June 16, 2011

Revirginization: A Spiritual Application

Revirginization? Perhaps you’ve heard the term. It refers to a couple who’s already engaged in premarital sex and decides to abstain from sex for a period of weeks or months before their marriage. When they do so they are practicing “revirginization.” According to People magazine, more and more couples are opting for periods of secondary virginity, either for spiritual, moral, or altruistic motives, “to restore self-worth and regain feelings of control, and that’s empowering.”
 
Truth be told, in light of the mess we so often make of our lives, we really need the help of someone who passionately intervenes on our behalf before God. Jesus Christ offers us that assistance—the opportunity to be forgiven, to be unpolluted and restored to what some might call a “secondary virginity.”
 
Cullen Murphy, of the Atlantic Monthly (January-February 2003), sees this trend as a powerful reassertion of American optimism. We want to believe “that what’s done is not always done, that the broken can be fixed, the ravaged restored—that you can have another swing, can wipe the slate clean, can go back to square one.” He goes on to say that we all ache to become pure again, and this desire plays out in our culture in many ways. One example: If you don’t do well on your college boards, you can take them again, and again, and colleges will look at your best score.
 
2011 1515 page17Revirginization. I read a touching illustration of this deep human need on a Web site about a girl named Liz. She wrote: “A few years ago I was dating a guy, and we had the most chaste relationship I’ve ever had. We had discussed our boundaries and set limits on our expressions of affection. We prayed together and asked for God’s help in the area of purity, and He was faithful to us.
 
“Anyway, we were at a stage of the relationship where we were growing in intimacy emotionally and spiritually, and we were talking one day. I made a comment to him about my high school days being a time of experimentation and that I had made some bad choices. He took the opportunity to ask me quite directly, ‘So, are you a virgin?’ I answered him truthfully, but somewhat sadly, ‘No, I’m not.’
 
“I don’t think I’ll ever forget what he said next. I had just made myself so very vulnerable to him, and his response was ‘So it’s true.’ Inside I was horrified and humiliated. Had people been telling him things about my past? I asked him what he meant, and he explained, ‘It’s true then. The gift of secondary virginity is real! God can restore a person’s purity!’ He went on to tell me that he saw me as the most beautiful, holy, spotless, and pure woman of God he’d ever known; and if I had a past that included anything impure, that God had truly healed and restored me.”
Revirginization is also a deeply rooted Christian desire. The Bible reminds us that we’re all sinners. We all want and desperately need a do-over. We want to become unsinners, to live as though we’d never sinned. But how can this restoration happen?
 
For years God’s people turned to the Temple in Jerusalem and asked the priests of Israel to help them regain their purity, “to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins” (Heb. 5:1). This sacrifice would lead to reconciliation between God and His people and repair their broken relationships.
 
God would purify the people from all their sins, and they would receive—in a sense—their “secondary virginity.” Hebrews goes on to say, “Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood” (7:23, 24). That’s good news for us, because it means that Jesus “is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (verse 25).
 
It’s a Christian cleanup campaign, a spiritual revirginization, recycling, renewal, revitalization, recovery, revival, and reformation. And it’s available to all who put their faith in Jesus Christ.
 
That’s the Jesus I serve. What about you?
 
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Delbert W. Baker is a general vice president of the General Conference. This article was published May 26, 2011.

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