Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Family Life

Amy Austin

Sharing Your Faith as a Family

Bob Benson

Elsena Benson

Managing God’s Resources at Home

Kaylene Chadwick

Choosing the Right College - Part #1

Choosing the Right College - Part #2

Tami Milligan

Sex- How & When Do I Teach My Child

Cinda Osterman

Family Worship Adventure

And I really think that a lot of times what this really comes down to is what has been your experience as a young person?

How many of you learned about sexuality through your parents?

And then how many learned it from your friends?

How many of you was it a positive experience?

Like when you learned about it, it was positive?

Now, to be honest with you, I don't think it's fair for us to launch into a topic like this without recognizing that about 1 in every 3 and 1 in every 4 boys, as young men or women, have been inappropriately touched or approached or sexually abused.

And so I think we just need to call it out.

So if we lined ourselves up this morning, it would be really kind of sad to recognize that there's that much sadness in the way human sexuality has been presented or experienced.

And I think that that colors our world a lot in how we approach our children or our grandchildren.

It's because we're like, how do we do this?

I don't want it to be done the way it happened to me.

It's important for us to reflect on that.

And what I'd like to do is I'd like to present a scenario to you this morning.

Let's pretend that all of us in this room, we are working on an assembly line.

And on this assembly line, we are manufacturing stainless steel heart valves.

I'm a nurse, so we use stainless steel heart valves when we have to replace a faulty valve in people's hearts.

And so we are all on an assembly line and let me ask you this, what are we wearing do you think?

I mean we're dealing with something that's going to go in someone's body, so what else?

And our scrubs, you know, they have those sleeves that come all the way down so that we don't want 1 particle of any of us to get on that conveyor belt, right, as it goes through.

We're packaging these stainless steel heart valves and we're putting them in sterile packaging.

Everything is going along as as planned, but all of a sudden we realize as we're working it's gotten a little warm in the room.

We're kind of layered up right and somebody starts to drip a drop of sweat onto the conveyor belt.

We say, stop, there's been a contamination.

We come in and we disinfect the whole area any of those heart valves that may have touched that gets sent to be sterilized I mean We're just very fastidious about everything because you know what when someone's chest is cracked open That stainless steel heart valve is put in there.

We do not want any infection right I want to tell you today that the 2 institutions in the Word of God that are most sacred and special and holy and set apart by Him are marriage and the Sabbath.

And that includes sexuality because that's a very important part of marriage.

My mother used to say that marriage is like it has 5 spokes and there's all these different aspects that make up a healthy marriage.

But she said 1 of those folks is sex and how we enter into that relationship.

But because there's been so much perversion, because it's so special to God, Satan has made it very much a focus of his intentionally bringing pain and suffering in this area.

And then he's also exaggerated like in America you're not even living if you're not having sex.

I mean there's Viagra, there's Viagra for women, there's everything you can imagine out there to make sure that when you're 80 you're still going strong.

It's become so aggrandized, in fact, it sells cars, boats, you name it, right?

But the other thing is there's been a lot of ugliness about it.

There's pornography, there's all kinds of, there's trafficking, there's a lot of ugliness.

And so I think as a Christian sometimes, especially if you've had a negative experience, you may have a tendency to just kind of want to do away with it altogether.

Or, how in the world do I approach this when perhaps it was a painful thing for me?

So we want to stop and say, we need to recognize our story.

We need to also recognize that this gives us perhaps a skewed reference about human sexuality.

How do we allow the Lord to change that and give us a different picture so then we can present sex to our children, our grandchildren, in a way that it was originally meant to be.

I can only imagine when Admae were created, and as Friday evening came, I can only imagine that God Himself sat down and explained things to them.

Either that, or he imbued them with the knowledge that they already knew.

But I know that it was a very holy conversation and it was a wonderful thing.

But you can say to me, Tammy, that's really hard to see because of my reference.

But I want to tell you a story that will perhaps become a new reference for you.

The only experience really that I can share with you is honestly my story.

And it really started out with celebrating development.

Sexuality is not just about having sex, right?

It's who you are, the differences between men and women, how we are all made up, how hormones work, what ovaries do, what testicles do, what a vagina does, what a uterus does, all of those kinds of things.

So it's absolutely an education about the body, right?

Well, I just remember When I was a young girl, my mother talking to us, we would see her feminine napkins or things and we'd ask her what that was for.

And as we grew older, she would tell us about things.

She always thought about what is the question and how am I gonna answer?

Like little Johnny, you may have seen the cartoon who runs in and says, Mommy, Mommy, where did I come from?

And the mother's doing dishes and all of a sudden she turns pale and begins to tremble because she's like, This is the moment I have to have the talk.

And then he says, well, Tammy came from Arizona.

So sometimes it's really important for us to stop and think, what is the question being asked?

So it really should be something that happens a little at a time.

Series

Family Life

Sex- How & When Do I Teach My Child

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Health

Depression and Anxiety - Blessings in Disguise

1h 34m

Michael Carducci Weekend

04 Unwrapped:LGBTQ & the Church

50m

LGBTQ Issues and the Church

1h 14m

Reprioritizing in the Last Days

Fervent Love for One Another

1h 5m

The Law of Love & Sexuality and Purity

1h 51m

Marriage

Marriage is Not For You Part 2

1h 4m

Righteousness By Faith

3. Righteousness By Works

1h

From Everest to His Rest

37m

Plenary

How Can You Make a Big Difference in Children’s Lives When You Teach Sabbath School in a Small Church

1h 18m

Becoming a Man

1h 12m

Breakout Session

Homosexuality and the Church with Michael Carducci Part 1

48m

The Renewing of Our Minds

5. From Presumptions to Faith

2h 8m

Sound Doctrine