What about sexual purity?

Question 12024

Sexual purity has become an embarrassing phrase in some circles, partly because it has been handled badly. A generation of young Christians was given rules, fear and a promise that keeping the rules would be rewarded with a happy marriage. When the promise did not materialise, the whole framework collapsed for many of them.

So I want to start again from Scripture rather than from that. What God actually asks is both more demanding and more liberating than the version many people were handed, and it has far more to do with who He is than with what we avoid.

The design, not the rulebook

God made sex. That statement is worth pausing on, because it is easy to speak as though the church were embarrassed by something the Bible is not embarrassed by at all. Genesis presents the one-flesh union as good, before any sin entered the world (Genesis 2:24-25), and the Song of Songs devotes an entire book to celebrating desire between a husband and wife.

Hebrews puts both halves together: “Let marriage be held in honour among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4). Honour and warning in the same sentence. The boundary exists to protect something valuable, not to spoil something enjoyable.

That is why sexual purity is not fundamentally about restriction. It is about living inside a design, in the same way that a river with banks is more useful than a flood.

What Scripture actually forbids

The New Testament word is porneia, usually translated sexual immorality, and it functions as an umbrella term for sexual activity outside marriage. Paul lists it repeatedly and never softens it (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3).

His instruction is not to resist but to run. “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Joseph did exactly that and left his coat behind rather than stay to argue (Genesis 39:12). There are temptations we are told to stand against and this is one we are told to get away from, which is a piece of practical wisdom worth taking literally.

Paul also grounds the command in something more than prohibition. The believer’s body “is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God” and “you are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). That is the logic. Not “this is dirty” but “this belongs to God”.

Purity of heart, not only of behaviour

A person can keep every external rule and remain thoroughly impure. Jesus made that unavoidable when He located adultery in the look and the intent (Matthew 5:28). Behaviour management is not the goal.

This is where the old purity teaching often went wrong. It measured success by a line not crossed, which produced people who were technically compliant and internally consumed, and others who crossed the line once and concluded they had nothing left to protect. Neither is what Scripture is after.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Purity in the Bible is a condition of the whole person before God, and sexual purity is one expression of it rather than the whole of it.

What this asks of the single believer

Abstinence, plainly. And I am aware how that sentence lands on a Christian in their thirties who did not choose singleness and does not know how long it will last. It is a real cost, and the church should stop pretending it is not by treating marriage as the inevitable next stage of Christian life.

Paul, who was single, treats it as a gift and a freedom rather than a waiting room (1 Corinthians 7:32-35). Jesus was single. Neither of them is presented as an incomplete human being, and any church culture implying otherwise has departed from the New Testament.

Practically, this means single believers need real friendship, not pity. It means honest conversation about temptation without the assumption that everyone is failing. And it means the rest of us stop asking when they are going to meet someone, which is not the light-hearted question we imagine it to be.

What this asks of the married believer

Faithfulness in body and in mind. The marriage bed is to be guarded (Hebrews 13:4), and the guarding includes what is watched, what is imagined, and which friendships are allowed to develop a private quality they should not have.

Paul also insists on generosity within marriage: “Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time” (1 Corinthians 7:5). Sexual purity in marriage is not only about what is refused outside it. It includes what is given inside it, and long-term neglect there is a spiritual matter, not simply a domestic one.

A word to older believers too. This does not conveniently expire. David was not a young man on the roof, and the temptations of middle age and later life are frequently underestimated by people who assumed they had graduated.

Grace for those who have failed

Almost nobody comes to this subject with a clean record, and the shame attached to sexual sin is unlike the shame attached to anything else. It attaches to identity rather than to behaviour, which is why it is so hard to shift.

So hear Paul on the Corinthians. After listing the sexually immoral, adulterers and others, he writes: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Were. Past tense. That is not minimisation, it is cleansing.

Jesus met the woman at the well with five husbands and did not pretend the history away, but neither did He define her by it (John 4:16-26). She became the first evangelist in Samaria. Your past is not a disqualification, and the enemy would very much like you to believe it is.

How sexual purity is actually sustained

Not by gritted teeth. Paul tells Titus that grace itself trains us “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives” (Titus 2:11-12). The power source is grace, not shame, and the two produce very different people.

It is sustained in the ordinary means: Scripture that shapes what we find desirable, prayer that keeps the heart honest, and a church where the subject can be raised without a room falling silent. It is also sustained by wise decisions made in advance, before the moment arrives, because nobody has ever thought clearly at midnight who had not thought clearly at noon.

And it is sustained by hope. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). The struggle is real and it is also temporary, and the direction of travel is towards a day when it ends.

Rebuilding after a purity culture that failed people

A number of believers now in their thirties and forties came through a version of church teaching on sexual purity that has left real damage. Some were told that their value depended on their virginity, which is not a Christian idea. Some married women arrived at the wedding night having absorbed years of messaging that sex was dangerous, and then found the switch would not simply flip.

If that is your background, the correction is not to discard what Scripture says but to recover what it actually says. God’s standard has not moved. What needs discarding is the shame-based scaffolding built around it, the promises Scripture never made, and the idea that sexual sin is uniquely unforgivable.

Read the Bible’s own treatment of these things and notice how differently it handles people. Rahab and Bathsheba are in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5-6). The woman anointing His feet was known in the town for her sin, and He defended her against the respectable man whose house it was (Luke 7:37-47). That is the tone we should have been using all along.

So, now what?

Sexual purity is not prudishness and it is not a scoring system. It is the recognition that God designed something good and placed it within a covenant, and that honouring Him means living inside that design rather than negotiating with it.

The gospel does not simply hand rules to reluctant sinners. It gives a new heart, a new power and a new motive, which is gratitude to the God who bought us at the cost of His Son. If you are struggling, you are not alone, not hopeless, and not beyond grace. But grace will not leave you where it found you, and that is the best news in the whole subject. Related reading: is sex before marriage wrong, what about pornography and the difference between attraction and lust.

“Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.”

1 Corinthians 6:18 (ESV)