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Mar 04, 2025 18:00pm

Letters to My Children: Teen Purity (Part 1)

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To My Children,

When I was a teenager, there was a popular program being taught to youth groups called True Love Waits. It taught about God’s design for sex to be within marriage and emphasized the blessings of waiting till you were married to enjoy these benefits and the dangers of not waiting. While this is good and right, many teens walked away from that teaching (or similar ones) thinking that as long as they didn’t have sex before they were married, then everything was fine—they had achieved the golden standard of purity. But purity is so much more than saving sex for marriage.

If you’re like most teens, your skin is already starting to crawl at the thought of your parents talking to you about this stuff. But there is great benefit and blessing in hanging in there and considering these things seriously. Yes, I’m going to talk a little bit about the physical (in PG terms, of course), but I’m also going to go beyond the surface and talk about the heart.

When it comes to physical purity, the goal is not to get as close to the line as you can get without crossing it. Any activity where there is touching or exposing of parts that should remain covered in public is out of the question. But it’s not just activities like that. There are many physical temptations out there that come before you get to the act of sex. It’s not usually a zero-to-sixty-in-three-seconds kind of a deal. Hugging or hand-holding may not be a temptation to some, but for others it is, and it always has the potential to be so—especially when there is prolonged physical contact. Again, you don’t normally go from no physical contact to sex—things tend to start small and gradually increase over time as familiarity and desire begin to grow. Even those seemingly small actions of holding hands or kissing can awaken in us desires that were under the surface.

Awakening those desires before you’re allowed to act on them (in marriage) leads to all kinds of trouble—either desire gives birth to sin as you give in to those temptations, or you needlessly torment yourself by awakening desires that cannot be fulfilled but now must be battled. That is why the bride in Song of Solomon speaks the refrain to her unmarried friends, “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases,” or until the time is right (Song of Solomon 8:4). The passion and desire that a human being can feel for another person is nothing to mess around with—“for love is as strong as death, [ardor] is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it” (Song 8:6b–7a). If you cannot act on your physical desires within the safe boundaries of marriage, there is a warning here not to do anything that would stir up those desires before the time is right to fulfill them. And that advice even extends to our conversations.

This is why Paul tells Timothy to treat younger women as sisters and older women as mothers, in all purity (1 Timothy 5:2). We will talk more about heart motives and looking out for our brothers and sisters in Christ in my next letter.

I love you. Grow in godliness and in your love for God.