Dr. Christopher Yuan’s story is more than a testimony—it’s a powerful narrative of redemption and the search for identity amid trials. In today’s episode, we explore the drastic transformation from living in darkness to embracing faith. Listeners will experience the profound impact of Yuan’s eventual surrender to God and learn how he moved from a path of imprisonment to inspiring others. His insights on sexuality, identity, and purpose challenge cultural norms, offering a compelling reminder of God’s unrelenting grace and the profound change that trusting Him can bring.
Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Family Talk, a radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, welcome to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. Today, we’re bringing you part two of an incredibly powerful testimony of transformation and redemption. Dr. Christopher Yuan shares his story from darkness into light, a story that demonstrates God’s relentless pursuit of those who seem furthest from his reach. Now, if you were with us on the last edition of Family Talk, you heard how Christopher abandoned his dental studies to embrace a homosexual lifestyle and to become a drug dealer, eventually landing in federal prison facing a six-year sentence. But as we’ll hear on today’s Family Talk broadcast, that prison cell became the very place where God captured his heart. Dr. Christopher Yuan now serves as an author, speaker, and Bible professor whose ministry on faith and sexuality has touched millions worldwide. After graduating from Moody Bible Institute, he earned both a master’s degree in biblical exegesis and a doctorate of ministry, becoming living proof that no one is beyond God’s redemptive reach. Christopher’s parents, Leon and Angela Yuan, also share their perspective in this moving presentation. Their testimony reminds us that persistent prayer can move mountains, even when circumstances seem hopeless. Now, if you missed our last program here on Family Talk, remember you can find it by visiting drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. And now let’s rejoin Christopher’s remarkable story at the moment God began working on him in his prison cell.
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I was walking around the cell block. And to be honest, I was trying to do my best to stay to myself. You know, I didn’t want to mingle too much with those really bad people, those criminals. Because I didn’t think I was a criminal. And I passed by this garbage can. It was a mound of trash. And I looked at this trash and I thought to myself, this represents my life right now. You see, I’m from upper middle class suburb of Chicago. My father has two doctorates. I was only three months away from receiving my own doctorate. I had it made. Now I found myself among common criminals. I was about to pass by that garbage can, but something on top of the trash caught my eye. I picked it up, and it was Gideon’s New Testament. I took that New Testament back to my cell, and I opened up that good book. For the first time, I read through the entire Gospel of Mark that night. But can I just tell you, I was not thinking, this is the Word of God. I wasn’t even thinking, this will be the answer to some of my problems. Actually, I was just simply thinking, I’ve got an enormous amount of time on my hands, and I better pass it somehow. But as many of you know, what we have in our Bibles is not just ink on paper. But what we have in our Bibles, beloved, is the very breath. Of God. And it is living and powerful and sharper than any double-edged sword. Able to cut through the hardest of hearts, exposing my sin, my rebellion. And it wasn’t a pretty sight that I thought things couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong. A couple weeks later, I was called into the nurse’s office. They handcuffed me, chained my hands around my waist, shackled my feet together. I shuffled into the nurse’s office. The nurse shut the door behind me, sat me down, and I just knew something wasn’t right. She was uncomfortably struggling with the words, and she couldn’t even give me eye contact. So she resigned to writing something on a piece of paper and slowly slid across the desk to me. I looked down, and this piece of paper said, And I saw three letters and a symbol. HIV positive.
SPEAKER 02 :
A few days before Christmas, I received Christopher’s phone call from jail. The noise in the background could not cover up his sad and hopeless words. Mom, I am HIV positive. His silent and weak voice shrilled off as my body went limp. I felt dizzy, and the world around me seemed to stop. Ever since Christopher told us he was gay, I had lived with constant fear that Christopher might one day contract this deadly virus. My worst nightmare was now a reality. Christopher was sentenced to six years in federal prison. But news of his HIV status was like a death sentence. A verdict I could not accept. Hang on the phone. The pain so grieved, torn at my broken heart like a knife. Endlessly, I stumbled up the steps and dragged my heavy body into my prayer closet. This affliction was more than I could bear. In the silence of my sorrow, a melody began to play in my heart. The soft and sweet streams of a hymn fill my ears and repeat over and over.
SPEAKER 03 :
It is well, it is well with my soul.
SPEAKER 04 :
When peace like a river attendeth my way When sorrows like sea billows roll Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul. Please sing with us. It is well with my soul, with my soul. It is well, it is well with my soul.
