GYC 2014: At The Cross

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Holy Sexuality

Ronald Woolsey

1. Sexuality Today – The Creator’s Perspective

This message was presented at the GYC 2014 conference at the Cross in Phoenix, Arizona.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

We want to thank you for coming and choosing this workshop this morning.

We have Pastor Ron Woolsey is going to give us our first presentation this morning.

We also have Danielle speaking after him at 10 o'clock.

She's going to give her testimony about coming out of homosexuality, bisexuality, wiccanism, witchcraft, and I hope that you'll stay for that as well.

1 of the things that we want to offer to you, not only are we going to have these testimonies that talk about coming out of sexual bondage, but also we want to give you an opportunity that if you have friends that you want to pray for, if you have a certain need in your own life that you want to talk to someone about that you may not want to talk in an open forum.

And so, yeah, if you would put those in that table in the back.

We have a sign-up sheet, and if you'd like 15 minutes with each 1 of the speakers and our testimonies, we want to give you an opportunity to talk to us, to pray with us.

Maybe we can give you something that has helped us in our journey as well, and so we encourage you to sign up for a 15-minute time slot.

We'll be available tomorrow afternoon as well.

We really want to address the issues that we all struggle with and are concerned about.

And so that's why we presented our workshop this morning about holy sexuality and the importance of it.

Has anyone got a banana or a bagel on them?

All right, before we begin, before we ask Ron to come forward, let us all bow our heads in prayer.

Father in heaven, I thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to come before you, Lord, and to start talking about the things that we relate to.

I remember, Lord, being 20 years old, and I couldn't resolve the thoughts that were going on inside my head, Lord, and my Christianity.

I wanted to serve you with my whole heart and yet I couldn't get the 2 to connect and I left because I thought you didn't care.

But Lord, I know you care because you called me home.

And Lord, for my friends and my colleagues that I work with, Lord, on a regular basis, we all have come home and we want to help those that may need to come home as well.

And so Lord, Give us power and strength only that comes from you.

Every open seat, Lord, I pray that you'll fill with your heavenly angels and that, Lord, that you'll protect us, guide us.

And I pray, Lord, that you'll speak to us in a loving and kind way, because I would never serve a God that wasn't loving.

And I pray, Lord, that you'll bless in Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Ron Woolsey, and I am a pastor in the Arkansas Louisiana Conference.

I've been there for living there for 23 years in ministry.

Of course it goes without saying I was not always a pastor.

I was born and raised 1 in the Seventh-day Adventist church and struggled with issues all of my life, which I later realized were due to being derailed at a very young age when I was sexually molested at the age of 4 and I was persistently molested when I was going through grade school.

Let's see if I can get this set up right.

And I want to apologize right up front for the low resolution on a lot of these pictures there just to give you the idea.

But anyway, I left the church in my young life.

But I was so confused about Who and what I was because of being derailed at such a young age and and the various Problems that happened throughout my life.

I finally just gave up, you know when when all of us were growing up Those of us who were growing up in the church With this kind of a struggle there were no resources that we knew of.

There was no 1 to talk to, no 1 was talking about the issue, and all of us, from what I have gathered, all of us struggled in isolation.

I prayed for many years, but the Lord did not seem to answer my prayers the way I wanted him to.

I prayed that the Lord would take away temptation.

I had a degree in theology and didn't understand that.

What God promises is that his grace is sufficient.

He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.

And he resisted under blood, striving against sin, according to Hebrews chapter 4, chapter 2, and chapter 12.

It was many years that I lived in the gay life after devastating my family and breaking that up, but I never was at rest with that.

The Lord never gave me peace about living the gay life.

And eventually, I just went to the word of God, I went to the Bible and the spirit of prophecy and went to my knees.

And I have to tell you, I found every answer I needed strictly in the word of God.

I did not go to psychiatrists and psychologists who early on had already said that kind can never change.

But see, that's human reasoning, it's not God's reasoning.

That's denying the power of God, the miraculous power of God.

So that's just a synopsis of where I come from, coming out of the gay life 23 years ago.

22 years and I was here and my wife was at home but our children are home.

We have 5 children altogether and 5 grandchildren.

Zachary is a freshman in college at Southern Adventist University.

Well, their home and they could not be with me on this trip.

We were going in so many different directions with the family dynamics.

We have a 92-year-old mother and an 87-year-old mother, and we have horses and dogs and cats, and somebody has to stay home all the time.

