My most difficult job is not my job as a pastor, but my job as a husband and father. My wife and I have been married for 20 years and we have 8 kids. That’s a lot of difficult conversations, and none are more challenging than talking to our kids about sexuality. As the culture around us departs further and further from God’s design for sexuality and marriage, these conversations take on new urgency. Today’s culture tells our kids the following: porn is a given, sex is expected, and being gay is okay. The Bible tells us something different.

A Biblical Overview

My view – and the view we teach at Family Church – is that God’s design for marriage is one man and one woman for life. God says sexual intimacy is reserved only for marriage. Sex by God’s design is a celebration of, and participation in, a potentially procreative act within the marriage covenant. Marriage and sex should be a joyful and satisfying expression of the union, faithfulness, forgiveness, love, and exclusivity that are all bound up in marriage.

In the Beginning…

Our beliefs are rooted in God’s Word. From the very beginning, God set out His design for marriage and sexual intimacy. Adam and Eve in the garden were naked and felt no shame. They were in a perfectly intimate relationship with each other. But when sin entered the world through man’s rebellion against God, that perfect bond was marred. Even though we live in a broken and sin-saturated world, God still wants us to pursue His plan for marriage and intimacy. This means striving to remain sexually pure and faithful in our own marriages, and to model God’s design for our kids. When we do this, our words are reinforced by our actions.

Gospel Reconciliation

At Family Church, we don’t hate or condemn anyone whose beliefs or practices differ from our own. Rather our desire is for all people to be reconciled to Jesus through the gospel and have a fresh start in Him. Our goal as parents is to point our kids to God’s design, not just for sexuality, but also for every area of their lives. God designed their hearts to search for Him and find life only in Him. We won’t always have perfect conversations, and every conversation should be saturated with gospel truth. Those who mess up can always repent and believe that Jesus paid the price for our sins so we can begin again to recover and pursue God’s design for marriage and sexuality.

Part 2: More on why it’s important to talk to our kids about sexuality.