Sex Before Marriage | Ron + Hope: Unfiltered

Foreign.

Here we are again. It's Ron and Hope. Unfiltered, real raw and relevant. So glad that you are here today. Look at my hubby and his cute little jean jacket.

Real fat today.

Oh, my word.

I was looking at my butt when I was getting ready. I think my butt's gotten big.

That's the smallest part of your anatomy.

I believe I'm getting too heavy.

Okay.

What?

Why'd you jump when I came over to grab your hand?

You made me jumpy.

You jumped like the holy ghost hit you.

Yep. Been jumpy all morning.

Have you?

When you was getting out of the bathtub, I peaked.

You did?

Yep.

That's made you jumpy.

And I had to repent.

Oh, you shouldn't have to repent.

You married? I repented. You didn't know. I speak at one peak. It just made me kind of shaky all morning.

Shaky.

Well, ironically, setting up what we're talking.

About today, last week, we talked about sex after marriage, and it was hilarious.

It was hilarious. I gotta be honest with you, I think today's much more serious because if you get me into a lot of stuff that I need to get into today, it's this. It actually is no laughing matter.

You didn't let me say what our topic is.

Tell them what we're talking about.

Sex before marriage. Sex.

So before those of you that are married say, well, I don't need to hear that. No, we're going to talk about how sex before marriage can also affect sex after marriage.

Yeah, it affects everything.

And this is going to be a strange sound on some ears, because even Gen Z, I would say, and then the ones that are coming up from junior high and the teen, whatever we're calling them, whatever category, I get lost with all the categories, it's hard to.

Believe we have a grandchild in that category.

Yeah, I have a grandchild just hit junior high and we're in, you know, a season where they're teaching transgender and binary gender and how do you identify?

You can be a cat today, a dog walk.

It's a whole different world the next day. And I could make off the cuff statements and I could crack jokes. But for a lot of people who are struggling with gender confusion and they were not raised in an environment like we were raised, it's no laughing matter. Because there's nothing more tormented than to not know who you are. When you don't know what you are, you don't know who you are, then you don't know why you're here. And then when you don't know why you're here. You don't know what you're supposed to do. So everything starts with identity. Everything. And I see an assault, an all out, demonic, dark, salacious attack on the identity of generations.

Yep.

Where, you know, they're this, they're that. No, they're confused.

They are very confused.

And I take.

And they have no direction.

I take that all to the. I take responsibility of that back all the way to our generation. Because that starts with the breakdown of the home.

Absolutely. I was just sitting here.

It starts with the breakdown of the home.

They wouldn't be confused if their parents.

And it especially starts with fatherlessness, because the father. And you'll say, well, Pastor, you have traditional roles, don't have biblical roles.

Right.

The father is the identity giver. That was not up to the mother. The father is the identity giver. The Father in heaven pointed to Jesus and said, this is my son in whom I am well pleased. And Jesus had not done a thing. Jesus had not performed a miracle. He had not cast out a devil. He had not raised the dead. He had not done one thing. I take pleasure in who he is, not what he has done. And his identity was solidified by his father, the prodigal, when he came back. I have lost this identity of a son. I'll change it to a servant. And the father said, nonsense, son. I'm putting a ring on your finger. The father. Yeah. The father is the one that solidifies identity. When you take the father out of the equation, you deteriorate into the utter, absolute chaos that we have today. And I want you to know I'm not cutting jokes and I'm not ripping you. I'm going to talk about this in a respectful manner because to a lot of you who are dealing with these, this is no laughing matter. To some of you young parents who's got a junior high coming to you, wondering if they're a girl or a boy, it's not funny to you. And I do see a lot of people politically and other things, they taking potshots at it. But to people who are in these real struggles, you know, a kid coming to you, I don't know what I am, but you.

But it's the parent's role exactly. To indulge in that. You have to set the record straight. It's the truth that makes people free.

And it's the nature of a child to be confused.

Yes.

And it's the nature of a parent to bring clarity.

Yes.

