Mentoring and Parenting

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Message M6: Mentoring and Parenting November 30, 2008

Text: Eph. 6:4

Big Idea: Mentoring and parenting involve sharing love, but also disciplining the young in the Lord.

Actor Bruce Willis of the Die Hard series lived life as a hard partier.

He said, I drank a lot…I took drugs…it wasn't until I had a kid that I realized it was my job and my wife's job to teach our children the difference between right and wrong.

Every man knows there is a line between good and bad and that, unless you're a sociopath, you know where that line is. That means honesty, kindness, trying to help people, not hating, and teaching that to my children. My life's a work in progress—that's how I view it.

My wife Sakiko, long before she envisioned becoming a mother, had a habit of saying if you want to grow up, you need to have a child. She was NOT necessarily thinking of a biological child, but someone you are responsible to care for.

We have been in this series on marriage and singleness in the Spirit, and today, in this final message in the series, we are going to look at what it means to be a mentor or a parent.

Whether we are single or married, we may be called now or in the future to a mentoring or parenting role or both.

Paul in Ephesians 6, after speaking about marriage in chapter 5, talks about parenting, and the same principles he offers to parents can be used by those who will mentor others.

(Let me also say here as some of you turn to the passage, that if issues have been stirred for you in this series on marriage, singleness and sexuality, I would encourage you to talk to trusted Christian friend, or counselor or pastor.)

In Ephesians 6:4 Paul says:

4 Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

As Paul writes these words he would have been aware that many people in his Greco-Roman world did not want to get married, or have children, because of the responsibility and money involved in marriage and raising kids.

In fact, this situation was so bad that toward the end of the 1st century BC the Roman emperor Augustus passed laws encouraging people to marry and have children through financial incentives.

In our own society, of course, there are many people who prefer not to marry or have children. The New York Times not long ago reported that in North America for the first time single adults outnumber married adults.

Like in Paul’s world, many people today are choosing not to marry or have kids because of the responsibilities and costs of being married and having children.

Or more positively as Kirsten Rumary pointed out a few weeks ago in her story, some people welcome the single life because of the freedom it offers…

Some are single, of course, because they haven’t met the person who is right for them.

So, as we come to this text on parenting, whether we are married or single, and God affirms both, I want us to see how this applies to us as either parents or mentors.

Parenting or mentoring can be a transforming experience.

A few weeks ago I talked about how, if you are single, it is possible to be self-centered without even knowing it. What marriage and/or a really close relationship can do is act as a kind of magnifying glass on our selfishness (prop). I talked about how, as a single person, you can work as long as you want late into the night and no one is going to mind. As a single person, if you tend to be messy, you can leave your apartment a total dump… leave your stuff everywhere…and it may well be that particularly if you live alone no one challenges you on that. If you are single, you can watch the movies you want to watch, eat the kind of food you want to eat, your life can revolve around you.

But when you get married, or build a close relationship with someone, that can put up a magnifying glass on our selfishness, as you are going to have to think about how our schedule affects our spouse, how our messiness affects them. When you think about choices around movies or food, we are going to have to think about the preference of another person. Marriage can help pull a person out of his or her self-centeredness and self-absorption, which can kill a person’s spiritual life.

Having kids, or having a person in your life that you are mentoring, can pull us out of our natural tendency toward being self-centered or self-absorbed.

Ron Rolheiser has said, “Perhaps there is nothing in this world as powerful to break selfishness as the simple act of looking at our own children. In our love for them we are given a privileged avenue to feel as God feels—to burst in unselfishness, in joy, in delight, and in the desire to let another’s life be more real and important than our own.”

(Rolheiser by the way is single a Catholic priest with no kids of his own).

Having kids or people whom we mentor can powerfully free us from our self-centeredness and self-absorption as we focus on the life of another.

Whether we have children or not, perhaps God is calling us to mentor someone.

Part of the reason why I had the gift of being mentored by an older Presbyterian minister was because his 21-year-old son Sandy died of a rare heart disease, and out of that loss he wanted to invest his life in younger men and women who, like his son Sandy, desired to serve the Lord. Instead of turning inward after losing his son, Leighton turned outward and God used loss to enable him to mentor scores of young leaders from around the world.

For many years I was single and thought that perhaps it was God’s call for me to be single for life. I thought as a single person I have more space to mentor other people.

