O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
    my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
    beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
    my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live;
    in your name I will lift up my hands.

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
    and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
when I remember you upon my bed,
    and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help,
    and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
My soul clings to you;
    your right hand upholds me.
Psalm 63:1-8

As I shared in the first part of this series, confusion about the gift of my sexuality as a woman led to hiding and shame.

The hiding came in the form of keeping anything I didn’t understand about myself physically related to sexuality a secret.  I knew that some feelings felt really good and that romantic movies or books (the ones I’m talking about were clean) or thinking about a boy that I liked increased those feelings.

But I WOULD NOT talk to anyone about it.  Just try to be good.  That meant that these feelings ran free with my imagination and even though my imagination did not include sex, (because, well, that was still confusing, icky and scary) I still felt shame.

As I began to understand what it was to know pure joy, passion and pleasure in my relationship with God, I felt like the strongest feelings I had came from two worlds.  The good, pure, right kind that I experienced spiritually and emotionally in relationship with God through Jesus, the Lover of My Soul.  And the bad, shameful, wrong kind if acted upon physically with a guy.

Would these two worlds ever come together? 

The most helpful analogy that I ever heard concerning sexuality, and I would broaden it to passion, is that it is like a river.  This river flows inside of all of us and is a gift from God.  Any sexual sin is when our desires overrun the banks, or boundaries, that God has given us.

While I heard that analogy a long time ago, I am still, ten and a half years into marriage, seeking to understand God’s design for the free God-honoring flow of this river.

The reason why it is so hard to understand is that the overrunning or perversion of sexuality is a virtual flood and it spans the world and has since the fall of man.  There are virulent strains of diseased thinking that abuse others and ourselves and fall woefully short of the perfect design God intended.

This is why I like to look at that river as the passions or desires God gives us.  Because sexual corruption is a most devastating destructor of all of the ultimate beauty God intends as we worship Him with our lives, we need the power and passion of God to overcome it. 

But with increasing clarity, I am seeing how my own confusing journey reflects much of what has been the church’s attitude and teaching regarding sexuality.  Silence. Secrecy. Shame. Sin.

We are afraid of the world’s virulent perversion and there is a healthy level of fear that is good to have and to teach others too.  However, too often this fear can be unhealthy and leave us all unequipped when our only recourse is resistance and willpower, essentially holding back the current of a very powerful river with our finite, weak bodies.

In returning to my story, I am finding something sweet and glorious as I thank God for the gift of sexuality.  By recognizing it as a gift, I give it back to Him.  I ask Him to purify all of my desires and that He would overcome every one that my life might be defined by pure passion.

Join me as I continue this series on Pure Passion.

Abby is a small-town loving, big city adventurer.  She and her husband have worked with high school students most of their lives!  Since their internship in Budapest, Hungary in 2005-2006, they have been working with the ministry of CRU.  In May of this year, they moved to Hungary answering God's call to work long-term with the students of Central and Eastern Europe.  Abby loves to laugh, especially at herself, has a passion for God and making Him known and is ever learning how to do that with three small children, ages 5, 3 and one month.  She wouldn't trade the journey for anything!  She blogs regularly at Fan the Flame   
If you'd like to read more from this contributor, type her name in the search box on the top right.

Sharing this over at these awesome blogs

“And David danced before the Lord with all his might. And David was wearing a linen ephod.” 
2 Samuel 6:14

I am like many good Christian girls.  I have certainly had moments of rebellion, but by the Grace of God I never strayed very far from the path of what I was taught early in my life about morality.

The problem is that most of my life I have been quite confused about what that meant in regards to my God-given sexuality that is a gift to every woman.

When it was time for me to learn about the birds and the bees I was given a book about gerbils.  Yes gerbils.  It was called ‘Susie’s Babies’ and I sincerely hope that it is out of print.  I read it front to back and I had absolutely no idea what it was really talking about.  The mommy and the daddy gerbil ‘got together’ and then came the baby gerbils.  Okay then.

My mom might have liked the book because her name was Susie.  It was also more education than she got from her mother.  She was always very private with her own affection with my father and combine that with the lowest, most distant points of their marriage happening during my adolescence and well, there was a lot of…confusion.

She asked if I had any questions and I didn’t because well, what more was there to know?  I always got good grades and graduated high school as the valedictorian. But as far as street smarts, well, I didn’t have any. There’s a side of this that is pure and innocent and I wouldn’t trade it for anything!

But there is another side that was mired in ignorance that lent itself to sex being a secret, hush-hush thing.  And where there is silence and the legacy of a fallen world there is hiding and shame.

