“Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. 2 For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. 3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality;” (1 Thessalonians 4:1–3 (ESV)
The following excerpt is by Dr. Walt Mueller. He is founder and president of The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding, author of several books, including A Student’s Guide to Navigating Culture, and host of the podcasts Youth Culture Matters and Youth Culture Today. His essay is entitled A Sexualized Society.
We see and hear sexualized messages trumpeted countless times over the course of our lives through marketing, film, television, music, and social media. In popular music, for example, research estimates that depending on genre, 40 to 60 percent of songs contain sexual lyrics. The familiarity with this ever-present cultural narrative desensitizes us to any shock value that may have once existed, so much so that we’re hard pressed to even notice the sexual content anymore. We all need to see these seductive lies for what they are while embracing God’s good design for His creational gifts of sex, sexuality, and gender.
While it may be nuanced in ways that we’ve never seen before, this cultural narrative is nothing new. Its roots go back to the garden of Eden, to the time when all things were the way they were supposed to be, including humankind’s understanding and experience of sex and gender, gifts given to them by God and declared by Him to be “good” (Gen. 1–2). But the wrecker of this world approached our first parents to whisper his seductive lies into their ears so that they might question God’s sovereignty and design, being enticed to rebel against God by asserting their own sovereignty over all of life (ch. 3). As a result of their rebellion and sin, everything came undone, including humanity’s knowledge, understanding, and practice of the good gifts of sex, sexuality, and gender.
In our day, the seeds of the sexual revolution have grown to the point at which their roots go down deep into the soil of our lives, bearing fruit that has come to taste so familiar that we don’t even question whether to believe or to behave as we are told. I remember a news segment that I saw at the height of the scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. A roving reporter went from table to table in a diner, asking folks their opinion on the president’s behavior. One grandmotherly woman expressed her culturally shaped attitude this way: “He had an affair. So what? That’s what men do.”
Pushing back on this sexual narrative can seem like an overwhelming task. But telling the truth about God’s design for sexuality requires us to understand the perfect storm of forces that have led us to believe that “when it comes to sex, you can do whatever, whenever, wherever, however, and with whoever.” Knowing the big lies that nourish the roots of our confusion will help us spot the lies, call out the lies, and correct the lies that have become part of the cultural air we breathe.
What are these big lies? While there are many, here are three interrelated lies woven together into the cultural tapestry that inform (or more accurately de-form) our understanding of sexuality and gender.
Lie #1: You are the boss of you. Nobody but you deserves your highest allegiance and honor. No authority surpasses your rulership over yourself. Not your parents, your boss, your teachers, the government, or even God Himself. This is the first and oldest lie of all. Self-worship and self-sovereignty are exactly what Satan tempted Adam and Eve to embrace in the garden of Eden (Gen. 3:1–5). The first four words spoken by this enemy of God—“Did God actually say . . . ?”—led our first parents to question God’s love and authority. They then chose to rebel against God by going their own way rather than His way. This choice to sin against God resulted in the corruption of God’s creation, which immediately undid everything good, including sex and gender. Satan continues to propagate this lie, urging us to choose our plan for sex and gender rather than God’s plan, fueling our doubt of God’s Word by continually whispering in our ears, “Did God actually say . . . ?” In her First Things article “Reflections on the Revolution,” Deborah Savage, a child of the sexual revolution, reminds us of this truth: “Human sexuality is at the core of man’s essence, which is why the serpent never tires of meddling in it.”
Lie #2: Follow your heart. This lie leads us to believe that since we are sovereign and have authority over ourselves, the only authoritative standard to follow is the one that we feel inside. And since our emotions can and will change from moment to moment, so will our standards. The most dangerous part of this lie in relation to our sexuality is that, while it recognizes that God has placed in us sexual desires, it ignores that these desires have been corrupted and are good only as they follow His original design. When not held in check by the good self-discipline needed to indulge these desires within the borders and boundaries of biblical sexuality, we are left to the whims of our ever-changing emotions dictated by hearts that are “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9). In a world where the only sin is to believe in sin, you can do whatever you want. Perhaps no message has been promoted more frequently over the last six decades of pop music than a phrase that sets up personal pleasure and fulfillment as the ultimate object and outcome of the sexual revolution: “If it feels good, do it.”
