A generation of young people — and often their parents — is growing up confused about sexuality and gender. Even Christian families with deep roots in the church can’t escape the messages our culture is sending. How can teens know the truth? What can parents do to ensure that their kids have an understanding of sex and gender from a biblical perspective?
Dr. Christopher Yuan has the solution. This summer, he released a new curriculum called “The Holy Sexuality Project” to help families with teens understand what the Bible says about sex, gender, singleness, and marriage.
Yuan knows a thing or two about the world’s view of sexuality. He came out as gay in his early 20s, and around the same time, his parents came to faith in Jesus. They prayed for him for several years, but it took an arrest and imprisonment on drug charges for Yuan to embrace Christ. He is now “a pastor, Bible professor, and Christian author who now puts his identity in Christ alone.” You have to read or watch his testimony to fully appreciate what God has done for him.
Yuan has already written multiple books, including “Out of a Far Country,” in which he and his mother share his journey from sexual sin to faith in Jesus, and “Holy Sexuality and the Gospel,” which serves as the jumping-off point for the new curriculum.
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The video curriculum consists of a dozen lessons in which Yuan clearly explains what the Bible says about our identity as image bearers of God and how that truth applies to our relationships with others. Accompanied by engaging animation and graphics, Yuan explains theological, hermeneutical, scientific, and philosophical concepts in a way that teens can understand without talking down to them.
He opens every lesson with prayer and grounds everything he says in scripture, ending the lessons with the Apostle Paul’s reminder from 1 Thessalonians 4:3, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” “The Holy Sexuality Project” concludes with encouragement to teens to dive into God’s Word and plug into a local church.
I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Dr. Yuan about the project.
Chris Queen: What was the impetus behind developing a curriculum for teens?
Dr. Christopher Yuan: There’s an onslaught today, with not just our teens and preteens; we’re talking about Kindergarteners and even pre-K and daycare, that our little ones are really being fed all these lies, and I feel like they’re just drowning. So the bulk of my resources, my two main books are for adults, for parents, for young adults, and for college students. But my ministry team, my parents, and I knew we must get something for kids.
As a matter of fact, my parents — my dad who’s with the Lord now, he was my biggest supporter, my biggest cheerleader — my mom and dad both were at the very beginning saying that we need something for children. And I kind of overrode them. I said, “I think we first need to do something for teens” because that would be an easier adaptation of my book, Holy Sexuality and the Gospel, to adapt that into this video curriculum.
I actually added a few things, as you noticed. I added something that’s a huge question with teens: “Why is God so concerned about what I’m doing in my bedroom?” And there are definitely reasons why because God is concerned a lot about our bodies. And then I also added in there something about gender.
So that’s really the reason because I’m hearing more and more and more parents who are distraught. “What do I do?” There’s nothing out there. We have some resources that focus on abstinence, a good thing, but we can’t stop there. We also have some that are very quote-unquote “loving,” but in essence, they’re just promoting the worldly view of love, which is “You do you. Just love.” We love, but not just love; we love people to Christ. So that’s why I knew that we needed this video series.
CQ: Why are today’s teens so susceptible to falling for the world’s lies?
CY: I think the reason why our teams are so susceptible to falling to all these lies, unlike when you and I were raised and parents were raised, we were raised at a time where biblical sexuality was accepted, where not only biblical sexuality was accepted, but we were also able to answer very simple questions like, “What is a woman?” And today, we can’t even answer that. As a matter of fact, we can’t even answer, “What is a human?”
Kids can say, “I’m a boy, but I can be a girl,” or “I can be a girl, and I can be a cat.” So we’re not only dealing with transgenderism; we’re dealing with furries, and we’re not talking about Halloween. We’re talking about schools that are allowing in cafeterias doggy bowls on the floor and litter boxes in the bathrooms. So our kids from young, at three years old, we need to teach our kids the basics.
But today, our kids are being taught that you can be anything and that there’s no truth, there’s nothing — you choose. And I think the worst thing to tell a kid, a five-year-old, is that you can choose whatever you want. That’s — we should have learned that over the past several thousands of years of Western history, that you don’t do that to a kid, but we’re actually doing that today. So that’s why I believe there’s so much confusion, and even Christian parents who might be teaching all this nonsense. All our kids’ peers are learning that, so it’s seeping into even the Christian community, even to the point that many parents are embracing this as well.
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CQ: Why do you think our culture is lined up so strongly against Biblical notions of sexuality?
CY: It’s a reason why the world is so rejecting biblical sexuality, and I appreciate how you worded that it’s not affirming anything. It’s a form of evil that’s rejecting truth, that is rejecting God’s good plan for humanity.
