Having the Talk: Educating Your Children About Sex
Parents are finding that their children know a startling amount of information about sex from a very young age. A recent study published by Pediatrics suggests that conversations about sex between parents and children needs to happen much sooner. By the time conversations happen, children have experienced far more sex talk than their parents would have ever imagined. How early should parents explain sex to their children? How detailed should they be? As Dr. Mohler notes on today’s program, this is not an unintentional conversation parents have at random with their children. This is a conversation that should be thought out and prepared with biblical wisdom and concern. Christian parents must be prepared to do far more than talk to their children about sex: they must teach about sex, marriage and God’s will for faithful relationships.
Transcript
Narrator:
This is the Albert Mohler program, your place for Intelligent Christian conversation about the issues that matter. Dr. Mohler’s, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the nation’s leading theologians and cultural commentators to get online with Dr. Mohler. Call toll free nationwide, 1-877-893-TALK. That’s 1 8 7 7 8 9 3 82 55. Now here’s your host, Dr. Albert Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
Hello America. Welcome to the Albert Mohler program. The topic today is going to be a good one for our conversation. It’s not timed for Christmas, it is time for urgency and it’s about sex education and it’s not so much about controversies over sex education in the schools. There are plenty of those or a debate over sex education in the public square. There’s plenty of that too. It’s about how parents are failing and many parents who don’t think they’re failing, who actually are failing when it comes to sex education and interesting studies out to the American Journal of Pediatrics. And I can cut right to the bottom line very quickly because this is a really easy study to understand. Here’s what it’s saying. It’s saying that most parents are saying too little, too late on issues of sexuality. I think this is probably where Christian parents may find themselves at something of a disadvantage because we are those who want to protect our children from too early and too much and for good reason, but we really need a good conversation about what’s right when, because in a world in which you’ve got elementary school kids who are talking about very, very unfortunate sexual matters, and when you have a peer culture in adolescence, it’s leading to very early sexual activity.
When you have a hooking up culture that’s becoming the norm in a lot of schools and in a lot of circles, the reality is that too little, too light can be absolutely disastrous. Lemme tell you the good news in this study, the good news in this study in other studies is that parents can really make a decisive difference and you know that from a Christian perspective, a biblical perspective, that it is parents who certainly ought to be recognized as having that kind of authority, that kind of influence what their kids. But the good news is that most kids are saying, we want more from our parents, and that really is kind of a surprise, isn’t it? Because most parents would think the last thing that their 10-year-old wants is more on the topic of sex and sexuality from mom and dad, but the reality is too little, too late, just isn’t going to work.
I want us to talk about it today. It’s one of those issues that should lead to Christian parents and all of us who love Christian parents and children. We really need to have a good conversation about what’s right when we think about the issue of sex education. We are involved necessarily in so many debates and controversies about sex education in the schools and the sexual message is being sent by the culture. Let’s talk about how parents really do need to think this through. The phone number is (877) 893-8255. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. If you look at this study, I think it’s very easy to come to the judgment that it is conservative Christian parents who might need to think this issue through even more than some others because our tendency is going to be to stay what we think is just slightly ahead of the curve on our kids.
Just give them enough to stay ahead of the curve of the kind of issues that we think they’re facing, the kinds of questions we think they’re asking, but if we’re behind that curve and here’s the real danger, someone else is going to be there in our place, that’s a pretty heavy message to think about. The phone number is (877) 893-8255. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. Good stuff we’re going to be talking about here. Important stuff, perhaps slightly awkward stuff, which is what makes the issue all the more important. Big issues are out there in the news. Of course, very sad news having to do with the governor of South Carolina and his family. The wife of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has announced that she is planning to divorce him in a statement that released to the press, Jenny Sanford said she’s filing for divorce, and by the way, she’s very clear about why it’s the ground of adultery.
