Scott Lively says that God recently gave him a prophecy that He “would soon use me to lead some homosexuals to Him” and so it seemed like a good time for him to write an open letter to the gay community explaining his history and motivation:

I am Pastor Scott Lively and it has been my mission for 25 years to work against the “gay” agenda. I am probably one of your best-known opponents in this world. Amongst the many hate-mail messages I receive are the occasional sincere requests to explain my motivation. I believe the time has come to do that.

On March 8th of this year I received a message known in charismatic Christian circles as a prophetic “word of knowledge,” which said in essence that God would soon use me to lead some homosexuals to Him, and referenced 2 Samuel 14:14: “For we will surely die and are like water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again. Yet God does not take away life, but plans ways so that the banished one will not be cast out from him.”

In the several weeks since I received that, I have given a lot of thought to the message, and realized that in all of my years of talking about you and “the homosexual issue” generally, I have never spoken to you as a community. I repent of that, and apologize to you.

I know a lot about repentance, because I have struggled with many sins in my life, and have only ever found victory in any of them by “letting go and letting God” take over. I had a terrible family life as a child due to my Dad’s mental illness. I became an alcoholic at 12, a drug addict at 14 and all my life have struggled with addictive behaviors. Today, however, I have freedom in Jesus Christ from all of those things.

Contrary to speculation, I have never struggled with same-sex attraction, but I have recognized in my own sins enough of a similarity to homosexuality to have felt empathy for you. Just as recovering addicts know that a drug is a drug is a drug, mature Christians know that a sin is a sin is a sin. They are different in form, but equal in their effect: separating us from God.