The wedding was fixed for the second Saturday in December. The introduction had taken place in March, in Kunbi’s father’s sitting room in Ibadan, with both families crowded onto the settees, the aunties in matching gele and Yinka’s uncle making a speech that went on for forty minutes. Kola nut had been broken. Prayers had been said. Everybody agreed it was a good match. Yinka was steady, kind and worked in IT at a bank on the Island. Kunbi was a nurse at a teaching hospital, with a quick laugh and a seat in the second row of the choir.
In August they went to a friend’s wedding reception together. It ran late, as Lagos receptions do, and afterwards Yinka drove her back to his flat in Yaba to collect a parcel his mother had sent for her. It was nearly midnight. The generator was humming outside. They sat on his couch to talk, and the talking turned into something else, and at a certain point Kunbi said, quietly, “Yinka, please, let us stop.”
He did stop. But he was hurt, and he said so. “Kunbi, we are getting married in four months. Our parents have eaten kola together. God knows our hearts. What exactly are we waiting for?”
She ordered a ride home and cried most of the way across the Third Mainland Bridge. Yinka did not call the next day, or the day after. On the third day a message arrived: I am beginning to wonder if you really love me.
What Yinka did not know was the question that had been running through Kunbi’s mind since that night. Years earlier, at university, she had been in a relationship she now deeply regretted. She had confessed it to God a hundred times. But a voice kept whispering, What exactly are you protecting? You lost that long ago. Between his hurt and her shame, she was very close to giving in.
She came to see my wife and me on a Sunday afternoon in September. She sat on the edge of our couch, holding her phone with that message on the screen, and asked a question I have heard many times from engaged couples. “Pastor, if we are going to marry anyway, does it really matter?”
The question engaged couples ask
It is an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. Yinka was no predator. He loved Kunbi, intended to marry her and had already spent a great deal of money on the engagement. Many engaged couples feel the same way. The commitment is real. The families have agreed. The date is set. Why should a few months make any difference?
The New Testament gives a short sentence that sets the frame: “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Hebrews 13:4). Scripture places sexual union inside marriage, and it calls that union pure and good. The bed is undefiled because of the covenant that surrounds it. Sex was given by God as the seal and celebration of a covenant already made, a covenant in which two people have publicly and permanently given themselves to one another before God and witnesses.
Engagement is a promise to make that covenant. It is a serious promise, and it should be kept with honour. But a promise to marry is still a promise about the future. Engagements are sometimes broken, for good reasons and bad ones. Pastors have seen it happen two weeks before the wedding. Until the covenant is made, the two of you do not yet belong to each other in the way marriage creates, and the honour you owe each other includes waiting for what has not yet been given.
There is a Nigerian question here too. In many of our families, marriage happens in stages: the introduction, the traditional or customary marriage, the registry, the church wedding. A couple whose bride price has been paid and whose customary marriage is complete are regarded as married by their families and by law, and sincere believers differ on whether they should still wait for the church blessing. Some churches treat the customary marriage as the marriage. Others ask couples to wait until the church wedding, for the sake of conscience and public witness. If that applies to you, settle it with your pastor and your families well before the day, and decide it together. What must never happen is that one person decides it for the other. An introduction ceremony, however joyful, is not a marriage, and Kunbi and Yinka both knew it.
What God wills for your body
Paul wrote to the young church in Thessalonica, many of whom had come out of a culture where sexual freedom was taken for granted. He did not leave them guessing. “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). The word fornication covers sexual intimacy outside marriage, including between people who intend to marry. It is not a word anyone likes to hear applied to a couple they love. But Paul uses it plainly, and pastoral kindness does not mean pretending he did not.
Then he describes what holiness looks like positively: “That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God” (1 Thessalonians 4:4-5). Whether vessel here means one’s own body or one’s future spouse, the instruction is about self-government. A believer learns to hold desire with honour instead of being held by it. Concupiscence describes desire that grasps and consumes. Honour describes desire that waits, protects and gives.
