What’s the Point

The cultural view of dating and sex and marriage is very different than the biblical view.

Shelby Abbott says we need to examine God's design for relationships before we start making decisions that can have harmful consequences. Our culture tends to view sex like you're a post-it note or a sticky note. You just stick to this person here for a time and then you peel away and you stick to this person.

You peel away and you stick to this person to find out what works for you. But sex wasn't designed to be like that. It's more meant to be like an envelope. When you use an envelope, it's meant to be used once. You seal it and then it stays sealed.

And if you ever try to open it and then reuse it again, it's destroyed. The way that sex was designed was supposed to be in a marriage context with one person. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Whether you believe the Bible is God's word or authoritative or not, there are plenty of good practical reasons why you ought to think twice about what the culture is peddling when it comes to dating, sex, and marriage. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I had a friend of mine who was a pastor who texted me the other day and said, so I got a dilemma. A couple just reached out and said, we're getting married and will you marry us?

And he said, I learned that they're living together. And I thought, OK, do I say yes? Do I say maybe?

Do I say no, not until? So you've been a pastor for years. You've had these. I want to hear what you said there, Bob.

You're throwing it right to me. I want to know, because you've faced this. I haven't faced it as a pastor. You have, right?

Oh, I've faced it for two decades. Yeah. More often than not today, couples who are coming to get married have lived together prior. Right.

So it's a touchy, hard decision. This happened many times in my Detroit Lions ministry. You know, players that weren't followers of Christ and they want to get married. They're living together. And like, do I hold them to a standard that's a Christian standard when they're not Christians?

Is this decision I make going to prevent them from taking another step toward Christ? And so that's the tension you live in, right? And I said to my friend, I said, I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for this. I think it's a relational issue that you've got to be able to sit down. And there's an opening here to be able to talk about the bigger issue, which I said is not that they're living together.

The issue is, do they know what God's word says and are they choosing to put themselves above it? And if that's the case, then they're headed into a lot bigger problems in their marriage. And it's even trickier when it's your own family or your own kids who have decided to live together.

And they know you're not going to be for that, but you still want to have a relationship with your kids. Well, there's a new book that is addressing this subject. Somebody, please. I am too. Shelby Abbott has written on this subject and Shelby's been on Family Life Today a number of times. Shelby, welcome back. Thank you.

It's good to be with you guys. This is a subject that you have had to address as you've been in campus ministry with crew for more than 21 years. Shelby's a writer and a speaker as well. And I remember sitting with a social scientist a while back and he said it used to be that this was the normal pattern for people. You date, you fall in love, you get engaged, you get married, you have sex, you have kids.

Now you go on The Bachelor and do it all backwards. That was the old pattern. Today's pattern is you date, you have sex, you fall in love, you move in together, you have kids, you get married. Let's ask Shelby, the expert, what is the pattern today?

Is that true? You know, there are certain patterns that exist in the culture now that are a lot more present than they were a long time ago. But I'd hesitate to even say that this is what people do. Because there are certain people who, they still go the old fashioned route and they don't sleep with one another before they get married. Can we call it the biblical route, not just the old fashioned route? Yeah, the old old fashioned route. Yeah, it's the biblical route. But it is increasingly rare, I'd say that that's true. The reason that I wrote this book, though, is not necessarily to try to convince Christian people that they shouldn't be sleeping with their boyfriend or girlfriend.

This was more of a book that reaches out toward a skeptical or maybe non-believing audience or people who are already living together and help them to see that there are better solutions out there. And the majority of the research that I quote in the book is actually secular research. Because the whole theory of you got to test drive the car before you drive it, and that'll lead to like a better marriage relationship in the future. It's actually just not true. It's not true at all. And this isn't necessarily Christian resources.

This is from secular ones. The myth of more satisfaction, more money, it acts as like a safety net, just in case, that kind of a deal. It's just it's not true. And the research communicates it over and over and over again. Now, have you found because when I was reading your book, I was somewhat blown away by the stats and the data that you compiled in there. I mean, it's like it is overwhelming, especially as you read page after page and you keep going through your book. You're like, whoa, this is compelling to say this is a dangerous thing to consider.

Yet do you find people that say, OK, I know the evidence. I still well, I'm going to I'm going to move in. I don't care. And there's something I talk about in the book called Sliding, Not Deciding.

