**this is quite long, I do apologize, but I pray you will still give it a read**
Alright so as distinguished women we walk in purity of speech (proverbs 22:11), AND you guessed it, we also walk in sexual purity. Check out 1 Thess. 4:3-7. “Paul states sanctification as God’s will. When each one of us makes a decision for Christ, we are bothjustified (declared legally not guilty) and sanctified (set apart as holy). There is also an on-goingprocess of being made more holy, and that is Paul’s exhortation here – part of sanctification willinclude the following three things: abstain from sexual immorality, control your body (or get a wife/ in our case a husband), and don’t transgress and defraud your brother.”
So let’s break those three down a bit. One question that immediately gets posed is: what is sexual immorality? You can find a pretty clear and obvious list in Leviticus 20, but most of those things are we fairly obvious to us. What are not so obvious are the questions about all the stuff that leads up to sex, like kissing, cuddling, “fooling around”, and masturbating. We like to ask the question a lot, “How far is too far?” That question in itself is inherently revealing our desire to push the limits and at the base of it our undesired to actually be pure. Wanting to know how far you can go before “crossing any major lines” reveals a works-based-ness belief that you have, thinking that if you are just “so good” then you can still be in God’s good graces. Here’s the truth though, the Lord’s word says in Ephesians 5:3, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any impurity, or of greed. Because these are improper for God’s holy people.”
I heard it said once that for a lot of people when they look at sexual immorality and what is permissible and what is not there are two obvious ends to the spectrum one being total abstinence from all things and the other being having sex before marriage, then there’s this big grey area in between. They then posed the question that if we are trying to be pure and live lives honoring to God, that if there is a grey area in between, why would it make sense to live as close as possible to the black side of that spectrum, it doesn’t, rather we should be asking how can I live as close to the pure side of that as possible. That becomes the question of our heart when we are putting God’s ways above our ways and when we desire His will above our wants and cravings.
The truth is we can’t deny that we all have desires that we’ve probably given into at one point or another and ended up sinning against the Lord. Whether that means you physically messed up in a relationship with a dude, you lusted after some guy, or you allowed your desire and love for a guy to overtake your thoughts and time more than your desire and love for the Lord. What I’m trying to get at is that, even if you haven’t even kissed a guy and by that standard consider yourself pure, we have all sinned in this area in some way or another. But Paul exhorts us to “control our bodies”; so, the next question that gets posed is… how?
It’s not a simple answer and yet at the same time it kind of is. During our study out in San Diego Holly challenged us by asking, why it is so hard to control our bodies? And she also helped us answer that by saying that “thoughts become actions, actions become habits, and habits become strongholds”. It help explain that she gave an example from this cartoon strip where this lady is trying to not eat chocolate anymore, but she keeps thinking about it all the time. She ends up driving past the supermarket on her way home and decides that she’ll just go in and look around but not go down the candy isle. Then she passes the candy isle an decides that she’ll just walk down it to look but won’t get anything. The next clip is of her with bags of chocolate in her chart checking out. Here’s a fact: the things we think about most are what will be manifested in our lives. So the next question is what the heck are you putting in your mind? What movies do you watch? What T.V. shows do you watch? What books do you read? Who do you stalk on facebook? And what pictures of them do you always click on? Are these things helping create strongholds in your life or are they furthering your desire for the Lord?
I want you to seriously ponder over that stuff, and I hope that as the Lord convicts you of the different stuff you do that are forming strongholds that you will allow Him in His grace to remove them from your life. I want you to know that this is a very serious truth. Somewhere in the bible (forgive my lack of reference right now) it talks about the eye being the lamp of the body and it talks about making sure that your filling your body with light and not darkness, because whatever your eye takes in is what you will walk by. Ladies what you put into your minds will have consequences. I personally saw the effects of this at a really young age, like elementary school young, when one day I found porn on a computer. I had no clue what I had found; honestly I don’t think I’d even had the “sex talk” at school yet, so I was especially clueless, but very intrigued. I had no clue why at the time but there was something about it that excited and fascinated me, so once I found it I continued, secretly (because some part of me knew it wasn’t right), to watch it. This carried with it two immediate consequences, that later led to a lot of other things. The immediate ones though were that, as an elementary student mind you, I discovered how to and began to on a more than daily basis masturbate. Also, when I would watch the porn, being a young girl, I was especially fascinated with what these older and more mature women’s bodies looked like; this fascination led to me finding women incredibly attractive and me having homosexual feelings, including crushes on my girl friends. For a good year of my life these things continued to grow in my life as I would watch this porn I had found. When I think about it, it kind of blows me away every time at how quickly those things entered into my life through that. And I’ll be honest this story generally isn’t a part of my testimony when I tell it, because literally by the grace of God they were taken out of my life when my mom also found the porn which was then removed from the computer and from my life completely.
