Why Singles Should Stay Pure

WHY SINGLES SHOULD STAY PURE

By Christy Shipe

Here are the three most important reasons to stay pure:

1. God says so! The very best reason of all to keep your mind and actions >pure is just because God wants us to do it. This is love for God: to obey his commands. (1 John 5:3) If you truly love God, you will do what He says.After all, He suffered and died for you!

2. You're not missing anything by waiting. The consequences of being impure are far greater than any of the benefits! Consider what you gain by making out or having sex with your boyfriend: a temporary good time. It doesn't last very long. A few hours at the most. Yet the consequences can last a lifetime. You could get diseases, you could get pregnant, you could lose your good name and self-respect. Even if you don't go all the way, you can still struggle with feelings of guilt and low self-esteem. You can damage your relationship with your boyfriend, your parents, and God.

3. True love remains pure. Eventually, you will have problems in your relationship with your boyfriend if your thoughts or actions are impure. If your relationship is based on lust instead of love, it's bound to fail. Lust can damage even the truest love and corrupt even the closest soul mates. If you really want a wonderful relationship with your boyfriend, you will have a pure relationship with him.

Lust, at its very heart, is self-centered. Yet love is other-centered. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not self-seeking. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. (excerpts from 1 Corinthians 13) How can you really love someone if you're focused on meeting your own desires?

Now that all sounds pretty good, but is it really true? Let me give you some examples of why lust corrupts true love. First of all, if you are lusting after your boyfriend, you are really wanting to use him for your own benefit. Eventually, he's going to get sick of that. If you continue the pattern of lusting after him to fulfill your needs and wishes, he's going to ;resent you instead of love you. Nobody likes being used. Nobody likes being controlled and manipulated. And you can guarantee your boyfriend will hate, too.

Second of all, if you are trying to love your boyfriend by meeting his demands for physical contact, you are really just feeding his lust. I will be so bold as to guess that 100% of guys struggle with lust, some more than others. When you hug your boyfriend, you may be thinking, What a sweetie! But he's thinking, What a hot body! The tiniest of things can send a guy's whole body flaming with lust, and the girl has no idea. That's why even if you don't struggle with lust, you should be extremely careful. You may think, But my boyfriend wants to kiss me because he loves me! That may be true. People who are in love want to express that love in physical ways. But you'll be able to tell if your boyfriend really loves you if he wants to keep your relationship pure more than he wants to kiss you. Real love wants the best for the other person. And God's standard of purity and holiness is the best for both your lives.

Don't allow your boyfriend to act on his lust with you. If you do, you are just storing up trouble for yourself in the future. A lustful boyfriend or ;husband will likely do one or both of two things: 1) Be unfaithful to you by lusting after other girls and 2) Use and control you to fulfill his lust. Anyone who lusts tries to use and control others. And you don't want that kind of relationship.

My parting thought is this: If you lose your boyfriend because you have ;high standards, then he was worth losing. Stay away from lustful guys who want to use and control you. Look for a guy who loves God first and who loves you so much that he wants to do the right thing.