Right. There are many couples just say, I just kind of happened. We just didn't really talk about it. But my toothbrush was over there and then I just decided to stay one night and then I went and grabbed some clothes. And now I have my own drawer and now like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There's like lots of things that they don't really talk about it. It just ends up happening. And so what I'm encouraging people to do is to pause and be intentional about it in a way that you might be intentional about getting a job. And so what I kind of compare it to is like if you're looking for employment, you don't just go to the building of the company you want to work for and stand around in the lobby in your sweatpants, waiting for someone to walk up to you and say, hey, do you need a job? You like get dressed up. You get cleaned up. You remind yourself to make eye contact. You send your resume. You like set up an appointment. You work at it.

Well, how much more important is a relationship, a romantic relationship than a potential job, especially if that relationship ends up being your spouse in the future? You should be intentional about it and you should make decisions with purpose as opposed to just sliding into things because it just kind of happened. You know, most people are not saying let's let's sit down and explore the pros and the cons of this. They are and they're not objective observers when they're when they are asking the question. They've got their hormones saying this is what I want to do. And they've got the culture saying this is what's normal to do. And and so they're not hearing a lot of dissenting voices saying there are some dangers here that you need to keep in mind. Everybody's saying come on in.

The water's fine. Yeah. And that's really one of those things is are we going to allow the culture which shifts by the minute to tell us how to live our lives? Or are we going to rise above that and help people to see that there is a better way? The Christian worldview in general offers a better apologetic for going the quote unquote old fashioned route.

It just does. It's just whether or not we're willing to stand up and talk about it and defend it in a way that we should be willing to defend it. Not only with like friends and stuff like that, but kind of what you were saying and with our kids as well. We need to show them that this is the better way to go about it, not because we want to squash your fun. It's because we care about you.

We care about you living life in a way that's enriching, that you will flourish as opposed to destroy yourself. Well, one of the things you said, which I thought, oh, man, if I were a woman, I would want to know this because you say that you were a woman. You know, I'm saying if I were a young, if I were a young single woman, I would want to know this because you talk about how women are more likely to view living together as a step toward marriage. You know, like, oh, well, this is just the natural thing. We'll live together and then we'll get married. But you also said men are more likely to see it as a test to the relationship and maybe even postpone the commitment.

Those are two different things here. And so I think, oh, we need to protect ourselves and know what the future is to know what the intent is behind this living together space. Yeah, there's lack of communication that often happens in the sliding and not deciding. They just kind of assume that the other person thinks the same thing about why they're moving in together and that they couldn't be more wrong about it. And, you know, I read this one thing about a girl who is living with her boyfriend for I think it was like five years. And then they ended up breaking up and she confessed. She was like, I felt like I was on a multi-year tryout to be his wife. And he just would never actually do it because he was getting what he wanted. And ultimately, if he didn't want anymore, they weren't married.

So he could just ditch it. Oh, that riles me up. I'm like, oh, you deserve so much better than that. Of course she does. Yet, if I'm right, Shelby, you said what she do in her next relationship. Yeah, she moved in with her other boyfriend right after that.

It seemed to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. And, you know, so what I offer as a solution in the book for the audience that I wrote it for is the solution ultimately is what you're looking for in your relationships can only be found in one relationship. That you are made to have an ultimate relationship with your Creator through the person of Jesus Christ.

Then and only then are we going to see better decision making that's more healthy for our souls. My daughter and her boyfriend, then boyfriend, were living in New York when they were dating and my daughter was working for a company there. And she announced her engagement and shared with everybody and somehow in the conversation about the engagement, they were getting married. It came out that they were not living together and people were incredulous that there was such a thing. Two people getting married who aren't living together. It is so much the cultural norm that it was kind of like, look, a black swan out on the lawn. Yeah, I remember when Rachel and my wife and I got engaged and then we got married.

We were unapologetic to talk to people about the fact that both of us were virgins when we got married. And my then brother-in-law, my sister's husband at the time, he just could not fathom the fact that I was 29 and I'd never had sex. He just could not understand it.

I really was like a unicorn to him. It just didn't make any sense at all. But it was incredibly impactful in his life. It was definitely one of those noteworthy things that goes, I never thought this was possible.

