This week I was listening to the radio and heard an interview with an author who just published a fascinating yet controversial book entitled “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.” The author’s name is Kevin Roose, and he is a student at Brown University who enrolled at Liberty University for a semester as a kind of secular undercover mission into the evangelical world.

Though I have not read the book, I was pleasantly surprised by how sympathetically Roose described his time at Liberty. He found some of the teaching to be archaic and biased, but he was also touched by the friendships he made. Contrary to my expectations, he did not sensationalize his time there, nor did he talk about it in over-generalizations or extremes. Coming from such a young author, that is especially rare and commendable.

(For a great review of the book, check out this article in Christianity Today here.)

Some of Roose’s crticisms are clearly warranted, but there was one perspective with which I disagreed, and that concerned the time he spent with a campus self-help group called “Every Man’s Battle.” The group was for male students resisting the temptation to masturbate, and while Roose felt that such a support group was sympathetic in nature, he was sorry that those men were made to “feel guilty about doing something that isn’t wrong.”

Upon hearing Roose’s words, it dawned on me how absurd the Christian teachings against masturbation must sound to the world. After all, you’re not actually having sex, and no one is getting hurt. What could possibly be wrong with it?

In fact, I wonder if a lot of Christians, particularly women, don’t really know why it’s wrong. There isn’t any clear Scriptural teaching against it, so it’s possible that many believers only have a vague conception based on the fact that it’s sexual and because their youth minister used to warn them about it.

With this in mind, I want to briefly explain why the practice of masturbation is so toxic to the Christian life. I know this seems like a weird topic for a women’s blog, but that is perhaps the first myth that we need to get out of the way. Masturbation is not just “every man’s battle.” Many women struggle with it as well. But regardless of whether you wrestle with this issue or not, it’s important to understand the dangers involved so that you can articulate them in compelling ways. Saying “It’s gross!” just isn’t going to cut it.

The main reason that masturbation seems so harmless is that it doesn’t hurt anyone. Some guys might use it as a way to relieve sexual tension so that they won’t try to have sex with their girlfriends. This would in turn sound like a means for staying MORE pure, right? Or for some of you, it feels good and it isn’t hurting anyone, so why not?

The problem with these 2 perspectives is that they overlook two very important realities about human nature and relationships:

1. Unlike physical appetite, sexual appetite only increases when you feed it, not lessens it.

2. Sex is inherently relational, but we sabotage this fundamental aspect of sex when we divorce it from its created purpose.

Let me tease these points out a bit more…

Point 1:

As I said, sexual appetite increases the more you feed it, so if you are turning to masturbation as a means to abstain from sexual intercourse, you are setting yourself up to fail. Aside from the fact that masturbation is frequently accompanied by lustful thoughts, which Jesus likens to the act of adultery, you are training yourself to desire that stimulation more and more. What can result is either an addiction to masturbation (hence the self-help group), or an eventual succumbing to sexual intercourse before marriage.

In trying to stay pure, you are instead shooting yourself in the foot.

Point 2:

One of THE biggest mistakes that our culture makes in determining its moral standards is short-sightedness. As long as there is no short-term damage, we don’t see anything wrong with it. It is this short-sightedness that enables us to engage in carefree promiscuity, masturbation, or even the “more innocent” serial dating. We plan to change our behaviors once we get married, but for now we’re living the unattached, single life.

The problem with this thinking is that it underestimates the power of our habits. We somehow think that after living one way for 20 years, we can suddenly change upon saying “I do.” But this is not the case. If we establish a pattern of dating tons of people, sleeping with lots of lovers, or masturbating to attain sexual satisfaction, those habits will still be ingrained in us as we enter marriage. That’s why so many marriages fail–Americans are not equipping themselves with the skills they need to make a marriage work. They’re doing just the opposite.

That said, masturbation may seem harmless in the short-term, but it can wreak havoc on your marriage. In particular, it can cause major problems for your sexual relationship with your spouse. If you can satisfy yourself better than your spouse can, then that has severe implications for your intimacy and trust with them.

Ladies, this point is especially important for you! Because women are stimulated differently than men, and because we know our bodies better than men, women who struggle with masturbation may find it easier to do it themselves than depend on their husband for sexual satisfaction. And if you are no longer satisfied by your husband sexually, then it’s likely you aren’t satisfying him, which results in a whole host of marital problems.

Suffice it to say, if you are training yourself to masturbate as a single person, you will not stop when you get married. And to believe that such habit-forming behaviors are harmless is like walking head-on into a coming freight train without a care in the world. It is naiveté at its worst.

Until our culture starts acknowledging that our single behaviors affect our married behaviors more than almost any other factor, I fear the divorce rate will continue to rise.

