Young Women on Fire

Absolute Purity

2010-04-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

If we, as young women, would be brutally honest with ourselves we would have to admit that our view of purity centers around our virginity. If you hear someone say "I'm keeping myself pure until marriage" they probably perceive "purity" as not having sex. At least I know for a fact I viewed it that way even until a few years ago. God had to open the eyes of my heart and help me to understand what purity truly is. I am a married woman and I still have to remain pure in this impure world. I have to remain a godly woman in an ungodly world. I have to remain holy in an unholy world. That is what our King expects from us. We are His Princesses. It cost Jesus everything so that we could be totally free from this world that is only a shadow in what God has promised us eternally.

1 Corinthians 3:16 "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?"

If we could just grasp the fact that when we ask Jesus to be Lord of our lives and over our bodies, He actually comes to dwell inside of us. He doesn't just appear when we wake up everyday. He doesn't just show up when we walk into church or Sunday School. He is living inside of us. Wherever we go, He goes. He is always with us. My husband recently gave me a clearer view as to where the Holy Spirit actually is in our lives. He said some of us choose to keep Him locked up in a box and only let Him into some parts of our lives. I want to ask you a question today. Do you do that? Do you keep the Holy Spirit in a box and only open it when you choose to or are you allowing Him to completely saturate every area of your life? Are you allowing Him to purify your heart, your mind, your soul, and your spirit? Do you desire to be the temple of the Living God or are you just wanting to keep Jesus in your own little box where He can be accessed at your convenience?

I believe with all of my heart if we want to live a life that is completely pure in God's eyes then we have go to stop compromising our bodies with the culture's insistent message that nothing we have is sacred. It is worth it to pursue intimacy with our Heavenly King alone and wait for Him to write an earthly love story for us. It is worth it to keep ourselves set apart for our King. It doesn't matter what the other girls or guys around you say "true purity" is. You cannot continue to compromise your precious body that the King himself formed with what the culture is saying you should be and do. We need the Holy Spirit to lead and direct us in every area of our lives. He cannot do that when we keep Him in a box.

Allow God to help you set boundaries to protect your sacred sanctuary that is set apart for the King himself. Allow Him to penetrate your spirit with His unending love today and strengthen you so that you will desire to be pure in His eyes.

My prayer for you today is that: "Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God" Ephesians 3:17-19

Your Sister in Christ,

Misty

Building an Intimate Relationship with our Prince

2010-04-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

As young women, we are often more worried about finding a boyfriend than discovering our Prince. And yet, an ongoing, passionate romance with our true Prince is the foundation for success in every other area of life. So how do we develop that intimate relationship?

To be a true princess for Jesus, we must develop an inner sanctuary for Him. 1 Corinthians 6:19 asks "do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?" We need to keep that temple clean and pure.

Imagine your wedding night: everything was perfect at the ceremony and reception, and now you and your new husband are walking in to your hotel room to spend your first night together. He sweeps you up in his arms and carries you over the threshold, then kisses you tenderly before gently setting you down. It is so romantic! But then you notice that instead of roses, you smell something disgusting. You look around and realize that your room, the place where you were going to spend your romantic wedding night, is covered in garbage. There are bags of rotting food and lawn trash, soda cans and bottles, paper and food wrappers scattered everywhere. As you look again, sure that your eyes are playing tricks on you, you see that there are also people in the room. All of your old boyfriends are standing there, watching you with something that looks too much like lust to make you feel comfortable. One of them comes up to you, takes your hand, looks you in the eyes and says, "hey, baby." Then you notice a movement behind you, and you turn and watch in horror as your new husband leaves the room. You run after him and ask him where he is going, but all he says is "I can't be with you tonight - not like this." Your wedding night is ruined, and your groom is gone.

Obviously this story would never happen in real life, right? I mean, no one in their right mind would let trash and old boyfriends in the room on her wedding night. But when it comes to spending time with Jesus, this is exactly what happens. There is so much garbage in our hearts that there is barely room for Him, and our other lovers have staked so many claims on our time that there is no time left for Him. An intimate relationship with Jesus is impossible while so many other things clamor for our attention.

So how do we get rid of these attention hogs? We need to take out the trash! Galatians 5:24 tells us, "among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good - crucified" (The Message). We need to weed those things out of our lives in order to truly belong to Him.

