Develop Moral Compass and Default to Love

Welcome to the Next Talk podcast. We are a nonprofit passionate about keeping kids safe online. We’re learning together how to navigate tech, culture, and faith with our kids. Develop a moral compass and default to love. That is part of our Next Talk 10 core practices. This is a formula on the culture that we want to build in our home to create open communication to keep our kids safe online and off. All kids need a moral compass. Now, in your family, as a parent, you get to choose what that is for your kids. It’s your family, your choice. But I think anyone can agree that kids need a moral compass. I think of it like children on the first day of school. The teachers outline what is right and what is wrong, what you can do, what you cannot do. They go over the ground rules, their expectations of what they expect of the students in their class. For parents, we need to do that with our kids in our home about cultural issues. So it’s key to create a moral compass so your kids will understand what you know is right and wrong. But then also the default to love portion of this practice is really about teaching love and respect for all people. If different families have different rules or different belief systems, no matter how we define our moral compass, that we are going to choose to default to love and respect everyone’s choices. Since we serve such a diverse audience at next talk, I want to talk to two groups of people, Christian believers and non-believers. And let me talk to the non-believers first. When you are defining your child’s moral compass, what I’m asking you to talk about are things like sex. Is it okay or not okay? What’s the moral compass? Is it when you’re in a committed relationship or not in a committed relationship? What is the definition of a committed relationship? These are the things that I think are extremely important to teach our kids about their culture and how they’re growing up because everything goes in their world. Like everything is okay. And most parents want to be able to define some sort of moral compass for their children. I know sometimes when we think moral compass, we think stealing, murder. I want you to think past the normal character traits we would call them or the obvious things that we’re all going to agree on and dig a little deeper into the cultural aspect of the world that our kids are growing up in. And I think sex is one of those things where, like, what is the line in your family? As you have conversations about sex with your kids, how are you defining the moral compass? Again, it’s your family, your choice. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but these are the things that I want you to think about because they do need to know boundaries. They need to know expectations. They need to know what you believe about this and when it’s safe and when it’s not safe. And by being unclear about that line, that moral compass line, it confuses our kids. And we don’t want to put them at risk for STDs or, you know, emotional baggage because they’re rushing into sexual activity too fast. Now I want to switch and talk to our Christian audience. And so if you are a non-Christian, feel free to listen in, but you may not agree with everything that I’m going to say. Again, default to love, you know, that love and respect I think is so important to teach our kids, even if we disagree. Christian families. For me and my house, the Bible is our moral compass. That determines right and wrong. And for me, talking to my kids about sex or marriage, it’s actually, I almost feel like a little easier because God defines that for us, right? I don’t have to figure it out. I don’t have to figure out when it’s okay to have sex or not and communicate that to my kids. Like the Bible is clear on sex should be maintained for a marriage between one man and one woman. As I try to teach my young kids a moral compass in the culture that they were growing up in, I will be very honest with you. This is the conversation that gave me a lot of anxiety. Because the last thing I want to do is raise a bully or raise a Pharisee or raise someone who’s not respectful to others. So that default to love clause was really big in our home as we were teaching them their moral compass. But I also believe that as Christian families, we they do need to know the truth of God’s word and what it says. And I want to talk to you a little bit about practical ways that you can have this conversation in your home. So if your kids come home and ask you, mom, is it okay for two women to be married? Mom, is it okay for two men to be married? I don’t know about you, but old Mandy, and I’m ashamed to admit this, but old Mandy probably would have said, Where did you hear that? And then they’ll say some kid’s name. And then I would have probably said, stay away from those kids. They’re confused. It’s a terrible response. It’s a terrible, terrible response. New Mandy, though, being challenged by God to create a Deuteronomy 6, 6, and 7 culture in our home where we talk about everything. New Mandy had to figure out how I was going to answer these questions. And I want to encourage you today. I was figuring this out back in 2014, 15, 16 when nobody was really talking about it from a Christian perspective. And the Lord gave me the wisdom. I want to reiterate that. No matter what happens next with AI, with wherever technology goes, with however we define sex in the future, God is going to equip you, parents. He is going to give you wisdom on how to respond to your child. I want to walk through a couple things that I feel like God really helped me grasp when my kids were little. One of the things was, you know, when they would ask these questions, can two can two women be married? Can two men be married? Old Mandy would have responded that terrible way. New Mandy, guess what New Mandy says? Honey, I don’t get to tell people how to live their lives. I’m a mom trying to figure it out. I get stuff wrong all the time. So I don’t really get to have an opinion on that, on how people live their lives. But there is one who is all-knowing, he’s all powerful, he created us and he sees things that we don’t see, he understands things from a bigger picture that we don’t get. And he gives us guidance on this. So why don’t you go look up First