Then I got married and for a number of years we did not have kids of our own. Early in our marriage, because of a pregnancy complication we experienced, Sakiko and I were led to believe that we might not have any children of our own. At first that was hard, but after a season of grieving the loss of that child, Sakiko and I accepted it. We were happily married. We thought that God in his providence, by not giving us kids of our own, was calling us to focus more of our energy on the spiritual children that we were being called to care for. It felt like a gift. Part of the reason that I have committed myself to mentoring young leaders in different parts of the world has come from the fact that I have received the gift of mentoring, but also because as a person without children, until recently, I had the space to do it.

As you look at your life, do you sense that God may want to you mentor someone?

If so, you might ask yourself these questions.

Am I living the kind of life that I would want to invite others to live?

That, of course, is a big part of mentoring.

Knowing that how we live will impact another life will can inspire us to live an exemplary life.

When I was playing on the basketball team in high school, I was motivated to be in shape, because my conditioning or lack of conditioning would either help or hurt people.

When you are a mentor, you will be motivated to grow in character, because your character or lack of it, your light or darkness, will either help or hurt those you are mentoring.

Am I living the kind of life that I would want to invite others to live?



The best path to become worth following is to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

In Eph 5:18, to be filled with the Holy Spirit of Christ and his teaching on parenting assumes this.

Second, if you may be called to mentor others, will you make yourself available to one or more people who are younger than you in some way?

In some ways mentoring is similar to dating, you find a person’s name, initiate getting together perhaps for coffee, perhaps to run, you feel out the situation, see if the there is some connection, a mutual desire to continue the relationship…


Now after this long preamble, let’s look more closely at the Ephesians 6:4 text and see how it applies to mentoring and then to parenting.

Paul begins by saying, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children, but instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” The Greco-Roman world was a harsh world. A father had pretty much the absolute right to punish his child in any way he saw fit. In the Roman world a father had the right to kill a new-born child by allowing it to die through exposure to the cold. A Roman father had the right to sell off his children as slave. A father could even issue the death penalty on his child.

So, when Paul says, “Fathers (and the Greek word, as respected pastor and Bible scholar Dr. John Stott points out, can also refer to mothers) do not exasperate your children,” this is a radically counter-cultural statement. Paul says do not be excessively harsh with them, do not bring them up in a way that would provoke and exasperate them. But instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. In Greek, the word which is translated “bring up” actually means “to nourish” or “to feed.” It is the same word that Paul uses in 5 verse 29, as he speaks to all husbands to take care of their wives as they do their own bodies by nourishing them, feeding them.

So part of what it means to mentor or parent someone is to love a person, to care for them, to nourish and feed them.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Parker Palmer in his book, A Hidden Wholeness, said that many people have an absence of a positive, healthy, robust sense of themselves. What both parents and mentors are called to do is to love and nourish people in such a way that it enables them to grow and become confident in the best sense of the word, and to emerge as their true selves.

Some years ago I was spending time with a young kid who lived out in Fraser Valley. One afternoon when I was at his house, I saw that he had a football and I asked him if he enjoyed it. He said, “I really don’t know how to play football.” So I said, “Well, I played football in high school. I was a quarterback and I’ll show you how to play football.” I showed Ryan how to play football and how to hold it, how to stand, and how to extend your arms. Little simple things. How to bring it behind your ear and kind of how to throw and rotate your wrist, counter clockwise. We spent part of the afternoon just learning to throw the football. His mom told me a few weeks later that the following week he was so excited about throwing the football and he would say, “Mom, this is how you throw a ball.” He took the ball with him wherever he and his mom went, including the grocery store.

That’s a very small thing, but part of what mentors do is love and nourish people and help them find their strength.

Part of what it means to be a mentor is to bring discipline. Paul says, “Do not exasperate your children, instead, bring them in the training and the instruction of the Lord.” I remember being with a person I was mentoring, and he was making some bad choices sexually, partly because of a drinking habit. I asked him to just go off alcohol for at least a year. As the year was coming to an end, he was invited to a party where he knew there would be alcohol. He didn’t want to appear like a stick in the mud. He asked me if it would be okay to drink a little. I said, “No, I want you to maintain the commitment for a year.” He agreed to do so, and later he felt good about the fact that he was able to maintain the commitment for a year. He felt that it had been an avenue of growth for him.