For me the hiding and shame led to some embarrassing situations as I attended public school through high school. The innocence protected me and a lot of innuendo went over my head, but not all of it. 

The confusion increased and it was much later than ‘Susie’s Babies’ that I actually understood and put some major pieces together. Since I understood…everything after everyone else, I instantly felt great embarrassment and shame.

I graduated high school and went to a Christian college which was a great choice for me. But even here, I was still innocent and confused about a lot relative to my peers. But, as I embraced, for the first time, the passion God had given me for Himself, I came like a child to Him and my purity was transformed to wild, full, uncorrupted passion for Him.

 The joy I experienced in my relationship with God was better than anything that I could imagine and I related to others with a type of blissful ignorance that allowed me to live unashamed, uninhibited. 

The best example of this was when I was studying in Spain during my junior year. Many of my fellow students were not believers and definitely not innocent. We had stopped at an old Spanish palace and grounds on the way back to Barcelona from Madrid. Almost everyone had returned to the bus, including me. There was a gorgeous sunset and I was vocally exclaiming my praise.

I remember hearing some of the others and our advisors snickering as they made fun of me. I understood enough to know why. The way I was expressing myself was something they could only understand as coming from the pleasure of sex.

I think my blissfully oblivious self took a bit of a hit that day.  But more than any feeling of embarrassment, I remember feeling pity for them. How sad that the only way they understood this level of pleasure was sexually and since none of them were married it was not the good-gift-from-God sexuality they referenced!  I remember the Lord speaking clearly to my heart that I had nothing to be ashamed of, but rather my expression of praise and worship brought great joy to Him.  

This was a major moment of clarity for me. I had the knowledge to not be confused about sex or sexual innuendo, yet a depth of pure, unbridled passion for God to know that His love is the greatest and NOTHING in the spectrum of human pleasure could compare.

Join me for this series as I continue to share what I have learned about Pure Passion.

Abby is a small-town loving, big city adventurer.  She and her husband have worked with high school students most of their lives!  Since their internship in Budapest, Hungary in 2005-2006, they have been working with the ministry of CRU.  In May of this year, they moved to Hungary answering God's call to work long-term with the students of Central and Eastern Europe.  Abby loves to laugh, especially at herself, has a passion for God and making Him known and is ever learning how to do that with three small children, ages 5, 3 and one month.  She wouldn't trade the journey for anything!  She blogs regularly at Fan the Flame   

If you'd like to read more from this contributor, type her name in the search box on the top right.

Sharing this over at these awesome blogs

The world is constantly bombarding us with sexual images, situations, ideas, philosophies, and innuendos. I will admit that there have been times that I have been blindsided by temptation or impure thoughts. As a young girl, it was the sleepovers with classmates who talked about sex, watched bad movies, and listened to impure music. As a teen, it was the steamy novel that I picked up unknowingly. As a young adult, it was the good TV series that turned sexual to keep its ratings up. In my mid-twenties, it was the unsaved co-worker who wanted to date me when I was lonely. I wish I could say that I responded to all of these temptations in the right way, but I didn’t. 

So whatever you feed grows right. (By the way, if you want a good laugh, check out this post illustrating this) If we don't take thoughts captive, they eventually give birth to death. Our thoughts can be the very thing that kills us. Have you ever thought about that? Rather than having your life destroyed by cancer, car crash or tornado, the most probable way of our life could be destroyed is by our own thoughts gone wild.

In my previous post I spoke about lust, and how lust doesn't have to be just a guy lusting after a lady. Lust is anything that we go after that isn't what God wants us to go after. But there is a big issue that has been brought to my attention lately that has to do specifically with lust. I will explain with a story from my own experience.

A friend and I were really into this TV show where the main character had his shirt off most the time. My friend and I would look forward to each new episode, and after we had finished watching the show we sat and talked about how hot this guy was. One time after we had watched the show and talked about this attractive man we went online to find more pictures of this guy and drool over his body.

What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the word "lust"?

I think many of us think of a man drooling inappropriately over a woman... Or if you're me, maybe the color red.... (honestly, that's what popped into my mind!)

How is lust defined? The Greek word most commonly used in the New Testament is epithymia which is defined as "desire, craving, longing, desire for what is forbidden, lust."

 Sex. Let’s just get that word out there. I am going to tell you some pretty personal things about my relationship but I think it helps to really portray what God wants us to know. The Bible calls us to keep the marriage bed pure. “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” Hebrews 13:4 (NIV)

Nothing gets under my skin more than when someone takes this verse and relates it to God not wanting us to experience joy or Christians trying to control people’s lives. Why would God have made it joyful to participate in this activity if he doesn't want us to experience it? God wants this for us, just to not abuse it. BUT WHY??