Customer Reviews

And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Every woman should read this book. Especially if you have daughters. No matter where you are in your life, as a young unmarried woman, a wife/mom, or even a grandmother Dannah's words will speak to your heart. I bought this book for my 16 yr old sister and found that even as a happily married wife and mom, I couldn't put it down. All my life I'd heard the "don't" message and although there are plenty of compelling reasons often mentioned (STD's unwanted pregnancy ect) the most compelling of all was missed. I found it in these pages. The most compelling reason to strive for purity is the reward. Purity is holding your hunger at bay, anticipating the incredible feast God has created in marital love. Purity is getting and staying focused on the goal- and like Dannah says it is a process. Why on earth would you choose cheetos when you have a banquet prepared and waiting! If you didn't know what the banquet was all about your hunger might get the best of you- For many of us it did. I cried when I finished this book thinking of how my life might have been different if only someone had given me this book when I was 16. But after the mourning came healing. Read this book. Give it to your daughters, your sisters, your granddaughters... God will bless you all.

Before meeting Dannah I had already heard the abstinence message. The message that I had heard told my generation not to have sex because we just shouldn't. Reasons for waiting was so we didn't have to experience STD's, unwanted pregenacies, and mulitple heartaches. Often the message would be given by someone who had long since experienced the temptation of premarital sex. It was almost if the married speakers would be bragging because they could do something that we were not yet allowed to. When I went to one of Dannah's retreats I knew that there was something different about her and her message. Her message was one of love, making you able to connect with her. She said that purity is a process, you do not wake up one morning and are pure, and you don't just loose it through an act. Purity is much greater and has to be culitvated through your relationship with Christ. By saying that purity is a process, she was also saying that just because you are married does not mean you are done with working on purity. When she admitted that she put herself on our level and was no longer someone who had it all figured out,but someone who understood what we were going through. She also used her personal stories to help us understand that she is not to condem us but to identify with us. It is how she identifies with us that makes us want to hear what she has to say. Dannah also makes it extremely clear that the reason why God wants us to wait is not to spoil our fun, but to give you the best sexual experience later. God loves His children to have sex, but only in the proper setting. He wants you to wait not so you can be deprived of sex but so that you will not be deprived of what sex is supposed to be. How can that holy act that is meant to bring two people and make them as one, be as holy if it has occurred with others and out of the context of marriage? Dannah also makes us realize that God does not set up these standards and then leaves us but is with us every step of the way. She reminds us that God is always there for us even if we had premarital sex. His forgivness out weighs our failures and he can always make us pure again. I would highly recommend this book because it encompasses everything that is in her retreats. My generation has to understand that they are precious in God's eyes and that He wants us to save sex so we can be the happiest later in our lives. Dannah Gresh does a beautiful job in drawing her readers closer to God so that He can tell them what He needs them to hear.

I found this book at the Christian bookstore and was intrigued by the title. I didn't realize until after I bought it that it was intended for teenagers (I'm in my late 20s and single) But I'm not at all sorry I bought this book. The Lord has really been convincing me lately of the importance of being sexually pure. I was looking for a book that not only discussed purity but how to live it out. This book gives some great tips. I can't wait to try them out for myself. I wish I had had this information when I was a young teenager. It would have saved me a lot of grief, regret and heartache. But while no one can change the past, with God's help and the tips in this book. You can change the future. I appreciate the author's honest. Yes, she is married, but she is very much aware of the struggles that young single women face. I think this book should be required reading for every teenager and for every parent with teenage girls. I would definitely recommend this book to others.

I bought this book to "skim" for information that I could use for my junior high youth group girls. I couldn't stop reading! I stayed up late to read to the very last page.

The nonfiction text is full of true accounts from all kinds of girls and women and that kept the pace of the book very readable. While some nonfiction can get bogged down in details and over-explaining, Dannah Gresh is a gifted storyteller and uses beautiful language with a gentle, encouraging style.

I found this book extremely helpful for use in our church's junior high youth group. Since that time, the author has put together a leader's guide, but I made my own lesson plans based on the book and it was a wonderful experience!

I did find, though, that the junior high girls didn't read it as voraciously as I had. Their older, high school sisters loved it, so I'd say the reading level is 9th or 10th grade.

I highly recommend this book!

