This takes a far more diligent effort than parents of previous generations. There is an all-out assault against this in the culture and media right now and it’s likely to get worse. We shouldn’t fear anything but we must respond with wisdom. This episode will help you think through this and give insights into actions to take.

Main Points From This Episode:

• Definitions: (1) Innocence: Freedom from legal guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil: blameless, naivety, lack of knowledge, ignorance, pure and upright. (2) Protect: Keep safe from harm or injury; aim to preserve; shield from exposure.
• It’s the parent’s job to protect their children. 
• Recognize your duty to protect your children and fully implement despite what others are doing.
• Progressiveness grows slowly in Christians in response to pervasive cultural shifts over time. Don’t become progressive.
• Be Biblically minded in your choices. This will mean you are counter-cultural, even at times in Christian circles.
• Keep your children from suffering harm as much as you are able. This includes media, influences, and friends…
• Equip your children to be able to make good choices when faced with exposure to things.

Scripture From This Episode:

Nehemiah 1-4 – (Refer to the Bible)

1 Corinthians 5:9-13 – “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolator, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat. For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.”

Romans 12:2 – “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.’

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Full Transcript:

Note: This is an automated transcript and misspells or grammar errors may be present.

Welcome to Courageous Parenting Podcast, a weekly show to equip parents with biblical truth on raising confident Christian kids in an uncertain world.

Hi, I’m Angie from Courageous Mom.

And I’m Isaac from Resolute.

Man, We’ve been married for 21 years and have seen the fruit from raising our eight kids biblically. Based on the raw truth found in the Bible.

We can no longer let the culture win the hearts of children. Too many children from Christian families are walking away from their faith by age 18. And it doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. Join us as we start an important conversation about effective parenting and the following. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Hey, guys, so glad you’re here. Today. We’re talking about.

Protecting your child’s sexual innocence.

Such an important topic, a deep topic. And I think what could be more important than this right now? I mean, there’s many important things, but this is one of them, right?

I think that there’s a sensitivity to this topic. I know that Isaac and I get a lot of questions, a lot of emails, a lot of messages from people who they find their kids in precarious situations regarding influences in their life or different things, or they’re concerned that they will in the future. And so they want to be proactive in their parenting and we want to support you in that 100%. I think today’s podcast is going to be equipping. I think that it will be one that most likely, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a long time, that means that you are like minded on many different topics, most likely, and so you’ll probably be cheering and going right on. Amen. I agree with this and I hope that this is a podcast that you feel comfortable sharing. I know that Isaac and I feel super thankful every time you guys share. Give us ratings, leave comments either on iTunes or anywhere that podcasts are listened to. It’s super helpful to the ministry. But you guys, we’re doing this because we really care deeply about equipping parents. We care deeply about the souls of the parents and the children that are alive today on Earth. And, you know, this is a big, big deal because progressiveness and these woke ideologies has been seeping into the church. And really the church is on attack. And that is even showing up as a not so safe place for kids in many ways as well.

Yeah, it’s a different world in a lot of ways. We have to parent more vigilantly. We have to be aware of things. We can’t just be go along to get along. And I think everybody agrees with that. But we’re going to give some practical insights here. You know, what the enemy wants is sin normalized. And so it’s really important that we understand the battle we’re in and we see this happening all over the place. So if the trend continues, which, you know, it could get derailed, but we also know that things get worse during end times. And here we are and things are getting worse. We don’t know the timing of things. Nobody does, but we definitely see this progression happening. I think it’s fascinating times, but it’s just because something’s fascinating because we’re living out biblical history, it doesn’t mean we’re relaxed about anything. We need to be paying attention because what very well, if the trends continue, it will be so normalized that boys kiss boys and girls kiss girls and these kinds of things that even large portions of Christians will just go along. And you might even be seeing some of that right now. I know. I just want to share this one story. We were recently looking for Playmobil.

Oh, yeah. Which I’m very sad to say that we are pretty sure that Playmobil has gone woke. And so you guys know that we’re not like super legalistic when it comes to, to these things. But the truth is, is that we do try our best to vote with our dollar. We did a whole podcast on it. I also did a podcast where I interviewed the president of a company that was called Second Vote that rates like over 1800 companies. So you can go listen to those podcasts if that’s interesting to you. And what I meant by like we’re not legalistic in it is that like we don’t sweat about this, we’re not obsessing about this and like, how dare you vote? You buy something from that company Like, no, no, no, no. Like the judgment is not ours to make. We just personally feel conviction to do our best, right? And so sometimes there’s something that you can’t get anywhere else but a certain place. And I think that God has grace for that. We talk about that in that podcast. But the point being, Playmobil won’t woke because on this little date that we had with our four year old to go find him a new Playmobil toy set because this.

Is what he wanted to date. That’s what he wanted. And there’s this whole section just Playmobil.

Yeah. And you guys, it was hard to actually find a farm kit that didn’t have two moms. I’m just going to say it. It was hard. In fact, it was hard to find any Playmobil kit that had, like a man, a masculine man in it. The majority of them had all women and kids. And so.

It was you can’t really.

Tell or you can’t tell. Yeah. They’re like unidentifiable. Right? And so that was like hard for a three, four year old. That’s like trying to navigate, figure that all out.

So here we are right now, this time in history and the trend, we know where the trend is going. I think we can all agree on that. And so we’re so we really have to. Work this muscle of protection because it can easily get moved over by trying to love other people with a misunderstanding of what a full biblical love is. And so we’re going to talk about these things because things aren’t going to get easier in this category. Parents have to get better.

