Proverbs 5:15-21

I'm writing this post right now, because I really need it.  I started memorizing these verses earlier this week in the hope that they'd help me fight temptation.  Now, they're being put to the test.  The question is, do I understand them--and is my hope in them or in the God Whose they are?

However, these verses are brimming with sexual innuendo (yes, the Bible has innuendo, and God meant it that way), so this post is not appropriate for readers of all ages.  It is also not appropriate for all people, since some if it's content is controversial.

Ordinary Post, Extraordinary God

I don't really have anything to say today.  My thoughts are scattered, half-finished, unimpressive...and I have a cold.  Thus, I'm not a very great candidate for writing something meaningful in my blog today.  I want to hold off and write nothing until I feel better and something has cemented in my brain: that is to say, until I have something with which to impress you the reader, myself, and God with.

But God doesn't need to be impressed by me.  To start with, He probably isn't impressed, no matter what I do.  I mean, He's the God of the universe and I'm just a lump of tissues He made from dust on one corner of one very small rocky planet orbiting a stable but otherwise unremarkable yellow star lost somewhere in the spinning arms of a generic spiral galaxy--one among a few hundred billion of which He spoke into existence on a single day.  What's there to be impressed with, exactly?  Anything I do, He's outdone infinitely.  It's not even like I can impress Him even with my performance given my circumstances (of not being God of the whole universe), since about 2,000 years ago He came down and took on flesh and lived a life very much like my own: except that He did much better despite living in less advantageous circumstances.  So I am, in this sense, nothing for God to get excited about, even on my very best days (and this is not one of them).

And yet, He is excited about me.  Everything He says and does demonstrates that He's quite taken with me and wants me to be totally enamored with Him.  On a slow day, with assignments piling up like tissues in my trashcan (and boy are those piling up!) and my thoughts scattered uselessly in a dozen different directions, that thought stops me, makes me sit back and just say, "Wow."

How can that be?  God is seriously the most majestic, powerful, and wonderful being in existence.  He's so much bigger and better than anything or anyone we vainly imagine to love us.  He's so much better than we deserve, ever.  Yet God condescends to love us, to love me.  Me!  With my nose turning slightly red and my eyes watering and my unshaved chin itching, and my thoughts on--of all things--a smartphone commercial featuring two fighting robots.  How stupid and small and fickle I am!  And yet, God loves me.  I do not say that He loves how much of an idiot I am, fixating on these things and thinking of them rather than Him.  He loves me though, rather like a boy loves a girl who is distracted from him, staring at her from across the room as she makes crude doodles in her notebook and scratches at her zits.  Her flaws are not apparent to the boy, because he is in love with her.  God is not blinded by infatuation, but the death of His Son has purged my sin in His eyes.  He no longer sees my zits and crude sketches as glaring and repellent flaws, for by the work of His Son, applied through the Spirit, He intends to (as I run away with the analogy--not literally) give me beautiful complexion in the end, and through my hand draw masterpieces.  When I realize this, I am in awe of Him.

I could see it, perhaps, if God decided to become involved with me personally when I had it all (or nearly all) figured out.  His love would be comprehensible if it only extended to me when I felt myself worthy of it (and actually was).  But without His intervention, that will never be, and so His love extends to me even now, just as I am (though this is not the way He means me to be).  Even this would not be such a stretch if His love only covered the big picture.  If God was indifferent to my day-to-day routine, calloused to my minor ailments and annoyances, and shrugged off my temporary swings of mood, I could understand it.  He's here for the bigger picture.  He wants something from me, that's why He's here.  Once He get's it, He'll be gone.  That's the way I've looked at God a lot, I confess, and as a consequence I feel like I've lived half my life (and still often find myself) looking over one shoulder, trying to see if He's still there.  I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Him to announce that the purpose of my life just got fulfilled and He's done with me now--or far, far, far more likely, storm away from me shaking His head in disgust, deciding that His big plans are better accomplished through somebody not quite as flawed, not half as bad a failure as I am.  Sometimes, I even directly ask Him to do that in my prayers.  Sometimes, I'm so weighed down in sin and guilt I just cry out, "God, why are you still here?!  When will you take a hint?  I'm a loser, you belong with someone else.  I don't want you to leave, but you really should.  I'll never be the sort of person you want me to be.  I'll only disappoint you, so you might as well cut your losses and get out of my life now!"

