Hey! Sorry for the late reply, moving to another country next week so I been crazy busy xD

Funny you should mention Joel Osteen, one of my Christian friends got his book as a present from someone and when we were going camping we were joking we should take it with us because it would make great fire kindling - since it is completely useless for anything else! I loved this review for it, I think it ties well with what this thread is about:

If you want to read a book in which discontentment is encouraged, a book that shows God to be powerless apart from your power-filled thoughts and words, a book in which sin is minimized and renamed in every conceivable way, and a supposedly Christian book that gives only trivial mention to Jesus Christ, Your Best Life Now is the book for you. But if you believe, with the Apostle Paul, that "godliness with contentment is great gain" (1 Tim. 6:6 NKJV)1, if you desire a deeper and more biblical understanding of God and His ways, if you desire to see Jesus Christ exalted in your life as you follow His pattern of humility and self-denial, if you believe a Christian's greatest hunger should be for righteousness (Matt. 5:6) and not for money, health, or easy living, then you would do well to look elsewhere.

At one point you made a distinction between your judgement and righteous judgment. Do you believe that my same-gender relationship with my boyfriend (we are intimate but we don't have sex of any kind) warrants righteous judgement? (Again, just curious)

Righteous judgement is basically looking at someone's life (even your own) and comparing it against what Christ and the apostles have taught. It doesn't mean thinking evil thoughts towards people or criticizing them. I mean you can express criticism in the form of correction if you feel it will help but you must be sure in your motives first - are you actually trying to help that person or are you just doing it to fulfill some power trip?

When it comes to homosexuality I think many Christians seem to give it some kind of special sin status, when I don't see any Biblical support for doing that. I also agree with some of the criticisms from the homosexual community about certain widely used Biblical verses that criticise homosexuality.

However what it comes down to for me (and I hope I won't offend you by this) is that when Jesus taught about marriage he taught about it being between a man and a woman, and that God joins a man and a woman and the two of them become one flesh. And overall the only references to marriage you will find in the Bible speak about a union between a man and a woman, the Bible tells us that it is the only kind of righteous romantic relationship. So because of that, to me, anything that falls outside of that is not what God intended for us.

But on the same note I must add that I don't think what some of the Christian community does with regards to homosexuals is right, and I think in many instances it even has a very negative effect. Basically the Bible teaches us to come to Christ as we are and then let Him change us, let Him do the work on us.

So trying to force homosexual people, many of whom aren't even remotely interested in following Christ, to follow Christian morality is futile. I think the issue of homosexuality should only be addressed when a person has already come to Christ and they have studied the Bible for themselves, spent time in prayer, and have come to a decision that something needs to change in their life only then should the other Christians start trying to help them in that.

And this goes for any sin, for example my husband got saved before me, before I came to Christ I used to dress.. lets just say not very modestly. So when my already saved husband asked the yet unsaved me to dress more modestly all that did was anger me "How dare he tell me what to do?!" kinda thing. Then when I became a Christian I just had a change of heart about many things in my life, and now dressing modestly is something that gives me a lot of joy, it is something I want to do.

So now if one of my non-Christian friends is dressed in an immodest way I'm not going to go up to her and criticize her appearance, but I will just say a silent prayer for her and witness to her about Christ whenever I feel led because I know that it is Christ who changes hearts, not rules and legislations. Hope this makes sense, and hope I didn't offend you, I know this is a senstitive issue and generally I try to stay away from it because I'm not a fan of conflict.