PURE Series Preview - March 7th

Pure [week 4]... What Now?

This week we will wrap up the series by really focusing on God's forgiveness and the immense power there is in His grace to remove our guilt from past sexual mistakes. We want every student to know, whether they have sexual mistake already in their past or not, that God's forgiveness is big enough to cover all. We want them to understand that while different sins have different physical and emotional consequences, nothing to too big for God. Many students experience immense guilt after a bad sexual decision and often they feel like they are too far for God to reach them. We want them to know that God is not only looking and longing for them, but is actually chasing after them to bring them back to fullness in His forgiveness.

The first week of this series, we learned that purity is bigger than we think. It is important to remember that even though purity is big, and that sexual decisions are important and have far-reaching consequences, there is nothing bigger than God. Often people feel or talk about sex and God as if there is some eternal disconnect between then, but in fact God is intimately connected with our sexuality, He created and designed it, and He is always willing to help us back onto the path of pursuing purity. Virginity is a one-time reality, and when that is gone, it’s gone, however it is never too late, no matter what choices you have made in the past, or what you have done, to begin to pursue purity and allow God’s transforming love to begin to heal and direct you from this point on in your life.

It is important that while we make every effort to pursue purity at all costs, that we also know that God is not looking to us to fail, but rather took it upon Himself to make a way for us to be forgiven. God loved us so much that He allowed His Son to suffer and die a horrendous death in order to be able to reconnect with us. Therefore, it is important that we all know that there is nothing too big or too small to bring to God and ask Him for forgiveness, nor is there any sin that is unforgivable.

“Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ's love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture… None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I'm absolutely convinced that nothing - nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable - absolutely nothing can get between us and God's love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”

Romans 8:36-39

The idea of purity is because God is holy. Holy means set apart. He is totally pure.

When something impure comes in contact with the pure God, his purity transforms what is dirty, into something that’s clean, sinful into something that holy, old and broken in to some that is new and restored. I have this really annoying habit, and it’s something I know bugs me but for whatever reason every time I tell myself I’m not going to do it, I continue to do it… many times when I do my laundry, I leave the clean clothes in the laundry basket and tell myself I’ll fold them later when I have more time, for whatever reason I never remember to come back and fold them and I end up putting dirty clothes on top of the clean clothes and they end up getting mixed in with the clean ones. Ugh this is so annoying because then I have to end up washing them all again because the dirty clothes got the clean clothes dirty… This happened again the other day and it got me thinking about how God’s love works in the exact opposite way. See God is so pure, but what is interesting about God is that he loves being mixed in with dirty, impure, imperfect, flawed people. Unlike my laundry pile when God comes into contact with our dirty, sinful lives, he makes us clean, not the other way around. When we open our impure lives to a perfectly pure God, the power of His love transforms us.

Guilt drives us to maybe just change our behavior, but experiencing God’s forgiveness drives us to a freedom in Christ’s love. This freedom is the confidence of knowing that nothing can separate us from God, that when he sees us he sees us pure as we are meant to be, this doesn’t mean we won’t still struggle or be tempted sexually, it simply means that God has started a process in us to change us from the inside out. This security in Gods love comes down to a simple truth that is your Big Idea for the day that There is nothing that you can do to make God love you more, and there is nothing you can do to make Him love you less.