No surprise there. She said in a statement that the dissolution of any marriage is a sad and painful process. This came after many unsuccessful efforts of reconciliation, yet I am still dedicated to keeping the process that lies ahead peaceful for our family. She said, while our family structure may change, I know we will both work earnestly to be the best mom and dad we can to four of the finest boys on earth. Folks, that’s just breathtakingly sad, heartbreaking. It is really, really tragic and this must be laid directly at the feet of the governor of South Carolina whose exposure on the issue of adultery was not only excruciatingly public but morally complex. I mean, this is a man who after all appeared to regret having been caught and he still continued to speak of his love affair for this woman in South America with whom he had the affair.
Now what’s really interesting is that on Wednesday of this week, South Carolina lawmakers decided that they would not try to impeach the Republican governor of South Carolina on the grounds of his use of state sponsored travel and for neglecting his official duties this summer when he was secretly visiting his mistress in Argentina. A couple of interesting statements in the Washington Post, these two statements kind of juxtapose where the issue of public morality is the representative there, representative Greg Delaney, a Republican, the lone member who did vote to impeach Sanford, told reporters that the governor has lost all moral authority to lead this state. So in other words, representative Delaney says there’s a certain moral authority that is absolutely necessary. You go underneath that threshold and a governor can’t function to govern. And the interesting thing is that he was the only member of the committee that voted to impeach the governor and he made a classic moral statement.
And even as the others appeared to disagree with him, my guess is they would’ve to agree that at some point an elected official can lose sufficient moral authority to be unable to lead on the other side. The representative here, representative James Harrison, also a Republican who heads the subcommittee told the associated press quote, we can’t impeach for hypocrisy, we can’t impeach for arrogance. We can’t impeach an office holder for his lack of leadership skills. Now, I don’t know Representative Harrison, but I can tell you that we certainly can do what he says we can’t do, and I’m just wondering, and I almost hate to have to wonder this out loud, but I have to as a matter of integrity, I wonder if these same Republicans were thinking and saying the same things when it wasn’t a conversation about a Republican governor in South Carolina but about a democratic president in Washington.
And I find this a very unfortunate argument. I’m not making a judgment as to whether or not the legislature of South Carolina should have moved to impeach Governor Sanford. I am saying that the moral argument that it simply can’t be done because his moral behavior is an argument that I don’t think they can live with over time, they may make the judgment that this immoral behavior is not sufficient to impeach, but that’s a different thing than going so far as to say there is no moral behavior that would be grounds for impeachment. We can’t impeach for hypocrisy. We can’t impeach for arrogance. We can’t impeach an office holder for his lack of leadership skills. Well, I’m not sure that the we, meaning we the people can’t. That doesn’t mean that we the people always should. That’s a question of political prudence, but I think we better be very careful about saying too much about what we can’t do, especially when there could be the charge that we’re being arbitrary.
We come up with a can’t. Very interesting news analysis out, and I’m reading this from Youth Worker Journal having to do with teenagers today and the fact that there seems to be an absolute fascination with very dark themes in adolescent literature. According to this article, today’s books for youth are filled with angst, trauma and death. There’s an entire series of different books and book series that are chronicled here. The Wall Street Journal’s, Katie Rofe said, teenagers historically have shown a certain appetite for calamity. They like a little madness, sadism and disease in the books they curl up with at night. However, this article goes on to say these books represent a new trend and a somewhat encouraging one to some people. Adolescents struggling with peer pressure separating from their parents and all the real life turmoil, the world’s thrown at us slightly are grappling with these issues in the pages of their books and she means by that rather than somewhere else.
I just want to speak up here and say if you think that an adolescent concern with matters of life and death and even with things like everything from mental illness to disease to all these dark issues, if you think that’s new, I don’t think you’re reading much teen literature because, or at least the literature that is commonly popular with teens because going back to Romeo and Juliet all the way through, frankly even fairy tales from medieval literature, there’s some very dark themes there. And in an odd way I find myself agreeing somewhat with this analyst here from the Wall Street Journal, Katie Roy, when she says, I think it’s healthier that they explore these things within the pages of a book rather than elsewhere at the same time, this is where parents again can be really decisive. It might be that a good deal of this should never be read by anyone, whether a teenager or an adult.
