written by Tami Hagglund

The number loomed before me, taunting me. While shopping for my wedding dress, a Christian friend who’d known me for 5 years- long enough to know I’d never dated nor even kissed a man until age 24 when I met the man I was then preparing to marry- quipped about how few women could actually wear white on their very special day with a clear conscience. But, according to her, thank the Lord that I could. The guilt bubbled up in me, the words crawling toward the top of my esophagus and threatening to spill forth. I choked them down, far too humiliated to tell my beloved friend the truth.

I was no longer a sweet and innocent virgin.

I had done the unspeakable for a Christian girl claiming to love Jesus.

I had sex before marriage.

It was easy enough to blame it purely on that fateful July evening when we crossed what my fiancé and I considered to be the big red line of sin, going the dreaded (but so longed for) “all the way”. But, when we were honest with ourselves, it began months and months before in a singular late-November phone call, when we were still separated by 3,000 miles, where we blurred the lines between sin and righteousness and put our own standards for holiness on our relationship. Disgusted by legalist views being forced on us, we egregiously mistook our freedom in Christ for an opportunity to sin and follow our own deceitful and fleshly desires. We thought that because we had never gone “all the way” it was ok, and we applauded ourselves on how much better we were than those legalistic people trying to force their interpretation of the Bible on us.

Crazily enough, however, our logic of “freedom in Christ” quickly became drowned out by hormones and we flirted with that big red sin line until we finally crossed it. We swore it would never happen again. Then, a few weeks later, it happened again. And then again.

And then again.

Four times.

I can’t remember the exact occasions that it happened, but I know that it was four times, and I will always know that it was four times. Me, the girl who met Jesus at 16 and vowed to love Him alone until marriage; the same me who was determined to break the generational sin of women pregnant as they said their vows… and I was not pregnant when I married my husband, but I was by no means pure. We stood before family and friends, all of them believing us to be chaste and holy; we took communion, bringing judgment on ourselves because we had never truly repented of the sin. To be sure, we felt awful, but guilt and repentance are as similar as Payless and Manolos (or T-Ball and the MLB, for the fellas); they simply aren’t on the same playing field, let alone the same team.

We brought the sin into our first few months of marriage, and we sought Jesus but continually found ourselves frustrated. We were in a church that refused to call sin by its name- SIN. Missing the mark. Offending God. Incurring the wrath of God. Forfeiting God’s blessing. SIN. When we confessed our sin in pre-marital counseling to our pastor, he made a joke about what a lucky guy my husband was that it was me pushing the boundaries, and he jumped right on past the issue to say something about agreeing on finances together. This same leader was the manifestation in the pulpit of the heart of the leadership – accountability was a good theory but not something intentionally structured into the church, and Sunday mornings were for encouraging Christians to hear some anecdotes and stories about other people who were happy living the Christian life, so that the congregation could walk out the doors and into their world… happy. No conviction, no challenge, no repentance… just happy that they were followers of happy-clappy-nice-guy-in-the-sky Jesus who enabled their kids to win soccer games. Happy happy happy while their lives – and the church – fell apart due to unrepentant sin.

One November evening “it just so happened” that we chose to go hear some guy we’d never heard of deliver a talk entitled “The Gods Aren’t Angry Anymore” with some friends (I won’t say his name, but we learned quickly enough that he is an integral part of the emergent church, and, well, his actual speech was a bunch of fluff and left us feeling completely dissatisfied, like watching a reality show all season long only to have the DVR cut off right as the winner’s name is announced on the finale) and on the way home “it just so happened” that one of the friends mentioned some guy named Mark Driscoll from a similarly named Mars Hill Church in Seattle and that he had solid sermons on iTunes. Our interest was piqued when the friend stated to us one of his favorite quotes that Mark had said in a sermon:

“Soft words produce hard people. I preach hard words in order to develop soft people.”

We immediately went home and filled up our iPods, and in 3 days we had listened to a collective 30 sermons between the two of us. We were hooked. We continued serving in our current church while being fed all day long by Mars Hill’s teaching. Within a few weeks Jesus clearly told us to leave our current church, to entrust Him to deal with it as He willed and stop trying to save it ourselves, and to join the ministry of Mars Hill. We obeyed, and have never looked back.

That was in November of 2007, almost one year to the day from our first phone conversation that strayed from Jesus’ path of the straight and narrow regarding issues of guarding one’s heart and sexual sin. Our lives have been turned upside down, if that’s not too overly clichéd in its usage. We took the last old-school version of the membership class in January and became members in March, and have been involved in an incredible community group since the beginning of the year. We officially became part of the Ballard campus when we renewed our membership on The City in April, and Mars Hill has become an integral part of our existence for these numbered days we have on earth.

In our day to day lives, I have been humbled to see my husband stand up as a man of God and lead our small family of two as a real man, one who loves Jesus first, me second, and other people third. The Lord Jesus has dug into my own heart, bringing me face to face with my own issues of sin and idolatry; He has long been my Lord but daily Jesus is becoming more and more my Master and as such He refuses to let me ignore my sin issues with food, comfort, and obesity any longer. My husband discovered a true God-given gifting for serving on the Theology Response Team, and recently has begun pursuing Jesus’ call to be a community group leader. I just began serving in the Wedding Coordinators ministry and am looking forward to using my love for writing on this Ballard blog. Additionally, we serve as greeters as needed and find it a great honor to serve communion each week.

I tell you these things not to our credit, but because Jesus chose two people who were living on their own terms, sinning all the day long, and slapping His name on it. We, like Paul, consider ourselves the worst of all sinners. No one less deserves to stand as man and wife and serve communion to sinners coming to honor Jesus, remembering Him and repenting of sin. Yet, by no work of our own, Jesus chose us, brought us to this amazing church, and bestowed upon us the honor of serving alongside Him. To His credit alone Jesus has called us to leadership, and I fully believe it’s so that we can minister to others who are burdened and shamed by their sin, keeping it in the dark for fear that the light will ruin their lives.

Just yesterday my husband and I were having lunch, and he told me how amazed he is at the change in our lives in these last 6 months. Our focus for so long was on what we could get away with, how far we could go before it became sin. Now, we desire to live according to

Ephesians 5:3—
But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named
among you, as is proper among saints.

Some translations say “not even a hint”, and that is our goal – for our lives to be so immersed in identity with Jesus Christ that there is no question of hidden sin in us. We long to become increasingly open about our sin, naming it, and putting it to death, so that Jesus’ name will be made great.

That’s a far cry from the couple who exchanged vows with forced smiles on their faces, her in white, while the words “four times” echoed hauntingly in their heads. Praise Jesus for changing our lives, praise Jesus for His conviction, and praise Jesus for a church unafraid to call sin by its name so that people can repent and be used by Jesus to share the gospel with His beloved city of Seattle where the Good News so desperately needs to be proclaimed.