We are living in revolutionary times. We are, quite likely, in the midst of the most powerful social revolution in the history of America. Changes in our culture are moving at a breathtaking pace. In the midst of the confusion we must understand the dangerous forces pressing on the family as a result of the sexual revolution and how Christian families can navigate the chaos.  

Well, God bless you. I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's good to be here with you. And it's good to look out. I've enjoyed just being here singing with you, hearing Scott speak, and also just looking out at the families that are gathered here.

It's just a reminder of God's blessing. And so it's been a blessing just to be here with you already. And we have a lot to do tonight, a lot to cover. I was assigned to talk about how should Christian families respond to the sexual revolution. Wow.

One word, seriously. Second word, biblically. But we'll have to say more about that in just a moment. I want to tell you what it's like to be here in this room. I know many of you have been here times in the past.

I just have to tell you, when you reach a certain age, and I turn 60 on Saturday, you begin to see ghosts. And some of you know what I mean. You walk in a room and you remember people who are now gone to be with the Lord, and those long gone that you saw in this room. And I started coming to this room when I was very young, when Ridgecrest meant camp, and this building meant where you came in to hear the preaching and so many memories forged in my life here, so many decisive moments in the Southern Baptist Convention's history right here, It was in this room in 1987 that the great inerrancy debate over the authority and inspiration of scripture took place right here in this room. And so I look around this room and I see lots of ghosts.

Those who are arguing for the inerrancy of scripture and those who are arguing against the inerrancy of scripture. I can tell you that in this room, in other times, an awful lot of Christian young people gave their hearts to the call of missions and are now serving and have served And many are now with the Lord who went to lands to take the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so, anyways, so very special places. So special place to me. I have a couple of friends here with me tonight.

One of them is Mr. Glenn Wilcox sitting right here with his son David. Glenn Wilcox, Mr. Asheville, North Carolina, just in case you wondered. But beyond that, when I was called to be president of Southern Seminary, I was called to an enormous challenge that was far greater than I am, to bring reform and renewal to an institution.

And one of the key Baptist laymen who helped make that possible and was my friend throughout that process was Glenn Wilcox, and I'm thankful he's here. And I'm here talking about the Christian family and the only thing I wish that I could be with, the only people I wish I could be with more is my own family. It is really interesting, the older I get, the more I recognize every moment spent away is a moment that had better matter. And so we need to make this matter. I have been asked to talk about the sexual revolution and how Christian families are to respond.

And so I was trying to explain to a couple of associates and they said, so you're doing the sex talk. Well, sort of, the sexual revolution talk. It reminds me of one of our students who has several children. He's been in service, he was a student years ago, but he had one of those wake up calls, 11 year old son asked his mom, where did I come from? And the mother was then expectant.

And so she said, well when your father gets home, he'll wanna have a conversation with you. So this dad was, knowing this day was coming, he knew that he had to be ready. And so he took the boy and said, tomorrow we're gonna go and, you and I, we're gonna take a walk out by the river, just the two of us." And the next day he did just that. He got the boy, they walked by the river and he told him everything the father had rehearsed in his mind he needed to say to his son in order to answer the big questions of where he came from. He hardly took a breath in the entire presentation.

The end of it, he looked at the boy and he said, son, do you have any question? The boy looked at him and said, Dad, I was asking which hospital was I born in? And so, be sure you know the question you're answering. The question I have been asked tonight is the question, how are Christian families to respond to the sexual revolution? It's such a massive question and such an incredible challenge.

Reference has been made already to Ephesians chapter five, but I want to point particularly to three verses in Ephesians chapter five, and they're often neglected because they're in the middle of other parts that we get to more often and cite more frequently. Ephesians chapter five, verses 15, 16, and 17. Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of God is." Now, you know, this is in between other arguments Paul is making and you understand that Paul's rhetorical style is that when he reaches the end of one of his epistles there is an increasing velocity in the arguments that he is making and that's typical. You begin as Paul so often begins with a salutation and then after the greeting he almost always plunges deeply into a theological theme that is the occasion, at least the first occasion of his writing of the letter.

But here as he writes to the church at Ephesus and by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, this means the Holy Spirit is writing this letter through Paul to us, you have in chapter 5, Paul's exhortation to walk in love, and you have even in that opening passage of chapter 5, a warning against sexual immorality as you see there in verse three, but sexual immorality in all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you as is proper among saints. He goes on with words of exhortation. Walk, he says in verse eight, as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true, and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. And then what follows, even as there's that exhortation we've already heard tonight to what it means for Christians to speak to one another, to sing to one another in songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. And then you have the instructions, the so-called household codes of Ephesians.

But notice that in between you have these verses, look carefully then how you walk. And the next words, not as unwise but as wise, that's our goal isn't it? That's our goal, to walk as wise, not as the unwise. And then he says, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. We have to think about that for just a moment.

Let's work at the end, because the days are evil. That's helpful for us to know because that isn't addressed to 2019 as if this is when that happens. Paul's writing about the age that the Ephesians were living in and he writes about that age as being an evil age And then you ask the question, well when did it become evil? And the answer is not in Ephesians 5, but in Genesis 3. So here is one illusion that we have to forfeit together as God's people seeking to be faithful tonight.

We have to forfeit the idea that at any time in human existence after the fall it has been anything other than an evil age. Now we need to keep that in mind because if we are not careful, evangelical Christians in the United States will think of even fairly recent history as a golden age lost. It wasn't. It wasn't golden, even though in one sense it has been lost. The present evil age is every minute from the fall and Adam and Eve eating of the fruit of the tree that was forbidden until Jesus comes and rules the nations judging them with a rod of iron, until Jesus' kingdom comes in full.