Part of what it means to parent or mentor is to bring a certain discipline and challenge to people. And then Paul says, “…bring them up in the instruction of the Lord.” The most important thing we can do as parents or mentors is to encourage people into a deeper relationship with Christ.

Ideally, in a mentoring relationship, we can lead a person in the way of Christ.

When I was a young, inexperienced new pastor here 12 years ago, intimidated by some of the challenges before us as church, I asked my mentor Leighton Ford for some counsel.

He said, “Remember that God is an artist. He will not lead you copy someone else. Seek God for a unique vision here.

A good word that led me to seek Christ.

This past week I was mentoring by phone a young Christian leader who lives in Mexico City. He’s wrestling through a decision. Through a series of questions I asked him, I tried to encourage him to consider how God was inviting into to decide on way or another. Part of mentoring involves leading people into the way of Christ.

At this time I am going to invite my colleague Catherine to come forward as she shares about some of the unique challenges and lessons she has learned as a parent of three. Catherine is our children’s pastor.

Catherine Fenn:



Conclusion:

There are only two things that really last forever—God and people. So, to invest your life in people is a great investment. It will change you and shape them.

Pray about: becoming a certain person (love, discipline, Lord)



And becoming available…


Benediction:

Christmas Concert invitation—a good opportunity to invite friends.

God's Vision For Sex

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Message M5: God’s Vision For Sex November 23, 2008

Text: Eph. 5:31; 1Cor. 6:15-20, Eph. 5:3

Big Idea: God intends sex for marriage so married and single people are called to sexual purity.

When I was working in Japan, part of my work involved helping to prepare Japanese businessmen for business meetings they would have in North America.

Sometimes Japanese business men would assume that Caucasian, North American women were very sexually easy and that if they simply propositioned them, these women would agree to have sex with them.

The reason that some of these Japanese businessmen assumed that North American women would sleep with them, even if they had no prior relationship, was because they had been influenced by western-made movies where a guy meets a girl, things move seem to move pretty quickly and after several more minutes into the movie the guy and the girl may end up in bed.

I had to explain to these Japanese businessmen that reality of life in North America isn’t always like the movies. I tried to explain that sexual relationships don’t move quite as quickly in real life as the movies because in the movies you’ve only got two hours of time to work with to tell a story. According to the movie stars, they admit that their real lives, are not nearly as sexually dramatic as they are in the movies.

We may not think that we are quite as influenced by the movies and tv as some people in other countries, but, as a recent article in the Vancouver Sun demonstrated, the media has a powerful influence over us and over our sexual habits in particular.

Studies at the RAND Research Organization have demonstrated that teens who watch sexy television programs are more likely to engage in risky sexually behavior and experience early pregnancies.

According to Anita Chandra, a behavioral scientist who led the research at RAND, “The television content we see (tends to glamorize sex and) very rarely highlights the negative aspects of sex or the risks and responsibilities of sex.”

We are all more likely influenced by movies and television than we are aware of.

As entertaining as the movies and television can be, if we want to get wisdom on sex, which is a fire that can bring joy, life and healing, but if misused can also bring heartache and pain and can take something from us, we would do well to turn to the wisdom of the one who designed sex.

So, today we are going to look again in scriptures at God’s vision for sex.

If you have your Bibles, please turn to Ephesians 5: 31.

We’ve looking at Ephesians 5 as part of this series on marriage and singleness.

Last Sunday we looked at Ephesians 5:31 where Paul says:

31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."

This text is actually a quotation from Genesis 2 where God describes what happens when a man and woman come together in marriage and sexual union.

These scripture texts tell us that sex is a profoundly unitive act where a person not only joins his or her body to another, but also their souls as well.

And the two will become one flesh.

As I said last week, God designed sex such that when you give yourself to someone physically in sex, there is an accompanying impulse that makes you also want to give yourself to that person emotionally, spiritually and in every significant way…

Sex may not always feel like a profoundly bonding experience. There are times when sex just feels physical, and perhaps even impersonal. But God designed sex as this powerful, mysterious act that would bond body and soul like nothing else to another person, like a stream of water, becoming one.

If you have been sexually active, perhaps the first time you had sex, or the first time you had sex when you were in love with someone, you felt this powerful connection… you got a glimpse of how it was intended to work.

Because in sex the two become one God calls us to reserve sex for marriage only.

