Christianity Today pt 1

With all three of our go-to carrots we are calling young people with the same thing: Self-interest. We are teaching young people that the main reason for you make a particular sexual decision is directly related to whether or not it will benefit you. If we are calling them with self-interest, then according to our axiom from earlier, we are calling them to self-interest, and the problem is that self-interest in this area, will be unsustainable for most people.

The promise of future relational fulfillment, sexual satisfaction and a consequence-free life has a difficult time standing up to the reality of humans in relationships. We are broken, frail and fail with regularity. Some of those anticipated idyllic marriages—even when waited-for—will end in divorce; many will have sex lives in marriage that don’t add up to what they anticipated; some will remain single but always long for that promised relationship as the pinnacle of human love; some will be completely on the outside of the Evangelical narrative because they have no meaningful attraction to the opposite sex. It is these exceptions to the rule, these examples where what we call them with is unsustainable, that make me seriously question the entire approach.

Part 2