Love

What do you think of when you hear the word "love"? Acceptance? Caring? When I think of love, I think of God. God IS love and He loves us infinitely. I've really been thinking these last couple of days about how much God loves us, and every time I do, it never ceases to amaze me. God's love is completely unconditional and I guess that's what blows me away. We have done nothing and never will do anything that can be deserving of His love, yet He continues to love on us despite our shortcomings.

If you think of human love, we are incapable of loving anyone the way God loves us. We tend to love depending on how people treat us. For me, I find it much easier to love someone who is kind than someone who acts rude towards me. I don’t know about you, but I am grateful that God doesn’t love me the way I tend to sometimes choose to love (or shall I say “not love”?) others.

As I thought about God’s love, I started thinking about how much His love fulfills me compared to, say, my parents love for me. It’s great to know I have friends and family that love me, but their love can never truly satisfy me the way God’s can. That being said, a boy’s love and acceptance cannot fulfill me either.

You see, at times I tend to think that when I finally meet “the one” I will be completely fulfilled. But, when I do that, I’m trying to place a guy’s love where only God’s love can fit. Only God will ever truly make me content. Only His love can truly fulfill me. Only His love will satisfy me. Only HIS love. I want to reiterate that so much because it is so true and until we get it in our minds that only God will be our one true love, we will never be ready for an earthly romance. If we go around trying to put the pressure on guys to love us like Jesus, we will only go through a cycle of heartache and disappointment.

Here’s my encouragement to you as well as myself: Find your fulfillment in Jesus. Make Him number one in your heart. Make Him the center of your dreams, thoughts, opinions, feelings-give Him anything and everything. Give Him all of you. Although we can never love God as much as He loves us, we can strive to love Him with our lives. How we spend our time, what we say, think, and do-everything about us can be a way of saying, “Jesus, I love you and I want to fall even more in love with you!” So let’s stop waiting for guys to try and fill us up when we have Jesus. He has been knocking on the door of our hearts saying, “Here I am. I love you. Will you give me your life? Will you give me your love?”

In Christ,
Madison

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the very first post of He Holds the Key! Maddy and I are so excited to be ministering in this new way!
I figured I'd better start with explaining our goal for this blog: to glorify God and encourage girls to a higher level of purity. Maddy and I desire to save everything for our future husbands from hand holding to the final step.

Why?

The Bible says in the Song of Solomon:"I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine" (Song of Sol. 2:16a). It doesn't say "my beloved is mine once I meet him so while I wait for him to come along I'll give my heart to a couple of other guys." Our bodies belong to one earthly man and everything we have to give belongs to him as well. Would you want to go into marriage knowing your husband had given his heart to other girls before he met you, or would you rather know that you are the first girl he allowed himself to love? Don't you think he'd like to know the same thing about you?

The second reason is that things like kissing, hugging, hand holding etc. are things that awaken love. Maybe it's just a "me thing", but I know that if I was going to hold a guys hand, or allow him to hold mine, I'd have romantic thoughts coursing through my mind! In the Song of Solomon, we are charged three times not to "awaken love until it so desires."
Now, you may be thinking,"Hey, I desire to awaken love when I kiss a boy or something." But the verse doesn't say to awaken love when you desire to,but when love desires to. And since "God is love" (1 John 4:16) we should awaken love in His timing, not ours.
But please understand that we don't look down on you if you don't have the same standards as us. You're not going to Hell because you kissed a boy or something. As Maddy puts it: "Although we believe that hand holding should be saved until marriage, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is a law in the Bible. It doesn't say, 'Thou shalt not hold hands.' But we want to shower our husbands with gifts- even something as small as hand holding. Our love life is like a flower. Each thing like hand holding, kissing and more represents a petal on a flower. Each time you give something away, a petal is taken away from the flower. To sum it up, the idea is that we'd love to give a really full flower to our future husbands someday."

On this blog, we'll discuss different aspects of this kind of purity, how to maintain it and simply encourage each other because (trust me) this is hard for all of us! We'll introduce you to books on this subject that are helpful and maybe even get testimonies from those who have waited and are experiencing the benefits of their choice and those who didn't and are reaping the consequences. The purpose of the chatbox on the side is for a more personalized encouragement (for us as well as for you!). We hope you'll take a moment and share your struggles, victories and anything else you want us and those who read this blog to know!

Thanks for joining this exciting journey! May God keep us pure!
In Christ, Elaina