Yeah, I mean, that really is the that’s the mic drop right there. Things are not going to get easier. Parents have to become more biblical. So we thought that it would be interesting, though, because of our topic title, to kind of dig into a couple of definitions. We don’t do this in every podcast, but I just thought it was very interesting to look up know. Webster 1828 is actually one of my favorite dictionaries. If you don’t have one, that’s a good one to have in your home because you will refer to it many times. But we were looking up the definition online as well of the word innocence, because I think that there’s some some vagueness to this word and even misconceptions within the Christian community. I’m not going to dive into that right now. That’s not what this podcast is about, but it’s important that you know what the true definition is. So it says freedom from legal guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil. Our children unacquainted with evil will win. A baby is born. They’re pretty unacquainted with evil, right? Like we’re born into sin. We’re born into a fallen world. Yes. And the Bible says that folly is bound up in the heart of a child. That’s true. But there is this element of being naive and unacquainted with evil. And as a child grows up, they become more acquainted with the evil in the world because they’re exposed to more. Right. Which is interesting because when you continue looking at the definition of innocence, it says things like shamelessness, naivete, lack of knowledge, ignorance, pure, upright. All of these are ping words that you would find under the definition if you were to look that up. And it’s kind of fun to go look it up, actually. So I recommend that.

You do that. And the other word is protect, which is to keep safe from harm or injury. Aim to preserve shield from exposure.

In computing.

In computing, restrict access to or use of data. And you have a Latin definition.

Oh yeah, yeah, I’ll talk about that for a second. But I just thought it was interesting that like in the definition it said that there was even a like in computing and technology, there is a terminology for protect, which is to restrict access to or the use of data, which we’re going to talk about boundaries later in this podcast, obviously. But I just thought that that was super relevant for parenting today because of the increasing issue of pornography and just wayward philosophies and ideologies being completely like brainwashing kids right now. And so it’s just interesting that, you know, it’s funny, whenever I look up definitions, I go, Oh, well, that goes against the woke agenda. They’re going to have to try to get rid of the dictionary. Like it just reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.

Right. And I just want to say, hey, husbands, we are to protect our families. It is our jurisdiction. God tells us to protect our families. We’re to provide for our families. We’re to protect our families. We’re to love our families. We’re to serve our families, which is part of love providing and protecting. And so it’s so important that we are masculine men, that God made us to be that good masculinity of protecting.

Yeah, it’s funny because when I was like, looking through the different definitions of protect, I was thinking about the husband’s role in this and how many scriptures in the New Testament talk about like being the head and dying for dying yourself to protect your wife, Right? I think that’s the love. And using that as an example of how Christ died for the church and that men are to try to be that example, an image bearer for their children, for their wives.

And one of the things I think happens sometimes in the marriage relationship, this isn’t all guys. I’m not trying to throw guys under the bus. But, you know, one thing that does happen is sometimes the wife is more conservative on protecting the purity of children than the husband is. This happens sometimes, and I think that we need to be just as vigilant as the wives are. I know that might not be the case for your particular marriage, but this is something that you see. It’s like, oh, well, no, they need to you know, if they’re not exposed to things, they understand how to handle things and so forth. Well, of course, there’s ages of when kids should be aware of what’s happening in the world. But let me just tell you, we have nine kids to launch from our home and we’re now grandparents. We have a little bit of experience. And I say that because there might be some new listeners and it’s you don’t have to try to let your kids experience things or allow your kids to experience things for them to come into the knowledge that evil exists in the world. We’ve done a really good job protecting. Our kids. We’ve lived this out since they were little all the way through. And praise the Lord. Our kids are doing well in this regard.

They don’t There’s this lie out there, I think, and I don’t know where it came from. It’s a very progressive thought that in order for for someone, just a person to be able to be aware of the battle that they’re in, they need to be exposed to it or to experience it. And I just have to say that that’s a lie from the devil, because being exposed to something or experiencing something is actually the devil’s way of entangling that person in sin, because the thing that they’d be experiencing is sin. Let me just use pornography as an example. When I was a little girl, this was not something that I was like really even aware of. And I can honestly say that my parents did a really good job of protecting me from pornography. And I to this day, I’m in my my mid forties. I still have not been exposed to pornography other than what I would say. Like I would say that the Victoria’s Secret like pictures in the windows at the mall is pornography. And so of course I’ve walked by those things and gone, oh gosh, turn away, you know, But like the reality is, is that you do not have to experience it or even be exposed to it to know that it’s bad. I am living proof of that. I’m sure there are many hundreds of other people that could literally raise their hand and go, Amen, That’s me. I agree. Yeah. And so I just have to say that because you can’t protect and preserve. Honestly, when we were trying to come up with the title, it was hard to choose between those two words because I also love the concept of like trying to preserve your child’s sexual innocence. You know what I mean? Like, there is an element of understanding that that is your jurisdiction as parents. It’s not just to protect them from things, but it’s to preserve what is currently intact, which when a baby is born, what’s currently intact is that they don’t have knowledge of pornography.

Hey, let’s there’s already going to be opportunities. Even when you’re protecting that, kids are going to see something, be exposed to something, and you’ll have those conversations. We don’t want to usher things in any earlier than they need to happen. We need to make sure you have to realize normal kids out there, they’re usually exposed to pornography at age eight or nine. The studies say you can go to Josh McDowell’s ministry and find all the statistics that are crazy. It’s somewhere in the 80 to 90% of all men are regularly looking at pornography.

