Sexual Purity

Keep yourself sexually pure. Do not have any sexual relations before marriage. Do not participate in talk or activities that arouse sexual feelings. Do not participate in homosexual activities. Seek help if you become a victim of rape, incest, or other sexual abuse.

“In matters of human intimacy, you must wait! You must wait until you can give everything, and you cannot give everything until you are legally and lawfully married. If you persist in pursuing physical satisfaction without the sanction of heaven, you run the terrible risk of such spiritual, psychic damage that you may undermine both your longing for physical intimacy and your ability to give wholehearted devotion to a later, truer love. You may discover to your horror that what you should have saved you have spent and that only God’s grace can recover the virtue you so casually gave away. On your wedding day the very best gift you can give your eternal companion is your very best self—clean and pure and worthy of such purity in return.”

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “Personal Purity,” Liahona, Oct. 2000, 42; New Era, Feb. 2000, 6.

Photograph by Craig Dimond