"Virgin" is not a curse word!

Sometimes watching TV – something that is supposed to be relaxing – can result in righteous indignation.  This happened to me recently.  I was channel surfing; I happened to land on a TV drama.  A man and woman were talking.  I didn’t see the whole scene, but it was apparent that these two had just met for the first time; they probably didn’t even know each other’s names.  But the scene abruptly changed to them having sex.  Afterwards, the man proceeded to ask the woman for her telephone number, and she answered, “Let’s not ruin this by getting to know each other.”  So they just agreed to go their separate ways.  The man smiled and said to himself, “It’s a golden age.”

This scene sends a powerful false message.  One of my heroes, Rebecca St. James, once put it this way: “I see so many in my generation ripped off; believing the lies that they are seeing in TV or movies: that you can do whatever you want, with whomever, at whatever time.  ‘Just do it.’  But they are not talking about the consequences.”  She’s right.  If you touch a hot stove, you burn your hand.  Similarly, if someone were to have casual sex like the scene described in the previous paragraph, they wouldn’t just glibly say, “It’s a golden age.”  To the contrary, there are inevitable consequences.

A few months ago, my mom and I came across a multitude of sermons that we knew nothing about.  My dad, the skilled organizer, without anyone’s knowledge, had stored them in a movie credenza.  What a treasure to find!  In my mind, uncovering these sermons speaks yet again to Dad’s strong faith in God.  One of the sermons in that credenza was preached back in 2006; the message was on sexual purity until marriage.   At one point the pastor gave these eye-opening and bleak statistics:

“Sexual transmitted diseases infect 3 million teenagers every year.  1.3 million new cases of gonorrhea occur annually…Syphilis is at a 40 year high, with 134,000 new infections every year.  500,000 new cases of herpes occur annually…There are 4 million cases of Chlamydia that occur annually.  And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg of the sexually transmitted disease epidemic that has come into play.”

The Bible repeatedly tells us to remain sexually pure until married life.  As I said in my blog title for today: “virgin” is not a curse word!  But have you ever asked yourself why God advocates sexual abstinence until marriage?  I submit to you that one of the reasons is because He knows that there are a myriad of negative consequences for choosing sexual involvement with whomever you happen to desire.

You say, “Kevin, I’m in full agreement with you.  But the sad truth is, I have been sexually active. What hope is there for me?”  The Bible presents a glorious and liberating truth. The Bible says, “The blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin…If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:7, 9).  There is hope for you!  Jesus shed His blood on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.  Once again, to quote Rebecca St. James, “You can be pure, clean, and whole again in God’s sight.  It doesn’t mean you’re not going to have those memories; because the memories will still be there to some extent.  But there’s that hope and that forgiveness.”

Let me conclude with this illustration.  Suppose you are driving somewhere, and you realize that you have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way.  Nothing looks familiar.  What do you do in that situation?  You turn around; you make a U-turn.  If you have been on the road of sexual indulgence, today is the day to stop, and turn around.  The Biblical concept here is repentance.  I love this quote by Charles Spurgeon: “Repentance is a discovery of the evil of sin, a mourning that we have committed it, [and] a resolution to forsake it.  It is, in fact, a change of mind of a very deep and practical character, which makes the man love what once he hated, and hate what once he loved” (source: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-repentance).

Kevin