Yet here I see an example of this. There's got to be something to this Jesus guy that I just don't get. I remember Shelby being at a weekend to remember marriage getaway and a young man came up to me after the engage session. He said, I work at this place with these guys and I'm engaged to my girlfriend and I've told them that we've not slept together. And my friends are like, are you out of your mind? You're going to buy the car without a test drive? I mean, what if you guys are not sexually compatible?

What are you going to do then? And so he's tossing it to me and saying, so do I need to worry about whether we are sexually compatible? And I said, she's a woman, right? I said, you are by God's design sexually compatible. You were made to be sexually compatible. That doesn't mean there won't be some hiccups along the way and you might have to get some help along the way. But trust me, testing out the merchandise is not the way to figure out whether you're going to have an enduring, lifelong, thriving marriage.

Exactly. And the illustration I use in the book is a sexy topic of paper products to talk about. So I talked about how their culture tends to view sex like you're a post-it note or a sticky note. You just stick to this person here for a time and then you peel away and you stick to this person.

You peel away and you stick to this person to find out what works for you. But sex wasn't designed to be like that. It's more meant to be like an envelope, which I make fun of myself for saying that. But when you use an envelope, it's meant to be used once you seal it and then it stays sealed. And if you ever try to open it and then reuse it again, it's destroyed.

And that's where I'm trying to get at it. The way that sex was designed was supposed to be in a marriage context with one person. Because eventually a sticky note loses its stickiness. You start to become numb to the idea that sex is a beautiful thing if you don't do it the way that God has called you to do it. Now again, this is an apologetic that hopefully will resonate with some people and hopefully help them to see the merits of what it means to have a relationship with God and how that can change everything in their lives all the way up to their sex life. And I've heard stories of people who come to Jesus, they're an engaged couple, they've been living together, they realize what the Bible calls them to, and then they move out from the apartment that they're in together for the remaining two months until they get married when they move back in together. What causes a person to do that? Jesus.

Jesus changes lives. It's so funny. Dave and I were doing a Weekend to Remember conference back when we had an engaged session. And we talk about why God says to not have premarital sex before marriage and just God's design for marriage. And this woman came up to me afterwards, and she came up and she was older. And she said, hey, this is my name, and I just want you to know my boyfriend and I have been living together for 15 years. And we have three kids.

And like they're getting a little bit older. And we're so excited because we've given Jesus our lives this weekend. And as we said in the engaged session, we realized, oh, God doesn't want us to have sex before we're married. So we've decided to move out. And we're so excited to have this conversation with our kids of why we're moving out, because they're going to think it's the craziest thing they've ever heard. But we're not going to have sex and we're going to get married in a month. And she's like, we can't wait to begin this new legacy. That's amazing. But I mean, I was like, whoa.

She could have said, oh, we've been together 15 years, you know. But it just, Jesus, I think when we have this encounter with him, he does radical things in our lives that can seem foolish to people. But man, it is something that changes every aspect of our lives. I'll tell you a similar story. And there's a podcast here.

If our listeners would like to listen to it, they can go to familylifetoday.com. I had a conversation years ago with a couple who had come to one of our weekend to remember getaways. They were living together at the time, and we challenged them not to continue having sex before they got married. And to hear their story later, they had grown up in the church. They had met one another on a missions trip, a long term, a nine month missions trip. They'd started having sex while they were on the missions trip.

When they got back home, they moved in together into his parents' house. And they said, nobody ever said anything to us about this being wrong. I mean, we really did not have any clue that this was against the biblical norm.

Until we went to the pastor at the church we were going to and we said, we'd like to help with the three and four year olds. And the pastor said, well, we've got this deal, you know, you guys aren't married and you're living together, you can't do that. They're like, well, what's the deal? Like they did not understand that there was anything about this biblically.

They come to the weekend to remember. They hear us challenge people, don't have sex before you get married. If you're having sex, stop having sex before you get married.

And the husband-to-be is convicted. And he goes to his fiance and he says, I think we need to do this and stop having sex until we get married. Here's what she heard, Shelby. She heard him saying, I am breaking up with you. Because in her mind, if he was going to stop having sex with her, the relationship was not going to survive. She thought the only reason you want to be with me or a primary reason why you want to be with me is so you can have sex with me. And if now you're not going to do that, you'll fall away. So she was saying, no, we've got to keep having sex because she wanted to keep the relationship there.