Until then, it's an evil age. Now that again is helpful, and one of the things that the Apostle Paul was saying to the Ephesians is something that American Christians and American Christian families need to hear. Even as we're just beginning tonight, just think about this. We are not to look to this age as the source or the affirmation or the reinforcement of a biblical understanding of truth, of goodness, and of beauty. We're not to look to the world to give us any assistance whatsoever in raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And that is a wake-up call because I dare say, I don't think that my godly Christian parents thought in those terms. I was born in 1959, 60 years ago this past Saturday. I shocked one of my students the other day when I said, when I was born Dwight David Eisenhower was president of the... I might as well have said James Madison. Dwight David Eisenhower was a very different age.

And the Lord in his sovereign mercy had me born to two wonderful, faithful Christian parents. And they did raise me in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but they also had me involved in just about everything. I went to the public school every day of my life as a child. It was not even a part of the conversation, that there would be any other option. And nor was there at that time any serious thought amongst evangelical Christians, especially in the south, that that could be even an issue.

And when my parents handed me over to the school, They weren't handing me over to the adversary culture. They were handing me over to what in the wildest extreme was a Sunday school teacher in some other church. The range of religious and worldview diversity in my neighborhood when I grew up was that it included such exotic belief systems as the Methodists and the Presbyterians. It was a different age. Now again, it was an evil age in its own way.

It has always been ruled over by Satan, but it was a different kind of age, and there was this sense of security and safety, and even as the issue of the public schools has been raised, just think about the fact that what is deeply ingrained in many American Christians is that we are just one vote or one school board away from regaining control. We never had it. We're not about to get it because once Caesar has it he doesn't give anything up. And then I was a Boy Scout. That's an anachronism.

That was back when the Boy Scouts were scouts and knew what a boy was. And oh, no, I'm serious. They're not the Boy, they're the Scouts, or Scouting USA now. It's lost, it's gone. But it wasn't gone then.

They could hand me over to the Boy Scouts. They didn't have to worry anything bad was gonna happen to me. I didn't have anything but wonderful, godly, God honoring experiences of Boy Scout, probably because the Boy Scout troop was sponsored by my local Baptist church. And I was a royal ambassador. If you're Baptist here, you know where the RAs were?

It was the boys. It was basically scouting for Southern Baptist boys. I was in it. It was the same men with the same boys in the same room, but we were a red kerchief on Thursday night because that was Boy Scouts, Royal Ambassadors was Wednesday night, it was the same people in the room. I was not raised in the sense that we were surrounded by an adversary culture.

But here's what we need to recognize, that was an illusion and it actually was a tremendous seduction. We're on the other side of something that happened, a huge seismic shift, a shift in the landscape, kind of like a tear in the entire fabric of the cosmos. Something happens, something is between 1959 and 2019 that means it's a completely different world. And this process of social change that is now at warp speed, it didn't begin in 1959. Henry James, the great American novelist, writing at the turn of the century, of the last century, in 1905, he said that a boy born in the year 2000 would have more in common, excuse me, he said a boy that was born in 1905 would have more in common with Moses than he would with a boy born in the year 2000.

There's a lot of perception there. In other words, a boy that was born in 1905 was sharing a world in which he would have more commonality with Moses. He knew that vast change was coming and that vast change is now reshaping everything and far beyond even what was imaginable just, say, five or ten years ago. Well, how do we think about this? Just a brief amount of time tonight, I want us to try to think about this before, because one of the things we have to address when we talk about the sexual revolution is a before and after.

So what was before in order that a changed situation is after? Careful thinking, and we're called to careful thinking as Christians, we have to say what was before and what was after. If there was a sexual revolution it changed something, it changed the rules of something, it reshaped the understanding of something. So what was this set of rules, what was the understanding that was repudiated and overthrown in order to declare a sexual revolution to liberate humanity? Well let's just go backwards, let's go backwards in time for just a moment.

Let's ask the question, What did the world look like before the sexual revolution? It was not a world without adultery and fornication, but it was a world in which people knew what those terms meant. It was a world in which marriage was defined as the union of a man and a woman, and that wasn't new. Let's just take a snapshot of the world, say in 1959. You'll forget my hubris, it was the year I was born.

Let's take a snapshot of our world in 1959. Guess what? No government on planet Earth defined marriage as allowing any two people of the same sex to claim to be married. Not only was it non-existent, it was not imaginable. Not only that, if you go back to 1959 and then you rewind history back to Moses and then you go behind Moses even into the earliest epic of biblical history.

From that time forward until the sexual revolution every single human society that survived any amount of time came to regulate sexual morality in terms of the institution of marriage as a monogamous union of a man and a woman, and the recognition of the family as the mother and the father and their offspring by natural birth and by adoption. Every single civilization on earth found its way to that. Now again, we have a theology that explains that. A creator who gave, who embedded his image in the entire world, common grace, explains how even people who did not know God came to understand marriage. Will and Ariel Durant and their multi-volume history of Western civilization make the point.

They said the first task of every civilization is to bank the river of human sexual passion. That's the first responsibility of every society is to bank the river of human sexual passion because if that river is not banked you can't have society, you can't have civilization, it's just chaos. The first professor of sociology at Harvard University, you're surprised I cite him, it's because he was a very wise man. His name was Piterim Sorokin. He was an emigre who fled the Soviets.

He came and found a teaching position at Harvard, became the founder of the Department of Sociology at Harvard, And one of the points that he makes is that the first task of every civilization is to reproduce. If you don't have a next generation, your civilization doesn't survive. But the second task is, again, to restrain sexuality, to order and regulate sexuality. Because even at Harvard, in the midpoint of the 20th century at Harvard University, the head of the Department of Sociology said, unless marriage as the union of a man and a woman is respected, civilization is impossible. That was Harvard in the 1950s.