It could be that some of these things would be well addressed in good literature that would be a good foundation for a discussion between parents and teenagers together. Very interesting adolescents is a time of what the Germans call stern drang, no doubt about it, and we have made it more so by institutionalizing adolescents and frankly identifying it with everything from bad behavior to sexual experimentation, do you name it. That gets us back to our topic of today’s conversation, which is sex education. This report from the American Academy of Pediatrics says parents are jumping in with too little, too late. Let’s jump in now for a good conversation about how Christian parents should think through this issue. The phone number (877) 893-8255. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. You’re listening to the Albert Mohler program,
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Albert Mohler:
Welcome back to the Albert Mohler program. The issue of sex education is most often debated in terms of what’s going to be taught in the public schools and the kinds of controversies that continually roil the popular culture. But the topic of our conversation today has to do with parents and sex education and it’s occasioned by the release of a major report in the American Journal of Pediatrics, and it’s really interesting, by the way, the journal is called Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The article’s title is Timing Parent and Child Communication about sexuality relative to children’s sexual behaviors. It’s by a list of researchers and doctors. It is in this journal released online on December the seventh, so it’s very fresh. It’s getting a lot of attention in the larger media culture and I’ll tell you why. It’s because it has its own agenda.
And by the way, the agenda of this article is not mine. The agenda of this article is suggesting the parents need to talk to their kids about things like safe sex and contraception before they are involved in what are defined as risky sexual behaviors. That’s a very secular way of looking at this and the tie to this is a particular program in California having to do with adolescents and sex and well, we could have a fruitful conversation and probably an important conversation about what those programs are like. That’s not what we’re talking about today when we’re talking about today is what’s in the background of this report, which I think would concern Christian parents who might not be at all persuaded by the kinds of arguments that these researchers are bringing forth that support their program in sex education. But nonetheless, you lead Christian parents to kind of scratch the head and say, look, maybe there’s something here that at least ought to be a wake up call for us.
So you want to wake up, here’s the wake up call. Too little too late. That’s what the research is saying. The research is saying, and by the way, these are kids reporting themselves, teenagers as young by the way, as our very youngest adolescents all the way up to college students saying, our parents are talking to us. They’re saying important stuff, but it’s too little and it’s too late. So let’s think about those two things. Number one, let’s take the too late first, and I suggested in the opening of this program that one of the reasons why Christian parents might in particular be talking about these things too late is because we are rightly concerned with sexualizing our children before an appropriate time of even raising sexual issues. We are afraid of giving them temptations and leading to questions of anxiety within our children when it is fundamentally unnecessary and that’s one of the reasons why we resent the kind of sex education programs that would basically indoctrinate our children and sexualize them at far too early ages about things that clearly are both wrong and wrongly timed.
But on the other hand, when it comes to how Christian parents should think about this too late can be a real danger including our own children because the reality is that most children are in an environment in which they’re going to be getting some sexual messages, perhaps even being addressed with sexual situations before we would want them to be, even if they are not giving into sexual activity. And even if they are merely innocent bystanders to a larger cultural conversation that goes on amongst their peers, folks, it’s happening. I mentioned earlier the controversy, various sex scandals in the culture. Lemme tell you, one of the biggest things that happened in terms of the sex education scene in the 1990s had to do with the scandal attached to former president Bill Clinton and what went on between the president and an intern and all of a sudden a topic of conversation that had been really far away from the lives of American children and younger teenagers instantly became something that parents were having to explain to kids because it was being discussed not on some internet chat room or perhaps at recess at pe, but on the evening news.
In other words, it was just put out there and a lot of parents were answering some very awkward questions, but we’re light years now from where we were even in the mid 1990s and this hooking up culture and all the rest you consider what kind of influences are coming to the lives of many children and young people, teenagers in particular. It’s clear that too little, too late, the too late part can really, really be dangerous, but the too little is as well, and this is where I get a lot of questions. That’s one of the reasons we’re taking up this program today is because I receive, oh, I don’t even know how to measure them dozens and then dozens upon dozens of questions of Christian parents saying, how much should we say to our kids about sex and to what extent should we take the question into what kind of detail should we go?