Lie #3: You must be true to your authentic self. The philosopher Charles Taylor called attention to our contemporary social imaginary, which is “a collective understanding about how the world should be and how we should live in it.” In today’s social imaginary, we are encouraged to embrace expressive individualism, a way of thinking and being that has convinced us that everyone’s quest for self-expression should be celebrated. Once you’ve looked inside and listened to your heart, you need to be true to your authentic self. Since your highest goal in life is to be happy, doesn’t it make sense that expressing yourself sexually is the pathway to happiness? Or if you feel that you’ve been born into the wrong body, go ahead and express your “true” self by taking steps to change your body to conform to what you feel. Your identity is something that you make rather than something you’ve been given. This culture of authenticity is one in which each of us has his or her own way of realizing one’s humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own authentic self, as opposed to surrendering to conformity within a model imposed on us from outside, by society, by the previous generation, or by religious or political authority. This attitude is no longer questioned but is simply accepted as the way things are supposed to be. The Apostle Paul doesn’t call this the social imaginary. He calls it “the course of this world” (Eph. 2:2).
The reality is that whoever speaks to a child first about sex and gender will set the bar for what is understood to be true, resulting in everything they hear after that being measured in light of whatever they heard first. Consequently, we must speak up first and teach them the truth. And “the talk” is never once and done. It must be “the talking.” Home and church must faithfully offer biblically based correctives to the cultural narrative on sex and gender, and they must do so over and over. Here are three essential elements to communicate as part of the biblical corrective.
God is our loving authority on sex and gender. As Christians, we are called to follow the way and will of God as contained in the Bible, which is the Word of God revealed and written as God’s authoritative rule for all matters of faith and practice. The Bible is the Christian’s authority. The culture teaches that we are to live under no other authority except the authority of ourselves. The cultural mantras “you do you” and “follow your heart” teach us to live under the authority of our own personal desires, feelings, and intuition. But God calls us to deny ourselves and our untrustworthy intuitions and instead live under His loving and life-giving authority. God tells us that our hearts are not to be trusted (Jer. 17:9). We should never allow our feelings to dictate and misshape our understanding of truth. The Bible is God’s gift to us, and it teaches us God’s plan, purpose, will, and way for how things are supposed to be. We are to believe and behave in ways that are firmly rooted in biblical truth (2 Tim. 3:10–17). Judge your feelings by Scripture rather than judging Scripture by your feelings.
God has given us His order and design for sex and gender at creation. God’s order and design for human sexuality, marriage, and gender are clearly stated in the creation narrative, reflected in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and maintained consistently throughout the Bible. Genesis gives us God’s master plan for sexuality, marriage, and gender, a plan that is consistently affirmed by Jesus Christ (Matt. 19:4–6) and throughout the rest of Scripture. This order and design serve as our pattern for living today.
God’s will and way for gender, sexuality, and marriage are clear. God has revealed His grand and glorious plan for humanity in the creation account. If we want to know what it means to be human—to be fully human—we find that plan and purpose “in the beginning.” What is that plan? We need to know that everything God created He stamped as “good.” But when He finished creating human beings, He said “very good.” And what He pronounced as “very good” was male and female, the gender binary that He designed and assigned—male and female only, both fully human and equal in dignity. Our first parents were given complementary biological forms and purposes so that they might work together to care for God’s good creation, to be fruitful, and to multiply. God gave each of us sex organs (and even genes in our DNA) that tell us what gender we are, either male or female. This is the way that things are supposed to be. Jesus affirms this in Matthew 19:4 when He says, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” Rejecting God’s design and attempting to alter one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within us and rebellion against God. To do so undermines one’s humanity and diminishes one’s flourishing.
As I help parents understand and respond to the cultural narrative and its influence over all of life, I point them to the question the psalmist asks in Psalm 11:3: “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Scripture points immediately to a statement of fact regarding God’s sovereign control even in the midst of a culture bent on self-sovereignty: “The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven” (v. 4). Yes, God is, and God is in control. We need to think about our God-given role in the lives of our children and grandchildren as stated in the resolve of the psalmist:
O God, from my youth you have taught me,
and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
So even to old age and gray hairs,
O God, do not forsake me,
until I proclaim your might to another generation,
your power to all those to come. (Ps. 71:17–18)May the Lord’s truth and grace be found here. Have a blessed day in the Lord.
Soli deo Gloria!
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