John Howard gave an address several years ago on the anniversary of World War II, it was actually then the 50th anniversary, and he said, speaking of World War II, from the vantage point of 1995, he said World War II was then a half century and an entire civilization ago. I think he sensed what he meant. It was a half century, but it's an entire civilization to go. We now inhabit a civilization that immorality, a completely different understanding of authority, a completely different understanding of family, even a completely different understanding of sex and gender, and it's not by accident. Every society has in its own way codified marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

Every society has implied sexual restriction and the rights that exist only between those married couple, the man and the woman. Every society has recognized that those children that come from that couple, that they are considered to be the responsibility and the privilege of that couple, and thus to establish a family which the entire civilization is to respect, a zone of intimacy that the state dare not invade, the language used in the early 20th century was that the family, meaning the parents and their children, that that home was to be a haven in a heartless world. It's a haven no more. Not according to the society's definition. So, what happened?

Well, when people ask when did the sexual revolution happen, you can say again, where does everything bad happen? We as Christians ought to have the biblical instinct to go back and say it happens in Genesis chapter three. The beginning of the sexual revolution was when Satan asked, hath God said? But the sexual revolution we're talking about is something we can trace in history to the late 19th and the early 20th centuries and you say, well, I didn't think there was a sexual revolution then. Well, it wasn't apparent in the society yet because these kinds of moral revolutions always begin in the intellectual elites.

And then they filter their way down to the general population. And it takes a long time for that revolutionary message to filter down to the general population. And by the way, you can't have a sexual revolution without the decline of belief in the God of the Bible. You can't have it. And so when you look at the rise of the sexual revolution, it comes at the very same time that Matthew Arnold in Britain was talking about the sea of faith, the receding tides of Christian belief.

And it was found in the same people. It was the people who were the new secular-minded who were also the sexual revolutionaries. But they didn't want it to happen everywhere. If you've seen Downton Abbey, or you know what I'm talking about when I say Downton Abbey, you've seen this. It was the people who had money and prestige who believed that they were above the rules but didn't want everybody else to be above the rules.

So you had playwrights and authors and others in the late 19th and especially in the early 20th centuries who were living licentious lives outside of marriage and outside of the moral norms that everybody else was to live by. But it doesn't stay in the elites. How does this kind of thing get filtered down? It gets filtered down most directly through higher education. It gets filtered down because you have these ideas that are held by an academic elite, and they reproduce themselves.

And I don't mean biologically. I mean academically. They reproduce themselves. They have their doctoral students, and they decide who gets elected, and who gets hired, and who gets tenure, and who gets to teach. And the adversary culture showed up there before it showed up just about anywhere else.

It shows up in the arts and it shows up in academia before it shows up somewhere else. In the late 19th century, you already had artists who were extremely well-known, celebrity artists who were way outside of the Christian understanding of sexuality and marriage and then you had the academics and then before you know it you know that the art becomes more mainstream with its moral messaging and the ideas become more mainstream. Hold that for a moment when you think about how this happens. So this is a little footnote, footnote. These are free.

Years ago, I came across an article. A research report had come out saying that, you know, again you look at the map of America, the red states and the blue states, okay? The red states more conservative, the blue states more liberal. A study had come out, fascinating study, saying that The birth rate in the red states is significantly higher than the birth rate in the blue states. It doesn't take much ability in world view analysis to figure that out, okay?

So, some of the people in the blue states were panicking, saying, we're going to run out of people. But a professor at Northwestern University, writing to his fellow blue state people, said, Don't worry. We'll let those people in the suburbs with their minivans and SUVs give birth to these little ones and raise them because eventually we will get them. They will drive up with their SUV and put that young man or that young woman on the curb and then their hours. That's how this happens.

This is how this gets filtered down. And they produce the people who become the Supreme Court justices, they produce the people who become the political leaders, they produce the people who graduate from the elite law schools. And you'll notice that right now on the United States Supreme Court, there are only less than a handful of law schools that are represented and basically just two, Harvard and Yale. You control those law schools, you just control the United States Supreme Court, at least to some extent. And when you don't, you're frustrated because having controlled those law schools, you think you also should be able to control the people who graduate from them.

That's how this gets mainstreamed. And then you have popular culture. Popular culture trails behind it with Hollywood and the entire the entire cultural production system and then it becomes mainstreamed and that's why if you just I would love to write a book sometime except I would have to watch the Disney movies if I were going to write the book, but I would like to write a book sometimes about how the world and the moral changes we have experienced can be explained by Disney princesses. Some of you know what I'm talking about. This is an entire new moral worldview.

And you can just track it because we're not talking about prehistoric Disney drawings on a cave in France. We're talking about just a few decades here. So the moral revolution, the sexual revolution began, and it began with the elites, and then it became more mainstreamed, but it took some time. What were the signposts? I want to talk about nine signposts in the sexual revolution.

I know what time it is. I will not take on with all nine of these, but I think you'll be able to understand how the sexual revolution happened. What is the most significant barrier to a sexual revolution? What is the most significant barrier to a sexual revolution? What has just by common grace, not by divine special revelation, not by the word of God, not by the Christian gospel, but what has by common grace prevented a sexual revolution until very recently?

Well actually, babies. I was waiting for one to cry, hoping one would volunteer some witness here and because this room is gloriously full of them. You can't have a sexual revolution if sex means babies. For several reasons. Babies, first of all, cry out, somebody had sex.

Secondly, babies cry out responsibility. And then babies cry out for an explanation, and then babies demand the attention to be raised. And so The first signpost of the sexual revolution was birth control and contraception. You could not have a moral revolution, you couldn't have a sexual revolution until you break the bond between conjugal relations and reproduction. You have to break the bond between sex and procreation or you can't have a revolution.

That's why you need to understand that the arrival of modern contraception, even the pill, it didn't come merely by dispassionate scientific and medical experimentation, it came by the devoted investment and attention of leading feminists and others who were determined to find a way to prevent babies from being the consequence of sex. They weren't very successful for a very long time. But early in the 20th century, they began to think they might have success. Do you know that until the 1920s, not one single church or denomination affiliated with Christendom affirmed the morality a birth control? Not one.

Not one church or denomination failed up until the 1920s to say that birth control was an interference in God's created order. The first denomination to do so was the Anglican Communion in 1929's Lambeth Conference. And even then it was just one. But the dam broke. And once you have contraception and the contraception revolution, then you can have a sexual revolution.

