purity: How far is too far

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 “How far is too far?”

This was a question asked by a high school kid to my youth pastor during a high school mission we had attended.

 As a 3 weeks old baby Christian, my heart literally jumped when I heard him read it aloud (quite sarcastically by the way). Completely surprised by his reaction, I wondered why he was agitated by such an honest question.

He thought that this was a Christian who knew better but was testing the limits on God’s grace. Yet here I was new in Christianity and clueless on what purity meant. I wanted to know just like the person who had asked that question.

So am compelled to write this to the young person who didn’t grow up in church (like me) and everything they know about sex and purity has been what the world has taught them.

Incidentally, he never did explain. However, God knew my heart and was sure to direct me to people who could actually explain to me the biblical meaning of purity.

What is purity?   “ to be untainted or uncontaminated.”

Therefore, to be sexually pure is to be untainted or uncontaminated by sexual immorality.

Here are some things I have learnt about purity;

1. Purity is both a heart issue and a body issue

Is being a virgin the same as being pure? This was a question I kept asking myself and I honestly believed because I was a virgin, I was also pure and I connected the two together. However, I believe you can be a virgin and not be pure at the same time.

 Purity is more than abstaining from sexual intercourse it’s also being uncontaminated in your mind and heart

                                            My story

I got born again at 22 years of age. Before  this, when I was in high school I had made a decision to wait till  am married to have sex (yeah I was those weird types that believed in the ONE) I held to it, fought for it and still am.

My friends mocked, ridiculed and envied me at the same time. They thought it was crazy, some even thought I was having sex on the down low and pretending to wait. I couldn’t blame them, it was so hard. I experienced culture shock when I stepped in campus; the party scene was the in thing, there was a party every other night and with this came the drugs and sex.

Nobody was waiting for nobody.

I dated crappy guy after crappy guy, to be honest it felt like looking for a needle in a haystack kind of thing.

I wondered who am I waiting for? These guys who are busy sleeping with everything in a skirt?

 At some point, it all looked hopeless.

When I became a Christian, I met some great Christian men who were not sleeping around but were honoring God with their lives. I felt relief just to know there actually was a guy out there for me who will love that I actually waited for him.

However, as much as I was all up and waiting, I struggled with masturbation and lust (I blogged about it here).

 Whoever looks at a woman (or man) with lust has committed adultery (or fornication) in his heart. (Matthew 5:28) Emphasis mine.

Jesus was expounding on the sin of adultery but I think it can apply to purity because the people he was teaching believed it was only sin when you slept with a woman but Jesus says when you as much as look at a woman with lust God sees it as adultery .

Purity is not an outward issue it is a heart issue.

 From the outside looking in, I looked all-pure, in the sense that I wasn’t sleeping around.  Yet even though I was not having sex with the guys I dated, I was flirting, kissing, and letting them touch me in a way only my husband should. My heart was a long way from being pure.

2. My body is God’s temple.

Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who lives within you? Whom you have received from God? You are not your own (1 Corinthians 6:19)

My body a temple of God?  You mean God (creator of the universe) wants to live in me? Whew! This was huge for me.

Purity became bigger than my wedding night.  

Before this I was waiting for a guy but now my purity was coming from a place of knowing that God has made my body His sanctuary and for him to live in there I couldn’t keep polluting it.

when you come to an understanding that your body is no longer yours to do with as you please because it’s God’s temple.   Questions like “how far is too far?” will never come up again, or the even more outdated game (that we Christian people love to play) called, “can you tell me how much I can get away with and still be a Christian?”

 I am yet to attend a church that is dirty, unkempt and neglected.  we go to great lengths to keep them nice, clean and spotless.  If we start viewing our bodies as God’s temple then we will be careful to keep them uncontaminated and unpolluted.

3. Intimacy with God

God has not only made my body His temple, He also wants to be intimate (entrusted with secrets) with me, and sexual impurity hinders this.

I wanted to know God more. I wanted all His secrets.  Therefore, everything that was making me impure had to go.

The movies that were full of sexual scenes, the music that was full of lust, the magazines ,the novels I loved to read ( yes even Christian ones ) the guys that were in my life that continually caused  me to lust had to go. It was such a small price to pay to know and to be known by God.

James 4:8 says, “Come close to God and He will come close to you.”

This verse tells me for intimacy to happen, it’s not only God who draws near, and I also had to take the initiative to draw near to Him too. He meets us half way.

Here is my question, how bad do you want to know God? Do you want Him more than the kissing,  holding hands, the flirting, the movies, the music, the porn, even more than your little feelings? You cannot have it both ways. It is one or the other.

4. A pure bride presented to her groom

My purity doesn’t come from me or from anything I do. It’s a gift from God.  When you know it’s a gift then there’s no ground for boasting.

