Sexuality and God's Good Design

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Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello and welcome to the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we answer your questions with the goal of equipping you to get the kids that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm so excited that you've joined me today for another episode of this podcast. Now, today's question is, how would you explain to kids that homosexuality and transgenderism are not what God designed? It is so counter-cultural and our kids are going to be labeled haters as time goes on if they have a biblical worldview. Now, this is a deep question, and I'm sure it's one that's on almost everyone's mind who is watching or listening to this podcast, that we know that we are in a time and a culture that just celebrates forms of sexuality that do not align with God's good design, that they're outside of the parameters that God has set for the good use of his good gift of sex and sexuality.

And so this is such an important topic to cover and to think through. Now, how we cover this with kids is going to be different depending on their ages. Now, here at Foundation Worldview, we really specifically focus on kids ages 14 and under. If you're working with teens, with high school students, even teens that are middle schoolers, what I highly recommend you check out is Christopher Yuan's upcoming curriculum called Holy Sexuality and the Gospel, which is going to be a curriculum for teens that just takes them through God's good design for sexuality and why these deviations that we find in our culture do not align with that. So, again, if you're working with teens, highly recommend you check out Christopher Yuan's upcoming curriculum, Holy Sexuality and the Gospel, for teens. I can highly recommend it. It's that I cannot recommend it highly enough.

So if you're working with kids 14 and below, what I recommend that you do is we must start with a positive biblical theology. We can't start with the deviations because we can't understand why something is not correct if we don't first understand what correct is. You can't explain that a crooked line is crooked if someone has no concept of a straight line. So we first need to start off with, okay, what is God's good design? And now, I'm sure that for many of you watching that this is not the way that you were taught about sex and sexuality, that it was more like an awkward conversation when you probably already knew about sex and it was just like, "Don't do this ever until you're married, and then that's fine." That's not how we want to present this to our kids, because that's not presenting an understanding of God's good design.

So we want to start with this positive biblical theology that's sex and sexuality are good gifts from God. And like any good gift, there's parameters around that gift because God is the designer and he designed it for a specific purpose. Now, if you're thinking, I don't know how to have these conversations with the kids God has placed in my care, I'll recommend something that I recommended a number of times previously in other podcasts and in Foundation Worldview webinars. It's an online course called The Birds and the Bees, and it's a 10 lesson video series that just walks you through, how do you have this conversation starting off when your kids are three or four or five? What vocabulary do you use? What do you have to cover? What's the best setting in which to cover this? So I highly recommend that course just to give you some ideas of, how do you actually start having these conversations with kids?

Then also, as another resource, highly recommend Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality. That does just such a great job of first starting off laying the positive biblical theology for sex and sexuality, and then how to have these conversations with your kids. In the beginning chapters of that book, the main author, Hillary Ferrer, she says that, "Sex is the bodily recitation of the marriage vows." And she wants to help our kids understand, she wants to help you help your kids understand, that sex is this good gift from God, that every time a husband and wife come together, what they're doing is with their bodies they are re-promising those vows that they made before God and before family and friends that they're going to love one another, they're going to serve one another, they're going to be faithful to one another. This is a good thing and this is what makes our kids safe within their families, that mommy and daddy love one another.

So we want to build up this positive biblical theology. Then, once that positive biblical theology is built up, then that's when we can introduce deviations from God's good design. And you know what? When our kids have that positive understanding of sex and sexuality and the goodness of God's design, they're going to naturally see why deviations from that good design are deviations. I saw this recently with someone who works for Foundation worldview. This person was talking with me and telling me how her son had seen someone who was cross dressing and asked her about that, and she just explained what it was, that this was a man but on the inside he felt like a woman, and so he had decided to wear clothing that traditionally in our culture is worn by women. And she didn't even have to get into yet how this contradicts God's good design. And her son said, "Oh mommy, that's so sad." And she said, "What do you mean that's so sad?" And her son said, "That man, he doesn't understand who God created him to be and how special he is as himself."

And so he already understood at this young age, I think he was eight years old when they had this conversation, that by choosing to do something that did not align with his biology, this man who was cross dressing was denying God's good design that God had designed him as a man. And so this is what we want our kids to see, that once they have the positive biblical theology, then they'll naturally see deviations as deviations. A way that I sometimes like to explain this to kids is an example I actually got from a Focus on the Family Adventures In Odyssey episode, something that Mr. Whitaker does in an album called The Ties That Bind. If you've never listened to that album, The Ties That Bind by Focus on the Family and Their Adventures In Odyssey, it's a great album to listen to. And this example that Mr. Whitaker gives is with a fountain pen, that we can take a fountain pen and we can look at it and say, "Okay, what was this fountain pen designed for?"

Well, the designer of this pen, he designed it so that people could write. And why do we write? Well, we write so that we can communicate to one another. So the purpose of this pen is that humans would be able to communicate to one another. Now, let's say we just had a new family photo done. We went out, we did a photo shoot, we got the pictures back, and we have this large framed picture of our family, and we want to hang it on the wall. Now, could I take this fountain pen, could I hammer it into the wall, and could I hang the picture on it? Well, technically I could. The fountain pen's pointy so it will go into the wall, I could take a hammer and hammer it in, and then if it's sticking out a little bit, I technically could hang the picture on. What's going to happen to the fountain pen if I do that? The fountain pen is going to be destroyed. The tip is going to get smashed. The plastic and metal on the end might even crack because I'm banging it in with a hammer.