And notice how this happens in law. When did the Supreme Court begin to invent new rights of sexual and intimate privacy? In the mid-1960s, and the first two decisions had everything to do with contraception and birth control. The Griswold case. Against the state of Connecticut.

The state of Connecticut said that birth control was not legal. Isn't that a world ago? I was alive then. I didn't have a clue what birth control was, but I was alive then. I was five years old when the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Connecticut could not say that married couples could not use contraceptive technologies.

Married couples, that's all that case said. But it invented a new right to privacy. Justice William O. Douglas just invented a right to privacy, saying it was in the Constitution. And again, that is one of the great facilitators of the sexual revolution.

That same logic, just within two years, came back by the Supreme Court to say, well, if you can't forbid married couples to have access to contraception, then you can't prevent unmarried persons from having access to contraception. You see how the sexual revolution now becomes facilitated? You have the technology that arrives because it's demanded and the money is provided for it, and modern medicine with all the good things it brings like antibiotics and antiseptics. It also comes with a way to facilitate a sexual revolution and then arrives a Supreme Court ready to facilitate a sexual revolution by its own decisions And the decisions we just talked about on contraception in the 1960s paved the way for the other signpost, which is abortion. With abortion on demand legalized by the Supreme Court in 1973.

The logic of those who argued for abortion, for the right of a woman to kill the unborn life within her, you talk about a break in the cosmos. Those who made the argument made the argument that men are not shackled with the consequences of pregnancy by sexual activity, so women to be equal also must not be shackled to the realities of pregnancy as a result of sexual activity. Now, one of the things we're going to look at in just a minute is, that's a denial of the order of creation. It's a denial of the fact that pregnancy in the Bible is something that is to be celebrated, but within the context of marriage. Another significant signpost, and many Christians don't think about this, was the invention of adolescence.

Please write that one down, the invention of adolescence. Now, I'm not saying that people didn't go through puberty before the invention of adolescence. They did. But adolescence in the 20th century became elongated as a period of life, this massively long and still lengthening transition between childhood and adulthood, and you can't have a sexual revolution without the invention of adolescence. Because in adolescence, What you're saying is, here are people who should be quickly moving into the responsibility of marriage and parenthood and adulthood, but now we're going to redefine the normal experience as slowing that down.

Oh, and let's decide we're going to put them together in adolescent factories we're going to call high schools. So you realize there was nothing like a community high school in the 19th century in most communities. That was a 20th-century development, and that helped to concretize adolescents. And then we made college. I'm a college president, I'm for college.

Please, just don't tweet. He's against college. I'm for college. But I'm not for college as an extension of adolescence. But by the time you had the normative experience expected to be high school and college, then you have an extension of adolescence, which means physical capacity without moral responsibility.

And that means that, of course, you have to redefine sexual morality because you got lots of people that, for economic reasons, you don't want married yet who are not not having sexual relations, they're not sexually inactive. And so the development of adolescence, and so that's why you have all these movies and all these, I mean, people did not make movies about, well, they didn't make movies, Forget that, that doesn't make any sense. Teenagers were rarely the center of the story in major works of literature throughout human history. Romeo and Juliet would be an exception, and that was actually to get to the dynamic between the two families. But I mean, you didn't have teenage comedies in the 17th century.

For one thing, adolescence was expected to be so short that the kid basically is able to be a father, and guess what? He is a father. He's married very quickly, And so a young man and a young woman who are barely young men and young women, I can remember reading this, just the church historian in me, I was doing a study on Reformation theology in Johann Sebastian Bach, and I happened to come across a letter that Bach wrote to parents of the boys in his boy choir, okay, in Leipzig. And he wrote a letter saying, as you know, most of their voices will break about age 17. He hadn't been to any eighth grade that I've been in lately, or ninth grade.

In other words, puberty's happening earlier. Why is it happening earlier? Because we now know it's triggered by body weight, and it's also now coming earlier because kids don't have mumps and measles and other things that had delayed puberty. So if he's worried about voices breaking in 17, realize most of those young men were married by 19. How long was adolescence?

Not long. And very tightly supervised. The invention of adolescence is a huge, huge issue. And of course, now it's being extended into what we now call emerging adulthood. That's what the sociologists call it.

You know the problem with emerging adulthood? They don't emerge. They end up living in boxer shorts in their mother's basement. It's pathetic, but you have this extension of adolescence, it's still being extended, but the point is that the society at large began very early to give up on trying to enforce sexual morality in this period of extended adolescence. So in the 1950s, colleges had what were called parietal rules, the college as in loco parentis felt its responsibility is to keep boys and girls separate and to monitor sexual activity.

The revolution of the 60s meant all that's gone. Another signpost was divorce. You can't have a sexual revolution without divorce. And Again, it's hard to imagine this, but if you rewind history to the year I was born in 1959, it was almost impossible to get a divorce in the United States of America. In order to get a divorce, you had to prove in court a breaking of the marital covenant, and that was actually quite difficult to prove.

You couldn't use divorce as a way to get out of what you might define as a loveless marriage or an unfulfilling marriage. You couldn't get a divorce. Now, that meant that if you did get a divorce, you would have to go in and prove adultery or another covenant-breaking crime. And thus came the revolution called no-fault divorce. It was as if to say, no one's going to have to be found at fault.

We'll just agree as a society that we're gonna see marriage now as a temporary commitment that exists in so far as both people want to be divorced. Do you know that right now, I know you guys know this, and right now in most of our states, a husband can find himself divorced from his wife without him ever consenting even to the idea of a divorce, and often cut off from any contact with his own children. Divorce on demand and divorce with no fault, which, by the way, was argued for on humane grounds, the sexual revolution was often adopted by people not thinking well and buying into the wrong arguments about what it meant to Be kind. You know who signed one of the worst of these laws was Ronald Reagan as governor of California. He had been heartbroken by a divorce he had experienced.