And so I got a lot of things I could Say, this is not a thing about, you know, your sexuality and your transgenderism and homo. We're not that. But I'm trying to. I'm just trying to awaken. This is who we're talking to. So things we're going to talk about are going to sound absolutely archaic. Hope. Yeah, but it's true. The fact is, what Hope just said and something Hope says all the time, it's like a thread that runs through her ministry. The truth sets you free, and I don't care how many generations the truth has skipped, somebody's got to come back and say, here is what God says. And it's not going to be right until you align it with what God says. Because God is the author and the finisher of all life.

Yeah.

He's the beginning, he's the end. He's the alpha and the omega. And what do you do when something malfunctions? You read the manual and go back to the manufacturer. The Bible is the manual. God is the manufacturer. And when there's ever something on a car or an oven or a microwave or a cell phone that you don't know how to do, you go back to the one who created it. That is so simple, but it's so profound. And that's what I want to do today. So I want to challenge some of you who may be in our younger people, in our audience, who is dealing with an out of control sexuality generation. I mean, where it's just anything goes. Let me tell you what I do, Hope. I have a few, not many. I don't follow much of anything. But me and you talk about marriage a lot. We talk about relationships a lot. We do leadership stuff. So I do have things when I know that I need to be developed. I'll follow it and I'll follow it sometimes even secular stuff, to get a gauge on where the world is. What are they saying? What are they talking about? And I've got about four or five, especially on Instagram, secular relationship sites. Just purely secular, not Christian at all. I'm amazed at what I hear. I mean, the most foolish, most ridiculous. You remember when I came home and told you the other day what the woman said about her husband, what she does? And you looked at me and you said, that is utterly one of the most ridiculous and almost impossible scenarios I've ever heard. And I mean, this lady was dead serious. I won't go into it. It's a little bit too raw even for this. Raw. And I sit there and I see and trying to get a gauge where the girl is not where the world is. And I'm sitting there saying, when you speak the Bible into this generation, you know, there used to be, there was only a little bit of way and you can close the gap real easy. There's a Grand Canyon between the sexuality of this generation and the sexuality of the word of God.

It's deteriorated.

And we've paid price. We've paid a price. We've paid a dear price. Pornography being available through Internet since 1995 has had an un.

It has.

There was a time when I was young, you had to go search for that.

Not anymore.

You had to know where to get it. You had to be a certain age to get it. You almost had to be embarrassed when you got it. And I remember, I remember those days, Wales. I participated in it at times. But now, you know, an 11 year old having the most insane things you've ever seen and twisted things you've ever seen at a click is a scary world. It's a scary world. And so we're not here to talk about that. Yeah.

The whole sex trafficking world.

But I want to talk, it's everywhere, about how badly we're just going to throw it out there. We would have loved to because we dated over three years. I want to talk about some of the things we employed. We didn't get this out of a book. I purposely didn't bring a book in here. There's some great books been written on relationships recently, especially by people in the millennial age. You need to read them. I've heard Michael Todd, I've heard him speak out of his. I hadn't read the book, but I heard him preach out of it. Had some great things. I heard him say. I know several others have written some things about relationships. This did not come from a book. I want to talk about mine in your life and how we did it because we were teenagers, which hormones are raging, and we dated three and a half years in an environment where we were with each other every day and we did not cross that line. It can be done.

Yeah.

So I think we got somebody we need to talk about before jump into it.

We sure do. We're sitting here talking about sex before marriage. Now we're going to shift right into hair thinning, old age stuff. Okay.

Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Not necessarily.

I have seen some of the guys.

I mean, I went. I remember a guy that was right across the hall from me in College. He's 22 and he's bald.

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Commercial break from Nutrafol I spilled water all in my lap. I wanted to be real raw and relevant and just go on my wet pants. But my wife was not hearing it so I had to go change pants. So we're not that rolled and not. Thank you. I thought it looked kind of fly when I put it on.

Yeah, it looks better because it matches your undershirt.

So. Increased my drip a little bit. It did. Okay, let's need somebody clean up behind me a little bit.

Okay.

All right. Let's talk about me and you.

Let's talk about us.

We laid the generational gap. Stay with us. Those of you guys who said this is going to be a strange sound because I want you to hear it because it can bring some real light to your life. Because in the third segment I'm going to get into the damages it can cause later on because nobody talks about that.

Right?

