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This is my sixth in the series, highlighting key aspects from each chapter of my new book, While We Were Sleeping: A Wake-up Call For All Christians (2025). (Check out my YouTube channel, where I am posting a weekly reflection on each chapter, to complement this post.)

The first five chapters were quite tame. Now it gets interesting!

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I interviewed Apenisa Rakuro, a pastor with an international reach who co-founded Kingdom International Discipleship, based in Fiji. Some extracts from his testimony:

I began to act like a woman, being a woman in my mind. I think I entertained it, and sometimes our parents can accommodate this by giving us certain chores in the home. Parents are not equipped to handle a boy who is being raised at home who is acting like a girl. In our Fijian culture, my parents treated me as a girl at home, cooking and cleaning, doing everything a woman would do. My parents felt they had to accept me for who I thought I was.

I later became sexually active and lived the life of a homosexual. A seed had been planted at a very young age. The best thing my mum and dad did for me was to take me to church. So even though I was living that life, I knew somehow deep inside of me, I knew this was bad, this was wrong.

Apenisa’s breakthrough took many years. Growing up in a Christian home, but suffering the divorce of his parents. He initially focused on praying for his parents’ reconciliation, not knowing that God was actually working on him!

One thing I would advise the church, is maybe we can stop telling people who they are not, and maybe we tell them who they are.

We say, ‘You are homosexual, you are this, you are that.’ They are not that, they are created in the image and likeness of God! What healed me was when I found who I was, the fake-self started to disappear. I was mentored under a pastor who constantly told us who we are in the Kingdom, our position in the Kingdom, our identity in the Kingdom, our inheritance in the Kingdom. He preached to me who I am.

I came to God regarding my condition and God said, ‘Deny yourself.’ I said, ‘I have feelings for boys.’ God said, ‘Deny.’ You have to crucify yourself on the cross. Just because you feel it, does not mean it’s the absolute truth. Just because a young boy feels he’s a cat, that doesn’t make him a cat. The Bible says, ‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.’ The truth is not a feeling. I had to choose truth over feelings. It didn’t happen overnight.

For me it was not until I met a man of God who fathered me and mentored me that I changed. The focus is sometimes that we are meant to be ‘straight’, but it should be we are to be ‘transformed’ into the image of God. I have to be ‘transformed.’

The homosexuality activists have been unwavering in their dedication to their cause. Look back to my Chapter 1, Marriage, the synergy with the Same-Sex Marriage Act. Then again in Chapter 3, Education, where we examined The Long March Through the Institutions and the Safe Schools Program. Also in Chapter 4, Screen Addiction and the investment in the pornography industry.

While We Were Sleeping, we have a lot to answer for. Have you noticed that in each of these three theatres of war, the enemy has created opposing sides: dividing, conquering, and paralysing any potential opposition?

My experience of the homosexuality question

Back in the 1970s, a Christian friend of mine, an ex-homosexual, started a ministry to homosexuals who wanted to become straight. He saw some success. But as the years went by, I became aware that some, who had claimed transformation, were reverting to their previous lifestyles.

Did this mean that homosexuality is a characteristic determined by heredity, like the colour of our eyes or our hair? A characteristic of the real person, to be celebrated and not stigmatised?

As the decades passed, it is now my perception shifted from the thrill of seeing lives transformed to disappointment that most in the church appear to believe that homosexuality is not a sin that is a choice of the individual, but rather an expression of the real person inside their body. In fact, to suggest that someone can be set free from homosexuality can be deemed deeply offensive and hurtful.

The result is that some churches fly the Pride flag and appoint gays into their clergy, while others, who can’t do that, go silent and try their best not to address the issue.  I would suggest this state of affairs is the result of the enemy having created opposing sides: dividing, conquering, and paralysing any potential opposition.

So, if homosexuality is an inherited characteristic, what do we make of Pastor Apenisa Rakuro’s testimony? Should we just wait awhile, and eventually we will see him revert to his true self, homosexuality? Is he just playing psychological tricks on himself, and the reality is that he is simply deluded?

What does God say?

I am indebted to Pastor Ryan Visconti, Generation Church, Arizona, for his selection of the most relevant texts: I Corinthians 6:9-10 (my emphasis).

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revellers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.

We all know this is not an exclusive list of sins, but notice how the sins are not graded from bad to not so bad. While We Were Sleeping, the world has effectively erased some sins from the ledger, while retaining others.

Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonour their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also, the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due. (Romans 1:24-27.)

Perhaps this is the most brutal text on homosexuality. This passage cannot be describing love. Quite clearly, it is describing lust.

God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27)

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. (Leviticus 18:22)

God’s command to mankind was to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28; Genesis 9:7). Homosexual or lesbian sex cannot fulfil this command. Nor are same sex parents the optimal setting for bringing up children.

… knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine. (1 Timothy 1:9-10)

To deny sin is to make Christ’s death on the cross null and void, and to deny the Gospel. You can’t be a Christian and a homosexual, comfortable with your homosexual desires and behaviours (Tim Keller). As Pastor Apenisa Rakuro says, our true identity is in Christ (Galatians 3:28).

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Image courtesy of Adobe.