There have been entire books written on this topic so I could go on and on–there are many other reasons why masturbation is destructive that I have not even mentioned. (For instance, just look up the term “self-abuse” in the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll find “masturbation” listed under its definitions. That has interesting implications for masturbation’s impact on you as an individual…) But in the interest of time, I hope this was a sufficient summary of the dangers associated with masturbation–especially for you young ladies who may not have given it much thought. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Remember that Christian teachers and preachers do not warn against masturbation simply because they’re prudes, or because they’ve been brain-washed into thinking it’s wrong. They teach against it because they’re wise and they know that ALL actions have consequences sooner or later. God created us to have open, honest, trusting, self-giving relationships of love and commitment, and masturbation is just one means of short-circuiting this goal. It may seem harmless now, but don’t be guilty of a naiveté or denial that will later come back to haunt you.

In case you haven’t heard the news, there’s apparently a young lady in California who has decided to put her virginity up for auction.

She’s 22 years old and she goes by the pseudonym of “Natalie Dylan.” And it’s all completely legal because the deal is going down in the great state of Nevada, where prostitution is legal.

I could probably write about 10 blogs on this topic, especially given her reasons for doing it and the thought process behind it, but instead I will defer to another blog, Intellectuelle. I recently read one of the contributing writer’s thoughts on the story, and they are insightful, as well as impassioned.

In particular, she hones in on the way that Dylan has compartmentalized the whole event. According to her logic, she’s only objectifying herself in this one particular area, but expects to be treated as a respected human individual in all other ways. The author’s response to this thinking is quite astute–it’s a logic so twisted that it couldn’t even hold up in our legal system.

So for your reading pleasure, I present to you No, Really, I’m Not an Object.

I also want to add that her commentary is pretty comical, which I appreciate. Sometimes our culture is so depressing that you just have to laugh.

Since writing the last post, I have received a number of great questions that I want to follow up on because they are relevant to us all, and they allow me to elaborate on some of my previous points.

The first question deals with whether or not it’s ok for your boyfriend to sleep over, as long as he isn’t actually sleeping in your bed. For instance, you might have stayed up extremely late watching a movie, and he’s too exhausted to drive home, so he crashes on the couch. What are we to think of this?

Again, this draws us back into some seemingly gray territory because it is even more “innocent” than lying in bed together without having sex. If you’re not even in the same room, then what’s the problem?

Well even though my last post focused on the intimacy of sharing a bed together, there are still some points from the post that apply. The first being that no matter what you do with a guy, it’s easy to compromise your witness if he sleeps over. Your roommates have no idea how long he’s been sleeping on that couch (though I would suspect he hasn’t been there very long…), and your neighbors know even less than that. 1 Thessalonians 5:22 teaches us to avoid even the appearance of evil, to flee from anything that even looks like sin, so this verse provides us with a great perspective on this issue.

But in addition to potentially hurting your witness, there are some other elements to factor in as well. I should have mentioned this in the last post, but if you have roommates, especially Christian ones, then you may actually poison your relationship with them if you have boys staying over. I’ve seen this happen a lot–a girl will have a roommate who invites her bf to stay over all the time, and she feels extremely uncomfortable about it. But her roommate never asks if it’s ok, and she gives off the vibe that it’s not up for discussion, so a minor estrangement begins to creep in. For some, it only results in a vague tension between roommates; for others, it can corrode the relationship altogether.

And this can happen even if he sleeps on the couch. While your roommate may feel weird when you two go off into your bedroom and shut the door, it’s awkward having a boy over late at night at all. The reason being that when a boy spends the night, you feel a little less safe and at home in your own apartment. There have been times when I couldn’t even walk around my own apartment in my pj’s because a guy was always around, and I resented my roommate for it.

The bottom line is that having your boyfriend sleep over, regardless of the circumstances, is disrespectful to your roommate. It invades her privacy as well as driving a wedge in between your relationship. So for the sake of your friendship and the health of your living situation, don’t let boys spend the night.

The final point I want to make about sleeping over relates back to the issue of appropriate intimacy. When I first thought about whether or not it’s alright for a boyfriend to sleep over, as long as he’s not in the same bed, I immediately sympathized with the question. From a technical stand point, there seems to be nothing wrong with it.

But the more I reflect on it, the more I am struck by the absurdity of it. With very few exceptions (like in the case of illness, or if you’re staying at your family’s house, etc.), having a guy sleeping in the same house or apartment is just another way of attaining as much intimacy as we can get away with, while also settings ourselves up for temptation.

