Pure [week 3] - What Girls Wish Guys Knew...
Last week Kurt talked to you guys about some of the struggles guys face when it comes to sexual purity and how to please God instead of give in to the pressures you see around you that simply lie to you about what it means to be a young man. Becoming a man of God is not easy, it’s a battle, and it requires God’s strength not just your own will power. I’m really excited to talk to you guys today and hopefully give you the girl’s perspective on what we’ve been talking about the last 2 weeks.
So as many of you have probably figured out, girls and guys are very different and as guys this probably confuses you quite often to try to figure out why girls act the way they do. Trust me I’m a girl and I love being a girl, but sometimes I can’t even figure out my own kind. When it comes to relationships girls by nature are much more in tune with their feelings and they are much more driven by their emotions. Not that guys don’t have feelings too, but usually guys tend to be more driven visually. What you see is what you get, most guys like to keep it simple. Girls usually seem much more complex than guys because the relational and emotional parts of their brain develops faster than guys do. They actually like to analyze details and talk to each other about their feelings… I know, weird!
[Girls are like spaghetti, Guys are like waffles]
My goal today is not to give you a bunch of smooth moves to help you get a girlfriend, but I’m going to try to help you see why it is important to become the kind of guy who knows how to respect girls and how to keep yourself in check so that you honor God in your relationships with girls.
First we need to talk about a little truth about ourselves, now just to warn you this is not a warm fuzzy verse from the Bible to make us feel better about ourselves, but it cuts right to the point. Simple. Guy style:
“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” Jeremiah 17:9
This is the plain truth about all of us—guys and girls—that outside of God’s grace none of us are naturally pure and none of us has what it takes outside of God’s help. The good news is that God doesn’t leave us stuck but actually guides us and helps us fix what is broken inside of us, but none of us can do it alone. The writer of Hebrews gives some wisdom to us about why its important to hold each other up:
“You must warn each other every day, while it is still ‘today,’ so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.” Hebrews 3:13
Here’s where your part comes in… See each guy has to get to the point where he realizes that there is something that matters more than just getting what he wants, or being popular, or having a girlfriend, or watching porn, etc. and he’s real enough with himself and others to admit that he needs help. You might be wondering what this has to do with understanding girls… well let me tell you a story about when Kurt and I just started dating.
When we first started going out Kurt and some other guys had decided that they were going to hold each other accountable in this area of sexual purity. And being the manly testosterone driven college guys that they were, they decided that the consequence for messing up was to have the biggest guy, we’ll call him “the enforcer,” and he basically punched whoever messed up in the arm. Now as a girl I didn’t really understand the whole punching part, that must be a guy thing, but one thing that did stand out to me was that here was a group of guys who cared more about what God wanted for their life than about what they wanted to watch on their computer while nobody else was around. They weren’t weak pansy boys who were okay with seeing women as objects… They were real men… and as a girl this was attractive. I remember thinking “Wow, that’s the kind of guy who is willing to make God his #1 priority, that’s the kind of guy I want to be with.” And I was not the kind of girl who would just date anybody, but I noticed this about Kurt. And here’s the other thing you guys need to know, when girls notice things that stand out about a guy, they tell all their friends.
When it comes to accountability, its important to know that true strength comes from acknowledging your weaknesses and being real with others. The goal is to become more like Christ, and the only way to do that is if we are willing to accept the truth about ourselves and our need for Jesus. There’s another verse from Ephesians that is challenging men to a higher level of love and sacrifice towards their wives and the writer, Paul actually compares the picture of husband and wife to the picture of Christ’s love for the church… it’s written to husbands, but I want to challenge you guys with this thought because this kind of love doesn’t just happen by putting a wedding ring on your finger, this kind of love takes years to learn and I want you guys to start thinking now about the ways you can selflessly serve the girls who God has placed in your life as practice for how you will treat your wife one day:
Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the church—a love marked by giving, not getting. Christ's love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her Ephesians 5:25-26
Now think about the way you treat the females that are in your life, not just your crush at school, but your mom, your sisters, cousins, friends who are girls. Would you describe the way that you treat them as “everything you do and say brings out the best in her?” do you love in a way that is “marked by giving and not getting?” or do you put down your sister or disrespect your mom when she asks you to do her a favor? I would like to challenge you guys to think of ways that you can go out of your way to do something nice for your sister, or tell a girl how special they are or how beautiful they look (not just the girl you like because you want her to go out with you) or write your mom a nice note just to tell her you love her.