I bought this to read and discuss with my 12-year old daughter. After starting it myself, I've decided to wait a year; but the book has truly spoken to me personally, and I can hardly wait to impart the values Dannah presents in such a readable, delightful manner with my daughter at that time. I have tried other "mother-daughter" books and none of them compared with this. This is written in such a personal way with true-life examples from Dannah's own life and lives of her friends that any girl can relate to it (It's not at all "preachy."). It also has the power to conjure up the dating memories from a mother's life, so moms can personally share the good and not-so-good things that happened to them in the dating years. I found it encouraging teenagers to live a godly life that any parent as well as God Himself would be delighted with. I only wish I had had such a helpful resource when I was 13 or 14. It would have changed the way I related to boys and young men.
I am updating this review 8 yrs later: My daughter is now 20 yrs old. This book greatly impacted her decision to live a pure life. I took her to hear Dannah Gresh speak & she came home very convicted about living out her role as a godly young woman while resisting worldly standards in dating relationships. She also made the decision to wait until she becomes engaged to share her first kiss with her future husband. This proved to be a very wise decision recently when she had been with an excellent young man for 6 months & we were thinking marriage might be a possibility;however, he then broke it off. Although painful for her, she's recovered quickly & remarkably well. I attribute that to the fact that she guarded her heart & limited her physical involvement with young men to hand-holding. Dannah does not dictate these specific boundaries in her book, but she does emphasize the benefits of setting high standards & remaining pure while waiting for the best that God has for young women. It is a great encouragement to me to see my daughter rise to a higher standard than I was presented with & be blessed by God as she lives it out.

I read this book for the first time when I was seventeen. At the time I hung on every word: my close friends and I were all in the middle of our "purity mania" stage and passing books like Gresh's around while we gushed about our future husbands, our favorite bridal designers, what our wedding colors would be, etc. My class was called into the gymnasium for a talk about abstinence and purity; we were learning all about abstinence in health class; and everywhere you turned purity rings were popping up on girls' ring fingers. We thought we'd really taken the moral high ground and were so proud of ourselves. Ah, those were the days.

Now that I'm a little older, a little wiser, and a LOT more open-minded, let me give you the rundown:

- Gresh's approach is not - in my opinion - worthy of quite the level of venom it's gotten from some of the one star reviews, but I don't think it is the treasure so many mothers and youth group leaders make it out to be, either. As has been noted elsewhere, the purity movement's points all start to sound the same after six or seven books. If you've read two or three others, you can probably sum up her arguments with just a quick skim of the book. Yes, Dannah, studies have shown that sex can lead to unplanned pregnancy, STDs, and heartbreak. Yes, women have historically been made to bear the brunt of these burdens. Anything else to add?

- I absolutely identify with another reviewer who said that she felt just a bit "deceived" at the end of the book: Gresh herself was not a virgin when she wrote it, having had sex at the age of fifteen. Now don't get me wrong, this certainly does not make her a bad person or invalidate the message she is trying to send, but I have to be honest: it left a bad taste in my mouth. It's clear she truly believes what she's saying and I think her intentions toward her audience are good, but I've never responded well to the "do as I say, not as I've done" approach. She would have done so much better just by being honest and up front about this fact instead of burying the admission of her "sin" in the very back of the book. If she's going to effectively stand on a mountaintop and preach to her audience that the only morally upright path is to remain abstinent until marriage, I as her reader simply would've preferred to know that she had made it to the finish line herself. That's all.

- Her writing style edges dangerously close to preachy in some places and could be a turn-off to some people: a good deal of the book reads as though it were written by a peppy bible camp counselor. When I first read it, I didn't mind her "conversational" approach, even liked it; now I find it mildly irritating and just a little condescending. (Of course this may be partly because I'm an older reader coming back to it after a few years' distance.) Note: If the reader has already given away her virginity, the book probably won't do much to pick up her day. Naturally, Gresh stresses the idea of "second time virginity" as most other books in this vein do. Just be warned if this is something you're sensitive to.

- Also like most other authors on the purity shelf, Gresh devotes a couple of pages to the dangers of dating and/or mingling with "unsaved" men. I realize opinions are going to run the gamut here according to your background and beliefs, and that's fine; you don't have to agree with mine. Personally, though, I find this sort of holier-than-thou attitude extremely off-putting, and it's one of the reasons I've mostly outgrown books like these. I completely agree with the bedrock of her point - that marrying someone with whom you aren't spiritually compatible is just begging for a divorce. However, if I had to choose between dating, say, a Jewish man, a Christian man, or a Buddhist man, I would judge them by character first instead of whether or not they are "saved." Just because a man is a Christian doesn't make him good husband material; likewise, just because he is not does not automatically mean he will be a bad one. (I briefly dated a Muslim man in my second year of college. Were wedding bells destined to ring? No. But am I a more tolerant, well-rounded human being for having known him? Absolutely. Had I taken Gresh's admonishments to heart, it is likely that I would never have spared him a second glance - and that goes not just for Ali, but for several wonderful people I have since become close friends with. Many of these relationships have been far richer and longer lasting than my Christian friendships. It all depends...one should not write a person off simply because they are of a different faith.)