Corinthians 7, 2 and 3? You tell me how God answers your question. Okay, now a couple things here. Typically, when my kids would ask me those questions, old Mandy, again, we would respond bad. I would say, those kids are confused, stay away from those kids. I would also respond kind of in a lecture. The Bible says this, God says this. And I would just go on and on and on in kind of an angry tone because that they even asked, right? That’s how I used to respond. But God really showed me that was not the way at all. And when your kids are little, of course you’re going to spoon feed them scripture. But when they are older and they can read, I need you to send your kid to the scripture to read it for themselves. That is a big shift that I made in my home. Instead of me saying God says this or whatever, I would say they would have a question and I would say, you go look up this verse and tell me what you think God says about the question that you just asked. That way, it’s teaching my kids to seek Jesus, to seek the word, to seek God for his knowledge and wisdom on this issue. And it takes me out of the equation because honestly, I’m gonna say it wrong. I’m gonna mess something up. I’m human. If you know this verse, 1 Corinthians 7, 2 and 3, I love this verse because it basically says, because there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have one wife, and each wife should have one husband to fulfill their sexual needs. Now, before I go on in talking to you about how this verse helped my kids, I want to go on a little tangent here and say, 1 Corinthians 7, 2 and 3, it is very clear that sexual pleasure is for both man and woman, husband and wife. I think the church really, and I’m talking about the big church, you know, Capital C church, got this wrong when I was a kid. Because I grew up in a culture that was basically saying men need sex, women need to keep them happy. That is toxic. And obviously, that is not what scripture says. And so I just want to encourage you like, like, sex should be equal pleasure for both husband and wife. And if it’s not that way in your marriage, that’s a conversation and maybe some therapy to work that out because it’s not the way that God intended. So that’s kind of my separate soapbox. And you guys let me know. I can do a whole separate podcast, a deep dive into that if you want me to. But let’s get back to how this conversation equates with some different discussion with my kids. So, you know, my kids would go read this scripture and they would come back and they would say, Oh, you know, God, it’s not okay for two women to get married, or it’s not okay for two men to get married. And I would see a little bit of judgment in them, and I would have a little bit of fear of, uh-oh, I am teaching them God’s moral compass, but I got to be careful here because I also need to teach them God’s love and God’s character and how God feels about people who may not be living this out according to God’s word in our culture today. And so, you know, we would talk about this is what the Bible says, marriage between a man and a woman, but then I would take them to the story of the adulterous woman in John 8. And this was really to teach the default to love section. And if you’re familiar with this story, a a woman is caught in the act of adultery, and she is brought in front of Jesus and the religious leaders of the day. Okay, they were they were called the Pharisees, but they were religious leaders. The law at the time was to stone her because she got caught in the act of adultery. Now, she was committing adultery with a man, but all sexual sin is sexual sin, right? So a married husband has an affair, that’s sexual sin. Two women having sex, that’s sexual sin. So that’s sexual sin is sexual sin. So she got caught in the act of adultery and brought before the church leaders. The church leaders said, We have to stone her. Like this is what we have to do. This is what the law says. Jesus was on the scene and he was calm. He it’s a scripture says he bent down to write something in the sand. And then he says, and he looks up very calmly and he says, You without sin cast the first stone. What’s he saying to the religious leaders of the day? He’s saying, you have your own sin to worry about. Christian families. We have people watching porn in our homes. We have addictions. We need to focus on our own sin. It’s real easy to point out everybody else’s sin and not deal with your own. And Jesus is saying, religious leaders, you holier than thou people, you guys have sin too. So if you don’t have any, you can cast the first stone. But if you do, you need to check yourself. You need to check your heart. One by one, the church leaders walked away because they’re thinking, yeah, I got my own stuff to deal with. It’s Jesus and the adulterous woman left. Jesus was perfect, Jesus could stone her. Jesus says to her, Where are all of your accusers? They don’t condemn you, neither do I. But go and sin no more. Jesus is the one to tell her not to sin anymore. Jesus is the one to convict her, to point her out. And I tell you this because we had a little saying in our home when the kids were little and we were walking through all these issues of teaching them the moral compass of the Bible and teaching them to love well, to default to love. One of our core sayings was don’t throw stones, right? Don’t throw stones. If you see a kid struggling with something in your class, don’t throw stones. I want you to think to yourself, what do I need to work on? What is my sin that I need to deal with? Right? It’s a gut check. And so teaching these two principles together in your home as a Christian will help your kids, yes, see the moral compass of God’s scripture, but also it will help your kids default to love and understand that we’re all sinning, we’re all falling short of where we need to be. So don’t throw stones. Now, your kids may also ask you things like, well, why wouldn’t God allow two consenting adults to do what they wanted to do? That’s a valid question. And don’t dismiss them. Don’t be mean to them for asking. Be thankful that they’re struggling with this and wrestling with God’s word and they’re trying to figure it out. They’re trying to understand the heart of God. One of the things that I would say to my kids is Do you remember when you wanted to have