Sexual Purity: 16 Things You Need to Know

I’ve developed the following material and presented it to many young people and their parents over many years. When my now married daughters were teenagers, I honed it further for sharing and discussion with them and the young men who asked to date them.

 

What follows is an abridged version of the longer material, “Guidelines for Sexual Purity.”

1. Sex is good. God created it, God called it “good,” and it existed before there was any sin in the world.

Sex was not created by Satan, Playboy, the Internet, or some pervert lurking in the shadows of a porn shop. However, God requires us to address sex within his intentions and requirements, not the world’s (Ephesians 5:3-4). God designed sex for the sacred union of marriage between a man and a woman, and reserves it for that union.

2. Like all good gifts from God, sex can be misused and perverted.

Water is a gift of God, without which we couldn’t survive. But floods and tidal waves are water out of control, and the effects are devastating. Likewise, God designed sex to exist within certain boundaries. When exercised in line with God’s intended purpose, it is beautiful and constructive. When out of control, violating God’s intended purpose, it becomes ugly and destructive.   Continue at Randy Alcorn

Are All Sins Equally Heinous? A Response to Barnabas Piper

In a recent article, Barnabas Piper criticizes Christians for the manner in which they confront the sin of homosexuality.  The problem with these confrontations, argues Piper, is that they are not equally distributed over other sins.  What about the sin of fornication?  Or divorce?  Why do these not get equal attention?

This is certainly one of the most common objections to Christians who confront homosexuality.  But, I think there are a number of problems with it.  Let me mention just a few:

1.  This objection can be a distraction from the real issue.  When someone is confronted with sin, one of the most common defenses is to “accuse the accuser.” Maybe they weren’t compassionate enough.  Maybe they weren’t gentle enough.  Maybe the confrontation wasn’t executed precisely right.

While these reverse accusations might even be true, they are often made in order to deflect attention from the main issue, namely the sin in a person’s life.  There is no better way to avoid repentance than to say to one’s accuser, “Oh, yeah? Well you sin too.” The best defense is a good offense.

It would be like complaining to the police officer about getting a speeding ticket simply because he didn’t give everyone in your lane a speeding ticket.

Thus, when Christians have the courage to confront a sin like homosexuality in our culture (and yes, it does take courage), I am not sure the main focus needs to be on how poorly they confront other sins.    Continue at Canon Fodder

The Millennial Generation's Acceptable Sin

Every human institution and society has its own list of sins and virtues that contradict the law of God. With the rise of the Millennial generation in evangelical churches, a vice is creeping up into the realms of acceptance, indifference, or at least resignation: fornication (i.e. extramarital sex or unchaste living).

A few decades ago, this was one of the main issues that evangelicals hammered in their social witness. The skeptical news cycle and entertainment industry mocked this often; they saw pleas for chastity as a laughable result of pietistic sexual repression and no small bit of hypocrisy. Theological leaders and other influential voices chided their fellow believers for obsessing over a select set of sexual taboos.

Now, however, the exhortations have eased off. Commentary from Tim Keller at the latest Q Conference in New York is quite telling. "We're not doing well on the sex side," he confessed. Talking about his church, Keller said, "We're just like the rest of the city. If I preach like that [on sexual ethics], everybody gets real quiet."

Similarly, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy discovered 80 percent of unmarried evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 had engaged in sex. Using a more stringent definition of "evangelical," the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) recently reported that 44 percent of millennial evangelicals had sex outside marriage. Of course, just because Christians oppose sexual immorality does not mean they never struggle with it. Nevertheless, in this sort of moral environment, harping on moral sex lives is analogous to starting an abolitionist church in the antebellum South. Thanks to the public liturgy of Hollywood and our own human inclinations, fornication has been normalized and poses a massive obstacle to effective pastoral ministry.   Continue at Barton Gingerich

Premarital Sex?

Christians talk a lot about premarital sex. And I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think it’s a mistake because the issue is unimportant but because the grammar is skewed. The word “fornication” is almost gone from contemporary Christian speech. It sounds creepy and antiquated. Instead, we talk about “abstinence” and “premarital sex.”

