Dear Delight, How Can I Maintain Purity?
Written By: Olivia Bayabona
Dear Delight,
I am not a virgin and I am just starting my journey of remaining pure to God before marriage. How can I maintain purity?
Thankfully, God is all about restoration!
The great thing about you and this question is that you have recognized that God has provided a journey for restored sexual purity!
God should be our First Love! Making God our First Love begins with confession and repentance after our mistakes.
Confession is agreeing with Him that your past behavior does not align with His will over your life. This is you making the active decision to live sexually pure with God’s strength! Repentance is trusting God’s strength to overcome temptation and to obey Him. “Repentance” means for you to flee from this sexual sin.
One way to abstain from sex before marraige is to remember the consequences of sex outside God’s will.
When I was younger my mother practiced this concept with me: She sat a jar of cookies on the kitchen counter, a very accessible, open setting. She then told me that if I take a cookie without asking her or waiting until she came home, that there would be consequences. She told me that I would go on punishment for however long, I would have to go to bed an hour early, or that I would have to do extra chores for the week! Thankfully I was a good child and never touched the cookie jar. It also wasn’t until I got a little older that I learned that some of the cookies had all types of nuts in them while I am deathly allergic to nuts. Imagine what would have happened if I did not obey her and was tempted so much to take a cookie without her permission.
Because I remembered the consequences of disobeying my mother, I restrain from indulging in such a tempting situation. This is similar to restraining from the act of sex before marriage when obeying God. There are many consequences to this such as you pulling away from your relationship with God, lowering your sense of self-worth, an increased risk of divorce, and may even reduce your satisfaction to marital sex.
Just like I was unaware of a possible allergic reaction to those pecan cookies, we don’t know the full scope of possible future consequences if we induldge in premarital sex.
So, keeping in mind the consequences of premarital sex helps us to restrain from doing it.
Another way that we can remain pure is to develop “self-boundaries.”
Some examples of “self-boundaries” are:
- Limiting to only kissing
- Limiting to holding hands
- Only hanging out in public places
- No contact at all
- No talking in a bedroom
- Only date Christians
- Have an accountability partner
While we can not change the past, we can allow God to come into our lives and heal us. While it can be difficult, it is possible. God longs for us to be pure again and with His Spirit and obedience, we can be!
Father, God, thank You for choosing your son Jesus Christ to be the one to die on the cross to save all mankind from our sins that we may be washed of our sins and live again. Father, thank You for a second chance! Help us to forgive ourselves from our sexual past and to learn from our mistakes just as David asks in Psalm 71:20, “You let me see troubles and hard times, but you will give me new life; you will restore my life again, from the depths of the Earth you will bring me up again.” With your strength, help us to remain pure even when we have misstepped, because with it is the only way possible. We give you glory God!
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