So we dated in 1960 and I'm always buttering you up. I'm going to do it again. I don't have to. I would tell the truth. We told the truth in a lot of areas of our life that were extremely unpleasant. I'll tell the good ones. Love brings with it very intense feelings. Even for a guy. Intense feelings that are indeed feelings that have nothing to do with his genitalia. They are indeed emotional feelings. When we first met, I found out I had never been in love before. I thought I had. Okay. I thought I had. I don't know if you can echo the same thing. Yes. But I had never experienced what I experienced. So with that the very good, the very innocent part comes. The other part, hope that has to be controlled. You can't let all the intense feelings that go with it because feelings, I've always said can be liars. And feelings will lead you down terrible roads. Feelings are many times not your friends.

Right.

Okay. And I think it's safe to say we're a feeling based society, far and away.

Yeah. We just do what we feel.

We don't even care what feels good. I tell people, you know, even in our voting and political, we vote what feels good. We don't even think of logical outcomes. Just it feels virtuous. It feels good. And we don't stop and we don't think of where is this going and what will be the harvest of it. We feel like we want a double cheeseburger and yeah. You know, until you have that tie around your waist. So the long and short of it is you and I very quickly found out and I think everybody can read into it without us going into details. After our first few times of being together because we were in college, you know, we didn't have a parent breathing down our back. We didn't have curfew looking over us. And we were going to have to employ some boundaries because I think you say me and you fell in love pretty hard, pretty quick.

And you were so good looking.

I don't know about all that, but you were a very committed Christian. You had been working the summer at ptl. You probably had a little bit more Christianese under your belly than I did. I never really embraced any worship style. I never really engaged into my church. I just respected my dad. But the church life never was a part of my life. So the real convictions of a man of God, I was learning. Okay. You may have actually been a little bit further down the road than I was when you met me. I'd been saved a few months but you had kind of, you know, you made your mistakes in high school, but by the time you got to pto, I think you were trying to correct the course. Okay. Some of the things that we did was we would have talks about, we can't do this anymore.

Because we wanted to have sex.

Absolutely. We wanted to have sex.

Our feelings have sex.

And I will tell somebody. It was awful. It was trying to restrain that. I didn't want to restrain it. I was in love with you. I knew I was going to marry you. And I do advocate for dating to take some time before marriage. Going back. I would not advocate long engagements because long. We had a very long engagement. We got engaged a year after we were dating, then we stayed engaged over two years. Engagement gives a level of intimacy that, if you're not careful, will give way to permission.

Right, Right.

And I think me and you experienced that when we got engaged. And we kind of sealed the deal. 99% done.

Right.

It made it even more difficult.

It did.

Because you knew I was yours. I knew you were mine. Nobody was turning our head. I mean, it was just what it was. And so I would say, first of all, you got to have a knowledge of what God expects. That sex before marriage, sex is too explosive. Sex is too powerful. And sex is not just your body. And I have heard that from this young generation. If I've heard it one time, I've heard it a million times from the people that are engaging in porn at a young level, a young age. From people who are working in everywhere. It's just my body. It's just my body. No, it's not guys who sleep around. I was on one of these sites the other night. Young college girl was with her friends and said she was going to France on a school trip with her university. And her goal, one of these sites, these secular sites, said, was to sleep with 20 boys before she got back. Dear Lord, these were not trashy people. These were. It was like a junior in college, you know, abroad to study. Young, attractive girl. And my goal.

Yeah.

And did not even explain it. And I sit there and I'm like, this is what I'm preaching to. So I've got to find a way to take biblical views which would sound sexually archaic to this generation, but somehow make them relevant and powerful. So you need to understand God invented sex. Porn didn't invent sex. Hugh Hefner didn't invent sex. The devil didn't invent sex. God. Sex is God's idea. Okay, so God is cool with it. But because it is so powerful, he said it can only be released and it can only be experienced in a relationship that is covenant tied. So that if I give you the very deepest part of me, I'm not worried about you being gone the next day. Because if I'm giving you. The Bible says when a man joins with a woman, he is one with her in spirit.

Spirit, that's right. Spirit. Not body.

Spirit. So if you meet somebody and you are sexually attracted to them, physically attracted, maybe I should say, which leads to sexuality, and you start the relationship there. The relationship is also emotional. The relationship is also spiritual. It has all these dynamics. But if you have made the foundation of it physical and you run into emotional or spiritual problems, the foundation of the physical relationship is not strong enough to hold you.

