The third Friday of every month I have the privilege of serving with a team of godly women through the ministry Treasures.  The Friday night outreach event involves a number of us shuttling around Los Angeles, bringing pink gift bags to all the women who work in the local strip clubs.  Inside the gift bags are earrings, lip gloss, and a Treasures postcard that invites these women to come to the website, to a community of other women who are in similar circumstances to themselves.  It’s a gift with no strings attached, a concept that many of the women have not experienced before.

Once a woman reaches out to Treasures, she is showered upon with Christ’s love in the form of a care package, prayer, healing resources, vocational resources, care teams, and most importantly, compassion.  The women who volunteer with Treasures are often women who have worked in the sex industry themselves before they found freedom in Christ.  Others are women who have understood in some way breaking free from shame and brokenness and have a heart for building up others who might be in that same bondage.

I could have written this post without mentioning Treasures, and in fact, I’ve had it drafted for over a year, before I even began volunteering with Treasures, but I’ve learned more since the first draft.  Though I myself have never worked in the sex industry, I see my own story rhyming with so many of these women’s stories.

There is a deep need to be fully known and loved anyway.  That was my story, and that is so many others’ stories too.  I’ve done ridiculous things in the name of being known and loved.  Unless that innate desire focuses on being known and loved by Christ, it will cause desperation, it will deceive, and in many cases, it will destroy.

89% of women who are in the sex industry feel trapped into staying because they can’t see an out for themselves (check out Treasures for more statistics).  What this means is that most women who enter into the business by choice “choose” to keep going back because they feel they have no other option.  This is no choice at all.  It is surrendering to the evil that seems to overcome.  It is seeking value, love, worth, success, provision, and purpose in all the wrong places without knowing there is another way.

This is so relevant because more and more Christian women are losing their virginity before marriage.  They “choose” to give it, but often they choose because they see no other option.  Whether a response to peer pressure, coercion, ignorance, defiance, or manipulation, pre-marital sex can seem so overwhelming that there is no other option. 

What happens next if you have already given away your virginity?  How can you be pure for your husband if you are already tarnished?  How can you be free from the images or emotions or scars that you have endured in your sexuality?  What if you were raped and forced into this position without any semblance of choice?  Are you forgivable?  Can you be truly loved?

The one point I want to drive home in this article, though there are countless, significant points on the subject, is that Christ died for you to pay the penalty for your sin, and He rose again, conquering sin and death so that you would be forgiven.  He did this for all of us even though we are still sinners.  Your past is not too much for Christ’s love, forgiveness, and restoration.  Your tarnished body, heart, mind, and soul are made white as snow by Christ’s love that frees you.

Or as the Treasures mission goes, you are loved, valued, and purposed. 

No matter how big a sin (your own, or someone else’s that was forced upon you) may seem or how dirty it may make you feel, all sin keeps us infinitely far from our perfect God.  But God loves us so much that He took drastic measures to bring us into His presence: “And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.[…] For by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:10, 14).

God can make all things new. I’ve seen it in hopeless marriages, in fatal diseases, and in lost identities.  I, myself, have experienced the breath of life raising me from the spiritual dead, transforming my heart from that of a prodigal daughter to that of a daughter of the King!

Begin praying for God to bring healing into your life that would allow you to function as if you were starting with a clean sexual slate, and He will answer.  When He breathes new life into an old, tired, reckless heart, He does changes that will grow you into a new-found person whose past now belongs to Him, not to you.  This transformation is rarely quick or easy, but He can use all things for good if you love Him and are called by Him (Rom 8:28), and He will. 

Just as we were born again when we accepted Christ as our savior, so too with any repented sin does God grow new life out of the parts of us that were spiritually dead or wounded.  By Christ alone, you can be a born-again virgin.  God can redeem and restore your sexuality, allowing for pure, complete, holy sex with your husband in marriage.

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