I’ve got a friend going through a heartbreak right now. She broke up with her boyfriend and she is devastated. They lived together. She prays for God to shine through and get her through the mess of her feelings of anxiety and depression. I can’t help but think that we can’t just pray it away, though. Praying enables us to quiet ourselves and focus on God’s word and will. So that when we focus on what’s not right in our lives or what’s bringing us down, we can juxtapose that with how it doesn’t align with God’s will for us. Our obedience to His Word is where we start to feel incredible peace and joy. And what does He say he wants for us? For starters, He says that sex outside of marriage is wrong.
1 Corinthians 6:18-20
18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.
19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
The whole point of saving our sexual intimacy for marriage is to aid us in protecting our hearts. How can we guard our hearts if we give away our most precious gift without the commitment of marriage? Marriage doesn’t solve our problems, but it does enact a legal and emotional responsibility that is not so readily dissolved.
Saving sexual intimacy within marriage also reminds us that we are fundamentally important. Precious. Worth more than a solitary act of sex. Think about that for a moment. You are worth so much that the sex you have is important. Sex is the most precious gift you can give someone. It is a freeing act of passion and love expressed physically. Our society would like to make it just the act of passion in-the-moment, and that satisfaction comes in satisfying our hormonal urges immediately. But think about what that passion can feel like when it’s with someone whom you’ve made a commitment within marriage. You can NOT have that intense commitment without marriage. Why? Because without it, there is no real investment. And aren’t you worth someone investing in? You are! Why don’t you believe that you are? Society says that you can have that level of commitment without marriage and we have examples of people that do that. But they are not the norm. We know this deep down because it has happened to us where we shared intimacy with someone that we ended up not staying with. Either he/she left us or we left him/her. It just didn’t work out.
And then I get to my third point: How do you get into the depth of a relationship when it’s clouded by emotions entangled in sex? We are made for relationships. Not just physical for the reasons I listed above. We are made for that deep connection for someone to know us and love us.
“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known but not loved is our greatest fear. To be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like Being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness. It fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.” – Tim Keller
Comment Form