It’s just like a big deal, like think.

About and women are growing in their percentage. I forget what it is, but their percentage is increasing over time. So it is just so important that we realize the reality and it doesn’t really. They actually have done studies too on clergy and pastors and leaders in the stats. Don’t decrease with that group of people either.

I mean. Well, and it’s interesting, too, because you would think that being a new creation and being born again, there would be this element of like being vigilant to protect yourselves. But the devil’s out. And he’s like in the sense of like he is on the prowl, right? The Bible says he’s like a roaring lion looking to see who he can devour. All right, That’s for Peter. And we need to recognize that if we’re raising our kids to love Jesus, that they do have a target on their back. Parents have a target on their back, your marriage has a target on it. And so you need to do all you can to fight the good fight.

Well, right. So, hey, we’ve got four points for you. But real quick, I just want to say all things can be now found at B courageous ministry dot org, the podcast. Yes, plural. You’ve got to go there to figure that out. What other podcasts there are. And our shops, there’s two shops. Usually you have to go to two different websites for them, the resolute man and be courageous shops all in one place. Now you can link to them also all show notes and so forth. You can get getting to this podcast through, be courageous ministry, talk courses, book all the different things, so please go there. It also helps, by the way, if you haven’t been there yet, just go. It helps the Google optimization for more impact so people see it, so it rises up and it’s easier to find for everybody. Would you go to be courageous ministry dot org. The org is important. It is a dot org where for profit for social good ministry. And by the way, if you’re interested in the parenting mentor program, I just want to it’s the price is on sale. But if you’re listening to the podcast and you’re loving it, use extra 50 at checkout. I just gave you an extra $50 off the current sale price and so go there, check it out. The Parenting Mentor program is so important. It’s important for this topic.

So let’s get back into it. Okay. So the first point that we have is to recognize your duty. We’ve kind of mentioned that it’s parents jurisdiction. Isaacs kind of gone off on his like passion for, like fathers. You rise up and protect your family. Which I absolutely love. But I think it’s important that we recognize that this is a biblical ordination, meaning God ordained you to unapologetically rise up and be a biblical parent. So what does that mean? What does that mean today? It means that we are to protect and to preserve. And it’s interesting that we even have to say like that this is part of your duty as a Christian parent. But the truth is, is that there is a progressive like resurgence seeping into the church that is against things like they’ll be they call it the purity culture, and they’re against purity culture. And like this concept of not being there against being sexually pure. They’re for promiscuity. They’re for things that are not biblical. They’re actually for sexual immorality. If I was to just lay out that truth and it’s important that we recognize that there are people that are probably sitting within pews or in their auditoriums at many churches who have these convictions and these deep beliefs.

And you have no idea that you’re sitting and going to church with them. And so to have a realistic perspective of what people believe that you’re like taking communion with and this is important. This is important because you have to have your eyes wide open and be alert and aware in order to do your job right. So if we’re saying that one of our duties, our jobs as parents, is to protect and preserve our children’s sexual purity, and we just turn a blind eye to the truth that even within our church. And so what does that mean? If we turn a blind eye to it, then we’re just like dropping our kids off at Sunday school. We don’t even know who’s in the room with them. We don’t know who’s taking our toddlers to the bathroom when they have to go to the bathroom. We don’t know who’s changing our baby’s diapers. We have no idea if we’re turning a blind eye. And I’m bringing this up because there needs to be an awakening of courageous parents who are like, Nope, not happening on my watch, because you understand that you are held responsible by God while your kids are being raised in your home.

It is a big job to protect. It is. You don’t just automatically trust people you don’t know just because they say they’re a Christian. Right? This is so important. Don’t we want our children as they grow older to adopt that as a belief that I don’t just automatically trust somebody because anything that comes out of their mouth, anybody can say anything. It’s the fruit of somebody’s life that you can tell if you can trust them. It’s as you build relationship over a span of time that you can tell if you trust.

Trustworthy or.

Not. And so we should not be over delegate and we should not be over trusting with other people for our kids. And sometimes we’re so tired, we just want to hear the sermon. We just want to do these things and a little bit of sacrifice. But you know what? You don’t want to live in regret because you retired and we need to find a way for that marriage team to work in a way where you’re less tired. Right. And we need to find a way to hear the sermon by training our kids to sit with us. Perhaps, you know, we’re not going to tell you exactly how to do church, but that’s what we did. Our kids sat with us as we went to church.

I do think that, you know, on that particular topic, we’re not going to dive into that in depth. I think that it’s important that people understand. We’ve done a podcast on that particular episode on our take on Sunday Schools and Youth group. You can go find that it’s in this last season. It’s just a few weeks ago actually very insightful and I would highly encourage you to go listen to that. But part of what the whole point is, is to like, recognize like, are you aware, like, are you alert and are you making wise choices with who you allow to be caregivers of your small children? Are you aware and alert of who you’re allowing to be teachers and influencers in your children’s lives as they’re getting older and they’re starting to talk about things that are more deep? Are you aware and alert of who is mentoring and influencing and purposefully trying to lead your teenagers? Like, are you aware that’s the whole point? And just bringing up an example of like recognizing that just because someone calls themselves a Christian or that neighbor next door calls themselves a Christian, we don’t just go, Oh, hey, yeah, then our kids can just go over and play without us there. There’s no I’m sorry. That’s in my mind that’s dropping the ball as a parent. Like, you need to stop what you’re doing. The dishes will always be there. You need to go over and meet the parents, and then maybe you invite them to come over to your home as a whole family.

