Cultivating Purity (Pt. 2): Breaking it Down

After my last post you’re were either offended or intrigued by the thought of changing the way we think about purity and sin. Let me explain what I mean.

The Apostle Paul tries passionately to convince new believers that they are not made right with God by keeping a perfect record (Rom. 3:21-23, Phil 3:9, Gal 2:16). He states that we are made right with God by simply accepting Christ’s sacrifice for us as the adequate payment for our wrongdoings (past, present, and future). Be clear that neither he, nor I, are saying that you should just do whatever twirls your carousel. On the contrary, we still do the things that the law instructs, but not because we are cut off and defiled before God if we don’t.

As believers in Christ, that’s not to be our driving motivation for living a pure life. We live a pure life because it’s part of the character of Jesus that we want to develop in our lives.

So here’s how it works: Jesus makes us right with God by his sacrifice. That makes us pure in the “spiritual” sense. Then he gives us his Holy Spirit to help us develop a habit of purity in our daily lives. We then make daily decisions that determine the development of our character.

As long as we are focused on “not sinning”, we’ll keep circling back to the things we don’t want to do. I learned, from my dad, the saying ,“where the head goes, the body will follow”. Experts tell us that the best way to break a habit is not to focus on breaking it, but to replace it with a different one. So if you’ve got a bad habit like pornography, sexual promiscuity, fantasizing, etc., then the only way to break that habit is to develop a habit of purity.

For a few years, I’ve been making notes of the things that help to cultivate purity and faithfulness in my life. Here are a few things from my list:

• Write down one thing a day about my wife that I love
• Brag about her to other people, especially women
• Shut down all visual media at 11 pm every night at the latest
• Go to bed with my wife
• Be honest with her about everything
• Develop close friendships that I can be truthful about my life with
• Keep myself from being in private with someone of the opposite sex
• Invite my wife into every relationship I have with a girl
• Talk candidly about sex with my wife
• Study Song of Solomon for a godly perspective on sex and relationships
• Limit my TV time
• Learn to “bounce” my attention from temptation instead of meditating on how bad it is and that I shouldn’t look at it

There are plenty more things you can do, but the point is, purity isn’t something you protect from being destroyed. It’s something you cultivate and care for. Make it your quest to cultivate purity.

I’d love to hear some of your habits that help to cultivate purity in your life.

Cultivating Purity

Don’t think of a guy in a hotdog costume playing a Casio keyboard. What did you do? You thought about it, didn’t you? That tactic never works, does it? I’ve played golf, I’ve played soccer (football for the rest of the world), I’ve played racquetball, and the same scenario unfolds. I tell myself, “just don’t hit the tree/goalie/my friend in the eye”. What happens? I never fail to do exactly the thing that I’m trying so hard to avoid. Why is it, then, that we use this flawed approach when it comes to sin, especially sexual sin?

Have you ever tried not to think of a naked woman/man? Have you ever told yourself, “don’t stare at that girl’s cleavage!”? What happens? How bout when you inevitably do make a poor choice and look at pornography or get frisky with your girlfriend or boyfriend? You feel terrible, right? You beat yourself up for it, beg for forgiveness, determine never to do that again, right? I don’t know about you, but as I continue to meditate on what I don’t want to do again, I end up finding myself tempted by that exact same thing and do it again, only to feel worse.

Why do we use this tactic when it comes to sexual sin? I think it’s because of how we think of purity. We treat it as though it’s a criminal record. We think that we start out with a clean slate, then we make a foolish choice and that goes on our record. We get so upset about messing up our perfect record and obsess about that choice and how it took away some of our purity, our perfection. So we confess and ask forgiveness and then we’re perfect again. All we have to do is keep sin from robbing us of our purity again. But what if purity isn’t something that can be stolen? What if it’s not a perfect record? What if it’s a character trait, a habit, like a fruitbearing plant that is to be cultivated?

I’ll go deeper into this in the next post. But until then, I’d love to hear your responses to that question.