He never listens, by the way.  Never.  Sometimes it frustrates me and makes me want to tear my hair out!  How can He be so persistent!?!  But He is, and the truth of the matter is, He isn't sticking around for anything I might give Him (it's not like He needs anything, anyway, is it?).  The other shoe will never drop because, quite simply, there is no other shoe to drop.  God is interested in me not for something I may or may not fail to achieve, but for me myself.  He's after my heart, right now, right here, even as I type these words (by the way, Who do you think prompted me to type a blog entry when I was feeling like crud off the bottom of a fish pond--and really wanted to post, but didn't think I had anything to say?  If your answer starts with a Go and ends with a d and has three letters, then you're correct.)  He loves my heart.  He courts it, me, in every thing.  Even the minutia of a day when I feel crummy and unremarkable.  Jesus loves me, and that is sooo remarkable!

I wish I knew Him better.  I wish I was more like Him.  I wish my life didn't always seem to be an endless chase scene with Him so purposefully and masterfully pursing me, and me so stupidly and awkwardly running away.  At least there are some good times when He corners me (like now).  I wish that happened more often.  I wish I didn't always wind up on the run again.  Being captured in His embrace is just so much better!  I suppose it will be like that forever someday.  That's what I imagine Heaven is like.  No more running, not even a desire to run or hide my heart!  Just me and Him, together forever (I know that there will be other believers up there--a lot of them!--but in that day, we will all be one and He will be the Bridegroom and we will be the Bride at the marriage supper of the Lamb).

Someday, someday...and in the meantime, He is still with me!

Life Verse(s): Ephesians 5:25-32

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for Her, that He might sanctify Her, having cleansed Her by the washing of water with the Word, so that He might present the Church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that She might be holy and without blemish [blameless].  In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.  He who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His Body.  "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."  This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.

--Ephesians 5:25-32 (ESV)

A lot of Christians I know have decided to pick out what they call a "life verse" from the Bible.   It's usually one of their favorite verses, but it's more than just a favorite.  Whereas a favorite verse is just a verse you find particularly striking or appealing (and, if you're like me, you highlight it in your Bible with a little colored pencil so you can read it again and again later), a life verse is a verse that--more than anything else--seems to speak directly to your life, your purpose, your mission and goal, by God's grace.

I've heard a few messages where, at one point the speaker--excited by his or her own life verse (which they've just shared)--will encourage everyone else to find a life verse somewhere in the Bible.  Every time that's happened, I've thought to myself, Well, that does sound like it would be really cool and godly.  Maybe I should do that.  So, I'd go looking through my favorite verses, but I'd never find anyone verse that was really that profound, that all-encompassing, for my life...until now.

To be sure, this is not the first time I've ever read Ephesians 5:25-32.  It's been a favorite of mine for years, but lately I've been noticing how much it and the concepts it presents keep cropping up in my life.  Actually, that's not quite accurate.  It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that this passage, in all it's meanings, dominates (to a large extent) my inner life--and it is my desire that it would dominate there even more in the future.  Perhaps it would be best if I explained what this verse means to me and how it came to be so important to me--how it became my life verse.

I guess I first noticed this verse while I was still in high school.  At that point, was, of course, unmarried and couldn't see myself getting married for a while.  Thus, I didn't feel like much of the passage was really talking to me.  I wasn't a husband and I didn't have a wife that I needed to be loving "as Christ loved the Church."  However, that last part did get my attention: here the Bible was saying that Jesus loved the Church the way a husband (ideally) loves his wife.  I knew at that point that I was a part of the Church, and it was incredible to think that God would extend that kind of love toward me.  In fact, at the time, it was too incredible for me.  I did not, could not, at first grasp that this verse was talking about me personally and how much Christ loved me.  To me, Christ's love was something I usually viewed as more general rather than personal--since personally I was sure I was not lovable.  Christ loved Christians, and I was sort of grandfathered into that, I felt.

However, this is not so.  As I would learn later, Christ's love in it's totality really is personal, even to me.  His death on the cross cleanses all who trust Him of their sin and guilt, making them worthy to receive His love--even I have been affected this way.  Due to the individual nature of Christ's love, the passage could as well read:

Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved Aaron and gave Himself up for him, that He might sanctify him, having cleansed him by the washing of water with the Word, so that He might present Aaron to Himself in splendor, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that he might be holy and blameless.  In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.  He who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does Aaron, because he is a member of His Body.  "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."  This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and Aaron.

