Many young people today believe that the emotion love should automatically lead to making love. This belief can be costly because outside of marriage, sex has a price tag.
Most young people get information about sex from TV, movies and the internet. These media usually tell a false story about sex or at most a story that is not completely true. They present sex as fun, good and as almost without consequences. Two out of these three are correct. Sex is good and fun but there are consequences. God created sex; it is a beautiful thing. He created it for a purpose and for a specific context and that context is marriage. Outside of that context, it will cost you. The question is: what does it cost and does it worth it?
What is most regrettable is that many young people go into sexual relationship without a good knowledge of what they are going into and the consequences that follow it. It is painful to hear, just after the damage has been done, that ‘Nobody told me’. Life is not a drama rehearsal. You are not here for a practice; you are living life. You haven’t been promised tomorrow, and the choices that you make today will determine what your future will look like. And for many of you, there will be no going back, no second chance. You will have to do it right the first time.
What is the price? If you have sex outside of marriage, you will pay Physically, Emotionally and Spiritually. Perhaps you may escape the physical cost, you can’t escape all, and for each of these, the stakes are very high. There is a price we all pay as individuals when we make wrong choices.
PHYSICALLY
The number one thing teenagers are afraid of when they have sex is pregnancy. But why the fear? Pregnancy is not a disease. It is meant to happen at some point in your life. If it happens prematurely as in teenagers, it becomes a problem, and then the choices are terrible. There is no easy way out. The good choice was before the sexual intercourse and the pregnancy but with the pregnancy, you have no good alternative. Abortion is painful. 80% of all women who have had an abortion said if they could go back, they would choose something different. It is not like going to the dentist to have a tooth-pull. There is the awful possibility of death and accidental damage of the reproduction tissues and organs. There are also permanent and emotional consequences to that choice that you don’t just get over it.
Parenting is not easy either. Imagine a fifteen year old girl who has to parent a child. She should be thinking about playing, having fun with others and studying, but she has to think about feeding a baby. Do you realize that 87% of young teenagers who parent, both they and their child will live below the poverty line for at least 10 years, most of them for the rest of their lives? It is a positive option but it is not an easy one.
Before you go to bed tonight, 12,000 teenagers like you will get a sexually transmitted disease. That amounts to 3,000,000 every year. In the 60s, there were 5 known sexually transmitted disease. Today, there 50, and 30% of these are absolutely incurable. That means that once you’ve got it, it’s there for life.
You know, sex don’t just happen; there is a time one decides to have sex or when one decides not to look at her options. I know a 13 year old who had to do a complete hysterectomy because she had sex and contracted gonorrhea that so badly affected her fallopian tubes and uterus. She will never have children. One night, one choice and she is permanently scarred for life. One day she will meet a man she loves and wants to marry, but she has to say to him: "You know what? I will never have children." If she can go back to make a different choice, would she? Yes! Can she? No! Her choice was made. There are other diseases as bad as gonorrhea or even worse. There are many people who find out that they are dying at 35 because of the choices they made when they were 17. And there is AIDS. AIDS doubles among teenagers every 14 months. It is now the 6th leading cause of death between 16 and 24 years old.
What are teenagers told to do to prevent them from the disease that will kill them? Condom, Safe-sex. Statistics are not constant about the failure rate of condom for AIDS but we can work it out. We know with some surety that the failure rate of condom for pregnancy is 17-30%, and there are 3-5 days a month when you can get pregnant, that it about 100 hours. But AIDS can be gotten every single second of sexual intercourse. Only women can get pregnant but everybody can get AIDS. What is that doing to our statistics? It is heightening the failure rate of condoms for AIDS. The sperm cell is 150 times larger than an HIV cell. Imagine it: 300 million HIV cells will fit into the space of the ‘full stop’ at the end of this sentence. How many of these cells will it take to infect you with a disease that will kill you? Just one! Two venereal diseases – human papilloma virus (the main cause of cervical cancer) and Chlamydia (the leading cause of infertility) – are carried by at least one of every three teenage girls who have sex. Venereal diseases and AIDS don’t always show symptoms, so many people don’t even know they have them. And you are being told to use a condom to prevent them. At the pack of a condom, it is written: “Don’t expose this material to extreme cold or extreme heat.” This condition can hardly be met as the condom travels from the manufacturers’ factory to the shop where it is sold. Very likely before the condom gets to the users, it is already damaged.
EMOTIONALLY
What if there were no physically prices to pay? What if we didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant? There will still be emotional side-effects. There is no condom for the heart.
God created sex to have a bonding effect on our lives. It is meant to take one special relationship and bond it together for life, but many have started using sex for fun, as a game and it does not mean anything any more. The average length of a relationship for people under nineteen once sex becomes involved is 3 weeks. So young people come together because they think they are in love and after 3 weeks someone who was special before isn’t that special anymore and they move on to the next relationship, most of the time leaving one another emotionally torn apart. You know, Sex can make you feel like you’re experiencing true love. That makes a breakup very painful, which can lead to deep depression, hopelessness, and even suicide. In addition, this deep pain makes it hard to trust again. Once a person’s heart is broken, they fear another broken commitment in the future. Many, once they’ve been burned, just give up hope.