Sex outside of marriage, of course, can bring pleasure but can also lead to unintended attachments, a feeling that something has been taken from us (especially if the relationship doesn’t work out), and can compromise some of sex’s life healing powers.

If you are in a committed dating relationship, God’s call for you to have sex only in marriage is a gift that will protect you and your dating partner and will open a door of the most life-giving kind of sex in marriage.

(BTW, If you are in a committed dating relationship, you may have all kind of fears about marriage. But a good marriage, and I speak from experience here, is a great blessing. Though the statistics show that about one in two marriages fail, marriages where the couple prays every day together that number jumps to 2000. Marriages where God is truly the center tend to flourish.)

God’s view that sex is intended with just one person, our marriage partner, is very counter-cultural… counter hollywood, but even for a “player” like Wilt Chamberlin (and I used that term in both senses of the word) at the end of his life resonated with this truth of sex with just one person…

Wilt Chamberlain the famous basketball, never-married, but claimed in his autobiography to have slept with 20,000 women.

According to columnist Clarence Page, Chamberlain "went on to write that he would have traded all 20,000 women for the one woman he wanted to stay with for keeps."

There’s a certain appeal, at least to some, to playing the field, but there is a greater beauty and a more enduring joy of living in a way that is consistent with God’s design for us.



There is a kind of appeal to the kind of life that he led, but there is a greater beauty and deeper fulfillment as Wilt Chamberlain acknowledged, in retrospect, that there is a greater beauty to being united to one person in a permanent and exclusive way, in a good loving marriage if God calls us to that

It is very rare these days, but there is a beauty in seeing a couple grow older and grow more deeply in love with each other. That particular model of a marriage is one that my parents have passed along to me and my siblings and is a great gift.

So, to say no to sex outside of marriage, and to say no to sex with people (other than our spouse) once we are married, is not just a way of being passive, but is to protect a great good that God intends for us.

(boundary illustration with bowl)

It should be no surprise to us that those are most fulfilled in their sex lives are people who live within a good, committed, loving, respectful marriage.

Contrary to what Hollywood suggests, the best and most meaningful sex arises out of committed, loving marriages.

If you’re a married, celebrate and cultivate your love and your love life—the two are powerfully connected--as gift from God.

Today I would like to explore what it means to honor God and to protect the gift of sex and sexuality whether we are single or married.

Paul says in 1Corinthians 6: 15-20:

15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." [a] 17 But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. [b]

18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins people commit are outside their bodies, but those who sin sexually sin against their own bodies. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

Paul says in Ephesians 5:3

But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity.

Paul says that we have bought with the blood of Jesus Christ if you belong to the Lord; that we have been forgiven at great cost to God—the life of his own son. Therefore, we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God and we are to honour God with our bodies.

One of the ways that we can honour God’s call in our sexual lives, whether we are single and seeking to be sexually pure in dating relationships or married and seeking to be sexually faithful to our spouses is by cultivating healthy, life-giving relationships with God and other people.

Psychiatrist Dr. Scott Haltzman reports that infidelity occurs in up to 40% of marriages.

According to Dr. Haltzman, in 80% of the cases the reason for a spouse having an affair is not primarily sexual. Most of these spouses are simply seeking validation: of some warmth, understanding or love.

The reason that single people will get involved in sexual behaviour that may violate their consciences or be outside of God’s will, is not always because they are over-sexed, but they are longing for intimacy and connection and love from another person.

Part of the reason why people go on to porn, cyber sex or engage in compulsive masturbation, is because they want to experience a sense of connection, a sense of intimacy-- God. Of course, pornography, compulsive masturbation, going from partner to partner to partner can never bring lasting satisfaction. It brings momentary pleasure and relief, but tends to make people feel more empty.

Part of the way we can safeguard against that and honour God with our bodies and our sexuality is to cultivate a healthy, lasting relationship with God and with other people and ourselves, as we experience connection with God and people, and also with ourselves through things that bring life--whether it’s sports, or through spending time outdoors, or though music, art.


A second way we can cultivate sexual wholeness and purity is by having certain healthy boundaries.

Sometimes we think of a boundary as a negative thing, but boundaries help us to protect something good. (Use bowl as prop) A bowl, for example, has boundaries that help to protect something good like water in the bowl, but if you tear the boundary (the bowl), the good is lost.

