There is always the potential of resentment going into marriage. I have talked with individuals who idealize waiting until marriage, but one pressured the other into premarital sex. Granted, they had agreed to it, but they carry with them a resentment which can subtly color their future relationship. This is why, in my premarital counseling, I urge couples to honestly face up to the relationship they have, laying aside any rationalizations which they manufacture. They can honestly discuss their disobedience to God and claim His forgiveness. It is possible for them to have a period of celibacy before their marriage. They then can go into their marriage with a much greater sense of integrity and honesty than would otherwise be present.

There are many other common-sense reasons for avoiding premarital and extramarital intercourse. We don’t have the time to go into all of them now. Simply stated, it is impossible to achieve in a premarital or extramarital relationship a spiritual, emotional, psychological and mental bonding, a oneness of the ultimate commitment, which is possible in Christian marriage. The potential for heartbreak and shattered dreams is enormous.

To put it bluntly, it’s smart to wait until marriage. It’s also smart to remain faithful inside of marriage. God’s way is not designed to spoil your fun. God’s way is the smart, the intelligent way.

Yes, sexual sin destroys. Claim the help of the Holy Spirit to flee from it, to shun it. You can’t play with fire without being burned. It is difficult to go right up to the line without stepping over it. Those lingering lunches with someone other than your husband or your wife can begin to set a chain of events into motion for destruction. Pray about how you act, how you dress, the signals you send and the signals you receive. Dedicate yourself to God in a way in which you claim His wisdom and sensitivity to that which would hurt another and hurt yourself.

Two Old Testament biographies come to mind. One was a man who played with his sexuality and that of others like a cat plays with catnip. His name was Samson. Read his biography—such a gifted man with so much potential. What he didn’t do was flee, shun immorality. Look at the price he paid.

Another was Joseph. Alienated from his own family, a slave in a foreign country, he stayed close to God. He knew the standard God set sexually. When his employer Potiphar was out of town on business, Potiphar’s wife made her move. On previous occasions, she had flirted with Joseph. This time, she attempted an all-out seduction. What did Joseph do? He literally fled from her presence, ran away from her. No one gave him the “Moral Man of the Year Award” in Egypt. In fact, he went to prison, accused by her of rape. So angered was this rejected woman that she fabricated a story. But God honored Joseph’s faithfulness.

What is the intention of this message? It’s twofold.

One, it is to faithfully portray God’s view of what He created you to be as a sexual human being in a way that does not push you toward asceticism on the one extreme or sexual anarchy at the other extreme. It is to challenge you to claim the help of the Holy Spirit to keep yourself faithful to Jesus Christ and, in the process, be faithful to yourself and others, urging you to flee fornication, remembering that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Two, it is to minister a word of God’s grace if you have cut corners. God is in the business of welcoming you home if you’re willing to repent. To you, God offers His good news of forgiveness. He accepts you as you are. He gives you a clean slate.

You may bear the scars on your memory of actions and thoughts that countered His will. Yet He is willing and He yearns to transform you into a right relationship with Him. He promises to remove your sins as far as the east is from the west and to give you a brand-new beginning. He wants to lift you out of that grocery list of brokenness, which Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 when he writes, “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers-none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”