Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2016: Sharing the Truth in a Dangerous World

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Forward to Zion

Danielle Harrison

Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

So often I go and I hear songs played in our churches these days that's just the same thing over and over and over and it's kind of like really shallow in its message.

But you know, Where's your anchor holding to?

I think it's important for us to all really realize that our anchor is sure.

There's so many deceptions in the world today and it's easy to be knocked off track.

But nonetheless, when we're seeking the Lord, when we're striving to walk with him, I think he has a way of winking at us.

Does anybody know what I mean when I say winking at us?

You know, there's certain things in my experience where the Lord has just made it abundantly clear that he is on his throne, that he's busy in my life, and he sees what's going on, and he's in control.

Sometimes it's big things, and sometimes they're very small.

But as an example of 1 of those things, we gathered out there to pray before we came in and began.

And earlier today I was claiming the promises of God because I do that and I know the power in that.

And I was claiming Exodus 4.12 and Isaiah 51.16.

The latter text says that God will put his words in his servant's mouth.

And while we were praying, the brother who was praying said, I pray that you will put your words in Daniel's mouth.

And for me, that was a little wink, you know, that God was saying, yes, I heard your prayer.

So before I begin, I just have to humble myself before the Lord and before his children and say 1 more word of prayer before I begin.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we are here tonight and this isn't our first prayer that we've whispered, But we know that we never pray too much, but usually we don't pray enough.

And so Lord, I have to come before you and say, Lord, I have nothing to share.

And you know that better than anyone else in this room.

Some people know a little bit about my story and so they know what I'm referring to and some people don't.

But as I share this story tonight, the story of my life, my testimony, Lord, I pray that we won't just hear the story of a person, but that we'll hear the story of Jesus, of his power to change and save.

Lord, because it's your book, I'm just the pages.

And so I ask that you will hide me behind your cross, Lord, that you will be lifted up because you said that if your son was lifted up, he would draw all men unto himself.

So tonight, Lord, I need your Holy Spirit.

And I claim Exodus 4.12, where you said unto Moses, now therefore go and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say.

Use me and speak through me because you made my mouth.

And I trust in you, in your name I pray, Amen.

And in essence, this presentation you'll see is about 7 presentations crammed into 1.

Because there's a lot of different points that I touch on.

And so I used to call this presentation Sexual Purity Lost and Found, but I actually changed it to Total Purity because there is a thread of learning about sexual purity through my testimony, but there's a lot of other topics that I talk about as well.

And God is calling us to be sexually pure, amen?

But he's calling us to have purity in all areas of our lives.

He's calling us not to hold on to any certain thing and keep it from him if He's calling us to give it up.

And so as I share the story of my life, let's not just hear the story, but let's listen for the object lessons, the parts of the story that you can glean from, and pray for the Lord to help you to apply those things to your life personally.

So I always start from the very beginning, because I think that there was a foundation laid in my childhood.

And for a lot of people, we have a foundation laid in our childhood that directs the flow of our life.

And that doesn't mean that I blame my childhood for who I became.

No, I take full responsibility because I made the choices that I made.

But there were things that impacted me in a very strong way in my childhood.

My parents were really struggling in their marriage.

They weren't expecting to have another child and I was a surprise, but nonetheless I was very loved.

And my mom says that 1 of the first things she remembered about my character was that I was always happy but I was also very musical.

And I had a natural ability to remember songs.

She said there was a song that we listened to on the radio once, and then we went into the store and I was walking around singing it.

She even remembers the song that it was because it impressed her so much.

And so music was very, very readily available in our home.

I didn't grow up in a Christian home, But we had the world abundant in our house through radio and television, Hollywood movies, and nothing was off limits for me all throughout my life.

You know, my dad was made to go to church, and he had to go to church every week because his mom played the piano.

So when he got older and could make his decisions, he wanted nothing to do with church.

And he didn't want to impress upon me any boundaries, I think, you know, to a large extent.

I think that's kind of what led my dad to give me ultimate freedom, because he felt like he didn't have that when he was younger, and he wanted me to have that.

This is actually Madonna, and she was interviewed for a magazine called The Advocate, now this is a pro-gay magazine, and they asked her about her hints towards homosexuality in her music videos.

She said they, meaning the viewers, will digest it on a lot of different levels.

Some people will see it and be disgusted by it, but maybe they'll be unconsciously aroused by it.

If people keep seeing it and seeing it and seeing it, eventually it's not going to be such a strange thing.

Now, Madonna was 1 of my idols, if you could call it that, how growing up, you know, The world says, oh, she was my idol because I looked up to her, right?

And this was 1991, so this would have been around the time that I was watching her music videos on TV.

And she understands something here that I think sometimes we as consumers don't really get.

Because some of us do know that the study of the subconscious mind began in the late 1800s with Sigmund Freud.

But Some of us don't necessarily understand the dynamic that these studies grew in complexity very quickly and they were used to sell you their products.

And they studied into your base needs as a human being, the things that drove you as a person, like your fundamental relationships, parent and child kind of relationships, your drive for food, your drive for sex.

These were the kind of things that they studied into to know how to sell you their products.

We've all heard the term sex sells, right?

Well, as time has gone on, this knowledge of how your brain works hasn't just been used to sell you their products, now it's been used to sell you their views, and I think that's kind of what she's bringing to light here by this comment.

Now we're gonna turn to a more holy influence.

This is taken from the book Appeal to Mothers and it's found on page 11.

It says, mothers, you cannot be too careful in preventing your children from learning low habits.

It is easier to learn evil than to eradicate it after it is learned.

So it's easier to learn how to sin than it is to stop sinning after you've learned how, right?

Neighbors may permit their children to come to your house to spend the evening and the night with your children.

She says, here is a trial and a choice for you, to run the risk of offending your neighbors by sending their children to their own home or gratify them and let them lodge with your children and thus expose them, meaning your children, to be instructed in that knowledge which would be a lifelong curse to them.

Now when we look at this quote, the way that it's found in the context of the chapter, we see that this lifelong curse that she's referring to is the curse of self-abuse.

Now that's an older term that not a lot of us use today, but the medical term that she's referring to here is the medical term that we use of what she's referring to here is masturbation.

And unfortunately, my mother didn't know this council when I was growing up, and so this very curse came into my life through this very avenue when I was very young.

My parents separated when I was about 6 years old, and my mother, my siblings, and I moved to a low-income housing development when I was about 6 or 7, I guess, in a neighboring town.

So we lived for a short time in the town where we were before, and then we moved to a neighboring town.

And both times, there was a girl that lived down the road.

The chance had it that she moved to the same area we did.

I don't remember who moved first, but I lived down the street from this girl for quite a while.

And I didn't know that she was being sexually abused.

She was learning things about her body that she shouldn't have known.

And so she started sharing those things with me.

But it was kind of like secondhand abuse.

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Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

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