Merriam-Webster announced recently that its Word of the Year is “they.”  The company, which publishes dictionaries and reference books said that online searches for the word increased 313% in 2019 over the  previous year.  The plural pronoun “they” according to the company, may now be used as a singular pronoun.  

Merriam-Webster also stated that “they” should be used for individuals who are “gender-nonconforming” or “nonbinary” and prefer the plural pronoun to refer to themselves, instead of “he” or “she.”  

As a number of observers have noted, Merriam-Webster has acquiesced to a gender theory which says that there are multiple “genders” rather than two sexes; that people may shift from one sex to become the other; and that gender is an internal sense, rather than a biological reality.

Men, when our culture loses a sense of transcendence, in which life has its source in a supreme creator, who created us in his image, our existence is reduce to a small horizon and narrow space.  We are then limited in making sense of our very personhood. We live with an enclosed self.  We don’t know who we are.  We then come to the place today where an individual human being is to be addressed as “they” since they claim to be “nonbinary.” 

It is vital that you get your basic biblical anthropology  straight.  Are you a new man in Christ, created in God’s image to live in fellowship with your heavenly Father and others?  Or are you something else?  Do you know who you are in Christ?  

I intend to stand firm as a male, affirmed in my masculinity, by a heavenly Father who delights in me.  I am a “new man” in Christ. “What this means is that those who become Christians become new persons.  They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone.  A new life has begun” (II Cor. 5:17).    

Again we have to go back to Genesis.  “When God created people, he made them in the likeness of God.  He created them male and female, and he blessed them and called them ‘human'” (Gen 5:1-2).  We were not created as “they” but as a person in relationship to the creator.  We also rejoice in being made new in Christ. 

I want to  give you the following quote from Fenelon.  He is celebrating his new life in Christ.  “The first of God’s gifts, the foundation of all others, is what I call self.  He gave me myself.  To him I owe not only all I have, but all I am……the mind of Man can not understand the infinity of such a gift.  The God Who made me, gave me myself, the self I love …..I owe to His goodness, and that God should be in me and I in Him, seeing I derive myself from Him.  Without Him I should not be myself, without Him I should not have the self I love nor the power of loving it, neither the will to love nor the thoughts whereby I know myself.  All that I have and am is given me”

It is a profound reality, when a man, comes to the awareness that God love him as he is in Christ, allowing him to love himself, to love God in return, as well as others with the love that God has for him.  What is so needed today in our culture are men, who know they are loved by God, who can love others with the love of Christ.