For instance, say that you live in different cities and he’s visiting from out of town, so you allow him to stay with you. In doing this, you are putting yourself in a very precarious position since you are alone, late at night, with no accountability.

If your situation looks more like the one I described above (he’s there so late that he’s too exhausted to drive home) then the more pressing question is why he was there so late in the first place. If it was really THAT late at night, then odds are I was engaging in behavior that I should have been avoiding in the first place. In that case, I had bigger fish to fry than the mere issue of sleeping over.

All in all, the cons of sleeping over far outweigh the positives. There is really nothing to be gained by having him spend the night, which reminds us of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians: “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.” By letting your boyfriend or girlfriend spend the night, then you are no longer seeking to be above reproach as you set yourself up for temptation, compromise your witness, and threaten your relationship with your roommates. Is all that really worth it?

~~~

In addition to the clarifications on sleeping over, someone else asked me about the Scripture that one might use in support of what I have argued in these posts. What follows are some highlights…

- Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.- Song of Solomon 2:7, 3:5, 8:4

This is written within the very specific context of sexual love. By not awakening love until it so desires, we should not put ourselves in a situation to do something we know is wrong and will later regret.

- You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. –Matthew 5:27-28

We should not engage in any behavior that would lead our boyfriends to desire us in a way that God has forbidden outside of marriage. There is no formula for this because some guys can’t even handle kissing a woman without lusting after her, whereas others are not as tempted by that, but if you are doing anything you suspect would cause your boyfriend to stumble, then avoid it. If you indulge his lust, then you are not loving him as your brother in Christ, and you are disobeying God.

- Flee from sexual immorality. -1 Corinthians 6:18

Notice that this verse is not a passive “how much can I get away with” approach to sexual relationships. On the contrary, we are to flee any situation that might lead us into temptation. To try and get away with as much as possible is to buck against the very spirit of this verse.

In closing, I want to you to think of this discipline in your dating relationships as an investment in your marriage. One of the reasons our marriages are so emotionally bankrupt today is that we have stopped setting the institution apart in any kind of definitive way. We want what we want now, so we mimic the love and intimacy of marriage without engaging in the commitment that that love and intimacy require. This instant gratification corruption can play out when we have sex, when we sleep in the same bed, or even when we sleep in the same apartment. But these are not meant to be legalistic parameters, since it is ultimately about your heart. You should be doing everything you can to honor yourself, your boyfriend, and your God. That, at the end of the day, is the question we should be asking.

Thanks to all those great questions!!

I published the following post about a year ago and I have received a lot of feedback from it since! Because this practice is so prevalent among Christians today, numerous individuals have asked me about how to deal with with it. I felt it would be beneficial to post it again for my new readers.

I originally posted this in two parts, so I will do the same now. I would also like to introduce these posts with a verse that I recently realized has great relevance to the issue at hand. Keep this question in mind as you read:

Can a man scoop fire into his lap, without his clothes being burned? – Proverbs 6:27

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think most Christians would agree that having sex before marriage is wrong. After all, Scripture is pretty clear on the topic over and over again. What is a little less clear is the lines we cross leading up to sex. I can’t count the number of dating talks I’ve attended in which some ambiguously intentioned young person asked, “How far is too far?” For many of us, we feel like we’re doing pretty well as long as we’re not going “all the way,” so prior to that boundary almost anything goes.

Because of this mentality, a new trend in Christian dating has developed: sleeping together but not having sex. Countless Christian couples will share a bed for the night without doing the actual deed, and I’ve done it myself. And on some level, it would seem pretty innocent–all you’re doing is sleeping together. That’s not so bad, right?

Well as a person who has herself engaged in this behavior, let me be the first to say that it’s wrong. And if you’re doing it with your significant other, then you need to stop. I know this is a pretty hard line stance, but here’s my thought process…

First, when you share a bed with someone you are tempting yourself unnecessarily. My pastor always says that if your boyfriend can lie down next to you without getting aroused, then he either doesn’t like you very much, or he’s probably gay. While he is overstating his point in jest, I think there is something to that statement. When you are lying under the covers in a dark room next to a person that you’re attracted to, then it will be extremely difficult to set appropriate boundaries. Your judgment will be compromised be your desires, and speaking from my own experience, my desires win every time.

Even if you don’t start out having sex, it won’t be long until you reach that point. You’ll find yourself needing to go further and further to get the same degree of pleasure, and eventually you will find yourself facing the final frontier. For that reason, don’t put yourself in that position. Even if you’re not spending the entire night together, being in bed is a tremendous temptation, so it should be avoided no matter the circumstances.

The second reason Christians should avoid sleeping over is that it compromises your witness. If your roommates aren’t Christians and they see your boyfriend sleeping over, they will likely assume you are having sex. When this happens, we fail to distinguish Christian relationships from worldly relationships in any substantive way.

But even if your roommates are Christian, you can still pull them down with your example. If, for instance, they are wondering about boundaries in their own relationships, and they look to you for direction, then you will be leading them right into temptation. Even if they know you’re not having sex, they may still come to think that sleeping in the same bed is okay, so don’t set them up for such a fall.

Now if you don’t have a roommate and none of the above applies to you, you can still compromise your witness. If, for example, your neighbors see your boyfriend leave early in the morning, the same perception may be achieved, so it is best to be above reproach in this area.

