Whoever speaks to a child first about sex and gender will set the bar for what is understood to be true, resulting in everything they hear after that being measured in light of whatever they heard first. Consequently, we must speak up first and teach them the truth. And “the talk” is never once and done. It must be “the talking.”

I’m on the couch, watching a movie with three of my grandsons, ages seven, ten, and eleven. Each one of these boys is inching closer to puberty, which means living in a body that is able by God’s design to reproduce, including all the confusing new sexual feelings and desires that come with that. What do they need to know to manage all these changes?

We live in a culture that eagerly answers that last question. During a commercial break, up pops an ad done in the TikTok video style, carefully created to connect with the social-media-saturated young viewers who are a part of Gen Z and Gen Alpha—my grandsons. One by one, some barely clad, enthusiastically amorous young girls seductively sing the praises of an over-the-counter male enhancement and sexual performance supplement that they’ve given to their men, a product that they testify has ramped up the one thing that we are told to look for most in sexual encounters: maximum personal pleasure.

The commercial assumes that all viewers accept and never question the idea that when it comes to their sexuality, “Anything goes!” Viewers, it is assumed, see themselves first and foremost as sexual beings, something they’ve learned from growing up in a sexualized culture that catechizes them 24/7 on all things sex and gender. And lest we think that this is anything new, it’s the same stuff fed to me and my baby-boomer peers by a 1960s and ’70s pop culture that promoted and normalized the beliefs and behaviors of the boundaryless doctrines of the sexual revolution.

We see and hear sexualized messages trumpeted countless times over the course of our lives through marketing, film, television, music, and social media. In popular music, for example, research estimates that depending on genre, 40 to 60 percent of songs contain sexual lyrics. The familiarity with this ever-present cultural narrative desensitizes us to any shock value that may have once existed, so much so that we’re hard pressed to even notice the sexual content anymore. In fact, we believe the narrative and live it. But viewing this commercial through the eyes of the impressionable kids sitting with me on the couch reminded me to sit up and take notice of this cultural narrative on sexuality, its pervasiveness, and my responsibility to know, live, and tell the truth on sexuality in the moment and moving forward. We all need to see these seductive lies for what they are while embracing God’s good design for His creational gifts of sex, sexuality, and gender.

While it may be nuanced in ways that we’ve never seen before, this cultural narrative is nothing new. Its roots go back to the garden of Eden, to the time when all things were the way they were supposed to be, including humankind’s understanding and experience of sex and gender, gifts given to them by God and declared by Him to be “good” (Gen. 1–2). But the wrecker of this world approached our first parents to whisper his seductive lies into their ears so that they might question God’s sovereignty and design, being enticed to rebel against God by asserting their own sovereignty over all of life (ch. 3). As a result of their rebellion and sin, everything came undone, including humanity’s knowledge, understanding, and practice of the good gifts of sex, sexuality, and gender.

In our day, the seeds of the sexual revolution have grown to the point at which their roots go down deep into the soil of our lives, bearing fruit that has come to taste so familiar that we don’t even question whether to believe or to behave as we are told. I remember a news segment that I saw at the height of the scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. A roving reporter went from table to table in a diner, asking folks their opinion on the president’s behavior. One grandmotherly woman expressed her culturally shaped attitude this way: “He had an affair. So what? That’s what men do.”

Today, our sex and gender behaviors are grounded in a belief that was reflected in MTV’s “Think” sex-ed campaign from 2005. The overall message to kids was this: “Fundamentally, it’s your body, and it’s up to you what you do with it.” Today, the “sex positive” movement—propagated through media, music, comprehensive sex education in schools, and peer influence—promotes countless forms of sexual expression as natural and healthy to life as a human being. A recent Google search on the “sex positive” movement returned this description generated by AI: “Sex positivity is an attitude toward human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation. It challenges societal taboos and aims to promote healthy and consensual sexual activities.” As followers of Jesus Christ, we need to know that this movement is serving to convince our impressionable children and teens that biblical sexuality is actually sex-negative. God’s design, it is believed, constricts healthy sexuality by putting borders and boundaries on matters of sexual and gender expression. Our sexualized culture not only actively promotes what it does, but it also actively works to undermine the “outdated” and “ridiculous” notion of traditional biblical sexuality and gender by celebrating all kinds of sin.

Culture’s Big Lies

Pushing back on this sexual narrative can seem like an overwhelming task. But telling the truth about God’s design for sexuality requires us to understand the perfect storm of forces that have led us to believe that “when it comes to sex, you can do whatever, whenever, wherever, however, and with whoever.” Knowing the big lies that nourish the roots of our confusion will help us spot the lies, call out the lies, and correct the lies that have become part of the cultural air we breathe. What are these big lies? While there are many, here are three interrelated lies woven together into the cultural tapestry that inform (or more accurately de-form) our understanding of sexuality and gender.

Lie #1: You are the boss of you. Nobody but you deserves your highest allegiance and honor. No authority surpasses your rulership over yourself. Not your parents, your boss, your teachers, the government, or even God Himself. This is the first and oldest lie of all. Self-worship and self-sovereignty are exactly what Satan tempted Adam and Eve to embrace in the garden of Eden (Gen. 3:1–5). The first four words spoken by this enemy of God—“Did God actually say . . . ?”—led our first parents to question God’s love and authority. They then chose to rebel against God by going their own way rather than His way.

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