Biblical Foundations: Parenting God’s Way

You can prepare your children to experience God’s best in the area of sexuality. You are capable of being a wonderful and effective sex educator, even if you don’t think so. You just need some advice, encouragement, information, and help to get there. That’s what this book (and the God’s Design for Sex series as a whole) provides.

We parents rightly want help from churches and schools, but we cannot abdicate such an important task to others. The primary job is ours. How do we do it?

Many of us think too small. We think of sex education in terms of “the talk” with the early teen that will convince him or her not to have sex before marriage. How could that possibly work? Wherever our children turn, the secular world inundates them with messages about sexuality, all pointing them in the wrong direction. Can one discussion at age thirteen or fourteen counteract all the destructive messages they are receiving? No.

Our vision is for children to grow up having godly, age-appropriate discussion and teaching about sexuality as a regular part of their relationship with their parents. Why you? Because parents are God’s most important agents for shaping the sexual character of their children. You can help your child to trust God’s wisdom given for their good throughout their lives.

Think on two of the most important passages in the Bible about parenting and the beauty of God’s commandments:

Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the rules—that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:1-9, emphasis added

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good?

Deuteronomy 10:12-13, emphasis added

Parents have the opportunity to encourage their children to become followers of God in love and obedience. We are to do so trusting that God’s commands are a source of blessing and for our good. We are to walk in faith, loving God with our whole being and seeking to impart the same love and faith to our children. Sex education is about making this great vision a reality in the area of sexuality.

Some content taken from HOW AND WHEN TO TELL YOUR KIDS ABOUT SEX, by Stan and Brenna Jones. Copyright © 1993, 2007, 2019. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. To purchase books in the GOD’S DESIGN FOR SEX book series, go to www.navpress.com.