He was horrified by what happened to his children in the midst of that, and as governor, he signed a no-fault divorce law. That's the wrong definition of being kind. The subversion of marriage as a stable institution has led to more grief and disaster, more evil in the lives of children and of abandoned spouses than just about anything imaginable. And by the way, much of the argument was made by feminists, but the primary people who are left impoverished and Wounded by divorce are women and children abandoned by men who are very glad to seize a sexual revolution. Feminism itself was another one of these signposts.

And in particular, second wave feminism, first wave feminism came basically demanding the right to vote, the right of the franchise. And again, it's interesting to remember how recently that came. We're only looking at about a hundred years ago in the United States. And the assumption was, up until that time, in most of Western civilization, and here in the United States, that the basic unit of society was a family unit and that the father represented the family. And thus, the father would vote.

And by the way, now, you've got articles appearing all over the place, especially from the left, arguing that teenagers should be able to vote. I mean, everybody should be able to vote. There are even some of them arguing that non-citizens should be allowed to vote. But the point is that we have shifted massively from when the family was understood at the center of society and the father as the paterfamilias would would speak and vote for the family. It's a very different thing.

But that was first wave feminism. It was second wave feminism that really brought the sexual revolution as we know it. Second wave feminists like Betty Ferdan who described the family, the nuclear family, father, mother, children, and she parried it in this sterile suburban conduct. She said that for women, the family is a domestic concentration camp. Gloria Steinem was mentioned.

She famously said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. It's a memorable line, but she got married later in life, so I guess that fish needed a bicycle. But nonetheless, I'm going to let that go. But the second wave feminists made the argument that marriage is itself an oppressive, heterosexual marriage. And we can't even in this mixed company go into some of the arguments the feminists made, but basically they argued that the marital bond was a form of sexual assault itself and that the limitation of sex to marriage privileged men because in that equation men would always be more powerful than women.

So second wave feminism saw the family. And children, again, children are now a fashion accessory in the minds of many people. They're a status symbol. And again, it couldn't be that way without the birth control revolution because everybody had babies. Every married couple had babies unless there were some, in other words, the norm, obviously there were people who had infertility and other things, but the norm was if you get married very quickly, you've got babies.

And if you stay married and healthfully married, you're gonna have baby after baby after baby after baby. Which also, by the way, meant that you couldn't really have extended adolescence in the same sense. Extended adolescence only works when you have fewer children and they become projects rather than extended families because if you have a large family, guess what? The 13-year-old becomes a babysitter. And there's a family project in raising children and the little brothers and little sisters.

Anyway, that's footnote number 41, again they're free. But then that set the stage for what would come sixth, and that would be the Gay Rights Revolution. Now I know that's an anachronism, but that's what it was called when it emerged, the gay rights movement. The argument was that if the sexual bond no longer is defined by marriage as the union of a man and a woman, And if marriage is now something that is temporary and not permanent, then it can't be at the center of society. And if the family is no longer mandated and respected by the law as the centerpiece of society, then there is no reason that Someone should be called morally deviant even if their sexual attraction or activity is directed to someone of the same sex.

And that's, by the way, when the word sex meant male or female. And the argument got very little traction. It got very little traction for a very long time. And I'm gonna argue it got very little traction because common grace meant that so long as most people were getting married and staying married and having children, you couldn't have a gay rights revolution. I will argue that you could only have a gay rights revolution when you had a retreat of marriage and a subversion of the family, and you had a thinning out of family responsibilities and parenthood such that sexual relatedness just became a matter of lifestyle choice.

And if it's lifestyle choice, and there's no absolute right and absolute wrong because you also can't have this. Again, it's the secularization of the culture. You can't have the gay rights movement if you understand the Bible to be the Word of God. You can't. But the gay rights movement began to gain steam in the 1990s, driven by the same kind of logic.

It borrowed the arguments from the civil rights movement, and it borrowed the lessons learned by second wave feminism and applied it, but it didn't stay the gay rights movement. By the time you reach, just say, 15 years ago, the gay rights movement is now LGB, and then T, and then Q, and then I, and then A. And of course the big letter coming is P, but we'll talk about that in just a moment. But the gay rights movement is assigned to us, and the success of the LGBTQ movement, and just think of its successes, Just think of Supreme Court decisions. Lawrence v.

Texas, 2003. The Windsor decision, 2013. Obergefell mandating that every state must recognize same-sex marriage in 2015. Draw a direct line to Beto O'Rourke standing in that CNN town hall just a few days ago saying that he is ready, if elected president of the United States, to move to strip the tax exemption from not only Christian institutions, organizations, ministries, and schools, but churches. I want you to notice something.

No major democratic candidate has walked that back in any significant way. He was just saying out loud the direction that they're all moving. Little footnote here, by the way, and this is footnote 114. There are people who say, look, we should not worry about the tax exemption. I just want you to remember what John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the United States said rightly, the power to tax is the power to destroy.

If that tax exemption is released, they will tax Christians and Christian churches and Christian schools into non-existence or into compliance with the regime. But the LGBTQ revolution, the gay rights revolution, I mean, without going into detail, again, we know what we're talking about here. This was the legitimation of what no society throughout human history had ever officially sanctioned as legitimate. There were people given to such sin and such sinful activity throughout all of human history we can imagine, but no society made it legitimate. Not only that, in the year 2010, not one society on planet Earth in history had defined marriage as being a man and a man or a woman and a woman.

Samuel Alito in the oral arguments for the Obergefell case, Justice Alito held up a smartphone and he said, same sex marriage as illegal reality is newer than this. But now we're being told that we are to comply as a society. Forced and coerced compliance is now coming in. The Solicitor General of the United States, when he was asked by Chief Justice Roberts and by Justice Alito if same-sex marriage's legalization would mean that Christian colleges would have to change their rules concerning hiring and admissions and housing, he said, quote, it will be an issue, end quote. That's President Obama's Solicitor General.

