If you let this chance pass, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton. So, go get him, for Pete’s sake!
—The old artist “Glass Man” in Amélie
This is what the LORD says: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the LORD.”
—Jeremiah 17:5
Spring had ripened into a warm summer. I sat with Merrie and friends from church, watching Bastille Day fireworks light up the July sky. The crackling fireworks and the cheering crowd reached a crescendo, and the burst of colors became a kaleidoscopic blur. Red. White. Blue. As I stared at them, my mind drifted, until it settled on a now-familiar face. Jerome. It felt like I’d just met him. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
It all started a week after my decision to surrender my sexuality to God. I was in the library with a pile of books on my desk, nose down, working. I had looked up from the stack of reading, just for a moment, and my heartbeat quickened. There was a handsome student I hadn’t seen before—French, I thought. He saw me looking and smiled back. I quickly ducked behind my books, trying to act as if nothing had happened. But something had.
I continued to read and study, but my furtive glances were noticed. My friend Margarite, a law student and the reigning socialite of the class, tapped me. “David,” she whispered with a smile, “I saw you looking at Jerome.”
“Huh?” I said, feigning ignorance. But my face betrayed me.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She giggled. “Jerome came over to me a while ago. He likes you. I’ve set up a drink for you two tomorrow night. And you’re going, by the way.”
My heart pounded. My dream of a French romance was here. I calmed myself down and shook my head no, but before I knew it, she was over at Jerome’s desk responding for me.
Jerome’s dark brown eyes stared at me through broad-rimmed glasses. “Bonjour, David,” he mouthed, and something in me melted.
How much could it hurt to meet and talk? We got together for drinks the following night, and over the next weeks, I found myself spending every other day with Jerome. He was charming and brilliant. We went to the cinema to watch art house films, dipped our croissants in coffee at cafés, and discussed European politics and his plans to work as a political journalist or public servant. I started to forget about celibacy. We were just friends, and then more than friends. I was falling in love.
One evening Jerome kissed me under a full moon near the Palais Universitaire. Its beautiful facade was decorated with statues of philosophers looking down on us—whether in approval or displeasure, I couldn’t tell.
The battle line was drawn between my love for God and my love for Jerome. I knew I was called to love God more than I desired this romantic relationship. I knew it was not God’s will for me. But right now, I simply didn’t care.
“I love you, Lord, but this is my dream,” I told him. “A boyfriend. A husband. A partner. A lover. A companion. Someone to share life with. You made me for this, and I want it. You allowed me to have same-sex desires, so you’ll just have to deal with this. I never chose it; you did.” I ignored my conscience and pursued a relationship, but I didn’t shut God out.
One late Saturday evening, Jerome and I went to the cinema. It was empty except for us. After the film, we wound our way through the dark cobblestone streets, hand in hand, until the cathedral came into view. As bells announced it was midnight and we turned the final street corner, I knew Jerome was going to ask me up to his apartment.
That old French dream resurrected itself in front of me. God, I know this is not your will, but I want this anyway, I thought, looking briefly to heaven. I want it more than you right now. I’m sorry. We climbed the spiral stairs to the top floor. Outside his door, Jerome pulled me in for a kiss. His dark brown eyes stared back at me, and he smiled. Our foreheads touched for a moment. Our connection was palpable.
As we walked into the apartment, Jerome fixed me a quintessentially French tisane, or herbal tea. I joined him to drink it in his room. Sitting on the bed, we began to kiss.
Psalm 139:7–8 flickered through my mind, uninvited: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”
David, do not try to give him the love only I can give him, God’s voice whispered. You are my son. Remember who you are.
The war of loves grew intense. God or Jerome. My physical self was choosing Jerome over God, but my new heart knew it had to choose God over Jerome. I realized that my love for God was stronger than my desire for Jerome. This had never happened before! My heart, I saw, had been too touched by grace to accept broken sexual desires over worship of my beloved, Jesus.
I stopped kissing Jerome. “I can’t do this,” I said in French. “I’m a Christian.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, puzzled. “I’m Catholic. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s love. God is love. If you have issues,” he said, smiling, “you can just go to confession.” He tried to kiss me again.
“No, Jerome, I’m serious. I don’t think you understand. Love isn’t just a feeling. Love is Jesus Christ dying on the cross for us.” I put my head in my hands, then looked up at him. “He is clear on homosexuality. His grace isn’t a license to do what I want with my body.”