My greatest joy on waiting till am married to have sex is that, on our wedding night I will be able to stand before my bridegroom and say, “ as hard as it was here I am with no regrets and with no shame am all yours and yours alone .”

He never has to worry if there’s any man out there who knows me as intimately as he knows me, and for me this is worth all the waiting.

That’s not to say that for the ones who didn’t wait there’s no hope, there is hope because the only way you and I are pure is through the blood of Jesus. By His perfect sacrifice he has made us all pure and without blemish before God.

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, Behold, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Jesus is the one who sanctifies me, He is the one who cleanses and purifies me with His word.

Jesus is the one who presents me to my husband as a pure bride without a spot or a blemish. Not me and my little efforts (Ephesians 5:26-27)

Its only by grace that I will stand before my husband purified. it’s by grace that am still a virgin and I know ,he will not only be glad that I waited(through God’s amazing Grace)  but He will also know it’s by Grace that this gift has found its way to Him.

 This is God’s grace; it always goes to the least deserving.

In the world we live in, it may not be the most popular thing to do. You may be ridiculed and mocked for it but to live a life of purity is to live a life that glorifies God.

Let's show the world it’s possible and let’s show them how to do it.

I choose to be pure. I choose God’s way.

My Triumph Over Lust (Becoming a joseph in sex crazed world)

I am writing this because I feel like this is an area the church is not addressing yet majority of the young people in church are struggling in. How do I know this? Because some time last year, every time I tuned in to my favorite radio station in the evening. Majority of the young people who called or texted had an issue with lust, masturbation or pornography.

I know. I understand because I have been exactly where they were and didn’t know where to get help.

 How can something that started as silly and harmless become this endless cycle of addiction that I now found myself in?  My 21-year-old self asked this question aloud to nobody in particular because I was all alone in the house at the time.

At 22 years of age, I encountered God’s mercy and grace and got born again and Jesus delivered me from the spirit of lust and masturbation I had struggled with for 9 years since I was 13 years old.  Crazy huh?  The devil never plays fair.

You have to understand the devil is a master deceiver. His ultimate goal is to make sure he keeps us from having a relationship with God. Satan will provide avenues, which try to substitute the place of God in our lives. My avenue was pleasing myself. This leads us to spend our lives, running from one addiction to the next without finding fulfillment.

The meaning of the word deceive is “to make someone believe something that is not true in order to get what you want.”

      Here are some of the lies I had believed;

1)      This isn’t hurting anybody.  Huge lie because sin does eventually hurt us. Masturbation and pornography does hurt somebody you! (1 Corinthians 6:17-18, The Msg) “Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us lonelier than ever—the kind of sex that can never 'become one.' There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God–given and God–modeled love, for 'becoming one' with another.”

2)      You are in control and  you can stop this whenever you want.  In the beginning we feel like we are in control but like any other addiction eventually we realize we never were in control and even if I want to stop now I don't know how to.

3)      At least you are not sleeping around.  Truth is God never classifies sin , there’s no such thing as minor sin and major sin to Him, to Him sin is sin no matter how we choose to look at it.

4)      There’s no place in the bible that categorizes it as sin. Well the bible says sin is anything that separates us from God; do you think God feels welcome when we are busy having sex with ourselves and idolizing our bodies?

5)      Some day when you get married you will no longer need to please yourself, your future husband or wife will cure all your lust issues. If this was true then we wouldn’t have the issue of unfaithfulness that is so prevalent in marriages today(especially in church) now would we?

Jesus came to set the captives free and that is what he did for me, I was a captive to the spirit of lust.

Because of a decision I made when I was in my teens. The devil could not trap me in a chain of sexual escapades and soul ties. Therefore, he looked for an alternative. Same offer wrapped in a different package.

Therefore, through lust, I opened a door for the enemy to create an area where he could exert control over my life.

                                               How do we get free?

Here are some practical steps that I have applied in my life for years that has enabled me to live a life free of lust.

1)      Submit your life to God , the only way the devil will release the control he has in your life is if your life is fully submitted to God .I submitted my life to God when I got born again(I accepted the free gift of salvation that Jesus died for me to have). Anything that had nothing to do with God had to leave, because now I was under new management.

       If you are already born again and you are struggling in this area, I suggest you recommit your life to God again. The word of God is clear James 4:7 Nkjv, “ submit to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you.” You cannot be resisting the devil and you are busy trying to run your own life.

2)      Quiet time. This is a specific time set aside where I hang out with God.  Spend some time in prayer. Prayer is paramount, Jesus told His disciples, “wake up and pray that you do not fall into temptation.”  Put some worship music on; it really helps in cleansing the mind and the heart allowing us to focus on God and who He is. Study the bible; God will never speak to us outside His word, so when I study the word then I can learn to know the voice of God apart from other voices.