Well, he held firm. They parted. They got married and then wound up teaching the pre-marrieds at their church eventually, taking them through the art of marriage and showing them this is how it's supposed to be by God's design. It's just fascinating to me that there are people in the culture who have never heard that the Bible says there's a better way than to live together. That's a beautiful story. I love hearing that. And it's a testament to what the culture thinks about what a romantic relationship is supposed to be in the first place.

Most people go into it and they just kind of intuitively think, this is about me. What can you do for me? How can you make me feel?

How can you improve my reputation? How can you provide me with pleasure? How can you bend to my will and serve me? But when we are changed at the heart level and Christ comes in and replaces our heart of stone with the heart of flesh, we can look at a romantic relationship from the very initial stages of just being attracted to one another all the way up through marriage as it's not about me.

It's about how I can serve you and care for you. And when you think about it, it changes the total dynamic of what a relationship is supposed to be like. And when you're thinking specifically about the area of sex, it's like, well, I want to do you a service here by not offending God and being the right type of godly man or godly woman to make sure that I can let you know that I care for you by not touching you. And I've told guys this. I'm like, if you can't keep your hands off your girlfriend, let's say you one day decide to get engaged and you get married and you decide to go on a business trip two or three years into your marriage, is your wife going to trust you on that business trip? Or if you have the ability in the future to control yourself like you did in the past, my wife is never going to think that I'm doing something because I was with her for three years and I kept my hands off her. I have much care and consideration for her as someone who's dating her, as someone who's engaged to her, and as someone who's married to her.

And she can trust me completely because I kept my hands off her in the past. The way I've said that to couples is if you are not married and you are having sex together, here's what you know about each other. You are both willing to have sex with somebody you're not married to. So why do we think in the future you're going to decide all of a sudden, now I am unwilling to have sex with people that I'm not married to?

I mean, is a switch going to flip or something? And I know for me, you know, I didn't become a follower of Christ until my junior year in college. And early in my Christian walk, I was presented now this biblical model of purity, sexual purity. I thought it was the dumbest thing I ever heard. Like, what? Who? What?

You know? And I also, I don't remember ever seeing a Christian obey that. So my question was, why? You know, why would God say this?

It doesn't seem to make sense. And obviously years later, and actually that year, I had such a great young man pour into me and he showed me God's trying to protect me. God wants the best for me. And I love Shelby in the book says, well, here's some data that backs up why God would say, you know, prevent this until you're married.

Here's some data. Your chance of divorce is going to be higher if you live together. Your chance of having an affair after you're married is going to be higher if you're having sex before you get married. It's like, oh my goodness. So God has our best interests in mind. So it isn't. I just don't want you to enjoy this. I actually know better. I love you. I'm trying to protect you and give you the best life possible.

Just obey me and you will see the fruit come later. I was going to read one of those stats that said those who had cohabitated two or more times in their life before marriage were 15 percentage points more likely to have been either emotionally, sexually or electronically unfaithful to their spouse than those who did not cohabitate. I mean, to put the data with that is compelling. It makes you stop and really think through your choices.

Yeah. And my hope is that, I mean, we know kind of what you were saying about hormones. When the hormones kick in, especially people who don't have Jesus, they're just going to do what they're going to do. But one of the things that I wanted to aim with this book specifically is to kind of metaphorically put a rock in their shoe. If you ever have a rock in your shoe, you just can't keep walking with it in there.

It just constantly bothers you. And so my hope is that with this, providing, of course, biblical evidence for this, but also, you know, legitimate secular research, that they will have a rock in their shoe and they will not be able to stop thinking about it to the point that they go, I need to make some better decisions here. And that was really my goal, to really help them to understand that Christ is the solution. How do I give a copy of this book to somebody without them interpreting that as, oh, you are just judging me and you're self-righteous? And I mean, I'm thinking of people that I go, this would be helpful.

How do I give them a copy without them thinking I'm a jerk? Well, I think that relationship is important. And so one of the things that we wanted to do when I wrote this is that we wanted to pass them out like Tic Tacs.

We wanted to give them to as many people as possible. It's a short read. It's not very, very long, but it really is aimed to be a clear and concise dagger of information that cuts right to the heart of it. There's humor in there as well.

