The Thought of the Week
by Georgie Márquez-André
August 29, 2004
Chastity - One Man and One Woman
Chastity - purity of the body; freedom from all unlawful commerce of sex; freedom from obscenity.
Chastity - the state or quality of being chaste.
Chaste - refraining from sexual intercourse, regarded as contrary to morality or religion; celibate.
I Corinthians 6:13b - "...the body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord,..."
I Corinthians 6:18 - "Flee from sexual immorality..."
And then, there's Song of Solomon - God doesn't just talk about what not to do. He doesn't see sex as bad, or dirty...but he created human sexuality to be always related to purity.
Purity - freedom from foreign admixture or heterogeneous matter (as in the purity of water); cleanness; freedom from guilt or the defilement of sin; innocence; chastity; freedom from contamination by illicit sexual connection.
We never think of putting these two together: sex and purity.
Yet if God created humans as sexual beings (which he did: Gen. 2:24-25), and if He warns that the body is not meant for sexual immorality (1 Cor 6:18), then, we've got to believe that there is such a thing as sexual morality, a "good, pure, moral" sexuality.
Indeed, it is God who inspired the author of Solomon to write Song of Solomon 5:2-3, "I slept but..."
And it is God who describes his relationship with Israel as one of lover and bride: Ezekiel 16:8ff.
So ultimately, the only way to be chaste, to be pure, to truly walk in chastity might be not so much to concentrate on the don'ts, the rules and regulations dealing with what we cannot do, but rather, to celebrate the joy and pleasure of pure, clean, sexuality, as God meant it.
Let us reclaim what the enemy has so successfully tarnished and sullied.
Christians need to rejoice, and teach our children to rejoice, over the wonderful gift of having been created as sexual beings. We were given bodies capable of joining us to another person in physical, emotional, spiritual ways; it is good for husbands and wives to become one.
And, this union between one man and one woman is a type, a shadow, a foretaste of the wonderful union, oneness which we will one day experience with our Creator, God.
Only when we know the real, and when we teach our children about the real, will we all be empowered to refuse the false the enemy keeps trying to sell us.
Have a blessed week.
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