The intense part for me thinking about all of that is that I wasn’t even looking for it when I found it, but once I did find it even though I felt enough shame about it to hide that I was watching it, I didn’t feel enough shame to not watch it. Sure I was young and naïve, but I continued to pursue the things it stirred up in me. What’s also intense is that I lived in those two things as long as I was watching it. They literally did not exist in my life until I stumbled upon and started filling myself with those images and then once they were taken away and I couldn’t watch it anymore, I didn’t find myself having homosexual attractions anymore or masturbating anymore. If you fill yourself with darkness, you will walk in darkness, but if you fill yourself with light, you will walk in the light. It’s not just a saying or a verse in the bible… it’s a reality that I know all too well.
It’s one of those things that’s not funny at all, but is kind of funny when I say it sometimes… but I’m pretty convinced that is only through the intervention of the Lord that I did not become a lesbian. Here’s the thing though, even though grace saved me from that, maybe because I didn’t know I had been saved from anything at the time, I later went on to sin against the Lord with guys, finding my identity in that form of sexual immorality instead of the other. Equally as bad and equally as enslaving. And it was yet again by the grace of God that I was redeemed from it, though much later in my life. Something I want all of you ladies to know is that no matter what way you have sinned in this area, through the Lord’s grace… which is more than sufficient… you are justified (declared not guilty) as Jesus paid the price for that and you can and will be sanctified (washed completely clean). When the Lord saved and redeemed me from all the sexual crap I was living in just a few short years ago, He showed me Psalm 51 and it became so dear to my heart as He spoke over me verse 7, that He would “purge me and I would be clean” that He would” wash me and I would be whiter than snow”. He will do this for us, gosh I can could go on for such a long time about how miraculously He will take the dirtiest of hearts (which I am convinced mine was one of) and clean it out while filling it up. But this blog is already way too long, so just believe me when I say He will do this, you only have to decide to let Him and with that allow the removal of those things which you know are continuing to fill your heart and mind with darkness.
Alright so last on our exhortations from Paul…”don’t transgress and defraud your brother”. This one takes the focus a bit off of us for bit and takes us back to our role as a “helper” which we learned about in the first study. Truth: men are supposed to lead us in purity in our relationships with them. Another truth: we are supposed to help them do this. In relationships, whether that be friendships or romantic relationships, we are called to help our brothers in Christ and even our brothers who might not yet know Christ walk in purity with us. One big and obvious way we can do this is through our appearance. Guys are visual, and if we give them something to look at… they’ll look. This is not being a helper to them in anyway, and even if it makes you feel good because you caught some guys eye (which should not be where you desire affirmation from) is it worth it, if you know that that is in turn causing him to struggle loving purely you as Christ loves you and not lust after you from his own desire. We should also consider the way you look at guys and touch them as we interact with them… basically consider the way you are flirting and be mindful that you don’t help lead them into sinful thoughts or desires.
If you’re in a romantic relationship, I want to challenge you even more with this idea of helping your brother walk in purity. One thing to consider is that until he puts a ring on your finger and marries you, he is your brother in Christ separate from you and you have no rights to his body, nor he to yours. You are to help him be the man of Christ he is called to be in all areas of your relationship and the truth is, he’ll probably mess up some time and need you to help remind him of what the Lord desires of you both in that relationship. This does not mean he isn’t a good man of the Lord and you should not condemn him for it, it does mean he is imperfect and will let you down (this is why he should not be number one in your life… the Lord should be), it also means that you can either hold a place of strength in his life by helping him overcome that temptation or you can hold a place of weakness by following him into sin. I pray that you be the former.
Okay so the last thing I want to say with this purity stuff is something that the Lord spoke to me about a year and a half ago after I had made some decisions to walk in purity. Like I said earlier that Lord saved me from a lot of sin that I was living and finding my identity and fulfillment in, after He did that that next summer I went out to summer project and experienced this women’s study. And after this talk actually is when I decided to take what seemed like drastic steps in purity at the time. That night I decided I was not going to kiss any guy until my wedding day, that I was from that day on going to completely reserve those things for my future husband. One day the following fall however, I was caught up thinking about that when the Lord really hit me the truth that I was not promised a husband. With that fact out there and no guarantee of a future spouse, my new dedications of purity were rocked. If I wasn’t saving myself for my future husband, then who the heck was I saving myself for? The simple response I got from the Lord was… Him. He reminded me that He was the one even made purity restored to me and He filled my heart with a renewed gratitude of that fact and I realized so fully in that moment that my purity did not rest in the potential of a future spouse, because my purity was not for them but was for and because of the Lord and all that He had done for me. I am the Lord’s and you are the Lord’s. We are His to give to a guy if He so pleases someday, but until then we are wholly His and our purity is for Him, because He is worthy of it. He is wholly worthy of our love, worship, and dedication.
