John Brusseau - myessaysetc

Beautiful Ugly Storms The storms are distant in my world today I smell them pushing dust, and debris candy wrappers, and benevolent leaves all down the landscape's grateful coridors I am a guest in this world and cannot taste what you have in store oh weather maker oh God of love's jealous particularity I will not go, pushed out or chased on I am free to worship so I will stand And you, dirty storms of grimace and the groan are not the one I fear You burly soldier of grace to this soul often stuck in the ease and conveinience of sameness of the known One only sanely fears what they most long for Desire is God's echoing presence in our soul And this is now a time for me a time for me a time for me .. and promise These beautiful ugly storms kiss my face as they pass No longer torment me, do they with thoughts of what should be what could have been I am on my way Words © by John R. brusseau 12/14/2009 Red (Written to Kristine’s photo) It was there for a long time taking up residence in the paved driveway in my soul red, oh so red this way, this lifestyle this picture of my ardent life of need and how I did need she was without and never complained so I needed I longed for her satisfaction And this was the red car between us She tried to tell me in her gentle voice to let it go But years rolled by and still it rested snug in my backyard of dreams delayed and hopes denied Well, the day came for reckoning for healing change and I, too lost to fight was swept off to wonder and demise at the end of yearnings’ road Never guessing the salvation or the beauty of rebirth On a day of unlooked for joy I watched my red car roll down my drive and out of my life behind God’ almighty tow truck It was white Words © by John R. Brusseau Saturday, December 12, 2009 A Secret Revealed *On the* occasion that you dare to listen *I will speak my soul* For long has this festered in agony twisted what nobody wanted to hear from a girl I never knew tender I never knew safety Never was anyone’s so precious, pearl Talons of fury ripping and pulling kept tugging my innocent reasons to trust collapsed on my childhood swallowing me whole and leaving behind me this crust Years of pain passed then lost in the deep woods the untidy swirling of horror and shame Alone, and forgotten by those who I trusted to never abandon for personal gain I drifted in silence that screamed out my desperate hopes for a savior to save me from lies But perverts of leering conscience bruised bastards would hear me and follow my unfolding sighs I cannot define it why I in my torture sensed there was something that I had to find Something that loved me Something not selfish Something that wouldn’t devour and bind And somehow it happened A voice in the desert called me to follow a lamb that was slain And I, in my sorrow knew in that moment that here was a person who’d listen to pain And listen and listen And listen he did To everything ugly, and rotting, and rage And I was wrapped up in His sad eyes of kindness And watched as he slowly turned every page Now, I am still broken in so many ways while healing slow marches the memories and death But I have found safety in trustworthy passions who shelter this child still catching her breath And so I now utter these scriptures of journey to those in my family, still bound to my life Forgiveness is flowing and love is enduring but you will not know it apart from the knife The blade of confession releases and soothes us and I do not need it, but you cannot move And so I deliver this key to the Kingdom and hope you will take it and see mercy prove Words © by John R. Brusseau 12/15/2009 Another Day Another Dollar And the storm rose and leaned over my shaken form like a giant intrusive metaphor ominous as Hades to a sailor on leave Putrid with the scars of past entanglements that foreboding taste would not leave my mouth I hoped to push my anxious teeth from my worried lips with my reactionary tongue and lapsed into the murmuring of fools drooling like a baby on his frozen ring eynah.. eynah.. ynah.. mmnnh! Words © by John R. Brusseau 12/14/2009 Aid And we will not give in to despair disease-like in the way it ravages our soul leaving us with but an empty shell of the person God made us to be. Though the tidal forces of hopelessness build to the heavens we will hold onto the hand of God God is our refuge and our resolve God is our hope and salvation Thus, we will stand, and not be moved Whatever we are given to do Whatever we are blessed to pursue That will we do, until God wipes our suffering away Go with those who bow and scrape to the terrorist