A Parent Guide to Dealing with Gender Confusion
What a tough topic this can be to address with our children. Though it may be tough, it is very much worth our time and energy to dive in to it. Chief guides us with solid biblical points.
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. – 2 Tim 4:3-4
This discussion begins with the assumption that you hold the belief that there are two genders – male and female – as God pronounced in Genesis 1:27. If that is not your position, please proceed knowing we are not attempting to discuss that point here. It is a worthy topic for another time.
Today however, we look at helping our children have a biblical approach to engaging others who identify with any additional gender or they themselves are struggling with their own gender identity.
- Culture is fluid – Truth is not: Paul let’s Timothy know that a time is coming when the idea of an unchanging truth will come under fire. People will say that truth (the Bible) needs to change with the times and adapt to newly discovered understandings. (2 Tim 4:3-4). If we give culture the position of “keeper of truth” in our lives, then we will be building on sand that will shift as the first wave of “new truth” rolls in. We will find ourselves disoriented, heading in the wrong direction. We must teach our children to make Scripture their unchanging source of truth. A light to their path and a lamp to their feet that does not change like shifting shadows but is the same yesterday, today and forever.
- Grace AND Truth: The danger of trusting in an unchanging truth is we tend to want to use it as sledgehammer to crush everyone’s arguments and any inroads to the gospel in one fell swoop. Paul said that if we do not have love when we speak then we are like an annoying, clanging cymbal (1 Cor 13:1). Speak gently, seeking to understand feelings and thinking. We need to be a loving guide not a belligerent cattle driver.
- The World is broken – Redemption is coming: The question quickly becomes “Why?” “Why does God allow me to feel this way if it is not true?” Add this to the long list of questions that are created when a kind God patiently endures a broken world while He draws the broken people to Himself. Paul spoke of a thorn in his flesh that caused him great angst and he prayed repetitively for the Lord to take it away. The Lord’s answer was not healing, it was sustaining until the day He returns to make all things as they should be (2 Cor 12:7-10). Pray for God’s strength when you feel weak. Your circumstances and desires may not change but your strength to endure will.
Praise God that He has not left us in this world without truth to inform us and love to guide us. Praying for each of us as parents to take part in raising up a generation full of grace and truth.
Camper Corner:
- One of the best questions you can ask yourself (or others) when you have something you are trying to make a right judgement about is, “What does the Bible have to say about that?”
- When it comes to strong feelings leading us in opposition to the Bible, what direction does the Bible say we should go? (Jer 17:9, 2 Tim 3:16-17)