Well, this particular study in pediatrics is suggesting that when it comes to information about sex, if parents are not giving enough information, enough data, and not only enough data as a Christian, I want to say enough moral context and moral reasoning, moral information to understand, then we are really putting our children at risk. There’s a fine balance here, no doubt about it. I’d like to hear from parents and from others concerned with this question and just let me know how you’re thinking it through. This is the place for intelligent Christian conversation. Let’s try to deploy some. Let’s think about it. The phone number is eight seven seven eight nine three eight two five five eight seven seven eight nine three talk. Now, by the way, one of the things you will see in the secular media is they’ll say, Christian parents just want to be an ostrich with the head in the sand on this. Christian parents they’re saying are a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution because they’re not talking to their own kids about sex.
They say, we don’t want, this is what the secular authorities are saying. They’re saying the Christian parents say, we don’t want the school systems talking to our kids about sex and we’re not going to talk to ’em about sex either. And folks, that is a morally damaging and damaged position to be in and that’s why we need to have this conversation. Write me at mail@albertMohler.com and I’m glad to hear from you. Also by social media at Twitter, it’s slash Albert Mohler and Mohler Radio, Facebook, the Albert Mohler program. Again, the phone number is (877) 893-8255. It’s 7 7 8 9 3 talk. When you think about the whole sex education issue, one of the things I try to help persons to understand and especially to try to think it through with parents is perhaps even a three stage operation here. It’s not first of all, something that you can handle in one conversation.
You can’t just get it out of the way. One of the things that comes up is a lot of kids are reporting that when their parents do talk about sex, it’s as if their parents just want to come in and dump a load and say, okay, that’s done. Now let’s never talk about this again. That is not helpful to a kid at any stage of development. I want you to think about three stages of development in an ongoing conversation. Number one, the basics of anatomy, physiology and reproduction. And that’s the ground level and that includes the differences between boys and girls and men and women, the difference between a mommy and a daddy. And it’s the kind of stuff that a kid needs to have very early for the world to make sense to him. And at progressive stages and given the maturity of the child and the intellectual curiosity, the child is the parent very sensitively tries to listen to exactly what the child is and is not asking.
Well, we’re not afraid of biology here, folks. Let’s remember that we as Christian parents better be very careful to know that the gift of sexuality and the gift of reproduction, the fact that we are male and female and that the males and females in marriage are made to have babies. That’s a part of the glory of God and we’re not going to run from it. We’re going to handle it sensitively, but we’re going to display it before our children as information that’s for their good and for God’s glory. The second stage has to do with how to handle puberty and adolescence and the particular kinds of temptations and sexual challenges that come during that age. And the third stage is getting our own children ready for marriage. And that involves a whole lot more than sex, but certainly sex is a part of it as we help them to understand that waiting until marriage is not just about waiting, it’s also about marriage and the glory of God in receiving all that marriage is intended to be. That’s an important message I think one that an awful lot of Christian Young people aren’t getting from their parents. The thou sh and the thou shalt nots are very, very important, but they must be placed within that narrative of God’s display of his glory in this gift for us, the phone number is (877) 893-8255. Back with intelligent Christian conversation on the Albert Mohler program.
Narrator:
You are listening to the Albert Mohler program, your place for Intelligent Christian conversation about the issues that matter to get online. Call toll free 1-877-893-TALK. That’s 1 8 7 7 8 9 3 82 55 or go to www.albertMohler.com. Here again is your host Dr. Albert Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
Welcome back to the Albert Mohler program. The phone number is (877) 893-8255. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. Now you look at the literature on sex education, the secular literature, and it’s going to say, look, parents, this is what you need to do. You need to help your kids to understand how they can avoid risky or dangerous sexual behavior. And of course that’s the whole mythology of safe sex. And that basically says that your salvation’s found in a condom and what you’re going to try to avoid is emotional injury and premarital pregnancy, and you’re going to try to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Christian parents can’t buy into that mindset and say that sex without those things supposedly is safe. The problem is that Christian parents are often not having the conversation at all. And that’s why I’m hoping that we can frame out here at least some fundamentals of how Christian parents should think about this.