The next verse is the one I read aloud to Kunbi. “That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: because that the Lord is the avenger of all such” (1 Thessalonians 4:6). To go beyond is to step over a line. To defraud is to take what has not been rightly given. Paul sees sexual sin before marriage as something done to a person. You take from the other person something that belongs to the covenant you have not yet made, and you take from the future spouse they might yet marry if the engagement does not survive.
This changes the conversation. The question is no longer only “How far can we go?” It becomes “How do I honour this person whom God has entrusted to my care for this season?” Paul gives a beautiful picture of that honour in another letter:
Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren; The elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity.
Timothy was a young pastor, and Paul tells him how to treat people across the generations. Older men as fathers. Younger men as brothers. Older women as mothers. And “the younger as sisters, with all purity.” Before Kunbi was Yinka’s fiancée, she was his sister in Christ, and she will remain his sister in Christ when they are old and grey. The purity Paul speaks of is the clean, protective love a good brother has for his sister. He would never use her. He would stand between her and anyone who tried.
Paul then closes the Thessalonian paragraph with a sober word: “For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness. He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, who hath also given unto us his holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 4:7-8). These boundaries were not invented by strict parents or nervous pastors. They come from God, and He has given His Holy Spirit so that we can keep them. Grace does not lower the standard. It supplies the strength.
Do not wake love before its time
The Song of Solomon is a love poem, frank and joyful about desire between a bride and her beloved. Scripture does not blush at romance. Yet three times in the Song, the bride turns aside to speak to the young women around her:
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
“That ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.” The bride knows the power of what she feels. Desire, once fully awakened, does not easily go back to sleep. She is not telling her friends that love is bad. She is telling them that love has its time, and that wisdom refuses to rush it.
Anyone who has been engaged understands this. Physical affection has a momentum of its own. What begins as a kiss in a parked car can become something neither person planned within minutes. God designed our bodies so that intimacy builds towards completion, and that design is good. It simply means that the decision about where to stop must usually be made long before the moment comes. Couples who decide on the couch at midnight rarely decide well.
There is something freeing in the bride’s charge. It means that the strength of your attraction to each other is a sign of something God made, and nothing to be ashamed of. The aim is to keep desire asleep until the day you can welcome it fully, without fear, without secrecy and without a single regret.
The wise couple therefore talks about boundaries early, in daylight, when neither of you is tired, emotional or alone together in a quiet flat. You may feel awkward. Talk anyway. It is far easier to agree on a line over a plate of rice at a busy restaurant than to discover where the line is when you are already standing on it.
Joseph and the wisdom of distance
When Paul tells the Corinthians how to respond to sexual temptation, his instruction is two words long: “Flee fornication” (1 Corinthians 6:18). The verb means to run. And Scripture gives us a picture of what that looks like in the story of Joseph in Potiphar’s house:
And it came to pass, as she spake to Joseph day by day, that he hearkened not unto her, to lie by her, or to be with her. And it came to pass about this time, that Joseph went into the house to do his business; and there was none of the men of the house there within. And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out.
Joseph was young, far from home and alone. Potiphar’s wife pressed him “day by day.” Notice his strategy. He “hearkened not unto her, to lie by her, or to be with her.” He refused the act, and he refused the setting too: he would not even be with her. And when the moment of greatest pressure came, in an empty house with no witnesses, he did not stay to argue. He left his garment in her hand and ran.
Paul gives Timothy the same counsel in positive form. “Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Timothy 2:22). There is something to run from, and there is something to run towards, and there are people to run with. Purity is rarely kept alone. It is kept in company.
For an engaged or courting couple, fleeing usually looks very ordinary. It means you do not spend the night at each other’s places, however late the reception ends. It means you do not lie down together on a bed or a couch “just to rest”. It means you choose public or semi-public places to spend long evenings. It means you agree on a time to say good night, and you keep it. It means you do not send each other messages or photographs that you would be ashamed to have read aloud. It means you do not travel together and share a room, even to save money. None of this is dramatic. All of it is wise.
Paul grounds the call in who you are: “know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Your body belongs to the Lord who bought it. So does the body of the person you love. Both of you are temples. Both of you have been purchased with the same blood. When you keep your boundaries, you are treating two temples with honour.
