You asked:

iam-sisgohard:

This was the second time this week that I had this conversation with someone, so now I’m wondering: Is it really unrealistic for me to believe that as a young Christian, I can be in a relationship and still wait until I’m married to have sex? Everyone says its not possible, but I refuse to believe that. I think it depends on the two individuals and where they are in their walk. Thoughts?….

If you want to vacation in Paris, can you keep yourself from buying, say, every new nail polish that OPI comes out with in order to save for the trip

If you want to lose weight (or maintain your ideal weight), can you swap seasonal fruit for Krispy Kreme?

If you want to hang out with friends, but need to finish a huge project in order to graduate or get a promotion at work, can you say no to your friends?

If someone makes you so angry that you want them dead, can you avoid killing them?

If everybody else is doing it — whatever “it” may be — can you go against the grain if doing “it” is contrary to your principles?

Of course you can. You can do all those things because you can rise above your brain chemistry to be who you are.

So, yes, abstinence is possible, but we don’t practice it because we have long-term goals, because we’re trying to be mature, or for the sake of our social status. We don’t practice abstinence because we have standards or because we’re afraid of what will happen if we violate someone else’s standards.

If we avoid sex outside of marriage for any of those reasons, we are doomed to fail.

Yeah, that just happened: I said, “Doomed to fail.”

We’ve seen it a million times, and so has every non-Christian who tells us it’ll never work.

We practice abstinence because Jesus — knowing before He even created us that we would minimize Him, deny Him, ignore Him, devalue Him, ostracize Him, reject Him, mock Him„ be ashamed of Him, and treat Him like trash — loved us.

He loved us so much that He died a hideous, agonizing, humiliating, and public death on the Cross, thrown outside the city gates with the rest of society’s garbage.

He loved us so much that He “became sin,” a scapegoat who abandoned His Godhood and His royal position to live sinlessly among us just to show us it could be done. Just to buy for us — with His own blood — eternal life with Him, in spite of knowing how we would treat Him in this life.

We don’t practice abstinence to get Jesus on our side. We practice it because He has proven without doubt and without fail that He was, is, and will always be on our side.

And if He — being so completely with us and for us, and having such an intimate understanding of who we are — says we shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage, we understand that He wants the best for us, and we’ll do whatever He asks in order to have the best.

Will we be tempted? Of course. But, “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” (I Corinthians 10:13)

Excuse the text spam, but there’s such an atmosphere of confusion around how and why we Christians do what we do that I always think too much information is better than too little.