what i want you to know

                                               

you're my friend, and i love you, and i want you to have a better understanding of why i had to turn down your invitation.

Let me start with this: my whole world was turned upside down my senior year of high school. I met a man who accepted me and gave me hope for a happy future. Prior to meeting him, I had reached a point in my life where because of some decisions i made, I felt guilty and shameful and that my life was hopeless. But he told me, among many other things, that those ways i had felt no longer had to define me or have an influence over where my life was headed. 

As you may have guessed, the man I am talking about is Jesus. I don't mean the distant Jesus you envision when you see church pews and hear organ hymns one hour a week, who turns up his nose to sinners and despises sloppy clothing. I am talking about the one who knows and loves me and you, who takes us as we are. He took my hand as I reached out for his and he changed my heart. He showed me my true worth and what he sees in me. One of the main things he taught me, and continues to pour into me, was the truth about sex. It made me want to change my life. It is the reason why I choose to stay away from things like 50 Shades of Grey and house parties for selling sex toys. 

For a more thorough picture of what He has taught me about sex, I would love for you to read my previous blog post, reached at this link: http://adreamofanairstream.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-i-want-to-wait-til-im-married.html if you opted out of reading it, let me just make one thing clear--that I don't hate sex, it is indeed a good thing, but only within a certain context. 

but for right now I want to piggy back off of that post. my convictions from what Jesus has taught me have led me to fight to save sex until marriage. It is a tough battle! That doesn't mean that I want to condemn you for not doing the same, but it does mean that I have to make choices that are not always easy or popular to make. 

I am in love with the heart of Jesus. I believe that what he is offering the world is worth every sacrifice we can make to be a part of it. I believe his Word is without error and is a mighty strong power. And because sex (in the right context) allows us to so intimately experience God's blessings to us, there is another strong power at work doing whatever it can to distort and confuse the world's views on the subject. That resistance is an attempt to stop us from knowing and following God...ultimately trying to keep us from spending forever with the one who made us and loves us. 

I have been reading a book called God in a Brothel by Daniel Walker and I am learning just how badly sex is being distorted in the world. Millions of young women and children as young as 5 years old are being robbed of their innocence through sex slavery, human trafficking and forced prostitution. Men with money from all over the world are so obsessed and bound by sexual desires that they exploit fellow human beings in the worst way possible and most of the time don't give it any second thought. Disease, unwanted pregnancy, emotional damage, and loss of livelihood are all consequences that the victims are facing for something they are forced into. All because people want sex so bad that they are willing to go those lengths to get it. 

My heart shatters the more I read and hear about this dark, evil force. As a follower of Jesus I can only imagine the heartbreak he feels for the world. I want to stand up against this evil and do anything I can to push back against its rapid growth. I believe that I can make a difference with the decisions I make for my life. and you could argue that there are big differences between the distortion of sex through human trafficking and what's going on in our lives. I would argue back with this: God's heart breaks just as much for anybody who takes part in sexual activity (willingly or unwillingly) that is not within the sacred covenant of marriage. 

what are the parameters of sexual sin? if we were to ask Jesus, he'd say something like, "if you so much as look at a person with lust you have already crossed the line" (Matthew 27-28). the definition is  pretty cut and dry in the bible. any activitity--mentally, emotionally, physically with someone who is not your spouse is sexual sin.

as for masturbation (which, from what i hear, is encouraged most at 'passion parties') let me ask you, is it not sex that one performs with one self? Let me offer you this: God made sex for a husband and a wife, not a man/woman with his/her self. it was given to us humans to enjoy "being fruitful and multiplying (Genesis 1:28)" and we most certainly cannot be fruitful and multiply with ourselves. Herein lies the evidence i have gathered, which convinces me that masturbation falls under the category of sexual sin. 

Though the world may call masturbation "healthy", God says that it is not. It is actually quite the opposite. It damages us as people because it becomes a force in our life that we may feel like we "need" more and more. Not only that, but it will be baggage that we take with us into our marriages. If we are the ones who provide ourselves with sexual pleasure, it will be a struggle to hand that position over to our spouses, who it was supposed to belong to in the first place. I want to do all I can to preserve that precious gift that my husband will one day receive! 