The wisdom of Proverbs adds one more layer:
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
Boundaries begin in the heart before they reach the body. What you allow yourself to dwell on, watch and imagine shapes what you will do when the moment comes. A couple who are feeding each other’s imaginations through late-night messages are already halfway across the line. Guard the heart, and the body is far easier to guard.
A boundary that is chosen, not forced
PunchlineHere is the part of this subject that is often missed, and it was the heart of the problem between Kunbi and Yinka.
Sexual boundaries before marriage are meant to be understood and willingly embraced by both people. They cannot be kept faithfully through coercion, and they cannot be kept faithfully through control. Affection does not cancel responsibility. Loving someone deeply does not give you the right to override their conscience, and it does not give you the right to manage their body for them.
Pressure comes in many forms. Sometimes it is open: “If you love me, you will.” Sometimes it is quieter: sulking, silence, withdrawing affection, a hurt look that lasts for days. Sometimes it borrows spiritual language: “God knows our hearts,” or “We are already one in the spirit.” Sometimes it uses a person’s past against them: “Why are you acting holy now?” Every one of these is an attempt to move another person’s boundary by making the cost of keeping it too painful. However gently it is done, it dishonours the other person.
Scripture describes love very differently. Love “Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Love does not seek its own way. Love is not provoked when it hears the word no. And “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour” (Romans 13:10). If what you call love is pressing someone to act against their conscience, it has stopped behaving like love.
The Bible contains a frightening example of what desire becomes when it refuses to take no for an answer. Amnon claimed to love his half-sister Tamar so much that he made himself ill. He schemed to be alone with her. When she pleaded with him, he would not listen, and he forced her. Then this:
Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone.
What Amnon called love was never love. It was appetite wearing love’s clothes. Once he had taken what he wanted, it curdled into contempt. That is an extreme case, but the principle reaches every relationship: desire that will not wait for consent is not love, however strong it feels.
There is an opposite danger, and it is just as real. Sometimes one partner tries to “keep the relationship pure” by controlling the other: checking their phone, dictating what they wear, shaming them for every expression of affection, treating them as the source of all temptation. That is not purity. It is control dressed in religious language, and it plants seeds that grow into an unhealthy marriage. Women can pressure men, and men can be controlled by women. The responsibility runs both ways.
Affection never removes the responsibility to honour another person’s body and conscience. A boundary is kept by two people who both choose it, never by one person forcing or policing the other.
So a healthy couple agrees on boundaries together. Each person is free to name a line, and the other honours it without argument, without sulking and without punishment. If one of you wants a stricter boundary than the other, the stricter one stands. A no is received with respect the first time it is said. And if you discover that your partner cannot honour your no before marriage, you have learned something you need to know about how they will treat you after it. Postponing a wedding is painful. Marrying someone who does not respect your consent is far more painful.
Abuse is never your impurity
NuggetI must speak plainly to anyone reading this who has been forced, pressured or abused.
If someone used force, threats, manipulation, alcohol, money or authority to take what you did not freely give, that was not your sin. It was a sin committed against you. You did not lose your purity through what was done to you. The impurity, the guilt and the shame belong to the person who did it. That is true whether it happened when you were a child, a student, an employee or a fiancée. It is true even if you had said yes to some affection and no to the rest. It is true even if it was someone you loved and planned to marry. Being engaged to someone never gives them the right to your body.
When Tamar was assaulted, her own family told her to keep quiet, and “Tamar remained desolate in her brother Absalom’s house” (2 Samuel 13:20). Too many survivors in our churches have been given the same counsel. That is not the way of Christ. If this has happened to you, please tell someone you trust. If you are in danger, go somewhere safe. If a crime has been committed, it can be reported to the police, and a church leader who hears of it should support you in doing so, never cover it up. Qualified counsellors who understand trauma can walk with you towards healing. You do not need to carry it alone, and you do not need to marry the person who did it in order to “make it right”.
When you have already crossed the line
Some who read this are not survivors of abuse. You simply made choices you regret. Perhaps it was years ago, like Kunbi. Perhaps it was last month, with the person you are now engaged to. Perhaps you are in a pattern now that you do not know how to stop.