Many people experience deep remorse after having sex before marriage. There is often the feeling of being used, a feeling that you’ve given up something precious, and all for nothing. Premarital sex often produces regret and remorse which lasts for years. One young wife says, “I would do anything, ANYTHING, to forget the sexual experiences I had before I met my husband . . . the pictures of the past and the other men go through my head, and it’s killing any intimacy. The truth is, I’ve been married to this wonderful man for eight years and I have never been ‘alone’ in the bedroom with him.”
Apart from the guilt feeling of doing something morally wrong that comes after sexual intercourse, young people also have a sense of lose of the self-respect. People are not things. Uncommitted sex treats them as things for pleasure satisfaction and that hurts and wrecks their self-esteem. They as a result often seek any kind of attention, even if it’s in other demeaning sexual relationships. Girls are more vulnerable in this respect because girls are more likely to think of sex as a way to "show you care." They're more likely to see sex as a sign of commitment in the relationship. If a girl expects a sexual interlude to be loving, she may very well feel cheated and used when the boy doesn't show a greater romantic interest after the event. As one 15-year-old girl describes her experience: "I didn't expect the guy to marry me, but I never expected him to avoid me in school." Moreover there is a sense of unworthiness that comes from doing what one knows she is not supposed to do.
My dear friends, premarital sex will corrupt your character. Good character includes honesty, fairness, decency, caring, self-control, etc. If you start messing with sex before marriage, your self-control will suffer, and sex can almost take over your whole life. Sexual addictions are out of control today and it expresses itself in promiscuity, incest, pornography, masturbation and sexual harassment, just to mention some of them.
Sex before marriage can also turn a good relationship bad. It can easily take over your relationship and stop other very important dimensions of the relationship from developing – leaving a one-track relationship with no solid foundation.
Why take risks that can cause you grief the rest of your life? Your future marriage will be much happier if you don’t have to worry about – or recover from – the negative emotional consequences of sex before marriage. Without sex, your relationship can still be great fun as you grow together, develop your own identities, chart your exciting future, hone your skills, pursue your interests, make more friends and nurture your spirit. Waiting will help each of you develop discipline and great respect for each other. It also makes for an awesome honeymoon!
Sex certainly can be a source of great pleasure and joy. But as should be amply clear sex also can be the source of deep wounds and suffering. What makes the difference is the relationship within which it occurs. Sex is most joyful and fulfilling - most emotionally safe as well as physically safe - when it occurs with a loving, total, and binding commitment. Historically, we have called that marriage. Sexual union is then part of something bigger - the union of two persons' lives.
Sex without commitment is very risky for the heart
SPIRITUALLY
Spiritually, sin cuts us off from God, and this is the most serious consequence of premarital sex. The loss of God’s friendship and the endangering of your soul is the greatest price you can pay for having sex now. We know that God forbids sex outside of marriage because it is not in line with His purpose of creating it, and He feels really bad about it. This is understandable. If you purchased a gift for a friend and before you can give it to that friend, he or she steals it! Wouldn’t you be upset? Imagine, then, how God feels when a person engages in premarital sex, abusing the gift that God has provided.
It is true that throughout the Bible, there is no place where it is written: ”thou shall not have sex before marriage”, but the Bible is clear that that is what God demands of us in line with his purpose, which is for our own good. In the Scripture, God also warns us of the deadly spiritual consequences of sexual sins. The apostle Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament, placed particular emphasis on the benefits of sexual purity and the disruptive impact of sexual immorality. If you read the sixth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, you will understand that casual sex is definitely not as trivial as satisfying a physical hunger. Bodies are important because God has bought them into being and will raise them. Notice also how St. Paul makes it abundantly clear that pre-marital sex is not a mini-marriage, but it is encroaching upon the holy ground of marriage in an unacceptable way. Physical union should not take place outside of a “one flesh” (i.e. marriage) union. The point is that to be united with someone other than one’s spouse is to tear oneself away from Christ with whom we are spiritually united as Christians.
Dear younger ones, God loves you and does not want you to dishonour your body by premarital sex or fornication. His recommendation is that you “Flee from sexual immorality. Every sin that a person does is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body” (I Corinthians 6:18). The implications of this statement are fairly clear. It can be read as “All sins are bad, but premarital sex is really bad.”
But why should you risk losing God’s favour, condemning yourself to hell and suffering other physical and emotional pain because of a momentary pleasure that you can actually save for the right time? The cost is really high and it doesn’t worth the trouble.
Our bodies, our hearts, our relationships, and our souls are not made for premarital sex. We're made for enduring love.
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