Years ago, I never would have even given purity a second thought. Now, it permeates my heart and mind and life and everything I do and do not do is measured against it. Purity.
I grew up like every girl did: dreaming of romance and love and fun adventures with friends. I lived out my life daring myself to reach past the barriers and experience all that life had to offer. Sadly, I was reaching out to sin, not to Christ, so I was only getting the pain and the wounds and the darkness of life, none of the joy or peace or prosperity or comfort that Christ brings.
The scars still exist, but the wounds have healed.
I don’t think anything has damaged me more than my loss of purity and innocence. Thankfully, I was protected by my loving Father and never had boyfriends. He covered me in so many ways. Just like the majority of us, the damage inflicted on my purity was primarily by my own actions.
Much later in life, I began to desire to be clean. I was serving God, and had been for many years, and the weight of bondage kept me from gaining any traction. I struggled to overcome anything, due to the things that held me tightly in their grasps. I knew that I could have freedom, for Christ promised us that and purchased it for us on the Cross, but I seemed to be stuck in a vicious cycle and there was no hope I’d ever get out.
When I fully turned my focus on Christ, things changed, and I was free for two or so years. I slowly began to look for studies and conferences on purity, in the hopes that I could find others like me, others that struggled in the darkness and now longed for the light. Alas, the studies were few and far between and the one purity conference I had discovered in my area were for youth groups only.
Set adrift, God revealed the call of purity onto my life in a light way. “Study it for yourself,” He said. And so I began.
It feels like centuries since that happened, and so much has happened since, but it has only been 5 or 7 years. And, in that time, it has come for mere purity to radical purity and a call so foreign in this day and age that it frightens people when I speak of it.
No one wants to believe that they can do more in regards to purity’s call. It requires too much, doesn’t it? I mean, what would you have to let go of? What would you have to release from your life? Who would you have to walk away from? What would you have to stop doing? Too much. Just too much.
When you consider the fact that purity covers all of your life: Heart, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Body and Eyes…it’s a pretty big call. Too big for most. It’s easier to let the little compromises of life have their way. It’s easier to watch what you want and listen to what you want and say what you want, than to try to be radical in the realm of purity.
Sadly, purity is not preached anymore. I have yet to hear it touched on. I had thought, a few months ago, that God was bringing our church to a new level of purity, to a new place. I could almost feel it vibrating in my soul. However, this is not the case. I stand here and I think, “Well, Lord, I know now that I must carry on alone, until the time when You send others to walk alongside me.”
Radical purity is a lonely road.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. In fact, due to the loneliness of this road, I am procrastinating as best as I know how. But, I cannot do that any longer. There is a call to purity, a call to radical purity, that the church refuses to hear. Purity has become the bad word of the church today, along with modesty. The fact that churches now embrace sexual sin as normal shows us how far we’ve drifted from the call of God.
Did we truly forget that Christ has called us to be holy as He is holy? Have we truly lost sight of what holiness is? We wrap up our sin in a veil of grace and continue on our merry way, ignoring the warning signs and the traps laid by the enemy to snare our souls.
Consider the fact that most single’s ministries are actually dating clubs. Consider the fact that there are actually Christian dating sites and Christian speed dating and that they are popular. Consider the fact that women have been date raped on a first date with a man they met on said sites…meaning that they had to be alone with a strange man in order for that to happen. Consider the fact that our teen girls cringe at the word ‘modesty’ and consider it to mean ugly, out-dated and out of fashion. Consider the last time you heard a sermon on purity from the pulpit in your church. Consider the fact that, due to lack of understanding, our young girls are lured out of the church by flattery, not knowing the difference between genuine compliments and false flattery. Consider the fact that many women were low-cut blouses daily, including Sunday, showing more than they ever should. Consider the amounts of affairs that happen within the ministry and within the church due to people ignoring the warning signs and spending time alone in mixed company, selling their hearts through emotional entanglements, and losing more than they thought possible by falling into fornication and affairs.
I wonder, does the church want to change, or do they desire to just keep going on and on down this road? Where is our desire for purity? Where is our longing for it in our own lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ? Why is the subject taboo, hidden under the guise of grace and mercy and love? Deal with the sins of the people. Stop tap dancing around the truth.
Hephzibah 