Well, guess what? It is an issue. And just in case we didn't think it was an issue, former Congressman O'Rourke helped us to understand what an issue it now is. The next signpost, the seventh being the LGBTQ revolution, the next signpost was the denial of sex, which means male and female as given. Now, I want to admit to you something very personal.

This is, for me, the hardest to explain. I think I can intellectually trace the developments that led to the previous signpost. I have a very difficult time explaining how in my own lifetime, no, not in my lifetime, in less than a third of my lifetime, no, in less than a sixth of my lifetime, this has now become the new cultural orthodoxy. This morning on the briefing, I talk about a seven-year-old boy whose father has now been stripped basically of parental rights and the mother has been authorized in the state of Texas to continue with puberty hormone, or actually to continue supervision and to allow puberty suppression hormones because the boy now identifies as a girl. That's lunacy.

I mean, you know that. It's insanity. And by the way, one of the points I made on the briefing this morning is I don't think most of the people arguing for this actually yet believe it. Evidence of that is the fact the mainstream media would not touch that news story. If they really believed in what they were saying, then why wouldn't they put that news story out?

Why wouldn't the Washington Post be talking about it? Why wouldn't the New York Times be talking about it? Because I don't think they want to be loud about this yet. They really didn't want Beto O'Rourke saying out loud what he said out loud. I don't think they really wanted this said loudly in Texas yet.

But mark my words, they'll be saying it loudly very, very quickly. And by the way, another footnote here, the subversion of parental rights came only after the subversion of parental authority. And we are not yet seeing in any full measure the threat that is coming to us in the subversion of parental rights. We just heard, as Scott mentioned, the fact that in Orange County, California they're not letting parents opt out their kids for sexuality education. That, by the way, was a ruse because the state of California mandated that they had to allow an opt-out for sex education, so they just rebranded it as sexuality education, and the courts have upheld the fact that, oh, that's fine, parents don't have any right to interfere in that at all.

What we're looking at in the sexual revolution now is the demand that as a society we enter into the mass delusion that biology doesn't matter. Now, again, we couldn't argue that biology doesn't matter until we had redefined by birth control even the general context of sexuality. Unless we had broken procreation and sex as a unitive bond, then you couldn't have the argument that sex itself can now be a matter that is entirely a matter of self-expression. If you've heard me speak about this or talk about it on the briefing, there's an expression that I want to affirm and I want you to hear. It's big and I know it's about nine o'clock at night and these are big theological terms but I think they will help and it's a short sentence.

Ontology trumps autonomy. Ontology trumps autonomy. What in the world is that? Autonomy is reality. The biblical worldview begins with the self-existent God who exists and the existence of anything else can only be explained by the fact that he has brought it into existence by his creative will, his creative act.

So ontology is being. Ontology means, okay, ontology means this is real. That's what this is. This is wood. It's real wood.

It's not an illusion. It's real and it exists and you're real and you exist and we're sitting in a room that's real and it exists and ontology means that reality is real, okay? Autonomy means that I claim that I am the Lord of my own existence. An autonomy comes on the wake of a secular worldview. Autonomy is the great idolatrous God of so many around us and now we have people claiming that their autonomy means that even as they were born male, they are now in their autonomy and their own ability to declare their own identity, they're declaring that even though they were born male, they're now female.

But you know what, they're not. And here's the proof. The chromosome. So I was in a conversation with a transgender activist not too long ago, a couple years ago, And they said, that statement of yours, that ontology trumps autonomy, they said, what does that mean? Now the person was an advocate, this person was not transgender.

I was talking to a man who knows he's a man, but he's arguing that other men can be women. But nonetheless, he knows he's a man, and so I was talking to him, and of course he would describe himself, given the new sexual identity language, as cisgender, a word that wasn't necessary throughout most of human history, and it's only necessary now if you're insane, but nonetheless. I was talking to him and he said, what do you mean that ontology trumps autonomy? And I said, well let's just say that we have someone who was born male, born a boy, in the delivery room they looked at the child and they said, it's a boy, okay? And why do they say it's a boy?

Because it's a boy, okay? Visibly to the glory of God, this is a boy, just as visibly to the glory of God, in the next room is born a girl, okay? So in the girl room, the chromosomes that are revealed are XX, and in the boy's room where the delivery is made, the baby boy, his chromosomal structure is XY, okay? So let's say that that girl declares, oh, I don't know, at 17, that she's actually a boy. And let's say the boy declares, oh I don't know, in Texas at age seven, that he's actually a girl.

And let's say that they lived their life with society saying on the driver's license, yes, you were born a boy but you're a girl, yes you were born a girl but you're a boy. Let's say all the teachers have to conspire in order to use by coercion all the demanded pronouns. Let's say that Society says you are just as, you are just as normative and normal as anyone else. Let's say that you live the entire life, that boy who now declares himself to be a woman and that girl that now declares herself to be a man, they live their entire lives and they die and they are buried in a cemetery and the headstone says what had been Bill is now Brenda and what had been Karen is now Carl and that's on the tombstone. Guess what?

100 years later if someone comes and excavates and does a DNA test, it's gonna be XY, where XY started, and it's gonna be XX, where XX started. And by the way, it doesn't even have to be that. It could just be an X-ray. You know what a male pelvis can't do? There is no way a baby is going to be born to someone with a male skeleton.

Not going to happen. But nonetheless, again, we know that that's right. And not only that, we know that the sexual revolution can only produce brokenness and despair. Because it offers people a lie and demands that the society celebrate that lie. But the thing we need to note is that we are now at the point as a society where this is becoming the new orthodoxy.

And those of us who cannot, cannot accept this new orthodoxy, we're being defined as the enemies of human autonomy and of human flourishing and human joy. It won't stop here. The second thing that's a problem with the revolution. Revolutions don't stop. Their logic just keeps getting worked out.

