I sat in church this last Sunday and listened to the message being preached. The theme for the month was managing your sexuality, this last one wasn’t my first Sunday on the series, but to me, there was something obviously missing in these messages. The messages sounded rather nice and appealing, they offered strategies for staying clear of sexual sin, offered understanding for the sexual drive, even offered comfort for those with a shameful past, but it offered no clear repercussions, offered the mercy of God, but lacked the equivalent balance of it’s truth. It offered peace passionately, but played the righteousness card less aggressively. In the end, the words that ring true for myself and many are – “Nobody is perfect”, “we all get tempted”, “we were all born with sin, save Jesus”, “we all make mistakes”, “no sin is greater than another”, “There is therefore now, no condemnation”. “Don’t expose your brother, cover him”, “if you remove the cover from your brother, God will remove your cover”, “The Church is a Hospital”. While these statements have merit and truth in them, there are some subtle untruths derivable from them. It is our responsibility to, like Berean Christians check these thoughts in the light of scripture, prepare our generation for what lies ahead and shake out the wheat from the chaff. While God’s mercy and pardon are real, God’s judgement and principles provide the balance for “sin no more!”
I miss the good old days of growing up in church. The messages were soul searching and convicting. God’s standards seemed regularly shoved in our faces. We hear God’s word and cry back to him in prayer. Like clay pots, we were eager to face the fiery furnace of God’s word and be moulded more into his likeness. I remember the days when we daily sought God’s forgiveness, for waking up late, not praying enough or missing the hour of personal bible study. We watched “pilgrims progress” and cried, watched “burning hell” and wept we read Leonard Ravenhill’s – Why Revival Tarries and our heart ached. Our generation had a lot of God’s investments. Today, I fear for the generation of today’s christians, I fear more for the generation of my children. A generation fed with flaky, easy going, user-friendly, hospitalized christianity. A generation that spends time in front of Hannah Montana and Ben Ten than kiddies praise and donut man. The fears are not far fetched, the prophecy of what our future can be is already visible in the developed societies ahead of ours. These thoughts take me all the way back to Thailand to the counsel of Tuks.
Tuks was a moral woman, over 50yrs of age, with the personal testimony that due to her upbringing and being a devout Buddist, she got married as a virgin. Today however, she is quite stumped by the issues facing the generation of her son. Unlike Lemuel’s mother who gave him great counsel about women and wine, this woman offered her son options, as anything short of that, and she might discover how irrelevant to his generation she had become! Even though she had a sexually strict upbringing, her major worry over her son is wether or not he change his sex and become a female. She advices him not to sleep around, but if he must she advised him to use condom. She admonishes him not to sleep with the girl he loves before marriage, but recommends that if he can’t control it, he should go to the bathroom and express himself. These were counsels from a woman who had it rough but stayed true to her convictions