And I’ve suggested a three phased kind of understanding where the first phase in childhood is simply about gender and biology and reproduction, understanding that those are reflection of the glory of God. We shouldn’t be embarrassed about those things at all. We should help our children understand how rightly to talk about them and discreetly to have conversations. That’s why it’s a privileged conversation with the parent and then at the next stage, getting them ready for adolescence, that’s huge. And then getting them ready for marriage. And when we’re getting them ready for adolescence, we better recognize that they’re going to be facing things that are not only what we faced when we were adolescents, but a whole lot more and they’re going to need even more from us than we needed from our parents. And the sad thing is most of us did not get what we needed just as a generation when we were kids.
And as a teenager I could see around me all that was going on with young people whose parents were frankly just disconnected from their lives and thankful mine were not disconnected from mine. But that was a grace given in my life that was definitely not found in others. And then getting them ready for marriage, that’s really important. That’s a part of sexuality and sex education too. And then again, a lot of parents just are just out of the game. Get in the game at least of lets thinking this through together by giving me a call at (877) 893-8255. Let’s go to Baltimore, Maryland. Jenny’s listening on WRBS. Go ahead, Jenny.
Listener:
Hi. I just wanted to make a slight comment. I’m a grandmother now and I have a daughter who’s in her mid forties and when she was young and in high school and learning about sex and everything, I was embarrassed. I didn’t talk to her. I didn’t explain things to her. Consequently, she made some very bad choices.
Albert Mohler:
Now Jenny, I really appreciate your call and let me tell you, I think just about every parent out there understands that word embarrassment because this can be embarrassing territory, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth, I just want to ask you if you had it to do all over again, my guess is that you would kind of overcome the embarrassment in order to have the conversation you wish you’d had. Is that right?
Listener:
I certainly would. I certainly would. My generation, like I say, I’m a grandmother, you didn’t talk about those kind of things. And consequently, when my daughter had questions that she wanted to ask, she didn’t come to her mother.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Jenny, thank you for sharing that. Let me tell you, I think there are undoubtedly some parents out there who needed to hear exactly what you had to say. And I got to tell you, I appreciate the fact that you overcame embarrassment to make a point you really needed to make. Now that was a real gift to others and I want to thank you for that and I really do appreciate your call. The phone number is eight nine three eight two five five. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. The two little too late messages, easy to understand. You don’t have to read the scientific literature and go ransack the data to get that. And I have to tell you that as a pastor and as one who works with young people and a lot of teenagers have to tell you that, I think that is an absolutely accurate verdict. I think there are a lot of well-intended Christian parents who have a good talk, maybe even two or three good talks and then think it’s done.
But this is an ongoing conversation. And lemme just give you one other word of urgency. If you’re not so closely connected in the lives of your teenagers that you have a pretty good idea of what they are thinking about and worrying about, then you need to be, we often talk about the fact that nature abhors a vacuum. Well, our children are not living in a vacuum, and if we are not there to fill their space insofar as it is possible with the right kind of Christian biblical wisdom, then that space is going to be filled by someone else. And you don’t have to have a very creative imagination to imagine just how bad that can be. I don’t want you to receive that kind of wake up call that Jenny talked about. Let her call be a matter of conviction, maybe a wake up call to think about just how you ought to have a conversation with your children, teenagers and young adults right now. The phone number is eight seven seven eight nine three talk. You’re listening to the Albert Mohler program,
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Albert Mohler:
Welcome back to the Albert Moer program. We’re talking about parents communicating about sex and communicating with their children too little, too late’s the verdict to this, it’s a convicting word I think for many Christian parents who find it difficult to talk about this issue with their children. And I’m trying to help you overcome some of that difficulty. If it’s embarrassment, lemme tell you, being embarrassed is the least of your problems. The phone number is (877) 893-8255. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. Let’s go to Theresa listening on KMMJ.
