Question: You mentioned the need to share the biblical basis for morality with our kids. Can you provide some specific scriptural references to help me teach it to them?
Answer: Yes, there are many sources, but those that follow should be helpful. Depending on the age of the child, begin by reading the first five chapters of Proverbs in a modern translation, where King Solomon gives fatherly advice to his son. There will be many points therein for you and your boy to stop and talk about righteous living. Then go on to the following verses:
- Matthew 15:19: For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.
- Romans 1:24: Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading oftheir bodies with one another.
- Romans 13:13: Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, notinorgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy.
- 1Corinthians 6:18: Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.
- 1Corinthians 10:8: We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did—and in one day twenty-three thousand ofthem died.
- 2Corinthians 12:21: I am afraid that when I come again my God will humble me before you, and I will be grieved over many who have sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, sexual sin, and debauchery in which they have indulged.
- Galatians 5:19: The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery.
- Ephesians 5:3: But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people.
- Colossians 3:5: Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed which is idolatry.
- 1Thessalonians 4:3: It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality.
- Jude 1:7: In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality andperversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.
Book: Bringing Up Boys
By Dr. James Dobson