Free The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love by Tim Lahaye

country.
    Personally, I lay the drastic decline in the SAT test scores and the increase in school dropouts to the overemphasis on sex in the life of our youth. True, the entertainment industry is also to blame, but these young people received their sex education and moral mistraining in those same valueless explicit classes on sex. Consequently, they have created an obsession with sex during an age when young people really need an obsession on learning. As an educator, I do not believe the average student can maintain an obsession on two subjects at the same time, particularly when one is sex. Girls maybe, but hot-blooded, undisciplined teenage boys? Never!
    Educators get what they emphasize. If they emphasize reading, they will get good readers, or if they emphasize math, they will produce good mathematicians. Instead, they have emphasized explicit sex education and have produced the most sexually permissive generation in the history of America. Recent reports indicate that 57 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys have had sex before graduating from high school. According to surveys, this form of public education is not producing responsible sex but is disillusioning many.
    It is no wonder that learning has suffered drastically and millions of our youth are not really being prepared for life. And like so many promises of the antimoral humanists, who control most of our nation’s public schools, their educational programs have not produced safe sex or even better sex. Instead, they have produced untold suffering by exacerbating the spread of STDs.
    Sexual ignorance, however, is not the alternative. Young people need to be instructed that sex is sacred, an experience God has reserved for marriage. Certainly they need to be taught the high cost of promiscuity and the dangers of venereal diseases, and when dating, they must be very conscious of the fact that the bodies of both persons are the temples of the Holy Spirit. Most Bible-believing churches, of course, teach such values unequivocally at youth camps and many youth meetings.
    Fortunately for today’s Christian young people, the church has responded to their needs by producing many morally based programs that confront them with the need to maintain God’s standards of virtue and that teach them how to make sexual love beautiful by saving it for marriage. Josh MacDowell’s True Love Waits program has been a rich blessing to Christian teens, parents, and church leaders. The Southern Baptists pioneered a program of challenging over a hundred thousand teens to make a written commitment to virtue before marriage. This was picked up by Lutherans, Catholics, and others; now millions of young people have gone on record that they are going to save their first sexual experience for marriage. They will not regret it.
    My wife, Beverly, and I were so concerned about this problem that we collaborated on a book for parents so they could be the principal teachers of their own children about sex. We titled it Against the Tide: How to Raise Sexually Pure Kids in an “Anything Goes” World. 1 The book instructs parents to teach their own moral values along with the facts of sexuality to their teens. We included a suggestion to parents to take their emerging teenagers out for a special dinner-date and challenge them to a commitment to virtue until marriage. Then we propose that parents be prepared to present their teen with a “virtue ring,” which they may wear proudly until their wedding night, at which time they may give it to their new spouse as a token of this important commitment.
    I cannot tell you how many parents and even teens have contacted us to thank us for this suggestion. Everywhere I go to speak, some teenager comes up to proudly show me his or her virtue ring. This practice has been promoted on Dr. James Dobson’s radio program and also by other agencies. One youth counselor called to tell me he was setting up a whole ministry dedicated to this cause. It won’t be