Reclaiming Purity

“So I find this law at work; when I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:21-25

I was torn. I felt God’s conviction cautioning me to stop. But deep within me was a longing for this boy to hold me—to gaze into my eyes and tell me I was beautiful and desirable…to reassure me just one more time. Kissing him was inviting escalating passion as I felt him respond to me. But I didn’t want to go too far. How far was too far? Can you relate to this struggle?

The Bible is very clear that sex before marriage is outside of God’s plan for His people. Hebrews 13:4 says, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” I am not just trying to convince you to seek purity before marriage. If you have picked up this book, I assume you have already made the commitment to purity, or at least you feel that quiet conviction that I did in my dating years. But maybe you, too, struggle with how to implement it. As the verse in Romans 7 above suggests, the problem is not just a lack of knowledge of God’s standards; it’s the difficulty in resisting the temptation to violate them. Paul says that even though He loves God’s law and wants to do good, evil is right there with him. There’s a tension between what our spirit knows to be right and the pull of our flesh. So once we make a commitment to purity, what happens next?

It took Brian, my husband, and I some time to grasp the idea of purity while we were dating. After reading our story, you’ll see that making the commitment to purity was just the beginning. We had tasted the forbidden fruit for a number of years. Then I got to know Jesus in a new and powerful way. Brian eventually followed and we knew things had to change. We had the difficult task of trying to figure out how to have a Christian dating relationship; living in the Garden of Eden so to speak, right next to the tree but resisting the habit and compulsion of reaching for that fruit. How close to the forbidden tree can you get? Can you actually hold the apple in your hand but not taste it? There is no hard and fast rule I can give you for where to draw the line. However, I will share with you some lessons that I learned that can show you how to build your relationship together through Christian dating and describe some strategies to keep the pilot light of your passion lit but under God’s gentle control.

I want to give you some ideas for ways to invest time in your relationship that won’t rob you of your purity but will help you to explore one another in new ways—to develop the emotional, intellectual and, most of all, spiritual sides of your relationship together. You may or may not be 100% sure of your future together. That’s ok. I believe God will provide clarity. In any case, you’re not just dating to pass the time. You’re dating with a purpose: to see if you’re compatible together. If you keep God in the center of your relationship, rather than just a passing thought on Sunday, He will bless your lives abundantly. He will guide you in the way you should go, and if it is His plan to join you in marriage one day, He will honor your vows of purity and help you grow and change in a blossoming relationship.