God’s Love

From beginning to end, the Bible shows us God’s definition of love, the only accurate definition available. Love is an attitude we have, resulting in action that makes the security, happiness and welfare of another as important to us as our own. This type of love is selfless, considers others more important than ourselves, and seeks to guard and strengthen the dignity God has given each person. It is a reflection of God’s love for us.

Unfortunately, since we as a society have lost sight of God, we have lost the understanding of His love. As a general rule, we have reduced love to one of two things: (1) a warm feeling or (2) a positive response to a relationship that makes us feel good. Both of these are self-directed, not outer-directed and stand in juxtaposition to the biblical model.

Divorce

I counseled a young woman whose parents were divorced when she was sixteen. She said, “If I had been a better cook, my father would never have divorced my mother.” As a teenager, because her mother worked outside the home, it was Debbie’s responsibility to keep the house clean and prepare the evening meals. Her father often complained about her cooking. Then one night this man, whom she loved and admired more than anyone on the face of the earth, packed his bags and left. Seven years later, Debbie remains convinced—no matter what anyone tells her—that “my father divorced my mother because I was a lousy cook.” Her cooking had nothing to do with the divorce of her parents. But regardless of how many counselors she may see (she’s now with her fifth psychologist), Debbie continues to go through life blaming herself.

After I had spoken at a conference, a woman came to me asking for my help. She told me that two weeks earlier her husband had served divorce papers on her. That afternoon, as she was driving to the conference with her fourteen-year-old son, the boy said to her, “Mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me!” Then he began crying. When she asked what he was sorry about, he answered, “I’m sorry for making Dad divorce you.” The woman assured him that the breakup was not his fault. But he kept insisting, “Yes, it is my fault.” When she asked why, he answered, “If I hadn’t loved soccer so much, he would never have left you.” I see it all the time. Young people feel responsible for their parents’ divorce.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

The number one barrier we can erect against the influence of the negative media is an emotional attachment, a loving bond and an intimate connection with our children. From this positive relationship you may then discuss the issue of the impact of media in their lives in your home. This is much more effective than categorically blasting the media and forbidding your children from movies, TV or the internet. Such a response is often an attempt to compensate for the lack of a close family relationship.

When our young people immerse themselves in the media and allow sexually-charged images and sounds to fan the flames of adolescent hormones, there is often a deeper reason for it. Kids are looking for something to satisfy their deep, God-instilled needs: love, acceptance, approval, affirmation, intimacy, to name but a few. And when those needs go unmet in home, church and school, adolescents intensify the search in other, less healthy areas. Those who should be part of the solution in a child’s life are often a large part of the problem.

Without Thinking

In a way, the amusement we seek in the media (by the way, the word “amusement” literally means “without thinking”) is a denial of God’s creation of us. We are created in His image: intelligent, clever and able to reason. By replacing mental nourishment with mental chewing gum, we turn our backs on one of the major elements that sets us apart from animals. When that mental sedative fills us with sexual suggestions and images, we associate sex with amusement.

From there, it is a simple step to seek out sex as a form of amusing escape, a sensory entertainment. Teenagers are doubly susceptible to this, because of the hormonal and emotional upheavals they are going through. Without the knowledge of right and wrong, without standards, without the Holy Spirit to fill the void, young people are open to the quickest counterfeit escape our society can provide.

Now or Later

Parents have the task of bringing their children up in the admonition of the Lord and the influence of the Scriptures, yet they cannot go on dates with their kids to keep them in line. Parents always must be a resource of God’s standards when a young person needs an answer, but kids ultimately make their own decisions. The more they are taught from their early years to make proper choices, the easier it will be for them to stay on the right course when temptation comes.

Sure, you may have to expend more time and energy to guard yourself and your children against the onslaught of lies being propagated through the media. And you may need to mount a personal campaign to confront your local television stations and the advertisers who sponsor them. But if you don’t make an investment in your kids now, you may have to later, after the unchallenged lies of the media have made a shambles of their personal lives.

Helping Our Kids

How much guidance have you given your children and youth about what television programs and movies to watch? What about the music they listen to? Have you ever written a letter of protest to your local television stations when they broadcast inappropriate programming? In most cases we have lost the battle without even putting up a fight. Many of us have been silent both inside and outside the home concerning the dangerous effects of what our kids watch and listen to.

