Last updated on November 2, 2020
Question:
My boyfriend and I are in a long-distance relationship. We are both 16 years old and I am very troubled with what I am about to tell you.
I am supposed to visit him for his baptism in a few weeks. Last night on the phone we were talking about another encounter we had just yesterday when he went back home. We make out sometimes, hug, and hold hands. But what was different about this time is when we were making out, he was moving his pelvis up and down, side to side, and he even grabbed my butt sometimes. After this, I start shaking, and I feel it in my conscience that what we did was wrong — except he doesn’t seem to think it was wrong at all. He tells me he loves me and that I will be his wife, he knows that 100% and I should know that. That left me speechless. I didn’t know what to say other than okay.
As the day went on, at night, he started talking about, as I said before, me coming in a few weeks and what we could do the day before his baptism. He told me he wants to do what we did again and that he wants to pleasure me. He said that he allows me to touch him “down there” and anywhere I want. He asked me if he could do the same to me. I said no. He responded, “Well, why not? I’m letting you do it to me.” I was speechless, but before I could say anything he moved on from the topic and said, “That’s okay my love.”
I don’t know what to do. I know for sure he would never go into the sex zone. I know him, and I know how strongly he believes in saving sex for marriage. I just don’t know what to do. There are some other things that I could tell you about what he said, but that would be too long to type.
Please answer as soon as you can thank you.
God bless.
Answer:
What he did to you is called grinding or sometimes “dry humping.” As you suspected, it is wrong because it violates God’s rule: “Now concerning the things of which you wrote to me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (I Corinthians 7:1). By “touch” Paul is referring to sexual touching, which is touching designed to arouse the desire for sex in another person.
The problem is that he is focused on not committing fornication, but he is allowing everything up to what he considers to be fornication. I suspect that in his mind as long as he doesn’t put his penis in your vagina, he hasn’t sinned. The fallacy is that he is allowing a host of sins:
- Lust (Matthew 5:28; Mark 7:21-23)
- Sexual touching (I Corinthians 7:1)
- Lewd behavior (Romans 13:13-14)
- Nakedness
- Mutual masturbation
- Oral sex
The last two actually do fall under the category of fornication, but I would not be at all surprised that he would not count them as actual sex.
Another problem is that sin tends to be progressive. Notice that he is moving from “making out” to dry humping to suggesting that you masturbate each other. What he is not considering is that he will keep progressing, even to fornication, because he is lying to himself by stating that he knows 100% for sure that the two of you will get married. The earliest the two of you could get married is not for another two years. Consider what James said, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil” (James 4:13-16). I can’t even guarantee what will happen tomorrow, let alone several years from now, and neither can he.
Until he agrees that what he has been doing is wrong, I strongly advise that you don’t spend time alone with him where it is just the two of you. It is too easy to give in when you are sexually aroused and someone keeps pressuring you to do more.
Truth be told, he isn’t ready to be a Christian yet. He doesn’t seem to understand the danger of sin, especially sexual sins, and because of this, there is no remorse or repentance over the sins he has already committed.
By the way, in the New Testament days when a person realizes he is in sin and needs to become a Christian, they were baptized immediately. There were no scheduling weeks in the future. See: Why Were They Baptized so Soon?