A Case Study on Christian Conscience: Navigating Convictions about Marrying a Virgin

It’s been six months since Liz opened up to Ryan about her sexual past. The conversation felt very one-sided, with Liz brokenheartedly sharing how, before coming to Christ, she had several sexual partners. Ryan, on the other hand, had remained a virgin. He’d never had sexual intercourse with another person before, and he’d always pictured himself marrying a virgin. There was a season when he struggled for a few months with masturbation to bikini pictures on social media, but that was over five years ago, and he disclosed it to Liz. He’d never been intimate with a woman in any way and was saving his first kiss for marriage.

Due to Liz’s genuine, repentant grief and desire for transparency, her disclosure and a few ongoing conversations centered around Ryan comforting Liz and expressing gratitude for her honesty. Ryan strove to care for her sincerely, inspired by Christ’s care for him. At the same time, Ryan hoped Liz’s answers to his questions would somehow take away the discomfort he was feeling in his conscience. But in the unspoken recesses of Ryan’s thoughts, Liz’s disclosure was crushing—he even threw up during one bout of anxiety over the situation. It brought an inescapable discomfort to how he engaged with Liz. This wasn’t what he was looking for in a potential spouse.

Ryan feels overtaken by fears, doubts, and self-condemnation. He feels as if his relationship with Liz has grown to include not just the two of them, but other unwanted ghosts of Liz’s past.

Waiting to have sex until marriage has been declining for some time now, even among Christians,^[1] and believers who have engaged in premarital sex are often burdened by guilt. Thankfully, God empowers his church to come alongside these suffering sinners and saints with discipleship rooted in transformative gospel hope, because “such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).

While we rejoice over our common salvation, a concern remains: are we neglecting those, like Ryan, who are rightly pushing against the grain in their personal commitment to wait until marriage to have sex and are also wrestling in their conscience with the sexual history of the repentant Christian they’re dating?

How might biblical discipleship care well for Ryan’s seemingly tender conscience? Here are some principles to consider as you seek to counsel a Christian whose hopes for marrying a virgin are being questioned or threatened—by themselves or others.

1. Ask and Listen: Cultivate Gospel Recalibration

First, discipleship that cares well for such a conscience challenges superficial reasoning that does not result in legitimate Christian growth. Such poor thinking might sound like…

• “My conviction about marrying a virgin is simply condemning myself to having to search for a needle in a haystack.^[2] I don’t care if it feels like compromising; I just want the easier road.”

• “There is a persistent, ongoing cycle of discomfort over his sexual history in my heart and mind, but everything else is blissful and exciting. Maybe if I ignore and suppress these concerns of my conscience long enough, they’ll go away.”

• “Christians, by definition, don’t judge, and if anyone knew my anxieties over her past, they would question the sincerity of my faith in the gospel. Though I’ve maintained my virginity, I, too, am a sinner saved by grace. I don’t want to risk falsely presenting myself as a prideful hypocrite. I just have to force myself to make this work.”

Our discipleship care should never settle for these categories of discernment. First, they are all based in self-centered fear—fear of being lonely, fear of being judged—and so provide a weak foundation upon which to build a loving marriage. Next, they reject the acknowledgement that God does work in and through a Christian’s conscience. Finally, they pit the sufferings of Christians (the virgin who is personally convicted about marrying a virgin is suffering under the pressure to compromise, while the non-virgin is suffering due to past sin) against one another in a disunifying manner.

A comparison study might be helpful in your discipleship care. Read Acts 10–11:18 and Exodus 32, and consider: What was the difference between the Apostle Peter’s discernment process toward changing his dietary convictions and the Old Testament Israelites’ discernment process toward erecting a golden calf? The primary distinction is that Peter obeyed God and Israel disobeyed God.

I recognize that our focus is not on moral absolutes but on navigating Christian liberty. However, a secondary distinction between these scenarios applies here: Peter’s conscience was matured by a developing understanding of the gospel, while the Israelites had seared their consciences through repeatedly indulging their sinful desires for convenience, ease, and immediate gratification. They prioritized the path of least resistance, ending up in hard-heartedness and disobedience.

Good discipleship tends to the maturing of the conscience by helping to recalibrate a faulty, unbiblical conscience. At the same time, it also seeks to correct behaviors or thoughts that sear the conscience.

Rightly navigating this discipleship requires a genuine commitment to two foundational components of counseling: asking good questions and listening well. Conversations are critical for understanding how someone has come to this conclusion about marrying a virgin. What has their reasoning process been? What are their expectations for marriage? What sources of input are they taking into account? How have they considered this through the lens of Scripture? Answering such questions will help reveal the heart and give clarity on the disposition of the conscience you’re seeking to instruct.

2. Discuss How the Conscience Is Burdened by Brokenness

A reality all Christians share is that, even after our conversion, “the prevalence of corruption remains” in us.^[3] The Apostle Peter denied Christ not once, not twice, but thrice. Even after the Spirit-indwelling event of Pentecost, Peter fell back into that old familiar and well-worn pattern when he denied association with Paul and the Gentile Christians (Matt. 26; Gal. 2). In his sixth-century work The Book of Pastoral Rule, St. Gregory the Great concludes that Christians who’ve “had experience of the sins of the flesh” have, in a particular way, not kept “whole the good things of nature which they have received,” and so must be on a particular path in the Christian life of “mending” what has been “rent asunder.”^[4] There often can be, even for believers, unique experiential wrestlings in the process of navigating sexual purity when sexual promiscuity is part of one’s premarital past.

