Searching for Companionship and Affection

The search for intimacy is a search for companionship. People are desperate to escape the loneliness that plagues our culture. And adolescents are among the most vulnerable to the pain of loneliness. It’s another reason kids get involved in premarital sex. A sexual encounter is at least a momentary escape from loneliness.

Girls are most vulnerable to loneliness. The following student got an up-close look at loneliness and how her friend tried unsuccessfully to escape it through sex.

I used to think it would be OK to have sex with a steady boyfriend; at least then you would be doing it with someone who really did care about you. I thought that until I lived with my roommate, Liz. Liz dated Chris for two years. They went to high school homecomings and proms together, they drank beer and ate Oreos together, and they made love together in the back of Chris’ car. And afterward, Chris would drive Liz back home. Then Liz found out she was pregnant. Chris said he couldn’t marry her because he had a good football scholarship. So Liz went to a clinic to have an abortion. She went by herself. Once again, she was alone.

Kids in Need of Instruction about Sex

When there is a love famine in the home, positive, nurturing communication suffers. As a result, adolescents lack parental instruction about sex. They must gain their sexual education elsewhere, through self-discovery, peers or the media. As a result, sex education is at best incomplete and at worst erroneous.

A couple of students summarized the situation this way:

Teenagers are ignorant about what they are doing. All they know is that they were made with certain body parts, so they might as well find out what they’re used for. Sort of like test-driving a car just to see how well it performs.

Lack of accurate information about sex, although less of a problem than in our parents’ adolescence, is still quite common, and young people often don’t realize how far they are going. Before they know it, they have an unexpected pregnancy on their hands. It must be pointed out that some parents are much to blame since they have not informed their children on the topic of sex, either because they are too embarrassed to discuss it, are irresponsible or are ignorant themselves.

Need I say more?

Divorce—It’s Never Over

Last time I said that I believe that divorce has a greater negative impact on a child than the death of a parent. To continue, a second reason I think it is more difficult to lose a parent through divorce than through death is the lack of finality. When a parent dies, it is painful, but the child eventually realizes Mom or Dad is gone and experiences a measure of closure. After a period of mourning, he goes on with his life.

But there is no finality with divorce. It isn’t over in the lives of the kids when the papers are signed. There is no mourning period after which he picks up the pieces, goes on with his life, and begins the healing process. The reality of divorce is that it returns every holiday, every summer vacation, and—for many youngsters—every weekend. The pain of separation goes on and on. Christmas with Mom, New Year’s with Dad, Easter dinner at Dad’s house, Thanksgiving dinner at Mom’s, spring break with one parent and summer vacation with the other. There’s no end to it.

Searching for a Father’s Love (continued)

Inattentive mothers are one reason that kids get involved in premarital sex, and they undoubtedly have a damaging effect on their children. But I think that we men must shoulder much of the blame for our teens being where they are. When we come home tired, it is easy to neglect our children. What we men need to realize is how important it is to our children that we have a close, loving relationship with them. Mothers can’t do the job of loving our children alone.

I held a one-week youth conference at the largest (and one of the wealthiest) evangelical churches in our country. I had counseling appointments with forty-two junior and senior high school students. Their number one question was, “Josh, what can I do about my dad?” When I asked what they meant, they made statements like, “He never has time for me”; “He never takes me anywhere”; “He never talks to me”; “He never does anything with me.” I asked all forty-two of them, “Can you talk with your father?” Only one said yes. I also asked all the girls, “If you got pregnant, could you go right to your father and share this with him?” Most of them didn’t feel they could. That’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Searching for a Father’s Love (continued)

Here are two more letters from kids that touched me deeply:

My name is Jennifer. I am fifteen years old. I watch your show every time I can. Thank you so much for just caring. I know you have never met me, but it’s almost like you’re the daddy I never had. You see, my real dad left me and my mom when I was a baby, and when I was just three years old my step-dad left. Neither one of them would fall under the name “father.”
The other night you said that most kids don’t want to have sex, they just want someone to care. That is so true! I have almost fallen into the “sex trap” because I just wanted a man to love me.

In Birmingham, when I shook hands with you and gave you the letter, and you gave me a “peck” on the cheek, I must say, it made me feel “loved.” A peck on the cheek is a “fatherly” expression. I’ve never had a kiss! I wish I’d had a father to phone me and say, “I love you, honey.”

Perhaps some of you fathers are feeling that I’m being unfair. “I thought you said the problem was inattentive parents. You seem to be focusing only on fathers. What about inattentive mothers?” (To be continued).

Kids Looking for Love

God intended for kids to learn to love in the home by seeing both parents first love each other and then love them unconditionally. When young people learn love at home, they won’t have to go out looking for it in the back seat of car. According to Sarah Brown, director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, “We know from studies that close relationships between parents and their children over many years reduce sexual risks.”

When loving relationships in the home break down and the parental model of love ceases to function, children grow up ignorant of how to give or receive love. For these children, developing close, intimate relationships may be impossible. Despite a desperate need for love, young people who grow up experiencing a love famine at home are afraid they will never find it. So they often settle for a cheap imitation: a sexual experience that will only make their pain and hunger for love worse.

Kids in Need of Love, Modeling, and Attention

Young people are adrift in their sexual beliefs, convictions and behavior because they don’t know how to love. Learning to love is not something that happens automatically. We don’t just grow up, reach puberty and find that all of a sudden we know how to love. I’m not talking about sex here; I’m talking about the essence of love—caring, transparency, vulnerability, and intimacy.

Love is not primarily a feeling; love is first and foremost an action. Paul makes that clear in 1 Corinthians 13. Telling someone, “I love you” has no meaning if it is not supported by loving actions. We can’t teach love to our kids. Love is not a lecture class; it’s a lab course. Young people learn to love by seeing love modeled, experiencing love from others, and replicating the example. Love is learned by responding to its expression.