 Every time I see it, such as when I was rewriting those verses just now, the immensity of Christ's love for me stuns me and brings me to the edge of elation or tears (or both).  These past four years of college (going on five--yep, I'm doing my four-year degree in five), Christ has made me aware of His love for me in so many ways.  He has convinced me of it, and I have fallen in love with Him until all I really want to do is just fall deeper.

Paul was right in that last verse: the profound mystery of the union of a husband and a wife is something that speaks of the union between Christ and the Church--between Christ and every believer.  It is, I've found, the best analogy and description of how I relate to Christ in my own life.  I know it sounds cliche, but in my own life--this past year especially--I've found that the best way to describe the way I relate to God (though admittedly not the only way to describe it) is as the sort of loving relationship that exists between a man and wife (more on this in the first three parts of my Unconventional Relationship series of posts, from June of this year).

But the love of Christ for me isn't all I see in this verse.  Over the past two or so years, I've seen another meaning in it, one that speaks to the ideal relationship between a husband and a wife.  I always knew that meaning was there (it's fairly obvious), but, as I said before, it didn't stand out to me at first because I wasn't married and didn't plan on being for some time.  As it stands now, I'm still not married--I'm not even in a relationship (and never have been)--and yet something has changed.

Three years ago (approximately), God began telling me that it was His will that I get married someday--that, in some sense, it was my destiny.  At first, I did not think too much of it.  I had always wanted a relationship (well, that's an exaggeration--like all boys, I once thought girls had cooties) and figured I would get married at some point (as the only boy of my family, I realized pretty early that if our family name was to continue, it was on me to do the continuing--not that this is so very important these days).  What God was telling me wasn't so very surprising at first.  I waited around, praying about it, and expecting that one day He'd just some pretty young lady in my lap and we'd get married and it would all be fun, romance, and adventures.  Then, about a year ago, I was reading John Eldridge's Wild At Heart and came across a chapter that took a real Biblical look at what marriage was supposed to be like.  It isn't all fun and games, and from that perspective, God's promise of a wife to me wasn't some flippant little blessing: it was a mission, a calling to love another human being in a radical, sacrificial way.  A paraphrase that emphasizes this in the passage is from The Message Bible (published by NavPress):

Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the Church--a love marked by giving, not getting.  Christ's love makes the Church whole.  His words evoke her beauty.  Everything He does is designed to bring out the best of her, dressing her in dazzling white silk, radiant with holiness.  And this is how husbands ought to love their wives.

When I first saw God's promise to me in that light, it changed my outlook on relationships.  It made me appreciate that marriage wasn't just a treat God had for me: it was something He wanted me to do.  It was a command, a mission, a good work that needed to be done.  I accepted it, and it changed my life.  It grew in my life.  Over the past few months, God has been impressing me with the importance of the quest of marriage with which He has charged me.  It is not a side-quest or a mere training mission.  If I really accept this quest, this will be what my life is about: my life will be about living out Ephesians 5:25-32 with the woman God will give me as my wife.

Now, I am keenly aware that this might raise red flags in the minds of some of you.  After all, our lives are supposed to center around God, right?  As a Christian, I've been taught that one of our highest (and indeed, it is sometimes portrayed as our only) callings is the Great Commission, to go and share the gospel with the world--which is generally interpreted as meaning simply evangelism.  How can something that doesn't involve sharing the Bridge illustration with people be the point of any Christian's life?

These were the questions I've been asking myself and God during the past few months, but I find that they stem from false assumptions about the nature of marriage and the Great Commission.  To start with, it is too narrow to think of the Great Commission as simply "go and tell people 'Jesus died for your sins.'"  There are a multitude of ways to fulfill the Great Commission, and many of them don't involve speaking at all.  One of these ways is marriage.  As Ephesians 5:25-32 says, the way a husband treats his wife in marriage is to be an exact picture of how Christ treats the Church, of how He loved the Church as He offered up His life on the cross.  In other words, marriage is intended to be a picture of the cross--and thus, marriage is a possible way to fulfill the Great Commission on an individual basis.  Not only that, but marriage is a very important way to fulfill the Great Commission and glorify God.  A good marriage can effect the whole world around it, inspiring and encouraging couples and singles alike with the love it displays.  If the marriage produces children (as is usual), then this influence can continue for generations, with the children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren being built up in their youths by the love they see in this marriage and going on to express that same love (the love of God) in their own marriages.  Marriage is a critical calling in the work of spreading the gospel and sharing the love of Christ--indeed, without it the entire human race would swiftly cease to exist.