Right.

So what I tried to do was let's build a foundation spiritually and let's build the apex to where the physical thing was the last thing we would experience. So if anything happens physically or even emotionally, and it did in our marriage, spiritually, we had the foundation to undergird it and be able to survive it.

Yeah.

So if I start the foundation of my relationship off with my body, that is not strong enough in the day of storms to hold me and you together.

That's right.

And that's where I see so many of them start. They don't even know each other's names.

Well, it's supposed to be, like you just said, a culmination. The other foundations are supposed to be built then in the marriage. That's the explosion of the joining, of the completion.

When you have proved me in every other area. I give you that.

Yes.

Not give you that first. And then we explore whether or not you can prove me in every other area. And I talk about in our marriage conference. It's one of the most emotional, most intense. It is the most intense session of our marriage conference where the man is the releaser, the woman is the receptor. Hope. Let's get away from the Bible. Scientists say that the DNA of a man can live up to 10 years.

Inside of a woman.

Inside of a woman. So the Bible says, when we're born again, we're born of incorruptible seed of the living and enduring word of God. So I have Jesus seed. When I get up from the altar and I've accepted Christ, I got Jesus seed. I don't have Jesus fruit. I got Jesus seed. So why does Jesus tell me, heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out. He tells me to do everything he does. Why? Because he knows that the stuff in there is already in me in seed form. It would be unfair. It would be unfair for God to ask me to do something that's not in there.

Right.

So if he asks me to do it, it's already in there. Well, people have got to understand, just like everything Jesus is, is in his seed. Everything Ron is, is in the seed. Good, bad, ugly, blessings, curses is in my seed.

Yeah.

And then you, when I release that.

Into you, into a woman, and you.

Walk away from that experience you have received, that's impossibility. You have received everything about Ron that Ron can be potentially good or bad. And you've walked away from that experience with that part of me in you. It's not just the orgasmic release. It is a spiritual tie, easily broken, unless you go back around and revisit it, usually in a painful way. Then you have two people who've had. I would say in our day, two or three. Now I'd say 10 or 12 sexual partners come together one day and say, I give myself wholly unto thee for as long as I shall live. No, you don't. Because when you're standing there, you're not whole.

No. You got all this sin. You're fragmenting inside of you as a woman.

You're fragmented. I give this example, and you can see the people in the marriage conference kind of wigging out. And I said, don't wig out. I said, just roll with me here. That. This way back in the early 90s when I had this lady come in my office, like for help, and I was every. I was on call 24 hours a day, and I functioned and everything. So I was the only guy there. And this lady was in. And this lady started wigging out in front of me.

I remember that.

I mean, just freaking out. And I wasn't a trained counselor, but I did depend on the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit said, she is manifesting the personalities of every man she slept with right now. And so I had to deal with her from that frame point because that seed, because she was carrying, she was very promiscuous. And she was carrying around the fragmentation of all those relationships that have been left in her. And people have got to understand, no, it is not just your body. Let's run a little bit past it, because I'm in a place. It's not just your body. It is the weaving together of what we call a soul tie. Now, I gave away my message on Soul Tie to any new Covenant partner on TV, and I usually do that for about 90 days. I did that one for two years because it was the most demanded that we ever had. A soul tie is when I am no longer free to make my own decisions without being able to think about you.

Right. Because you're emotionally tied to that.

So you come into a marriage with Larry and you're tied to Bob, Tom and whoever else, and all of a sudden you want to give all of yourself. You wondering a little bit about what's wrong, but you know, there's a part of you being withheld. Why? Because as a part of you, you never even got to bring to the table.

That's good. And you know, one of our biggest watched, most watched podcast is the time that Pastor Denise and I did a podcast on soul Ties, how to break Soul Ties. So if that's very interesting to you, you know that you have them in your life.

Yeah, we don't have time to do that today.

The lights flashing. Go back and watch that podcast. It was very enlightening. Before we go on, we have another amazing partner.

And stay with us, guys, because I'm telling you, we love our clients and we believe in all of them.

