You Have Heard It Said...

One of the goals of Transformed is to help participants see how easily our culture can affect our thinking. That is why our program is based on Romans 12:2, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world…..” or as The Message translation puts it, “Do not fit into your culture without even thinking….” The reason we are to be cautious is that cultural ideas so often miss the mark and are not grounded in truth. Jesus repeatedly demonstrated the need to compare worldly assumptions and beliefs to truth. His teaching in Matthew 5 is a wonderful example. With each, “You have heard it said … but I tell you” statement, Jesus confronts and corrects a widely held, cultural belief that his hearers had heard many times, and had allowed (intentionally or unintentionally) to become a part of their lives.

One category of current cultural wisdom has become abundantly clear to me thru conversations in churches, schools and with my own daughter. This is the fallacy that we cannot tell people the truth about sexual activity and the consequences it brings in a factual manner without introducing moral or religious beliefs and being judgmental towards them. The Christianized version of this cultural belief is that even though Scripture clearly teaches abstinence until marriage, we find it hard to embrace the factual information available to support this. In other words, we struggle to embrace the fact that God’s Word always plays out in real life. God’s plans, especially when it comes to sex, truly are in our best interest and in the best interest of every person in our society.

While the number of sexual images and ideas we are exposed to in our culture continues to increase dramatically, (and with them, the amount of misinformation), the receptiveness to discuss factual information in an open, honest and mature way continues to decrease. Sex has become a matter of privacy in very unhealthy ways. Christians can live how they please, but they have no right to tell others how to live. What one does and with whom one does it is up to the individual. The underlying assumption is that every sexual choice can lead to the same outcome; that sex doesn’t have to have consequences. What this has actually lead to is students being more than mildly confused and surprised by their reality—that social, emotional, physical, mental or spiritual consequences do come with their own experiences.

Lauren Winner makes an incredibly important statement in her book, Real Sex, when she writes, “When we tell falsehoods about sex, and listen to falsehoods about sex, we end up living falsehoods about sex.” We understand at the Pregnancy Care Center that we do not have the right to tell people how to live and we are not interested in doing so. However, we also understand, and take very seriously, our responsibility to equip and empower students and clients to make healthy choices. The fact substantiated with data and statistics is that all sexual choices are not equal. There is a healthiest, best choice. Choosing to save all sexual activity for marriage is the healthiest, safest, lifestyle choice.



Lisa Newton