In the most recent issue of Touchstone magazine, I argue that the loss of the words “fornicate” and “fornication” implicitly cedes the moral imagination to the sexual revolutionaries because the words “fornication” and “premarital sex” aren’t interchangeable.

Fornication isn’t merely “premarital.” Premarital is the language of timing, and with it we infer that this is simply the marital act misfired at the wrong time. But fornication is, both spiritually and typologically, a different sort of act from the marital act. That’s why the consequences are so dire.

Fornication pictures a different reality than the mystery of Christ presented in the one-flesh union of covenantal marriage. It represents a Christ who uses his church without joining her, covenantally and permanently, to himself. The man who leads a woman into sexual union without a covenantal bond is preaching to her, to the world, and to himself a different gospel from the gospel of Jesus Christ. And he is forming a real spiritual union, the Apostle Paul warns, but one with a different spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Cor. 6:15, 19).   Continue at Russell D. Moore

Let's Not Dance Around the Real Issues

Read THIS, then come back.

Let me say to begin with that it's neither the tailored Confederate pants nor the ill-fitting Yankee shirt that makes me want to shoot Doug Wilson. It's those ridiculous tap-dancing shoes.

It takes a very talented two-step artist to hopscotch around the many overturned cans of writhing worms Mark Driscoll's prophetic claims and recent jeremiad against cessationism have left strewn around the dance-floor. Doug attempts some impressively fast footwork, but without the necessary finesse. He comes off looking suspiciously like he's just doing the Curly Shuffle. 

OK, Doug did have several good things to say, including the quote I've put at the top of this post. When he's right, he's capable of breathtaking clarity and remarkable gems of pithy wisdom. When he wants to obfuscate, he does that with supreme skill, too.

The latter is what I think he was doing throughout most of the post I've quoted above.

Remember: Mark Driscoll claims God has put a TV in his head which regularly plays explicit videos of sexual crimes and acts of fornication. Those claims (and Driscoll's other recent attacks on cessationists) have caused (or widened) a rift between Mark and certain stodgy, outspoken cessationists.  Keep Reading...

What do you Say to Your 15 yr Old Son When he Sees two Dudes Kissing at School?

As Christians we claim to have a worldview that is hefty enough to interact with and explain life in a consistent, clear, and logical way. We should not shy away from giving an explanation or an answer to what we see.

Therefore, when my son gets home and tells me he saw two dudes making out in the hall, I had better have something to say. It is time to put the gospel insoles in and actually walk the walk. What follows is a quick summary of where I went recently as I tried to impact and instruct my son (and my own heart!) with the gospel.

Listen and Learn: First and foremost I was glad that he talked to us about this. I wanted to hear what he thought and how he responded. I wanted to hear his commentary and editorial. This helped me to learn a bit about my son. You don’t get opportunities like this every day. The events of the day force a reaction. What is it? This is parenting gold.

Be Disgusted: It is probably of little surprise that my son was disgusted. Even if you made it past the title without breaking out the ‘bitter beer face’ you probably remain disgusted by the thought. It is right to be repulsed by sin.

Diagnose the Issue: The best question to ask is “why?” Why is this happening? The Bible has answers to these questions. All sin, including homosexuality, is a result of The Fall. We live in a post-Genesis 3 world. Sin is rebellion against God. But notice there is a broad net that is drawn, even in Romans 1, to show that the heart of rebellion manifests itself in many different ways. In my view, before going any further, it is important to note that the issue here is sin.  This gives us the proper redemptive context. Keep Reading>>>

Carnality and Contextualization in Corinth

t the heart of all the problems in the church at Corinth was a tendency to let the values of that debauched culture seep into the church. That's something for missional Christians to consider today: cultural assimilation as a strategy for church growth in a pagan culture is fraught with serious dangers. Especially in a city filled with both temples and brothels—where fornication was literally deemed a religious rite—the worst thing the church could do would be to take a lax attitude toward sexual sin.

The vast majority of the Jewish community in Corinth had rejected the gospel (Acts 18:6). So the church was made up of mostly Gentiles who, of course, came from a culture that was not inclined to see sexual sin as unspiritual. Just the opposite. Most of the "religion" in Corinth involved temple prostitution and debauched sexual behavior. Continue Reading>>>