Truth Encounter: Street Smart Godly Kids

"If you feel like having sex with someone and they agree, go ahead. This proclaims your love for life!" The responsible choice in this culture is not in controlling passions, but in being sure they are coated with thick enough plastic so that no viruses can escape to do their dirty deadly thing. Isn’t it about time for a lot of us to stand up and speak up. What about an old fashioned thing called the truth?

Choices--we all have to make them. Will we wear this shirt or that shirt this morning? Will we go out to eat or stay home tonight? Should we go to this college or that college? In the course of a life time thousands of choices will be made, and as a young person sets out down the path of young adulthood, their choices are life determining. How does a parent or grandparent help prepare these kids to make the right choices?

If your free from guilt, if you have truth on your side, if you are confident of love, you can look at others right in the eye with boldness and strength. This is the bearing of royalty and God wants all of His children to remember that this is exactly what they are if they have invited His Son into their lives.

Every one of our towns and cities needs a better business bureau to guard against con men and women who seek to make a fast buck on the naive and unsuspecting. I am sure that some of your local news stations have business reporters who seek to sniff out the latest sting. Why not learn to sniff them out for yourself?

“Fantasy island,” “fantasy vacations,” fantasy perfumes”—the word fantasy places magic, thrill, satisfaction before any word it modifies, but is it possible that our fantasies could destroy us? We can’t live without dreams, but when our dreams restrain us from doing the practical, uncomfortable, hard things that must be done today, they can turn our future into one tragic nightmare.

As you drive by this individual’s house, weeds have taken over the lawn, the door is blocked by thorn bushes, and the gate hangs on broken hinges. From the looks of the place you would conclude that a gang of marauders had invaded the place and torn it apart. But instead of this kind of overt attack, a more insidious silent destroyer has smothered prosperity. It is possible that this thief is already at work on your bank account, your home, your prosperity.

Lotteries, Las Vegas, Atlantic City—our country is crazed over the dream of getting rich quick with little effort! Why wait and save when you can borrow and enjoy? We all realize that illicit sexual desires destroy families, but have we realized that there is just as dangerous a foe that is probably destroying more homes than immoral liaisons? This is Truth Encounter and today we are going to talk about money!

Have you ever been on a trip and you made a wrong turn but you didn’t realize it? You kept driving, oblivious to the fact that you were not heading toward your destination. When you finally discovered your error-- oh the frustration! Lost time, wasted gas, missed opportunities. What road are you on in life? Have you made a wrong turn? Proverbs 4 has some fascinating things to teach us about this trip called “life.”

How do we keep the spiritual center of our being healthy? We all worry about whether or not we are getting the right information to our kids, but we need to be asking whether or not we are maintaining the intimacy factors necessary to insure a good relationship with our children and with our marriage partners. It needs to be a real internal thing, not just a canned talk thing.

Heart disease can be a disguised unsuspected killer. The person looks healthy. There are few warning signals. But suddenly there is that radiating pain down the arm or that pressure in the chest. All of us know loved ones and friends who have had this experience. But did you know that at the core of your being there is something even more important than the blood pump in your chest?

The atheistic philosopher Nietzsche once said, “If these Christians want me to believe in their redeemer, then they need to act a lot more redeemed.” One of Satan’s most powerful tools used to keep Christ followers enslaved under his rule is our failure to put what we believe into action. We need to have right thinking about God in our minds, but it needs to grab a hold of our hearts and get into our feet as we live in the office, the home, and the school.

Today’s Truth Encounter is committed to helping us discover exactly what it means to be a “good neighbor.” Our discussion turns to a forgotten art in contemporary America--the art of neighborliness. Dave shares some down home sense from Proverbs 3 on how to have a healthy relationship first with God and then with the people living next door and down the street.

The modern women’s movements love to paint themselves as the revolutionaries who set women free to be all they can be. For this reason it is fascinating to pick up a portrait of womanhood from 900 BC and discover that this noble woman from the past could give any superstar feminist a run for their money and yet, strangely, she still cherished the love and priority of home and family.

What are the virtues we should seek to develop in young women? Movies tend to mock the old fashioned idea that young women should be taught the feminine graces and some modern women’s groups call any emphasis on the distinction between the sexes bigotry. At the opposite extreme some traditional religious groups have locked women in a household slavery that denies their unique gifts. Where does the Bible fit into this tug of war between militant feminists and chauvinistic traditionalists?

Our society is convinced that the key to getting people to behave sexually is to give them facts about it. Having the right information in their heads will get the right actions into their bodies. Facts make a poor defense against lust’s heavy artillery. How do you conquer false loves? How do you find true love when all you keep finding is destructive, selfish lust? These are the questions to be answered in today’s Truth Encounter.

Abstinence from sex before and outside of marriage. Thousands have made vows of chastity and we need to encourage this return to purity. But what about those who have already fallen into the pit of sexual immorality? Is there any way to get out? Can there be cleanness again for those already soiled in sexual impurities? Today we turn to those already ensnared in its grip.

It keeps happening within even the church community. It soils the purity of white wedding dresses. It mocks the stability of covenant promises. It causes children to be robbed of adults who can model moral standards for them. What is this enemy that is causing so much pain and destruction? Sexual sin. From pastors to evangelists to kids in our youth groups, sex sin is destroying any credible witness to the power of Christ to change lives. Why has sexual scandal become so common among evangelical believers? What can we do about it? What about our own personal pulls into this dream like world of intrigue and lust?

Sounding the alarm against sexual sin—that is what the wise instructors in the book of Proverbs did and that is what we intend to do as we continue our series on how to raise godly kids in a godless age. The sixties generation believed it is impossible to control one’s sexual desires--they must be expressed--so their solution is to hand out condoms and hope the teenagers will use them. These so-called modern sex educators want our children to bet their lives that a condom will prevent them from disease and pregnancy. The ancient sex educators of the Old Testament gave far more protective advice.

Sexual immorality is tearing families and churches apart and our study today will take us into this world of the huntress and the hunter as we learn how God’s handbook for skillful living--the ancient book of Proverbs--still has the information we need to overcome the seduction of lust. We are in the midst of a vital series titled “Street Smart Godly Kids,” and it has been incredible to see how straightforward the biblical text is about sex.

Want to know what goes on in a seduction? As our culture debates over what we teach our children about sex and sexuality, Proverbs has words that have guided young people and protected them physically, emotionally, and spiritually. What about all the destroyed lives when our culture wakes up and discovers that their experiment with sexuality was not liberating but devastating? We only get to experiment with our own life once. It only makes sense to read what godly parents taught their kids about sex in Proverbs.