By: Annagail Lynes
“You can’t handle the truth,” Jack Nicholson barked in the courtroom in the military drama, “A Few Good Men.”
Can you handle the truth about abstinence? Abstinence is not just abstaining from intercourse but sex in all its forms. To truly be abstinent, you must refrain from all activities that stimulate you sexually.
Working from that definition, you will have to be selective in the movies and television programs you choose to view. You will have to be discriminate in the books and magazines that you read. Anything that causes that affect should be avoided.
Why is abstinence important?
First of all, in I Thessalonians 4:3 (TEV), the Bible instructs, “God wants you to be holy and completely free from sexual immorality.”
What is sexual immorality? It is Biblically defined as having sex outside of marriage. Sex outside of marriage could be sex before marriage or sex with a partner other than your husband or wife. God wants you to be holy and completely free from sexual immorality. From this, it is clear that it is God’s will for you to not have sex until you are married.
Second, if you allow yourself to have sex before you are married, you do not respect yourself. And a man who asks you to have sex with him without marrying you doesn’t respect you or himself.
“But we love each other,” “We are going to get married eventually,” “He can’t wait that long,” “If I don’t, I will lose him” … the list of excuses for having pre-marital sex goes on and on.
The cause is the same, though: disrespect. You do not value yourself if you have pre-marital sex. Instead you value your significant other’s opinion and worth over yours. What is causing you to need this person’s approval? Is it your need to be loved? Love and sex are not the same thing, my friend. You can love someone and not have sex with them. You can have sex with someone you don’t love. Sex does not equal love.
If sex isn’t love, what is?
“Love is patient and kind; it is not jealous or conceited or proud; love is not ill-mannered or selfish or irritable; love does not keep a record of wrongs; love is not happy with evil, but is happy with the truth. Love never gives up; and its faith, hope and patience never fail” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).
That is what love is. Love is not selfish. A person who asks you to have sex with them doesn’t love you. They are being selfish, feeding their own needs.
When you and your significant other cannot respect each other and yourselves enough to wait until you are married to have sex, that is a sign of immaturity and lack of commitment. You want to have sex without the complications of marriage and commitment.
But once you have sex with a person, like it or not, your spirits are connected. And when you break-up and you have sex with someone else, that new person is not just having relations with you. He or she is having relations with you and all of your past lovers because you are still connected to every person you have had sex with.
In order to grow up spiritually, you must respect yourself.
What does that mean? Respecting yourself is to put a value on yourself, to hold yourself in high esteem. It means that you believe you have purpose, significance that you are worth something.
God loves you so much that He sent His Son to die on the Cross for your sins. He has your face tattooed on His palms. His thoughts toward you every day outnumber the grains of sand on the beach. He hurts when you hurt. That’s how much God values you.
When you don’t value yourself, you are essentially saying that God is wrong. You are saying that instead of being valuable, you view yourself as worthless, insignificant and unlovable. None of which are accurate statements.
You are worthy because God made you worthy. You are significant because God has a purpose for your life. You are lovable because God loves you. Put that in perspective for a moment, the Creator of the Universe, the Person who formed you in your mother’s womb, the Person who planned a good future for you from the foundation of the Earth – He loves you. How awesome is that?
But instead of receiving His love, accepting His love, by not respecting yourself, you are saying that God’s opinion of you doesn’t count. You are saying that you value your opinion and the opinion of others over God’s.
Could you create a universe? Could you create a human being from dust? Could you part the Red Sea ? Could you made a virgin girl pregnant by the Holy Spirit? No, no, no and no. So who are you to think that you are smarter, that your opinion is more important, than God?
To respect yourself, you must love yourself.
How do you do that? By learning what God says about you. Think about it. Roll it around in your mind. Speak it out your mouth. Pray it. By speaking what God says over your life. By taking these steps every day until what God says about you goes from being head knowledge and finally drops into your heart. Then God’s opinion and your opinion of you will be the same.
When you have a godly respect yourself, you won’t want to do anything that will violate what God says about you. You will not want to do anything that will disrespect you or God’s Word.
I challenge you to work toward valuing yourself and seeing yourself as God sees you. When you do, you will be one step closer to being the person God created you to be.
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