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I ’m on the couch, watching a movie with three of my grandsons, ages seven, ten, and eleven. Each one of these boys is inching closer to puberty, which means living in a body that is able by God’s design to reproduce, including all the confusing new sexual feelings and desires that come with that. What do they need to know to manage all these changes?
We live in a culture that eagerly answers that last question. During a commercial break, up pops an ad done in the TikTok video style, carefully created to connect with the social-media-saturated young viewers who are a part of Gen Z and Gen Alpha—my grandsons. One by one, some barely clad, enthusiastically amorous young girls seductively sing the praises of an over-the-counter male enhancement and sexual performance supplement that they’ve given to their men, a product that they testify has ramped up the one thing that we are told to look for most in sexual encounters: maximum personal pleasure.
The commercial assumes that all viewers accept and never question the idea that when it comes to their sexuality, “Anything goes!” Viewers, it is assumed, see themselves first and foremost as sexual beings, something they’ve learned from growing up in a sexualized culture that catechizes them 24/7 on all things sex and gender. And lest we think that this is anything new, it’s the same stuff fed to me and my baby-boomer peers by a 1960s and ’70s pop culture that promoted and normalized the beliefs and behaviors of the boundaryless doctrines of the sexual revolution.
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. In fact, we believe the narrative and live it. But viewing this commercial through the eyes of the impressionable kids sitting with me on the couch reminded me to sit up and take notice of this cultural narrative on sexuality, its pervasiveness, and my responsibility to know, live, and tell the truth on sexuality in the moment and moving forward. 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.”
Today, our sex and gender behaviors are grounded in a belief that was reflected in MTV’s “Think” sex-ed campaign from 2005. The overall message to kids was this: “Fundamentally, it’s your body, and it’s up to you what you do with it.” Today, the “sex positive” movement—propagated through media, music, comprehensive sex education in schools, and peer influence—promotes countless forms of sexual expression as natural and healthy to life as a human being. A recent Google search on the “sex positive” movement returned this description generated by AI: “Sex positivity is an attitude toward human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation. It challenges societal taboos and aims to promote healthy and consensual sexual activities.” As followers of Jesus Christ, we need to know that this movement is serving to convince our impressionable children and teens that biblical sexuality is actually sex-negative. God’s design, it is believed, constricts healthy sexuality by putting borders and boundaries on matters of sexual and gender expression. Our sexualized culture not only actively promotes what it does, but it also actively works to undermine the “outdated” and “ridiculous” notion of traditional biblical sexuality and gender by celebrating all kinds of sin.
culture’s big lies
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.”
Gene Edward Veith reminds us that “Satan seduces us by appealing to our desires. Satan lures us by promising precisely what we like and what we want.” With God-given sexual desires being part of the normal humanity we feel, it’s easy to be swayed into indulging those desires our way rather than His way. Ultimately, Satan will do anything that he can to convince us to join him in his rebellion against God, including choosing against God’s design for sex and gender.
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).
correcting the narrative
Our children and teens—and even we ourselves—are being educated and wooed on matters of sex and gender by a current cultural narrative that engages in 24/7 messaging, even to children as young as preschool age. This education—or, more accurately, miseducation—takes God’s good gifts of sex and gender and distorts them in ways that undo God’s grand and glorious plan for our children and teens. 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.
We also learn that God has established marriage to be a covenantal, lifelong, monogamous, one-flesh, heterosexual union between one man and one woman. God has given humanity the good and beautiful gift of sex to be shared and experienced only within the context of marriage between one man and one woman. Marriage is the place for sex. The purpose of sex as God has given it to us is to consummate and seal the marriage relationship between a man and a woman, to express and foster mutual intimacy and love, to enable mutual pleasure, to respond to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, and to provide a picture of Christ’s love for the church. As Christopher Yuan reminds us, God calls us to “holy sexuality,” “which consists of two paths: abstinence in singleness and faithfulness in marriage.” It is in living God’s will and way according to His design that true freedom and flourishing are experienced.
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)
This is valuable guidance as we seek to speak the good news that will correct a sexual narrative that’s catechizing our children, teens, and even us in a 24/7 presence that’s undoing our humanity and relationships at the core.