But anyway, I am so blessed in my new life of being married and with children and being in ministry.

The Lord has certainly given me much more than I ever, ever deserved and more than I ever expected in my life.

I told my story last year at GYC and I'm not supposed to do that this time.

I was given I think the most difficult subject of all and it's totally out of my comfort zone but bear with me today because we're going to look at sexuality today, the creator's perspective.

I want to take a moment and talk about God's original plan.

When God created man in the first place, in Genesis 2 verse 24, He said, therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be 1 flesh.

And in Genesis 1, 27 to 31, God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them, and God blessed them and said unto them, be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth, subdue it.

And God saw everything that he had made and behold it was what?

Danielle Harrison

2. Sex and the Media

Did you want me to do testing before I start?

Well, as you can see, today my topic is on sex in the media.

And like Michael said, I'm gonna be sharing, a lot of my presentation is my testimony.

So I would just like you to please bow your heads 1 more time that I can say another word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, it is humbling to be up here speaking to your children today.

And Lord, I just know that you have ordained this opportunity.

And so I ask humbly, Lord, that you will hide me behind your cross.

As I have a lot to get through today, I just pray that you will help me not to stand in the way, not to stutter or stumble.

But you promised that if I would go, that you would give me the words to speak.

So I just claim that promise, Lord, today, and I ask for your divine timing, and thank you for your blessing, in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.

All right, so today, obviously, we're talking about some mature topics.

And I just want to let you know there are some images that are kind of mature in this presentation.

I have tried to err on the side of caution with this and be pretty conservative.

And I just wanna let you know I'm not trying to shock or offend anyone today.

My burden is to illuminate this subject for your eternal benefit.

Our journey begins with a quote that was printed in the Wall Street Journal, and it says, the businessman's hunt for sale boosters is leading him into a strange wilderness, the subconscious mind.

The study of human psychology and subconscious mind began with Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and quickly gathered interest.

By the end of his writings in 37, he had come to believe that every human being's libido is distributed either in a manifest or latent fashion over objects of both sexes.

So he was saying here that he came to believe through his studies that everybody was attracted to both sexes to a certain degree.

And this illusion strongly colored the underground use of subconscious manipulation as we will go on to see.

So we're taking a look here at an ad that's obviously very old.

And the sexualization movement progressed not just towards sexuality in the media to manipulate viewers but also to largely towards strange sex.

As you can see here not only does she have a man on either side of her, but the man's hand is on the other man's face.

This is something that you don't really notice in the ad unless you study it, but they know that you're not going to look at the ad for very long.

So there's a lot of stuff in the peripheral that they add in.

And somebody might say, well, maybe the guy's trying to push the other guy away.

But judging by the look on man number two's face, I doubt that that's actually the situation.

In 1957, Vance Packard articulated for the first time to the mass market in the US the fact that advertisers and marketers were using the science of psychology to know the mind of the consumers and to find out the best way to influence consumers' buying decisions.

And this was first boldly done, well, not so boldly done, on the cover of a magazine for Playboy.

There was a beautiful woman on the cover, but it was actually a man dressed up as a woman.

And they did a poll, and most of the men did not even recognize that it was a man, but a lot of the women that saw it did recognize it.

It says, the transvestite cover was clearly designed to appeal to the latent homosexuality presumably inherent in all males to the subconscious level.

The out-silver queen, which is what they were calling him or her, was not the only example of media utilizing repressed sexual identity reversals as a marketing technique.

Latent homosexuality has become a frequently utilized subliminal management device in advertising.

People's surface desires, needs, and drives have been probed in order to find their points of vulnerability.

This is him speaking about what they were doing in the media.

It takes time, yes, but if you expect to be in business for any length of time, think of what it can mean to your firm in profits if you can condition a million or 10 million children who will grow up to be adults trained to buy your products as soldiers are trained to advance when they hear the trigger words forward march.

And I just want to keep in mind that it's not just in advertising that they're doing this, it's through all avenues of the media, including music and movies and video games.

Here's a quote that shows an example of that.

The teenage rock market has been studied for years by commercial researchers, And this is kind of the things that they were studying.

Purchasing patterns, lifestyles, psychosexual development, mating customs, aggressions, costuming, sex systems, or drive systems, excuse me, paternal, maternal relationships, the whole range of complex needs within the individuals and groups to which they belong.