And you say, well, The French Revolution stopped. Oh, did it? Did it? Have you been to France lately? The French Revolution didn't stop, it just started taking on new guises, which by the way is one of the most unstable civilizations, in moral rebellion.

Revolutions don't stop. Their logic keeps working out. The logic of the sexual revolution won't stop with LGBTQIA or whatever follows. The coming thing is clearly P for polyamory. Because if you can change marriage in its composition, you can change it in its number, which arguably is a less significant change over human history.

I mean, you at least have polygamy recorded in ancient civilizations, and even mentioned in the Bible, unlike same-sex marriage, but it's coming. And by the way, it will come without much attention to marriage. That's my prediction. It's not going to come as polygamy because we're kind of so past marriage that doesn't matter in this society. It's going to be polyamory.

So what about raising Christian families, raising Christian children in the midst of this sexual revolution? I just want to remind us as Christians that what this is gonna take is thick Christianity. Now when I say thick Christianity, I want you to think with me for a minute. This is a philosophical term. It comes from Michael Walzer with Just Worth Theory.

You don't need to know that. It's late, forget that. The point is, Michael Walzer said there are two different forms of argument, thin argument and thick argument. Thin argument is superficial, thick argument is substantial. His point was that only thick argument survives to a second generation.

So forget just war theory and think about biblical faith. Just think about it. Think about Christianity. It takes thick Christianity to survive under these conditions to the next generation. A little bit of Christianity is not going to be passed on to your children.

A little bit of Christianity is not going to survive in your churches. A little bit of Christianity is not going to have binding moral authority. It's going to take the full weight of biblical conviction. It's going to take a comprehensive biblical theology. It's gonna take the knowledge of scripture.

It's going to take hearts and minds and souls who are submissive to the Lord Jesus Christ and submissive to the authority of scripture. It's going to take the development of a comprehensive Christian identity that works its way out in an ecclesial reality known as the church and works its way out in the intuitions and patterns of life that becomes second nature to Christians because by the Lord's will they conform us to the image of Christ. Three big things to think about, creation order, New Covenant theology, and the means of grace. Just very quickly, we as Christians have to think in essentially theological categories. The answer to raise our children cannot be sociological, it can't be psychological, it can't be therapeutic, it's got to be theological.

And the first thing to say is creation order. So we begin with a biblical worldview and a biblical theology that starts in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and in the understanding that in creation an order is revealed that is not only for the glory of God, it is also for the flourishing of humanity. And so violating that creation order can never under any circumstance be right, every single violation is in every case wrong. So creation order, and you say, well, why do we have to talk about that? Because if our children are not grounded in the reality and the glory of God's creation order, then they will not be faithful in resisting the sexual revolution.

What does it mean? Do you recognize the very first time that the image of God is mentioned in Genesis 1, 27, it is mentioned with the categories of male and female. In his image created he them, male and female created he them. So how quickly does God tell us in his word that his perfect plan for humanity comes down to that, oh here's a word we're supposed to shiver at now, binary. Male and female.

Right in the beginning, chapter one of the book. And so we're grounded in creation, which points to God's sovereignty. You can't have creation, which is one of the reasons why you can't have any theology that begins to minimize God's sovereignty if you're stuck with the biblical account of creation. If you've got the biblical account of creation, then guess what? God is sovereign.

Capital S, sovereign. That was footnote 213. But nonetheless, you look at this, creation order is just vitally important. Creation order means we have to teach our children the storyline of Scripture and we have to make clear that we mean this is exactly what took place in space and time and history. It happened in just this way.

Here's how God loves us and has told us this. And behind creation order is the basic twin theological axiom that God is and He speaks. So our entire worldview begins with the fact that God is and he speaks. The man who clarified this for me when I was a teenager in a way that was so helpful was Francis Schaeffer, his book, He Is There and He Is Not silent. I hung my life on those two sentences, those two statements, for a long time.

And as I was trying to understand Christian theology, I was trying to understand apologetics, I was confronted with vast challenges when I was a teenager, atheist teachers and agnostic friends for the first time in my life, I realized that I wanted to know more than anything else if God exists and if he speaks. Because if God exists and he speaks, guess what? He's God and this is his word. And his word reveals creation order. And by the way, here's one of the other things to note.

The sexual revolution is not a modification of creation order, it is a denial of creation order. Because if we recognize creation order, then we recognize that in creation, God has revealed, as Romans 1 tells us, even his invisible attributes so that they are clearly seen. So there's no one who has an excuse. And again, I point out when I teach systematic theology, this is why A, you don't have to teach your children to sin, and this is B, why they hide when they've done things they haven't been told are wrong yet. And you know what I'm talking about.

You haven't yet cataloged everything to tell your three-year-old not to do. And if your three-year-old's not the normal three-year-old, they're going to invent things you don't even know to tell them not to do yet. But you'll notice that your three-year-old does something that he has not been yet told is against your command, and he hides himself. Why? Because written on his heart is the knowledge that he has just sent.

So creation order comes with a sexuality order, it comes with male and female, It comes with marriage because as you note in Genesis 2, that is made abundantly clear, but it was already ordered in Genesis 1. Not only is it male and female created in them, but then there is the mandate to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and that's going to take both of them and by the way it still does it still does I was told the other day about a couple in my town in Louisville and it said there are two lesbians married to each other and the baby has no father. Yes, the baby does! Genetically have a father. That cell may have been bought by a catalog or in the internet, but there is a cell there somewhere.

There's a male gamete there somewhere. But you notice again, it's going to take the affirmation of a thick argument of creation order. Second, New Covenant theology. It's gonna take just really clear affirmation of the gospel which is not just transactional as in you believe this and you'll be saved and given the gift of everlasting life, it is the gospel in its comprehensiveness and it means the gospel in all its particulars. It means the full weight of Christology, the full weight of atonement.

It means penal substitutionary atonement. It means explaining the cross. It means double imputation. It means an alien righteousness. It means justification by faith alone.

