The Truth About Sex

It's hard to wait. Of course, many people don't care to try. But even for those who want to, not having sex until marriage is hard. Many fail. Why is sex so attractive? Why do we think about it so much? Why is sex so hard to avoid? There's no mystery to this. If you want to blame someone, blame God. He made you that way.

Wired at Birth
Imagine a house under construction. While the walls are still skeletal, with the breeze blowing through freshly cut wood, electricians come to install an elaborate network of wires. Later, when the walls are solid with Sheetrock, plaster and paint, these wires lie hidden.

One day, when the house is ready to live in, the electric company hooks the wires into a source of power. You can't see any change. The wires stay hidden. But suddenly, you can do things you couldn't before. You can plug in and blast your stereo, do homework after dark, watch your favorite TV show.

You can also electrocute yourself.

Your sexuality is something like that. Biologically, your potential was wired in at birth. You have the proper organs. You have a male or female mix of hormones. That's good. God said so.

At puberty, your wiring gets hooked into power. Suddenly sexuality becomes an active potential. Males and females are charged particles, ready to bond. That's good too. Because God made you, and that's the way you are.

When the power turns on, you begin to feel that the wonder of the opposite sex is more than something to wonder about. If you're a boy, you want a girl for your own. If you're a girl, you want a boy. It's a strong and thrilling (sometimes frightening) urge.

Biologically you want to touch: to hold hands, to kiss, ultimately to make love. Psychologically you want to touch, too: to explore a personality so distinct from your own, to love and be loved, to expose your thoughts and your fears, to be naked and unashamed, to never be alone again.

There's also fear: Will I ever love? Will I ever be loved? Am I wired right? Will I find the person I dream of?

God made you to long for love and all that goes with it. Let's go even so far as to say he made you so it's hard to wait. Call it a challenge, flung down by the Creator God. "I'll give you this amazing potential. But know in advance: It's not easy to master. It will test you to the limits."

If it's a challenge, it's also a compliment. God challenges us because he believes we can live up to the challenge.

Worth the Wait?
If you stood up in class and proposed following God's Word as it relates to sex, people would think you were trying to outlaw happiness. You'd have to work hard to explain that God is not against sex. In fact, he considers it something good. It was, after all, his idea. God could have made us to reproduce the way plants do, with floating spores and pollen. But he preferred human life to spring from the loving embrace of intercourse. So it only makes sense that the all-knowing God who invented sex should know how it can best be celebrated. God wouldn't sacrifice his own Son to redeem us, and then turn around to arbitrarily spoil our fun.

A lot of people do feel it's spoiling their party if someone says sex before marriage is wrong. But where exactly is this party? Oh, maybe some people are having fun, but people on the whole are having a miserable time. You can't cut the statistics to read any other way. AIDS, millions of divorces, adulteries, abortions and unwanted pregnancies add up to something other than fun.

When God gives direction for sex, he does it either to protect us from harm, provide for our needs, or both.

The Bible is very frank about sex. There's not a prudish note from Genesis to Revelation. A whole book (the Song of Solomon) celebrates the sensuality of erotic love. The Bible reflects exactly the attitude you'd expect from an inventor writing about his invention. God, better than anyone else, appreciates what his invention means. He understands how it works and knows exactly what it's good for. He tells us how to use it—and how not to.

So what's God's view of sex? Simple: Sex is wonderful within marriage. Outside of marriage, it's an offense to the inventor.

Why marriage? Isn't a really committed relationship close enough? Nope. According to the Bible, only the commitment a man and a woman make in the ceremony of marriage counts. Marriage is the only place to experience truly committed love, love that echoes our relationship with God:

Husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church. He gave up his life for her. … In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man is actually loving himself when he loves his wife (Ephesians 5:25, 28).

It was that way from the beginning, when Adam and Eve were created and presented to each other by God:

"At last!" Adam exclaimed. "She is part of my own flesh and bone!" … This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. Now, although Adam and his wife were both naked, neither of them felt any shame (Genesis 2:23-25).

That's the ideal, the dream, as the Bible sees it: total nakedness, total unity, total love, total sexual satisfaction within marriage. Plenty of marital problems parade the pages of Scripture; God is no fool. But the ideal stands above the failures.

The Bible doesn't ignore behavior that falls short of the ideal. Jesus, particularly, made his views plain. Though he never married, he spoke with absolute authority against abuses like fornication (sex between people who are not married), adultery and divorce. He said of married people:

Since they are no longer two but one, let no one separate them, for God has joined them together (Matthew 19:6).

Paul had similar words of advice:

Our bodies were not made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies. … Don't you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which belongs to Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never! … Run away from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. Or don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body (1 Corinthians 6:13, 15, 18-20).

God wants your marriage bed to be pure because he cares for you. He wants to protect you from the worst. He wants to provide you with the very best.

But what if two people love each other? What if they know they'll marry someday? Why should they wait?

It may seem that being deeply in love is enough to bond two people together forever. But God says it's not. Marriage is more than just love. It's a promise of lifelong commitment—a promise made in front of others. And those who save sex for marriage are rewarded in two ways:

Honeymoon virginity. Virgins may be nervous on their wedding night. But that's good. You ought to be nervous for the biggest night of your life. For virgins, everything is about to change. They will delve into mysteries they have wondered about most of their lives. They will unfold those mysteries with the person they love more than any other. That's worth celebrating. For the sexually experienced, however, a honeymoon is merely a nice vacation.

You only get one "first time" in life. There is great joy in experiencing it with the person to whom you've just publicly committed your life. But that's only possible if you wait.

Total commitment. When you're used to having sex without total commitment, it may be difficult to understand what totally surrendering your life to another person is all about. If, earlier in your life, sex merely meant, "I'm strongly attracted to you," it's not easy to change your thinking to, "I give myself wholly and exclusively to you."

Virgins are uniquely able to give their total selves to love in a marriage. That's why "the first time" is such a big deal. You are giving your total self to the one great love of your life.

It's not easy to resist the temptations and pressures to have sex before marriage. But if you want to experience sex the way God meant for it to be, the surest way is to experience no other kind of sex. It's tough to wait for, certainly. But most good things are.