Last night we concluded the series “The Truth About Sex.” This was a video series from BlueFish.tv led by Doug Fields. I don’t use the leaders manual so much. Instead I used an illustration with glow sticks, asking the students to keep them un-broken. Most of the students didn’t make it through the video. Then I gave them brand new ones to illustrate God giving us new life instead of repairing our broken life. Cool part, a young woman was there that hasn’t been to church in a couple of years. She responded during my “altar call.” More later.

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Anyways, Bob is also a Sooner’s fan and a Christian. I’m pretty certain I would force him to be my best friend (at gun point if need be) if we lived closer to each other based on these facts alone. Part of my payment for one of the projects was done in CDs and other merchandise. This was a real boon for me. I have a lot of the albums already, but did find several that I didn’t already have, including stuff from some bands I really like. The best part is that I’m using all of this stuff as giveaways on Wednesday Evening.

The deal is that if my students read Proverbs through the week and can memorize at least one verse, then they have a chance to win something out of the new prize box. I also put up a “teaser” for my sermon on the youth website with a chapter that I’ll read from or somehow reference. If they memorize at least one verse there then they also have a chance to win. I do some occasional games and such where they can have other chances to win.

Mostly I’m just happy to be encouraging them to read and memorize scripture. I’ve been trying to think of a way to get that in their life and it seems this is actually helping.

On a side note, please pray for the youth group in general. Long story but the short version is we need to get jump started again.

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After this and my short introduction I sent the guys down to the basement with my male leaders and had them start going through the questions and I talked to the girls. I talked about how they have had various images put on them and how that has made so many girls do things that are destroying them. This isn’t really new, back in the day women were practically second class citizens. Actually there was a point where they really were. Things changed but because we are so broken we only made it worse. God showed respect to women through Jesus who always treated them like real people, which was huge compared to the culture He was walking in. I related to my girls that they could never hear enough that they deserve respect, and that God made them to be perfect without destroying themselves. I thought about showing this video, but I figured one was enough.
Then I talked to the guys about the differences between us and girls and how it can drive us crazy, and even make us angry, but I brought it back around to this same issue of respect. I used a lot of illustrations from my life and talked about how different the kids were even before they were born. We are all so very different but we are patterned after God according to Genesis. Because of this we must respect each other, especially that guys need to show respect to girls. They way they treat their mothers and sisters and girlfriends is exactly how they will treat a future spouse.

At the end of the night I brought the groups back together and we went through questions that the guys and girls had come up with to ask each other. Most of the questions were really good. A few were kind of obvious, but some of the guys were asking, “what kind of guy would you like to marry?” and “what impresses you?” The girl’s answers to these were really great and I hope the guys were listening. The girls asked some interesting questions too. A lot revolved around things that had hurt them in the past like “why do guys only go for the pretty girls?” and “why do guys cheat instead of just breaking up with a girl?” I think the discussion went really well though and I hope people learned something from it all.

Did you ever get this kind of chance as a teen? I wonder what questions you would ask given the opportunity?

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I have mentioned the statistics that show the shocking hours a day the students have been exposed to sex. Literally thousands of hours of sex by the time they are teens. One night every couple of years isn’t even a drop in that ocean of sex. An entire series barely scratches the surface.

Anyways, last night I focused on sex and sexual purity. I presented 5 major myths that they are having screamed at them on a daily basis.

• Sex is no big deal
• Sex is just physical
• Sex is something everyone is doing
• Sex is unavoidable
• Sex is something God hates

Then I presented the story of sex that the Church tends to present. “………….” Either a bunch of nothing or a bunch of hate.

Finally I showed what God really had to say about sex.

God MADE sex. He wanted it to be fun and frigintastic. He formed up Adam out of the dirt and then said, “he looks lonely” so He goes down to talk to Adam. He says, “Dude I got plan for you that you will LOVE. Now take a little nap and when you wake up you will think you died and went to Heaven … which is admittedly pretty cool since you’re already in paradise with Me.” Then Adam wakes up and sees Eve and is blown away. One of the first commands God gives is to have lots of sex (makes plenty of babies).

The thing is, God put a boundary around sex to make it better. God knows how we are designed and knows that sex is best in a long term committed relationship designed for raising children. We call that marriage.

I explained a bunch of reasons why and then went on to talk about purity. Is it ok to do everything but intercourse? Personally I don’t think so. I explained how even looking at porn can cause problems down the road, but ultimately I put the responsibility of choice on them. If you give a bunch of rules then people are interested in pushing the boundaries of the rules or keeping the exact rule while breaking the intent of the rule. “Don’t lay down with the person you are dating” which of course means it’s ok to have sex before marriage as long as you do it standing up.

I do want to say it is really difficult to talk to students about this. It is troublesome trying to be frank and specific without being vulgar. The whole time I kept hearing myself say words that are full of innuendo. Early on I explained that this was a difficult subject but an important one. I said “This is hard to talk about,” and immediately I thought “why did you have to say ‘hard’?” Do you realize just how much you say that sounds dirty? If not go watch old Bevis and Butthead reruns.

Every try to talk to students about sex? How did you handle it? Were you overly focused on how each word you said could be taken?

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