christian life: dying to what the self demands and finding that what remains is abundant. The call is costly. It is not new.
What to do next
These four steps give the believer specific, ordered actions: the honesty that makes prayer possible, the Scripture that relocates identity, the community that can hold the struggle, and the clarity about what the call to holiness actually demands.
Step one
Do not abstract it. Do not call it 'my struggle' if you mean same-sex attraction. Do not call it 'questions' if you mean genuine gender dysphoria. The act of naming precisely — 'Lord, I am attracted to men and I do not know what to do with it' — is not a concession. It is the beginning of honesty that makes prayer possible. God is not surprised. He knew before you did.
Step two
Read Colossians chapters 1–3 over the course of a week. When you reach 3:3, stop. Read it aloud. Then ask: if this sentence is true, what does it change about how I answer 'who am I'? The exercise is not to suppress the experience but to establish the theological geography — where are you located? You are hid with Christ in God. The attraction, the confusion, the history: none of these have the same address.
Step three
You cannot carry this alone, and you should not have to. Many churches have pastoral relationships specifically designed for believers experiencing same-sex attraction who want to live faithfully before God. Ministries like Harvest USA and Desert Stream/Living Waters have developed careful, Scripture-grounded frameworks for exactly this community — combining honest pastoral care with a full commitment to biblical sexual ethics. The goal is not a church that pretends the experience is not real, but one that holds you in your full humanity while pointing toward Christ as the location of your identity.
Step four
The call to holiness is a call to lay down same-sex practice. It is not a call to suppress honest prayer, perform an emotion you do not feel, or be silent about your experience in every context. It is not a call to be alone forever. The richness of Christian friendship and community is a real gift that many faithful believers in this situation have found to be sustaining — and so is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, who has brought genuine freedom and transformation of desire to many who have pursued Him with this specific burden. Harvest USA offers pastoral resources and a community of care built around exactly this kind of faithful, Spirit-expectant living.
Clarifiers
These clarifiers address the most common misconfigurations of navigating this experience — the expectation that the attraction will disappear, the pressure to perform happiness, and the false equation of same-sex attraction with identity.
This route is not
The Holy Spirit has brought genuine, sometimes profound transformation of same-sex attraction for many believers — transformation that goes beyond behavior into desire itself. That testimony is real and should not be erased. At the same time, the gospel does not guarantee the removal of every unwanted desire in this life. For some believers, attraction changes significantly over time through sanctification, prayer, and community. For others, the cross they carry is longer. What the gospel secures in every case is not a particular outcome of desire, but a located identity — hidden in Christ, which is more stable than any feeling or its absence. Honesty about what you actually carry is not faithlessness. It is the beginning of trusting God with the real situation rather than a managed version of it.
This route is not
If you are carrying anger, confusion, or grief about your experience of sexuality or gender, the gospel has room for that. The Psalms are full of believers who brought God exactly what they felt rather than what they thought they were supposed to feel. Naming your experience honestly to God — including the parts that hurt and confuse you — is not rebellion. It is the beginning of prayer. Do not perform a peace you do not have. Begin where you are.
This route is for
This is not only about same-sex attraction. If your identity has been constructed around any desire that the gospel calls you to lay down — or around a sense of gender that does not match your body — the same pastoral move applies. Colossians 3:3 does not offer a category exception. Your life is hid with Christ in God. The question is whether you are willing to let that sentence be more fundamental than anything else you currently use to answer the question: Who am I?
Helpful next pages
Identity and sexuality generate connected experiences that deserve their own address — the shame that can accompany it, the sexual wounds that can compound it, the doubt that can lurk under it, and the gospel study centered on the cross that is sufficient for whatever you carry through it.
Related support
If shame is the deeper experience underneath the identity question, begin here.
Go to the shame routeRelated support
If wounds from sexual sin or abuse are part of the story, this route addresses those specifically.
Go to the sexual healing routeRelated support
If wrestling with whether God is good enough to be trusted with this is underneath the struggle, start here.
Go to the doubt routeRelated study
A study on the cross as the one door — sufficient for whatever you carry through it.
Enter through the crossCommon questions
These questions address what someone carrying this experience most consistently holds: whether this is the same as the shame route, what to do if already in a same-sex relationship, how gender dysphoria fits, and what to do with the cultural claim that orientation is identity.
Question
The shame route addresses generalized shame — the sense that you are fundamentally defective or uniquely disqualified from grace. This route addresses the specific question of how to hold same-sex attraction, gender identity, and orientation as a believer. The two can overlap. If shame is the primary experience and the identity question is secondary, begin with the shame route.
Question
The invitation here is not to judgment but to the same gospel truth available to everyone who comes. The pastoral conversation becomes more complex when a relationship is already formed, and it deserves a real pastor — not only a web page. If you are genuinely trying to understand what faithfulness to Christ requires, begin with that honest question before God and then find a pastor you trust to continue the conversation. The door of the gospel is not narrowed for you.
Question
Gender dysphoria — the experience of significant distress over a mismatch between the body and one's sense of gender — is a real and painful experience that deserves pastoral care, not dismissal. The gospel's claim is the same: your identity is located in Christ, not in the resolution of that distress. The church has been slow to develop good pastoral care here. Preston Sprinkle's Embodied is the most careful evangelical engagement with gender identity available and is worth reading.
Question
Modern culture — and sometimes affirming theology — teaches that same-sex attraction is the core of a person's identity and that to call it anything less than identity is to deny that person's humanity. The gospel disagrees — not because it thinks the experience is trivial, but because it claims that every human being has an identity more fundamental than any desire: image-bearer of God, redeemed by Christ, hid in him. That is not a denial of your experience. It is the refusal to let your experience be the last word about who you are.
Next steps
Your life is hid with Christ in God. That sentence is the beginning and the end. Below are the paths and places that can walk with you as you learn what it means.
If you have never met Jesus
The gospel is the ground under everything else on this page.
Begin with the gospelShame alongside identity
If shame is the deeper experience, start there first.
Go to the shame routePrayer
Not with performance but with the honest weight of it.
Learn to prayCommunity
You were not made to carry this alone. Here is how to find a church.
Find your church