I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris

conviction of your heart.
    purity in action
    If we desire purity, we have to fight for it. This means adjusting our attitudes and changing our
    58 lifestyles. The following pointers
    the direction of purity 93 will help us maintain a direction of purity with both our hearts and our feet.
    1. Respect the deep significance of physical intimacy. We will never understand God's demand for sexual purity until we appreciate the deep spiritual and emotional implications of physical intimacy.
    Many non-Christians view sex as a bodily function on the level of scratching another person's back. They engage in sex whenever and with whomever they want. While this lifestyle is an affront to biblical values, many Christians treat lesser expressions of physical intimacy with the same lack of respect. They view kissing, holding, or fondling another person as no big deal. While we may hold higher standards than our pagan neighbors, I'm afraid we, too, have lost sight of the deeper significance of sexual intimacy.
    "Men tend to see the physical as more of an experience," a good female friend once told me. A girl's point of view is very different, she explained. "Kissing and "making out" mean something very precious and deep to a woman," she said. "It is our way of giving our trust, our love, our heart to the man we love. It leaves us very vulnerable."
    Physical intimacy is much more than two bodies colliding. God designed our sexuality as a physical expression of the oneness of marriage. God guards it carefully and places many stipulations on it because He considers it extremely precious. A man and woman who commit their lives to each other in marriage gain the right to express themselves sexually to each other. A husband and wife may enjoy each others bodies because they in essence belong to each other. But if you're not married to someone, you have no claim on that persons body, no right to sexual intimacy.
    94 joshua harris
    Maybe you agree with this and plan to save sex for marriage. But in your opinion, you view "making out" activities such as kissing, necking, and fondling as no big deal. But we need to ask ourselves a serious question. If another person's body doesn't belong to us (that is, we're not married), what right do we have to treat the people we date any differently than a married person would treat someone who wasn't his or
    59 her spouse?
    "But," you might say, "that's completely different." Is it really? Our culture has programmed us to think that singleness grants us license to fool around, to try out people emotionally and sexually. Since we're not married to anyone in particular, we can do what we want with anyone in general.
    God has a very different view. "Honor marriage, and guard the sacredness of sexual intimacy between wife and husband," He commands (hebrews 13:4, The Message).
    This honor for the sacredness of sexuality between husband and wife starts now, not just after the wedding day. Respect for the institution of marriage should motivate us to protect it from violation while we're single. We can do this by recognizing the deep significance of sexual intimacy--at any level--and refusing to steall these privileges before marriage.
    2. Set your standards too high.
    In the early days of his ministry Billy Graham experienced deep concern over the public's distrust of evangelists. How could he preach the gospel to people who assumed he was a fake? As he consideredl this question, he realized that most people who distrusted evangelists did so because those evangelists lacked integrity, particularly in the area of sexuality. To combat this, he and the close circle of men who ran the crusades avoided opportunities to be alone with women who weren't their wives.
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    Think about this for a moment. What an inconvenience! Did these men really fear that they'd commit adultery the moment they found themselves alone with a woman? Weren't they going a little too far?
    We'll let history answer the