Relationship Goals: How to Win at Dating, Marriage, and Sex

by Michael Todd

Sis, you’re not your body. You’re more than that. God has made you special and beautiful, and these busters around you who just want you to send them pictures and do all this—they don’t want you. They want what you can provide for them. Tell them to leave you alone, and one day you’ll say (in the words of the

“prophet” Beyoncé), “You turned out to be the best thing I never had.”

“Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for

the glory of God.”

Rebuild my self-worth until I truly believe I’m Your masterpiece.

Realign my perspective to see myself and others the way You see us.

Surrendering your sexuality will change your whole future. Why? Because while sexual immorality destroys purpose, getting back your purity restores your purpose. “If anyone cleanses himself…, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified and useful for

the Master, prepared for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21, NKJV).

The soul is made up of three distinct parts: the mind, the will, and the emotions. Your mind is how you think, your will is what you desire, and your emotions display how you feel. If you think about it, the collaboration of these three entities directs your entire life.

Soul ties happen when someone allows his soul to become attached to someone or something that has the power to affect him.

There are all kinds of soul ties: godly ones and ungodly ones, constructive ones and destructive ones.

This shows that attachments can form with anything, especially when you’re desperate.

And then, of course, like Caleb and Jasmine, we can have soul ties with sexual partners outside marriage. This is one of the greatest means the Enemy has of blocking purpose and destroying lives.

So, every time you get out of that bed belonging to a person you’re not married to, it’s not over when you leave the room. You’ve joined physically, and by default, your thoughts, emotions, and desires have become intertwined. Later on, feelings of guilt and shame might cloud your perception, and the same temptations and urges are bound to return.

Unrighteous relationships set you back in your relationship with God because sin creates separation.

be separated from His most valuable possession—you—but some things just don’t mix. Light and darkness can’t be in the same place at the same time, but then that’s why He wants to come into the dark areas of your life and light them up.

Real talk here: Healing relational damage takes up your time and drains your energy. Ungodly soul ties can cause delayed destiny, wasted time, emotional stress, trust issues, bitterness, insecurities…and the list goes on. These, and so much more, are ways soul ties with ex-lovers can beat up on your purpose and put your future at risk. Unhealthy soul ties are always easier to create than break.

Soul ties can be persistent, but they don’t have to be permanent.

doing—break off the soul ties from past partners.

God has made sex so powerful that every time you have sex with somebody, you are not just joining physically through that action; you are joining emotionally through the intimacy created, and you are joining

spiritually because you are two people each with a spiritual nature inside you. So, this is why I say that every time you have sex, you’re “marrying” somebody, just without the covenant. A connection is formed, a strong soul tie.

each one is making a counterfeit marriage through sex.

Biblically, a couple were married when they consummated the relationship physically. God recognized a marriage was real when a man and a woman had sex. That made the covenant official.

I’ve counseled and dialogued with thousands of people who were practicing what they believed to be safe sex but still ended up with broken hearts, broken spirits, and broken relationships, and they found that trying to put those pieces back together wasn’t worth the moment of pleasure they had experienced.

S is for sacred. There’s a reverence for something that is sacred. It’s considered holy, set apart, and not just frivolously given away. It holds great weight and great worth. Most of all, it’s connected and dedicated to God. A is for anointed. Don’t get all churchy on me. If something is anointed, that just means it has God’s stamp of approval, and God loves sex! He created it Himself and thinks it’s awesome as long as it’s happening between a married man and woman. F is for faithful. Now, I could go in a million different directions with

this one, but the number one thing I want you to remember is that God remains faithful to us, so we should strive to remain faithful to Him and reciprocate that character to those we commit to in relationship. E is for exclusive. This one’s pretty simple. Sex should be between one man and one woman. Oh yeah, sorry—I keep getting ahead of myself. I said I was going to talk about that in the chapter on God’s plan of oneness. Stay tuned!

There’s no condom for your heart. That may be a bit of an extreme example, but I want you to realize that your heart is so important to God. Having sex outside marriage affects the core of your being, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. (Proverbs 4:23)

It’s just that it’s never easy to separate two people who have been sexually intimate.

It’s like if you glue two pieces of paper together, let the glue dry, and then try to rip the pieces of paper apart. It’s messy. It’s damaging. Remember, your hearts are involved, so in terms of emotion, you’re going to have pieces of the other person stuck to you, and the other person is going to have pieces of you stuck to him.

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?” and “Whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:15–17, NIV).

What that means is God is not watching what we’re doing from a camera, like Big Brother, observing, evaluating at a distance, perhaps averting His eyes at embarrassing moments. No, He’s right here with us, taking part in everything we do. So, if we’re forming or strengthening harmful soul ties with other people, then we need to know it’s pulling on our soul tie with Christ.

Let me be clear: sex outside marriage not on...

relationship we’re supposed to exclusively have with our spouse; even worse, it violates our relationship with the Lord. This is where Paul got really upset: “Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitut...

If you’re having sex with a gf/bf or a friend with benefits, you’ve taken Christ with you into that bed for sex.

If you’re watching porn, Christ

is sitting beside you, and the reflections from the screen are hitting His face.

The acts themselves are wrong.

Involving the holy Lord in them is worse.

I want you to remember this for the rest of your life. The next time you get ready to send private pictures to somebody, or the next time you get ready to slide into the DMs or lie in the bed of somebody who’s not your husband or wife, I want you to rea...

If you’re a believer, your unity with Christ is a permanent thing; it doesn’t come and go. It’s just a fact for you. So, now it’s a stewardship issue. ...

You might want to think about it like this: When you’re having a

good time in bed with somebody you’re not married to, is God having as much fun as you are? Is He as comfortable in that position as you?

Christ is not enjoying it; He’s just enduring it. United to you out of love to redeem you from the ve...

In the same way, sexual sin is an assault weapon to your purpose, and you need to break it off immediately so that you suffer as little damage as possible.

For you, running might mean saying no to a date offer you just got from that guy who’s smokin’ hot and a gentleman but is up front about how he is not a believer.

Or it might be putting some boundaries in place with your girlfriend because your date-night activities are about ...

Unfortunately, it’s easier to break up with a person than it is to get rid of the invisible ties that may still be attached between you and someone else. You’ll never be able to change the fact that you were once physically united with a person in your past, maybe many persons. Your heart and your spirit were affected by the experience.

Then you need to confess it. God can’t heal what you won’t reveal.

Many people aren’t self-aware, or they live in denial. Calling it to yourself is one thing, but confessing it to someone else is another thing. This can be to a