The Passion Conference is an annual conference for young adults to bring them together to worship and receive strong messages from the Word, spurring them on to change their worlds for the Lord. It also gives young people an opportunity to raise funds to help fight hunger, homelessness, human trafficking and sex slavery. Did you know there was such a thing as slavery today? According to Passion’s website, as of January 2012 there were over 27 million slaves in the world.

What? Yep, you heard me right. Real slaves! Until I learned about this, I thought of slavery as something that was abolished with the Civil War. Well, I was wrong. Every day people are taken into slavery. Every day girls and young women are taken from local malls, bus stops, and street corners. Not all of them are taken by strangers though. Some of these young women are lured gradually by men calling themselves their boyfriends and claiming to love them with all their hearts. The result: they are sold into sex slavery.

Why do I mention this on my purity blog? Well, these girls and young women do not have a choice when it comes to remaining pure, guarding their bodies, or saying no. But you have that choice. You can choose to remain abstinent and pure. To save your sexuality and everything that goes with it for your future spouse. And you have the ability to make a difference in the world around you by being aware of slavery and aiding the cause in abolishing it again.

Please know that I am in no way trying to make light of a very serious problem in our world today. But I want to bring it close to home. My question for you today is: Are you choosing to exercise your freedom or are you allowing yourself to be a slave to your own sexuality?

You may not be taken from a mall or street corner and put through a horrible ordeal like slaves are, but if you’re practicing sexuality outside of marriage and if you’re allowing others to rob your purity and scar your mind and your heart for years to come, then you are a slave. This kind of slavery is the sneaky kind because you’ll find yourself a victim of it before you even know what’s happened—if you don’t stay on guard.

There’ll be people throughout your life who will try to make you fall prey to living a sexual life and who will try to convince you to follow in their footsteps. Some common traps:

Social media friending and chatting with strangers

Chatting in Internet chat rooms

Hanging out at the mall or other places without a chaperone

Dating older men (especially ones that your parents do not approve of or ones that you don’t know their history)

Talking to strangers

I know you’ve been told never to fall for the line: “Can you help me find my puppy?” Well, sometimes the lures of a predator are not so easily detected.

One day, last holiday season, my twenty-one-year-old daughter was shopping at a thrift store. It was pouring down rain outside. When she checked out at the register, there was a young lady there who had purchased clothes and stuffed animals for her family for Christmas. She didn’t have enough money to pay for everything so my daughter paid the balance of what she owed. The lady didn’t have a car and she asked my daughter to drive her home. My daughter felt sorry for her and felt completely safe giving her a ride. She talked to her about Jesus and even gave her her cell phone number in case she needed her.

When she pulled up at the girl’s house, she noticed immediately how run down it was and began to feel a bit insecure in that neighborhood. The rain was coming down in droves and the girl asked my daughter to help her take her packages inside. She decided it would be okay to help her but when the girl took her into the house through the fenced-in back yard, she became quite frightened. On her way back to her car the girl asked her to come into the shed in the backyard to check on “something” with her. My daughter at that moment ran as quickly as she could to her car and sped away before any harm could come to her. To make matters worse, because of the downpour, her cell phone had no reception and she couldn’t have called for help if she had needed it. This girl might have been completely innocent or she could have been a slave who was being used to lure more girls to her captor’s den. We’ll never know.

Dear sisters, we must be on guard! We have freedom to walk in purity and we have to watch out for the traps. We do not have to be mastered by our sexual desires or the desires of others. It’s time to rise up and claim the victory of your purity. Refuse to let others convince you that you are missing out. Remember those precious young girls who have no say in that area of their lives! Pray for them. Become active in helping to free the slaves!

Here is a film that the Passion Conference made regarding human trafficking.

Here is an article in The Christian Post with more information about human trafficking.

Here is a story of a young woman who was taken into slavery by a young man who professed to be her boyfriend.

Romans 6:16-17 – Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance.

My prayer for you is that you will choose NOW to be free from all things that enslave you!

Photography copyright of Kayla Johnson.

Sherri Wilson Johnson

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