Posts Tagged ‘teens’

What do I tell my kids about sex? When do I talk to them about it? How old should they be when we have “the sex talk”? These are questions that I get all the time from parents in regard to educating kids about sex. It’s a task that many dread and can make even the strongest of men and women tremble with apprehension and fear. But is doesn’t have to be daunting if you can get comfortable and approach it as a constant conversation, rather than the one big event. “The Talk” is 1950s thinking and it doesn’t cut it in the world we live in today.

As parents, if you believe that talking to your kids one time is enough, you are dumb as a brick! It shows how just backward we Christians are in the area of sex education that we’re still thinking in terms of “the talk”. Your kids are bombarded with thousands of negative impressions, misinformation and straight-up lies regarding sex every single week of their lives. If you think that one conversation with you is going to counter all of that, you are sadly mistaken. Now, the good news is because you are the parent, you don’t have to go one-to-one with each message your kids take in. You have far greater influence than the world around and your voice carries more weight. But what you must do is capitalize on the teachable moments over and over again.

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In the last post I began discussing the way most churches handle teaching their young people about sexual purity (or not teaching it as the case may be). While many Christians use purity rings and pledges to ensure right living, they also throw in a healthy measure of the world’s view making concessions for masturbation and what I term “non-sex” sex to tackle the question of sexual immorality. But we are giving the wrong answer.

It’s time that The Church starts acting like The Church, time to start giving the right answer to immorality and that answer is this: Get married.

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Go to almost any church in America and sit for an entire year of Sunday morning services. Odds are great that you will not hear the subjects of sex, sexual purity, or sexual morality mentioned. If by some chance a pastor has the cojones to talk about sex at all, most often it will be couched in code using the words “intimacy” or “marital relations”. Most churches don’t teach it, preach it or talk about it because they are afraid to offend someone with the word s-e-x and The Church is a mess today because of it.

Make no mistake about it, the group of people we are failing the most in all this is our youth. Young men and women from a very early age are inundated by millions of sexual messages from our media and culture, yet The Church remains silent and says nothing to combat the plague. Fornication, cohabitation, STDs, pornography use, and out of wedlock births are all occurring in churches at nearly the same rate as the un-churched world. Isn’t that just great?!

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One of the first words that a child learns is “no”.  A small toddler knows what it means and it is an early entry in their verbal vocabulary as they wobble around repeating, “No, no, no” everywhere they go.  Even a dog will quickly learn the word when you are training him.  Yet while it is one of the earliest concepts that humans acquire, and extraordinarily simple to understand, many people never grasp the word or learn to act on it.

It is imperative that we get the whole idea of “NO!” drilled into our heads, learn to deny selfish desires and feelings, and do the right things in life. If you don’t get this, you will live a life that is nothing but a series of disasters that leave a wake of destruction in your path.

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There are things in life that we typically don’t think twice about until something changes or impacts our normal day-to-day activities. For instance, usually there is no reason to be concerned about things such as saying hello and greeting someone with a handshake or a hug. But that can change dramatically during times of crisis or epidemic (real or potential) and people have to consider that they are not in a “business-as-usual” situation. Take for instance the recent scenario of H1N1 in our country. For the first time people in the public sector were dealing with something that would ordinarily never be an issue. Even pastors at churches were making decisions as to the safety of something as simple as greeting those around you at a Sunday morning church service. Again, the rules changed because of the circumstances around us.
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