Now, I don't say this to tell you, reader, what your life is to be about.  That's for God to decide.  There are, to be sure, a wide variety of legitimate callings out there, and not every person is called to be married.  But I know I am, and Ephesians 5:25-32 is what my life is about.

My Hope is Built on Nothing Less

Today, the sermon my Dad preached was on the importance of discernment from 1 Thessalonians 5:21 "Test all things; hold fast what is good." (NKJV).  Since the only other family who attends our church (an older couple) were out of town on vacation and my youngest sister and Mom were both at home, too sick to come, his entire audience consisted of my college-age sister Audrey and me.  He said that discernment was especially important to us.  We were (are, and have) entering a whole new world of ideas we had not yet been exposed to.  He also said that discernment was something on the decline among Christians in America in general.

He sited three examples of this.  The first was the seeker-sensitive church, which is growing in popularity these days.  Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with a church that seeks to be welcoming to the unsaved--so long as it welcomes them so that they may hear the gospel and be saved from their sins.  Some seeker-sensitive churches have overdone this welcome and forgotten its purpose, welcoming the unsaved from every walk of life and in every form of debatchery and making them feel as though God is perfectly happy to let them remain just as they are, sins and all.  This is not the truth of the gospel and it erodes the foundations of such churches.  Second was the rise of Christian mysticism, which he held to be something totally bad.  He defined mysticism as basing one's faith on subjective experiences and feelings.  Such a faith was completely subjective and utterly immune to doctrine and scriptural correction.  If a mystic of this vein decided that God wanted him to marry his mother-in-law and sacrifice his kids to cows, there would be nothing anyone could say against it so long as the mystic "felt" that it was right between him and God to do so.  The third example he warned of was parachurch organizations, specifically in the realm of publishing.  While these organizations can build reputations for publishing doctrinally and scripturally correct books, they can be (and sometimes are) lured by the profitability of less wholesome spiritual books.  Thus, one should not judge a book by its publishing company but make a careful testing of its content as well.

I had a mixed reaction to his sermon.  I agreed, of course, that discernment is very important and that in the age of political correctness, tolerance, and diversity good spiritual discernment is going out of style.  I also disapproved of the practices of these unnamed book publishers, who, in addition to using their resources to blaze about damnable heresies, are also practicing just-plain bad business.  Publishers have an excellent opportunity for branding with thier books.  A reputation for sound doctrine and spiritually wholesome material could take years to build up for a publishing brand.  As such, it is far too valuable to be wasted by letting one heretical book slip through--especially as the heretical book will not appeal to the nitch market the publishers have so carefully courted but only the mass market where the publisher will quickly be out-competed and lose significant profit margins...followed by its devoted (or should I say formerly-devoted) nitch market, who will feel they can no longer trust a publishing brand that carries such a deplorable book (and rightly so).

Yes, I'm a business major, so I'm a nerd about these things.

My other reaction was much more personal.  When my father was describing and denouncing mysticism, he could hardly know that I, his son, considered himself a mystic.  I was appalled at the definitions my father applied to mysticism, which fit better with relativism (an altogether different matter) in my mind.  I was afraid to speak up, but nevertheless I did, in the end.  I told him that I considered myself a mystic and, although I based my faith on scripture and held to doctrine, I did enjoy many "experiences and feelings" of God.  He asked me to be more specific and, put on the spot, I was unable to answer.  I don't talk about these sorts of things hardly ever, and certainly not with people who don't seem to have anything similar in their own life (I'm afraid I'll either sound crazy or super-spiritual, neither of which I am or want to be taken as).  Even when I do talk of them, I hardly know what to say.  How does one go about putting the inexpressable in words?  It is beyond me.  In the end, my father said that my experiences and all were fine, as long as they were not the basis of my faith, since they are, at best, of uncertain origin and subject to personal interpretation--two pitfalls of which I am keenly aware.

