by Andy Stanley
While I stood waiting, the woman finally stepped out of the car and said, “Are you Andy Stanley?”
I said yes.
“I’m your escort,” she said.
Suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. Why? Was it because it is a sin for me to be alone in a car with a woman? Nope. That wasn’t it at all. I was uncomfortable because my conscience had become attuned to the standard I had set for myself. And she could tell I was hesitating to get in the car.
I didn’t want to make things awkward for her, so I got in the car and we drove to our first appointment. And it felt really weird. As soon as I got the chance, I called Sandra and told her what had transpired. I sounded so stressed on the phone that she laughed. To make matters worse, the woman kept introducing herself to people as my escort. I, on the other hand, felt the urge to tell everybody we met that I didn’t usually ride around alone with women. The truth be known, nobody but me really cared about any of that; nobody gave it a second thought. But I felt uncomfortable the entire day. And I’m glad I did.
Wherever our question leads you to set boundaries for your behavior, your conscience will take up residency there as well.
Perhaps you’ve begun to wonder if I’m overreacting just a bit … that maybe I’m taking this whole thing a little too seriously. And perhaps you are right. Maybe I am overreacting. But having talked to so many people who have underreacted and paid dearly, I would rather err on the side of caution. And, for the record, as I read the Scriptures, it appears our heavenly Father would have us err on the side of caution as well.
In Paul’s letter to Christians living in the city of Corinth, a city known for its tolerance of sexual impropriety, he penned these words:
Regarding sexual immorality, pursue all manner of sensuality and impurity, yet remain faithful to God and your spouse. Husbands, gaze upon women in a lustful fashion until your heart is full, but do not touch that which is forbidden. Wives, dress in a manner that provokes the lustful passions of the men around you, but in your actions remain faithful to your husband.
That’s from 3 Corinthians, the lost epistle.
Just kidding. Go ahead and look—it’s not in there. But doesn’t that pretty much describe our approach?
Actually, what Paul had to say was far more succinct: “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18).
The Greek term translated flee means “flee.” As in “run really fast in the opposite direction.” No doubt you have fled from something in your lifetime—an oncoming car, your neighbor’s dog, a linebacker, your big sister. We all know what it means to flee.
When I was in third grade, I shot my sister with a toy arrow. My dad took the arrow and began chasing me through the house. I fled. I ran into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet to keep him from spanking me with the arrow. Unfortunately, the lid was open and I fell in wearing my favorite footy pajamas. My dad laughed so hard that he couldn’t spank me.
When I was in fifth grade, I was walking with a buddy across a pasture when we looked up and saw a herd of cattle stampeding in our direction. We fled. When we reached the barbed-wire fence, we dove underneath and rolled to safety.
There is a certain emotion associated with fleeing. Fear. We flee when we know we are in danger. Fear prompts us to flee. The reason we don’t flee sexual immorality is that we don’t fear it; we naively believe we can handle it. So instead of fleeing, we flirt with it. We snuggle up next to it. We dance around the edges. After all, we aren’t doing anything wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with standing out in the middle of an open pasture with a herd of stampeding cattle heading your way, either. No verse of Scripture prohibits such behavior. I have never heard a sermon on the subject. In fact, the United States Constitution protects your right to do so. But nonetheless, it is a stupid thing to do. And by the time you’ve learned your lesson, you won’t have another opportunity to apply what you’ve learned.
In a Category All Its Own
Paul doesn’t stop with his four-word warning. He goes on to make one of the most profound statements in the New Testament: “All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.”
Sexual sin is in a category all its own. It is the most dangerous kind of sin. Anyone who has done any significant amount of counseling knows this to be the case. Sexual sin wreaks havoc with the soul, whether male or female. The shame runs deep and the regret runs wide, often seeping into every facet of a person’s life. Long after men and women come to grips with God’s forgiveness, those who have sinned sexually still wrestle to forgive themselves. I don’t know why I bother to write this in the third person. We all know this to be true from personal experience, either our own or that of someone close to us.
So flee! Don’t hesitate. Don’t look back. Don’t try to endure it. Don’t flirt with it. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t try to be strong. Run! Like a coiled snake, sexual temptation has a considerable striking distance. You are never as safe as you think.
Fleeing 101
In light of your past experience, current circumstances, and future hopes and dreams, what is the wise thing for you to do in order to avoid regret in this area of life?
If your past is dotted with moral failure, then it would be wise to establish extraordinarily conservative boundaries. Your past points to the fact that you are more susceptible in this area than the average person; consequently, you can’t be content with average boundaries.