Sexual sin will damage our relationship with our spouses--but more pressing is the damage it does between us and God. The reason that God hates sin is not because it makes us unloveable--he loves us no matter what. He hates sin because it tears us away from him. He hates it because it gets in the way of what he wills for us. He wants us to know true love, freedom, and the ability to love others the way he loves us. In Christ, we are able to experience the depths of those gifts as well as recognize that which interferes with receiving them. For me, the way the world offers sex is a big interference. In order to fight for my offering to God of abstinence until marriage, I have to say no to anything that does not line up with what he has taught me about sex. 

"We know that we are from God,

and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. 

And we know that the Son of God has come 

and has given us understanding, 

so that we may know him who is true; 

and we are in him who is true,

in his Son Jesus Christ. 

He is the true God and eternal life." (1 John 5:19-20 ESV)

i have come to know these things to be true, and sweeter to my soul than anything else that this world offers. My hope is that my motives are a little more clear to you and anyone else who might not understand <3 

why i want to wait til i'm married

this is my attempt to explain why i choose to wait til i'm married to have sex. 

for those of you in my life who have communicated to me that you're not sure why God would want people to wait to have sex. for those of you, like me, who have ever seriously wondered why he would tell us not to partake in such a wonderful thing.

there is an increasing, poisonous, "Christian" tolerance toward couples living together before they're married. i am not casting judgment toward anyone who chooses to live and/or have sex with people who are not their spouse. But God has a role for each of us in His plan of redemption for us, His people. 

that being said:

i want to point out that God made the "family unit" to be the first and foremost representation and demonstration of his love in this world. when you reflect on a lot of issues in the world and America, they stem from lack of a solid family unit. God made men and women to live together as such: the father leads the household and serves his wife, who is the mother of his children. The mother serves her husband with reverence for God and in doing so, their children see first hand what God's love is like and the foundations for their lives are built on it. i learned at one point that the best way for a father to love his children is to love their mother. and i say "amen" to that. 


when fathers or mothers are absent, when they're not fully committed to each other, when their relationships are not built on the foundation of God's word, the "family unit" becomes a playground for a very present enemy who thrives on feeding lies into human hearts. Lies about love, truth, and life. It causes us to turn to other things (people, appearance, status, substances) to fill the void we develop from not having that as a foundation. too many of us, as much as we may fight it, know the effect of these lies all too well. 

Song of Solomon advises us, "Don’t excite love, don’t stir it up, until the time is ripe—and you’re ready." and not for nothing. I believe that behind this huge lack in the world is the driving force of sex as it was not intended to be. Here’s the good news--we can choose to not give the enemy that kind of foothold in our lives. it is possible. "because you belong to Christ Jesus, the power of the life-giving spirit has freed you from the power of the sin that leads to death". Romans 8:2.

Now onto the juicy stuff…

People have said “you don’t know what you’re missing out on” by choosing not to have sex before I’m married. Brothers and sisters, I’m speaking from experience. All of this is coming from a heart that, once upon a time, was consumed with an unhealthy desire to fill my need to be loved by another person. Please believe me when I say, I know how real the struggle is! I know the temporary high of having connected with a person on such a deep level. I loved having sex with my boyfriend of my younger years. If we love each other, it’s okay--God gave us each other, so we can do what we want, right? WRONG. 

Well, we can do what we want. But not if we are reaching to know the fullness of God’s love. When we want to love another person more than we want to love God, as you can imagine, our hearts are on the really wrong track. Err go the struggle. 

I caught wind of God’s truth, and by His grace I grabbed onto it and ran with it, mainly because I was forced to. Here’s what happened:

I was so caught up in wanting my boyfriend to love me that I lost my grip on reality. I heard that having sex outside of marriage was bad so I wanted us to stop, but he wasn’t with it so we started hitting the brakes on our relationship. I was convinced that this was temporary and we were going to be together forever once he started thinking clearly. Looking back, I can only imagine that God’s thoughts were, “enough! You give me no choice but to tear you apart so I can put you back together again”. So God assigned a huge fish to swallow me (Jonah and the whale reference). that is a metaphor for God allowing something really bad to happen in my life so that he could get my attention, speak to me, and redirect me. Still, I thought I was meant to be with this guy. I put everything else aside and put my hope in my future with him. 

