Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Marriage for Holiness not Happiness (Part I)

Speaking at a couple’s wedding in 3 weeks and have been reading a book I read before my own marriage to help me with my preparation. It is called Sacred Marriage and it poses the question, “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”
This is a question of fundamental importance that actually enables us to work through all the externals and marriage and get to the biblical reason for marriage. To get married without any relationship to God seems almost impossible for me as it denies a basic biological maxim. Males of the species mate with many of the females in order to ensure the continuation of the gene. This ensures that ‘the strong survive.’ Without God we are just animals, why commit your life to just one person if there is no other ‘divine’ reason for this relationship?
Well here is a quote to chew on, and I may place a few more on this blog in the coming weeks:

We need to be called out of ourselves because, in truth, we are incomplete. God made us to find our fulfilment in Him—the Totally Other. Marriage shows us that we are not all there is; it calls us to give way to another, but also to find joy, happiness, and even ecstasy in another.

An Everlasting Kingdom

Here’s the picture. A bold Spirit-filled young Jew stands before the great King of the Babylonian Empire declaring that the God he knows will reveal to him the dreams that have been haunting the King leading to sleepless nights and haggard appearance. It seems the dreams were about the future Kingdoms of the earth and their end…well all except for one.
For at the end of the dream a ‘rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces’ appeared setting up an everlasting kingdom.
Oh how well I know this Rock, He is the firm foundation upon which the ‘house’ of my life is built! His name is Christ. Read these words spoken by Daniel, the fearless Jew in the story, so many years before this great Messiah came to dwell among us stating what His great power would achieve
[In that time] the God of heaven will set up a Kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.

I know the King of this Kingdom. I have experienced His kingdom-destroying power. I have tasted of the Eternal power that can transform a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. What a wonderful thing to think that I am a warrior in this kingdom, I am called to advance this kingdom by force. A force unlike the force used by nations of the world and other religions—the force of a Spirit-Empowered love, a Christ-like love that has the power to transform culture.
Do you know this king, are you in His Kingdom, or are you a rebel adamantly denying the longing in your heart to bow the knee and give your life to such a one as this? Big Question!