What's going to happen to the picture? Well, the picture's not going to hang exactly right probably. And even if it does, really, the purpose of a fountain pen isn't to hold pictures in the wall, so probably eventually that family picture is going to fall. It might even shatter if there's glass in front of the frame. And then think about that fountain pen. Will that fountain pen actually get to fulfill its purpose of helping humans communicate? No. So there's lots of things I can do with a fountain pen that don't actually align with that fountain pen's design. And what's going to happen is the fountain pen's going to get harmed, the wall's going to get harmed, the picture's going to get harmed, even though we can do that. And you know what? There are so many things that we can do with our bodies that are physically possible to do with our bodies, but you know what? Those things are not how God designed our bodies to be used.

And when we use our bodies in ways that don't align with God's good design, our bodies get hurt, our souls get hurt, other people around us get hurt. So our kids understand that just because something is possible doesn't mean that it aligns with God's good design. Now, as we're doing this, we know that it is impossible, unless you completely go off the grid and you keep your children inside at all times, which I do not recommend at all, our kids are going to be exposed to homosexuality, they're going to be exposed to transgenderism, they're going to be exposed to all of the different letters on the acronym, and we need to be careful that as we're preparing our children for this, that we do not present the people who are involved in these forms of sexual deviation, that we don't present these people as the enemy, because they're not. These people, just as we all were at one time, are captives.

But the goal in our interaction with our neighbor who is a homosexual, or our neighbor who's a lesbian, or our neighbor who's transgender, the goal is not that our homosexual neighbor would become heterosexual or that our transgender neighbor would accept her true gender. That's not the goal. The goal is that everyone we interact with would come to know and love and trust Jesus. That's the goal. The goal for our children is not that we would clean up our culture so that they're living in a culture where they're never going to have to encounter homosexuality or bisexuality or transgenderism or queer theory. No, the goal is that our children would know and love and trust Jesus. So we need to be careful in the way that we present these things, that it's not like, "Oh, look at those people over there and the bad things that they're doing." I mean, scripture is clear. In scripture, the Apostle Paul writes that, "No one who practices these things is going to enter into the kingdom of God," and such were some of you.

It's only by God's grace that we know the truth and we want to therefore help other people come to know the truth as well. So we want to make sure that we're not presenting people as the enemy, because people are not the enemy. Our enemy is our flesh and our enemy is Satan. We want to make sure that we are targeting the right enemy. Then we want to make sure that our kids know this goal as well, that our goal in understanding why homosexuality and transgenderism and any other letter on the acronym does not align with God's good design. Our goal is not that we'd be able to point those things out and then have those people not be one of those letters. Our goal is that we would understand God's good design so that we can honor God and so that we would know how to love others well by pointing them to Jesus. That should be our goal.

And with these things, we don't want to shelter our kids. If we do, we're setting them up for failure because they're going to be so sheltered and then they're going to grow up and they're going to realize there's this whole portion of the world they never heard anything about, and they're going to be curious, or we're going to create in them just a hate for others, which is completely against the Gospel. Our goal should not be to shelter, but to prepare. We want to prepare our kids to understand God's good design and to love others well. Now, sometimes this involves discussing with our kids things to say and things not to say, because especially, a lot of times these issues have even hit hard at home. Whether it's a sibling, an older sibling, who is identifying as gay or transgender, or an uncle, or an aunt or a cousin, we want to prepare our kids, why is it that this lifestyle doesn't align with God's good design?

Are we going to talk with our cousin or with our aunt or with our uncle or with our brother about this every single time they're with us? No. They already understand what we're thinking about this and what we believe about this. Our goal is we want to live out the truth and we want to love this person well so that we're pointing them to Jesus. Now, we know in the culture that we're living in, even if we are genuinely loving others, that love might be viewed as hate. Because, in our culture, where the self has become king, anything short of celebrating someone's personal subjective identity, many times an identity that does not align with reality, anything short of celebrating that personal subjective identity is viewed as intolerant, is viewed as hateful, is viewed as bigoted. And so we have to be okay with others being mad at us. We have to be okay with this.

I mean, look at the Gospels. Jesus didn't purposefully try to make people mad. Jesus intentionally loved others, but many times people walked away from him upset and angry. Jesus is probably one of the only people in human history who purposely made his ministry smaller. He said things that he knew were going to turn people away. Not for the purpose of one upping them, not for the purpose of making the mad, but because he was there to do God's will. As always, I'm going to recommend the same thing that I recommend every time, pray, pray, pray, pray, pray. Pray that God would give us wisdom to build up the correct positive biblical theology for sex and sexuality with kids. Pray that our kids would have hearts that are tender towards God, that feel the weight of their sin, and understand their need for Jesus. Pray that we and our children would have mouths that honor God, that would only speak the truth with a gracious spirit.

Pray for our neighbors, our family members, our country. Pray for those who are held captive by this new sexual revolution and don't realize that the lifestyles in which they're entrenching themselves are drawing them further and further away from the God of the universe who knows them and loves them and gave His all for them. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray. Well, that's a wrap for today's episode of the Foundation Worldview Podcast. But as always, my prayer for you as you go on from here is that God would bless you as you continue to intentionally disciple the children that He's placed in your care. I'll see you next time.