No, I’m not advocating that we throw out our TVs and radios, destroy our computers, boycott movie theaters or video rental stores and toss all paperbacks and magazines into the furnace. These avenues of communication all have a positive upside. We just need to help our kids sort through what they watch and listen to, recognize the lies that are being communicated, and put appropriate filters in place.

Changing Habits

If the attitudes of our young people toward sex are going to change, either the media must change or the listening and viewing habits of young people must change. While we have been permissively silent, the media of our culture has been telling our children that you find intimacy through sex and that casual sex and free love are valid expressions. As a result, most of our young people have developed their concept of sexuality from the media’s message without realizing that premarital sex comes with a staggering price tag of broken hearts and broken lives.

Before placing all the blame on the media, however, we must examine our role in this problem as parents, teachers, pastors and youth leaders. Many of us share in the blame because of our permissiveness. Often we regard television as a harmless “electronic baby-sitter.” We send our young people off to the local multiplex theater without reading up on the movies they are going to see. We turn our kids loose on the computer without monitoring the sexually explicit websites that can be accessed with only a click of the mouse. We have to be more diligent.

It’s “Just” a Movie

The sexual “freedom” portrayed in today’s entertainment media is a joke made at the expense of human dignity. Sex without marriage so often leads to self-doubts, diseases, unwanted pregnancies, shattered emotions, manipulation and exploitation. Such results are rarely portrayed on TV or in the movies, because people don’t want to hear about those things. They want to be told that somehow, someday, their promiscuity will lead to happiness, even though it hasn’t up to this point. And since our culture demands entertainment that reflects its hopes—not its realities—our TV and movie screens will continue to bring us lies about sex.

The Scriptures admonish us to flee youthful temptation. If a teen knows that, and still takes his girlfriend to see an R-rated movie with plenty of skin, he will probably act out his aroused feelings when the movie is over. He can blame society all he wants, but he chose to see the movie, despite the warning in the Bible. Or if a teen girl invites her boyfriend over to watch an R-rated video or cable movie, she shouldn’t be surprised when she violates her own limits of physical contact.

The Deception of Distorted Values

For years now we have allowed the media to misrepresent casual sex and free love. Young people have been shown that the cure for everything is to jump into bed. Sex is proclaimed as a cure-all. It’s the remedy for emptiness and loneliness. It’s the answer to a lack of significance. All lies. Sex is not a cure-all. There’s no such thing as casual sex. There’s no such thing as free love.

For the most part we have allowed our young people to determine who they are as sexual beings on the basis of these lies propagated by the media. This deception is crucial, because our sexuality affects everything we say, hear, think and do. Sexuality is at the core of our human existence. And we have allowed our young people, who are growing up right now, to base their sexuality on lies.

Enticing, erotic scenes on TV and in the movies communicate to our teens, “Be sexually active.” The focus is on immediate sexual gratification. Yet the concerned parent says “Wait” and promotes abstinence as the standard for young people. Our kids are getting mixed signals about sexual behavior—no wonder there is so much confusion.

Guarding the Mind

Our society has been spared the work of having to create evil thoughts. We just buy a magazine, go to a porn theater (and hope no one sees us), pay for a sexually-explicit channel on the cable or dish, or log on to a XXX website that brings degradation and exploitation into the comfort of our living room or bedroom. It all looks so professional and nicely done that we forget what we are really seeing: a gift of God being perverted for profit. And our kids have greater access to these evils than we want to believe. You may have the sex networks blocked on your television system, but the parents of your child’s friend may not.

When our thoughts are out of sync with the truth, our actions will be also. That is why the Bible tells us to guard our minds, not to tempt ourselves, not to be conformed to the garbage the world offers us, but rather to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may understand God’s good, pleasing and perfect will. And when we get a grip on His will, we can act in accordance with it.

What’s on Your Mind?