The final reason that spending the night should be avoided is that it is actually very intimate, and in a way that is not appropriate outside the bonds of marriage. You know, we don’t really talk about sleeping in the same bed as being an intimate act, but whenever I woke up the next morning I always felt like I had crossed a major line of intimacy that I hadn’t intended to transgress.

I think this intimacy stems from a lot of things–One, you are imitating the intimacy between married people. Across time and culture, marriages have been consummated when the husband and wife came together in one marital bed. Conversely, a husband might be kicked out of that bed and exiled to the couch if the couple is fighting. That said, sleeping together in one bed can sympolize the union between a husband and wife. The sharing of a bed represents the sharing of a life.

Two, when we share a bed with another person, we are in close proximity for an extended period of time. This, in my mind, is what separates sharing a bed with a friend of the same sex, from sharing a bed with someone you’re attracted to. When I share a bed with a girl friend, we might as well be sleeping in separate beds. I don’t want her all up in my space, and neither does she. In fact, I had to share a bed with an old friend last week, and I woke up in the middle of the night when I felt her nudge my foot back onto my side of the bed.:)

But when you sleep with your boyfriend, it’s a very different story. He lies close to you with his arms around you, and he can feel your entire body against his. Because of this closeness, sleeping together is very intimate for dating couples in a way that is distinct from same-gender friends who share a bed.

And finally, sleeping together is intimate because we are most vulnerable when we are asleep. In a sense, sleeping with someone in such close proximity is an act of trust and commitment. We can let down our guard and be ourselves, trusting that the person will still be there in the morning. Again, this is a kind of commitment that is appropriate in marriage, but should be avoided prior to that time. In a sense, spending the night with someone can be a kind of commitment in which we feel safe and protected by the person who is next to us (especially for us ladies), so for the sake of guarding your heart and not jumping the gun emotionally, you really shouldn’t do it.

So if you are dating someone with whom you find yourself spending the night a lot, talk to them about it. Make a commitment to one another to stop this behavior for the sake of the relationship. After all, this is not about rules and regulations–this is about honoring God and honoring your significant other. When the physical relationship gets out of hand, then it corrodes your relationship with God and your boyfriend, so we should all abstain from such spiritual poison. And if your roommates are doing this, talk to them about it and figure out how to hold them accountable in a way that is encouraging, rather than judgmental.

And finally, enjoy having an entire bed to yourself while you can! Some people hate going to bed alone, but I say relish in it, because the poor guy I marry is gonna be fighting me for bed space.

The Tuesday morning before I spoke on 1 Corinthians 5, I told someone I was going to be speaking about sex in the church. They stared back at me with a shocked look on their face and said “Sex IN a church?” I quickly cleared up that misunderstanding. My message was about sexual immorality within the Church Body, not about having sex in a church. Sorry to disappoint some of you.

Below I am posting the audio from that message. It deals with the Christian reponse to sin within the Body of Christ. How are we to treat other Christians when they seem to be rejecting Christ with their lifestyle? Paul comes to a tough conclusion, but it’s one worth hearing.

Because it’s a difficult topic, I was wary of producing a formula for ALL instances of Church discipline, so if you have a question or situation that my talk didn’t cover, feel free to post it here!

You can download the mp3 version of the sermon here.

* The device I used to record this talk died about a minute or two before my talk ended, so when it cuts off it’s not because of your internet.

The following post concludes a 3 part blog series about diagnosing whether you are a possessive women.

(And the picture to the left has nothing to do with today’s topic per se. I just thought it was awesome. If you try and take that girl’s dolls she’s gonna bite your hand off!)

Part 3: You’re possessive about your boyfriend

When you think of a possessive girlfriend, what do you imagine? The kind of girl who freaks out when her b.f. even looks at another girl? Or how about a girl who forces her guy to un-friend all his female friends on facebook? That’s exactly what I imagine.

So in my opinion, I have never been the possessive type. I don’t rail on Ike because he happened to be in the room when a Victoria’s Secret commercial came on. And I don’t accuse him of cheating on me when he says “hi” to a friend at school. I’m not that girl.

However, I’ve come to realize that there is a possessive side to me. It doesn’t play out in a crazy Lorena Bobbitt type fashion, but it’s definitely there.

To help you understand what I’m talking about, first consider the following situation: Have you ever had a friend who started dating a guy, and instantaneously dove into a super serious mode? All they did was spend time together and talk about their futures and be inappropriately affectionate with one another. If it was a long distance relationship, they were probably gone every single weekend traveling to see one another.

If you had just met them, you would have thought that they’d been dating for years. It’s like they went from 0 to 60 in no time flat.

That behavior is indicative of a possessive spirit. Why? Because she is treating her boyfriend as if he belongs to her in a way that he does not. Yes, he should be faithful to her, and yes, she should have certain expectations of him that go along with a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.

But he is not really “hers,” especially not in the same sense as a married couple. They should not have the same intimacy and commitment to one another that a married couple has, but often times dating couples do. They expect to see one another every day. They have the physical relationship that a married couple has. They plan their entire future together the way a married couple does.

And this all happens as soon as you start to see your boyfriend, or even fiancé, as somehow belonging to you, when, in fact, he does not.

All of this boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of courtship. To see what I mean, I thought I’d draw up a little comparison between the worldly view of the dating process, and a more Biblical view of the dating process:

Worldly View of the Dating Process:

Dating=Marital behavior without the commitment

Engagement=Marital behavior with the commitment but without the legal status of being married

Marriage=The State now affirms the lifestyle you’ve already lived for years