I’m speaking from experience because I was in those shoes, I was rejecting it and called evil good. This is exactly what we’ve seen in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
I believe one of the core issues — and this is where I begin in my book and in the video series — lessons two and three focus upon false identity and then true identity. I didn’t want to go to the next step before addressing this matter of identity.
If there’s one thing that I think Christians miss when it comes to understanding and sharing the gospel with those who are lost in the gay community, it’s that we don’t fully comprehend the depth and the immense consequence of how sexuality and now gender have been equated with identity and personhood. Because the world doesn’t view this as sinful behavior, but they don’t even view this as behavior. They view this as a person. They can’t separate that. So I think that’s why when you get that wrong, it’s very logical then to say, “Well, this is who they are. I need to love this person. I need to affirm this person.” See, they can’t separate sexuality from the person, which is what I was back then. I could not hate my sin without hating myself. Now that I’m a follower of Christ, I can hate my sin without hating myself.
CQ: How did you come up with the term “holy sexuality,” and what does it mean?
CY: Holy sexuality, actually, to be honest, came out of when I had all this time on my hands sitting in the prison cell. The Lord was doing such an amazing work in me as He was removing the blindness from my eyes, showing my own sinfulness, and revealing to me how pursuing same-sex relationships was sinful.
I had to struggle because what I had heard previously, before I knew Christ, was a misunderstanding of what God is calling people to do. I thought Christians were saying that gays needed to turn straight, and I’ll have to be honest, I think for a time that was the church’s message: “You need to turn straight.” But as I’ve compared that thought with scripture, I realized, even if a man had opposite-sex attractions, he still would need to resist sin and flee temptation. So actually, heterosexuality is not the right goal. It’s the right direction, but it’s not precise and accurate enough.
So therefore, as I kept reading this picture, I was like, “God is calling two things.” One, if the person happens to be single they must be abstinent, must be chaste. If a person is married — and there’s only one definition of marriage, a man and a woman, as Jesus reiterated in Matthew 19 and Mark 10. A person who is married biblically must be faithful to a spouse of the opposite sex. Holy sexuality is chastity in singleness, faithfulness in marriage, and the term may be new. It might be new for people, but the concepts are not new. It just comes right out of the pages of Scripture.
CQ: There’s a lot of talk about identity these days, and you address it in the Holy Sexuality Project. One of the statements that most stuck with me is that everyone is deserving of dignity and respect not because of a commitment to social justice but because we’re all made in the image of God. Why is that so important for everyone to acknowledge?
CY: Because I think when we try to treat people with dignity and respect based on anything other than the Bible, it really ends up being human effort, a very man-centered, “I do good works” righteousness, which is why we see unbelievers virtue-signaling. I mean, it’s “I do this. I do that.” What is that? That is me-centeredness.
And the world really has no reason to fight for people’s dignity. I mean, if you think about it, if you don’t believe in God, you believe in evolution. What’s the premise of evolution? Well, it’s survival of the fittest, which actually is bullying. It’s treating people badly and pushing them down; the strong oppress the weak, which is exactly what the world is fighting against, which doesn’t make sense because that’s what evolution is.
Christians are the only ones who can actually give a reason for why we fight for the marginalized, for why we fight for all people — because every human being is created in the image of God. And because of that, we value human dignity.
CQ: In the curriculum, you clear up many of the misunderstandings about singleness and marriage. How many of our problems do you think stem from those misunderstandings?
CY: I think a lot of how we live, especially when it comes to relationships, stems from a misunderstanding of both singleness and marriage in that sometimes we view marriage as the only way to be happy. So, therefore, people who are single, whether they’re teenagers, or whether they’re young adults, they feel like they can’t even serve in the church, that they’re not home yet.
Marriage makes no one whole; only Christ does. And we can serve the Lord in whatever situation we find ourselves in, yet we treat singleness as this unbearable burden. And we forget that Jesus Christ Himself was not only single, but He was fully human, and that Paul was also unmarried. So it’s understanding that and not celebrating this kind of worldly view that’s rooted in a tradition of being celibate that’s this lifelong chosen vocation. I’m not talking about that.
I’m simply talking where individuals who are open to getting married, like myself — I’m a single man; I’m open to getting married, but I happen to find myself single now. And I could still be whole and serve the Lord in the condition that I find myself in, so I think that it actually has huge implications, that the proper understanding of singleness and marriage is very important.
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CQ: The Holy Sexuality Project includes content for ministering to people who are struggling with sexual identity or sins. How important is it for Christians to be ready to help people?
CY: In my book, I had the last four chapters talking about ministering to those in the gay community, ministering to people who struggle with same-sex attractions, and ministering to ourselves. How do we walk? You know, what if I struggled myself? And as I was doing this project, I thought that those are very important chapters, but we’re also dealing with kids and I really, intentionally broadened it out to not just address the issue of same-sex attraction.
