Sample Discussion: Dad, are boys and girls the same?

Ephesians 5:22-32

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

25   Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.… This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

Have you ever been to an event with a lot of new people? It can be very helpful if everyone wears name tags. Then, you don’t have to walk around confused. You can have a clear idea who everyone is right away.

Name tags are a way you signal to other people who you are. But they also reflect the identity you’ve been given by your parents. People write their names on their name tags in lots of different ways. Some use all caps, others write in cursive with extra curlicues. Some even add little pictures. There’s a lot of freedom in how you write your name, but if you wrote a completely different name down, you would be denying the identity your parents gave you and confusing everyone around you. And if everyone did that, it could throw the entire event into chaos.

Gender is like a name tag. The clothes we wear and the way we behave is how we communicate our biological sex to the world so they won’t be confused. However, names are just words we use to identify people, but sex and gender are fundamental to who we are. But, just like our parents give us our names, God gives us our sex. God gives us a lot of freedom in how we communicate our gender to the world. We can write it in all caps or in cursive, so to speak, but we shouldn’t deny it.

Boys and girls will live out who they are differently. That’s good. God created humans to be male and female (Genesis 1:27). He didn’t just do that so that we would have babies (though God loves babies!). He also did it so that, in the way that people who are different from one another self-sacrificially love one another, we would live out a picture of how he loves us, even though we are different from him. If gender communicates our sex to others, sex and gender communicate the gospel to us. That’s what Paul is saying in Ephesians 5:22–32 above. The way we live as male and female is a picture of the gospel. We receive our identities as men and women from God and then we express them to the world through the way we live. But, more than that, as men and women do that together, they express the even more amazing reality of who we truly are: people who are loved by God.