~~~~~

Biblical View of the Dating Process:

Dating=Considering whether marriage is a wise decision

Engagement=Preparing for marriage

Marriage=marriage

After looking at this comparison, you can see that the very first break down between these two perspectives is in the dating period. Most couples begin acting as if they somehow belong to one another as soon as they start dating, but that’s not what dating is for. The purpose of dating is to determine whether or not you should take the step of belonging to one another in marriage.

That said, as long as you’re not married, you should function under the assumption that your boyfriend could actually be someone else’s husband. Honor him, and his future wife, accordingly. He is not yours, so treat him as if he belongs to another woman.

Now before you feel like I’m being too harsh, I will admit that I’m speaking from my own struggles and temptations. Even though I’m only engaged to Ike, I’m often tempted to think of ourselves as basically being married but not living together. The temptation is most significant in our physical relationship–why not have sex if we’re going to eventually?

But the reality is that we are not married. And until we are, God reminds me that Ike is not fully mine.

Why is this so important?

The way we treat dating relationships is one of the chief reasons that so many marriages end in divorce. Marriage has essentially become a version of dating. In treating a dating relationship like a marriage, we don’t exalt dating to a more intimate level–we simply tear down marriage by no longer setting it apart.

So be cautious about how you view your boyfriend. He is not yours! He does not belong to you and you alone, so don’t treat him as if he does. Don’t have sex with him, don’t move in with him, and don’t even monopolize his time. Even if you think you’re going to get married one day, don’t depend on that fact. Many couples have broken up who KNEW they were meant for one another, so until you say “I do,” remember that he could belong to someone else.

So while you may not go crazy when he looks at another girl, you act like a possessive woman when you treat your boyfriend like a husband. And ultimately, that’s what all these forms of possessiveness are about–you are functioning in a way that does not reflect reality. Maybe you’re taking illegitimate responsibility for a guy friend, or maybe you’ve constructed a romantic fantasy with a crush, or maybe you’re acting like a married couple when you aren’t actually married yet–all of these behavior ignore reality and construct the reality we want.

And what does this tell us as women? That we need to start trusting in the goodness of God and what that means for our lives. Maybe He has something better! Maybe if we surrender control we’ll experience a kind of wonderful that we never before dreamed of having. We must stop being content to make mud pies in the slums because we cannot imagine a day at the sea. God has more for us than the shoddy dreams we’ve concocted for ourselves, and as soon as we un-clinch our possessive fists then our hands will be open to receive His bounty!

One of my favorite stories from my early courtship with Ike (my fiancé) begins with my initial belief that he was a TOTAL sketchball.

My perception of him largely originated from the way we met–he was being auctioned off at a charity date auction. And no, I did NOT bid on him. I was there to support a friend–totally innocent on my part. In his defense, Ike claims it was “all for a good cause” but I wasn’t so sure.

As a result of my initial impression, Ike spent the following 2 months convincing me otherwise. Week after week he took me on dates, but not once did he ever make a move. He never tried to kiss me, put his arm around me, hold my hand, or really even touch me. At first it was nice, but after awhile I started to wonder if he was even attracted to me…or girls, for that matter. No guy had ever been so stand-offish before. Maybe he just liked taking girls out to dinner and paying for them?

