Creating & Loving Life:
The Most Profound Thing You Will Ever Do
A message to Young People

Most young people today are being cheated out of the greatest gift that God has given them-and they do not even know it. The good news is that the information on this single sheet of paper can empower you to take back what is rightfully yours. The few minutes it will take to read this can change your life forever.

The Bible starts out with the very simple message that God created the universe, including our planet earth and all of the life on it (Gen 1:1-25). He also created Adam and Eve, the first man and woman-and commissioned them to create the rest of all mankind (Gen 1:26-28).

God gave this first couple everything they needed to do the job. He wanted it to be interesting. He wanted it to be fun! God is too often pictured as a harsh task master who will make our lives miserable if we do not follow His arbitrary commands. He is not!

He gave them a garden that would supply all of the food they needed. It had trees from which they could build things. God's creation also contained gold and jewels from which people could build beautiful things of lasting value (Gen 2:11-12; Deut 8:9). Before God brought Eve to Adam, He gave Adam an education and a job. He told Adam to study his creation-to name all the animals, and gave him the job of tending the garden (Gen 2:15, 19).

But that was not the central focus of human life. As it turned out, Adam later lost his first job and home, but his most important mission of creating and loving life continued.

Just as God enjoyed creating the universe, Earth, and all life on it, He wanted us to enjoy the continued process of creating billions of human lives. Yes, he knew it would take a lot of work, but he intended it to be enjoyable work. When Adam and Eve were brought together for the first time, they were naked. Their bodies were perfect. They were beautiful. They were attracted to each other. They wanted to spend time with each other: talking, sharing, loving, touching, kissing, etc. They were excited!

They had no fear of intimacy in any way-no hang-ups about sex. They had never heard of a sexually transmissible disease. God told them sex was good-He had concentrated more nerve endings in their sexual organs than in any other single place in their bodies. And they were feeling it!

Sex Symbolizes the Creation of Life

God was showing this first married couple, through the microcosm of sexual intercourse, the joys of creating new life. Sex needs to start with a loving relationship-symbolizing the love of God for His children and the love of parents for their children. The foreplay of sex symbolizes the beauty that God has put in his creation and in our lives and relationships-the fun that it is to raise children. The intense physical movement of sex is a picture of the work required to raise children to adulthood-but work that is well worth it. The climax reached is the joy of children becoming adults functioning on their own-that one cycle of the creation of new life is complete. The feeling of peace and relaxation after the climax teaches us to relax after our children are grown-that our part in shaping their lives has been done and can't be changed after the fact. We have to rest and let them lead their own life before God.

The fact that every act of sexual relations between husband and wife starts with the same two people, the same minds and the same bodies, but turns out differently shows us that each of our children is unique. Indeed every child of God in the world is different. We can also learn that when a husband or wife is selfish or fearful, that sex does not go as well-it can produce pain. Experience teaches us that when sex is forced without love or consideration, it can be one of the worst experiences of life.

So it is with raising children. If our purpose is to share the love of God with them, their upbringing generally goes well. If we have a selfish purpose in raising children-hoping to have someone who will love us or serve us, then we are likely to have pain. If we are not willing to put in the work required to see the job through, we will also have difficulty.

Producing Love and Not Pain

God gave us strong mental and physical desires for love and sex-and mankind, in general, has done a good job of producing children from that. God also gave us some teaching on methods that would be the most successful. But he also gave us free choice.

God asked Adam and Eve to choose to live by His methods-symbolized by eating from the tree of life, which would allow them to live forever (Gen 2:9; 3:22). He also allowed them to decide for themselves what was good and what was bad-symbolized by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 3:1-24) God warned them not to eat of that tree, but it looked and tasted good, so they did. Because they did this, both of their lives became more difficult-including their raising of children.