You need to start out by not just like all hands off. Yeah, kids can go play over there without supervision. Now, instead, why don’t you play together in the front yard or have the whole family over together so that you create a culture or a relationship where you’re inviting families over and you only go over, your kids only go over when you are there. Also that. Is where it needs to actually begin. That’s where the play dates need to begin. We don’t do drop off birthday parties with our four year olds. You don’t know who the older siblings are, what they have on their phones. You have no idea what kind of music is being played. You have no idea whose uncle is going to be there or aunt or like. Can I just I’m just being honest. And I know that some of this might be like, Oh, well, I never really thought about that. That’s kind of scary thought. And I hope that that, that, that’s like a I don’t want to instill fear in you, but I do want you to have the rose tinted glasses taken off and recognize that the enemy is a strategic schemer and we are in a spiritual battle for our children and we are the ones that God has called and given us parental jurisdictions and duties. And part of that is this concept.

Absolutely. And you have an awesome scripture for us in Nehemiah that I think is so relevant to this.

So it’s interesting, today we were just talking about this concept and I was reading through the beginning of Nehemiah, and it has an exhortation that I think is super important for all of us as biblical parents. If you haven’t read Nehemiah lately, I highly recommend you go read it. It’s short book in the Old Testament. It’s awesome book. Nehemiah In chapter one, he just says, I think this is important for creating a little bit of context here as I asked them concerning the Jews. So here he is. Nehemiah is talking to different people about Susa Judah. He’s talking about the Jews concerning Jerusalem who had survived the exile, and he’s talking about the wall and the wall. Jerusalem had broken down in its gates, were destroyed by fires. What verse three says in chapter one, and he just continues on. Well, the very next verse, and it’s a huge section. I’m not going to read all of it. Nehemiah, When he hears that the wall is broken down, the first thing he does is he prays, he gets on his knees and for the next like six verses, very long section, he is just crying out to God. He repents on behalf of his people, his father and his father’s home. He says, We’ve broken your commandments of God and he repents and he says, I’m he basically is like apologizing in here. And he’s saying, I recognize that we need to turn and do better and we need to obey your commandments. And then he asked God to redeem them. Right? This is literally the first thing that we should be doing as parents, like recognizing that this battle exists because too, for too long, Christians have sat on the sidelines, inactive, not standing up for biblical truth. And we’ve just been like, Oh, Harm, everything’s good. It’s not been good. Sin exists. We live in a fallen world and we need to have our eyes open on the reality.

We have to stand firm.

That is true.

That’s I wear this hat everywhere I go. And at least in Idaho, everybody loves my hat.

Oh, your stand firm hat.

It’s like people give me deals, places and discounts. I can’t believe it. It’s like this funny. It’s because people are like, yes, finally, it’s I think it resonates that we need to stand firm. We need to draw a line in the sand. Nobody is going to influence my kids negatively. They’re not going to get a chance to tarnish the future of my kids. They’re not going to win them over. Not going to be I’m not going to allow anybody to be used by the enemy to impact my kids.

You know, it’s interesting because, like, obviously our all our lives are in God’s hands and God is sovereign. And like, sometimes he allows bad things to happen to good people. And we have had horrible things happen to us. Yeah, right. I mean, we’ve experienced that. But looking back on those things, like while we would never wish them on anyone because we were we were strong in our faith and we kept leaning on Christ and running towards him in that hard time he was glorified. And because of that we learned a lot and we grew a lot. So even though we would never want to go through it again, we never wish it on anybody. We wouldn’t want to change it either because it’s part of what’s made us who we are today. And that can be that’s like the story of redemption. And so if you’re sitting, you’re listening, you’re like, Oh, I’ve already made these huge mistakes or I’ve already let the floodgates open and we’ve got like apps and we’ve got all kinds of like, we don’t have like protection on our servers or whatever. Maybe a kid has already fallen to some kind of sin. I just want to tell you that those things can be used for God’s glory and there can be redemption that can happen. And that is part of Nehemiah is prayer in this chapter is Lord, we have sinned. Like he literally even mentions in here that sexual immorality has occurred in his family line, and he’s repenting on their behalf. And he’s talking about a nation, too. He’s talking about Jerusalem, he’s talking about God’s people. This is like a nation of people that he is praying for and repenting for. Are we not a part of a world that is fallen, that requires us? We should be. Ideologies that are getting pushed today. Am I right? Confusion. We just did a podcast on that.

Don’t let anyone confuse your kids.

But then you skipped down last part. I’m sorry that it’s taking so long. Verse 14 says, And I looked in a rose and said to the nobles, into the officials and to the rest of the people, Do not be afraid of them. Don’t be afraid to, guys, just because, you know, the reality of what’s happening doesn’t mean that we get to be afraid. He says, Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord who is great and awesome. Remember him and.

Fight.

He doesn’t say remember him and do nothing. He says, Remember the Lord, our God who is awesome and great and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives and your homes.

That’s the beautiful thing. You mentioned God is sovereign. A little bit ago, God is sovereign. He also gave humans free will. It doesn’t mean he’s orchestrating everything happening by every person. Oh, it’s. We need to. If there wouldn’t say to fight right there unless we have responsibility to protect our families.