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So we were talking about before we went to our amazing advertisers. We were just talking about the fragmentation that multiple sex partners does and how a woman there is really. I'm not saying a man doesn't have soul ties because we may give a little bit of our personality testimony in a moment. A man can have soul ties, but there's something about the woman that gets the worst end of the deal because God has built her as a receiver and an incubator. She incubates what the man releases. That's the way she's built. She don't only do that physically. She's built to incubate. I have to. You know what I tell you? You incubate conversations with incredibly difficult for a woman to.

To get rid of souls. I mean, both men and women have this because it's an emotional connection. It's not just physical. It is. It is where you get tied to that person, Whether it's memories, you know, special times, sexuality, your jokes, blah, blah, blah.

It can be just an inner pool. Yes, it's just a pool.

But it's harder for a woman to break free because of that incubation. Taking that seed in. That seed starts producing.

And then you got people that sincerely want to make a marriage work and don't understand why they're having all these difficult problems. And so then if the Bible hope says that this is not just a physical act, then I've got to understand, he saved it for marriage because of the value of it. You, you, you can't cheapen what God meant for sex to be.

That's right.

I just.

And, but, you know, I hear people, even adult people, Ron, say, well, that's just ridiculous. That's too difficult. How do you expect a man and woman not to have sex?

We had conversations. They were embarrassing because we knew when we crossed lines and we would circle back and have conversations. If I may say, it aggravated you because I think it was embarrassing for you. So when I would come back like, hey, man, we're going to have to. And those were not pleasant conversations. We didn't fuss a lot. But as I look back on it, that was some of the more strained conversations we had during dating is how far is too far? And where's our stopping points? Because when we were together, I'm going to say it straight up, I wanted you. And when we were alone and we had those alone times all the time, I was immensely in love with you. You were very desirable to me. You were really my first love. And I wanted to express that in that expression. And the second Thing after the conversation is boundaries giving no place to the devil. Giving no place. And when I say no place, I mean no place. Because the boundaries are really no good outside of a relationship with God. Because I've heard you say over and over, you say, ron was really, really disciplined. And then you'll follow it up saying, and you had a relationship with the Lord. The relationship with the Lord empowers the boundary.

Yeah, it creates the boundary.

Just a boundary out of sheer discipline is hard.

Yeah.

But conviction, conviction, conviction. A boundary not only because I don't want to take advantage of you.

You want to please the Lord.

I want to please the Lord. We watched a movie a while back that was actually somewhat wholesome, called A Walk in the Clouds. And a man had a chance. It was kind of reeves in there. And he had a chance to sexual encounter with a woman, which he was not married. And he stopped it. He stopped it. And he said, I won't hurt you like that. And I said, where is that? Where is that? He said, I want you more than anything. He said, but I will not hurt you like that. If you would let me put this hat on and be a little chivalrous. I have those same feelings.

Right.

I did not want to take that from you before it's time. My flesh wanted to take it from you every day. But my convictions to the Lord, I honored you as not another girl I was dating, but as someone God had brought to me.

But I also think, too, that we had had a lot of open conversations. Not, you didn't know everything, because I was embarrassed to share everything with you about my past. But we had open conversations, you know.

About where we come from, relationships.

Yes. How sexual encounters had hurt me in the past. And I knew about yours. And we didn't want to. We didn't want to do that. We didn't want to pile on top of that. Thank God that we had enough God in us.

But I want people to know that we're real.

Yes.

I don't want people. So that's ridiculous.

We're saying you and I didn't have sex before we got married. But both you and I both had had sex before we met each other.

Now, let me think.

So we get it.

We do get it. And I keep saying how bad I want to because I want to know I'm real. And we did cross lines. We crossed lines and we backed up and we prayed together. I wanted a spiritual foundation. Me and you prayed together. Me and you went to Bible studies together. Me and you sat in church and we held hands and we listened to the preacher and why we wanted these foundations. And when. When the storms came and we didn't have the physical connection and we were away from each other without an emotional connection. It was our bond and our spiritual covenant with God and with each other that held something together. That should have. That should have been ground to powder.

Yeah. Well, let me say this. That, I think is a very important aspect, a basis in marriage, is that you better want to have sex with them. I think that's healthy.

And we've been around some couples who just kind of are there and you can tell they're not turned on.

Chemistry.

Yes.

Rod and I had. We had so much chemistry. And I think that's healthy. But then you employ the self. Self control part. That's the God part that comes in. I think if you don't have chemistry, if you don't desire that, that's a red flag.

