t!His Youth Group Blog

(Con’t’d from:  The “S” Word | Part 1: First, a little background… )

Gettin’ down and dirty…

Ok. I know you’re thinking, When is he ever gonna start answering this question?!? So here goes. Let’s just jump right in with pre-marital sex!

For the sake of discussion, I’m going to assume that you will someday get married and maybe even have children (but whether or not either of those turn out to be true doesn’t affect my answer).

Also for the sake of discussion, I’m going to assume that you may have already engaged in pre-marital sex and are worried about how that affects your relationship with God. Or perhaps you haven’t yet engaged in sex but you are feeling very tempted to try something and are worried about the spiritual implications. We’ll spend some time talking about God’s response to our failures in the last section.

I like to look at the pros and cons of things, which means that is exactly what we’re going to do now! Let’s go with the pros first:

Pros to participating in pre-marital sex

• It seems like the urges you are having are so strong that you might die if you don’t have sex (and, yeah, I know that might sound like I’m joking, but I’m think you know what I mean)
• It sounds like/is fun
• All your friends say they’re having sex and you don’t want to miss out on anything
• You’re afraid your boyfriend or girlfriend might dump you if you don’t have sex
• You’re worried that if you don’t have sex people might think something’s wrong with you
• You’re just a really curious sort of person and want to find out what all the fuss is about
• You’re sure that the person you’re with now is “The One” so you may as well have sex (and this time you’re certain that this is “The One” unlike last time when you only thought you were certain
• You think that if you don’t experiment with sex before you get married, you’ll never be able to figure it out on you’re wedding night
• You’ve heard that having sex is the only way you can tell if you’re truly in love with someone
• You are convinced that if God didn’t want you to have sex, He would not have given you all those hormones and urges and “tingly” feelings
• Having sex with someone will make you ex mad/hurt/sorry (or whatever you want your ex to feel)
• Having sex will make you “mature”
• Having sex is a good way to get back at your parents for every wrong they’ve ever done

Wow…the list is longer than I expected! Notice that I didn’t limit the list to rational reasons to have pre-marital sex. Instead tried to think of some of the possible things that might really be running through your head when you’re thinking about having sex. You might have laughed at a few of these or thought some of them were silly, but I have heard every one of them used by teens to rationalize having pre-marital sex.

Maybe you can think of more. Maybe you can even think of some really really really good ones! If so, leave a comment with your Pros. And don’t forget that you can leave comments completely anonymously here (just leave the info fields blank or type in a user name by which we can refer to you).

Ok. Now for the Cons:

Cons to participating in pre-marital sex

• Pregnancy and the painful, life-wrenching decisions that come with that
• STDs
• The worried, sick feeling when you miss your (or she misses her) period and you’re thinking, What now?
• The fact that statistics show that despite what you might hope for, pre-marital sex is more likely to lead to a break-up than it is to save your relationship
• You’ll need to spend a lot of time sneaking around, lying and keeping your story straight to keep from getting caught
• The person you’re having sex with may very well end up using it to hurt you
• You’re relationship will eventually consist of not much more than having sex (and NO! that’s not a Pro!)
• You are building a set of memories of lovers that your future husband or wife will have to compete with in your mind for your entire marriage
• Your reputation is a lot easier to destroy than it is to regain
• Your reputation matter more than you think—it has a direct effect on the kind of people who find themselves attracted to you, so as you become known as someone who will have sex, you’ll be attracting people who are more interested in sex than they are in you
• Dating should be about learning how to relate to the opposite sex, and if your dating boils down to having sex you are not learning how to relate in real and substantial ways
• Dating relationships that become sexualized often isolate one or both of the people involved—they give up friends and pull away from family only to find themselves alone when the relationship ends
• Many of the above Cons also lead to low self-esteem issues, mostly for girls but also for guys

That’s enough of the lists. I purposely left God out of the entire list of Cons and only mentioned Him once in the Pros. That was so you don’t see this as only a religious discussion. We’re getting to the God part though…

Now that we have the lists, what do you think? Did it affect your views one way or the other?

What sorts of things would you add (to either list)?

Click here to continue on to The “S” Word | Part 3: The ‘God talk’ part…