fears that lie As for me and my house, we will look to the God whence comes our help God is not a liar, and God is love. Love hopes all things, and so will I while looking for the cure And beating down the doors of apathy and hate that block the way to life God, come soon. Our life is ever before you Let all men see your heart that cares Let all men see that it is you who save God, come soon The Flow And the blood flows Down between seems and the cushion seats of a family’s very old sofa The smell of that blood Is the very sweetest smell on earth And it forces happy tears And smiles full of joy All of them born of deepest heart-crushing gratitude And the blood flows Like a flood of light beaming Bathing the family temple With golden light Not a shadow hides within This living room of lives unfolded Unfolding And Oh Yes, the blood flows on And over Covering totally, forever The caustic, the brutal the buried, and the hidden Sins and damage of ten generations In both directions, past and future Oh that blood Oh that Man The only faithful witness Of God’s love, and righteousness Jesus…Jesus…Jesus, your blood Covers me Covers mine Covers us with every bit of God’s love And forgiveness And healing And The Blood flows Over my grandmother and father Over my parents Over my siblings and I Over our children, and on And on Every act of lust Every act of wounded rage Every act of love suspended Like a death knell in the air Oh Jesus, you covered every act of torture we have lived to level at each other Our own Our precious Our loved ones Our family caught in fears and unbelief in boiling ignorance of God’s love Jesus, your blood… flows Jesus, your blood…covers Jesus… Jesus… We are bought, whole lock, stock and barrel Jesus, now and always we are under your blood © By John R. Brusseau Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Nature of Truth The truth is always seen as unpatriotic when men and women care more about safety than God. The truth always becomes viewed as heretical when men and women care more about maintaining their place in their religious herd than they do about God. The truth will always seem like a monstrous terror as long as we men and women care more about survival than we do God. The truth will always be thought a tyrant when men and women care more about freedom than they do God. Truth only manifests as love, so… Love is also considered to be unpatriotic when men and women care more about safety than God. And love always becomes viewed as heresy when men and women care more about maintaining their place in their religious herd than they do about God. And love will always seem like a monstrous terror as long as we men and women care more about survival than we do God. And love will always be thought a tyrant when men and women care more about freedom than they do God. God is the symbol for objective reality, which is another way of saying, truth, and whenever we value anything (however inherently good it may be in and of itself) more than God, it places a filter of fear over our perceptual lenses. God (and truth, which is love, and produces life) is one. Therefore, God synthesizes everything in the universe (even evil). God is the absolute harmony of compliments in the universal set. Fear (and pride, his bastard offspring) stirs up disintegration, and chaos. Fear would masquerade as God in the inherently subjective soul of every person. Thus we are, each of us, are left with a choice, and it is actually our only choice, between God-truth/love/life, and fear/pride/disintegration. And here’s the kicker; we can only see our choice (given our subjectivity) when it comes to us in the form of sacrificial love, selfless love. Any choice offered us from the hands, and heart of pride may be awfully tempting, but it will always lead to disintegration, and chaos. So, choose between a gift of selfless, sacrificial love from God-truth/love/life, and the coercion of pride from fear. At the resolution of this age, all humanity will choose one, or the other. We will either choose to hold onto pride in our own potential, which leads to the usual self destruction, or we will choose to accept an unearned gift of sacrificial, selfless love, which engenders within us the freedom to love others in the same selfless, sacrificial way. God-truth/love/life gives us the freedom to choose, which is how evil is synthesized into the whole. Fear obscures our choice. Those that opt out of relationship with God-truth/love/life are self-canceling, thus restoring the universe to a state of absolute harmony/oneness. Choose, oh wonderful aspect of God’s universe. Choose.