True. It’s an it’s a verb. It’s an action word to go do something to go fight. And so what’s interesting, if you were to go in here and read, it was really cool because the guys are out there like the rebuilding the wall, right? And that’s what many of you may feel like you’re doing if you’re trying to leave a new legacy. I know that for as again, we talk about legacy and building the legacy and like our ideas come from the word that’s just like you have to understand, like our ideas come from the word and you can build a new legacy too. But this concept of like rebuilding something, building something up. It says that he commanded the Jerusalem people as they were building the walls to be working hard, but in the right hand they also had their weapon, they had their swords with them. And when I saw that sort of just automatically reminded me of Ephesians six where it’s talking about the armor of God and how the Sword of the Spirit is the word. And we have to have our swords, we have to have our weapons, right? Because we are in the spiritual battle and yeah, we let the walls get knocked down for too many generations.

You might be going, Well, it’s just sounds exhausting. It’s like we already work hard, we’re already doing all these things. And yes, I’m letting my kids go to so-and-so’s house or my kids are part of this group over here, and I really don’t know what’s going on. How do you guys do all this? And I would say that this is our next point, which is to be biblical. It takes courage to be biblical and courage takes effort. It takes action. It takes prayer. Right? It takes unity and marriage. But we have to be biblical. That’s our next point, which is countercultural. It’s even countercultural to a lot of normal Christian circles. Let’s face it, normal Christian parenting largely is failing from the very day one of launching the Parenting Mentor program and the podcast, which launched almost simultaneously almost four years ago, I believe we said this exact same thing is equipping confident Christian kids for an uncertain world, and it’s being countercultural. It’s super important. So I want to take a moment and give you something for free if you haven’t got it already. Is the date night one sheet? It is a beautiful document you can download that will have some key questions on it for your date night to just get in alignment about what’s most important for your family. No matter what time of year, it’s always important to recalibrate. You can get that by going to parenting dot com and subscribing to our mailing list. Also, you can get all of our show notes and everything at courageous parenting dot com. And I also just want to share real quick about the parenting Mentor program. So many families are being transformed by going through this. It’s the six week self paced program with live engagement from us and even direct interaction. So if you want to join us, here’s a little bit more about it. You can find out more at courageous parenting dot com.

Steve and I realized that we were getting too comfortable with the world’s vision of how to raise our children. But Angie and Isaac have done in creating this is literally phenomenal. This program provided awesome scripture based teachings and just some really great practical applications. This class has just really rocked my world. It has given me a vision for not just the different things that we might focus on as parents who are trying to raise our kids biblically, like how our kids are behaving or what we’re doing with discipline, but also the things of the heart. We now have a game plan to how we want to raise our children. We have so many answers to the questions that have been in our mind. It’s not just these hypothetical situations or it’s not just this. Here’s what I think you should do. It’s let me show you where in scripture this is. Do your legacy a favor and yourself a favor and just do it. One of the best things that we’ve done this year, one of the best investments we’ve made this year, and I could not. Mend it more. We’re no longer fearing dark days ahead, but we’re so excited to raise the lights to be leaders for the next generation.

So part of being biblical and being countercultural. It’s interesting because when you start thinking about what is the culture doing in parenting laissez faire, what is the the culture doing for parenting? They are literally laissez faire parents. They’re sitting back, hands off consent parenting and other worldly philosophies of parenting where they never tell their kids, no, they let them rule the roost. It’s a child centric home. The kids make the rules. The kids decide what they’re going to eat. The kids decide when they’re going like, it’s just not biblical parenting and it’s not biblical family. Right? And so when we’re when we say in point to, like, be countercultural, it’s literally like I almost feel like in a lot of ways you can look at what the culture is doing and if you just do the opposite, you’re probably going to be doing much more biblical parenting than you realize.

It’s so true. It’s so true. So we have to be biblical right here in first Corinthians five, nine through 13, it says, I wrote to in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all, meaning the sexually immoral of this world or the greedy and the swindlers or adulterers. Since then, you would need to go out of the world. But now I’m writing to you, not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother. If he’s guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or as an adulterer, revealer, drunkard or swindler, not even to eat with such a one for what have I to do with judging outsiders, is it not those inside the church whom we are to judge? God judges those outside purge the evil person from among you. It’s really important to understand the context of this and what it’s talking about. This is a very accurate verse because it’s in the Bible and the New Testament, which I shouldn’t have to say that because we believe in the Old and New Testament. But but this is talking about people inside the church. This is talking about people who say they are Christians. I think a lot of times Christians get this wrong. Christians become judgmental of people outside of the church and they’re judging people and showing judgment towards non-believers. And that’s not what we’re supposed to do. We’re not supposed to be judging them in that way. We’re supposed to be showing love towards non-believers. Of course, we’re supposed to show love towards our brothers and sisters in Christ. However, if somebody is a professing Christian, but then they’re sexual, immoral, or they’re idolaters or they’re drunkards or any of these things, we’re not even to eat with such a one. So that’s accurate. And the reason is, is because it causes confusion, especially, well, not only for adults, but especially for children.

