“How shall I speak of a few careless kisses to a generation nurtured on the assumption that nearly everybody goes to bed with everybody? Of those who flounder in the sea of permissiveness and self-indulgence, are there any who still search the sky for the beacon of purity? If I did not believe there were, I would not bother to write.” (Elisabeth Elliot in Passion and Purity)
Jon and Aimee Keulen, another couple who had their first kiss on their wedding day.
I remember when Gana and I first had feelings for each other. We had known each other only a very short time when God began to plant in our hearts and minds that this might actually lead to marriage. Yet, we never really did the typical dating thing--it just didn't work in our situation. Gana called my dad and asked if I would be willing to live in Mongolia. Before he pursued my heart, he was willing to make a commitment and wanted to know if I was willing, too.
"Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." Proverbs 4:23
I have always respected Gana for this. He wasn't raised in a Christian home with parents who taught him godly relationship principles. And yet, he knew that before he asked for my heart there had to be a commitment.
The privileges of romance and love should parallel increasing commitment. Commitment is the boundary that keeps romance pure and beautiful.
Yet, in our society we hesitate to make commitments until we've tasted a little fruit of that commitment. We view relationships as test-drives for marriage. And as Christians we know that some things are reserved for the marriage relationship, so we set personal boundaries for ourselves--arbitrary though they may be. The problem with this is, that humans are great redefiners. Say we set a line that we won't be together alone after dark. Next thing you know, we are arguing with ourselves whether dusk is considered dark or that it doesn't count as long as we are indoors and things are brightly lit.
The problem with setting lines is that we always go right up to it. Anyone who has children knows this. I tell Belgee, "Don't go into the kitchen." Next thing you know his toes are at the very edge of the carpet where it meets the linoleum. The trouble begins when his brother runs by, knocks him over and he falls into the kitchen. Human nature 101.
It's like thinking, "If it's a mortal sin, I don't want to do it. But, if it's a venial sin, I don't want to miss it!" But this is not the heart of God.
(The following from an interview with Scott Croft and Michael Lawrence. Complete interview here.)
ML: I make the analogy with baptism. We are united with Christ when we repent of our sins and place our faith in His death on our behalf. There is a union, a spiritual union that happens. Well there is a sign of that covenant union that visually pictures for us what was going on there: the ordinance of baptism. The same sort of thing is going on in the relationship between sex and marriage. A covenant union is created in marriage. The picture of that union and the thing that actually affects it — and without it, there is no marriage — is this physical union of sexual intercourse. Now then, I think it's important for us to ask what is sex? And is sex just intercourse? Well I would argue no. I would argue that part of our problem is we have tried to create boundaries and draw lines within a whole category of activity that we call an experience as sexual intimacy. And we think we can draw the line here or here or here and all Christians probably agree we have to at least draw the line at sexual intercourse. And then we get into trouble when we do that, right? When we draw our line we say OK we will go this far physically but no further. And then what do we do? Well we come right up to the line because that's what lines invite us to do. We come right up to the edge of that line and we fall over it. And we are surprised? We shouldn't be surprised because there really is no qualitative difference between the kind of activity on one side of the line and the kind of activity on the other side of the line. It's all sexual activity and God created it that way.
SC: And biblically all such lines are synthetic. They are artificial.
ML: That's right, they're all artificial, they're all synthetic. So I don't want to create new boundaries within that sphere of sexual activity. I actually want to move the boundary to outside of sexual activity. That's where the real boundary should be. Biblically, the boundary is between sexual activity and not sexual activity, not between the kinds of sexual activity we are going to engage in. And married couples understand this I think because married couples engage in a lot more than just sexual intercourse. They do all the things in their love making that an unmarried couple does on what they consider the safe side of the boundary. And they do all of that and they enjoy it and they call it foreplay. And they do it because it leads, in a same way that an on-ramp inevitably leads you up onto the highway, all of that foreplay, does a really great job of leading you onto the highway of sexual intercourse.
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I think we need to be careful not to dissect our bodies from our souls from our spirits. We are triune beings that should be approached as a whole--not just in this issue, but in all issues.
More to come....
David and Heather Knifton