Surviving In The Wilderness Encouragement for those who want to overcome Since the fall of man the religious landscape has been cluttered with the self-help manuals of the old serpent. Through these esoteric guides he panders to the insecurity he so deftly impregnated our species with to begin with. This insecurity is about God; What are His intentions, can He save, and can He prosper me. Without the truth of who God is, we are doomed to a life of fear driven, selfish, brutal, competition over the means to save and prosper our selves. We are broken, dysfunctional people who, through the persistent enticements of that old rapist, also now find a need in us to cover up our vulnerability. And the means to do this is proffered us in the form of self-helpism. We pass on this mirage (as though it were a family heirloom), that the human species really can pull off what no other thing in the universe can, that we can be our own originator of safety and prosperity. This is essentially the point which most religions, try very hard to make; That we, the creature can become our own God, can be in absolute *control* of our own destiny. And we must have control, now that our safety and prosperity are no longer assured. This, finally, is what our self-help religions and philosophies offer us, human control over our own destiny. Because this dillusional, fear saturated, need to cover up our insecurity with self-help religion, is so dominant in us, God had to devise a means to overcome this spiritual addiction, this tyranny. He came up with the wilderness. A beautiful plan, really. Simply, place those who choose to accept an intimate relationship with God in an environment where they would; -1. Have to trust God for both their safety and prosperity and thus… -2. Have to face their inability to trust God for their safety and prosperity. And finally … -3. remain in this environment until the distrust mindset in them dies out and is replaced by the memory ( read experience ) supported mind set that they can trust God. In other words God would ( like the man in Deut. 21: 10-14 ) take us to a place in which He governed, while foregoing the fulfillment of His own desire that we respond to Him, in order to have the opportunity to show us His intention and ability to provide for us. In this age, we who have been rescued from the decaying world around us, are all in such a place. And we will be, in one area of our mindset or another, until we go to be with God. So get used to it. It isn’t going to end. It will just move to a new, unclued in area of your soul. And if you want something to do while you are going through your wilderness, and I know you do, you may *endure* and *despise the shame* ( ALA Hebrews12: 2 ). This will probably not sound very practical, but, give it some serious thought and you may see the value in doing so. Choose to endure and choose to despise the shame. When Jesus was crucified, He was associated ( numbered ) with the criminals who normally were given this kind of death sentence. When you choose to trust God to provide safety and prosperity for you in some area of your life ( and thus come to die to your unbelief that He can ) , there will surely be some sinful parts of you that will go along for the ride. The adversary would get you to focus on those, very real problems in you, instead of on God. For shame will compete with God for your attention. Remember, you are righteous. There is no place, whatsoever, for shame in the life of one who is trusting Jesus to be his right status with God. Satan will say that the suffering you are experiencing is caused by your sinfulness. And to be sure, you are thoroughly missing the mark in a wide variety of areas. But the reason you are going through your present suffering is because you are Gods. Jesus IS Lord; not will be when you have gotten your act together. Anything that sets itself against the knowledge of Jesus the Christ is worthy of being despised. Shame is a lie, the sole purpose of which is to get you to take the lordship of your life back from Jesus. It says that Jesus is not in command of your existence because you are a terrible sinner ( which by the way, is the whole reason that you need Him to be *Lord of your life)*. Despise shame. Hate it, loathe it. And for Gods sake, don’t rely on it to transform you into the image of Jesus. All things are from God, through God, and to God. To God be the Glory forever and ever, amen.
