I recently heard a mentor of mine share how he pleads with teens in his church about sexual purity: "Purity paves the way for intimacy."
I like that. It takes something that is almost wholly thought of in terms of the negative ("purity" usually equals "I don't get to do what I want to do") and focuses it on the positive fruit that is the outcome of a life of purity.
Sexual purity is a means to a greater ends. It is a "no" that serves a much bigger, much more significant "YES." The final word in our life with Christ is always "YES!" We get some "no's" along the way, but they always, always, always are there to serve and bless us...to lead us into the joy of the yes.
Intimacy is what we were designed for. Purity makes a way for genuine intimacy to happen. It's not that purity automatically means intimacy. It's that without purity, genuine intimacy is much more difficult to cultivate.
Impurity builds walls, builds more obstacles to the life of intimacy that we are hard-wired for. Given our fallen and hiding nature, intimacy is already challenging. When we fall into a pattern of sexual sin, it only makes matters worse, more complicated, sometimes impossible.
This is challenging stuff given that in my work with college men my operating assumption is that there's some degree of ongoing porn consumption unless I know for a fact that it is otherwise. I don't know as much about post-college-age men, but my guess is that this struggle doesn't magically dissipate once someone has a diploma.
But porn and the hook-up culture and all our other ways of acting out sexually are like trying to find a short-cut to intimacy that dead-ends before the promise is delivered. All sin is like that. Sin makes promises that it can't deliver on and leaves us with the consequences.
All the various abuses and distortions of the gift of sex are like drinking salt water. It never actually meets the thirst for intimacy that we were designed for.
Purity paves the way for intimacy. That's worth pursuing. That's something worth fighting and living for.
2 comments:
remember, issues of purity, sexuality, pornography, etc. are not just issues that MEN deal with. unfortunately they are issues for women, too (yes... even pornography), and also unfortunately, that fact is often over looked, and therefore not acknowledged and dealt with. just a little amendment. :)
amanda,
thanks so much for the amendment. sorry to overlook the women's struggles here, it's definitely an issue and made even more taboo to talk about because it's almost expected that guys deal with it...and that women don't.
apologies if this post fed into that. over the past several years i've tried to acknowledge the women's struggles whenever i address this stuff and i neglected to do so here.
thanks for the help, amanda!
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