When a teenage boy sees a scene of tender, casual sex in a war movie, he may consider it innocent and relatively harmless. The sex is great, and the characters go on with their lives (and subsequent loves) enriched from having met and mingled bodily fluids. The boy is left with the subtle impression that casual sex isn’t so bad. But that’s not real life. In real life, such encounters often end with the participants diseased. But we almost never see that in the movies. No wonder boys have begun to question God’s prohibitions on premarital sex. They are falling under the influence of the lie.

It is not unusual for a teenage girl to read a secular novel portraying a young woman “coming of age” in the arms of a dashing, romantic man who introduced her to the glories of sex in the bedroom of a romantic Victorian mansion. But books like that rarely describe the guilt and emotional trauma many young women suffer after being conquered and eventually discarded. So when the girl’s boyfriend stirs up her passions with his loving words and tender kisses, what reason does she have to delay the bliss she expects from yielding to his advances?

Our actions are the result of our thoughts, and our thoughts are the result of what we have put into our minds. If someone had never seen pornography, would he be able to conceive it and dwell on evil thoughts? Possibly. But if all he had ever heard of sex was how it forms a beautiful bond in a marriage, he would be hard-pressed to warp those thoughts.

No One Pays for Sex on TV

You may say, “Yes, excessive examples of illicit sexual activity on television, in movies, in music lyrics and videos, on the Internet, etc. is undoubtedly a bad influence on our young people. But in a society as sexually permissive as ours, where’s the lie?”

You can see it yourself by answering this question: In all the casual sex you have seen portrayed in the media, how many times has a character contracted a sexually transmitted disease? You are unusual if you can think of at least one occurrence. I often ask that question of the audiences to whom I speak. Even in crowds as large as 5,000, I rarely find someone who can remember even one bad outcome from casual sex.

Here is my point in bold letters to underscore its importance: Hardly anyone on TV or in the movies pays a price for illicit sex. But in real life, people often pay dearly.

Pornography: Media At Its Worst

The darkest lies about sex told in the media are found in pornography. Pornography promotes sexual promiscuity, incestuous sexual relationships, marital infidelity, sexual deviancy and “no-consequence” sex. Social scientific studies indicate that pornography is also progressive and addictive. Pornographic videos, magazines, web sites, etc. arouse aggressive sexual feelings and they graphically demonstrate the “how-to’s” of sexual acts and perversions. Soft-core porn has been termed the “marijuana” of pornography that leads its users to desire harder, more bizarre “heroin” versions of sexual explicitness.

It can be tenably argued that increasing occurrences of date rape are linked to increasing exposure of males to non-violent, soft-core pornography. I am convinced that the attitudes, perceptions, values and sexual aggressiveness of teenagers are altered in the same or in an ever greater way than those of adults as a result of their exposure to pornography. It is reasonable to assume that soft-core pornography and its themes would be especially appealing to adolescents discovering their own developing human sexuality. However, teenagers are less equipped and less experienced than adults to understand and properly control their developing human sexuality and related sexual drives.

Degrading or Dignifying

Frank Zappa wrote an article on the role of rock in the socio-sexual revolution. His conclusions were that rock music is sex. The big beat matches the body’s rhythms, and the lyrics reinforce it.

A teenager’s world view, his value system and his attitude toward human dignity will determine the role music plays in his life. If he knows the effect the lyrics have on him, he must make a choice about which music he will allow to influence him. If he chooses to listen to music that degrades rather than dignifies men and women, he is not only showing what his true worldview is, but which influences he wants to shape his future actions.

Sex and Music Top the List

The music kids listen to today conveys another strong message about sex. Popular music on the radio and CDs bombards them with explicit lyrics of sexual invitation and conquest. And as if hearing the words were not enough, cable networks like MTV and VH1 provide the suggestive images through their music videos. Kids don’t just hear and see the music; they feel it through high-tech sound systems and booming speakers. They are persuaded by what they hear through constant repetition. Studies show that teenagers who listen to hard rock and heavy metal music are more likely to participate in high-risk behaviors, including drug use and sexual intercourse without contraception or with casual partners.

When the music that teenagers find most appealing contains a barrage of encouragement toward sex, it is no surprise they are affected by it. Psychologist Abraham Maslow researched what he called “peak experiences” in human lives. He pointed out that of hundreds of cases studied, there were many different experiences which people singled out as their life’s highlight. “Peak experiences” involving music ranked second in the list— surpassed only by sex. From such a statement one can deduce the dynamics when sex and music are combined.

