Friday, 14 August 2009
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Response: How Far is Too Far?
How far is too far? Ahh, the question that all teenagers want to know. They are usually concerned more about the restrictions than the freedoms within Christianity, but I guess in the way of moral comprehension, they are simply at the stage when they want to avoid doing wrong so no one says anything to bad (when they are trying to be Christian or survive in HS/college, I mean). It's called Level 2 Conventional morality wherein individuals seek the approval of society, whether scholarly or spiritually.They even ask religious authorities, where does it say in the Bible that I can't....? But this is not about what you are not allowed to do, but rather why. Why is it that you want to give so much of yourself to one person who you are not married to? Physical activity with one person only leads to one thing: a soul tie. These are almost unbreakable in relationships. This is why we must guard our hearts above all things and be careful for hearts are the most deceitful parts of human nature. Sometimes we are convinced within our hearts that this one person is so right for us, we can defy the law of marriage and purity and patience for that one person. But the patience, the purity, that is the true test of love. Waiting for the right time within marriage for anything of a sexual nature, for the marriage bed is holy (aka separated) is the ultimate pop quiz. Forgive the pun please.
So for those seeking answers straight from the Bible, no it doesn't mention anything about the prohibition of below-the-belt activities. But God did not leave anything out of His Word that we might have questions about it. It's not like these questions have not occurred in the minds of ancestors past. This is not something new, you know. What God did do is give us reasoning and logic capabilities so we may connect the different pieces of the puzzle. Don't make yourself so seemingly ignorant when you're not. Don't look for a loophole because God is most certainly clear on everything. You just have to use the great mind He has given you.
But for how far is too far, my answer is this, and you can hold me against it: if you cannot tell your parents, who still pay for pretty much everything you have (cell phone, clothes, food, shelter, school...etc) what you are doing on the weekends or late nights with your boo, you really should reconsider your hobbies together because unlike your parents, God is always watching. If you are breaking your parent's rules and dishonoring them with what you are doing, then you have gone too far because honoring your parents is following their rules even when they are not there to enforce them. And if one parent deems you an adult, that doesn't mean s/he gave you the privilege of going ahead and having adult relationships. It means that you are old enough to make wise decisions and pay the consequences on your own without crying to Mommy and Daddy (although they do welcome the chance to help, I promise).
If you have to sneak around and sometimes can't even tell your best friend or close sibling, then you have gone too far. If you can't imagine talking to your pastors about it (or other religious authority) then you have gone too far. I'm not saying go spread your business out there, but if your boo-loving is a topic that makes you uncomfortable and you're afraid of what they will think and on top of that, you don't have peace about it, trust me when I say that YOU HAVE GONE TOO FAR.
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Comments (27)
This is an excellent post. If you can't tell your parents, then you certainly can't tell God, even though he already knows. I needed to read this, this gave me a new understanding. Thanks for posting it!
I think there are some good underlying principles in your post, and so I agree.
But we can't always assume everyone has Godly parents who have Godly views of purity. I know of several parents who buy their kids condoms and even encourage "responsible" premarital sexual experimentation. I've dealt with many troubled youth who have parents who don't really give a crap about what their kids do sexually, as long as they don't come home with babies.
Accountability with Godly people is a great way to help nurture your purity. It definitely helped keep me in check.
But even so, that isn't where true purity happens. I already said this, but I really like what @Ancient_Scribe@xanga said:
Virginity is not simply about abstaining
from intercourse; virginity is a state of being and a reality. God
desires purity, that the man and woman being wed can make a pure and
complete gift of one to the other, and both to God. If one is asking,
"How far can I go?" odds are that you are already going too far.
Purity is about understanding and honoring what God wants from us, not just being paranoid about what body parts are or aren't touching, and definitely not about keeping mom or dad from grounding us. I think if someone has no desire to honor God with his/her life, abstaining from sexual relations isn't the purity God desires, its just abstaining from sexual relations. I suppose that doesn't hurt, but that isn't how one achieves true purity in my opinion.
kohlberg, eh? basing actions on "what our parents/best friend/religious authority would think" is still conventional. i thought the goal was to achieve post-conventional morality.
God seemed to think Parents were a good judge of "how far is to far" sense he instructed Parents to raise up their children in the ways they ought to go and to instruct them in Gods laws. etc.
Alright, now that you told me (and my peers) that we may have gone too far, my question is "what do we do if we realize we went too far?".
Oh, but you have great points in this one! Kudos!
I make it a point to not tell my parents anything. It just isn't worth it.
I think revelife is in general a little too optimistic about the quality of parents that are out there, and the amount of trust that exists between the parents and the child.
So... God wasn't clear because He wants us to fill in the blanks? Riiiiiiight, it all makes sense now.
That would be like if, on your first day of pre-school, your teacher handed you a black and white illustration and said "Here, I want you all to color this. There's only one correct way to color this, and I'm not telling you whatt it is because I want you to use your creativity and do it yourself. If you use the right colors, you'll get an A, but if you don't then you get an F. Good luck!"
