Dating might be the most talked-about topic in the world, and also the one word you will never find in your Bible. Open a search engine, a group chat, or your favorite streaming queue and you will find no shortage of opinions on how to date, who to date, and what dating is even for. Trying to hear God’s heart on the subject over all that noise can feel like standing in a crowded room, straining to catch one conversation among a hundred others.
The Bible Never Says “Dating” — But It Says a Lot
The word “dating” appears nowhere in Scripture, which leaves a lot of people wondering whether we should get rid of the practice altogether. Some have tried. Joshua Harris’s bestselling book “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” helped launch a movement in the late nineties and early 2000s built on the idea that any physical or emotional intimacy before marriage would ruin what came after — a relationship, the thinking went, works a little like tape: every time it sticks and comes loose, it loses some of its hold.
I don’t think dating is going anywhere, and I don’t think it needs to. The Bible doesn’t hand us a step-by-step dating manual, but it gives us something better: principles and truth we can actually build a healthy dating life on.
The Purpose of Dating Is Marriage
We don’t date just to date. Dating has a purpose, and that purpose is marriage. That raises the obvious next question — what actually is marriage? At its core, marriage comes down to two things: covenant, and two people becoming one flesh.
Dating is the process of figuring out whether that’s the direction you and another person are moving. When you’re dating, you are not yet in covenant, and you are not yet one flesh — you’re still two. That’s exactly where dating tends to go wrong: when a couple starts treating their relationship as if it already carried the weight of a covenant, or the oneness marriage was built for, before either one has actually been given.
Why Dating Needs Limits
American culture tends to embrace a life without limits. We assume the more we possess and the more recognition we receive, the more fulfilled we’ll be — more relationships, more freedom, more happiness. We’ve come to believe, almost at a foundational level, that limits are bad for us.
But that’s not how anything actually flourishes. Trees need to be pruned. Bushes need to be trimmed. Even landscaping needs boundaries to thrive, and the same is true throughout nature — animal populations included. We tend to assume limits exist to hold us back. More often, they exist so we can grow into what we’re meant to be.
Our Allergy to Limits
A lot of people walk away from Jesus specifically because of his limits. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote, “the worst feature of the Christian religion is its attitude towards sex” — and honestly, I hear a version of that a lot. Talk to enough people outside the faith and you’ll find their picture of Jesus is mostly a list of dos and don’ts.
That wasn’t always the complaint. In the earliest centuries, the case against Christianity wasn’t that it was too restrictive — it was that Christians kept championing the weak. How dare they care for the poor and the enslaved. How dare they treat women and the marginalized as worth looking after. Somewhere between then and now, the objection shifted from who Jesus cared for to what Jesus limits. Scroll social media for five minutes and the argument against following him isn’t usually about evidence — it’s about autonomy. “Why can’t I sleep with whoever I want? We’re both adults.”
What the Bible Says About Sex — and What It Doesn’t
The thing that erodes a dating relationship faster than almost anything else is sex — taking something built for marriage and placing it somewhere it was never meant to go. That’s a hard word for a culture that treats sex like a test drive before you commit to the car. I care about you too much not to be honest: sex outside of marriage is sin, and some of you may never have heard anyone say that plainly.
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female…”
Matthew 19:3–4
Marriage happens when two people make a covenant to each other before God, and God joins them together. Any sexual relationship outside of that covenant falls short of what it was made for. I want to lay that out plainly before going further, because most people I talk to land in one of two wrong answers about sex.
Sex Is Bad
This is the purity-culture answer, and it goes back further than the late nineties. Some of the early church fathers took things to genuine extremes trying to escape sexual desire altogether. But Paul never goes there. Writing to a church that had turned sex into something disordered, he doesn’t say “no sex, ever.” He says sex is good — in its proper context. Sexual desire isn’t the villain here. A husband and wife desiring one another is a beautiful thing. Sex isn’t bad. But like any good thing, it becomes a problem the moment we let it become a god.
Sex Is God
The opposite error is just as old and just as common: if only I could have more sex, then I’d finally be happy and fulfilled. Society has run this experiment before, most recently through the free-love movement of the sixties and seventies, but you can trace the same instinct back through Rome and Greece. Of the two, I think this is the more dangerous one, because it’s the one that has quietly infected the most people — and it shows up most clearly in how normal pornography has become.
An Honest Word About Porn and Lust
This is a heavier subject than most sermons touch, and I don’t say that to shame anyone. The numbers are staggering: recent studies suggest a large majority of young adult men and roughly a third of young adult women watch pornography weekly, that around a quarter of all internet searches are related to porn, and that usage has climbed sharply since 2020. This isn’t a fringe issue. It’s one nearly all of us are navigating in some form.
You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Matthew 5:27–28
I’ll be honest with you: my own journey here hasn’t been a clean one. I was exposed to porn young, and it became a daily rhythm in my life for years. Of everything I had to walk away from growing up, it was by far the hardest to let go of. The more I looked to it to make me happy, the lonelier and sadder I actually became — and the lonelier I felt, the more I’d turn back to it. It’s a spiral, not a solution.
Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.
Frederick Buechner
The Deeper Idols Behind It All
A struggle with lust is almost never just “I’m horny.” When it’s a genuine pattern, there’s usually something underneath it. Pastor and author Tim Keller has written about a handful of deeper idols that tend to drive compulsive behavior, and I’ve found this framework helpful for naming what’s really going on:
Power — chasing influence, success, or achievement until your sense of worth is tied to what you accomplish. Approval — craving acceptance and affirmation so badly that you’ll bend your convictions to avoid being rejected. Comfort — wanting security and ease so much that you avoid anything genuinely difficult. Control — needing certainty over your circumstances, convinced that if you just manage everything well enough, you can secure your own future.
Underneath the habit is usually one of these, quietly promising something only God can actually deliver.
Where This Leaves Us
Sex isn’t bad, and it isn’t God either. It needs a home, and that home is marriage. Your dating relationship, whatever stage it’s in, hasn’t yet reached the weight of covenant or the oneness marriage was built for — which means keeping things within their proper limits isn’t a way of holding back love. It’s how you protect what that relationship is still becoming.
And whatever idol is quietly running underneath your own struggle — power, approval, comfort, or control — you’re not the only one carrying it. That’s exactly the kind of thing God is patient enough to work on with you, one honest step at a time.
Andrew Washkow 
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