Listener:
Yes, hello, Dr. Mohler. I agree with you that it’s really important to cover biology and to get all that straight, but what concerns me is that we as Christian parents are sometimes neglecting to let our kids know that when they’re ready to hear it, that, okay, so you didn’t get pregnant, you didn’t get a disease or what have you, but you still, you give away a part of yourself that you never give back.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, Ressa, the problem with the safe sex mentality is that it assumes a completely secular worldview. And that is that sex is just a matter of biology in which emotions can get damaged. So what you would try to avoid is pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and any undue emotional damage. That’s why this report that we talked about on Wednesday, someone called Nasco, I don’t ask anything Wednesday coming out of Minneapolis about the fact that casual sex doesn’t cause emotional damage. Well, first of all, it turned out to be not much of a study, but secondly, it’s just an effort to try to create kind of a moral fig leaf to cover the emptiness of that secular worldview from a biblical worldview. We need to understand exactly what you’re suggesting here, and that is that sex is about the totality of the person. Sex is about our relationship with God.
Sex is about whether or not we’re going to live out the purpose which our creator made us to His glory, or whether we’re going to sin and claim our own autonomy and be determined to live our own way. The one way leads to life the other to death. And of course, again, this is one of those issues that reminds us again of our need of the gospel. But when it comes to sex education, we’ve really got to be honest with our kids, our children, our teenagers, our young adults, with the fact that sex is never merely about biology, physiology, anatomy, reproduction. It’s about the totality of the human being because God did not just give us sex, he made us sexual creatures. That is a very important difference. Thanks for your call Tressel. Let’s go to Louisville, Kentucky. Eric’s listening on WFIA. Go ahead, Eric.
Listener:
Yes sir. Dr. Mohler, how are you doing?
Albert Mohler:
I’m doing great. Glad to hear from you. What do you think?
Listener:
Oh, I very much my life is a testimony to the mayhem that can occur when someone is not offered and given and guidance and given direction in their lives and information. My life, my youth was just full of mayhem and I very much regret it. And now with my daughters, I have done just the opposite and tried to provide them with information, try to be a resource for them personally, try to develop a personal relationship with them. And I very much think that’s the duty as a Christian parent, and I wish I would’ve received the same.
Albert Mohler:
Eric, that is one of the most important gifts that you can now give your children even as an appropriate age. You tell them, look, no one told me what I needed to know. And no one in my life, and in particular my parents didn’t give me the kind of ongoing counsel and the spiritual direction concerning all things, but especially in this case a focus on sexuality and all that that entails. And I know in an incredibly painful way what that loss means. And I don’t want you to know that loss. I’m determined. I really appreciate that intentionality and conviction in your voice, Eric, when you say about your own daughters, you say, I’m determined that they will have what I did not have. And that’s very, very important. And the Christian Church has understood that from the very beginning as persons that come to faith in Christ, sometimes from a background that involves things that are almost unthinkable and unspeakable, you just look at the honesty.
The New Testament, for instance, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians one Corinthians where Paul goes through an entire catalog of things that these Christians have been involved in and says, but look, now you belong to Christ. And one of the most important things we can do in testimony without being salacious, but merely seeking to give glory to God an urgency to our exhortation and our teaching, we say to our children, look, things can go really wrong. And I’m in a position to tell you how wrong they can go. And it is my job as parent to put the right structures in your life, to put the right accountability in your life and to put the right wisdom and instruction in your life so that you will not know the pain that I know. And I think that’s very, very important. That’s another gift. Eric, I want to thank you for your gift to this conversation as you’ve spoken so honestly of your own situation.