SPEAKER 05 :
A few days after receiving that devastating news, I was in my cell all to myself. And I was just contemplating the mess that I’ve made in my life. Someone had written something in the corner and it read, if you’re bored, read Jeremiah 29, 11. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future. You see, at the most hopeless point in my life, God was using the words penned by a prophet thousands of years ago to a rebellious nation, Israel, to tell me, to tell me that regardless of who I was and what I had done in the past, he still had a plan for me. I had no idea where this plan was going to take me, but God gave me enough faith, enough strength to get through that one day and the next and the next. My transformation was gradual. I wish I could tell you I got down on my knees, said a sinner’s prayer, and everything after that was just perfect. I didn’t have any more problems. That’s far from the truth. God was convicting me of the dependencies, the idols that I had in my life. The most obvious was drugs. I was in prison for drugs. No one had to convince me of that. That was the most obvious. But within a few months, God delivered me from the bondage of that addiction. However, the last thing that I was holding onto and just felt like I couldn’t let go was my sexual identity. Amen. Amen. So I went to a chaplain and I asked him his opinion on this issue. You know, I’m a new Christian, so I don’t know that much about the Bible. I wanted to go ask someone who should know more about the Bible, the chaplain. To my surprise, this chaplain actually told me that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. And he gave me a book from a shelf and he said, here, this book explains that view. So with much curiosity, I took that book in the hopes of finding biblical justification for homosexuality. I wanted my cake and eat it too. Don’t we all? So I had that book in one hand and the Bible in the other. And can I just tell you from a purely human perspective, I had every reason in the world, every single reason in the world to accept what that book is claiming to justify the way I had been living. But God’s indwelling Holy Spirit convicted me that those assertions from that book were a clear distortion of God, his word, and his unmistakable condemnations against gay sex and relationships. I couldn’t even finish that book, and I gave it back to the chaplain, which meant I turned to the Bible alone. And I went through every verse, every chapter, every page of scripture looking for justification for homosexuality. I wanted to look for any type of a positive affirmation or a blessing of a monogamous gay relationship. I went cover to cover several times. I had time. I looked and I looked and I looked and I couldn’t find any. And the decision had to be made either abandon God and his word, live as a gay man, pursue a monogamous gay relationship by allowing my attractions to not only dictate who I was, but also how I lived. Or abandon pursuing a monogamous gay relationship by liberating myself from my attractions and live as a follower of Jesus Christ. My decision was clear and obvious. Jesus. As the days and the weeks and the months of abstinence passed, I realized a few things. First of all, abstaining from sex is actually possible. I know, I know. It’s actually possible. Who knew? Second, sexual abstinence is not going to make me go crazy, no matter what Freud and Oprah say. Third, I realize that from abstaining from sex that my sexuality should not be the core of who I am. You know, I told myself before, God loves me unconditionally, and that is true. But then I added, so therefore he doesn’t want me to change. We hear that all the time. God loves me just the way I am, so leave me alone. But now after reading the Bible, I learned something very important. That unconditional love is not the same thing as unconditional approval of my behavior. Did you catch that? Unconditional love is not the same thing as unconditional approval of my behavior. You see, my identity should not be defined just by my attractions. My identity should not be defined just by my desires as deep-rooted as they might be. My identity isn’t gay, isn’t ex-gay, isn’t even heterosexual for that matter, because my identity as a child of the living God must be in Jesus Christ alone. God says, “‘Be holy, for I am holy.'” You know, I used to think that if I were to become a Christian and if I wanted to please God, I had to become a heterosexual. That the more heterosexual I was, the more Christian I would be. But in actuality, people who have heterosexual feelings also struggle with sin. So that shouldn’t be my goal. God never said, be heterosexual, for I am heterosexual. But neither did he say, be homosexual, for I am homosexual. Rather, God said, be holy, for I am holy. So the opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. That is not and should never be the goal. But the opposite of homosexuality is sin. As a matter of fact, the opposite of any struggle with sin is holiness. I should not focus upon my attractions, my temptations, my desires. The ultimate issue is that I yearn after God in total surrender and complete obedience. As I began to live this life of surrender and obedience, God began to reveal His plan for my life. And He called me to full-time ministry while I was in prison, of all places. And I realized that it didn’t matter where I was, whether in prison or out of prison, because my calling on life would remain the same regardless of location and with that change of heart, God did another miracle. And he shortened my sentence from six years to three years, which is almost unheard of in the federal system. So I called home, collected my parents, told them I think God’s calling me to ministry. And I asked them to mail me an application to the only Bible college I had ever heard of in our hometown Chicago called Moody Bible Institute. But there was silence on the other line because I think they both dropped their phones. They mailed the application into me to prison. I was so excited when I got it. I tore it open and began filling out the questions and the essays until I got to the end where they asked me for references. Not from anybody, but specifically people who knew me as a Christian for at least one year. I had some slim pickings in prison. But I was able to persuade a prison chaplain, a prison guard, and another prison inmate to write my references to Moody. So one of the greatest miracles of this story is that Moody actually accepted me. I was released from prison July of 2001, and I started the very next month in August of 2001. So imagine the surprise of my classmates when I answered their question, what did you do this summer? I graduated from Moody in 2005, went on to my Master’s of Arts in Biblical Exegesis from Wheaton College Graduate School. I received my doctorate of ministry from Bethel Seminary. Hallelujah. A miracle. A miracle. And in 2011, I had the honor… the immense honor to