I think one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past in the podcast, which you can go listen to because we’re more in depth there, I’m just going to drop one thing is that it’s actually more dangerous for kids when someone is calling themselves a Christian and then their lifestyle is that they’re actually choosing a lifestyle. Sexual immorality, for example, that’s confusing, confusing, that’s not traditional. I am going to say traditional biblical gender roles because kids know they don’t even have to be taught. They literally know what works and what doesn’t work, what God created and what man screwed up. Like, they just it’s an inherent thing that people actually know. And the confusion that’s trying to happen right now is an acceptance of that. So the so that the thing that is normally not the way God designed the confusion that happens is that those people are trying to make that be the new normal and there is no new under the sun, there is no new normal there. What there is, is good old fashioned traditional sin, God’s word talk specifically about that. And there is a truth that like certain things, for example, like procreation, literally cannot happen without both male and female. Like it literally cannot happen. And so for people who are out there saying, like, oh, the future is female, I’m like, oh, then there will be no future.

You know, it’s interesting. Even non-believers like Elon Musk are admitting and actually promoting that we have a demographic problem, that we don’t have enough people to keep our economies going around the world because people are not having enough children. And the number of children people are having is going down to a level it’s not replicating. And so populations are going down.

People are admitting it. Now it’s interesting because there is a lot of that happening just randomly, like people that we wouldn’t necessarily agree with on. A lot of things are saying like, oh, wow, this doesn’t make sense anymore, right? Like even there’s even a fight within the LGBTQ community regarding the drag shows and the grooming that is happening as such a. Like it’s just such a sinful level. Like, even people that are within that community are now wanting to divide themselves from transgenderism. Actually, it’s just interesting what’s been happening in the culture. And so when you see with your eyes what is happening, the only truth that we can ever count on and bank on is the Bible. It’s just the word of God, especially as we’re raising our kids and our kids are going to come to us with questions. We need to take them back to the truth that is found in the word, not our truth, not Isaac and Angie’s opinion, not this person’s opinion, but what does God say? What is God’s truth? Because it’s not even an opinion. It’s literally what’s true. And I even think about like this concept of we talked a second ago or a few minutes ago about like the progressive seeping into the church subtly and like little lies here and there and that we need to be aware of and and how there is this fight on what they call the purity culture. And I’m not I’ll be honest, I’m not super familiar with what purity culture is. I’m just trying to obey the Bible.

And when I do a definition research. So just a side note, the progressive Christians out there would need to go change the definition of purity to actually make their argument worthy. But purity in the Bible says freedom from adulteration or contamination, freedom from sexual immorality. So as a Christian, we definitely would want to be pure like that’s an obvious thing based upon the definition of purity. I do have like compassion for people who have been hurt, though I think that there’s this element where like even just people that I’ve come in contact with where they may have been raised with people that were very focused on purity all the time, but then they were hurt by those same people sexually like and the abuse levels that have happened, or even just by hurt by people like youth pastors or other people in their church or different things like that, that that unfortunately has happened on a great scale and there hasn’t been accountability for that. And that’s not okay. And that has that in and of itself is sexual immorality. And there should be church discipline. There should be a purging, like Isaac said, of the evil person out from among them the person who did the hurting, because that’s not of God. And so to be attacking purity culture or to be attacking this concept of sexual purity is an inaccurate target. In reality, what needs to be happening is there needs to be accountability and there needs to be a justice, if you will, and God will do that.

And so if there’s any pastors listening or anything, by the way, the toughest leadership job that exists, you’re leading volunteers mostly, and caring for the spiritual well-being of so many people. And that’s not an easy job. But one thing that is concrete about your job is to not allow people in the in the in the flock to hurt anybody in the flock. There is a there’s a there’s got to be a no nonsense attitude about that. And the scripture talks about that. And so I really think that leadership is complicit if they ever allow somebody to continue to be hurt in their flock. It’s part of their job.

Yeah, I think that I mean, obviously, again, if you have experienced hurt or pain or if you’ve been struggling sexually, like God can redeem those things and he can create a new creation, but there needs to be a repentance. And repentance actually means to turn away from your sin. And so, like it’s not just pornography that is a problem. Right now what we see is parents willingly, purposefully taking their little children to drag queen shows and being exposed to completely inappropriate sexual debauchery and fornication. And it’s completely immoral. It’s corrupting these children. It’s not preserving or protecting their innocence like it’s exposing them to things far beyond when they’re they should be exposed to them. And what’s crazy about this is that a lot of the times, those people, those parents that are purposefully taking their children, they also want other children exposed to it. And so part of their methodology is that they expose their children and then their children goes and sits in the school classroom with your children, and then they bring it up. Like some of the stories that I’ve been hearing in the last six months to a year of things that little kids have been exposed to, whether it’s ideas, pictures, concepts, teachings, books, what have you. A lot of it comes from kids. And it’s interesting because you know that a kid didn’t come up with that themselves. They had to have actually been groomed and taught that by an adult, and it’s just sad.

So being biblical is saying no to involvement with things is opting out of things that you have a tug in your heart about. That’s probably the Holy Spirit tugging at your heart to say warning, warning you’re putting your kids at risk. God is in control and He gives us the Holy Spirit to. Convict us of things and we need to listen. Even if it causes challenge in human relationships. That’s really important boundaries. We need to shield our children from exposure. As they get older, they’re naturally going to be exposed. Our kids understand how the world works. We educate them. They are out there in the world as they get older doing things and being exposed it. It’s not hard for them to understand how the world operates. If you just go to the grocery store, if you just go out there, it doesn’t matter what state you live in. There’s people everywhere and they’re going to understand how things work and you’re there to communicate with them. So what do you need to opt out of? What do you need to say no to? What do you need to set boundaries on?