- I can't quite ignore the veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) hypocrisy behind her message. This is not entirely Gresh's fault; the purity movement itself has had a tendency toward sexism. I understand that the book is geared towards young girls, but I don't think that's any excuse for the pressure put on us to be the primary (or sole) guardian of a relationship's purity. Why aren't there shelves and shelves of books equally devoted to guys' "purity battles"? Last I checked, it takes TWO people to have sex. It is NOT okay that young men can run around having as much premarital sex as they want and then demand a "pure" girl when they've had their fun and are ready to find a wife. Feminists have worked as hard as they have to remove ugly double standards like this. Gresh cheerfully promotes them.

- Her insistence on linking all premarital sex with Satan is not only potentially emotionally crippling to those who've already done so, but also a discredit to her readers' intelligence and power of free will, i.e. "I didn't mean to have sex before marriage... really! The devil made me do it!" There is such a thing as taking personal responsibility for one's actions. The decision to have sex for the first time, and when, and with whom, is one of the most life-changing anyone can make - but especially so for girls. The idea of taking that choice out of a young woman's hands and laying it at the devil's feet is both dangerous and a little bit laughable.

- It's possible for an idealistic young reader to come away with the impression that all you need to do to ensure a lasting, healthy marriage (and future sex life) is to pray a lot, dress modestly, and remain a virgin on your wedding night and happily-ever-after is thereafter promised to you. (Gresh throws around "prince" and "sunset" a lot in connection with staying "pure.") This is miles away from the truth. For a MUCH more balanced look at how a young woman can make constructive use of her single years, you MUST, MUST read "Last One Down the Aisle Wins" by Shannon Fox and Celeste Liversidge.

No matter what Gresh has to say about "If/then agreements" ("IF you will wait, THEN you will be blessed") the simple fact is that even the best marriages have bad days, in the bedroom and out of it. Girls: you will fight with, cry about, and occasionally hate your Prince Charming throughout your marriage, and even the most compatible of them can and do end for one reason or another. That's just the way it goes outside of a Disney movie. Having an intact hymen on your wedding night is a wonderful goal if it strengthens your character or your bond as a couple, but that alone does NOT promise a perpetual sunset. This section really made me raise an eyebrow, as Gresh never truly explains how waiting is going to guarantee all of this marital bliss - just that "God will provide" if you follow and adhere to this last remaining "blood covenant". She tries very hard to be profound, but I find her handling of the idea both naive and (again) unsettling. Perhaps it's underhanded of me...but I always have to wonder if Gresh then believes that her failure to fufill this "blood covenant" is responsible for her husband's struggle with pornography. (In "Persuing the Pearl, the companion book for married couples.) This is to me yet another example of Gresh touting a potentially very damaging idealogoy: if there truly is such a covenant, why has the keeping of it been entirely one-sided for so many millenia?

I should be fair, though: I DID get something from this book in high school, and I still haven't tossed it into the used book bin because despite everything I've listed above, there is value to it. Gresh devotes an entire chapter to the importance of knowing the sacredness of both body AND heart, and treasuring oneself as a princess, something today's girls desperately need to hear. It gave me cause to think about those things when I was younger, and contemplate the value of my femininity and how I present myself to men. She also prompts her readers to put some serious pen-to-paper thought about what they desire in a future husband - her "Shopping List for Him" activity - something I had never actively considered before reading this book. I credit the hours I spent thinking about these tough topics then and really firming up what I believed for making me the woman I am now. That alone makes it worth a glance, I think.

(Edit: I recently came across a suggestion from another author in conjunction with the list for a future husband - a list of "What I Expect From Myself". Although not nearly as easy or fun, this makes a great deal of sense to me. After all, how fair is it to hold your future husband to standards that you won't live up to yourself? If you want to one day share your life with an amazing, out of this world man - which I certainly do! - it follows that you should be an equally amazing woman for HIM.)

So, to sum up - I'm sorry for letting this get so long - skim through it, buy it if you feel drawn to it, get what you can from it, but keep your eyes open and don't expect your mind to be miraculously changed if you're not already a proponent of Gresh's message. Mothers, READ IT WITH YOUR DAUGHTERS instead of just handing it them and thinking your job is done!

