Once a month, I teach at the preteen youth group at church. My assigned topic a few weeks ago was what the Bible teaches about marriage, romance, and godly boundaries.
Not exactly what was on my mind during my own preteen years. But since teenagehood keeps expanding both directions (from the 7-going-on-17 to the 27 year-old pro-gamer-in-training-in-the-basement), I guess the topic made sense for the age group.
But how? What’s the best way to talk about marriage and boundaries from a biblical perspective with preteens? I can’t pretend that what follows here is the best you’ll read on the topic, but I am hopeful that it was helpful for those kids, and I hope you find it helpful as you too navigate the topic with kids.
Here’s what I said.
First, I held up a single Uno card. It was a blue number card—let’s say it was a blue seven. I said, “Hey everybody! You want to play this new game I came up with? It’s super fun. It’s called ‘Blue Uno Card.’ You just take the card and hold it up like this, and you keep holding it. That’s how you play. How cool is that?!”
Then I put the card down and picked up a flat, square Lego platform for building Legos on. I said, “You guys want to play another game? It’s called ‘Lego Platform.’ Basically, you take a Lego platform like this, and . . . you hold it. Like this.” I kept holding the Lego platform for a few seconds. “Looks fun, huh?”
“You just take the card and hold it up like this, and you keep holding it. That’s how you play.”
I put the Lego platform down and picked up a key—a regular, metal key like what you would use to unlock a door. I said, “And now, for our next game, I’d like to introduce the super fun game I call ‘House Key.’ How do you play, you might wonder? Well, you hold the key and pretend that it’s a key to a house. Now, there’s not actually a house or door for the key to go into. But you still get to hold the key, and that’s how you play the game.”
I dropped the key and picked up a baseball glove. “And this,” I said excitedly, “is a really fun game I call ‘Baseball Glove.’ What you do is you take the baseball glove, like this”—I kept holding it up—“and that’s how you play ‘baseball glove.’ What a game, huh?”
“Two more games,” I said. I picked up a chess set queen and showed it to the kids. “This is a game I call ‘Chess Queen.’ How you play is you take the chess queen and move it around.” I started moving it along in mid-air. “It’s great fun.” I put down the chess queen and picked up a nerf gun dart. “And the last game,” I announced proudly, “is called ‘Nerf Dart.’” I held it up and began moving it around in the air, doing figure-eight’s. “You do that a few times, and that’s how you play ‘Nerf Dart.’”
“What a game, huh?”
I then asked the kids if they noticed anything wrong with my new games. In response, they explained that the Lego platform all by itself was lame. For it to be fun, I needed actual Lego’s to build on the platform. Similarly, the house key made no sense without a door. The baseball glove needed a ball, a bat, bases, and other players in order to make a game worth playing. The chess queen needed a board and a bunch of other pieces before it could work as a game. And a nerf dart makes no sense without a dart gun.
Now, as you’re reading, you might be getting nervous. But let me be clear. With these analogies, I wasn’t making some kind of weird male-to-female, birds-and-bees lesson. No, by these illustrations, I was simply getting them to think along the lines of this: If you take one thing (like a Lego platform) and separate it from other things that are meant to connect with it (like Lego’s), it becomes boring.
The point I would go onto make is that marriage is made of many amazing things—not just one thing like sexuality and romance. Just like a chess queen makes sense only alongside the other pieces, marriage is made of many amazing things, and you can’t just take one piece out and expect that piece to work well.
“Marriage is made of many amazing things, and you can’t just take one piece out and expect that piece to work well.”
I went on to explain the many wonderful things that make marriage amazing:
- Married people commit to be there for each other. Marriage is built on a promise; it’s a covenant. Married people have promised they will be there for each other in both the easy and the hard times. Whether you lose your job, go bald, lose your hearing, are no longer athletic or beautiful—it doesn’t matter. You’ve committed to sticking with each other for better or worse.