Eventually he came clean and said that he wanted to make our relationship official. But even then I wasn’t sure about him. I needed more time. And time he gave me. We continued to go out and he continued to be a gentleman as he waited on me.

Now here’s where the story gets good: One night I was talking to him about how I STILL wasn’t ready to make things official, and I was very apologetic about it. I felt bad for making him wait so long. Ike’s response is something that I will never ever forget:

(Warning: if you have an aversion to slightly cheesy, uber romantic dating moments, avert your eyes now!)

“Sharon, when I think of you I realize how Jacob felt when he worked for 7 years to marry Rachel, but it only felt like a day. That’s how I feel about you. I’ll wait as long as you need.”

At that moment I’m fairly certain that I swooned. I had never heard anything so beautiful in my life, and it’s one of the reasons that I am engaged to him now.

But it also gave me a great perspective on dating. Many of my past dating relationships have been characterized by a sense of hurried urgency. We couldn’t stand to be away from one another, everything moved super fast, and the physical stuff was well on its way before the relationship was even official. There was very little waiting.

When it comes to romance, we hate to wait.

But when you meet the right guy, he’s going to have a vested interest in doing things right. He recognizes the precious treasure of winning your heart, so he’s willing to work for it. Just look at Jacob–he was hardly the poster child for honesty and integrity! He was not the kind of guy you’d bring home to dad. On the contrary, he was a scheming cheater and a liar.

But as soon as he laid eyes on Rachel, that boy snapped right into shape. He suddenly developed a work ethic. He honored the wishes of his father-in-law more than he’d honored his own father. He wanted to do everything just right because he wanted Rachel to be his wife, and that’s what she deserved.

That is the kind of behavior that godly women must wait for. Don’t date a guy with the secret hopes that he’s going to change–if he isn’t changing now then he won’t change when you’re married. And when it comes to the physical stuff, don’t put up with a guy who wants to sleep with you now because he can’t wait until marriage, or he simply doesn’t have any self-control. If he’s sleeping with you, then he doesn’t respect you the way God has called him to.

(And by the way, if Jacob could wait 7 years, your bf can certainly wait a few!)

This also goes for sleeping over. Even if you’re not having sex, there’s still a temptation to share a bed since it all seems innocent enough. And I can relate–it’s hard to send Ike packing at night when I know we’ll be getting married soon. Why not ease into the married life now? But Ike would never do that. The reason he waits for me now is the same reason he waited back then: I am worth it. Our relationship is worth it. Our future marriage is worth it. And most importantly, his commitment to Christ is worth it.

So stand for nothing less. Just because a guy isn’t respecting you now doesn’t mean you won’t find someone else who does. Plenty of guys refused to wait for me, but I found one who did. And let me tell you, it was WELL worth the wait!

Several weeks ago I wrote a blog entitled “What God Thinks About Your Sex Life.” Since that post, I’ve had some follow-up thoughts that I have decided to add here.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but God designed sex in kind of a weird way. Depending on the context, sex can have two completely opposite effects. Within marriage, sex can make a marriage stronger, but outside of marriage it is just the opposite. Rather than make a dating or engaged couple stronger, sex can actually tear the couple apart.

Perhaps one of the best analogies for this principle can be seen in a fireplace. When a fire is built inside the fireplace, it heats the whole home and keeps everyone warm. Prior to the age of electric heated homes, this was a life saving gift during winter. But if you take that same  life-giving fire out of the fireplace, it will burn the house down, destroying everything and everyone within it.

It is the same with sex. Marriage is the hearth that contains the flames of sexual passion. When taken outside that protective guard, it has the power to destroy.

But why is that? Why is it that, in one context sex builds up, and in another context sex tears down?

To answer this question, we must first recognize the fact that most people, even many married people, have a fundamental  misunderstanding about sex. We see it as a right, not a responsibility.

Think about it this way–the way that Christians frequently articulate the nature of sex within marriage is that all bets are off once you say “I do.” As soon as the ring is on the finger, your bodies belong to one another so you can and should do whatever crazy sexual stuff you want, as long as it’s legal. And the more sex you have, the better.

For example, I heard about a church in Texas in which the pastor gave his married listeners a homework assignment as follow-up to the sermon–every night that week, they had to have sex. That is the Christian culture we live in right now.

What is somewhat problematic about this mentality is that it flirts with the idea that sex is a right. In a Christian form, it sells the worldly mentality that we all deserve sex whenever and however we want. That is the perspective driving the homosexuality debate right now–Americans believe they have the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and sex. And anyone who stands in the way of you having sex the way you want it is either a religious fundamentalist or a chauvinist.