Yeah, that's a red flag.

Red flag.

That's a huge red flag. If you're not.

You never get so spiritual and glow in the dark that you don't have sex and have chemistry with your partner.

One is not exclusive of them. Spirituality and sexuality are not exclusive. You've got to have sexuality inside of spirituality. It's got to come with God says, I love you.

Come with boundaries.

Do it right here.

Do it this way.

And the Bible says that the marriage bed is undefiled. I think in our sexual marriage conference, people are amazed at how much the Bible does talk about it. I've heard preachers get up and say, well, the Bible doesn't really speak. The Bible speaks a lot. If you read the Song of Solomon. Well, the Song of Solomon is an allegory about Jesus. The Song of Solomon is a man writing about the woman he loves. And it is a book of erotic love.

Right.

And it has secondary implications of Christ in the church. It is not its primary implications. And then when you start reading it and you understand what is going on in the nature of that relationship, this is the Bible given permission to all of those levels of sexual expression. But who is it? It is the bride, and it is a groom talking to each other. And so it is. The marriage bed is undefined. I tell people, it's your playroom. Go have at it. Within these boundaries. Within these boundaries. Now. Now let's go to after sex, before marriage. Affecting after mine. And your downfall has been highly public and very chronicled. Don't really want to go back and tell the story again. The book has been written. You know, everybody knows it's a part of our life. It's unfortunate. We're sorry it happened, but we can't rewrite it. We just recover from it. There was a moment, and this is really letting people in a long way after we were in our restoration. You mind going here?

No.

There was this moment that was our first intimate encounter after trying to patch it back together. And I was as nervous as if I had never seen you naked before because we were coming from a place of so much brokenness and we were vulnerable. I was very vulnerable because I was rebuilding trust. You were vulnerable, probably not knowing how you would be received. I mean, there's all these odd feelings that me and you had never had to manage before. And I remember, you know, there was just a time, you know, I just wanted my wife. I wanted my wife back. And I don't know how many months it was into it. It wasn't a terribly long time. Two or three months, maybe eight weeks. Twelve weeks. You came home and I brought you home to visit one weekend because you'd been staying at a ministry place by choice. And it was during the moments we were alone. And it took us there. Our passion took us there. And we had gone through counseling. And in one of those counseling, we had gone through the breaking of the soul ties, because I had never done that. You, I don't think had ever done it. Not to that extent. And so that was the first time we had ever come to the marriage bed free from all that. Okay, now, don't let me put words in your mouth. It's been about it a little over a decade ago now. We came out of that experience and something exploded. And all I know to say was it was in my chest. I didn't say it was in my genitalia. It was not in my sex organs. It was in my chest. Something happened, and it was very weird because I'm a loving guy. I don't do my business and jump up out of the bed and leave. But I remember after it was over with, I got up, I sat, put my feet on my side of the.

Bed, and I did, too.

And I turned my back to you. And if I remember, I wasn't looking at you, but you told me you did the same thing.

Because I was like, oh, my God.

And I sit there and I was trying to. What just happened? Because I just experienced something, felt something in your life that I had never experienced before, never felt before, and loved you dearly, had great sex with you for many years. But that. Whatever that was had never happened. I had no idea you were experiencing it too. So the reason I kind of turned and was gathering myself is because I didn't know how I was going to explain to you what I just experienced. When we finally came back around to talking, we had just had the same experience. And I said, could it be our souls just died for the first time?

And we were married a long time.

Married over 20 years. That's amazing. And unfortunate.

Because people are not. People are ashamed, People are afraid. People are living in guilt. And people don't want to talk open about it. Because to talk open about it, you have to talk about your own issues. The people talking have to have something to say and an experience. And a lot of people don't want to bear their souls.

Great people.

We've got to talk about these things to get people free.

Great sex is not an act that somebody can perform.

Right.

Great sex is somebody you are intimate with and into, and they are into you. We're 50 now. Can we do all the calisthenics we did when we were 24?

Calisthenics?

Probably not. But that didn't make for the Great Savior. Your. My sex life has never been what it's been now because of the level we are into other.

Yes. The unity.

There is something that comes in our bed with us that has more to do with the orgasm experience itself.

