Answer

Why Does God Care So Much About Chastity and Sexual Intimacy?

Chastity is often taught as a list of things not to do, which makes it sound like God is being restrictive about something trivial. If that is the version you have, the commandment will always feel arbitrary.

He cares because of what He made it for. Sexual intimacy has two divinely appointed purposes: creating bodies for God’s children, and binding a husband and wife together emotionally, spiritually and physically. Both are enormous, and both are the reason for the boundary rather than an afterthought to it.

Eternal Truths

The commandment describes what intimacy is for. Like every commandment, it is given to bless rather than to constrain. The Family: A Proclamation to the World declares that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between a man and a woman lawfully wedded as husband and wife. Abstaining before marriage and remaining completely faithful within it is what keeps intimacy doing the two things it was designed to do.

The power works whether or not the commitments are there. Outside that setting it still bonds and it still can create life, but without any of the promises that make either outcome safe. That is the actual risk, and it has nothing to do with reputation.

Repentance is part of the design. If you have already made other choices, this is a commandment with a Redeemer attached. The Savior is not surprised by your situation, and the belief that it is too late keeps more people stuck than desire does.

What Can Make This Confusing?

If chastity were arbitrary, breaking it would only be disobedience. Because it is not, breaking it does real damage to real things: to trust, to a future marriage, to a child who arrives without two parents committed to each other. That is why the Proclamation puts chastity next to the strength of families and the wellbeing of society rather than in a list of personal virtues. Reading it as a private rule about personal purity misses what it is actually protecting.

Questions to Think About

• Have I ever heard chastity explained as a purpose rather than as a boundary?
• What am I assuming about what sex is for, and where did I get it?
• If I have crossed lines, what is stopping me from starting back?

What You Can Do

Read the seventh paragraph of the Proclamation slowly this week and notice what it says intimacy is for before it says where it belongs. Then name one decision you can make now, in advance, rather than in the moment. The essay behind this answer works through the doctrine and the research at length.

Jesus Christ is protecting something in you that is genuinely valuable, and He can restore what has already been spent.