Understanding the System around You A Glimpse of the Big Picture There is, for most of us, at least those of us who have thought to look for the reason, meaning, and purpose for things, a large degree of difficulty in putting things together. In fact, the degree of difficulty is so great that we usually wind up conceding the inscrutability of life, of the universe around us, and our own existence, by the time we are thirty. There is very little we expect to puzzle out after that, and so increasingly default to a position of hunkering down in our rational foxholes, now wallpapered with every escape we can find. Intermittently we bump into the painful wounding of our subjective timid souls by the harsh hands of a dysfunctional system, and lash out with the cynical ravings of our victim consciousness. This victim consciousness becomes more and more entrenched as we grow in years, and of course, nothing productive or useful comes from such ranting. Every once in a while some of us get a wild impulse to investigate in a concerted, intellectual way, the workings of the system. When this happens we are confronted with a bewildering array of disharmonious terminology sets, and concept sets that are jumbled together into a make-shift world view. So, we soon get bogged down in the confusion inherent in the operation of a shoddy database and once more bow to our concession to the insane inscrutability of things. There are so many sub-systems holding our human existence in their hands, and we have conceded in so many of these, that we have almost come to believe that there is no over-arching system binding all the sub-systems together. If there is, we certainly wouldn’t be able to learn how it is at work in the many confusing sub-systems our human life is composed of. The religious system, the political system, the cultural systems, the legal system, the governmental system, the academic system, the biological systems, the astronomical systems, the atomic system, our emotional system, our instinctual system, our psychological system, our sociological systems, and on and on; these are the systems our world is made up of and we increasingly don’t get it! One would have thought that with the advent of advanced technology we would have come closer to grasping the big picture, to finding a model of all there is that is at once, both accurate, and clear. Yet, we seem to be moving further away, not closer, to a unified whole picture of things. Perhaps the problem we face in finding the big picture, or the context for our existence, is not due to a lack of information, but rather is the result of a spiritual/emotional dysfunction. Perhaps we are at odds with the first cause in the universe because of the emotional/spiritual damage done to the god archetype within, and no amount of learning will serve to enlighten us. If this is so, this systemic problem will need to be worked out before we take on systemic issues of lesser importance to our cosmological database. The god problem remains one of the issues we are least objective about, given all the painful, personal and collective experiences the species has endured in connection with this issue. Religion, and its associated systems, holds a potential mine field of personal, and cultural problems for us in our quest for resolution of any outstanding god archetype issues we are afflicted with. We may pretend to be objective (and, of course, we all do), yet if there are in fact god archetype issues present, it is logical to assume these issues will play a preeminent role in shaping our miss-perception of things. In as much as our perception of everything may be currently skewed by the presence of emotional/spiritual damage to our god archetype, how then can we hope to effectively proceed toward a cure? Won’t we be dependent upon the very perceptual system we have suggested is damaged? And wouldn’t such a dependence upon the same flawed perceptual equipment we have always employed guarantee we repeat the same outcome? There is a simple and logical solution to this problem; ask God to fix it for us. If there is in fact a God, and we in fact do have a flawed concept of this god factor in the universe, then asking said God to fix whatever problems exist in our concept of God would not only be a good place to start, it would be the only place. In other words, if a god factor originated the universal systems we are a part of, this same god factor must maintain (which in our case would also involve repairing) those systems. Such a request would not be dependent upon any faulty perceptual equipment we have. Rather, it would be dependant upon the functionality of said god factor. A surprisingly philosophical sounding statement mirroring this idea was made be the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Roman followers of Jesus. He says; Rom 11:36 For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen. Rom 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. Rom 12:2 And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, and ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Paul was suggesting to his readers; first understand that there is a god factor that originates, maintains, and realizes everything, and then he urges them to trust the restoration of that which said god force originated, to this god force (to yield control of your existence to God as one would yield control of a sacrifice). He finishes by saying; don’t remain in the present general state of human dysfunction that all people are born into and