Growing up a Christian, I learned to believe one thing about marriage: A good wife submits to keep her husband happy, and if the marriage falls apart it is due to a failure on the woman’s part. It’s not that anyone ever blatantly said it in those words, but it was easy to pick up on when listening to adults talk. Along with implied expectations learned from those around me, I felt like the Church focused a lot on the biblical call for women to submit to men, but very little on what expectations were placed on men. As an adult I’ve picked up on a lot of what was left out. I would hear people preach Colossians 3:18 - wives submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord - but don’t recall ever hearing Colossians 3:19 - husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. I would hear “a wife belongs to her husband instead of herself…” but never the second half of 1 Corinthians 7:4 which says “a husband belongs to his wife instead of himself.” I don’t think I ever once heard anyone talk about Ephesians 5:21-29. Add to that the fact that more often than not when the church talks about sex to children or young adults it is only in the context of when God disapproves of it, rather than the truth that God purposely designed sex to be a physical representation of a husband and wife becoming one flesh in marriage. Along with the negative teaching around sex, I would hear people preach “love the Lord your God with all your heart” as motivation for remaining pure so that you are capable of loving God (and someday your spouse) with your whole heart - making it clear that if you did make the mistake of having premarital sex, you were irreparably damaged. The trouble with this selective or one-sided scripture teaching is that girls are never hearing the whole story, and it can make marriage both unappealing and a bit frightening. It also breeds deep shame to teach women that they are damaged or broken if they give into the temptation of sex before marriage.

It’s harmful for both boys and girls to grow up without hearing the whole truth. We can’t raise boys to believe they are designed to have authority over the opposite sex. When we leave out the parts of what the Bible says about the responsibility that comes with the authority God has given to men, we are not equipping them for to be godly. God makes it very clear what He expects from men, and we need to be teaching it as much, if not more, than we teach girls what is expected of them. As a church we have spent centuries telling women how they are expected to behave, almost always in the context of what makes them weak or less worthy. We haven’t spent as much time teaching boys or men how to love their wife as Christ loved the church. We haven’t been teaching them that just as their wife will live for her husband, that they are to live for their wife. The church struggles to understand why young women, even in the Church, are more often choosing to remain unmarried and exercise sexual “liberation” because they can’t acknowledge how they’ve played into it. If we're raising girls to believe that they are inferior or subservient to men, and infinitely damaged if they make the wrong sexual choices, we can’t be surprised when they decide to chart their own course rather than follow the one we’re guiding them down. The Church readily acknowledges that we live in a society that places high value on independence, self-worship, and instant gratification, yet when it practices selective scripture teaching it isn’t giving young women a lot to look forward to if they follow the path laid out for them according to the selective teachings. When you grow up only hearing about the expectations placed on women in marriage, the whole point of marriage will be lost on both men and women. If girls grow up thinking they must surrender all autonomy when they marry, they never understand the joys God intended marriage to bring. Without understanding those joys, young Christians can hardly begin to understand the reasons God tells us to save ourselves for marriage.

We need to be speaking the whole truth as a Church. Young men need to understand the responsibility that comes with the authority placed on them. They need to be taught how to be the kind of husbands God created them to be. Our girls need to hear that they were created to do more than submit in all ways to their husband and more than “you’re giving away a piece of your heart every time you’re intimate with someone.” They need to hear that they should be loved and coveted by their husband. They need to hear that sex is a holy representation of why God designed marriage - to make man and woman one flesh. They need to know that God created sex to bring us joy, comfort, intimacy, and more with our husband. Most importantly, they need to hear that if they stray into sexual sin that all they have to do is flee from it (or marry) and God will redeem them. And that even if they’ve given away parts of their heart, they can still love God with ALL they have. They need to hear that Jesus doesn’t turn away from their immorality, that he looks them in the eye and offers them water so they will never thirst again. They need to hear that no matter what choices they have made, they are loved by the Almighty Father. This is the whole truth, and it is what we should be teaching.

(To read more regarding the reasons God tells us to save sex for marriage, check out my first article titled “The Reason for Waiting.”)