How do you renew purity and become right with God after giving your virginity away?

Great question. Because we live in such a sexually-charged culture, there is this perception that one is permanently marked as “impure” after having sex for the first time. While the dynamics may be different it seems that as a culture we have not come much further than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Victorian Classic, The Scarlet Letter. Particularly within the church, we are even further behind in how we talk about sex and purity. I hope this can change.

Becoming right with God is an endless and exhausting endeavor. In fact, I’ve never met anyone that can get right with God whether they have had sex or not. It’s a bit bewildering why our churches don’t make a bigger deal about lying, cheating, stealing or stewarding our money, but churchgoers often hop on this bandwagon of ultra-condemnation io someone who has sex before they are married. The reality is that sin makes it impossible to be right with God, regardless of what the sin is. On our own we cannot become pure or get right with God. That’s the bad news. The Good News is that the story of the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ is a story about a God that welcomes his children back over and over again. We discover a God that gets down on his knees and washes the feet of the ones he loves. We do not make ourselves right with God; it is Jesus, his life, sacrifice and glorious resurrection that make us right with God. Our job is to trust and believe that such love is genuinely for us. Even those of us that have made mistakes sexually.

God is dying (and in fact has died!) to free you of the guilt and shame that so often comes along with such sin. The church is in need of repenting for perpetuating such guilt and shame. When we believe that we are loved, forgiven and purified by a God who seeks relationship with us, we begin to change. Our decision to follow Christ might be a one-time deal, but the whole idea of transformation and purification is an ongoing process. Scripture tells us of a woman caught in adultery that Jesus does not condemn. He does however encourage her to start anew and sin no more. In the story you get the idea that Jesus’ great hope for this woman is that she would never find herself in that position again -- a position driven by guilt, judgment and condemnation.

In Christ we are a new creation, only by the work that Jesus has accomplished. Our job is to simply believe that it is a love for us that we are to share with others. That is what purifies us.