Hear the voice of God through the prophet Isaiah:
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD : though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
“Come now, and let us reason together.” God’s first word to sinners is an invitation. Scarlet and crimson were dyes that soaked deep into cloth and did not wash out. God promises a whiteness that no human scrubbing could achieve. Through the blood of Jesus Christ, that promise is fulfilled. Paul wrote to Corinthian believers who had once lived in sexual sin, “but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Washed is a finished word.
Your past choices do not disqualify you from purity now. Purity is not a prize you either still have or have permanently lost. It is a way of living that begins again today, from a cleansed conscience. The voice that whispered to Kunbi, What are you protecting?, was lying. She was not protecting a trophy. She was honouring her Lord, her future husband and her own body, which had been washed and was now a temple. That is worth protecting whatever lies behind you.
If you and your fiancé have already been sexually involved, the way forward is the same. Stop. Confess it to God together and receive His forgiveness. Tell a trusted pastor or mature couple, so that you can be helped. Nobody needs to shame you. Put new boundaries in place, because what has happened once will happen again without them. Do not rush the wedding date to cover your tracks, and do not assume that because you have crossed the line you might as well keep crossing it. And if a pregnancy has come, receive that child as a gift from God. Do not let anyone push you into a hasty marriage or a hidden decision out of fear. A wise church will surround you with practical love, not gossip.
Kunbi went home from our house that Sunday and asked Yinka to meet her and us the following weekend. He came, a little defensive at first. I asked if he and I could talk alone for a few minutes.
I read him 1 Thessalonians 4:6 and asked what he thought it meant to defraud his sister. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I have been treating her no like a problem to solve.” He told me he had grown up hearing that a man who waits is weak, and that he had half believed it. He had never once thought of his sulking as pressure. “I just thought I was being honest about my feelings.”
When Kunbi came back into the room, he did not make a speech. He said, “I am sorry. You were right to stop. I should have been the one to say it, and I made you pay for saying it.” She cried, and so did he.
They sat with my wife and me that afternoon and wrote their boundaries on a sheet of paper. No visits to either flat after nine at night. Long evenings in public places or with friends. No messages they would not want us to read. An older couple from the church, who had been married twenty-six years, agreed to ask them every few weeks how they were doing, and to ask honestly. Kunbi added one line of her own: If either of us says stop, we stop, and nobody sulks. Yinka signed beneath it.
PunchlineI also told Kunbi that if Yinka had not been able to honour that line, the right thing would have been to postpone the wedding, however much it cost. She said she knew. I believe she would have done it.
They were married on the second Saturday in December. At the reception, long after midnight, I saw them dancing. Kunbi caught my eye across the hall and smiled. There was no shame in that smile. There was the freedom of two people who had honoured each other, and who now belonged to each other without regret.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What reasons have you heard, or given, for why sexual boundaries do not matter once a couple is engaged? How does 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8 answer them?
- How does it change your view of the person you love to see them first as a brother or sister in Christ, to be treated “with all purity”?
- Have you ever used sulking, silence, spiritual language or someone’s past to move their boundary? Have you been on the receiving end of it?
- What practical boundaries, in time, place, technology and travel, would genuinely help you flee instead of testing your strength?
- If you carry regret or the wound of abuse, what would it mean for you to believe that you are washed, and that what was done to you was not your impurity?
This Week
If you are courting or engaged, sit down with your partner this week in a public place, in daylight, and write down your sexual boundaries together. Let each person name any line they need, and agree that the stricter boundary stands. Add one sentence: “If either of us says stop, we stop, and nobody sulks.” Then share the list with a mature couple who will ask you about it. If you are single, write down the boundaries you intend to keep in any future relationship, so that you have decided before the pressure comes.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that my body is a temple of Your Holy Spirit, bought with the precious blood of Jesus. Thank You that You have called me to holiness and given me Your Spirit to walk in it. Teach me to honour the people I love as brothers and sisters in Christ, with all purity. Keep me from pressing anyone beyond their conscience, and give me courage to say no and to hear no without resentment. Where I have crossed lines, I receive Your washing and Your call to begin again. Where I have been wronged, heal me and let no shame that belongs to someone else rest on me. Keep my heart, and let my love be patient, kind and honourable, until the time You have appointed. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.