Here at Living Out, Andrew and I have a theory.

As the grandiosely-named Emerging Generations team, our time is focused on those under the age of 25 (and those who serve them). We often find that young people's questions and objections relating to the biblical view of sexuality and gender are coming from faulty foundations.

When it comes to teaching about sexuality and gender, we think that the best place to start is with these foundations, the basics of the Christian worldview. These are things like the goodness of God, the authority of Scripture, the story of the gospel, the nature of human identity, and the shape of Christian living.1

The best place to start is with these foundations, the basics of the Christian worldview.

If you get the foundations wrong in a building, whatever you build on them will be crooked and wobbly. But get the foundations right, and the rest of the building is stable and strong, even beautiful. In the same way, when we aren’t clear on a basic Christian worldview, biblical teaching on sexuality and gender really makes no sense. But when we are clear that God is good, that everything he says to us is for our good, that he gives us a better identity than any we could find for ourselves, and so on, then biblical teaching on sexuality and gender is a natural outworking of these foundational truths.

That’s our theory. Get the foundations right, and the work of teaching on sexuality and gender is already two-thirds done.

Didn’t God make you gay?

Let me show you an example. When we speak at youth events, we’re often asked variations of the question, ‘How can being gay be wrong? Didn’t God make you gay?’.

One assumption here is that we are as we were designed to be. The way that I am, the way that the whole world is, is what God wanted when he created it.

Of course, if we have our foundational Christian worldview in place, we know that that is not the case. God made us good, yes, but we are fallen. There are things about and in each of us that are not as God intended. Everybody’s sexuality is damaged in some way, and we are all called to submit our sexual desires to Jesus and to obey him in them – and in spite of them.

Everybody’s sexuality is damaged in some way, and we are all called to submit our sexual desires to Jesus and to obey him in them.

So, no, God didn’t make me gay – he loves me, and he made me good, but just like you I’m a fallen human being, and sin has affected everything about me, including my sexuality.

From here, we get to point out the good news – that Jesus redeems us, and that a new creation is coming where sin will be utterly abolished and everything about me will be in glorious, joyous harmony with my creator’s design.

I might also spot another assumption in the question, the assumption that sexuality = identity. Here a foundational understanding of Christian identity helps – that we don’t look inward to discover who we are, but upward. Identity is received from God. It's not determined by my desires or my experiences. When it comes to the biblical sexual ethic, God isn’t rejecting me or asking me to cut out part of who I am. Instead, he’s asking me to come to him to find my true identity, just as he asks of everyone who follows him. And again, there’s such good news here. The identity that God gives us is stable and secure, based not on my feelings or other people’s perceptions of me but on Jesus’s finished work.

So we can see from just this one example that good biblical foundations about the gospel and about identity are crucial. They make all the difference in understanding this question – the question which, as it happens, is the one teenagers most frequently ask us.

What about gender?

I recently read a short book called Rewriting Gender? by David Martin which seems to subscribe to a similar theory.2

This is a book for parents who are trying to help their younger children navigate the world around them, specifically when it comes to questions of gender. Each chapter is written as a short letter to one of the author’s children and focuses on a key theme, what I would call a foundation. For example, the first three chapters discuss how we must show to others the compassion that God has shown towards us, that our identity and bodies are received from God, and that we can trust the authority of our good God and of his word. These foundations are the starting point for how we understand the Christian perspective on gender, and how we treat those around us who think and believe differently to us. With gender, as with sexuality, foundations are crucial.

Don’t skip the last third

So our theory is that when you get the foundations right, the work of teaching on sexuality and gender is already two-thirds done. But Andrew and I (and I believe David Martin too) would agree that it’s also incredibly important to do the last third – to teach specifically and clearly on sexuality and gender.

We would argue that with your foundations in place, that becomes a much easier task. Instead of a confusing and rootless theological position that flies in the face of what culture holds to be true, you get to present good news to the young people around you – that the good God who created them has liberating truth about all their deepest questions.

1. You can explore the groundwork sessions in our youth group resource Kaleidoscope for more on these foundations.
2. David Martin, Rewriting Gender: You, Your Family, Transgenderism and the Gospel (Christian Focus, 2022).