Because if we treat the gospel as anything other than that, and we make it just a matter of transactionalism, That's the thinness we're talking about. A little bit of atonement theology won't work. It takes the full conviction of scripture. That's why, by the way, the Christians who show up in church increasingly are going to be seriously theological, because if they're not, they're not gonna show up. Especially when it comes to raising our families.

So the father and the mother have a responsibility. Every father is the prime theologian in his family. He's the theologian in residence of his family. And the responsibility is to create little theologians who are able, even in the youngest ages, to offer not just thin, even right responses, but as they grow into critical thinking, especially in early adolescence and throughout the adolescent years, they have got to be able to offer on their own thick arguments. And of course they've got to see it lived out.

They've got to see it lived out in their own parents. They have to see it lived out in their own home. But third, it takes the means of grace. And just for the sake of time, I'm moving quickly to this. And the means of grace here, I mean by this to point to the congregation of God's people, the gathered people of Christ.

And the means of grace, most importantly, the preaching of the word of God and the ordinances of the church. But in the larger scheme, the means of grace being the entire structures of what God gives us in the church, including the fellowship of fellow believers, the gathering together of worship by God's command and grace. Here's something I want to say just based on my own pastoral experience, my experience being president of a seminary and a college. Because I spend so much of my time not only on my campus but on other campuses, I'll tell you this. I would not have known to say this 30 years ago, but I know to say it now.

The most crucial transition, parents, in your child's life is when they leave your home. You know that already. But what I'm going to say is, the most urgent issue should be, where are they now going to go to church? Because the chain is most often broken when it's broken at that point. If a child moving into adulthood, going off to college, doing whatever is the next step into adulthood, and moving, perhaps, going into the military, doing anything, going somewhere else, the big question is where is their new church identity and how secure is that new church identity because if that chain is broken then it is extremely unlikely that it is relinked.

On the other hand I can tell you that if that chain is kept in order and intact. In my experience, it's very rare that it's later broken. And I think a lot of parents don't think about this. I have so many Christian parents, I'll say, you know, where is, you know, where's Henry now? Or, you know, where's Karen now?

And they'll say, this college or that college, this university, and I'll say, where do they go to church? And they'll say, well they're still kinda looking for a church. Oh yeah. Yeah, they're gonna be looking for a church when they're 31 and not even going to church. This is where that's just so important, the means of grace, the ecclesiology, the ecclesial shape of the Christian life is so important.

Now, when I mention New Covenant theology, the other thing I want to mention is we have to focus on regeneration to the extent that we should not expect unconverted, unregenerate people to hold to a biblical morality, because there's no cultural reason for them to do so. So the only people who are going to hold to a biblical morality are those who believe the Bible to be the Word of God and themselves to be God's redeemed people, and those who have experienced conversion and regeneration by the sovereign grace of God, and thus their hearts are opened, whereas otherwise their hearts would have been continually resistant to the word of God. So that means we've got to keep a focus on the gospel. We should not expect our unregenerate children to live like servants and followers and disciples of Christ. Nor should we expect non-Christian people to do it because even though the society used to hold up Christian morality as the expectation without Christian doctrine, that's no longer the case.

Now Christian doctrine having been abandoned, Christian morality is being abandoned. Very quickly, this means that we have to teach our children biblical theology, yes teach them the scripture, yes have them memorize the scripture, but again, help them with thick argument to know how to argue from the scripture in biblical theology. Well I must bring this to a close. Let me just mention a couple of honest words. Raising our children in the midst of the sexual revolution is not avoidable.

There's no safe place. There's no safe place. My family background, several generations back, is Amish. It's easy for me to think if we were just back on a farm with a horse and a buggy, things would be easier. But you know what?

Those Amish farms are surrounded by the same America as you and I live in. There's no place safe from the sexual revolution. It's unavoidable. And then next, it's not going away. I hear Christians who think, If we could just win more elections, we can resolve this.

But the problem is that no election has yet brought any correction on anything since the sexual revolution began. I'm not saying it doesn't matter who's president. It does matter who's president. Trust me, it matters who's president. But no political party and no president has pressed back fundamentally in any way that has regained ground since that Griswold decision in the Supreme Court in the 1960s.

Now, there are presidents who would accelerate the revolution, And I certainly pray to keep them from office, but we're not just a couple of votes or elections away from winning this thing. It's because the fundaments of society have shifted. And just as I said, we can't expect the unregenerate to live like the regenerate. We can't expect a secular culture to live by any logic other than a secular logic. And you know what that is.

And then finally, this is not something merely out there that threatens us, it's in here. Which is to say, we as Christians come to understand that the sexual revolution didn't begin in Hollywood, and the sexual revolution didn't begin in the Supreme Court. The sexual revolution actually begins in the human heart. And the problem of the human heart is right here. And the only remedy is Christ.

One final thought. We're supposed to be joyful in the midst of this. Count it all joy. And so here's the odd thing. I have just tried to explain how horrifying the situation is.

Explain how this horrifying situation came about and tell you that you and your families are now to live out faithfulness in the midst of a horrifying reality. I have told you that there is an enemy out there trying to swallow up your children and subvert your family. I've told you, now I've told you just about everything I could say in this length of time, but let me tell you, the Bible still says that we as Christians are to count it all joy. You know what? It's going to take more of you than it took the previous generations of parents to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and you know what?

God's going to be glorified in that, and that just is going to serve in a strange way as a witness that you otherwise would not be able to give to a fallen sinful world. And you know what? We're stripped of the illusion that we're raising our children to go out into the world in a way that's friendly and comfortable. But here's the joy. We're raising our children to be subversives and spies and agents of the one true and living God and infectious vectors of the gospel in a world that so desperately needs to hear the gospel.

So let's do it and let's count it all joy. Let's pray, Father, we come before you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to confess that we are not up to this. But you are. And in this evil age, may we walk as the wise, not as the unwise. And may you show your glory in our churches and our families in this world by your grace to your glory till Jesus comes, amen.