Essay

What Chastity Protects

You may have heard from influencers that sex is simply a normal part of dating, that consenting adults should be free to decide what feels right for them, or that waiting until marriage is an outdated religious expectation. Maybe your questions are more personal: Why would God give me strong sexual feelings and then ask me not to act on them? What if I am dating someone I genuinely love? What if I have already crossed sexual boundaries? And why does sexual purity matter so much to God?

Those are good questions. Start with something important: your sexual feelings are not shameful. Your body is part of Heavenly Father’s creation and His plan for His children. That is precisely why He asks you to treat it as sacred. Chastity makes much more sense when you understand what God is protecting—your soul, another person’s soul, your relationship with Him, the power to create life, and the kind of complete union He intends a husband and wife to share.

Jesus Taught That Sexual Purity Matters

Jesus taught His disciples that sexual morality reaches deeper than simply avoiding adultery. In the Sermon on the Mount, He taught them to pay attention to what they deliberately allow into their hearts and minds, including lust (Matthew 5:27–28). He was teaching that discipleship includes learning what to do with desire, not simply controlling our behavior when someone else can see us.

That matters in a world where sexual images, jokes, videos, dating expectations, and pornography can reach you without much effort. What you repeatedly watch and dwell on can gradually shape how you see another person’s body and how you understand intimacy. Jesus invites you to learn a holier way of seeing people—as complete sons and daughters of God rather than bodies that exist for someone else’s gratification.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World explains why the sexual powers God placed within us deserve that kind of care. It teaches that “the sacred powers of procreation” are to be used only between a man and a woman who are married as husband and wife. Those powers are connected to bringing God’s children into mortality and to the covenant relationship in which a husband and wife become one.

So chastity is not mainly about God trying to keep you away from something pleasurable. It is about learning to use something powerful and holy according to the purposes for which He created it.

Madison’s Story: Why Purity Is Worth Choosing

Christian speaker and author Madison Troutt has talked about this question in a way that connects especially well with Emma’s experience. Instead of beginning with How far is too far?, she encourages Christians to understand why they want purity in the first place.

In this Instagram reel, Madison explains that her desire for purity is connected to wanting to see God clearly, know Him deeply, become more like Jesus Christ, and live with greater freedom and confidence in Him. She also speaks to people whose past has not been sexually pure and emphasizes that purity can still become a choice they make going forward:

Her experience comes from another Christian tradition, so our understanding of chastity also includes restored doctrine about premortal life, bodies, priesthood ordinances, temple covenants, eternal marriage, and the family. But the question she raises is worth carrying with you: What am I actually trying to become, and why would purity help me become that person?

Your Body Is Part of Your Soul

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments gives one of the clearest explanations of why sexual purity matters.

He begins with the restored doctrine that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:15). Your body is therefore not a temporary shell that is disconnected from your spiritual life. Receiving a body is part of why you came to mortality, and Jesus Christ gave His life so that your body and spirit could ultimately be redeemed and eternally reunited.

That helps explain why sexual choices can affect us so deeply. Sexual intimacy involves more than physical sensation because a body belongs to a whole person—a person with emotions, memories, hopes, relationships, divine identity, and an eternal future.

Elder Holland then described marital intimacy as a “sacred, physical union ordained of God for a married couple.” He explained that it is meant to express a much larger union between a husband and wife: their love, commitments, lives, family, hopes, and future.

Seen that way, God’s boundaries around sexuality begin to make more sense. He is teaching you to preserve the physical expression of complete union for the covenant relationship where that kind of union belongs.

What Is God Protecting?

Part of what God is protecting is your future.

The choices you make during young adulthood help shape the person you are becoming and the relationships you will eventually build. Sexual choices can also carry consequences far beyond one night or one relationship. Pornography and compulsive sexual behavior can become difficult patterns to break. Sexual relationships can involve pregnancy outside marriage, difficult decisions surrounding pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, broken trust, emotional pain, and memories or images that may continue affecting later relationships.