So therefore, Lesson 11 was about, how do we minister to Christians who struggle with sexual temptations, but also how do we respond to individuals who are in unrepentant sexual sin?
It’s so important because kids need to understand, first of all, that we’re all sinners and that we all struggle, but for those who are in the world, their biggest problem isn’t that they’re in sin but that they’re in unrepentant sin. Because we Christians all sin, but hopefully we’re in repentance. We may sin and then kind of repent, and of course, that can be a cycle because we’re all sinners and we’re all on this journey. But we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over the fact that we just sinned. We need to get back up quickly. It’s when we’re in unrepentant sin, serial unrepentant sin, continuous unrepented sin, that we are more living like the world and like unbelievers.
But then the last lesson was pointing us back to the most important thing that I hope people got from the entire lesson, which was to follow Jesus. I think a lot of approaches to these courses on sexuality focus a lot on human effort. “Don’t do this; don’t do that.” And abstinence is important, but some of these messages on abstinence are about human effort, or it’s, “Be nicer,” “Just love,” which I have a huge issue with because it’s not just “Love,” it’s “Love people to Christ.”
“Just love” makes love an end in itself. “Just love” makes love a god. A lot of people justify, saying, “God is love.” Yes, but love is not God. So we don’t just love; we love as a means to that end, and that end is Christ. So that last chapter just kind of brings it back all around to remind people that our goal is Christ.
So how do we live in the midst of trials and temptations as an individual? We need to just foster intimacy with Christ. So that’s daily renewal, but also foster intimacy with the body of Christ. So often in our discussions around sexuality, we lose sight of the body of Christ, which needs to be the main context for discipleship, sanctification, and growth. In all of that stuff that’s important for the daily life of a Christian believer, we can’t make the Bride of Christ an afterthought.
CQ: The last lesson places emphasis on personal discipleship and plugging into a local church. Why do you think so many Christians these days have lost focus on following Jesus wholeheartedly?
CY: I think the reason why a lot of Christians today kind of lose that focus is they focus inward. They focus on “This is my problem,” and then when they view it that way, “I need to come up with that solution. I need to do, do, do,” when the Christian life is not about “do,” but it’s about “done.”
Christ’s work on the cross — He did the work for us, and we need to rest in His sovereignty. We need to rest in who He is as a person and how He has created us and how we need to reject ourselves. Deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow Him. I think we lose sight of that.
I mean, honestly, Chris, it’s easy to fall into this all the time. “I gotta do this. I gotta do this. I gotta do this.” But that’s not the Christian life. So I totally get how we fall into that trap, but it’s a reminder that Christ has done the work. All of our biggest solutions are going to be solved as we press into Christ.
And thus, as a result of that, we need to also press into the body of Christ. I mean, it’s really more and more common today where the local church is an afterthought, is an option. And so we have to be able to remind each other that we can’t say we love Christ without loving the body of Christ. And many of the previous approaches have had this kind of expert mentality that “You’ve got your problems, send them to us, and we’re this parachurch organization and we’ll take care of this.” That’s not our ministry. We want to actually point people to Christ and the body of Christ because that is the best context for sanctification and accountability to occur.
CQ: How can Christians who are committed to discipleship and Christian community make an impact on the world at large, especially when it comes to sexuality?
CY: More than anything else, I think we need to be courageous and we need to be bold. You know, I would say 20 years ago — or maybe even not even that long ago, 10 years ago — the thing that the church needed to learn was to be more loving and to be more gracious. We had the truth, but we were truth at the expense of grace. And unfortunately, we have taken how we’re supposed to have acted 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and now we think the church in the world hasn’t changed, and we’re applying that today.
When I see the church, the mistake they’re making today, it’s that the pendulum has swung. It is not that we need to be more loving. We need to be more truth. Right now we are grace at the expense of truth. I hear churches that, in June, are like, “Oh, you know, we’re celebrating pride month because we want to support those in the gay community.” You don’t support the lost or try to win the lost by celebrating the sin. So we have to recognize that we shouldn’t be truth at the expense of grace, but we also shouldn’t be grace at the expense of truth. We need to be full of grace and full truth.
We need to show that love is a person. Love is Jesus Christ, and that is going to be offensive. We don’t have to be offensive, but we need to continue to boldly and courageously and lovingly give the gospel message of Jesus Christ, who came for sinners, and that He saved me and He can save you as well. So if that is an important message, we need to give it to the world and to the lost.
You can purchase The Holy Sexuality Project for a two-year license for only $20. To learn more about Dr. Yuan, his books, and his ministry, visit his website.