Throughout history (Deut 30:19; 3Jo 1:11), and even today, the basic issue is still the same: Will we follow God's best methods for creating and loving life, or will we try some other method which will produce pain and heartache? We do not have space to cite all the Scriptures about this, but we will teach the Bible lessons and encourage you to read the Scriptures for yourself. Here are the concepts you need to understand to use your most profound gift of creating life:

Creation not Evolution

Suppose you showed your friends a new kind of cell phone that they had never seen before. When they asked where you got it, suppose you told them, "from a city dump-the bulldozers pushing around the old electronics caused this phone to evolve." They would think you are crazy. Suppose you told them, "I will never have to buy another phone, because every year my phone reproduces itself!" They would think about getting mental help for you. Suppose you told them, "My phone loves me!"

While that sounds "nuts", evolutionists with advance degrees believe something even more ridiculous. Every living species is mega-trillions of times more complex than any cell phone. Factoring in only 2 billion years of chance for random changes to produce evolution is utterly deficient by all mathematics. All the 20,000,000 species living on our planet have reproduced themselves for thousands of years. Humans, dogs, and other animals are capable of a wide range of emotions, including love, anger, jealously, etc. Modern science, with its awesome tools, has not been able to make one new species, nor has it been able to change an existing one to something else.

If life is simply a random freak, there is no purpose to anything. The human race could all die out tomorrow, and something new-maybe something better might evolve in its place. Who would know? Who would care? But since we are created by an outside intelligence, by God, then the only thing that makes sense in life is to figure out His purpose for us here, and to live our lives accordingly.

The Wrong Order:
Sex → Maybe Love → Maybe Marriage → Maybe Death for Child

Everything from cologne to cars is marketed to us with sex today. Glamorous women are primarily used, because other women want to be like them and men just want them. Popular movies and other media constantly hammer us with the idea that it is good for two people to meet and then enter into a sexual relationship almost immediately. They also teach us that a "little bit" of sex is good no matter how one can get it: through a book, a movie, Internet porn, a peek at someone else, or some hands-on encounter short of the real deal.

By contrast, life-long marriage and raising children are portrayed by the media as "old fashioned", burdensome, limiting, expensive and certainly optional. Even though Christians may know that these concepts are wrong, we are often influenced a lot more than we realize.

The "my fun first" approach to sex is exciting and can be used to make money, but it does not bring long-term happiness to anyone. While sex education and free contraceptives are everywhere in the USA, people with a "my fun first" approach to sex produce about two million unwanted pregnancies a year. About half of those children are killed by abortions, and most of the rest are kept by a parent or two that consider them more of a burden than a blessing.

It is the story of the "Garden of Eden" repeated all over again-mankind determining for itself what is good and what is bad. God wanted sex to be a wonderful precursor to the creation of new life. For so many people, lack of love, the fear of being found out, the danger of disease, or the possibility of pregnancy has wasted the wonder of the sexual experience that God intended. Removing sex from its proper place in marriage turns God's greatest gift into a curse.

God's Order:
Love → Marriage → Sex → Life → Love

"God is Love" (1John 4:8). He pictures himself as a good Father, willing to sacrifice His son to save all mankind (John 3:16). Love is the foundation of good marriages (Gen 24:67; 29:18). Just as God is committed to us and will not desert us (Heb 13:5), so we should be committed for life to the one we marry (Matt 19:4-9). One does not have to talk to very many young children to find out the best way to grow up is with both a mother and a father who are present and who love you.

There is no doubt that a lot of self-control and work is required to establish a loving relationship leading to a life-long marriage. People with these values are hard to find. It can take years and one usually has to do it while one is going to school, and working to obtain the necessities of life. Temptation to give up is everywhere. Ads say you can have sex tonight-and they are probably right. But why give up the gold for a plastic trophy?

Once a couple has lovingly committed their lives in marriage, sex is nothing but good. It binds them closer together. Sure, there are times when it is sensible to practice birth control. But with the blessing of God, there is time to experience all of the beauty, joy and ecstasy that God intended in the creation of a new life. There is nothing else in the world like it. The entire process of raising children can also be mostly joyful when parents realize that they are raising children in the image of God, not in their own image. Most of the heartache of raising children comes from parents who selfishly ignore them, or who try to make them into clones of themselves, rather than let them develop the gifts that God gave them. When parents raise their children in love, their children usually want to marry and repeat the cycle.

May God help us all to use, and not waste or lose, His most profound and precious gift. &