And and then what things do you go to? But then just know that you need to have a serious conversation with your kids afterwards because you don’t know what they saw, you don’t know what they experience. And so not shying away from those conversations, I guess, is the point. Like for us with courageous parenting, we’ve tried to equip parents with knowing how to have those hard conversations. The very last session in the Courageous Parenting Mentor program, if you haven’t gone through it, literally talks about all of the hard conversations, like how do you talk to your kids biblically about concepts, suicide, rape, pregnancy out of wedlock, like sexual immorality? How do you have these conversations with your kids? We talk about all of those drugs in the Courageous Parenting Mentor program in depth, trying to help parents to have this confidence and resources that can help them to proactively have these conversations versus just being, like, scared to have the conversation. So they shrug it underneath the carpet and then their kids never feel confident going and having that conversation with their parent again in the future.

Well, and remember, Romans 12 two says do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Isn’t that a perfect verse when you’re discerning what to say? No to opt out of set boundaries on, we need to. But but the question is, are you conformed? Do you have a renewing of your mind or are you so saturated with the scrolling and the apps and the media and the peer pressure and the influence of people around you? Way more than the Word of God. And I would challenge you that we need to be in the Word of God. We need to know what it says. We need to write it on our hearts.

And we need to keep the commandments like Nehemiah was praying, like part of repenting and part of his prayer that was crying out to God was like, Lord, we know we need to keep your commandments. Do not walk away from us. Like and like there’s this aspect of like understanding that we have an incredible God. We have an incredibly forgiving God. We have been given an immense gift in grace. And to not spit on that by how we live or how we don’t live right. And understand that there is like we need to have an aim to preserve our children, our babies like Isaac. And I used to always say use this terminology of like not trying to awaken sexual desire far before it’s supposed to be there. And you have to do that now by opting out of watching movies, certain movies that have been marketed to little kids. Right. And keeping them from harm, which is our last point. One of the last points is keeping them from harm, shielding them. These are all actual definitions in the word protect. I just remind you that the like keeping from harm was one of the definitions. Shield from exposure was one of the definitions. Aiming to preserve was one of the definitions. So ask yourself right now what can harm my kids? If part of your job being a protector is to keep them from harm? What can harm your kids? Your list may be different than ours because we’ve been proactive in trying to protect our little ones. But have you? Have you have to be alert and aware? But then the next step is understanding predators and equipping your children to also protect themselves.

Like there’s these there’s these different levels, like when you’re littles we’ve been primarily talking about with like younger kids, right? Protecting your children, preserving their innocence. These are like little littles. And then as your kids start getting older, they’re like, you go to the grocery store. Like Isaac said, they’re going to notice things that the three year old’s going to go over their head. They’re oblivious, right? But the eight year old is going to be like, why were those two people holding hands and kissing? Or why was like they catch on to things at the fair or the rodeo or whatever, and you need to have those conversations with them. You need to start equipping them, then age appropriate and only you know that because only you can discern that with so that they can protect themselves. Like when we go to the mall, for example, like I remember many years ago, I used to go, we lived in Portland and it rained ten months out of the year. And so to get a little bit of exercise, I would take the kids and stroller in the backpack and all the things, and we would walk through the mall and I’d let them play on the play structure that was inside the middle of the mall. Well, there is this Victoria’s Secret shop, right? And so I had to like park purposefully park away from that part of the mall. And then I had like a walking path that protected us from actually walking past it by using elevators and escalators. No. And so that’s like a way that you can protect.

But you brought up a good point, honey, which is also, I think one of the reasons our kids have done well in this regard is because we equip them and how to protect themselves, because you’re not always there. And you’ve got to when they’re young, you’ve got to be equipping them for those times when they’re not going to be when they’re older. It’s not all of a sudden they’re older and then you equip them. No, no, it’s it’s this gradual process of doing that. And so when they are exposed to an ad or an image of a woman not dressed appropriately, you’re educating your kids to shield their eyes, to look the other direction, and to do the counter to what is normal. And so we have to do that. So shielding eyes to not look at people’s phones, to not participate in debauchery and and and and.

So having like like we were talked about boundaries and you guys are all like, well, what are your boundaries? I’ll just give you one. We talk about this more in depth than parenting mentor program, but our kids know not to look at other people’s phones. And that’s just like, obviously we have a four year old, so we’re still teaching him that, right? And even our six year old, like at times we’re like, Hey, remember, don’t look at anybody’s phone. And that also means that like you have to lead by example, by not having a device that your kids are showing other people things, even if it is good, right? Because the whole point is like you don’t want to have the temptation for technology to be there. And so if you’re like, Oh, no, my kids can’t look at your phone, but they can look at mine like, that’s just not that’s not okay. Instead, you just go, No, you just don’t do that with friends. You don’t look at each other’s phones. And when you create that kind of a standard, that boundary, then when the kid is on the soccer or basketball bus with the team driving to the next game and somebody’s like, Hey, dude, check this out. And they start handing them a phone, they go, No, dude, no thanks. And they don’t even look at the. Like, are your kids at that level where they don’t do that? Have they been taught not to do that and practiced.

Where they’re going to stand firm and they see parents standing firm and they’re not going to look at things like when we watch a movie, even an animated movie. Every once in a while, even a good animated movie will have a spot where a kiss happens or something like that.

And all of our kids, our kids, all our kids would always close their eyes.

Shield their face, look the other direction, whatever. And it’s just something we have instilled we don’t want to stir up in our children things and desires before they should be right. And it’s a long time like we could do a whole nother episode on dating, which I’m sure we’ll do.

