Chastity: A Lost Art Worth Rekindling

Dianna and I are weirdos.  We were both virgins when we married at 21 and 22, respectively.  We know lots of other freaks who remained chaste until marriage as well.  Some of the truly cah-razy couples even waited until their wedding day to share their first kiss!

Let’s be honest: abstinence before marriage…  I mean, c’mon!  Really?  It’s 2015!  Am I really advocating for a life of chastity and sexual purity?  Abstinence is really old-fashioned.  It’s not 1820, or even 1950.  Modern humanity is freed from the prudish shackles of yesteryear.  Besides, sexuality today is ubiquitous: it is everywhere inescapable.  And really, to avoid it is simply impossible.  Right?

Modesty, chastity, abstinence?  Let’s face it: these are arcane words from a bygone era that failed and gave way to a more progressive, advanced, sophisticated age of sexual freedom, experimentation, and experience-as-king…  Right?

In 2015, the pursuit of such virtues as modesty, chastity, and abstinence feels like an exercise in futility.  If a standard is high and only a few people can reach it, then the answer is to lower that standard, expect less, and remain ambivalent and in denial towards the obvious results: brokenness, outbreak of disease, sky-high divorce rates, widespread sexual dissatisfaction, and unprecedented fatherlessness.

I have written before that women are precious treasures who should expect to be sought after and paid for dearly.  A woman should not give her heart or body lightly.  The only man worth a woman’s heart and body is the one who pledges to love her and serve her for the rest of his life.  But let me take that a step further:

Not even the pledge is enough.  Ladies: a mere promise of love and affection and adoration and service is still not worth your heart and body.  The fulfillment of that promise is.  That is why the Bible and 2,000 years of Christian practice advocate for abstinence before marriage.  That is one of the many, MANY excellent and undeniable reasons to pursue a life of modesty and chastity before marriage, and to save sex for after marriage.

Modesty.  Chastity.  Abstinence.

• Old-fashioned?  Yep.
• Difficult to maintain?  Certainly.
• Impossibly unattainable?  Hardly.
• Worth it?  Absolutely!
• Proven to be directly connected to peace of mind and wholeness of heart and soul?  Yes.  Yes, it is.  Both the Bible and secular science agree on this one.

And hey, lest there be naysayers who want to attack me or the Bible’s motives, I’m not trying to make everyone into 18th-century Puritans.  No, I’m trying to describe one aspect of a whole, full, peace-filled, regret-free life.

Chastity is not something God wants from you; it is something He wants for you.  Your peace, your happiness, your wholeness – these things matter to Him, and He knows that one of the things that shatters the abundant life He wants for you is sexual frivolity.

You are worth so much more than that to Him!!!

“Humanity thought that, if they could only get rid of puritanical taboos and of moral codes written in Scriptures, they could be free to do as they liked with sex. But they now find that the moral law is written in sex itself. Keep that moral law, and there is heaven; break it, and there is hell, here and now.”  ‐E. Stanley Jones

“No age ever emphasized sex more than this age has done, or enjoyed sex less. Restraints are gone; Puritanism has been banished. But now that the age is free to do as it likes, it finds it doesn’t like what it does.”  ‐E. Stanley Jones