Saddleback Pastor Breaks Down In Tears, Comparing His Marriage to a Homosexual One

Andy Wood is the new pastor of the 25,000-member, 14-campus Saddleback Church, replacing outgoing purpose-driven pastor Rick Warren. Saddleback, who were recently disfellowshipped from the SBC for ordaining several pastrixes, has also come under fire for having a “Blacks Only worship service” where no white members were allowed in, so the “black fold” could have a “safe space” to “heal” and for pastor Wood saying that he doesn’t know if a homosexual couple should divorce if one of them becomes saved, and later saying he’d attend a gay wedding/ marriage and even get the couple a gift. 

It’s also been revealed that, like Andy Stanley at North Point Church, they have gay-affirming pastors on staff that promote and partner with the pro-LGBTQ+ ministry ‘Embracing the Journey,” which seeks to counsel parents of children confused about their sexuality.  

In a 2018 sermon, Wood starts by saying that the bible teaches ten times more about greed than homosexuality.

And if you look at our church, look around you, all of our campuses, what you will notice is that there are a lot of people different than you. If you don’t like that, too bad, get used to it, that’s the way it’s going to be in heaven. There gonna be a lot of people different color skin than you.

….we have a lot of disparity and who comes to our church….and within that we have people who have different sexual orientation. We have some people who are heterosexual, some people who are gay, and we have a lot of disparity and a lot of differences in our church.

What happens oftentimes in the church is there are walls and even in society, there are walls that get built between us. So the first part is that there are walls which exist. And a lot of times those walls come out of our hatred, they come out of our frustration, they come out of our bad negative experiences from the past. And Jesus came to tear down our walls.

…So we what we do is we take the things we’re good at, and we don’t struggle with and then we judge somebody else who struggles with the thing that we’ve by God’s grace we’ve overcome. That’s why the Bible, although it teaches 10 times as much about greed as it does with homosexual activity, sometimes the church identifies and focuses in on things that maybe we do a better job with, so we don’t have to isolate it.

Meet Rick Warren’s replacement, Andy Wood. “The Bible says ten times as much about greed as it does homosexuality.” Sound familiar? pic.twitter.com/Tdf7E2kMWS

— Terri Green (@TerriGreenUSA) March 14, 2023

Then, he breaks down in tears at how a homosexual must feel at having to say goodbye to their gay ‘spouse’, comparing their agony and grief to how he’d feel if he had to give up his wife and children for the sake of the kingdom.

Now, if you are gay and this is the passage of scripture that somebody has used to tell you that you were going to hell, I want to say I’m sorry. Because that’s not what this is teaching. In fact, watch what Paul does next. He says this, here’s the list. He says “Those who indulge in sexual sin, or those who worship idols, or those who commit adultery, or male prostitutes or practice homosexuality, or are thieves, or are greedy people, or drunkards, or abusive or cheat people, none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.’

Now, let’s have a moment of honesty. We don’t have to say which one, but how many of you can identify in that list of sins at least one time at some point in your life you have violated that standard? Just raise your hands up high, okay?

The rest of you, your next cuz you’re lying. Right? So if that’s what the Bible teaches, if that means that we’re going to go to hell as a result of that, every one of us would be sentenced to an eternity apart from Jesus, based upon that of sins. And maybe you’ve been apart of a church that zeroed in on one of those areas of sins. All of those. Every single one of us as human beings are broken before God, in need of a savior.

(Even?) of ourselves, we deserve to spend eternity apart from Jesus in a place called hell. And notice how Paul when he highlights it, when he talks about the subject of homosexuality, he doesn’t say ‘homosexuality’. He says it’s ‘the practice of homosexuality’ that is the thing that is the sin inside of our hearts. See the desires inside of our hearts, we all have different desires that have the propensity to move us away from God. (Editor’s note. Exegeting the unique phrasing of NLT translation, which is a dynamic equivalent translation, is a really dumb thing to do and makes no sense)

And we’re born with desires away from the perfect will of God. And those desires have the potential to lead us, every single one of us to death and relationship apart from Jesus. It’s not the desire that is the sin, it’s what you do with it. It’s how you act on it.

And this is hard. Again, this is really hard. Because in our meeting with a group of people in my office, there’s this one young gal, and she starts sharing her story. And she says, ‘you know, In many ways have become convinced that this is, this is not what God wants for me, but I deeply love this person right next to me, and I feel like I might need to surrender this to God.’ And she said, ‘I want you to know my struggle because I’m saying to God, as hard as this is, as difficult as this is, more than anything I want You. And if this thing separates me from You, in experiencing your joy and your peace in my life, I give it back to you.’

And I’m sitting there and I’m thinking. ‘What if God asked me to give up Stacie and my kids?’ That’s what that feels like. It’s not easy and sometimes we just throw out platitudes and we just say things.”

Of course, there’s no world in which ‘gay marriage’ is even comparable to biblical marriage so the analogy to his own marriage is nonsensical and instantly breakdown.

Would Wood break down in tears talking to a father in his office who’d taken his 20-year-old daughter as his ‘wife, ‘ lamenting how hard it would be to let her go and give up his incest? Would he liken losing his kids to a beast of a man losing his molested daughter? How about a kleptomaniac having to give up his thievery? Or an adulteress having to give up her cheating?

Wood wants to flatten all the sins out when it’s convenient for him, giving it special status at his discretion. That he would weep over homosexuality but not those other scenarios demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the sinfulness of sodomy and shows how compromised and warped his theology actually is.

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