Will you seek God’s leading on how to vote and how to pray for Australia’s 2016 Plebescite on Same Sex Marriage?
1. We invite Australian watchmen and gatekeepers to communicate with us about how we can discern God’s strategy for how to stand together in love and prayer through this year leading up to the Plebescite – which is to be held after the next election e.g. late 2016.
Let’s discern how to call the Body of Christ to awaken and arise and shine (Isaiah 61).
- Consider a Prophetic Warning by La Nora van Arsdall
- Consider Word for Australia and the South Pacific Islands 2015-2016 by Sheena Ryan Australian Prophetic Council
- Consider advanced strategies emerging from the Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network – exemplified in expediential prayer tools available at http://www.hapn.us. For example: Kingdom Prayer Power: A Quantum Leap by Dr. Yolanda McCune http://www.oapn.us/kingdom-prayer-power
Let’s pray all Australians have their eyes opened by God to the agendas underlying this and the consequences of Australia’s decision – which will impact all Australians spiritually as well as socially for generations to come.
2. We invite you to prayerfully consider the perspective and leadership of Indigenous Australians in asking our government to respect that marriage between a man and woman is the basis of traditional culture. In August 2015 representatives from many tribes travelled from all over Australia to come together in Canberra to present the Uluru Bark Petition to the ACT and Federal Parliaments.
https://www.facebook.com/Uluru-Bark-Petition-1601102330156044/?ref=py_c
3. The Media is Raising Concerns: Religious freedom under threat
PAUL KELLY A test case is unfolding for the Catholic Church’s freedom of speech
4. We invite you each to invest the time in discerning the will of our Father who so loves the world. Jesus offers abundant eternal life to all, seeking that none would perish and seeking to warn us of the consequences of our personal and national choices. Explore what the Bible says.
Same Sex Marriage: Should It Be a Civil Right? by David Orton
In view of the current shifts, particularly in the English speaking western nations, in regard to same-sex marriage we have felt a constraint to release a paper that might resource Christians in thinking the thoughts of God after him in this regard. Be warned though, it is a necessarily comprehensive response – and some – to the main arguments of the pro-homosexual apology.
With the UK government’s Wolfenden Report of 1957, leading to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, culminating in the Same-Sex Couples Marriage Bill of 2013, and the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell v Hodges same-sex marriage ruling of 2015, the shift in the western nations to full acceptance of homosexuality and imbuing it with full civil rights – including marriage – is virtually complete.
However, to answer whether same-sex marriage should be a civil-right, it must first be asked as to whether it is, in fact, a criminal act.
Behaviours that are not classified by the state as criminal, we are clearly free to do, which denotes that they are also a civil-right; thus with the gradual decriminalisation of homosexuality across the western nations over the decades, it is consistent that same-sex marriage has become an issue of equity and justice—of equality before the law.
Therefore, to answer the same-sex marriage question, we must first discover the biblical ethic in regard to homosexuality itself—that is, its sinfulness and/or criminality.
Issues
To do this and answer the marriage question we need to not only consider the texts that deal with homosexuality, but also consider the role of:
- Scripture
- Hermeneutics and Exegesis (interpreting Scripture)
- Law and Grace
- Church and State
Confusion in all four of these – and as to how they interface – has led to a revisionist and prohomosexual theology that has not only overtaken the more theologically liberal denominations, but also more recently significant portions of evangelicalism; and consequently to their acceptance, if not outright advocacy, of same-sex marriage…
Clarifying these four issues, this paper will argue that homosexuality is antithetical to biblically orthodox Christianity. It will show that the church has a divine mandate to teach the state and civil society the ways of God, including his righteous standards, and that the state has a responsibility to uphold justice based on those standard…