What nonsense would that be? The teacher would either say "Color it however you want" and give everyone who colored it an A, or she would sayr "Color it PRECISELY like this" and take off points for those who did not follow her PRECISE directions, but it would be completely idiotic for him/her to expect her pupils to simply "figure out" the right colors on their own and grade accordingly.
My point; what kind of God can't just give us precise instructions on how to live our life and, instead, gives us vague instructions and then tells us to figure the rest out for ourselves?
If it's something you will remember when you are actually married (perhaps to someone else), then it's something you shouldn't be doing. Ideally you are only supposed to be seriously intimate with one person in life. It is a good thing to protect that possibility as much as one is able.
@Soul_Pizza@xanga -
You want a codebook? The Bible is a lot more meaningful than that. Life is about poetry and art, and discovering deeper truths of life. God helps us to find them as well, as long as we are humble and willing to ask.
I am amazed when people think that a relational way of living, where we love and interact with God directly, is somehow worse than some sort of mechanical religion where we just have rules we are supposed to follow.
The three prominent metaphors for our relation to God in the bible are sheep to shepherd, bridegroom to bride, and children to father. Codebooks, I am afraid, don't fit into any of those. And we are all the better for it.
I completely understand why asking "how far can I go?" is not the right question for a Christian to be asking, but physical boundaries still need to be placed in every relationship, and they might vary slightly among different couples. You know, ultra-orthodox Jewish couples often don't even hold hands before marriage, out of fear of giving into lust. That may seem extreme to a lot of people, but diferent people have different limits. It's something you need to discuss with your SO.
That being said, some things are clearly off-limits because they're just obvious. Taking off your clothes for someone who isn't your spouse isn't being pure, even if you're not having sex. Sleeping in the same bed with someone who isn't your spouse isn't being pure, even if you're not having sex. I personally draw the line at kissing, but even kissing has limits of its own. While every person has their own unique boundaries, some are too obvious to even debate about.
Many Christians (and others who don't believe in pre-marital sex) get married before they're ready because they want to experience sex. Doesn't always happen, but many people treat marriage as merely a prerequisite to losing virginity. Also, adolescents who live in communities that associate shame with pre-marital sex are just as likely to have sex as those who don't; however, they're actually less likely to use protection (and I'm not jumping to conclusions -- it's a statistic).
@StrokeofThought@xanga - well hey man, that all makes sense until you start throwing the whole Heaven/Hell thing into the mix; Really, what you've just described is s a respectable worldview until you get into the "you're doing it wrong, you're going to Hell part." If my "eternal soul" is at stake, then I want to know PRECISELY what is acceptable and what is not in order to save it. You can say "just accept Jesus," but even then someone will disagree and say that that alone isn't enough.
So, yes, if it's a matter of life or death, I DO want a codebook. You wouldn't give someone vague instructions on how to drive a car and then put them out on the road, would you? Hell no! You'd want to make sure they knew EXACTLY what to do before they landed themselves with some dire consequences.
This is interesting. I agree that if you can't tell your parents or your best friend, then you probably shouldn't be doing whatever it is you're doing. I hope my children will be comfortable enough to come to me or their father regarding these issues. I agree with someone else who said that we should train up our children in the way they should go - clearly a Biblical principle and one I'm attempting to follow.
The thought never crossed my mind to share anything with anyone about my sexual relation with my wife, not with my parents nor my best friends. I felt that would have been a huge violation of my wife's trust. I felt the same with any girlfriend I had prior to getting married. That always disgusted me that people would share something, whatever that was, intimately with someone and then tell people about it the first chance they get. That's just me. Nothing a woman says or does leaves the bedroom. A woman trusts me with her heart and the minute she's not around I'm going to say "HEY. GUESS WHAT GUYS!". I was very much into sports in high school but I hated locker room talk.
Sometimes kids in high school have to sneak around, making believe they aren't straight A students for fear of how peers will treat them. Did they go too far in getting good grades? I didn't tell my mother I made the dean's list at college because I knew she would somehow use that for some agenda. Does that mean I was wrong to have made the dean's list? Why are police hotlines anonymous? If you call in to say you know a gangmember committed a crime you probably don't want to go around bragging about it and you might not even tell your best friend. Did you go too far by making that call?
There are good reasons not to jump into having sex. Feelings of guilt and the fear of condemnation by others are not two of them.
Do we have a clue what God wants and believes? We know what we want and believe and we look to justify those wants and beliefs with passages from the Bible, which is why there are so many different interpretations of passages from the Bible. We become the blind leading the blind and it's often that the blind who scream the loudest are the blindest and they are also the ones people often feel most intimidated by. People are well meaning but there is the expression "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Try and catch the show Mad Men. I'm not promoting it. In fact I don't care much for the show. It makes me sick actually but I'd say it is pretty good at depicting the workplace in the 60s. Back then a lot of people believed that was the way God wanted the world to be. God wanted a male dominated workplace in which women were treated as inferior. God seems to have changed his mind since then. Back then a woman would do anything she could to hide from neighbors that she had gone through a divorce. It's hard to imagine now but back then, no matter what, getting a divorce was considered to have been going to far. There was such shame and guilt attached to the word divorce and guess what? It wasn't so bad for the man. In fact a divorced man often received a "way to go" slap on the back because he was now "back in the game". A divorced woman on the other hand was shunned by society. I don't think we'd want to go back to those days.
i only rarely did anything my parents wouldn't approve of. most of the time, they were kept in the dark just because i didn't feel like talking to them.