Maybe this surprises you, but most girls don’t know how beautiful they are… I know they’re crazy huh? But most of that is because of the ridiculous standard that is set by beauty magazines, or because they overhear guys at the mall rating girls on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their “hotness” not on qualities that really matter like being trustworthy, smart, a good friend, honest or for their love for God and commitment to purity. Now just in case it needs to be said… “Don’t be that guy!” Don’t be that guys who see’s girls for what you can get out of it. Maybe you think that this challenge I’m giving you is for the girls’ sake, so that they feel better about themselves. Honestly, that is not the point because they are hearing a message today about how they need to believe they’re beautiful because God say’s they are, not boys. This challenge is not to benefit them, it’s to benefit you. Because when you decide to treat women with respect and love, something changes in your heart. Something in you will start to see “that hot girl” that you’d used to lust after as someone’s sister, or someone’s future wife. And in the process of developing healthy friendships with girls you’ll start to learn how they think, and how each girl is unique and special, you’ll see qualities in certain friends that you’d like in a girlfriend and others that you don’t like, and you’ll help them learn too.
Your Big Idea for today is this:
Are you willing to show true strength by revealing your weaknesses to others?
Pure [week 3] - What Girls Need To Know About Guys...
As Katie discussed with you girls last week, girls face unique challenges when it comes to this issue of purity. Many of their challenges revolve around their issues with insecurity and identity. It is possible that the single most effective way to ensure that a person’s pursuit of purity is successful is to determine their trust and dependence on God. As you learned last week, without God strength, we cannot do this alone.
As we look this week at what girls need to know about guys, the main point comes down to compromise. As girls, your struggles often involve looking to other people to convince us that we are beautiful or that we are important. As we look at the Scriptures today, we hopefully will be able to understand that our identity and ultimately our worth comes from who God has created us to be. Now this is true for both guys and girls, but specifically for girls, it is easy to forget that God has made women for a purpose and that we need to be sure that we keep focused on God as we enter into the time in our lives as we look for relationships, specifically with members of the opposite sex. Girls, it's important to remember that you are the only thing God created to make a perfect creation better... Let that sink in for a second...
“God said, ‘It's not good for the Man to be alone; I will make him a helper, a companion.’ …God put the Man into a deep sleep. As he slept he removed one of his ribs and replaced it with flesh. God then used the rib that he had taken from the Man to make Woman and presented her to the Man.”
Genesis 2:18, 21-22
As we look at the creation account in Genesis 2, we see that the first thing that God said was “not good,” was the fact that the man was alone and that we are created for relationship with another person. This relationship is designed to be spiritual, emotional, relational as well at sexual. This is God’s plan for our lives. We also see that the first relationship Eve had was not with Adam, but was with God. Too often, ladies try to bypass the process of God forming and creating them into who God wants them to be, and just run over and find a man. Eve didn’t go wake Adam up and say, “Hey, I’m hot and you’re the only guy around, so lets do this thing.” This process is very important. We know that Eve sinned by eating the fruit from the tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil. Notice that what caused Eve to sin was that she took her eyes off of God, and started to focus on what she wanted. Satan’s line is still the same, “Did God really say…?”
Too often we try to entice guys to be interested in us, by the way we dress, they way we act, what we show is important in our lives, the way we text, and the way we pursue boy’s attention. Here is the deal, if you begin to get in the habit of pursuing guys now because you don’t want to be lonely, eventually you will pursue a guy and get him to marry you, and then a few years into your marriage, you will still have to be the one working to get his attention, and you will be more lonely than ever! Some of you could ask your mom about how that works. Instead, what would it be like to become the woman God wants you to be, and be so focused on God’s plan for you life, that no guy could sidetrack you... that the guys would have to actually pursue you, like run after you, to get to you. That’s called a pursuit, and each of you know that that is what you all want in your life, because that what all fairytales are about. By the way, to have guy pursue you, that means you have to say “no.” As you become more of who God wants you to be, the guys that are interested in you will be more and more like the guys that God wants you to be with.
“Let every detail in your lives, words, actions, whatever, be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.”
Colossians 3:17
If you want to live the life that God desires for you, then you have to live life God’s way. Especially when it come to dating and relationships, we need to remember who we are and who God made us to be, and that if you love Jesus it will be displayed in your character. And, your character will be matched by the character of the guys that are interested in you. What would you life be like if everything you did, even your dating life and your actions regarding sexuality, brought glory to God and caused other people to look to God and thank Him and want to follow what He has to say about purity. That is the role that God is hoping for you to live.
BIG IDEA: You are designed to improve creation, so don’t settle for “good enough.”