It kind of gives us an idea of really what was driving the media market behind the scenes.

But some of you might be asking, does this really have an impact on lives today?

Well now we're going to go into my testimony, we're going to take a look at how my life was changed by the media while I was growing up.

As a young girl, my first love was music.

My mom says as soon as I was old enough to, I was singing and dancing everywhere that I went.

And a big part of my influence as a young girl was Madonna.

Now, I don't really remember enjoying her music but my mom says that I did.

And in 1991 she was interviewed for a magazine and she was asked about the hints towards homosexuality in her music videos and this was her response.

They, meaning the viewers, digested on a lot of different levels.

Some people will see it and be disgusted by it, but maybe they'll be unconsciously aroused by it.

If people keep seeing it and seeing it and seeing it, eventually it's not going to be such a strange thing.

So she was well aware of what was going on.

So this would have been around the time that I was watching her music videos on MTV.

And she doesn't even let her kids watch TV now.

And she doesn't even let her children watch TV now that she's a mother.

So by the age of 7, my parents had separated and we had moved into some low-income housing.

And it was there that I met a certain girl and I started having sexual interactions with her.

And because of these interactions that I was having with her, I was learning things about my body that I really shouldn't have known.

And so masturbation soon became an addiction for me, and it was a stronghold in my life for many, many years.

I had been infrequently attending a church with a family friend, and the pastor sat me down and he said, do you believe in Jesus?

You've been coming here to Sunday school for a long time.

Do you love him and want him to be your savior?

And I did, but it wasn't like I had a personal relationship with Jesus.

I didn't read my Bible or have a prayer life, and so it was not a converted baptism.

But nonetheless, around that time, my mother had talked to me about sexual purity, and I wanted to remain pure.

I was saying that I wanted to stay virgin until I was married, and also that I wanted to abstain from all drugs and alcohol because my parents had had a lot of tribulation in their marriage, especially towards the end, and alcoholism had been a big driving force of what pulled them apart.

And so I didn't want those things in my life.

When I was 10, I was in the fifth grade, and there was this boy in my class.

And he was a little bit awkward, so I wasn't intimidated by him.

And for some reason, I didn't understand it at the time, I just decided that I was going to go out of my way to try and convince everyone in the class that I had a crush on him.

You see, whenever I was having sexual interactions with that girl at 7, my mother and my sister found out because I had told someone in the neighborhood.

And instead of sitting me down and having a sober conversation with me.

Maybe they just didn't know how to respond.

But I was so humiliated and ashamed by that, I thought this is something that I need to hide.

And I wasn't going to tell anybody about what was going on in my heart.

So I thought maybe if I could convince everybody that I had a crush on him, maybe I would appear more normal.

But I never gained his attention, but in the end, when I look back on it, I realize that the enemy at a very young age was predispositioning me towards seeking the attention of the opposite sex.

At age 14, I did start interacting with the opposite sex sexually, and I was really struggling inside of my heart, you know, that teen angst.

Wayne Blakely

3. When Facts & Feelings Collide

And once again, we want to welcome you to Holy Sexuality.

We want to talk about the issues that you deal with on a regular basis.

As a matter of fact, speaking from coming out ministries, each 1 of my colleagues and I not only struggled with homosexuality, but also with lust, with pornography addiction.

And so we want to talk about the things that we just aren't talking about in church culture.

As a matter of fact, We have Taylor Hinkle with us this morning, or this afternoon, and he's gonna give us his testimony about coming out of sexual sin as well.

So I hope that you'll keep your ears open and your minds open, and if you have any questions, we have a box in the back you can submit your questions to.

You can also use the telephone number on the screen to send in your questions as a text message and we'll compile them together and on Sabbath afternoon we're going to have a powerful Q&A where we're going to answer the questions that you ask.

So at this time would you bow your heads with me in prayer as we open up our afternoon session.

Father, thank you again for this opportunity to speak to young people.

And I remember, Lord, when I was 20 years old and walked out of church culture, I couldn't get any answers, Lord, for the issues that I was struggling with inside my heart.

Not only that, but I didn't feel safe to even go to anyone in the church.

And so I thank you, Lord, that I wasn't lost to you and that you still brought me back and you gave me another opportunity, Lord, to not only learn about your goodness, but also to get the answers to those questions that were burning in my heart.

