by Edmund Bertram

Created on: May 07, 2008

Over the last 50 years, many changes have taken place in American culture's views on sexual relations before marriage. As the culture's view has changed, the Christian church has slowly followed, even to the point in some cases, of forsaking Biblical teaching to sooth personal consciences from the effects that the reality of sexual bondage has on those committing acts outside of God's creative order. Teenagers are especially suggestible to the confusion caused by the tension between societal values and Biblical truth. To a very large degree, it matters not if Christian teens are raised in a family that respects Biblical teachings on sexual relations or not. This is not to to deny the responsibility and power of great parenting that can certainly keep a teenager going in the right direction. Rather it is to make the point clear that the world's force-feeding of its sexual values have infiltrated all areas of life and cause damage to all exposed to its influence.

On the official website for Dr. James Dobson's organization, Focus on the Family, family.org, an article is found by Linda Klepacki (R.N., M.P.H.) called "What Your Teens Need to Know about Sex." In this article, Klepacki quotes a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, explaining that "American children devote more than 38 hours per week to various forms of media, such as television, videos, video games, music, and the Internet." She uses this statistic to prove the greater point that "the average adolescent will view nearly 14,000 sexual references per year."

With a statistic like this, it is easily conclusive that many of the adolescents being studied here are committed followers of Christ. They may not make the best decisions to balance their spare time appropriately, but they still have a desire to follow Christ. This desire, however, is attacked dramatically by the amount of sexuality the teenager is exposed to in the world today. This openness to impurity, then, makes an obvious impact on the teen's thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and attitudes towards sexuality. Every time an adolescent-still in the development process of understanding who he is and what his values and beliefs are-is exposed to the world's ways of viewing sexuality, he becomes more and more immune to its effects.

One of the first effects of this immunization is questioning Biblical reality. A teenager who has come to the Lord in genuine repentance, receiving salvation by the blood of Christ, now has a battle to fight against

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