But sex is not a right. It’s a responsibility. When two people engage in sex, they put one another in a position of extreme vulnerability, which means they are in a position to get hurt more than ever before. That’s why affairs are so devastating. But when two people have sex they ALSO create the possibility of conceiving a child. Those are high stakes!

And that’s why it’s important to guard sex no matter where you are in life. Whether you are married or single, it’s not as if anything goes. Sex is still a responsibility, and it should be treated as such. That is what I love about the natural family planning method of birth control. It requires that a married couple abstain from sex once a month when the woman is most likely to get pregnant. It demands that the couple make a sacrifice and step away from the act of sex to reflect on the responsibility that it involves. It prevents them from taking sex for granted.

When married couples forget the significance of sex, they are tempted to use abuse it just as much as single people. Maybe a husband begins to see his wife more as an object to used than a gift to be treasured and romanced before she gives herself to him sexually. If she does not give him his right to sex, he may even go looking for it elsewhere. Conversely, a wife might withhold sex from her husband as a form of manipulation.

Yes, sex must still be guarded within marriage because it can very much be abused.

But what does this mean for single people? Given that sex is such a powerful force, even within the hearth of marriage, it has an even greater potential to destroy when taken outside of that context. Why? Because having premarital sex means you have altogether bought the lie that you deserve sex whenever you want it. And when you engage in that kind of perspective, sex becomes a false idol.

Maybe it’s not an idol at first. Maybe it begins with you messing around with your boyfriend from time to time. Slowly, you two push the line back further and further and further. You’re no longer going too far once a week–now it’s almost every night. And one day you push the line back all the way. You have sex.

But don’t think the story ends there. Soon you find yourself justifying the sex. “I really love my boyfriend” or “I know I’m going to marry him” or “There are worse sins than this one.” Eventually you reach a point at which it no longer bothers your conscience. You have altered your entire system of faith to suit your sexual practice. Now, your life and your beliefs center around  your sex life. Your interpretation of Christianity has been perverted or ignored to serve your sexual needs.

That is the definition of idolatry–when you center your life around something other than Christ. That doesn’t mean you’re a sex addict, it just means your sexual desires hold rank over God.

And that is the key difference between sex in marriage and sex outside of marriage. One stems from a life centered around idolatry and a need to satisfy one’s own desires. The other stems from a life centered around God.

And that is why one practice is more likely to bring life, whereas the other is likely to destroy. Whenever any practice or belief supplants the centrality of God in our lives, then we are headed towards self-destruction.

No matter where you are in life, married or single, that should be your theology of sex. Sex should always be practiced in a way that draws one another closer to God. This can ONLY be done in marriage, but it is not necessarily done in marriage. It is a discipline, and it is a form of worship so we must keep it sacred. Take the steps to guard it as such.

Odds are that many of you who are reading this blog right now have either had premarital sex, are having premarital sex, or are thinking about having premarital sex.

Just look at the statistics:

• A 2002 government survey reported that 94% of American women and 96% of American men engage in premarital sex–as one article concluded, almost EVERYONE has sex before marriage
• According to a poll conducted by Time Magazine 10 years ago, 61% of frequent church attenders do not believe that it’s wrong for an adult to have sex outside of marriage. A recent Barna study confirmed this statistical range, also citing that over 60% of born again adults believe that co-habitation before marriage is also acceptable.
• In 2003, researchers at Northern Kentucky University showed that 61 percent of students who signed sexual-abstinence commitment cards broke their pledges. Of the remaining 39 percent who kept their pledges, 55 percent said they’d had oral sex, and did not consider oral sex to be sex.
• According to statistics in the book Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Mark Regenerus), Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17

Now statistics can be unreliable–we have no way of knowing just how the terms “evangelical,” “born-again,” or even “Christian” are defined in these studies. But even considering the margin of error, premarital sex is a big problem in the Church today. Just ask any pastor who does premarital counseling. I, personally, have a number of friends who are professing Christians but have no problem with it and don’t believe it is in conflict with their faith.

That said, I thought I should write a blog about a seemingly obvious truth that is not so obvious anymore: why premarital sex is wrong. And just so you know where I’m coming from, this is a point on which I have no room for argument. If you say you’re a Bible-believing Christian and you think it’s ok, you are wrong. There is simply no way around that fact. Scripture is clear.

(And if you don’t believe me, just go to biblegateway.com and search “sex.” Or if you’ve got the KJV version, look up fornication. That’s the old school word for premarital sex. It appears pretty frequently, and you’ll get the idea pretty quickly.)

