Friday's Thoughts on Marriage

The 2nd in a series:

Have you got a marriage partner who doesn't treat you good? It's not all h/her fault. You cannot expect a person to treat you good, if you chose to marry someone who is not a good person. In fact, you will not attract a good person if you yourself are not a good person. Health attracts health, sickness attracts sickness. I've said these things before on http://makarios-makarios.blogspot.ca/2006/12/will-i-ever-find-partner-whos-good-for.html so I won't go into it further here.

The reason that I love working with married couples, particularly couples in a Christian marriage, is because there is no relationship in all of humanity better suited to helping us learn to love than marriage. Of course any relationship can help, but none is better than marriage. I've long said,

“We get married because we think we're in love. In reality, it's marriage that teaches us what love is.”

Marriage as the Christian paradigm intends, mimics Jesus' philosophy of life, “I did not come to be served, but to serve and to give my life . . .”

In the Christian paradigm, the man is the Spiritual Leader of the home. As such, he is to model for the family:

. submission

. love

. patience

. gentleness

. forgiveness

. mercy

. kindness

. faithfulness

. grace

. self-control

. servant leadership, and so on.

Ultimately husbands and wives show their love for Christ when they unconditionally love their spouse. If you are not loving your spouse unconditionally, you are not loving Jesus. This is a huge, huge difference from what marriage means to most modern day couples.

In fact, completely ignoring empirical evidence regarding longevity of marriage, today more than half of all couples live together before getting married. That may not surprise you, but consider that only 40 years ago, only those on the dysfunctional fringes of society lived common-law.

It used to be that marriage taught dedication and commitment. It used to be believed that marriage provided a safe environment for children to learn about all aspects of life, since in the absence of safety, children function less well in all areas of life. Again, studies are congruent on this conclusion. Today marriage is all about self. I purposely leave out the term “secular marriage” because more and more marriages of couples that would call themselves “Christian” copy their secular neighbour's reasons for getting married. Marriage no longer has anything to do with reflecting God's nature, or trying to better society by bettering oneself. It's no longer about “us” and has become totally about “me”. In fact, the very thought of having a spouse who helps you to change let alone expects you to change is anathema to modern marriage. Not so for Biblical marriage.

More next Friday.

Why Is There Something?

Now atheists, at least the educated ones know that matter has not, does not and cannot exist eternally, infinitely. The existence of matter; the coming into being of matter is time bound. Therefore, educated atheists know that we have two options:
. Either matter is eternal (not) or
. The immaterial Cause of matter is eternal.

All atheists, both the educated and the "brute beasts" as G.K. described, will spend the rest of history trying to prove that there is a third option.

In the meantime, knowing they're down to one option that refutes their blind faith, atheists are forced to say with as straight a face as possible, At one point there was nothing, and then for no reason, nothing magically expanded, and then there was everything, and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into living self-replicating bits and with lots and lots of time plus impossible luck - here we are.” The absurdity is so profound that centuries from now, if humans are still around, I’m certain that they’ll be laughing at the credulity of 21st century secular humans.

Imagine

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1953379_1953494_1957160,00.html?cnn=yes&hpt=T2

Imagine what would happen if you went to your local police department with videotapes of young children, some not even school-aged, being sold for sex. What if you gave the police pictures, names, addresses of the men and women who were selling these children (for those old enough, the movie Taxi Driver “You can come all over her face if you want to,” should ring a bell) and the police took this information / evidence and destroyed it. What if the police then arrested you and threatened you with false charges if you didn’t stop “harassing” the fine citizens who were running the brothels who sold these children to men from around the world, men who came to your country for the sole reason of having sex with children?

That is happening in more and more countries around the world.

Do you care?

John Locke once described how we Christians say that we believe the most marvellous, earth-shattering and revolutionary things. We say that we believe we are fully loved by a good and all-powerful God who will never fail to secure us in life and death. We say that we believe we are free to experience and exhibit selfless love and courage and joy every day - for eternity.

But how many of us live as if these things are true?

Locke estimated about one in ten thousand.

I think that he over estimated by about half.

So what can be done? First of all reject the atheist / secular vile and disgusting world-view that refuses to name evil for what it is.

39% of paedophiles arrested for internet porn had images of 3 to 5 years old children

83% had images of 6 to 12 year olds

80% had images of actual penetration of the child

21% depicted violence such as rape and torture

The atheist world-view doesn’t want to touch these issues because on atheism nothing can correctly be named right or wrong. As long as the community is accepting of something, then, on atheism, that something becomes right.

