t!His Youth Group Blog

I received another good question on Facebook from my Formspring.com account last week!

Question from Formspring.com: “what are your views on pre-marital sex? or any other kind of “inappropriate” touching/kissing”

I was slow about responding, so I received a little prodding 6 days later:

sooooo you still haven’t responded to the question asking your views on sex before marriage…

It’s a great question and I feel bad for not getting an answer out sooner. I’m breaking my response up into several parts so that you can comment on and discuss each part separately. I’ll add links to the other parts on each post once I have them online.

So here goes:

First, a little background…

I am a Christian and I’m assuming that the person asking this question knows that and wants to know what my perspective as a Christian is on pre-marital sex and other sexual activity. I’m not going to answer this by giving a Bible lesson and quoting all kinds of Bible verses.

Instead I will just answer this as a person who is a Christian and loves God, but also as a person who has not always been a Christian and who has made a lot of mistakes in life and has a lot of regrets. I’ll answer this as someone who has failed many times but has received forgiveness and healing from God.

I care deeply about other people and want to help them work through the messiness of real life struggles and real life failures. I want people to understand that even in the middle of our worst failures, God still loves us and is reaching out to us wanting to heal us, wanting to help us. All we have to do is let him.

When I was a teenager (quite) a few years ago, this question was frequently asked of our youth pastor. Sometimes we would get a little more specific…asking questions like, “Exactly how far can you go before it’s wrong?”

We didn’t pose the questions just to see our youth pastor squirm. We honestly wanted to know! We wanted everything laid out in black and white. “Is it ok to do this?” “Can we touch there?” “What about…?” “Why not?!?” “But what if we really like each other?”

We didn’t want to do anything wrong. But I think some of us (yes, I was one of them) wanted to make sure that we didn’t miss out on something fun and exciting because we wrongly thought it was sinful. We wanted to go as far as we could without any fear of God getting mad at us. More importantly, we wanted to have a much pleasure as possible without feeling guilty.

My teen years were in the mid to late 1970s. Way back in the dark ages…. The world was a different place back then. Song lyrics weren’t as explicit. Sex wasn’t talked or joked about openly on TV. There weren’t any cable channels. And maybe most importantly, we didn’t have the internet and it’s easy access to porn of all varieties.

But even way back in the mid 1970s, teenagers weren’t all that different than they are now. We still had hormones rushing through our systems. We still had plenty of curiosity. We still had imagination. Ok, I’ll just come right out and say it—an awful lot of us still had sex on our minds just about 24/7!

People’s (and especially teenagers’) sexual urges did not originate with this generation. It wasn’t invented by MTV. Sexual desire originated in the beginning. It’s been around since men and women have been around. And it wasn’t invented, as some would have you believe, by the devil. Sex and sexual desire was created by God!

Yes. I just used the words God and sex in the same sentence…. I hope you’re ok with that.

So if God created sex and if he’s the one who gave us sexual desire, then what’s the big deal? Doesn’t that mean we should just do whatever we want and enjoy everything he gave us? What’s the problem with that?

Here’s the problem—God created sex and sexual desire in a perfect world.

We didn’t have to wait for the internet or MTV…once sin entered the world, everything got messed up. That’s what the Bible is all about. In the first chapter of Genesis, God created people to be in a perfect relationship with Him, and that relationship lasted all the way until the end of chapter 2 of Genesis when the people failed—they sinned—and messed up that perfect relationship in the 3rd chapter of Genesis. And you thought you had relationship problems!

Starting with Genesis chapter 4, the whole rest of the Bible is about God working to help people get back into that perfect relationship with Him.

I know you must be thinking, What does all this have to do with pre-marital sex?

I’m only going to quote one Bible passage, and this is it:

One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus replied, “What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?”

The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!”    Luke 10:25-28 (NLT)

Ok. So I picked one Bible passage to quote and it doesn’t have anything to do with sex. What’s with that?!? Weird, eh? We’ll get back to that…

Click here to continue on to The “S” word | Part 2: Gettin’ down and dirty…