I try to write it so that it's incredibly readable for younger people. But handing it to them, the title of the book really gets at the heart of why there is a good argument, a good apologetic for marriage and against living together. And so I think since it's so permeated in our culture, as we've been talking about, that it's just a natural thing that people think, challenging that in a way that makes people go, hmm, that's interesting. I don't know how people are going to hand it out to other people, but hopefully it would do it in a spirit of love and caring for people and saying, hey, have you ever thought about considering a different option?

I think that that question in and of itself is compelling enough to open a little book and read through it. I sat down with a couple decades ago and they were living together and I was assigned to do their wedding in probably three or four months. They shared with me and first time I met them, Scott and Jessica, and they said, hey, we are so excited. We just gave our life to Christ. I go, what?

Yeah. And the pre-mineral counseling thing you have set up here at your church. We didn't never understood the gospel. We're so excited.

We gave our life to Christ. And man, we're going back to our home. And so I realized they're living together. And I remember sitting there thinking, hmm, do I tell them? Because the other couples that I had actually challenged, most of them looked at me and said, OK, I'm going to go somewhere else and get married.

I'm not going to get married here. And so I hesitated for a second. I said, well, let me let me show you God's plan. And I showed them something they had never heard.

And I had never heard it for a long time. And it's what you said earlier, Shelby, about you think you're having sex with somebody. It's like a Post-it note. You know, it's no big deal.

I'll just move on. No, actually, what you're doing is you're giving a part of your soul away. And, you know, God says, I want to protect your soul.

So here's why he says this anyway. And I got to go through exactly what I said, but I laid out a biblical plan for sexual purity. They both looked at me and I thought, oh, here it comes. They're going to go, you're nuts, dude. This is crazy. I remember they looked at each other. They looked at me and they said, we're going to do this.

I've never nobody's ever told us this. That makes so much sense. And they go, we can't afford it financially. I don't know how we're going to do this, but we're going to honor God. And I go, really? And they go, yeah. And they walked out all excited. And I thought, I wonder if they'll follow through. They follow through.

They got married. I mean, I'll never forget this. Two years later, I get this call and they said, hey, we're pregnant. And we're naming our baby boy, Dave, because you were the first one to speak the truth to us. And we've never been able to thank you. And so this little guy now is a teenager.

And, you know, obviously sometimes they don't respond and they get mad at you. Other times it's going to change a legacy. That's beautiful. I love that story. Shelby, thank you for this conversation. Thanks for the book called What's the Point? And we hope listeners will join us and buy a bunch of these and hand them out like Tic Tacs. Right. That's what we want to do.

If people have Tic Tacs. You can go to our website, family life today dot com to get more information about Shelby's book. What's the point asking the right questions about living together and marriage? Go to family life today dot com to order copies or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to find out how to order. Again, the website is family life today dot com.

The phone number to call is 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life. And then the word today. David Robbins, who is the president of family life, is here with us in the studio. And David, our listeners have had a chance today to hear from a teammate from Shelby Abbott. And he is increasingly a key part of what God is doing through the ministry of family life. We've had him as a guest on family life today before.

But this is the first time he's been a guest on family life today as a part of the family life team. And he is a fairly new addition to the family life team as the lead writer and contributor for next generation resources. And as you likely are aware, Gen Zers are entering adulthood with different presuppositions about marriage and whether to marry and why marriage even exists. And we are so grateful to have Shelby as a thought leader to engage this space, because at family life, we are about helping effectively develop godly families generation after generation. We are committed to the timeless truth of scripture while speaking in a compelling and needed way to the cultural moment we are in.

We believe in the institution of marriage that God designed for his glory and for our good. And I'm really excited to bring you this resource, What's the Point, and introduce you to Shelby as another member of the team God is raising up here at family life. We are encouraged and committed to help the next generation of marriages of families and are so thankful for the ways you play a part in that.

Yeah, we sure are. And a quick word of thanks to those of you who pray for us and those of you who financially support this ministry. You make all that we do at Family Life possible, and we are indeed grateful for you.

Thank you, David. We hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend. And I hope you can join us on Monday when we're going to hear from Dave Wilson about what real biblical manhood looks like, not toxic masculinity, biblical masculinity. We're also going to share with you about our plans for February of 2022 to be back sailing on the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise and how you can reserve a stateroom for the cruise.

All of that comes up Monday. Hope you can join us. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. We got some help from our friend Bruce Goff and our entire broadcast production team.

On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. Have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.