Keeping the Spirit

My wife and I listened to the recent Face to Face event for the youth with Elder and Sister Renlund in Africa.  We were impressed by the sincere questions that the youth of Africa and the islands of the Indian Ocean asked.  One of those questions was about the law of chastity and why it is important.  Elder and Sister Renlund shared several insights, and he described breaking the law of chastity with an analogy.  He asked them to suppose they were trying to travel a long distance and they were supposed to travel forward on the road.  Breaking the law of chastity, he suggested, would be like going off the road and into the ditch, putting the car in reverse, and flooring it while looking only in the rear view mirror.  Basically the image I got was that of a life out of control and taking enormous and unneeded risks.  It reminds me of the quote that Elder Holland used from historians Will and Ariel Durant suggesting that sexual desires are like “a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.”

               One of the reasons that Sister Renlund gave for why we should live the law of chastity is so that we can have the Spirit to be with us.  Besides the simple fact that this is a commandment from God, to me this is the most important reason—we simply cannot have the Spirit with us to any level of consistency while violating this law.  One might have fleeting pleasure but they will not have peace; one may have temporary excitement but will not have love; one may feel for a moment that their freedom has been gained only to realize soon thereafter that casting out the Spirit has brought spiritual chains.  The Lord put it succinctly in the law of the Church: “And he that looketh upon a woman to lust after her shall deny the faith, and shall not have the Spirit” (D&C 42:23).  The story that perhaps illustrates this better than any other is that of Amnon, the son of David.  Right after we read of his despicable act of raping his own sister the writer of 2 Samuel gave us this insight: “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her” (2 Samuel 13:15).  Violating this sacred commandment took from him all feelings of true love and whatever part of the Spirit he might have had with him immediately left so that after his heinous crime (that he thought was motivated by love) he was filled with hatred.  I don’t think that we can always see that clearly the effect of such terrible deeds right away, but we cannot escape the consequences of immorality eventually: until repentance we will we not have with any level of permanence the feelings of the Spirit that we all so deeply want: “Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22-23).