Our culture is in a heated debate over the nature of marriage and sexuality, which puts the church in a unique position to express God’s design. God designed men, women and children to flourish when we live according to His will for marriage and sexuality, but this is one of the most obvious stress points between the Church and the culture.
I have the privilege of serving as the chairman of the board for Sarah’s Home, a long-term home that provides ministry and support for girls rescued from human trafficking here in the U.S.
A few years ago, I accepted an invitation to speak about what we were doing in a roundtable discussion of several local social service organizations. That was a new circle of people to me, and I was surprised by the services represented that morning.
There were about 15 other people present from roughly a dozen organizations, including adoption agencies, financial services, food assistance, support for kids with special needs, education, and even the literacy program at the public library.
These were hard-working people who wanted to do as much good as they could. However, it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn into a lament for all the kids slipping through the cracks. For all they did, and with the funding they had at their disposal, they could not take care of every child.
Something dawned on me as I sat there. Except for a few extreme situations, every state and county program represented around that table could be replaced for free by a healthy family. The reason so many kids need this kind of help is that so many of them have experienced the breakdown of their families.
Our culture is in a heated debate over the nature of marriage and sexuality, which puts the church in a unique position to express God’s design. God designed men, women and children to flourish when we live according to His will for marriage and sexuality, but this is one of the most obvious stress points between the Church and the culture.
It is easy for the Church to feel the pressure to change its views, but we have every reason to defend God’s design with courage, compassion and clarity.
We Were Made for This
God literally built His design into the human race. The biblical model for family and sexuality can be summed up as heterosexual, monogamous, binary, and lifelong. Though not every life will reflect this arrangement, it remains the design.
Marriage, as a heterosexual union, represents the possibility of procreation. Monogamy represents God-like love and commitment. We need “binary” in the list because it is becoming more common for advocates of the sexual revolution to normalize relationships of more than two (as in the unfortunate term “throuple”).