Snapchat in third grade? And I said no. That wasn’t because I hated you and wanted to make your life miserable. I knew what was on Snapchat. And now that you have Snapchat, do you understand that I was trying to protect you? So I think we need to shift our thinking in the sense of why does God make rules for us to follow? It’s not because he hates us, it’s because he loves us and has our best interest at heart. I heard a pastor one time talk about a dog going out in the backyard and it had a fence up. And the pastor said the dog hated the fence. But the fence saved the dog from getting hit by a car. It was a safety feature to keep the dog safe. The homeowner didn’t put up the fence to make the dog miserable. The homeowner put up the fence to keep the dog safe. That’s our good God. He does ask us not to do certain things, but it’s because he knows best and he has our interest at heart. And so when we’re having these conversations, it’s extremely important for your kid to see the heart behind the rule, the character of God behind the restriction. I also want to say, you know, some other conversations that have come up in our home is uh, you know, this saying, love is love. And years ago, when I first heard this saying, it was from a mommy blogger that I followed. And I know that’s dating me, but yes, I used to follow mommy bloggers. And I remember her saying, love is love. And I honestly thought that’s such a just a cute, trendy saying. Years passed, and I helped a family through Next Talk, through our nonprofit, and it was a mom with a 12-year-old girl, and she had been groomed online by a much older man, like a 76-year-old perpetrator in another state. And the little 12-year-old kept saying to her mom, but mom, love is love. I want to be with him. And when her mom told me that, you know what my mind flashed to in Ephesians 4:14. It says, We will be tricked with lies so clever they sound like the truth. I thought love is love was a cute, trendy little saying. And we see hashtags like that all day on social media, you know, these three-second buzzword phrases. We cannot adopt those as theology. We cannot adopt that as truth. We have to process everything we’re seeing and hearing through the lens of scripture. And guess what? We need to teach our kids to do that because they’re hearing the little buzzwords. And we need to, as a family, work together and be like, that is such a cute saying, but is it truth from God’s word? This is a critical skill that we need to teach our kids, like a critical thinking skill. That part of it, for sure, is helping us teach the moral compass of our kids, right? Talking about culture, talking about these cute trendy sayings, talking about God’s character and heart, about why He makes certain rules and restrictions for us. But I also want to talk to you about this default to love section. Your kids need to see you love people who are different than you. They need to see that. And not is it only biblical and what Jesus would do, but there’s something that happened in my home that I did not anticipate. When my kids were younger and they were bringing these sexuality and gender questions to me, and I would respond with a loving response, but also a moral compass, biblical response. When they were younger, they would just really accept it. Like, okay, that’s truth. But as they got older, they got exposed to more worldview stuff. They saw stuff on TikTok, they just got ingrained more in the culture. And the culture was telling them if your parents believe marriages between a man and a woman, your parents are phobic. Your parents are bigots, your parents are hateful. That’s what the world is telling Christian kids. And what I did not expect was that when that started happening, my kids would be like, wait a minute. My mom loves this person, this person, this person. This person comes over for dinner and they’re they’re not like us, and they’re my mom’s not phobic. Yeah, she’s true to her religious convictions. Yeah, she’s not gonna waver on what God’s word says, but she loves everyone. Like I’ve seen it. She loves these people and these people that come over and they’re they’re in our lives. Here’s what I’m telling you: if you are modeling this behind closed doors well, your kids are gonna see Jesus in you. And when the world tries to tell your kids that Jesus is phobic, that Jesus is hateful, they are gonna be like, no, that doesn’t add up. I see my mom and dad behind closed doors modeling this. So I want to challenge you, Christian parents, the worst thing you can do is talk negatively about people who are different than you because you’re not modeling Jesus. And you’re probably gonna turn your kids away from the faith because it’s not the heart and character of God. Does God want those people to turn from their sin? Absolutely. But he meets them where they are and he loves them radically, like he did the adulterous woman. We need to check our hearts. We need to make sure that we are being the real Jesus behind closed doors and when we talk about culture with our kids. Because if we don’t and we get this wrong, we could turn our kids away from the heart of God because we have not modeled it well. We need to be in scripture. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it. And we need to have the loving spirit of God guiding us in every conversation. Now, listen, this balance of moral compass and default to love, it may fluctuate in different seasons of your kids’ life. For example, when they’re little, you’re just telling them moral compass and they’re believing it, and you’re gonna have to sprinkle on the love and teach them how to love. But as they get older and they’re open to more in the world, they’re gonna probably love everybody well. And you’re gonna have to remember the moral compass, the sprinkling of there’s only one who knows the truth here. And his name is Jesus. Let’s go to his word and try and figure it out together. This is a core principle at Next Talk. Develop a moral compass and default to love. This will help you navigate any cultural topic that comes your way. Because Jesus is all-knowing, he doesn’t change. And when you’re instilling that wisdom in your kids, they’re gonna be safe and they’re gonna be protected from the crazy world that we live in.

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