At the end of the day, it's a personal choice that requires a lot of soul searching and consideration - and one that I believe can't be undertaken solely because Mommy or Youth Group Leader or Motivational Speaker says so. Six years later, I am the only virgin left out of my high school circle of "purity buddies" by a wide margin. (In fact the most vocal among us, who flashed her purity ring and loudly proclaimed to anyone within earshot that God had led her to save her innocence for her "handpicked" man on her wedding night, had a two-year-old daughter and was already active with her fiance for the better part of three years when she walked down the aisle.) And it's not because I wrote longer in my God journal than they did, or prayed harder for protection from temptation, or practiced Dannah's Seven Secrets more diligently. It is because it was and is MY choice. Not my church's, or my parents', or my friends', or even the Bible's. Mine. If it doesn't come from the heart, there isn't a ring or a pledge or a book in the world that's going to make a difference, including this one.

I am reading the book and I am single 38 years old. I find the book extremely helpful. I think if you want to have a pure life for God as a single woman I think this book would be a good one. I am ready to give the book to several of my friends. I find that it is a decision about being pure. I plan to also share the book with my church website and suggest the teen and possibly the preteen girls of the church read this book and the boys read "Who Moved the Goal Post?". The chapters are just right for the teenagers. I plan to get the leadership book so that I can lead a Bible Study group on this. Thanks so much Dannah and Bob.

I imagine there are only two kinds of reviews here: Those who agree with this book and think that purity is important before marriage, and those who don't agree with that concept at all and think that pre-marital sex is ok. This book isn't written to people who are already bent on having sex before marriage; it's not written in a way to change your mind on that issue. If you are bound and determined that it's impossible to remain pure, then simply don't buy the book -- you won't agree with it and you won't like it. If you ARE looking to have a pure, God-centered relationship (even in the distant future), this book is a great way to start. I do agree with some other reviewers who complain that this book holds females to a standard that isn't necessarily placed on guys. But it's written to girls. And the important part is that you shouldn't be in a relationship with a guy who is pressuring you to do things you don't want to do -- you should look for a guy who has these standards or who respects the standards you have and cherishes your purity. They DO exist. And you are worth waiting for. If nothing else, this challenges you to think about what is helpful and hurtful in a relationship. Society tells us that pre-marital sex is ok, and even if it's not -- everything else leading up to it is. But there are deep emotional consequences, which society at large ignores.

This book explains how to grow in purity -- even if you've already "screwed up." It shows you why you should be striving toward it, and it gives some practical steps toward attaining it.

NOTE: this is written with the high schooler/college student in mind. In fact, I think it's important for girls that age to read it. I'm a mid-20s adult who found it helpful and insightful for that age group, but it was repeating many things I either already know or wish I'd heard a LONG time ago.

I am so thankful that I found this book during one of my perusals of the Christian section of the bookstore. Gresh has written a wonderful book that is highly inspiring and encouraging to those who want to bring purity into their marriage. Not only does she write in a way that makes one proud to have remained a virgin, but she also ensures that those who may have already taken that step don't feel condemned or left out. There is no judgmental attitude whatsoever. There is no effort to make sex seem like it is only for procreation and that if people are religious they are not to enjoy sex. Each chapter delves into how purity is obtained and maintained and the importance of bringing such purity to the marital bed. Instead of writing a book that tries to drum into you that you should remain a virgin because otherwise you will go to hell, Gresh spells out clearly how wonderful the intimacy is when shared for the first time with your new spouse and how this intimacy is directly related to God's love for us. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to wait until they are married for having sex the first time, or who has had sex, but now wants to stop and abstain until marriage. It will encourage you and even make you excited about that special gift that God has given to us.

There are scores of book on purity on the market today, and they're all starting to sound the same. The seven secrets don't feel like secrets after already being familiar with abstinence/purity. The author's intentions in writing this was that no one ever told her HOW to live chastely. One radical and increasingly unpopular idea about how to live is this: Read the Bible. There are many references and guidelines to help. 1 Corinthians 7:1 is a starting point.

The writing style felt awkward as though the conversational approach was forced in some places. The text is littered with way too many parenthetical phrases (which became annoying). Nevertheless, the reader will be able to see the author's desire for women to value themselves and have a strong relationship with God.

I've read and re-read this book several times, and I still can't shake the sense of feeling just a little deceived. The fact that the author didn't marry as a virgin doesn't make her any better/worse than someone that did. I don't like her ambiguity about it throughout the book only to confirm it near the end in very certain terms. She does make reference to her "sexual sin" a few times, but that's such a subjective term that it's open to interpretation. I don't believe the author intended to deceive the anyone at all. However, the way she presents her story discredits her honest approach to some degree. Bringing everything out in the open in the beginning would make the book more effective.

Overall, it's not a bad book and it's not groundbreaking either. How much you enjoy it will depend more on what you already know about purity than on what the author has to say. Be sure to use the "Look Inside" feature before buying.