‘Recently my fiancée and I made the horrible mistake of having sex outside of marriage and it has damaged our relationship, and also severely damaged my relationship with God. I can’t seem to find peace with Him and the adversary is all around me making everything even worse. I have this gut-wrenching feeling inside of me that will not go away. I feel torn apart . . . .’
As I read the heart-breaking e-mail, I learnt that he had been a Christian since he was in his early teens. My mind flashed back to the shock I felt when I first heard the claim that research suggests that nearly as many Christian couples as non-Christian have at least once fallen into premarital sex. Then I remembered what I had once written about temptation, and with that the mystery slowly unraveled. Here’s the gist of what I remembered:
Most people who lose their battle with temptation do so because they don’t start the fight soon enough. They let the Tempter have too many early victories. They give the Evil One easy, uncontested wins by hardly thinking twice about viewing/hearing/reading things that weaken them, and dabbling with ‘legitimate pleasures’ that edge them closer and closer to the crumbling cliff face.
Suppose you are in a leaking boat. You are lounging on deck as the water seeps in a few bucketfuls an hour. No problem. Any fool can bail that out. Hour after hour you continue to snooze until suddenly you find yourself plunging towards the ocean floor. You then bail furiously but it’s too late. The disaster was not the product of some momentary weakness or inexplicable lapse the last five seconds. It was all so avoidable, if only the danger had been taken seriously.
That’s what it’s like with temptation. Act soon enough, and you’re safe. Take no action as temptation begins to seep in, and the danger slowly mounts until finally not even the strongest saint could survive the onslaught.
It’s not what happens in a moment of weakness that is critical. What matters is what you do right now to protect yourself from those moments. I began wondering how far back from intercourse one must begin the fight. If there is no big difference between Christians and non-Christians when it comes to the movies they watch and the way they kiss when dating, should we be surprised if there is no big difference further down that slippery slope?
It would be very wrong to suppose that knowing where to draw the line is just a young person’s problem. It is a dilemma for Christian singles of all ages, breaking countless hearts, even when it hasn’t lead to a moral fall. A woman in her mid-sixties, having been widowed for several years, was not only free from fresh memories of sex, she had gritted her teeth during marital relations throughout her long marriage. A 70 year old widower, whom she felt no physical attraction to, tongue kissed her. Despite what we might expect from her age and sad sexual history, she found it dangerously arousing. He couldn’t see a problem. She felt herself inching closer to a no-longer dormant volcano of uncontrollable passion. The result was heart wrenching as she tried to explain why she had to back off.
As I pondered the danger of snoozing in a leaking boat, I recalled a feature of lovemaking that I, being unmarried, suddenly found alarming. Because of its key role in maintaining marital oneness, lovemaking is divinely designed to disarm one’s reservations and aloofness and be almost drug-like in its amazing ability to soothe. In fact, when the Bible speaks of David comforting his grieving wife, it resulted in pregnancy (2 Samuel 12:24). The nearly miraculous power of lovemaking to comfort and reassure is a feature not just of those aspects of lovemaking that must be restricted to marriage. Even something as innocent as holding hands or saying or hearing the words, ‘I love you,’ is infused with an almost hypnotic power to melt away one’s apprehensions and make a couple feel wonderfully secure and at ease in each other’s presence. Little wonder, then, that when, as an unmarried couple, we become even slightly affectionate, we tend to let our defenses down in the very situation that we need to be on heightened alert to sexual temptation.
Two devout Christians who had been dating received a very special touch from God in a church service. They left the church on a spiritual high, and after an hour or so they fall into sin with each other. Devastated, they came to their pastor in tears. ‘How ever could this have happened at such a time?’ they asked in shattered disbelief. They had been feeling so close to God that they supposed they were invulnerable. Filled with the warm love of God and excitement over what he had done, their feelings imperceptibly slipped from God to love for each other and slowly gained momentum on the roller coaster ride to out-of-control passion. The enemy is like a beast of prey silently stalking those who suppose think would not be attacked. He’s smart enough to know that those who are on the alert for danger will spot him early and be off in a flash; running so fast that he’ll never sink his teeth into them.
‘So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!’ (1 Corinthians 10:12).
In other words, a false sense of security is as spiritually lethal as passionate kissing behind the steering wheel of a speeding car. The issue is not whether a couple can trust each other but whether they can trust the devil. Letting our defenses down is as smart as bedding down to sleep across a railway track.
If we were alone with a stranger of ill repute, alarm bells would be blaring within us. Not so, when we are alone with our most trusted and dearest friend. And yet we have a deadly spiritual enemy who delights in tempting us when we least expect it, and in getting at us through the person we love and respect the most. He used this very ploy on the Holy Lord himself. ‘Get behind me, Satan,’ the Son of God was forced to tell his best friend. Moved by love, Peter was trying his utmost to comfort and reassure his dear friend. It was at that very moment that the enemy slipped in. Peter had no idea that his attempts to comfort his beloved Master were being used of the Evil One to tempt the Holy Lord (Matthew 16:21-23).
Given the soothing, reassuring nature of lovemaking and the fact that it involves our dearest friend, it is hard to think of any other type of temptation in which we are so lulled into letting our guard down. Add to this the fact that even limiting oneself to handholding – to say nothing of further down the slippery slide – is like trying to stop at eating a single salted peanut. No wonder so many of us fall!
There have been times and societies in which couples were never allowed alone until after the wedding. That sounds hopelessly old-fashioned – almost as old-fashioned as virginity is becoming. I’m seeking, not necessarily to convince you of the wisdom of the past, but to stimulate your thinking. My goal throughout this webpage is to inspire you to stretch your mind and to think outside the square in your personal search for wise, Spirit-led ways to avoid soiling yourself. This is needed because the sad reality is that the approach of average present-day Christian couples is simply not working.
By the way, don’t let the Deceiver tell you that because of a past tragedy you have nothing left to preserve. If you are trusting Christ’s miraculous ability to purify, then you are his virgin and have everything to preserve. You won’t want to break the heart of the One who gave his all for you.
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