Then one day he told me about how he was having a baby with another girl. A short lived, not-even-together type of thing. I felt like I had nothing. I knew it was over. I loved him more than anything and now Everything I had hoped for was ripped away. Torn. Broken. Seemingly beyond repair. But it had to happen.

I share that story so that I have some credibility on this topic. I understand that not all sex before marriage and premature commitment ends up in a sudden catastrophe like it did for me. But I do believe whole heartedly that it eventually will. It will turn our lives into something God never intended them to be. And that is not what he desires for us. He has given us His word, his spirit and His son to help us live a life that overcomes the world’s standards and glorify his name.

sex is good. sex is holy. sex is one of God's greatest gifts to his beloved children. Sex fills our desire to be loved in the most intimate way by another person. here's the kicker: it was meant for husband and wife, the physical, more literal sense of "becoming one" with your spouse. anything else is wrong, and against the will of God for relationship between a man and a woman.

You see, God made your body. He looks at you with love and adoration, because you are his. He wants to bless you with sex. He made it for you to enjoy in the fullest. But he wants to give it to you in a safe place so it can’t be mistreated. That safe place is a God-appointed, sacred, covenantal relationship with your spouse. Because of the tremendous joy and relationship with God that is possible through sex with your spouse, the enemy is doing everything in his power to destroy it. And we feel the ramifications of it all over the world. “The enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I come so you can have real and eternal life, more and better life than you ever dreamed of” John 10:10.

Here’s the scripture that a majority of my view is based on:  

God honored the Master’s body by raising it from the grave. He’ll treat yours with the same resurrection power. Until that time, remember that your bodies are created with the same dignity as the Master’s body. You wouldn’t take the Master’s body off to a whorehouse, would you? I should hope not. There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, “The two become one.” 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 more lonely 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. Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through. Now, getting down to the questions you asked in your letter to me. First, Is it a good thing to have sexual relations? Certainly—but only within a certain context. It’s good for a man to have a wife, and for a woman to have a husband. Sexual drives are strong, but marriage is strong enough to contain them and provide for a balanced and fulfilling sexual life in a world of sexual disorder. The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband.  1 corinthians 6:14-7:4

I have come to know that there is a greater joy in life than what this world offers. I am waiting to have sex with my husband because I want to honor God. I want to find out what life is like on His terms. According to his word, those terms bring promise and life that we could never attain by doing it on our own. It takes patience and discipline. I don’t want to miss out on what He has planned for me. And honestly, its really hard to keep up with. The world makes relationships look so captivating, so fulfilling, and even though I know it’s not what God wants for me sometimes settling seems a lot better than waiting.

But I can “be of good cheer” because of promises that are bigger than what I think I’m missing out on. God delivered me, made me new, so that my past decisions and way of life no longer define who I am. God took my brokenness, my faults, and my huge mess-ups and showed me the power of his forgiveness. The power of his love for us is held in Christ. It didn't matter how far gone I was, how lost i was, or how many wrong things i did.
My identity is in Christ, whose spirit compels me and gives me the strength to face this battle. And nothing in this world can separate me from the love he has for me (Romans 8). 

There is a sweet victory in Jesus that he desires all of us to have. 

My prayer is that my story and lessons learned will fan the flame into more hearts. If you feel God nudging you to change your ways, give him the reins. If he has allowed something really painful to happen to you, don’t harden your heart toward what God is doing in you.

Surrendering to Him is one of the hardest things to live out. But from our pain, confusion, and heartache can come our most powerful ministry. His ultimate work is to connect all humans in love. and there is a desire that he develops in us during painful times to relate to and love others who have yet to receive that love. When we have known the great pain of heartache and struggle, given to God we have known the greater power His son Jesus has to heal us and bring us new life.

If you feel like you’re settling in any area of your life, you probably are, and again I say, God does not desire that for you. Let him prepare your heart too, because allowing Him to change your life always comes with a LOT of resistance. But behold, He is alive and well and still doing his great work “For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” Habakkuk 1:5

Surround yourself with truth in the form of God’s word and his praying people. He promises in Jeremiah 29 that you will find him when you seek him with your whole heart, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” John 8:32

and the Son has set me free, and I am free indeed.