co-author a book with my mother called Out of a Far Country, A Gay Son’s Journey to God, A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope. She wrote chapter one. I wrote chapter two. She wrote chapter three. She actually wrote all the odd chapters. I wrote the even chapters because we wanted to tell you from our own first-person voice how you can have the same situation told from two totally different perspectives and yet God in his power and his grace says, brought us all back together. The back of every book, every book we have Spanish, English, Chinese, but the back of every book has a study guide that many small groups are using to continue the conversation on healthy, biblical, holy sexuality. And we’ve even found out that some youth groups are using it as a curriculum and even some Christian high schools are using it as a textbook. And it makes sense. This younger generation are being flooded, intentionally inundated with resources on sexuality, starting from kindergarten. And they’re all from a non-Christian perspective. And yet, where are our resources that we can give to our youth, our young adults, that not just communicate, but show what biblical sexuality look like? So sometimes people go back to our table. One time we had this old lady, she came back and she wanted 12 books. We’re like, 12 books? You only need one book. And she said, I have 12 grandchildren and they all must learn biblical sexuality. Silence is no longer an option. Silence is no longer an option. We have to talk openly and frankly about sex and sexuality, about holy sexuality. But God has been so amazing and given us back the years that the locusts have taken away. My parents and I, we travel around the nation, around the world, talking about God’s grace and God’s truth on this issue of sexuality. And then as if that wasn’t amazing enough, God has a great sense of humor. How many of you guys know God has a sense of humor? God has an amazing sense of humor because he’s brought me back to Moody, full circle. So now I’m teaching in the Bible department. So I went from prisoner to professor. How about that for a resume? but God has done far more abundantly beyond all that we have asked or thought. As I look back upon my life, most of which were far, far apart from Christ, I see a lot of bad decisions, which have resulted in some big consequences. But you know, I realized something. I’m no different than any of you. All of our days are numbered, are they not? And yet we take today and tomorrow for granted. You know, it took getting HIV for me to realize a profound truth. That as a child of God, I must live today. With a sense of urgency. When I look at this world today, I know this world doesn’t need another good Christian. A good Christian who might go to church every Sunday. And they’re good people in the eyes of man. But in the eyes of God, doing little for the kingdom of heaven. What this world needs, what this world demands are great Christians. Christians who won’t settle for mediocrity. Christians who don’t care what the person on the left says or puts on the right says, but living for an audience of one. Christians who know that they’ve been crucified with Christ and they no longer live, but Christ lives in them. Christians who are living with a sense of urgency. You know, you’ve been created for greatness, not in the eyes of man to say, oh, look at how great I am, but in the eyes of God, which means being the least of these, which means not coming to be served, but coming to serve. Because I don’t know whether you realize this or not, but every one of us will one day stand before our God, our creator. And my hope is that he will look at you in the eyes and say, well done, good and faithful servant. Let’s pray. God of wonders, you are the great I am. Everything that was, is, and will be has come from you, oh God. Lord, we praise you, not because we ought to, but because that is what we were created to do. Father, help our hearts to break for those things around us that break yours. Lord, help our hearts to break for the LGBT community. Lord, might we be a people that gets down on our knees to pray today for our gay loved ones and friends in the gay community. Lord, I pray that we would be a community that welcomes and walk with our HIV positive sisters and brothers, not shunning them as if they had leprosy, but loving them just as they are. Father, give us opportunities to share the good news of Jesus Christ to those who need to hear it. We love you. We praise you. And we ask this in the powerful, matchless name of Jesus, the Messiah. And the people of God said…
SPEAKER 01 :
Amen. Friend, you’ve been listening to a very special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk featuring Dr. Christopher Yuan’s powerful testimony of transformation. His journey from prisoner to professor reminds us that our true identity isn’t defined by our struggles or our sexuality. It’s defined by our relationship with Jesus Christ who calls us to be whole, holy, and fully surrendered to him. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you’d like to share this powerful message of hope and redemption with someone who really needs to hear it, I encourage you to go to drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk, and you’ll find both parts one and two of the program. You’ll also find information about Dr. Yuan’s book called Holy Sexuality and the Gospel. And while you’re on our website, be sure to check out the book he co-authored with his mother, Angela. It’s called Out of a Far Country. It tells their story from both perspectives of mother and son. Well, if you’re a parent, I know that you are navigating challenging conversations with your children right now in today’s complex culture. And that’s why I want to share with you about a resource that can strengthen you on your parenting journey. Dr. James Dobson and his wife Shirley have written the book Nightlight for Parents as a daily devotional filled with encouraging insights and practical wisdom drawn from their decades of family ministry. Now, we’ll be happy to send it to you as our way of thanking you for your gift of any amount in support of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute today. So go to drjamesdobson.org with your donation or call us at 877-732-6825. You know, Christopher’s story reminds us that persistent prayer and unwavering faith can transform even the most difficult circumstances. And your faithful financial support helps us reach people who need to hear that no situation is beyond God’s redemptive power. You can make a secure donation online at drjamesdobson.org, or you can send it through the U.S. Postal Service. Our ministry mailing address is drjamesdobsonsfamilytalk.org. P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado. The zip code 80949. Well, I’m Roger Marsh. And from all of us here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. The voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