Jesus sacrificed himself to cleanse us of our sins, and the Bible tells us that he moves our sins away from us "as far as the east is from the west" (Psalm 103:12). All we have to do is ask Him. Leslie Ludy, author of Authentic Beauty, suggests taking these steps to cleansing the trash and sin from our lives:

Get alone, with plenty of uninterrupted time, in a place where you are comfortable talking to God. Play worship music or songs of surrender softly in the background, and make sure to take a pen and some paper with you.
Ask God to show you, one by one, the sins in your life, past and present, that need to be dealt with. This can hurt, but as you go through all the trash in your heart, you will begin to feel a freedom like never before. Also ask Him to reveal the "other lovers" in your life - the things that take up your time and attention.
Deal with your sins. If you have hurt someone, call or visit them, repent and ask them for forgiveness.
Make every part of your life right to the best of your ability. Destroy things that have a hold over you, like mementos from a past relationship, or objects that cause you to act in a way that is displeasing to Jesus, such as seductive clothes.
Step away from your other lovers. If you spend all of your time watching TV or playing on the computer, set a time limit for yourself each day. If your attention is spent on friends, stop seeing as much of them and set yourself some time alone with Jesus.

It is hard to hear these steps, because often we don't want to give up certain things. Sometimes we may think that we will have nothing if we give up the lovers to which we cling. But God has promised to take care of us, and Psalm 37:4 reminds us of this promise: "delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." You will find that once you take out your trash and kick out your other lovers, you will have made a pure place, a sacred sanctuary, for Jesus in your life. And when He is your Prince, your Lover, and your life is consumed with an intimate relationship with Him, you will lack nothing. He will enhance the areas of your life that you thought would be destroyed when you got rid of the trash.

- Pam

Living a Lily White Life

2010-04-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

Purity. We hear it all the time: "You should remain pure for your future husband or wife." But what does that even mean? And why would my future spouse care?

Purity often seems like a sterile rule, forced upon us for no apparent reason except to make us miserable while everyone else is having fun. This notion is reinforced every day on TV and in movies and songs, not to mention in the lives of our friends. Many people mock innocence; purity is something to be ridiculed and avoided.

When you finally meet your true Prince, Jesus Christ, purity starts to make sense. When you decide to give yourself to Him, your heart, soul, mind and body, you want them to be pure. You want to be set apart for Him - a soft, pure white lily surrounded by the dirt of the world. But if you aren't, don't despair. He will make you lily white, if you let Him!

True purity is not something that we can achieve on our own. It is so much more than waiting for your spouse. True purity is complete set-apartness for Jesus, and it can only come when we allow Him to shape us into His likeness.

Maybe you feel like you have been so bad that you can never be made pure. Maybe you're thinking, "I can never get clean, so what's the point of even trying?" Maybe you feel good with your life the way it is, and you don't want to change. Or maybe you're just feeling lazy. These are just EXCUSES! The truth is, you are never too broken for Jesus. Your life will not be perfect if Jesus is not the most important part of it. We need to stop making excuses (and I'm speaking to myself just as much as to anyone else) and start working on our relationship with Jesus.

It's not easy. There is so much going on in our lives: school, work, sports, friends, dating... the list can go on forever. And then there is the emotional baggage that we carry everywhere that also weighs us down. When is there time to work on another relationship?

Jesus does not live at the frantic pace of our world. He is a still, small voice that is easily drowned out by the confusion and clamor of life. So to truly discover Him as our Prince and know Him as our lover, we must become like the princesses in fairy tales who leave everything behind to follow the one they love.

We cannot stay where we are and go with Jesus.

In my next post, I'll give you some practical tips from Leslie Ludy's book Authentic Beauty to help you (and myself) leave behind everything else to follow Jesus.

Until then,

Pam

Finding our Inner Princesses

2010-04-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

We have been studying from Leslie Ludy's book "Authentic Beauty" for several months now. In this book, Leslie guides us through a journey to find our inner princess - a dream that most of us secretly cherish for many years. We all grew up watching the Disney princesses - Cinderella, Snow White, even Belle and Jasmine - and, if we are honest with ourselves, we wanted to be just like them.

The truth is, there is a princess inside each of us. No, life is not a fairy tale. No, a knight in shining armor riding a white horse is not going to come sweep us off our feet. But there is a prince out there for each of us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He loves us unconditionally. He is a friend who is always there. He loves us, sees us as beautiful and deeply desires us. He doesn't pressure us. He doesn't judge. He waits for us to come to him. And when we do, He washes us clean. He takes away the filthy rags we've been wearing and replaces them with a sparkling gown fit for a princess. He makes our wounded, bleeding hearts whole again. Who could this prince be, who does all this? That's right - He is Jesus.

Most of us don't ever realize that Jesus Christ is not a flimsy, flannel-board figure from a Sunday school lesson, a stern dictator looking down on us from heaven to make sure we obey His rules or a distant being too busy running the world to care about us. Jesus is so much more than these labels that we make to pigeon-hole Him. He is the Lover of our souls, our true Prince, the One we have been longing for, searching for and dreaming of since childhood. No matter how many times our dreams have been shattered, how many times our hearts have been trampled or how far away we have strayed from Him, He is always there, waiting patiently for us to invite Him to rescue us from the bleakness of a life lived without Him.

Yours in Him,

Pam