remain in (He says this even though he is aware most people, everywhere are trying to improve their condition), but undergo the restoration of your emotional system by means of the altering of your perception of God, from a God who is merely a figure head deity, to one that is the originator, maintainer, and realizer of all things in the universe. This is a viewpoint that is wonderfully atypical of most religious viewpoints, in that it doesn’t urge one to rely upon their own faulty perceptual equipment, and/or emotional, rational and instinctual systems to attain a cure for what ails them. Even many Christians advocate the pulling up of one ‘self by their own dysfunctional bootstraps (Paul would call such Christians, foolish Galatians). Paul asks us to completely trust our restoration to the god force in the universe (beginning with the restoration of our acceptability status with said god-force) by trusting God’s gift of Jesus, and continuing through the complete God originated, maintained, and perfected, overhaul of our human equipment. This viewpoint is radical in its departure from most of the religious viewpoints you will ever hear expressed, then or now. Interestingly, it was different even from Paul’s previous religious viewpoint, apparently, in as much as he was once known as a militant legalist. It seems apparent to me that the whole of our species has a strong tendency toward a legalistic approach to behavior modification, and this is true regardless of whether one accepts the idea of a god-force in the universe, or not. We are a species that is largely choosing to trust our conscience with our issues with human dysfunction. Aren’t we fond of saying we believe in the rule of law? The funny thing is this sort of approach hasn’t altered our individual and collective behavior enough to even assure us that we won’t eventually wipe our selves off the surface of the planet. In fact, at this point in time, it appears that mankind has lined up several viable paths to his self-destruction, be it environmental, pharmaceutical, ideological, or military. Still, we hypocritically put our faith in whatever set of rules, or mores, or values, we are comfortable with to change what we have never effectively been able to change. The only significant change in a segment of the human population ever witnessed by mankind was the change in the community of early followers of Jesus (such as Paul). They, as an entire community, experienced the transformation of their human emotional system from a predominantly fear-driven one, to a love-driven one, capable of even choosing love over survival. Whole communities of people sold all of their worldly possessions, and gave the money to meet the needs of others, and then moved to other countries in order to herald the arrival of a significant catalyst for real human transformation. Large numbers of these people eventually died rather than give up their loving, self-sacrificing, advocacy of this catalyst. The modern Christian community is almost completely incapable of this way of life, and this indicates the departure of its members from the original ideas of Jesus, and his Apostles. I’m sure we will want to argue this point, but the proof is in the lives lived. The ratio of love-motivated behavior to fear/survival motivated behavior is far less favorable in today’s believers than it was in Paul’s day. We are still trying to raise ourselves up by our own boot-straps, and are finding the same limited success found in the general population. Jesus is quoted as saying; Joh 15:5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for apart from me ye can do nothing. We haven’t been, and we don’t. Jesus is the personification of a solution produced by the god-force. Every element of the Jesus/messiah Biblical account shouts out that the solution to mankind’s dysfunction originates with God. We, the people of this planet, will continue to attempt to raise our level of functionality, using our own dysfunctional equipment, and finding the same miserable degree of success, until we finally fall into that inevitable state of dysfunction that can best be described as a collective psychotic break. There will be the typically rare (remnant) exceptions to this oft repeated sociological process of discovering our own spiritual limitations until we have one last collective psychotic break. This will lead to the collective-Cain killing collective-Able (as it always has), and Able ultimately being resurrected in the form of Seth being established (his name means established) upon the earth (in the Kingdom of Jesus). It seems this god force is all, in all, after all.
Since I started visiting the internet forums I have heard a torrent of demands by people who think of them self as agnostic or atheist, that someone prove to them that God exists. I think that in some of those demands, I have heard the sort of objective, open-minded mentality I see myself as having (and the others just being the same sort of ranting from intellectual insecurity one hears from people of all ideologies). For those who are like me, I'd like to propose a, perhaps, different approach to the idea of the possible existence of a God factor. If God is spirit, which is to say, non-material, (as presented by the Hebrew/Christian Religion) then it would not be reasonable to think one could ever approach an understanding of God's existence by means of reason. Here's why. Only the material universe is quantifiable and therefore rationally qualify-able (provable). If there is