3)      Clean house: to have a new life means I have to change the way I have been living. Change the way I have been thinking. Because lust is not really a body, issue but a heart and mind issue.

Romans 12:2 NLT says, “Don’t copy the behaviors and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

I have no ability to change the way I think on my own I need God’s help. And that’s what He did and is still doing for me . This is not a one time thing its continuous process that lasts a lifetime.

4)      Guard your heart. We have to be careful what gets into our hearts because it will overflow into our lives .I had to let go of some friends because all we discussed was their sexual escapades or some sexual movie they watched.  Whenever one of my friends had sex, she would come and give us all the gory details.

The friends we keep really define who we are and who we want to be. If who you want to be is not being reflected in the friends you keep then you need to let them go.

5)      Guard your eyes and ears gates. whatever gets through our eyes and ears gets to our heart and mind. we therefore have to be careful what is coming through these ‘gates’ this means what I read , what I watched , the music I listened to that was lustful or sexual had to go. You have to be vigilant to take out the devil or he will take you out.

This saying is true garbage in, garbage out. Godliness in, godliness out.

                                                   

I remember about 3 weeks after I got born again my youth pastor told me ,I had to find some new music to listen to. I asked him you mean I can no longer listen to my music? He said No!

I went home opened my computer I had over 1,000 songs , I love music ,I had since I was 7 years old I felt like God was stealing life from instead of giving me life. Even though it was hard, something in me knew I had to trust that God would bring me some new music to listen to so I cleaned my computer. Yes, I deleted everything!

All the Chris brown, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Beyonce, Usher Raymond, drake, lil Wayne, nickleback, had to go.

Here is a fun fact today I have over a 1000 songs on my laptop, and all of it glorifies God! Now I listen to music that breathes life into me rather than music that takes life from me.

6)      Train yourself to flee. Yes to run away if you have to.  Sounds a bit over the top but its true. You can clean out your life but that doesn’t mean everyone around you will clean house. You will live with people who love to watch or listen to lustful stuff, they maybe Christians even because you know yourself you have to do whatever it takes. if you find yourself in a situation that would cause you to compromise,run.

1 Corinthians 6:18Amp says,  “shun sexual immorality and all sexual looseness (flee from impurity in thought, word or deed).”

 The meaning of the word flee is ‘to run away, as from trouble or danger.’

7)      Know your purpose. God didn’t just put you in this world so as you can live and die. He created you for a purpose. Life is more than getting an education, a job, getting married and getting some babies. God put you in this world as a solution to a specific problem.

When you get a vision for your life. All the above becomes very easy because you will understand what you are running towards in life. You will be angry enough to no longer allow lust to steal the purpose that God has for you.

   

Joseph is a guy who finds himself sold as a slave in a foreign country. God was with him and made him successful in his master’s house. The master’s wife casts her eye upon Joseph. This woman was probably drop dead gorgeous. She keeps pestering Joseph to sleep with her, but each time Joseph would tell her no! He said “how can I do such a thing and sin against God?” she would not hear ,one day she caught  him by his garment and said “lie with me,” but Joseph left his garment and fled and got out of the house.   (Genesis 39:6-12)

Joseph had a purpose. He knew if he gives in to this woman, he is done. Your temptation might not be a woman or a man, it could be a phone, a computer, magazine or it could be yourself. When you understand God has a purpose for your life none of this things will stand in the way.

8)      Become a living sacrifice. Surrender your body on the Altar; let your body become a sacrifice before God. Here is the thing is with living sacrifices they can walk off the altar unlike dead sacrifices. Therefore, this is a daily thing.  You can do it in your Quiet time and tell God “here is my body it’s yours and not mine.”

When God owns your body. You can no longer do with it as you please. You will live a life that brings glory and honor to Him.

9)      Have an accountability partner or talk to someone you can trust. When we confess our shortcomings one to another then we deny the devil the power to hold it over our head, with guilt and condemnation. Confessing also allows people to pray for and with us. We are not meant to walk alone in this life so don’t choose to die with your struggles when God has provided a community that can hold you up.

10)  Get an understanding of Gods purpose for sex.  When we get a healthy understanding of God’s intentions for sex and marriage we will not put unrealistic expectations on another human being. I will know it’s not my future husband’s job to heal my lust issues. Moreover, everyone comes with issues in marriage, how can two broken people  help each other? it’s my job to get my soul whole ,my heart whole and my body whole before marriage so that when I do get married what I will be  bringing into the marriage is wholeness. Do your part. God will help your future spouse to do their part.

Masturbation, pornography and sexual immorality in themselves are not the disease. They are just symptoms of the disease and unless we treat the disease, we will forever be dealing with symptoms that keep resurfacing. Lust is the disease and when you take out the disease, the symptoms will eventually disappear.

God bless you,

Lucy