Hayley DiMarco - True Purity: More Than Just Saying No to You-Know-What

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the stead-fastness of Christ.

2 Thessalonians 3:5

True puritygot some? Want some? Not even sure what it is? Then youve come to the right place. True purity aint what you think. In fact, it might not even be what the adults in your life think.

A Dirty Water Story

Theres a common practice among well-meaning speakers that talk about purity, and it goes something like this: Take two bottles of water and set one aside. Have someone open the other bottle and drink from it. Now give it to someone else and have them drink from it. Do this five or six times, then take that backwashed bottle along with the unopened bottle and ask someone in the audience, Which bottle would you wantthe unopened, pure bottle or the one thats dirty from being passed around to who knows who? Who would want that? This illustration and many others like it are being used to convince young people to wait to have sex before marriage. The race is on to tell you this dirty water story before you have a chance to offer your water to someone. But there are two major problems with these kinds of stories:

1. It ignores the fact that there are likely many dirty water people in the audience hearing the message and thinking, Who would want me?
2. The speaker doesnt understand, or at least doesnt accurately communicate, what purity really is or where it comes from.

What we want to do with this book is get real about what true purity is. We want to show you that its not about how you get it or how you keep it; purity is not what you do or dont do. And heres the kicker: true purity is found in a person who isnt you and can never be you.

A Dirty Secret

When someone at your church says, We are having a purity weekend! whats the first thing that comes to mind? Probably dating, relationships, and sex (or the planned absence of them from your life!). While purity does affect how you make decisions in those areas of your life, true purity is not about saying no to you-know-what. Truth is, a lot of adults in the church use the word purity in a really limited sense to convey an important message on an important topic. Theyre not lying to you when they say that the decisions you make about your body and sex before marriage have huge implications for your physical, emotional, and spiritual life. But purity isnt about just saying no; purity (or the lack of it) affects every aspect of your life, and sex is just one of those areas. So if you limit your understanding of purity, you might just miss out on who God is, what he has done, and who you are.

You see, in order to keep you from making the biggest mistake of your life, many adults have made sex the be-all and end-all of purity. They create purity pledges, purity balls, and purity rings. What they are really talking about is abstinence, which is something Christians and non-Christians alike can practice. They make your self-effort to remain sexually pure their number one spiritual ambition for you; how to save yourself for marriage, remain abstinent, and avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancies is worthy education, after all. But premarital sex and all its side effects are just symptoms of an impure life, not the extent of it. Purity in the life of faith is a heart issue. Its more about how much of yourselfyour heart, mind, and soulyou have given to your passions and your desires for the things of this world than it is about just your love life. When you fail to love God with 100 percent of your heart, as Jesus taught in Matthew 22:37, your devotion to God becomes impure, tainted by a love for this world that pulls at you and drags you in the opposite direction of faith. And we all fail at that 100 percent thing, by the way. Its that failure, this impure devotion (or sin), that leads you to give yourself to the pursuit of happiness in the things of this world rather than in the presence of God.

When your heart is tainted by the love of this world and the pursuit of all its goodies, whether you are sexually immoral or not, you are living an impure life. Boom. Let that sink in. You are no longer living to bring God all the glory but are holding on to a little bit of that glory, or happiness, for yourself. This impurity then starts to invade all the areas of your life like an infection slowly creeps through your bloodstream and soon takes over your entire body. As you let the impurity of devoting yourself to something other than God distract your heart, steal your thoughts, and control your actions, you end up obeying the call of your flesh to do things that you desperately dont want to do but cant seem to stop. Then things start to control you. You start to say things like I just cant help it or I wish I could stop. You end up going places you never meant to go and doing things you never wanted to do, and life gets out of control. You wonder why you dont feel the way you used to feel about God. You start to have pangs of guilt, feelings of loss, and aches of regret. And slowly, like the infection that infiltrates the body, the bacteria of impurity pollutes your soul and the fire you used to feel for God dims, while your passion for the things of this world is stoked. This is the essence of impurity.