something outside of the material universe, that is in some foundational way, acting as a catalyst upon the unfolding material universe, then the rules for observing, and proving, such a factor would obviously not be the same as those for proving the existence of a factor within the material universe. So, why then should anyone bother with the whole God thing, if it cannot be proven by means of deploying reason? Well, just because a God-factor cannot be proven by deploying reason, this doesn’t mean that it cannot be experienced. And here’s the thing, if it can be experienced, say by deploying one’s intuition, then it can, after the fact (after one has had what one takes to be an experience with God) be rationally defined. Reason can go along for the ride to a human understanding of God, it simply can’t be in the driver’s seat, one’s intuition must. By the way, another way of saying, deploy your intuition, might be to say (to use an old quaint expression) have faith (trust). Now, this will likely threaten the atheist, in as much as the person who thinks of them self as an atheist has had to tangle with the intellectual insecurity of religionists many times over the course of their life, and have thus developed a sort of defensiveness about the value of reason. The approach I am suggesting here would not ask anyone to divest one’s self of their investment in reason, it simply adjust their deployment of it to account for the reasonable idea that a non-material factor could not be approached by the same laws that things within the time space continuum can be. Remember, there are a great number of humans that have given testimony to having experienced the non-material facet of life, both within them self, and in the world around them. If we simply explain this wealth of experience away by saying that it is all merely a bunch of superstition, and/or hearsay/group-think, then we are be overly defensive, and will never ever look for the reality of the God-factor. I know that deploying one’s reason and intuition in this fashion will prove too great of a threat to the insecurity we humans feel about the value of our reason, and most people will never be able to make this effort. You see, it is our ego, our current, and evolving, idea of who we are, that will resist such an experience. We over-identify our self as an atheist, rather than as being a person who has atheistic ideas, and thus cannot entertain rationally (objectively) all the relevant issues. Religionists have to deal with the same thing when listening to an atheist bring up issues that may contradict their over-identification of them self as a believer. We see this over-identification syndrome being aired constantly on this R&P forum, because we are all not sure of who we are, and what we know. This fact of human consciousness must be factored in to our pursuit of the truth of things if we are to avoid sabotaging our self.
Christians following Jesus into Christian communities outside the religious establishment.
Today I Slew the Worm I hope this allegorical accounting of my deliverance gives some hope, and encouragement to some of you. Something I went through last August. The deliverance of God's spirit, in the context of Jesus is awesome. There really is nothing like it. It's not some nice, insubstantial head-trip. It is an experience that gets to the core of something fear-driven in our soul (our psyche) and roots it out, leaving us free to be vessels of love, and joy and peace, and all the other fruits of God's spirit, as we were created to be.
Art and the Christian Community This essay deals with these three questions; what is art; how should art be evaluated; and how should art be published by the Christian community?
An essay on WHAT MAKES A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY PROFITABLE?
Sharing my Dream of Transition
Contrasting The Religious Establishment & The Living Body of Jesus Christ Gift-based righteousness, and how it orders our Christian social existence. Self-covering, this prideful intellectual construct, this pride in our own life, has been destroying our soul, individually and collectively, since the fall. It ravages human community with the wounded mentalities of rebellion, selfishness, obsession, co-dependency with selfish, abusive, authority, and war. God has an alternative. His alternative is submission to His rule, in the context of his solution to our alienation from him (Jesus, the Messiah), and submission to Jesus body. The social dynamics of this divine alternative are something Christian community has seldom experienced since the early days of Christianity. It awaits us now, who are willing to leave everything to follow Jesus, outside the camp, outside the herd, outside our own comfort zone. Feel free to discuss this, and the other essays, as well in the forum I have posted on the John Brusseau's Music page.
Following Jesus This is a gathering of scriptures from the four gospels highlighting what it means to follow Jesus. I have not added any commentary; I want you to see for yourself what it will cost you if you choose to follow Jesus. Feel free to discuss this in the forum.
I Corintians 13 This is a study of the "love" chapter (1Cor. 13).
On Babylon This was my response to a post in the MySpace religious forums, suggesting that the Roman church is Babylon. I think it may help to shape our understanding of the symbol of Babylon, and what Jesus means when he directs us to leave it in Revelation 18:4.
A Sinister Contruct An essay on religious pluralism.
