Q: I have been a lesbian for years. Is it a sin when I only want love in this world – not sex? It so happens that my heart chose to love a woman not a man. I believe God is present when there is love.

A:

Thanks so much for writing to us here at TruthBook with your heartfelt question. It is a sad commentary on the world we live in when someone like you is in doubt about whether loving one person or another can possibly be sinful. As you say in your last sentence: “I believe God is present when there is love.” I agree with you. I can’t make a judgment about anyone’s sexual orientation, but I can say that sincere, devoted, honest love is always appropriate.

All true love is from God … whether we love our children, our parents, our friends, or our life partner, those feelings of love stem from God. The Urantia Book says this:

56:10.21 “Love is the desire to do good to another.”

It is interesting to me that in your note, you make the distinction between wanting love and not sex. In the normal course of things in life, love of one for another in a consensual situation like that between life partners, often can lead to sex … but it is not always so. Maybe you have discovered that sex can cause a lot of difficulties of its own, and that you’d rather just share the love without the physical expression of it through sex. I applaud you for that. So often we can get love and sex mixed up and that can be very problematic. The Urantia Book teaches:

82:1.10 No human emotion or impulse, when unbridled and overindulged, can produce so much harm and sorrow as this powerful sex urge. Intelligent submission of this impulse to the regulations of society is the supreme test of the actuality of any civilization. Self-control, more and more self-control, is the ever-increasing demand of advancing mankind.

Finally, I hope you have read enough of The Urantia Book to have seen the discourse of Jesus where he redefines and fully explains the concepts of evil, sin, and iniquity.

In that discourse, Jesus teaches: “Sin is the conscious, knowing, and deliberate transgression of the divine law, the Father’s will. Sin is the measure of unwillingness to be divinely led and spiritually directed.”

Click to read the whole discourse

Elsewhere in The Urantia Book we read this:

54:0.1 EVOLUTIONARY MAN FINDS it difficult fully to comprehend the significance and to grasp the meanings of evil, error, sin, and iniquity. Man is slow to perceive that contrastive perfection and imperfection produce potential evil; that conflicting truth and falsehood create confusing error; that the divine endowment of freewill choice eventuates in the divergent realms of sin and righteousness; that the persistent pursuit of divinity leads to the kingdom of God as contrasted with its continuous rejection, which leads to the domains of iniquity.

54:0.2 The Gods neither create evil nor permit sin and rebellion. Potential evil is time-existent in a universe embracing differential levels of perfection meanings and values. Sin is potential in all realms where imperfect beings are endowed with the ability to choose between good and evil. The very conflicting presence of truth and untruth, fact and falsehood, constitutes the potentiality of error. The deliberate choice of evil constitutes sin; the willful rejection of truth is error; the persistent pursuit of sin and error is iniquity.

I can’t see where your description of yourself as lesbian would constitute “sin;” I hope that you will take heart from these descriptions and teachings regarding sin. If you are engaged in the “pursuit of divinity,” if your main objective in this life is to give and receive love, that is, in my opinion, doing the right thing, regardless of whether some people think otherwise.

Thanks again for writing to us with your question; I hope that my reply has been helpful. Please feel free to write again anytime!

:: Date published: 2016-02-01 11:57:05.843
:: Author: Truthbook Staff