The first thing to do in rescuing children is to reject secular atheist relativism.

Secular relativism leads judges to make the follow judgements.

. Chilliwack physiotherapist Laurence Wong was sentenced to 60 days in jail, to be served on weekends, after police found 26,000 images or child porn on his computer and several hundred child porn videos.

. Brian Caldwell of Quelph was sentenced to 90 days for distributing child porn over the internet. The children were between 3 and 12 years of age having sex with adults and other children.

Regardless of what atheists / pagans tell you, pornography is not harmless entertainment. If you care, don’t allow secular relativists tell you that porn is harmless.

Atheists talk about consenting adults as though people just one day decide to allow themselves to be used and abused by others. Atheists talk about consenting adults as though the brutality upon brutality that is heaped on these men and women, boys and girls is a career choice. The degradation of the human soul is nothing more than evil having its way in a world of selective and relative morality, bashing relentlessly at the imagio Deo that neither evil nor the atheists that support evil can abide in the human being.

What’s Driving You?

Most have heard the phrase, “He’s so heavenly minded, he’s of no earthly good.” So rare is someone like that, that I’ve not met one. Not in my whole life. In fact, it’s been my experience that the more heavenly minded a person has been, the more crucial they’ve found the needs of earth. Let me give you an example.

On the weekend Wendy and I attended a workshop on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. That’s a long term to describe the brain damage that occurs to the pre born child when the woman drinks alcohol while pregnant. Six of our seven adopted children have been affected by this tragedy. Hundreds of parents and grandparents were at this conference. Most were, like us, people who had adopted children with FASD. Some were mothers who too late realised that they had damaged their children by drinking while pregnant. Virtually all were people who loved the Lord; we were a huge room filled with heavenly minded people. All who spoke at some point during the weekend gave God’s love for them as the reason for sharing their love with disabled children. There were three characteristics of these heavenly minded people that stood out at this conference:
Love;
Joy;
Peace.

This post has to do with Love:
Living immersed in God’s grace cannot help but lead to experiencing and absorbing a sense of love. The kind of love that I’m talking about here is the willed, volitional, desire to do good to someone else regardless of whether or not that love is returned. This is the love of God for us. See 1st Corinthians 13 for a fuller definition of love as understood from a Biblical perspective.

Now of course, the secular world, the pagan world is forever writing about and singing about and producing movies about their vision of love. Love for the pagan is very closely related to desire. If you’re experiencing a constant craving, longing and desire for someone, that is love to the secular world. Other telltale signs of love for the secular person are possessive controlling behaviours which are closely related to the greed / need / lust combination. Love as demonstrated by our secular leaders is jealous and focused on ‘can you make me feel good’. It is exactly this mind-set that causes homosexuals of both genders to think that a “love” relationship with each other is more important than an obedient relationship with their Creator. Of course love in the pagan world is equated with sex where men use “love” to get sex and women use sex to get what feels to them like love. Most of all, true love to the pagan is based on impulse and preferably ignores self-control.

Not so from the Biblical perspective. Love, from a Biblical perspective is not self-seeking.

Desire is self-seeking.
Lust is self-seeking.
Pride is self-seeking.
Personal offense is self-seeking

Not so, love.
God is love.
For God so loved the world that He gave . . .”

Like God, real love is not part of our natural world. What is natural to our world is “the lust of the flesh [craving for sensual gratification] and the lust of the eyes [greedy longings of the mind] and the pride of life [assurance in one's own resources or in the stability of earthly things]--these do not come from the Father but are from the world itself.” 1st John 2:16

“All ya need is love,” was correctly sung by a rock band several decades ago. While they got that part right, they could not pull it off because love is not a natural part of who we are. Oh sure, we can love those who love us but what good is that? Our world needs a populace who can “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you.”

Without that, not even babies in their mother’s wombs are safe from violence. Without love, FASD occurs. Without love, fetal alcohol afflicted children, literally unable to learn from mistakes, remain rejects who rotate through the criminal justice system until the day they die.

Thank God for the heavenly minded. Thank God for love, for love comes from God. Only His love for us allows us to truly love others. We can give a love to those who, due to brain damage are seldom able to even appreciate, let alone reciprocate that love.

The workshop that we attended had become a community of people who were able to love in the fullest sense of the word. This, not of our own ability or will, but love as a gift of Creator God.