A Viable Means of Walking in Unity with Gay Believers. Most of the following was from an email to a Christian brother who is Gay, and celibate. He had undergone much Christian therapy to heal him of his sexual preference, and it had not effectively changed him. I wrote this to comfort him. To Blank on the topic of homosexuality. Blank, the problem I see many people who are gay/lesbian having is, on one hand they have a faith in God, and want to be in harmony with Him, and on the other there are two separate groups of people pulling them apart, saying things like; being gay is not unnatural, suppressing it is, and; Homosexuality is a sin, stop it right now. Neither of those groups meet the needs of a person of faith, who truly wants a closer relationship with god. The first group ignores altogether the needs of a relationship with God (to please , and harmoniously trust him. The second group, likewise ignores the needs of a person of faith,being so wrapped up in the rightness, or wrongness of homosexuality. The apostle Paul said, nothing is unlawful, but not all things are expedient. This was an intensely radical statement coming from a former ardent legalist (moralist). What he was saying was that making decisions about one's behavior (such as whether or not to engage in same sex unions), cannot be resolved apart from one's own personal trust in God. God must convince (convict) one that homosexuality is not expedient for them, and God must change whatever needs changing, if He does happen to convince a person of this. And all of this must happen within the context of that persons ongoing relationship with God, meaning, God will have his own agenda, and priorities for the restoration of our dysfunctional souls, and His ways, and priorities, are not ours. This means that a Christian may very likely live much of their life (and perhaps even all of it) before God gets around to addressing the issue of sexual preference. The same is true of any other moral issue. God has his own priorities, and agenda for restoration. This all means that we need to love one another, and let God deal with each others moral issues, in His time, and way. Look at Romans chapter 1 (that scary passage in which Paul addresses all of the morally bankrupt behavior which leads to God's judgment). After scaring, pretty much all of us, in as much as he covers a lot of moral issues (at least one of which each of us will relate to), he then says (in chapter 2); Rom 2:1 Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judges another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest dost practise the same things. In other words, we're all doomed by our moralbankruptcy, and therefore require God's mercy, and forgiveness. He spends time putting us in the same moral situation with those who replace the natural desire for the opposite gender, so that we could realize that whatever our moral issues are, we will not be the one's who resolve them, merely by just saying no. If we could have resolved our moral issues by just saying no, the entire human race would have done so already. Most of us are tired of the damage unfolding from our lack of love (which sums up our moral dysfunction). If we could snap our fingers and no longer lust (selfishly, obsessively desire another), for example, we would. Paul is very carefully breaking it all down for us, telling us we need God to first resolve of status of disharmony with Him, and secondly resolve our dysfunction, and that it is He who must do this by his spirit, not we by our will power. If Paul is of God, then we Christians need to let our fellow believers who have a same sex preference deal with their preference within the context of their trust in God to restore them, when, and how, he chooses to do so for them. This means that if one of our fellow believers is doing something we know is immoral, we need to ask God what He wants us to do about that. We cannot just assume he is wanting us to do something. He is Lord. He calls the shots, and we must submit to his rule, not the rule of our own understanding. This approach (which Paul lays out in his letter the the Roman believers, is not very popular with many Christian leaders today, because of the legalism that has strangled the faith of believers for centuries, but it is the faith recommended by Paul, and his fellow apostles. I for one will go with Paul as he follows Jesus. One last point; there is the fact of God's governance within a Christian community. There was, apparently, a great deal of confronting of sin in the early Church; far more than in the church of our own time. Yet, the confrontation Paul advocated was centered upon the state of a person's faith (trust) in God. In bringing up the greed, or sexual impurity, etc. of someone, Paul was actually bringing up that person's decision to not accommodate God's will in their life (as it related to some specific misconduct). In order to be able to do this, Paul (or others in a position of responsibility) needed to be shown by God, what was in the heart of the one being confronted. In other words, Paul did not simply choose to confront because he saw some immoral conduct in someone. He waited on God to reveal the person's intentions. All of us people continue to sin, trusting God to perfect that which we've committed to Him, in Christ Jesus. Paul would not have confronted every sin he saw in every person (that would have left no time for preaching the Gospel of Jesus). He waited upon God, and only confronted someone when God showed him that the person was choosing to no longer trust God to transform the moral dysfunction in question. Only God knows whether a person is trusting in God to convict of sin, righteousness, and healing judgment. Trust is the issue that is paramount to God, and it should be to us who believe in God, in Jesus.