@Soul_Pizza@xanga - exactly. for a religion that claims to be the single truth in all the universe, there are far too many things that are unclear.
Response:How far is too far?
Penis in vagina or anus. Or vice versa.
Hmmm. I actually agree with this and it is well stated. I think that rule could apply to anything, not just sex. If I would be embarrassed for my dad or stepmom or grandma to know about it, I should probably rethink it.
@MissPixieGlitter@xanga - Whose goal is that?
Author isn't attributed? One of the better Revelife posts and the author is anonymous? Hmm...
Actually some pretty good principles, I think (provided your parents are also Christian and godly), since the Bible does not explicitly say how far to go. I followed this principle before marriage. Turns out I didn't go as far as my parents had but they didn't mention their limit until I was married. lol... However, AFTER you get married, there is such a thing as TMI. Everybody knows you're married and having sex; leave it at that and don't provide many details because that is betraying trust and can be just plain weird to boot.
@scrambledmegzntoast@hardestlevel - kohlberg's.
Good post. Someone once said that it's not wrong to walk on the edge of a cliff but it IS dangerous.
@Soul_Pizza@xanga - i'd write the letter A on the top of the paper.
regarding the vague directions, uhm good gave us free will and the decision to either do what's right or wrong. and if i understand correctly, before you submit ur poorly drawn illustration, you ask the teacher to forgive you for coloring badly and she'll give you an A (repentance?)
i think the post is pretty straight forward. if you can't be honest to people you are closest too about what you do.. if you have to sneak around and hide what you do, you probably shouldnt be doing it.
yes, spies, officers of the law, and secret agents shouldnt be sneaking around. shame on you!
I don't think parents are a good way to scale to go by. Everyone must discover that for themselves. Taking the words from someone else's mouth means you're not discovering it for themselves. How can you know someone else isn't coloring their own ideas with their own prejudices? Everyone does.
I firmly believe that the subject of purity is something everyone has to decide for themselves, christian or not. Many christians feel perfectly comfortable having sex before marriage, among other things. It's not the place of other people to tell them if they're right or wrong, but god's.
Teenagers do need guidence in particular, because most of them just don't have the experience to put everything in perspective. However we have to recognize that they're nearly grown up, and they have their own decisions at some point. Being too conservative, or restrictive towards them and they clam up and then you aren't going to have any say.
@Soul_Pizza@xanga - most of my BEST teachers don't give precise instructions. They leave some room for interpretation so that learning is involved. So that students are putting their hearts into a project and not just fulfilling requirements or going through the motions. A good art teacher teaches about abstract art and then lets the kids draw their own interpretation. A bad art teacher insists everybody copies the same Picasso painting stroke for stroke. A teacher might give an assignment; everybody has to write a story. There are right ways and wrong ways of writing a story, of course. For instance, it must be grammatically correct and follow some kind of character development, plot, etc. It must also be neatly written within the lines. But every kid isn't going to come up with the exact same story. It's not like, in order to get an A, every kid has to copy a story that has been stamped onto the chalk board, exactly word for word, all on identical pieces of paper, or else they won't get an A. No. The teacher might read great examples of great stories and talk about ideal character and plot development, but when it comes time to grading the story, she might take off for some things that weren't explicitly outlined as "rules." Her guidelines for the story might be vaguely outlined: A guideline might be: "The paper must be written neatly" If a kid hands in their story and it is on paper that is ripped or crumpled, the teacher will probably take off a point or points because it isn't neatly written. Even though she didn't explicitly write a rule that said "if you have two rips or crumples in your paper, I will subtract a point, but if you only have one rip or crumple, then that's ok. Three rips or crumples I will subtract two points, four I will subtract three points. And it's ok if you have a rip near the upper right hand corner but it must not exceed two centimeters in length and it is definitely never ok to have a rip extending from the hole punch to the edge of the paper. Eraser marks must measure no longer than 1 cm in length." No teacher gets THAT specific. They just say "neatly written" and expect that the kids will make the paper presentable. Some papers look presentable despite two rips and a piece of tape and others catch a bad eraser mark and look terrible; the teacher can look at it and immediately tell that the kid didn't bother to fix it or even try to stay neat. It's the same with God. He gives us examples of perfect love in the Bible. He talks about the commitment of marriage. He warns against violating that commitment and against sinning sexually. He warns against lust. But he doesn't say "Making out is ok, but copping a feel isn't" or "grabbing a boob will only earn you negative one points but insert a penis and you lose ten points." Because it's not about the picky little things like that. It's about your overall heart and motivations. Are they holy or are they lustful? It's your overall presentation. Are your actions something you would be proud to hand to God and say "here they are!" or are they more like that crumpled homework assignment? You know it's not "neatly written" but which crinkle or tear or eraser mark or smudge crossed that line?