A “LOVE FAMINE” AT HOME

Students at certain universities are not known for their benevolence toward visiting speakers, especially those with conservative and/or Christian views. As I waited my turn to speak at the outdoor free speech platform of one of these schools, I felt butterflies in my stomach. What I say had better be right on or it would be shoved back down my throat. If the students were not interested in my topic or how I developed it, they would simply ignore me.

As I stepped up to speak, the crowd was noisy and not particularly hospitable. There was no public address system so I had to rely on old-fashioned lung power to be heard. I had only a few seconds to grab their attention. The butterflies were still there as I began. “Almost every one of you has two fears. First, you are afraid you will never be loved. Second, you are afraid you will never be able to love.”

The noise suddenly evaporated and everyone turned in my direction, suddenly eager to hear where I was going with my bold opening. I wasn’t surprised, because I knew my statement would strike a nerve. Most students readily identify with these two deep fears. Psychologists believe that this “love famine” is one reason many young men and women get involved in premarital sex.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Sex Proves that I’m an Adult, Not a Child”

The teenage years are times of transition from being a dependent child to becoming an interdependent adult. Interdependent persons believe that they have something worthwhile to give to others, and that others have something worthwhile to give to them.

While this transition from childhood to adulthood involves every facet of a young person’s life, we must remember that the different areas of that individual’s life develop at different rates of speed. For example, one person may seem more “mature” than another of the same age because he or she is more mature socially and emotionally than the other. But the second person may be more mature physically than the first.

Regardless of a teenager’s actual level of development, many of them see sex as a way to speed up their total passage to adulthood. After all, sex is not something children do. It is for adults. The logic behind this way of thinking is not hard to see. So kids begin to mimic adults by engaging in so-called adult activities: smoking, drinking, and sex. By doing these things, they mistakenly think they will magically become adults.

Giving

Sex is not a chip to be bartered with. You don’t buy it in the market. When it becomes something to be obtained by making strategic moves, sex becomes an end in itself.

A manipulative boy does not want sex with this particular girl, he just wants sex. When he indicates that she owes it to him if she wants to keep the relationship, he shows that he is out to take, not give. He’s not seeking to cement a lifelong commitment of love and sharing and looking out for the other person’s best interests; he wants to make it with anyone who will say yes. A girl who offers herself at such a price doesn’t feel she is of great value, which is tragic in light of so much that God says to the contrary.

What Future?

A majority of today’s young people view the future with apprehension. As a result, they have lost hope in their own future. Instead of viewing the future optimistically as a time of opportunity, many young people view it with pessimism and fear. And their fears have changed drastically in recent years. Several years ago the New York Times reported on an eye-opening study conducted by Nadine Brozan. She found that the five greatest fears of a primary school child were loud noises, dark rooms, high places, dangerous animals and strangers. More recently, the average primary child’s greatest fears are losing a parent through divorce and becoming a victim of burglary, mugging, rape or cancer. Life’s fears and uncertainties are unsettling to our children and youth.

This uncertainty in our society leaves our young people with diminished hopes for the future. A sixteen-year-old in Oakland, California said, “I feel like I’m preparing for nothing.” Another student said, “I think I’m going to grow up, and there won’t be anything to live for.” With such bleak hopes for the future, most young people are easily influenced to make decisions on short-term pleasure rather than long-term consequences. Why should a teenager who believes he or she lives in a “doomsday world” follow the Christian advice to wait for sex until marriage? They have been taught that with one push of a button the world can be blown apart. Tomorrow they may be gone, so “Why not?”

Immature Sex

The pressure teens are under is real, and the momentary release that sex provides is real. Sex does not resolve a stressful situation, of course, but it does supply a temporary escape. And when life gets hectic, stressful, or painful, teens will likely seek each other out for the comfort and relief of a sexual encounter.

Desire to escape stress through sex—or alcohol, drugs, food, etc.—is a sign of immaturity. A mature person has a healthy sense of self-worth. A mature person shows self-control. A mature person can make decisions that will not necessarily alleviate the stressful situations but will help him or her deal with stress without having to run away from it. A mature person has a solid set of values on which he or she bases behavior, even when pressure is intense.

Sexually active adolescents may blame their actions on stress, but they are responsible for their actions. They cannot control the future, their relationships with parents or friends, or the decisions of a teacher or coach. But they can control themselves. When teenagers are better able to deal with stress through personal discipline and self-control, they won’t feel the need to resort to sex as a release. When they begin to focus on the quality of their own character instead of a “quick fix” for their problems, they will be able to establish and strengthen their personal values.

Will Anyone Love Me?

After a meeting with a group of high school students in Orlando, Florida, I was approached by a big, husky, handsome young man whom I’ll call Jed who had joined the marines. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “I got so lonely in the Marines,” Jed said, “that when I met this girl, I went to bed with her. I’m a Christian. I know Christ personally, and it’s the only time in my life I’ve done something like that. She gave me herpes.” Then Jed’s tears really began to flow. “Josh,” he said, “will anyone ever love me?”

My heart was broken for this young man. Jed will pay a heavy price for his moral failure. He will have to deal with his disease for the rest of his life. He may end up living a single, celibate lifestyle for fear of infecting a potential wife. He may miss out on the joys of being a father and grandfather. His one moment of weakness may lead to physical, emotional, and relational bankruptcy.

What if Jed had been one of your children or one of the young people in your church, youth group, or classroom? What would you have done or what would you have given to prevent him from paying the high cost of premarital sex? It may be too late for Jed, although God has forgiven him and can still use him. But it’s not too late for many of your young people. You can save them from the high cost of promiscuity by helping them wait for sex until marriage.