The phone number is (877) 893-8255. That’s 8 7 7 8 9 3 talk. Not only by the way is there the angle here from this report of two little two late, but there’s a particular focus on the fact that parents who are doing a fairly inadequate job across the board are actually doing far more disastrously with boys than with girls. And I think I understand that. I think I understand that a lot of parents who don’t want to talk about sex at all will muster the courage to talk about their daughters to their daughters because they want, in particular for their daughters to avoid certain things that they see as particular vulnerabilities. And of course, as looking at this from a Christian and biblical perspective, I understand the particular vulnerabilities that should be the parents’ concern about girls and young women, but to neglect the boys is disastrous. And by the way, it’s also illogical, but nonetheless, in a fallen world, all kinds of illogical things take hold of our.
And the reality is that there is a weird double standard that emerges in this even when it comes to Christian parents, Christian parents who would never say the premarital sex for girls is wrong, but for boys is right. They know better than that. They would nonetheless hold to some kind of double standard by saying, I really need to have a conversation with my daughter, but I’m not sure I have the same need to have the conversation with my son. Lemme just give you a very strong word of exhortation. This is an ongoing conversation you need to have with your daughters and your sons and in a way that is appropriate and strategically directed to each. And lemme just say as one who is both a father and a son, that this is really, really important. Certain things can only be conveyed from a father to a son, and there’s very important knowledge there. Not just physical and physiological knowledge, but there is moral knowledge and spiritual knowledge. There really is very, very important crucial for that transmission. Week by week, I’ve received so many questions and I’m always glad to hear from you. Just write me at mail@albertMohler.com. I wish I could deal with all of them every week immediately, whether by email or by radio. But I’ll tell you a part of the reason why we’re having this conversation today is because I think most of you’ll be shocked at how many are writing me about this issue. And I hope at least this starts the right kind of conversation. Back. A final thoughts in just a moment. You’re listening to the Albert Mohler program.
Welcome back to the Albert Mohler program. I had a very rare privilege this morning. I have been able to preside at well over 30 commencement ceremonies at this institution. And today I was looking out at an assemblage of young scholars, but more than that, young ministers well over 200 young graduates getting ready to go out into the ministry and mission fields of the world. I am president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and in our chapel this morning we had our December commencement and I had the responsibility and the privilege of addressing these graduates with a commencement address. You’ll find the text of my address on my website@albertmiller.com and you’ll find the audio there too as you look under the audio version of the message for today. But the title of my message was This, starting Something You Cannot Finish Christian Ministry from Generation to Generation.
My Texan was from one Corinthians three where the apostle Paul writes about the fact that he planted an Apollo’s watered, but God gave the increase. And my ex to those students was this, I want you to start something you can’t finish. Do understand the Christian ministry is to understand that we don’t get to finish this thing, we’re going to pass it off to someone else till Jesus comes. And our responsibility is to build as the apostle Paul says, upon the foundation built by others to build worthily, to build faithfully, and to build well knowing that God’s judgment will be upon our work. But the reality is that we need to start something we come to understand we can’t finish. And I’ll put it this way, if you finish what you start in Christian ministry, then you have aimed too low and what you finish is not Christ because this is a bigger task than we can do.
And the Christian ministry begins in a calling from God and it’s demonstrated in a life of faithfulness and self-giving and self-sacrifice and devotion and teaching and the taking of the gospel to the ends of the earth. And at the end of the day, we’re all going to die without this job actually done. We have to pass it off to others. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not accountable for how we build, how we teach, how we plant, how we water, how we cultivate, and how we irrigate in the fields of God. Lemme tell you, it’s a moving thing to come to graduation and I really could not and would not have understood that until I actually was in this role, and I’ve now been in it now in my 17th year, I had no idea how emotional it is When you look at it, students you come to know and love and they’re getting ready to be sent out to the very ends of the earth. You’re proud of them, your hopes and prayers, go with them, you’re going to miss them. And it was wonderful to see them, so many of them with wives and young children and others, and it’s just a display of God’s glory. Every once in a while when you see something like that, you just have to tell people about it. Folks, if you want to look at a sign of hope for the future of the Christian Church, well you would’ve seen one this morning with these young ministers ready to go out.
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