I read a British news article that claims:
“Four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn online while one in three ten-year-olds has seen explicit material, a disturbing cross-party report reveals.”
I wrote a post related to this several years back. I’ll repost it here. Maybe it will be helpful.
Posted in Parenting, Pornography, Sexual Sins
Second, if a pastor is to create a culture of discipline he must reform his preaching to be intensely contextual. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “Any true definition of preaching must say that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people.”
God calls a particular pastor to preach to a particular church. Consequently, preaching needs to deal with the specific areas of sin in a particular congregation. All of Paul’s letters were crafted to address issues specific to each church’s context. When writing to Corinth he dealt with their divisiveness, sexual immorality, and faulty understanding of the spiritual gifts. When writing to Collosae he primarily dealt with a dangerous mixture of proto-gnosticism, aestheticism, and Judaism. The content of his letters varied greatly based on the pastoral needs of the church. The same should be true of a pastor’s preaching if it is to create an environment of discipline. Once again, Lloyd-Jones said:
That is what preaching is meant to do. It addresses us in such a manner as to bring us under judgment; and it deals with us in such a way that we feel our whole life is involved, and we go out saying, “I can never go back and live just as I did before. This has done something to me; it has made a difference to me. I am a different person as the result of listening to this.
This type of conviction is especially true of contextual preaching. Like Nathan standing before King David, it doesn’t shy away from saying, “You are the man!” This type of preaching is like the airstrike that precedes a ground attack in a battle. It softens up the congregation so that they will be ready and willing to receive discipline from their pastor.
This Saturday marks the starts of my “This Week in Sexuality” weekly feature. Every Saturday I will spotlight the “sexuality” stories I came across in the previous seven days.
“Since then, however, there has been a shift in evangelical thinking about contraception, and therefore about big families. You can see it in the Duggar family, the enthusiastic Santorum supporters who star on the reality television show “19 Kids & Counting.” You can read about it in books like “Quiverfull,” Kathryn Joyce’s 2009 account of Christians who forgo contraception to add children to the Lord’s army. And you can hear it in the teachings of theologians like Russell D. Moore, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dean who warns evangelicals to be skeptical of the ‘contraceptive culture.’”
First, the father was often absent due to working long hours to provide for his family. It should be noted that the father appeared to be godly in all examples I observed. He just was gone a lot and was exhausted when he was home.
Second, the mother tended to be overbearing in her management of her home. Her home was well kept. Her lesson plans well-executed. She was queen of every aspect of her home.
Third, not all the sons in these homes came across as effeminate. Some of the boys were very masculine. They were covered in bruises and cuts from building a tree house or playing soccer. However, I noticed the sons that did demonstrate these prehomosexual tendencies were usually homebodies. They tended to be very timid, artistic*, and clung to mother while his brothers explored the world outside.
So, in summary, a distant father, overbearing/protective mother, and timid child were a concoction that tended to produce effeminacy and potential homosexuality. This was disturbing to me because all three are common in home-schooling households. In this sense, home-schooling can be a very dangerous environment for young men to mature in.
What is a parent to do? Should we reject homeschooling? Should we force our artistic boys to build tree houses? Not necessarily. There is another way to come at this and it starts with the parents.
Consider this passage from Joseph Nicolosi’s A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality:
“For variety of reasons, some mothers also have a tendency to prolong their son’s dependence. A mother’s intimacy with her son is primal, complete, exclusive, and this powerful bond can easily deepen into what psychiatrist Robert Stoller calls a ‘blissful symbiosis.” But the mother may be inclined to hold on to her son in what becomes an unhealthy mutual dependency, especially if she does not have a satisfying, intimate relationship with the boy’s father. In such cases she can put too much energy into the boy, using him to fulfill her needs for love and companionship in a way that is not good for him.
Continue reading
Posted in Biblical Sexuality, Fatherhood, Femininity, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Parenting
Times are tough and money is tight. Don’t let that stop you from picking up some great resources on biblical parenting. Here are four free resources that I’ve found especially helpful.
1) Future Men by Doug Wilson (free on Google Books) – This book is insanely helpful to parents of boys. It is an extremely practical and crisp read. I learned a lot about being a man just by reading it.
Preview Snippet…
“So strength in discipline by itself is not sufficient. A father must also be wise in how he uses his strength. Many strong, aggressive fathers are very foolish in how they use that strength with their boys. Strong men are frequently competitive men, and competitive are often competitive with their sons. And this is why many “strong” fathers have weak sons–the son was never allowed to attempt anything. Or, when he attempted something, it was never good enough, and the “disciplinary” response was always disproportionate and unjust. Discipline of this sort comes from fathers who are control freaks, having to do everything themselves.”
2) The Duties of Parents by J.C. Ryle (free on a website)- Are you looking for a short read that gets you the basics of biblical of parenting? Look no further. Ryle’s little work is packed with more insight than an entire library of parenting books. I find myself returning to it a couple times a year.
Preview snippet…
“The mother cannot tell what her tender little infant may grow up to be—tall or short, weak or strong, wise or foolish—he may be any of these things or not—it is all uncertain. But one thing the mother can say with certainty: he will have a corrupt and sinful heart. It is natural for us to do wrong. “Folly,” says Solomon, “is bound up in the heart of a child” [Proverbs 22:15]. “A child left to himself disgraces his mother” [Proverbs 29:15]. Our hearts are like the earth on which we walk; leave it alone, and it is sure to bear weeds.” Continue reading
Posted in Books for Fathers, Fatherhood, Parenting
