Posted on 02/14/2006 6:43:15 AM PST by Mr. Silverback
Note: This commentary may not be suitable for young children. This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.
A 25-year-old Christian man e-mailed a friend—a young Christian author named Lauren Winner—and asked her a question. He claimed he had endless opportunities for casual sex—including one that very evening. Why should he not take advantage of them? After all, he said, he was already “dealing with seventeen other things in my Christian walk. Shouldn’t I just focus on learning to pray, and deal with the sex stuff later?”
Nice try, buster. Winner, the author of Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity, says that in our sex-saturated culture, young, single Christians find chastity much more difficult than many older Christians can imagine. A college minister told Winner that “every college pastor I’ve talked to about this says the same thing: Their students, even those in their leadership groups, people leading Bible studies and so forth, are sexually out of control.”
Winner herself converted to Christianity at age 21, when her ideas about sexuality had already been partially formed by Hollywood and Cosmopolitan magazine—not the Church. One thing she learned firsthand as a new Christian: A few isolated Bible verses are not much help to those who have been sexually active since their teens. What she needed was an entire sexual ethic—truths that are “part of the large biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption.”
The starting point, Winner writes, is that God created us with bodies and declared that they were good. But in the fall, “our sexual desires were disordered, and one task of Christian ethic is to help us rightly order them.” Rightly ordered by a Christian moral vision, she says, “Bodies are tools God uses for His glory.”
Winner writes that biblical writers from Moses to Paul understood what happened in the fall and articulated efforts to protect and perpetuate the ordering of things that was established in Genesis. For example, the Mosaic laws about sexual practices “do protective work, pointing to, guarding, and returning God’s people to the created order, the world as God meant it to be.” And in the Scriptures, the book the Song of Solomon, we find, among other things, “the perfect expression of what this sexuality, restored by law and grace, looks like.”
When youth pastors talk about sex, Winner notes, they need to “begin with the picture of intended reality that is laid out in Genesis.” They should invite teens to answer “a host of larger questions: Who created us, and for what ends? What is God’s creational intent? and What are we made for?”
We need to help youth understand that they are God’s creatures, made for His best purposes. And then, when they are alone with a boyfriend or girlfriend, they “may think very differently—even righteously—about sex, and bodies, and the context in which those bodies are to touch and be touched,” Winner writes.
I hope you’ll read Winner’s book Real Sex. It will help you understand and help you teach children that the right question is not, “How far can I go?” but “Who created my body, and for what purpose?”
By the way, her book is not just for children. It’s a good reminder for us all—for me and for you.
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BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Ping!
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Prayers both before and after intercourse with good worship music in the background might cool the lust a tad.
Why not during?
I remember being about 15 when the church I attended handed out these little books to all the teenagers about what Christians should do about their sexuality.
Basically, it was advocating abstinence, but an odd sort of abstinence. The questions it kept trying to answer were all about "How far can we go?" The book didn't ever really define it all that well.
Kissing was OK, according to the book, as long as you really cared for the other person.
A little light petting wasn't so bad, really, as long as it didn't lead to arousal. I remember thinking at the time that if you weren't aroused why were you engaging in "light" petting. The book didn't bother to define what "light petting" might be, but we all figured it was stuff above the waist and with clothes on.
Heavy petting, on the other hand, wasn't OK, but apparently wasn't so bad if you were engaged to the other person. But, if it led to the desire to actually have intercourse, you were to stop at once. Right. We took "heavy petting" to mean anything with clothes on.
Masturbation got a full chapter, but the book wasn't sure about what to say about it. It hemmed and hawed, but the message was unclear. Basically it said that almost all boys did it but few girls, and that it wasn't necessarily a sin, unless it led to excessive thinking about sex. Duh.
Oral sex was simply not mentioned at all. We weren't supposed to know that it existed, I guess.
As today, apparently, the message was unclear for the teenagers who read this little book and, apparently to the adults who wrote and distributed it.
Us kids? Well, we did whatever we did.
"Nice try, buster. Winner, the author of Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity, says that in our sex-saturated culture, young, single Christians find chastity much more difficult than many older Christians can imagine. A college minister told Winner that “every college pastor I’ve talked to about this says the same thing: Their students, even those in their leadership groups, people leading Bible studies and so forth, are sexually out of control.”
A real challenge and at the root of modern problems.This is the true battlefield for American culture, because it is the one battlefield where each individual is in total control of their own choice. This is a problem that is largely decided by the female, I think when male birth control becomes practical it will lead to women fighting to take back control over their sexuality, already many young women seem to sense their sex has given up too much in the "sexual revolution".
To me sex is like food. It is wonderfull, necessary and should be respected. We have to be carefull, I know of far too many people who are enslaved to sexual adictions and starting early was probably part of the cause. I´d guess that for every extremely overweight person there is a sexual addict. Believe it or not, it is as bad, if not worse than a drug addiction. Hard to control, dangerous, and hurts a lot of people.
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