Although the target audience of Christian Nymphos is married Christian women, I want to take the time to speak to the unmarried women who might come across our blog to address the age old question: How far is too far?

If you have decided that you want to live with sexual integrity and are honestly seeking to understand want boundaries you need to establish, then I hope to help you by way of leading you through several things you’ll want to consider.

Let’s first remind ourselves that if we have submitted to the authority of Jesus, then we have His Spirit living in us to empower us to stand in self control. No temptation is too great that we can not give way to the Spirit of God in us to have victory over it. However, for us to know when we need to allow the work of God to help us with this, we need to understand what behaviors He desires us to establish.

So where do we draw the line? Is virginity only about whether or not your hymen is torn? Is any sexual behavior that leaves the hymen in tact OK? Is oral sex real sex? Should all genital contact be avoided, but fondling other private areas like breasts or rear ends is OK? What about kissing? Should all kissing be avoided? These are some of the questions you must know the answer to if you want to live a life that is pleasing to God.

To begin with, I believe that Jesus is much more concerned with purity than virginity. If your only goal is to keep your hymen in tact, not only are you setting yourself up for sexually transmitted infections, but you are also setting yourself up for sin. Thoughts turn to lust far sooner than the moment a penis is inserted into a vagina. The term “sexual immorality” in the Bible covers so many areas for a reason. Lust, premarital sex, adultery… though all of them may have unique consequences, all do a similar thing in our hearts. So we want to follow the command to flee sexual immorality which involves the idea of getting as far away from it as we can rather than seeing how close we can get.

In light of this, I will share some of the physical boundaries I established to keep myself from lusting after the guys I dated when I was single. You will need to evaluate who you are and develop your own set of guidelines based on what works for you

Boundary 1: If it isn’t seen in a bathing suit, it isn’t touched. This avoided all confusion about whether oral sex was OK or if it was OK for my boyfriend to fondle my breasts. Any act that would involve the parts that are normally covered by a bathing suit was most definitely something I had determined that I did not find to be appropriate for an unmarried person.

Boundary 2: If my physical behavior is something I will be embarrassed to tell my husband about some day, I won’t do it. I am happy to say that there are very few things that I look back on and wish I hadn’t done. More than pushing my boundaries, they were just not honoring to the people around me. (ie Heavy kissing with another friend in the room.)

Boundary 3: I will keep all kissing above the shoulders. I knew that kissing was something that I could do without lusting. That doesn’t mean I was free with my kisses, but I knew that if I was in a committed relationship that kissing was something I could choose to do and not be lusting as long as we kept all kisses above our shoulders.

When I started dating my husband we talked about what physical boundaries we would set and he wanted to refrain from kissing on the lips until we were engaged. (We knew early on that we would get married.) I didn’t feel that I needed to set that boundary, but he did so I honored that.

These are modest boundaries and so uncommon today, but I am still young. It really wasn’t that long ago that I was committed to this set of standards for myself. If your boundaries can be more generous without lusting or becoming overwhelmingly tempted to enter into more intimacy than you believe is right for an unmarried person then feel free to establish them as God leads you.

Just believe me when I tell you that oral sex, anal sex, breast sex, and penis in vagina sex are all sex, and it is my conviction that all of them are behaviors that are completely inappropriate outside of a committed marital relationship.

January 10, 2008
Categories: Sex Issues for the Engaged, Spices We Leave on the Shelf: Sexual Boundaries . . Author: cinnamonsticks . Comments: 51 Comments