God understands those possibilities better than you do because He sees much farther down the road. His commandments are given with your whole life in view—your present happiness, future marriage and family, spiritual strength, and eternal relationship with Him.

This is one reason a list of rules will never be enough. A boundary can tell you where to stop. Doctrine helps you understand why it matters.

Why the Adversary Wants Sexuality to Feel Casual

Once you understand what God says sexual intimacy is only within a marriage between a man and a woman, you can better recognize the ideas that work against that purpose.

The adversary benefits when something sacred begins to feel ordinary. Sexual desire can then be treated mainly as something to satisfy, sexual attraction as something that must be acted upon to be authentic, pornography as entertainment, and physical intimacy as a normal step in dating before two people have made the covenant that intimacy was designed to express.

Those ideas can be persuasive because sexual desire really is powerful, physical affection really can feel connecting, and culture often presents sexual experience as part of becoming a mature adult. The problem is that those messages leave out much of what God has revealed about your body, the purpose of sexual intimacy, the creation of life, covenant marriage, and your eternal destiny.

The adversary can also work through shame after someone has crossed a boundary. Shame may persuade you to hide from God, avoid the sacrament and repentance, keep secrets, or decide that purity is something you already lost and can never recover. But there is a better way. Jesus Christ invites you toward honesty and repentance because His Atonement makes real cleansing possible.

What Has Research Found?

Research can tell us something about the idea that sexual restraint necessarily harms later relationships.

BYU researchers Dean Busby, Jason Carroll, and Brian Willoughby studied 2,035 married individuals and examined when couples became sexually involved and how that timing related to their later marriages. Even after accounting for factors including religiosity, education, relationship length, and number of sexual partners, greater sexual restraint was associated with better relationship outcomes.

In the researchers’ group comparisons, couples who waited until marriage reported about 20 percent higher relationship satisfaction, 12 percent better communication, 22 percent less consideration of divorce, and 15 percent better sexual quality than people who became sexually involved early in their relationships. They challenge the common idea that couples need premarital sex in order to discover whether they can build a happy intimate relationship.

A Few Questions Worth Thinking About

• Who or what has been teaching you what sexual desire means and what you are supposed to do with it? How closely does that message match what Jesus Christ teaches about your body and your eternal purpose?
• When you think about chastity, do you mainly picture restrictions, or do you understand what Heavenly Father is trying to protect and prepare you for?
• What messages about sex, dating, pornography, bodies, or attraction have started feeling normal to you simply because you encounter them so often?
• Are there places in a dating relationship where you already know you need clearer boundaries before you are in a difficult moment?
• If you have crossed sexual boundaries, are you allowing that experience to move you toward Jesus Christ and repentance, or has shame been convincing you to hide from Him?

What Can You Do This Week?

Read 1 Corinthians 6:13–20 and notice how Paul connects the body to Jesus Christ.

Look honestly at the situations that make purity harder for you. That might include what you watch, who you follow, late-night scrolling, pornography, the boundaries in a dating relationship, or situations where you repeatedly rely on willpower after you are already vulnerable. Choose one practical change before the next difficult moment comes.

If you are carrying sexual sin that needs to be resolved, talk with your bishop this week rather than trying to decide how long you need to punish yourself before you deserve help.

Sexual purity matters because you matter, the people you date matter, your body matters, and the covenant family God is preparing you to build matters. Jesus Christ can help you learn to govern powerful desires without becoming afraid of them, repent when you have made mistakes, and prepare for the kind of intimacy God intends to be joyful, faithful, and holy.

References

The Family: A Proclamation to the World, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Jeffrey R. Holland, “Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments”, Brigham Young University devotional, January 12, 1988.

Madison Prewett Troutt, “Why Purity Matters”, Instagram, January 29, 2024.

Dean M. Busby, Jason S. Carroll, and Brian J. Willoughby, “Compatibility or Restraint? The Effects of Sexual Timing on Marriage Relationships”, Journal of Family Psychology 24, no. 6 (2010): 766–774.