My desire, Lord, is that my friends, my young friends here this morning, and some of us not so young, but Lord, that you would still, as you have poured out to me, Lord, we wanna pour out to them.

Lord, allow your angels to come and sit with us.

And I pray, Lord, that you would remove every evil spirit that's in here, and Lord, that you would open up again the opportunity for the Holy Spirit to speak to each 1 of us through Taylor and also through Wayne as they speak to us today.

I'm excited to talk to you this morning, this afternoon.

I guess that's a light, not a microphone.

My name is Taylor Hinkle, and I'm so excited to talk to you because there's nothing worse in my life than sexual addiction.

I've dealt with things from drug addiction to all sorts of other things that are sins in my life, but there was nothing more grasping than the sin of pornography, of masturbation, of those things that doesn't get talked about very frequently.

And I want to let you know that there is hope, and so I'm excited to be able to share with you this morning.

So, I was raised in an Adventist home, very good Adventist home.

You can interview her about it afterwards.

And there was issues in the home, even though we went to church our whole lives.

I've been in Adventist school my whole life.

And my dad was depressed bipolar, which caused a little bit of conflict in the home.

Other moments he would feel like you're the worst person in the world.

And I was talking to Mike, I can't think of specific words that were used, but all I know is I felt demeaned and belittled.

I could be, you know, my dad could be yelling at me 1 moment, we walk into church, he's an elder there, be kind and nice to everyone else and then turn and chew me out in front of everyone.

And so I didn't find fulfillment through family and my brother and I didn't have the greatest relationship.

Sometimes we had tension, and that's to put it very lightly.

To be very honest, you know, my brother got it hard for my dad and then he would reciprocate it to me.

And it was always looking for something to fulfill the desire that was missing in my heart for acceptance.

I remember at the age of 8 years old at my little church school that probably only had about 20 people in it at the time, that a little boy, he was in fifth grade, brought a picture that was pornographic and showed it to me.

That was my first introduction to pornography.

I didn't understand it or anything like that.

And before I knew it, it was something that was riveting in my life.

By the age of 10, it was kind of a commonplace, and for 7 years I struggled with looking at these things, with the anxiety that goes along with knowing you're living a life of hypocrisy, of struggling with the joy, I mean you enjoy it but yet you don't want to do it and it's just you're torn and you're in a dichotomy.

And to medicate, since I didn't have any peace in life, I remember trying to turn to things such as street racing, drugs, anything that could maybe bring me some satisfaction, loud music, media, trying to drown out my own thoughts so I didn't even have to deal with the thought of who I was and where my life was going.

And that continued until I was about 15 years old and I remember just the misery, not feeling accepted, struggling with the 1 thing that I felt was the dirtiest thing that I couldn't talk about.

You hear people share testimonies about alcohol, You hear them share testimonies about other things, but I never heard someone share a testimony about struggling with pornography or anything like that.

But I remember when I was 15 years old, I was driving from school, or maybe I was 16 by then, and I was listening to some rap music, and all of a sudden I remember just thinking how empty life was.

And so I turned off the music and I remember just talking to God.

It wasn't a formal prayer or anything like that, but I just said, Lord, if you have something better for my life, I want to know what it is.

I didn't know what it was, I didn't know the steps of becoming a Christian or anything like that, but I remember going home and I didn't listen to that music anymore, I actually decided to throw the CD away and I thought, you know, maybe if I give my life to God everything will be fine.

I remember pastors making appeals at church during that time period and I would go forward, but yet I would still go home and fall back into pornography.

Well, 1 day I went over to my friend's house and we got drunk to the point where I was so drunk I punched myself in the forehead and bruised myself.

But I remember going back and the last thing my friends told me was, hey, whatever you do, don't drive home.

Well, I didn't think that'd be a problem because it was my mom's car and I figured she was gonna drive home.

So I walked back to where my mom works, which is the conference office, and I walk back and I meet my mom, and she gives me the car keys, and she says, hey, why don't you go ahead and drive for us?

And I realized at that point I could either admit that I was drunk, which she had no idea that I was involved in that lifestyle, or I could risk killing us in a car accident.

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Series

Holy Sexuality

6. Q&A Session

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Attachments

Parts

1. Sexuality Today – The Creator’s Perspective

54m

2. Sex and the Media

44m

3. When Facts & Feelings Collide

45m

4. I Want Out!

56m

5. Blessed Sex

28m

6. Q&A Session

44m

Sound Doctrine