The Influence of Television

What impact does the deluge of television viewing have on kids? It is anything but neutral, as several studies have documented. Television can and does influence behavior, often in a bad way:

· Adolescents who watch a lot of television consistently score lower on academic achievement tests. Researchers have found that high levels of television viewing have a negative impact on school performance.

· Adolescents who were sexually active or used alcohol, tobacco or other drugs listened to the radio, watched music videos, and viewed movies, cartoons and soap operas on television more often than other teens who did not participate in these behaviors.

· Those fifth and sixth graders who had a greater awareness of alcohol advertisements in the media than their peers intended to drink as adults, had positive associations with drinking, and were more aware of beer brands.

Television Says Yes

When was the last time you saw anybody on television say “no” to sex? Think about it. You can see why a sixteen-year-old girl who had just lost her virginity wrote me to say, “Mr. McDowell, I couldn’t compete with television.”

And not everything we see on television is make-believe. Young people see glamorous actresses talking about having a big rock star’s out-of-wedlock child and saying what a wonderful life she has. And there seems to be an endless procession of unmarried media stars living together and boasting about great sex. The line between their own lives and the characters they often play on the screen is hard to distinguish.

Doesn’t the portrayal of sex on television seem seriously overbalanced to the permissive side? This is the message our kids are receiving from the hours and hours they spend watching. No wonder they go out and experiment with sex.

The Message About Sex (Part 2)

What is the damaging message about sex so frequently communicated through the media, either directly or indirectly? Abbylin Sellers, author of The Sexual Abstinence Message Causes Positive Change in Adolescent Behavior, identifies six media lies about sex. For each lie, Sellers gives us the truthful message our kids need to grasp:

Lie #4: If you don’t express your sexuality freely, you must be repressed, sick or prudish. This can be a very intimidating lie, but the facts are that premature sex is bad for your emotional, physical and cultural health.

Lie #5: Sex is freedom. Young people who become sexually active in response to peer pressure to be sophisticated and independent are actually becoming victims of current public opinion. No one is really free who engages in any activity to impress the majority.

Lie #6: Surely God understands that this is the twentieth century! God did not give these rules because he is a spoil-sport. Quite the contrary. Because He is God and because He loves us more than we can ever know, He has told us how to have the best, most satisfying sexual experiences--in the context of marriage.

The Message About Sex (Part 1)

What is the damaging message about sex so frequently communicated through the media, either directly or indirectly? Abbylin Sellers, author of The Sexual Abstinence Message Causes Positive Change in Adolescent Behavior, identifies six media lies about sex. For each lie, Sellers gives us the truthful message our kids need to grasp:

Lie #1: Sex creates intimacy. True intimacy is built on commitment to honesty, love and freedom. A prostitute may expose her body, but her relationships are hardly intimate.

Lie #2: Starting sex early in a relationship will help you get to know one another and become better partners later. Sex is an art that is learned best in the safe environment of marriage.

Lie #3: Casual sex without long-term commitment is both fun and freeing. A satisfying sexual relationship requires trust--trust which grows only in the context of the life-long commitment of marriage.

(To Be Continued)

What Are the Media Trying to Sell?

The media bombards us daily with messages about sex. Sex is a primary ingredient in most advertising. It is used to sell everything from automobiles to deodorants. Our radios, television sets, movie screens, CD players, books, magazines and newspapers loudly proclaim that “sex is normal, available and certainly not restricted to adults, much less married couples.”

We are often told that television doesn’t affect behavior very much. The tobacco industry, at a time of public pressure to remove tobacco ads from TV, declared that media commercials don’t affect a change in a person’s lifestyle, and that media ads would not cause a person to take up smoking. That’s about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard! If advertising doesn’t influence people, why did the tobacco industry spend hundreds of millions of dollars on TV commercials? Marketing and advertising people are not stupid. If there is no relationship between TV commercials and viewers’ behavior, why do American businesses spend multiplied billions of dollars on advertising each year—for prime time television alone?