T URN BACK THE clock. Well, we can’t, can we? But I think we would underestimate our Redeemer if we leave it at that.
This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
—JOHN 17:3
Our eternal life in Christ is well underway. We have been seated in heavenly places with Christ. Eternity is now our realm; we may be temporarily assigned on Earth, but we who are in Jesus are never going to die.
Oh my goodness, did you hear that? We are never going to die.
For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
—COLOSSIANS 3:3
We already died. And we have already come back to life with Jesus, in newness of life, as a new creation. We cannot die again. We are now living in His eternal life.
Come on, that’s worth a shout of praise. Nobody’s looking, honest. Well, so what if they are.
There are no clocks in eternity. Now, I suppose there may be a clock or two, but time in eternity is of a different nature than the one we are familiar with. There is certainly no aging. There will be no “last day” in heaven with Jesus. John Newton wrote:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.1
It’s going to be an interesting environment, don’t you think? Do you ever think about it? I do. Perhaps you’re thinking, “Steve, that doesn’t help anyone here now on Earth, does it?” How can you be any earthly good if your mind is on heaven? It is having that heavenly perspective that fuels my energies in the here and now. I find that when heaven is at the forefront of my thinking, my influence here on Earth is much more potent and effective, because the truth is that in Jesus we are to live from heaven. That is where we are seated; that is where our authority is assigned. That is where our home is.
So with time a non-issue in heaven, and as we understand that our eternal walk with Jesus is happening even now, we have a useful and encouraging perspective for our lives. Earlier I quoted Elizabeth Elliott, who spoke of the “once known, never again unknown” facet of our sexuality when we have been to bed with someone. I don’t think that need be the final word.
REGRETS AND MISTAKES
If you can find a man or woman who has never regretted something that they have either done or failed to do, I would like very much to meet them.
I do not believe that Regretland is a place for us to stay. We may visit on occasions, but let’s not look anywhere there for accommodation!
We are aware that we have not, at times, behaved as we might now behave. We have been responsible for poor choices. We may have acted selfishly, and others may have so acted toward us.
In the area of relationships and sex, we may have made a mistake, or some mistakes. And if others have mistreated us, we may have found it very difficult to forgive them. This could be very understandable. To forgive is costly. We are all probably familiar with the words of the Lord’s Prayer, which command us to forgive those who have done us wrong, just as we enjoy forgiveness for our own mistakes and shortcomings. When we are the recipient of the sin, of the abuse, our minds and emotions will rage and demand justice. But, as John Arnott writes:
Can I have mercy for me and justice for you? No way! We can have justice or we can have mercy, one or the other, but we cannot pick and choose and have both.2
When it comes to mistakes we have made in this most personal of areas of life, I believe that God will restore and renew us. Even in this most personal and delicate of arenas of life, we can know what it is to be a new creation, where the old has gone and the new has come.
If you gave away your virginity through a bad judgment and now regret this, I want to encourage you to bring this to Jesus. Perhaps you have felt a sense of regret for some time. He wants to embrace you and to show you that His arms are wide enough to encircle you in an intimate hug of complete acceptance—just as you are. In Him, the pain can melt away to be replaced by His peace. He is the Prince of peace. He has already paid the price for you and me to live in peace, not only with Him but also with and toward ourselves.
More than that, I believe that God does something when we come to Him in transparency and faith and ask Him to heal us and to touch our lives. The arena of our sexuality is not excluded.
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
—ROMANS 5:1
He has justified us. Our lives are “just as if ” we had not sinned. He can touch you and restore that sense of purity once again. He can touch you so that it is “just as if ” you had never given away your virginity. The Cross of Jesus encompasses all. He is so awesome, so powerful, and so full of grace. No walls can stand before Him, and even where they appear to refuse Him entry He walks right through them!
Do you want to pray?
Lord Jesus, thank You that nothing is too hard for You. Nothing has taken You by surprise. I have not shocked You. You know me, You know my ways, and You know the path my life has taken. I come to You now and ask You to touch my life, to bring your healing and your restoration. I am making a decision to place my trust in You, in Your goodness. Thank You, Jesus.
I understand the biology. You don’t need to draw me a picture. Nevertheless, I stand by my belief that God can remove all sense of shame and disappointment and make you and me new, and this includes our sexual purity.
FRUIT
You see, I may not have physically been with a woman, but that does not make me any more pure than someone who has engaged in sex before marriage. Let’s get real here. We are so adept at making our judgments and at ranking the severity of this or that sin or offence. This kind of thinking and reasoning does not come from the tree of life; it comes from the tree of reasoning, commonly known as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
My purity is based in my righteousness in Christ. Period. I have not had sexual relations before marriage, but I could write you a list of other misdemeanors that I have committed. Nonetheless, I won’t, because my Savior no longer remembers them. He dropped them into some water. Into a sea. It’s a blood-red sea called the sea of forgetfulness. It’s where He chooses to drown my shortcomings and where He chooses to separate them from me and to disown them and forget them. There is not even any point in me trying to fish them out because they dissolved a long, long time ago.
If you know Jesus, it is the same for you. God does not want you to be burdened with mistakes from the past. He has taken those things already and mixed them with His grace, transforming them within a bowl of redemption.
Every part of your life is redeemed in Jesus. If you could be likened to a stick of rock candy (in the UK these long sticks of hard candy often have a place name, perhaps a resort, piped all the way through them) then the word redeemed would be evident from one end to the other. Can you see that as a reality? Would you allow His grace to touch even the rawest of disappointments?
I remember that I was beating myself up about something on one occasion. It was going over and over in my mind. A friend prayed for me, and the Lord gave him a picture for me. He saw that I was sweeping a room. The room had already been swept clean, but I was working so hard at sweeping it! All I was doing was producing a fog of confusion as I raked up particles of dust from the floor into the air. The room was clean. It had already been swept. The job had already been finished before I ever got near the broom.
It is important that we stand on the Word of God. It is His work of grace that brings kingdom results. Just because you haven’t done things right does not disqualify you from His grace.
I remember some years back that a friend of mine got baptized in a traditional church service. She was not fully immersed, as she may have liked to have been, but was simply sprinkled with a little water as is sometimes the fashion in certain church denominations. In our church we used to dunk people! Oh yes, right under they go! In my present church we dunk them too, right under, into the watery grave and then out of it, risen to new life in Jesus! Hallelujah! I’m just getting a little excited here thinking about it!
So do we say that my friend had not been baptized because it had not been a “proper” under-the-water ceremony? I will just comment in this way: She shows the fruit of the life of the Spirit. She shows it in areas that I fall short in—and I was fully immersed!
We may feel, at times, that we want to turn back the clock. But the truth is, we are where we are today, and God is with us and in us now. His love, grace, and provision are at hand to touch our lives in whatever area is needed. He is just as gracious and willing to touch our sexuality, our memories, and our desires as any other facet of our walk with Him.