With this honest understanding of the persistent reality of warring against sin and the life-impacting process of repentance, the discerning single should feel validated in their desire to broach this topic for consideration. There can be appropriate reasoning behind why marrying a virgin would be a desire of the heart.

At the same time, your discipleship must seek to discern whether there’s a personal log that needs to be considered in the context of addressing another’s speck (Matt. 7:1–5). All sins of body and mind have personal and communal impact, and so honestly self-disclosing and rightly considering one’s own sins is applicable here. It’s also important to help someone like Ryan consider their spiritual maturity and willingness to mutually bear with and care for a fellow saint in the context of marriage through the enduring process of repentance, healing, and sanctification. 

3. Maintain the Integrity of the Conscience

In Romans 14, the Apostle Paul identifies that, when it comes to how individual Christians embrace their freedom in Christ, we fall into two categories: those who are weak and those who are strong. Paul then makes an important clarification and application:

Clarification: One category is not superior to the other in the believers’ developing relationship with each other before the Lord (vv. 5–9), and neither is one category superior in terms of the believer’s individual honoring of the Lord.

Application: When Christians express their freedom in Christ, the weak and the strong should relationally coexist in a manner that cultivates “peace” and “mutual upbuilding” (v. 19), and that generally means an expressed deference to the convictions of the weaker Christian. When both the strong and weak Christian are acting out of a sincere conscience, their differing convictions and behaviors equally honor the Lord. That divine acceptance should be validated and honored by one another, too.

True discipleship never coerces a weaker Christian to “do anything that is ‘beside’ or in addition to the Word of God.”^[5] This is unloving. When someone acts from coercion rather than a sincere conviction of faith, that endeavor will be rooted in instability of heart and action. The book of James warns that when we act out of double-mindedness, doubtful and lacking faith, we will be unstable in all our ways (James 1:5–8).

Pastor R. C. Sproul gives masterfully-worded direction for the discipleship application of this point: “The conscience is a delicate instrument that must be respected. One who seeks to influence the consciences of others carries a heavy responsibility to maintain the integrity of the other person’s own personality as crafted by God.”^[6]

This also applies to a believer who, in their conscience before God, is convicted about marrying a virgin. When we neglect delicacy and exchange it for forceful coerciveness, discipleship falls short in cultivating fruitful application of Scripture and instead risks an extra-biblical and exasperating subjugation.

4. Beware of Unbiblical Conflations that Burden the Conscience

God has established a distinction between earthly relationships and heavenly ones that flow from our union with Christ—these relationships overlap but also remain distinct (Eph. 5–6, Gal. 3). This means that you can genuinely embrace a fellow believer as a spiritual sibling while, at the same time, appropriately and freely deciding not to marry them. However, any rationale that denies the redemptive power of the gospel and the resulting nature and quality of the family of God is not an expression of a tender conscience but a conscience in denial of the gospel and its relational implications.^[7]  

A sincere helper who’s offering discipleship on this topic may want to jump to the book of Hosea and say, “Look, God explicitly called Hosea to marry someone with a sorrowful sexual past.” But God’s particular charge to Hosea was not a generalized argument or a binding of the conscience regarding earthly marriage. Instead, God’s intention was to make a glorious statement about God’s spiritual marriage to his unified people: 

And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me “My Husband,” and no longer will you call me “My Baal.” For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord (Hosea 2:16–20).

5. Ultimate Purity Is Not About Marrying a Virgin

The Christian single navigating a personal conviction regarding marrying a virgin reveals a deeper wrestling that exists in the heart of every Christian: we are all waiting and longing for the coming of our one and only spotless Lamb who bestows his purity onto us. In him eternally we are all together as the church, a holy virgin before our bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ (Eph. 5:25–32).

Christian men and women have the principled freedom to marry one another regardless of our sexual pasts, because our hope in this life and in the next is not in the perfection of anyone we might marry on earth but in the purity of our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit to work out purifying righteousness in us all (Gen. 1-2; Prov. 18:22; Col. 1:15–23).

Discipleship regarding the conscience can remain grounded in true purity of heart that is ours only in Christ. All who are in him are spotless, pure, and blameless for the day of consummation. As you disciple the Christian with a tender conscience, remember, above all, to point them to the unifying purity of Christ that clothes all believers.

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^[1] 1. Jeff Diamant, “Half of U.S. Christians Say Casual Sex between Consenting Adults Is Sometimes or Always Acceptable,” Pew Research Center, August 31, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/31/half-of-u-s-christians-say-casual-sex-between-consenting-adults-is-sometimes-or-always-acceptable/.

^[2] 1. David J. Ayers, “Sex and The Single Evangelical,” Institute for Family Studies, August 14, 2019.

^[3] WCF 17.3, “Confession of Faith: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church,” accessed March 5, 2026.

^[4] Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, trans. George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 154.

^[5] Chad Van Dixhoorn, Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2014), 263.

^[6] Justin Taylor, “Is It a Sin to Act Against Your Conscience?” The Gospel Coalition, June 23, 2011.

^[7] Cornelis Venema, “Redemption Applied,” Ligonier Ministries, February 1, 2004.