Preaching on Sex to Junior High Kids

By Nic Gibson

About 2 months ago I did a talk at a retreat center on Panama City Beach for a youth group from Georgia. They were having a purity commitment retreat and wanted a speaker to talk about sex and purity. I got invited.

Now most people know I’m not really big on Junior High Ministry. I have trouble connecting. I can play and hang out with JH kids, but teaching is another story.

So I did a talk called “Sex is Good and so is God”. I talked mainly about why God has called us to purity by explaining some reasons why God’s commands are actually extremely wise for reasons I was sure they had never considered.

I expanded this into a talk for our Senior high students and I gave the talk there a few weeks later. This precipitated a long discussion with the SH guys and a 4 week Sunday schools class we called Sex and Christian Faith. More than 20 students came to this poorly scheduled and promoted class and we have had some really good discussions about the meaning of gender, marriage and sex and why God’s commands are good ones and how we can really pull them off.

The study includes a look at 4 themes on sexuality:

1. Song of Songs- this is an exploration of the tasteful eroticism of Song of songs. We talk about how God invented sex, that God intended for us to want to have intimate, fun and extremely erotic sexual lives with our husband or wife and that it is God that gets the credit for the good of sex.

2. Genesis 1-2. In the second session we talk about the connection between gender, marriage and sex and how Christians cannot really think about them in isolation from each other. We also talk about the three pointed triangle of the ‘Purpose of Sex’. I talk about how, not only do we need to see sex as having these three purposes, but that great recreational sex can only find it’s real potential intensity and longevity when it comes out of the proper first purpose of bonding. And we see how out of sex being the bonding mechanism of the two genders in marriage, a couple can rightly enjoy each other for pleasure and receive children in a loving family.

3. 1 Cor 6:12-Ch 7. In this talk I explain some of the non-health based reasons to pursue Biblical purity. Most students have two reasons to not have sex:

1. God will be mad
2. I could get a disease or get pregnant

These are not sufficient reasons to motivate students to seek and build biblical purity into their lives. This insufficiency in motivation creates a slippery slope to their spiritual-sexual undoing. The steps of this slope are:

1. Insufficient motivation- Doing sexual purity is harder than it is important.

2. Students will have sex.

3. Christian students are going to feel gnawing and nagging guilt about their failure.

4. They will deal with guilt one of two ways:

A. They will repent and restart. The problem is that they simply go back to the top of the slope and ski down it again, except faster and with less felt guilt. So long as the process repeats, it will continue to do so and negatively effect the Christian's conscience and dynamics of dealing with guilt from sin.

B. They will “Follow their heart” instead of be obedient to Christian faith. This will lead to either an implicit or explicit denial of the faith. They may just not care to obey Jesus in this and soon other areas. And this is an implicit denial of faith. Or they may just “Give up on Religion”, and decide their faith was a phase and that Christian faith isn’t compatible with modern life- and modern life is truer (because it feels closer).

I will put some of these non-health based reason in another post.

4. Real Tactics for Biblical purity. We end the study by talking about how to actually live out biblical purity. This includes though and tactics and I’ll include some of this material in another post.