- Married people are emotionally connected. There’s something about each other that makes you want to be in the same room together. You learn each other and come to appreciate each other’s interests and quirks, even when at the same time those quirks can drive you crazy. You “get” each other better than anyone else does.
- Married people are romantically attracted. Marriage is meant to be a home for romance, including the physical, sexual activity that comes along with it.
- A loving marriage is God’s plan for how babies come into the world. God designed it to where babies would be born to a couple that loves each other and is committed to each other. That context of joy and commitment makes for a happy baby. And babies are some of God’s greatest gifts to the world!
- Loving marriages point us to how much Jesus loves the church. In Ephesians 5, the apostle Paul describes how the relationship between a husband who loves his wife and a wife who respects her husband is an everyday picture of Jesus’ relationship to the church, in which Jesus is the groom and the church is the bride.
“Married people commit to be there for each other.”
I went on to make it clear how I feel about marriage: it’s awesome! I’m a huge fan of it. I’m deeply and daily grateful for it. Genesis 2 describes how everything God created was good, good, good—until Adam came along and had no one to share the world with. He’d been given a job by God to rule creation, take care of the animals, and fill the earth with more humans. But he couldn’t do any of that just by himself! So God created his crowning masterpiece, the woman. God married them to each other and declared, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, NIV).
Again, marriage is awesome! God designed it and called it “very good.” Then I went through what marriage is again: a man and woman who are committed to stay faithful each other; they’re emotionally connected and romantically attracted. It’s into that home that babies come, and it’s that husband-wife relationship that points us to how much Jesus loves the church. Marriage is amazing stuff!
But . . . what’s going to happen if I take one of those things—let’s say all the romantic, physical stuff like sex—and I try to do all that before marriage and without marriage? What’s going to happen?
Well, it’s going to be a lot like trying to play “blue Uno” without the other cards. It’ll be like trying to play “Lego platform” without Lego’s or “chess queen” without the board or the other pieces. You’re taking something great and wonderful away from what makes it great and wonderful. It’s all those other things in marriage—the commitment, the emotional connection, God’s design, family—that make the romantic and sexual things so good and beautiful.
“It’s going to be a lot like trying to play ‘blue Uno’ without the other cards.”
Again, let’s say I see the fun feelings that go along with sex, and I try to get all those feelings outside of marriage with somebody I’m not committed to. Or let’s say I try to get those feelings from seeing stuff I shouldn’t see on my phone or on the computer. Again, it’ll be a lot like trying to play “baseball glove” or “nerf gun dart.” It’ll be missing all the other stuff in marriage that makes it good and beautiful. Without those other things like commitment and unconditional love, sex won’t work at all the way it’s supposed to.
Marriage is wonderful! But if you take something that’s meant for marriage and try to do it without the commitment of marriage, it’s going to mess things up. Instead of being something that God blesses and gives to you as an amazing gift, it’ll become something God calls sinful, and it will cause you and other people harm.
I told them that, later, in their small groups, they were going to talk about setting healthy boundaries which would help them not cross lines they shouldn’t cross until marriage. I asked them: If you get married, you want to have a good marriage and stay faithful to each other, right? You want to be committed to each other for the long haul, right? Well, there are lines which, if you cross them, make it a lot harder to have a good marriage. So, you really need to set some boundaries you set for yourself.
“There are lines which, if you cross them, make it a lot harder to have a good marriage.”
I explained that here were a few examples of boundaries which might help them (and which have been helpful boundaries in my own life):
- If I’m dating somebody, I’m not to cross ___ lines with this person.
- If I’m going to stream a movie or go to a movie theater, I’m not to go to a movie that shows ___.
- If I’m on a phone or computer, I’m going to stay away from sites and videos that have ___.
I ended by saying: Again, in your groups, you’re going to talk through important boundaries you can set for yourself. And if you set good boundaries and keep them, I promise you, you will be grateful that you did.