Through the years, I have had numerous conversations with young men who have been very sexually active before coming to faith in Christ. From their past experience, dating was almost synonymous with sex—sex was pretty much the goal of a date. Coming to faith in Christ didn’t automatically erase those leanings.
My advice to a young man or woman coming from that kind of past is always the same: Don’t date for a year. I tell them to get out their calendars, look ahead one year, and circle the date. They always stare at me with the same look of disbelief. Some listen; some don’t. Those who do come back and thank me. Those who don’t, don’t.
Why a year? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Yep. But those who’ve taken the challenge will tell you that what God did in their hearts during that year prepared them to venture back into the world of romance with a completely different perspective on relationships. Many of these young men and women are happily married now. They consider their decisions not to date to be defining moments in their lives.
I know young women who went out and found female roommates in order to have some built-in accountability. I know of young adults who moved back home in order to avoid unnecessary temptation. I know young men who have canceled their Internet services. These people, because of their pasts, took extreme measures in response to our question. And while their friends chuckled, they were set free.
You Must Decide
As we said earlier, this question enables us to plan not to get into trouble. Asking the question enables us to stand our ground against the seemingly overwhelming current of culture. Applied to the arena of sexual purity, it’s a question that enables us to make a clean break with the past and move purposefully toward our hopes and dreams.
But to leverage this powerful principle, you will need to predecide some things. You need to predecide about what are and are not appropriate environments. If you are single, you need to predecide how physically involved you should become in a dating context. You need to predecide your entertainment options.
All of this might strike you as a bit overboard. Extreme. Maybe even legalistic. But here’s what I know. When men and women and teenagers are confronted with the consequences of their moral impropriety, they all say the same thing: “I would give anything—anything—to be able to go back and undo what I’ve done.”
Anything? Isn’t that a bit extreme? They don’t think so. Perhaps you, too, would be willing to go to extreme measures if it meant being able to undo certain moments of your life. So why not take extreme precautions up front
instead of facing the reality that even extreme sacrifices on the back end won’t erase the past?
If you don’t decide some of these things ahead of time, somebody else will decide for you. If you don’t have your own personal standards, others will force theirs on you. Everyone agrees that there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed. You must conduct your relationships within the boundaries you have set for yourself in light of your past experience, your current circumstances, and your future hopes and dreams.
Had you adopted our question earlier in your life, perhaps your greatest regrets could have been avoided. If you adopt it now, future regrets can be avoided. It enables you to experience what God originally intended when he gave humankind the precious gift of sexuality.
A Designer Gift
In the beginning, God didn’t just create the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created sex. It was his idea! Is God good, or what? Better yet, after creating it, he gave it to us as a gift! I know you’ve thanked God for a lot of things, but have you ever thanked him for the gift of sex?
He gave sex to us as a gift—a gift that comes with instructions. Contrary to popular opinion, the guidelines for using this Designer gift were created to enhance our experience, not diminish it. God is not against sex. He’s all for it! The parameters he has set are evidence that he is for you as well. For within these boundaries a man and a woman are able to experience something that goes way beyond physical satisfaction. When sex is enjoyed the way God originally intended, the result is intimacy. When we ignore God’s guidelines, we pay the price in the very realm sex was designed to enhance—intimacy.
So once again we find ourselves asking this confining yet liberating question: What is the wise thing to do?
In light of my past experience, what is the wise thing to do going forward? In light of what’s going on in my life right now—the health of my marriage or the nature of my current dating relationships—what is the wise thing to do? And as I contemplate the future—the legacy I want to leave for my kids, the prospect of finishing strong in my marriage, the story I want to tell my future spouse—what is the wise thing to do?
No, it won’t always be easy to do the wise thing. But you’ve already experienced enough of life to know that it will be worth it.
Since I always read with a pen in my hand, I often write questions in the margins of a book. I am grateful when I later discover that the writer has anticipated my questions and addressed them. I imagine you have a question or two or ten that you hope will be answered before we reach the end of our time together.
One of those questions is probably, “What should I do when I don’t know the wise thing to do?” Asking our question will usually reduce your options, but it won’t necessarily single one out. So what then? What should you do if you are genuinely committed to doing the wise thing but you aren’t sure which of your options qualifies as the wise choice?
Emotional Static
Wisdom is not always readily apparent. Often the wise choice is obscured by the emotion of the moment. Emotionally charged environments are not conducive to answering our question.
We have all made decisions in the heat of the moment only to regret them later. Excitement over a person, product, or opportunity will skew our perspectives. A good salesperson can engage you emotionally in a product. Emotions can make it hard to see straight, think straight, decide straight. This is usually the case when love, lust, money, or a crisis is involved—these are not emotionally neutral environments.