His confusion melted into acceptance. Seeing my earnestness, he nodded. “I understand,” he said, with the gentle intelligence I so appreciated in him.
I understood that I’d just made one of the hardest decisions of my life.
“On peut être des amis,” I said, with tears in my eyes. “We can be friends.”
At church that next evening, the pastor preached from 2 Samuel, focusing on the words of David: “I will not sacrifice to the LORD . . . an offering that costs me nothing” (24:24). God knew. That was it. God knew.
The choice to give myself completely to God was not one I made as an indifferent, unfeeling robot. My heart was tender, bleeding, human. And it was the costly sacrifice I was offering him, a sacrifice that cannot be put into words. It went against the natural forces that raged within me, but God promised me grace and resurrection strength to help in my weakness. I was becoming a real disciple.
And even as I lost something I so desired, I was given my life back, as Jesus promised, in return. It is difficult to describe the depths of intimacy I shared with Jesus Christ after that choice against Jerome as my lover. Jesus was there, as if he were in the room, even as I mourned what I had just lost.
Jesus understood my struggles and temptations: “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Heb. 2:18). He knew what total sacrifice looked like, since he had submitted all of himself to his Father to bring us the kingdom of God.
That scared me. It also opened a new horizon of possibilities, a new kingdom reality. I knew that the intimacy and love I now shared with God was worth suffering for. This was entering the fellowship of Jesus’ sufferings (see Phil. 3:10).
Besides Merrie, not many believers had warned me about costly sacrifice in the Christian life. In my experience, the church barely talked about what Scripture said about being living sacrifices. Instead they settled for a comfortable, easy gospel, offering what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” That meant there was no need to surrender our choice sins, our closely held dreams, our deepest desires that went against God’s revealed will.
I longed, so deeply, for something more than that—his will, and not my own. And I had taken my first steps toward it.
My year in Strasbourg ended, and I moved back to Sydney. Even while I missed my life in France, I was glad to be home in Australia.
After I returned, my questions about biblical interpretation resurfaced. I saw now (Don Carson’s voice ringing in my mind) that much of my reading of Scripture had simply been interpreting it as saying what I wanted it to say—putting myself above the text. Besides studying the context and using reason as I read God’s Word, there was also a relational aspect. I needed to have a healthy respect, a fear of the Lord. That relationship would put God’s view above my own.
This fear isn’t a cowardly, trembling thing. It doesn’t come from fear of punishment or the understanding of God as cruel. It is simply the full acknowledgment that he is Lord, the only Lord, and we are not.
I read in Isaiah 11 that the Messiah was prophesied to have “the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the LORD” (v. 2) and that he would “delight in the fear of the LORD” (v. 3). Jesus, this Messiah, I came to understand, perfectly modeled this awe and respect for God, and he offered and imparted it to me—to all Christians—through the power of the Holy Spirit. It was not something I could cultivate on my own, no matter how I tried.
This fear is a sign we are living in real, costly grace, not in cheap grace that requires no sacrifice and never allows God’s Word to challenge or change us. Sadly, many Christians I observed seemed to live a lukewarm life that lacked this awe for God.
Søren Kierkegaard faced similar challenges from the nominal Christian culture and scholarship of his day. I resonated with his words: “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. . . . Christian scholarship is the church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.”20
One Sunday at church, the preacher’s message was on the fear of the Lord. He quoted Psalm 19, which says, “The fear of the LORD is clean” (v. 9 ESV), and talked about how “the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes” (v. 8 ESV). As he shared from Scripture, I was convicted of the uncleanness of my own heart. The two other churches I sometimes attended, I realized, did not fear God in this deeper way; that was the hesitation I’d felt there from the beginning! That was why the Spirit in me held back, even in the midst of some wonderful things they taught and did. The relationship with God was skewed. They simply didn’t fear him in this clean, beautiful way. If I don’t have the fear of the Lord, I thought, my love isn’t real.
That night, I submitted my life anew to the lordship of Christ, yet another milepost on my road. I now knew I had to leave these other churches and commit to one for my heart to be clean. While that did not mean severing friendships with people I cared about, it did mean cutting the ties of official fellowship and attendance as a sign of my new commitment.
In subsequent weeks, many of the people from these churches harshly criticized my choice to be celibate. It was so hard. I loved these people! But I didn’t turn back. The freedom I’d found was worth it.