However, for a lot of you it’s not enough to hear “because the Bible says so.” You need to be convinced that this is more than a matter of rule following. And I sympathize. Sex is hard to resist because, simply put, it’s awesome. We wouldn’t want to do it so badly if it wasn’t.

But what feels good now is not necessarily good later. My 6 year old self thought that my greatest good was to eat all the cookies that I could get my hands on in one sitting. My parents knew better. They knew that I would enjoy the cookies at first, but I would get horribly sick, and eventually horribly obese. But at the time, I was blind to the ways in which that instant gratification could make me sick, and we do the same thing with sex.

That said, we need to redefine our categories. Instead of thinking in terms of just right and wrong, we need to also think in terms of healthy and unhealthy, or spiritual life and spiritual death.

And that is what’s at stake here–your soul. Sure, it seems like a bunch of harmless fun, or maybe you really do care about the person you’re sleeping with and this is one way of showing them how you feel.

But God says otherwise. God cares about what you do with your body. And what we do with out bodies is very much connected to our souls.

Here’s why:

Sex is not just a benefit of being married. It is an integral part of the way God designed marriage and our function within marriage. The reason being that marriage, as a whole, reflects the relationship between Christ and the Church. And what do we know about that relationship? That it’s defined by two things: intimacy and sacrifice.

Sex within marriage is the only perfect picture of the Christ-Church relationship because it incorporates both of those elements. In the same way that we only achieve intimacy with God as a result of Him first sacrificing His Son for us, intimacy between spouses should only come as a direct result of their sacrifice for one another, their willingness to lay their lives down for one another.

And this idea of laying yourself down for one another is not mere lip service. God didn’t casually mention one day, “Hey, I’ll be there when you need me. Just shoot me an e-mail.” No, He didn’t just tell us with words, He died.

Similarly, it’s not enough to claim, “But my boyfriend loves me and he WOULD do anything for me.” No, he needs to show it, just like Christ. And he needs to make this sacrifice in 2 ways:

1. He needs to sacrifice having sex with you before marriage. Scripture tells us that we are bought at a price, and this verse reminds us that anything worth having comes at a price. That said, when a man sleeps with a woman without “paying the price” of laying himself down for her in a marriage covenant, then he essentially cheapens her asking price. He wants the pleasure without the commitment.

And we do the same with Christ–we “pray the prayer” but we don’t want the commitment and the sacrifice that true discipleship entails. And when we do this, the intimacy we claim to have with Christ, or another, is nothing but a sham. Even if you and your boyfriend have lived together for years and you really love each other, you’ve still sold one another short, because he simply wasn’t worth waiting for.

2. He needs to sacrifice by standing before God, your pastor, your family and your church community, promising to lay himself down for you. In addition to this, he must subject himself to the continuing accountability of those witnesses, who will push him to put you before himself, to take on your finances, your debts, your cares and your hardships, even when he doesn’t want to. In so doing, he lays down his own interests and puts yours first. Only then, having gone through the sacrifical marriage ceremony, does he have the freedom to engage in full intimacy with his wife in a way that mirrors Christ’s relationship with the Church.

With all of that in mind, we come to the key reason why premarital sex is not just wrong, but spiritually poisonous: IT TELLS A LIE ABOUT GOD. It proclaims the lie that intimacy, as God has defined it, is not worth sacrificing for.

That said, you cannot build true, long-lasting intimacy upon a deception about the nature of intimacy. What you have with your girlfriend or boyfriend might be special, but that does not mean it reflects the heart of God. Even if you get along great and never fight and you think that you’re soulmates, you are sewing seeds of destruction into the relationship when you have sex before marriage–you are sewing seeds of impatience, lack of self-control, disrespect, lust, and idolatry. And even though you don’t see it now, those seeds WILL come to fruition.

And that is why I plead with you, not as someone who is lily white in this area, but as someone who has seen the destruction that sexual immorality leads to in my own life–flee from it! Run as fast as you can! Your life might be good now and you might think you’ve got it all figured out–maybe you even think you’ve pulled a fast one on God, that you’ve figured out a way to work the system and get what you want without the consequences. But you will be shocked and regretful 10 years down the road to realize the ways in which your decisions have corroded your soul, your relationship with God, and your relationship with your sexual partner.

Remember, sex is an act of worship because it reflects the character of God. But it is not a thing to be worshipped, something worth compromising your beliefs and your lifestyle just to attain. I know the rationalizations and the justifications because I’ve used them myself, but they are all ultimately lies. There is only one foundation upon which you should build your future, and that is truth. Anything else will ultimately and inevitablely crumble.

*For a GREAT book on this, check out Lauren Winner’s book Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. You can also find two great articles here and here.