Sex 180 - Part 2 of 3

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAND: You know, Chip, I have a good friend who is a professor at a Baptist University and he told me, he said, “The single most emotionally draining and time-consuming thing I do in my ministry here is not teaching my classes, not preparing to teach my classes, but trying to counsel with Baptist boys and Baptist girls whose Baptist parents are getting divorced, even though they know they are not supposed to.”

INGRAM: And I think what has happed is, it is the subtly of it. It is because they don’t think clearly and biblically. They don’t see the lens of God. They think this is going to deliver them. They think that there is a better relationship. Well, where did they get that message. Not from Scripture. Then what we will see, what you sow to the flesh, you reap corruption. There is going to be multiplied pain, and really at the heart of this book, whether it is a single person or a married person, my dream and my hope was that if people read through it, and you know me, Richard, I’ve got to be just real practical and straight forward in it, I just want to help regular, ordinary people improve their relationships and it starts with looking at them incorrectly.

LAND: Well, you know, Chip, my son got married and they wrote their own wedding vows and when I got down to Florida where the wedding was going to take place, her pastor was going to help with the ceremony. The two of us were going to do it together and he said, “Have you seen these wedding vows?” I said, “Yes, I have.” He said, “Well, I took one look and I went and got a vitamin B12 shot.” They were long. And so we got them to cut them to some degree, but one thing they insisted on, was a part of their marriage vows, they said, “in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, till death us do part, and that means that no matter what happens, I will never divorce you.” Now this is a conservative, I mean a really good solid conservative evangelical spirit-lead Baptist church, and there were gasps all over the auditorium, and people came up to me afterwards and said, “You know, I’ve never heard that before, that was really impressive.” And I turned to my wife and I said, “What part of ‘until death us do part’ do they not understand,” and she said, “Well, that’s just become a formula.”

INGRAM: You know what, that’s true.

LAND: It has just become a formula and I think we have an obligation in the church to do a better job of helping people to understand the promises they are making to God, as well as to each other in the marriage.

INGRAM: And I think also letting people know, some people may hear us and think, “Oh, that sounds so Victorian, why don’t you two guys come into the twenty-first century, you don’t really think people are not going to live together.” Even among Christian people, it’s kind of like, you know, I believe in about 9 out of 10 of the Ten Commandments, and you know, da da da, sort of deal, and I just got done teaching this entire book to about three or four thousand single people, age 16 to about 40, here in Atlanta at a large church that has a huge single outreach, and had an awesome time, and here’s the amazing thing. Fifteen-year-olds, twenty-two-year-olds, twenty-eight-year-olds in line for an hour, hour and a half afterwards as we talked, and here was their response when we talked about doing it God’s way and the fallout otherwise. I mean, beautiful 28-year-old girl goes, with tears in her eyes, “I wish someone would have told me this ten years ago, what you said was true, I have done it the other way.” “Like my relationship is like you talked about, two pieces of cardboard glued together, and then you pull them apart and part is stuck on you, and stuck on them, and the damage emotionally and spiritually.” She goes, “You know what, I’m glad there is forgiveness and restoration, but why didn’t someone tell me?” I want people to hear the next generation is not poo-pooing what I’m saying, what you’re saying, what the Scripture is saying. The next generation is saying, “You know what, we got sold a bill of goods,” and “some of our parents aren’t living out, the media has been trying to deceive us, and now, we’ve had a lot of free sex, what we have now is a lot of free damage.” “We want help.” And we need to teach it, lovingly, caringly, boldly. We’ve got a generation of people that don’t know how to do relationships and they are hurting.

LAND: I think you are absolutely right, Chip. We have enormous opportunity. That is why the True Love Waits Campaign, I think, has been such a success. If we had tried the True Love Waits Campaign twenty years ago, I don’t think it would have been as big a success because what people were comparing the sexual revolution to was, let’s face it, a sub-biblical view of sex that was being billed as traditional Judo-Christian sex. And it was not up to the biblical standard and it had a double standard to it, you know, with the males having one standard and females having another standard. But now, young people can look and they can see what the lies of the sexual revolution have done to their parents, to their grandparents, to their aunts and their uncles, their older siblings, and they want a different answer. They don’t want to have the experience that their older relatives have had and their peers have had, and they don’t want their children to have the experience they have had of growing up in broken homes.

INGRAM: That is so true, and where we hear some of these values about doing the right thing, and even, how do you attract the opposite sex? I mean, when you look how people are dressed on TV and you know, Sex in the City, and all the different things, it is interesting to me, one of the most, a couple of years ago probably now or so, Wendy Shalit, she is a graduate student, wrote a book on A Return to Modesty, and when I read the article, it was already in its sixth printing. And here is a 24-year-old, young Jewish girl, calling her generation to modesty and I still remember one of the lines. She says, “Those of the sexual revolution made a choice about their sexuality, what they would do,” and the idea that we are so over exposed outwardly, but we are underdeveloped in genuine intimacy, and she said, “but my generation inherited it, we walked into it blind.” She goes, “I envy older women who have a man in their lives where their word means something, where there is real security, real stability, and where people dress in such a way,” here’s the book, Return to Modesty, “where they dress in such a way where some things are still left to mystery, rather than showing everything that you have.” Now, that’s from a 24-year-old, and in its sixth printing.

LAND: Twenty-four-year-olds who are shocked by the immorality of their peers and their elders.

INGRAM: And the thing is, it doesn’t work. I mean what she was saying is, she uses a line in one of her books where she said, “Sex on the average college campus is what your parents would do as casually as shaking hands.” In fact, it is so depersonalized, she describes it as “two airplanes refueling in the air,” and it’s just simply called, “hooking-up.” And she said, “There is no meaning, there is no relationship, it is purely self worship.” This is about what I just want to get, I don’t want to know your name, I don’t want a relationship, and it violates the most precious premises of Scripture about the intimacy, and the bonding that occurs when a man and a woman are joined physically, even as Apostle Paul says, “even with a prostitute, it still occurs.” Sex is not only sacred, but sex is very serious business. We are reaping the whirlwind now because we’ve taken it as casual.