Most of the decisions we later regret are made when emotions are running high. My guess is that the decision you regret most was made in an emotionally charged moment: not only were you unable to identify the wise thing to do, you didn’t really care.
But I love him!
Just look at her!
Three hundred horsepower!
Five bedrooms!
A 40 percent return!
No money down!
Negative emotions leave us emotionally out of balance as well. We’ve all made one or more unwise decisions in the throes of anger, greed, guilt, loneliness, or jealousy. The truth is, when painful emotions are running high, we don’t really care about making wise decisions, and so we pretty much do what we feel like doing. We are drawn toward activities that distract us from our pain, and therein lies the problem. It is next to impossible to discern the voice of wisdom when our emotions are raging.
The Know-It-All
An emotionally charged atmosphere isn’t the only influence that causes wisdom to elude us. Our ignorance—or shall we say, lack of expertise—can also put wisdom out of reach. There are decision-making environments where our lack of training or education or experience makes it next to impossible to identify valid options, much less sort through them. Unfortunately, our roles as parents, spouses, board members, business owners, etc., often leave us in the precarious position of having to make decisions in specific arenas that lie beyond our core competencies.
As a pastor I run into this all the time. I can’t count the times I have sat in, and sometimes led, team meetings where I am expected to shape decisions regarding real estate, construction, sewer easements, rights-of-way, cash sweeps, collars, interest rates, and a plethora of other business-related issues. And each meeting ends somewhat the same way. After all the smart men and women in the room make their cases for whatever it is we are trying to decide, they all turn to me and say, “So, Andy, what do you think?”
What do I think? I think I need a vacation.
After twenty years of looking at financial reports, I’m still not sure whether parentheses on a P&L statement indicate good news or bad. My wife will tell you that I have a difficult time balancing my personal checkbook. And I quit helping our kids with their math homework once they reached the fourth grade. When it comes to numbers, I can pray for wisdom all day, but what I really need is an MBA!
Seminary didn’t prepare me to make wise business decisions. Nevertheless, as senior pastor, I am responsible for the business of the church. It is my responsibility to make sure we are following the path of wisdom on the corporate side of things, whether or not it is something I am equipped to do.
Reaching Our Limits
Eventually we all bump up against our limitations. We find ourselves in situations where we are expected to make wise decisions but feel totally inadequate to do so. Parents, remember bringing your first child home from the hospital? Talk about inadequate. How about your first year of marriage? Remember the first time you closed on a house? You signed a hundred documents that you never took the time to read. Why? Because you knew you wouldn’t understand them anyway!
So what should you do when you’re supposed to know what to do, but don’t? What do you do when wisdom is just out of reach but everyone is looking to you, depending on you to know and do the wise thing?
I’ll tell you what wise people do: nothing.
Wise people know when they don’t know and are not so foolish as to pretend they do know. Eventually they make a decision and move ahead. But only after they have employed their best-kept secret.
Get out your pen or marker because I’m about to let you in on the best-kept secret of wise men and women everywhere. This is how they became wise, and it is how they continue to appear wise. This is how they manage to make wise decisions concerning areas of specialty in which they have no expertise. This is how they manage to make wise decisions even in emotionally turbulent decision-making environments. Ready?
Wise people know when they don’t know, and they’re not afraid to go to those who do know. When wise people bump up against their limitations, they stop and ask for help.
This is the rule of thumb for wise men and women as it relates to their limitations experientially, academically, and emotionally. They don’t deceive themselves; they don’t pretend; and they don’t act like they’re smarter than they really are. They know their limits. They know what they don’t know, and they make sure they know people who do.
This
is somewhat counterintuitive. A wise man needing wisdom? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. What’s the use of being wise if you have to ask for advice? If you need outside input, isn’t that evidence of the fact that you really aren’t all that wise?
No. Wise men and women frequently seek the counsel of others because that’s the wise thing to do. Solomon himself espoused this simple, yet often neglected, principle.
The Wise Guy
According to the Scriptures, Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. As a young king, he found himself overwhelmed with the responsibilities that befell him. Then one night the Lord appeared to him in a dream and made him a rather unique offer: “Ask for whatever you want me to give you” (1 Kings 3:5).
Imagine that! God appearing to a teenager and offering to give him anything he wanted. What would you have asked for? Think about it: God offered Solomon a blank check and said, “Fill in the amount.” Here’s how Solomon responded:
Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours? (1 Kings 3:7–9)
I suppose I would have asked for the same thing. Well, maybe not. In fact, “a discerning heart to govern” would have been about the furthest thing from my mind. That probably explains why God didn’t make me the same offer when I was sixteen. But Solomon’s response was exactly what God was hoping for: