In a few short weeks, I will have the privilege of performing the wedding ceremony for another young couple that has decided to enter into a marriage covenant relationship together. As with any couple, the road to that marriage ceremony requires a set number of pre-marital counseling sessions. This couple has been no different. Just last week, we completed the session dealing with money and sex. The reason we go through a session of this magnitude is because money and sex are typically two of the top reasons married couples get divorced.
Most of these sessions I do with young couples follow a predictable pattern. This session did not. This session actually surprised me. As I sat across the table from this young couple in their mid-twenties, who were about to enter into one of life’s greatest adventures together, I gracefully rolled out the question for which I generally get the typical answer. The conversation went something like this:
Me: So, are you all having sex together right now prior to marriage?
Couple: No, we are not
Me: What!? I don’t believe you. You’re kidding…right?
Couple: No, it’s true. We’re both virgins and we decided to remain sexually pure until we get married to each other.
Me: Do you know how rare that is? What made you decide to do that?
Couple: Our spiritual convictions and honoring God’s Word and will for our lives.
Me: Where did you get those convictions?
Couple: We were taught that growing up, being in church, and going to a Christian college. We want to honor God and do it the right way.
As I sit and write this, I am still pleasantly amazed by their response. It was so refreshing and encouraging to hear of their commitment. They are definitely marching against the grain. Typically, when I ask this question, the couple stares back at me with a look that says one of two things: 1) “Of course we’re sexually intimate, why would you expect anything else?” 2) “Wait…what? You mean there’s something else?”
Yes, there is something else, and in spite of how much our culture has tried to normalize it, it was never supposed to be normal, it was supposed to be special. God actually has a plan for our sexuality. The plan was laid out by Jesus in Matthew 19 when He said:
”Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Hebrews 13:4 added to that, “Let marriage be held in high honor by all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and the adulterous.”
Simply put, God’s plan is one man, one woman, one lifetime. Though all may not choose that plan, and many falter along the way, thankfully, God can redeem us when we deviate from the plan and He is able to restore and make all things new. It is not an easy plan. It was not supposed to be an easy plan. The greatest rewards never come from the easiest journeys.
The plan exists for God’s glory. The plan exists for our purity. The plan exists for our protection and to sanctify one of the most precious gifts God gives to us…our sexuality. The plan is not meant to stifle us or rid us of sexual pleasure. It’s actually meant to maximize it. But most never realize that because they don’t follow the plan or even hear of it. This young couple will experience the fullness of that plan.
This couple said to me, “Our friends tell us not to expect too much our first time on our honeymoon night.” Their friends are wrong. If I’m in a sexual relationship with my partner prior to marriage, what is the point of a honeymoon? It’s just another night. But when the night of your first sexual encounter follows the ceremony of your marriage vows before God, friends, and family, and you look at your newly crowned spouse and say, “For all these years, even when I didn’t know you, I saved myself for God and for you, for this moment right here,” nothing about that is “don’t expect too much your first time.” I would rather fail in the exploration of marriage than sell out to the sexual heat of what everyone else around me is doing. Anybody can do that. Not anyone can save themselves for marriage and march against the grain of culture.
Very soon, this couple will experience the divine truth that very few on planet earth choose or get to experience anymore. And in that moment, every ounce of resistance to temptation, every ounce of not bowing down to what their friends were doing, every ounce of ridicule and standing out for something so many have normalized, every insult…it will all be worth it.
I may be called “out of touch” for writing this. I may be called a “dinosaur” for writing this. I may be called “foolishly irrelevant” and “naïve” for writing this, all of which is fine. Just don’t tell me it can’t still happen, or that I don’t know what I’m talking about…because I was 29 years old when it happened to me on my honeymoon night, and twenty years later I still don’t regret it.