Sex and Marriage, Part 1

When I was a very young man, premarital sex was not common among Christian women or women from Christian families. During the same time I spent four years in the Far East. When the ship was in port, whether it was in Sasebo, Yokohama, Hong Kong, Manila, or Subic Bay, the first several blocks from the dock were several hundred prostitutes. Officers and enlisted men both participated in the sex business. But back home there were few pregnancies and few abortions.

If some young woman got pregnant or was known to be promiscuous, she was avoided by the saints. In the late sixties, I was Sunday School superintendent in a church in Maryland. One of the teenage Sunday School teachers got pregnant. I met with her and found that she was repentant and forgiven for her sexual activity. She was not guilty of being pregnant. Only God creates children. I allowed her to continue to teach. The church got upset with me for that decision. There have been over 50 million legal induced abortions performed since 1973 in the US.

Here are some statistics:

1.2 million abortions per year
135,000 adoptions per year

There are close to four million births every year in the US. One hundred thirty five thousand of these are adopted out.

There are over five million conceptions in a year and one million of them are aborted. That is one fifth of all pregnancies are aborted.

I am not writing this to horrify you with statistics. I am writing to see if you care enough to reach out to these women to love them into the kingdom. I am concerned about the lack of love. The two choices seem to be either acceptance of premarital sex and of abortions, or judgment and exile of the women. Neither one of these is a Christian view. Read John 8:1-11 and John 4. What about the men? They are the most responsible. But they are not as vulnerable as the women or as helpless. They should protect the woman, not take advantage of her. This means we have to go after the men.

In addition, we should go after the fathers of these women. You could reach out to them while they are still virgins, or when they are promiscuous, or when they have an abortion, or after they have had it. In every case they will be open to your love.

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