So, as I've gone about the rest of my day, I've wondered, what is it that my faith is based on?  What function do my mystical experiences play and what role does scripture, doctrine, and the intellect hold?  I have not really sorted all these questions out.  I know my experiences, which vary widely, serve a wide variety of purposes in my spiritual life.  They comfort me, challenge me, direct me, and confirm me in my faith (more of this in "My Unconventional Relationship" series posted this June).  Yet they are not the basis of my faith.  Scripture grounds me and helps me to sort through my thoughts and feelings--to test them and hold fast to what is good.  From scripture I have learned doctrine and using scripture I have tested doctrine itself (and found some doctrines wanting).  Yet, while I hold to scriptura sola as a Protestant, I do not find that the basis of my faith is, at bottom, the Bible itself.

My faith is built on nothing less than the person of Jesus Christ, my God and Savior.  Without Him and His Spirit, the Bible is--in the end--just words on a page.  Think about it, if there is no God, or if He is not at all Who we understand Him to be, of what good is the Bible?  Of what good is the Bible even now in the hands of those who do not know and refuse to know God?  I have known far too many people who have based their faith on their ability to understand the Bible (often with the help of some supposedly divinely appointed organization, such as the Watchtower Society of the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Prophets of the Mormon Church).  These people had the Bible.  I went through the Bible with them and they read it, but when they left they did not have God.  Without the Author, the words themselves are just that: words, and any amount of studying and memorizing them cannot bring one (in themselves) to a right relationship with their Maker.

One might argue that a better basis, in light of this, is doctrine, and a correct understanding of Scripture.  Doctrines, by themselves, though, are dry.  Further, who can claim to have it all together, doctrinally?  Let me rephrase that: who can truly say they correctly understand every word of the Bible?  Perhaps some people are so bold as to make that claim, but I do not.  There is a lot there in the Bible and there is a lot I don't understand.  There are doctrines I'm not entirely sure of, such as the working out of predestination and free-will.  I know that both are real, but I've never been able to figure out just how they work together.  If my faith is built on my correct understranding of scripture and doctrine, my faith must never be complete and must remain forever dry and intellectual.

Works give our faith legs, and works of righteousness are definately something that God has prepaired for us in our spiritual lives (Ephesians 2:10), but these are not a suitable basis for our faith.  From scripture and doctrine, we know that our faith is not born of works (Ephesians 2:8-9).  Further my own experience has taught me that basing one's faith even partially on one's own work sets up an enormous burden of performance and guilt (for the constant failures of our own nature), which never lets up and from which we can never escape.  At bottom, I find that we cannot live up to anyone's standard of righteousness, not even our own and certainly not God's.  God is, further, not interested in us for what we can do for Him.  He has all the power and knowledge of the universe, after all: it's not like He needs us to do everything for Him.

In the end, the only solid basis for my faith--and the true foundation it rests on--is Christ Jesus in His own person.  God never changes, never lies, and never changes His mind, so my faith and my relationship with Him is totally secure.  It cannot be shaken because I haven't had a particular feeling of His nearness lately (though I do crave these feelings--it's impossible to describe how wonderful they are!).  It isn't broken because I find I can't understand a passage or verse (though I do want to understand what it is He's said in His Word--after all, He said it!).  It isn't lesser than the faith and relationship of someone else who's read the Bible in a year and memorized Psalms (my Christ is the same as their Christ--though I do enjoy reading the Bible over and over again and learning about Him this way).  It isn't incomplete because I don't understand every doctrine (though this can be useful) or understand some of them wrong (it is Christ that matters, Who also was preached by the apostles of old).  It isn't destroyed when I sin (though I really don't want to sin), for Christ remains sinless and interceeds for me.  Christ is further the only thing that will endure, the only thing, ultimately, worth seizing in Christianity and all the world.  As for the Bible, for all I know every copy may be burned up when this world is destroyed by fire in the end--and I don't know if it will continue to exist "when that which is perfect is come" (1 Corinthians 13:9-10).  When that time comes, I know that all our incomplete and inadiquate doctrines and understandings will surely be no more.  In that day also, works will cease (John 9:4) and be complete--and with what or how (or even if) we shall busy ourselves in the eternity thereafter has not yet been revealed.  As for my feelings and experiences, I know that these also, though pleasurable, are incomplete, a shadow of things to come.  I feel a tingle, and it is as if my LORD embraced me, but I see nothing.  I know He is there and I am partly aware of His presence, but it will not alwayse be so.  "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; but then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12).  Christ will remain, and He is my hope and my reward (Genesis 15:1).