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because now you’re probably thinking, Well, do your kids see you kids like, you know, it just I think that there is a healthy we have to we’re image bearers and so we this this podcast because literally just keep going and going we are going to have to end it here soon. But my point is, as of course they do, they it’s good for them to see an image bearing relationship loving one another in a biblical way, and that’s a good thing. But does does that mean that they see more than that? No, of course not. And so, like, there’s this element like of again, you don’t need your kids to be exposed to things like you should be purposefully protecting and preserving them and training them as they get older and teaching them to have certain boundaries so that they can be protected, so that they’re aware, so that they know it’s okay for them to discern if they don’t feel comfortable, if they are like red flag with that person, they don’t get in the car of them. Like, yeah, for sure you have to. There is an element of discernment judging that you have to teach your kids is okay so that they don’t find themselves in those bad positions, those dangerous positions that are going to actually end up hurting them.

You might be wondering, well, how are they going to get along as they get older in the world? How are they going to make friendships? Obviously, lots of families, even Christians, aren’t raising their kids in this way. And I would just say we aren’t going to sacrifice biblical truth in training up our kids because we’re concerned it’s going to make it harder for them to get along with people in the world. That would be that. Is. Is that a fallacy?

No. Yeah, it.

Is. It’s a fallacy. It’s like, okay, so you don’t be lenient on one thing because something is true. Because something is true. Just because something’s harder doesn’t mean something isn’t still true. Truth is truth. Truth doesn’t change, right?

Actually, what’s interesting is that question is actually asking if you raise your kids that way, they’re not going to get along with people who are sexually immoral. And it’s like, Well, yeah, actually, I hope not.

I hope their lights and.

Lights.

Love other people. Well, and people come to know the Lord because they are looking different, aren’t we, to look different? And you know what? They may not be popular in all circles and that shouldn’t be any of our goals. Yeah, we’re going to look, in fact, we need to embrace being unpopular and we need to train up our kids and embracing being unpopular because that’s what Paul talks about in the Epistles and the New Testament is how unpopular we’re going to be as Christians as we live out biblical truth in a loving way. And it doesn’t mean we sacrifice our position on something We need to get good at loving other people well, while holding our biblical position, disagreeing with somebody in a loving way while not sacrificing our biblical position. And if you’re if your children see that they’re seeing a wonderful example, if they’re seeing parents who just omit and go along to preserve relationships with people, and then they’re, well, how can we expect them to do any different? And so we need to be that example of always loving people well, but never deviating from truth. We need to get good at that.

And we need to be okay with like putting like we’ve talked about this before, like having a realistic expectations on friendships and not expecting people who are not walking with Jesus or not walking with Jesus strong to be acting and being the people who are walking with the Holy Spirit activated in their life. Like there’s that’s what’s having grace with one another is actually and being able to have that opportunity to speak truth into people’s lives and like recognizing that there’s some conversations you just don’t have with some people, right, Because they’re not ready yet and you pray for the opportunity to be able to be a light to them. But then those are not the people, though, that you have in your close biblical community that you’re trusting to influence your kids like that. That type of person goes in a completely different category. Like a confused person might be somebody who’s like only friends with mom and dad and has coffee every now and again to connect because they’re from the past or whatever. And you’re like, on mission, right? Like you’re thinking, Great commission, but. And there’s people who are like in your biblical community that you are like minded with, that you rub and elbows with, that you’re encouraging one another that you’re having hard conversations with like this conversation.

Like, is this the type of conversation that you would share with your best friend? And if the answer is no, I would really like to ask you why not? Because if you agree with what we’re talking about regarding preserving and protecting your children and then starting to equip them and this like progression of equipping them for being able to stand firm against the lies of the devil. Like, if you don’t agree with that concept, then go to the Bible, right? If you do agree with it and you’re not willing to share it with your best friend, then should that person be your best friend? Like we need to get to that place where we go, What is my biblical community? Am I in close like minded fellowship? Like Paul says, being of one sound mind Because this is important. This concept of sexual immorality is covered in almost every single book in the Bible.

It can’t be ignored.

Like it can’t be ignored. God is very serious about this situation. And in our in the culture in the year 2022, it is rampant.

Everywhere. Well, the three paths the enemies using is gender confusion, marriage, confusion and sexual confusion.

So we have to understand that all of those confusions actually go in our category called identity. And so we need to pray for our kids get saved. We need to pray that God would just fill them up with this Holy Spirit that the word would transform and renew their mind like we were talking about today, and that they would have a firm identity of who they are in Christ so that they aren’t led astray by these other ideologies that are out there.

We hope this is helpful.

Thanks for joining us today. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. For more resources, go to courageous parenting and courageous mom. Dot com for free online workshops, blog posts, and best selling courses. Also, we wanted to quickly tell you about our six week online parenting mentor program. Isaac and I created a powerful biblical curriculum. Here’s how it works. Each week we release a video with a downloadable parenting packet to make it easy for you to incorporate those teachings directly into your parenting.

This is an incredible self-paced program where we cover everything from obedience training to overcoming mistakes most Christians are making. But more than that, it’s a supportive community. You’ll have access to our private online group, live Webcasts and the courageous parenting text message line where Angie and I can send you weekly encouragement straight to your phone.

If you’re interested in joining our next online parenting mentor program. Secure your spot now at CourageousParenting.com