‘I’m sure you would agree, Andy, that we need to be biblical and compassionate.’ It was a comment made by somebody chairing a meeting at which I was speaking. I’ve heard many similar things over the years. And it was easy to agree. I want Christians to live in line with the teaching of the Bible because I believe it is the word of God, and it’s hard to object to being compassionate.

But I had a concern lurking in the back of my mind. An extrapolated version of that comment could be, ‘We have to be biblical because we are evangelical Christians, but the Bible sounds quite hardline on sexuality so we need to make sure that we add some compassion.’ And I sometimes wonder whether that’s what many of us think.

That thinking becomes problematic for a couple of reasons. For some, it will give them the impression that the God of the Bible is not fundamentally loving and kind, which will inevitably stunt worship and obedience. For others, it will give them the impression that compassion is somehow a compromise. I once spoke to an older lady who felt guilty because she had been nice to a gay couple living on her street and she was worried that this meant she was not being true to the Bible’s teaching.

We certainly don’t need to add compassion to the Bible. It’s already there, supremely in the person of Jesus. 

The reality, though, is different. Far from being hardline, the Bible’s view on sexuality is beautiful as it points to the great eternal love story at the heart of the universe. And we certainly don’t need to add compassion to the Bible. It’s already there, supremely in the person of Jesus. You see it in the way in which he approaches the woman at the well in Samaria and asks her for a drink (John 4). She certainly hasn’t been living in line with the Bible’s sexual ethics, but Jesus goes towards her. Sexual sinners who come to Jesus in faith are assured that their sins are forgiven (Luke 7:36-50). And, following Jesus’s example, in 1 Corinthians 5 we are told that we should not avoid non-Christians who are living sexually immoral lives (1 Corinthians 5:9-10).

This was brought home to me when I was asked to speak at an event on how Christians should respond to Pride. I talked about the sin of forming an identity apart from our creator. And yet there was a verse from Matthew’s Gospel that I couldn’t escape: ‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd’ (Matthew 9:36). As we look out at a generation without any clear direction on matters of identity and sexuality, it is not hard to guess at Jesus’s likely response.

I tend now to avoid the phrase ‘biblical and compassionate’ as though they are somehow two separate things. We can simply be biblical, which involves both holding to the beautiful sexual ethic that Jesus taught and going in love towards those struggling and sometimes failing to live in line with that ethic.