Teenage Temptations
by Drenda Keesee
We can’t be naive when it comes to youth and hormones. Don’t forget the temptations lauding themselves on every newsstand, computer screen, and television program, trying to entrap your son or daughter. My husband had monthly and sometimes weekly discussions with each of our sons to ask them how they were doing in this area. We once left a vacation resort in Riviera Maya because the Spanish tourists were topless (and almost bottomless), and the resort refused to uphold its policies concerning this. Our sons said, “We don’t want to be here. Let’s leave!”
What is not talked about in a healthy way can become a dirty little secret. There are increasing issues in homes between…
…siblings, especially step-siblings, concerning sexual exchanges. Just because they are brothers or sisters doesn’t exempt them from temptations, especially when the seeds are being planted constantly from the time a youth wakes, attends a secularized, sexualized school with hormonal peers and sexual taunts, checks their smartphone thirty to forty times an hour, turns on the television, works on a computer with pop-ups, and goes to adulterated movies. That’s a ton of sexual messaging!
I had a young girl tell me that no adult could withstand that kind of pressure, so how did her parents expect her to since they put her in the school? This was a youth begging me to ask her parents to homeschool her!
Acquaint your youth with the story of King David’s son Amnon and how he lusted for his half-sister, Tamar (2 Samuel 13). It clearly illustrates that what a young man thinks is love because hormones can merely be lust. The Scripture says after he raped her, he hated Tamar as much as he loved her (or so he thought it was love). Love is a desire to give to a person, to bless and honor God’s plan for them. Lust desires a person for what it can get from them; it uses them for self-gratification. Teach your youth the difference between lust and love. Amnon’s sin cost his family great hardship, hatred, pain, and death.
A fireside worship time with girls at a youth camp turned into several confessions of struggles with pornography. Yes, girls are being bombarded with the same lustful, demonically charged lies and images, pop-ups, and porn, too. Lots of open communication can help children and youth sort through temptations and how to handle them.
Pray and communicate. I sometimes see critical blogs from youth who have rebelled, complaining that their parents taught them to save their bodies for marriage and that they were wrong to do so. Maybe their parents’ methods lacked, or maybe the young person is simply defiant because they chose sin over God’s plan, but their worst criticisms of purity or courtship teachings do not compare with the devastating results of the schools and the carnage of abortions, broken hearts, suicides, and breakdowns of “the system.” So even if a few rebel against some of the concepts I’ve shared, for every rebel there are many more of those who have a loving marriage today with positive experiences that far outweigh the few who are bent on rebellion. Everyone will not agree with these vintage values, but they don’t have to for them to be right. It’s not my Word; it’s God’s.
~Drenda
ps…Are you looking for a good church? Be sure and listen on Saturday evening or catch the 3 services on Sunday for Faith Life Church!
*Excerpt from “The New Vintage Family” by Drenda Keesee
Drenda Keesee’s contagious zeal and humorous personal experiences help make her ministry of spiritual, emotional, and relational wholeness one that will bless your life and spark a new fire in your spirit.
A wife of over 30 years and a mother of five children, Drenda has ministered at churches, seminars, and conferences, and through the mediums of television and radio, for more than 20 years.
Her books, The New Vintage Family, Better Than You Think, and She Gets It are available wherever books are sold. In these heartfelt books, Drenda shares her personal journey and the life lessons that have brought her to where she is today, as well as practical answers that all people need to live a joyful life.
Drenda and her husband Gary founded Faith Life Now, a ministry designed to spread the message of freedom in the areas of finances, faith, marriage, and family. Tune in for their weekly messages here. Faith Life Now hosts conferences worldwide and sponsors both Fixing the Money Thing, which Drenda co-hosts with her husband Gary and Drenda.
Through their own life experiences, the Keesee’s have found the principles from God’s Word to be powerful and effective. At one point, Drenda was a young, suicidal feminist with no hope of ever being “good enough” for her own standards of perfection. She never wanted the “inconvenience” of a husband or children, and she was on her own path to success. But the stress of trying to achieve perfection and perform for love left her broken and used. She had success, but it was nothing compared to the pain and loneliness it had also brought.
That’s when God got a hold of her heart. It was there—at her lowest point—that she found the One who accepted and loved her, faults and all. Since that transformation, Drenda has had a passion to reach women who find themselves where she once was.
She married Gary after attending college, and there she found herself in a personal boot camp of sorts. She says, “I cried and told God, ‘I can do anything but be a wife and mother.’” She committed to learning how to do it God’s way. Through the many years of raising their children and struggling to make ends meet, Drenda learned from their mistakes. “I didn’t know how to be a wife and mother, but God saved our marriage, taught us how to parent our children for success, showed us how to have financial success, and then the irony of all ironies, He called us to ministry.” It’s truly because of these life experiences that Drenda can now share so many insightful principles for people who are now going through the same struggles.