Yeah, it's unity.

And that happened that day. And the only thing I can tie it to is our souls knitted.

That's right.

Spiritually, we became one. Because you don't become one when.

And it's only supposed to happen one time.

Right. You don't become one when you sign a marriage certificate. You become one when you consummate the relationship through that act. Adam was one. God made him into two and then said, it's not good that it be alone. And when the two came back together sexually, it was two. What was previously one divided in half, becoming one again. That's why God intended sex to be so powerful. It was what used to be one God has made into now Adam and Eve. And it's Adam and Eve coming together. And the two shall be one flesh. And so I want to give myself to my husband. I want to give myself to my wife. But for some reason, and it's. I think you may have experienced that. It's confusing. And why am I bad? So I guess we start picking our spouses apart and this and that and that. But the fact is, you weren't all there to give away in the first place.

That's true.

So we had to come back around after the fact and figure out what that looks like and what that means. And we did. And I would encourage other people not to say, oh man, that makes me feel nauseous what he's doing. Don't get wigged out about it. No, get it, pursue it. And I don't know where it is. I'm sure it's in the vault. I've got some messages on Soul Ties. I know Living Waters does some things on Breaking Soul Ties, but the fact of the matter is I would encourage everybody to understand boundaries before that are empowered by relationship with God and many conversations that you agree on. And then afterwards, if you are bringing other relationships into it, you need to deal with how to break those soul ties so you can enjoy what it really means to be one.

Before we finish and we've got a few more things to talk about. We have our very last ad factor. So happy to have them brand new.

Thank you guys.

Yes. And I love this because we're in a stage in our life that we are so busy.

I knew you're gonna say this.

We are so busy and trying.

Good food is hard.

Yeah, good food.

Good food is hard at our yeah.

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I think we've said all that probably needs to be said. I just, I don't.

Here's the, here's the, here's the deal, Ron. Sex before marriage. Most probably everybody listening to us has had sex.

We're late to the game. Yep.

Yes. And this. We're not here for condemnation. We've done it. Everybody almost that I know has had sex, whether, you know, just stupid. Maybe a rape, you know, maybe you thought you were in love with somebody.

Just promiscuous, maybe just being a teenager. Yeah.

Yes. But it does come with consequences. It does. Because God's way is not that way, even though the world says it is that way. And it seems so old school and old fogey, but there is a method to the madness there. He gives us rules for our benefit. He gives us rules to protect us. It's just like us as a good parent. We give our kids rules to protect them.

Thy rod and thy staff, it comforts me. In other words, when the sheep begin to get out of the fold, he taps them to the left. He taps them to the right. And what has David said? He says that don't make me mad.

No, it comforts me.

He said, it brings me comfort that I've got somebody watchful and a caretaker and keeping me away from the wolves.

I had to have a conversation today. It had nothing to do with sex or sex before marriage, but just somebody who works for us in a capacity. And I had to call them. And I wanted to not confront them, but had to. Felt like God was giving me the liberty to address something in their life. And I said, you know, a lot of times when I do this, I said, you know, I'll get labeled the B word. You know the B word. It's the witch with the B. I said, but the truth of the matter is it should comfort you that I love you to this degree, that I would take time out of my day to call you and say, what's going on in this area. I see this in your life. And here you are as an extension of us. I love you that much that I'm going to shepherd your soul.

I don't.

I don't just love you for what you do for me in the ministry. I love you enough to call you out on things that are going on in your life that I see, that are. That are wrong, that are godly, ungodly, that are going to lead you down a wrong path. And it's the same way that the Lord does with us. And I'm so grateful for it. Do we like it all the time?

No.

No. But he does it because he loves us. He chastens those he loves.

And my last comment would be, you know, I go with what feels good where I have such strong feelings. Let me tell you something.

If you let feelings drive you, your.

Life will be the most schizophrenic life you've ever had. Because I can change. I can have three different feelings, Hope. About what I want to eat for supper, right? So if I. If I take that same standard over to my sexuality, my life is going to be so jacked up. And people that go through many sex partners or many times, they're so emotionally fragmented and it's not a terminal illness. God will repair and God will restore you. But I needed to come and say, these are the things that happens. And know it is not just your body.

That's right.

We love you guys. We love you.

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Be blessed.