Lauren Winner has written a great book called Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. In Chapter 6, called On the Steps of the Rotunda, she gives some very practical counsel on how to draw healthy sexual boundaries. This is a terrific book on the Christian view of sex I would highly recommend you buy.

Lauren Winner, was single at the time she started writing the book.

She had been sexually active before coming to Christ. Then she came to a point where she was able to embrace God’s call to sexual purity. As she was writing this book, she met and started dating a single person—a guy named Griff and married.

She writes (on page 106), “We got into the habit of taking an evening walk on the lawn in the architectural heart of the University of Virginia. We usually began our walks by the dome-shaped rotunda and ended up at Cabell Hall. Griff’s friend Greg, the campus pastor at the University of Virginia, sized up the situation and gave this piece of guidance:

‘Don’t do anything sexual that you wouldn’t feel comfortable doing on the steps of the rotunda.’ Griff and I took Greg’s words to heart, and even climbed up on to the rotunda steps one night and kissed to our heart’s content. Griff said, ‘That’s it. That’s our line. We won’t really feel very comfortable stripping our clothes off up here in front of the rotunda.’ And that became our mantra on the steps of the rotunda.”

That’s very, very practical counsel. Until reading Lauren Winner’s book, I had never thought about the image of staying on the steps of the rotund or public place as a way to maintain sexual purity. It is a very powerful and practical one.

Part of what establishing boundaries means is that we literally won’t go places where we are tempted. I remember being with a girl (that I had a romantic connection with) on a street one night, and her saying, “Come to my bedroom.” I remember wanting to go, but also the alarm bells going off in my mind, saying “don’t go”. I remember when I was single, an attractive girl wanting to come into my hotel room at midnight (again part of me wanted to let her in, but the alarms bells we’re going off in my mind saying don’t invite her in). Even at the risk of seeming like a complete stick in the mud, I’ve said “no” to protect something important.

Part of what this healthy boundary-setting will mean for a disciple of Christ is a refusal to live with someone before marriage.

If you are living with someone--I don’t mean as a roommate—but living with some you’re romantically involved in, let me just speak to you.

Let me speak to you. You may think, I’m saving money, I have an opportunity to “test drive” marriage I commit—it’s a win-win situation.

But living together before marriage almost certainly means you’ll cross sexual boundaries that God does not intend for you to cross… or to put it biblically, you’ll sin.

And contrary to what we you think, living together before marriage, marriage, correlates with a higher rate of marriage failure. According to the Vanier Institute a typical couple who lives together before marriage have a 66% higher divorce rate when compared to those who don’t live together before marriage.

Sometimes we need to establish healthy boundaries with respect to where and how we are with someone, but sometimes we need to set boundaries with other things.

If we are tempted by internet porn, we can set boundaries in those areas. We can install software like ‘Covenant Eyes’ or download resources at xxxchurch.org that will help to hold us accountable in the way we use our computer. We can talk to people voluntarily and confess our struggle with this. If porn is a secret, it will have much more power over us.

I know of a person who decided to not have a computer or a television in his apartment so that he would not be tempted to view pornography. That’s healthy boundary setting. If that sounds drastic, remember that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said if you’re struggling with lust take drastic measures. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. It is better to lose one part of your body then for your whole body to be thrown into hell. Jesus was saying take decisive, drastic measures to deal with lust. Because lust will cloud your relationship with God and porn in particular compromise your relationship with a real woman.

Again, these boundaries are not just about doing not something wrong--but they help to create a positive good in our lives.

I hesitate a little to share this story, because I know it’s personal and it’s not everyone’s story.

Leaders--and I am no exception--face unique temptations.

My wife also grew up in Japan where men in power often are unfaithful.

We’ve talked about this and Sakiko is ok with my sharing this with you.

I’ve said to her, I think that while leaders will face unique temptations and I am no exception, I think you can be reassured by the fact we honored God and each other as a couple by not sleeping together before we were married. You know that with my girlfriends in the past, while we had there were some levels of physical affection depending on how close we were, I never had sex with any of them—even when some of them made it clear that it would ok to sleep with them with no strings attached.

Based on my past, I think you can conclude that sexual purity really matters to me.

I hope that that is reassuring.

If you are able to set your boundary, for example, before you are married with your girlfriend or boyfriend or fiancée--even if you have sinned sexually in the past--as a result of a new commitment to Christ, you commit to being faithful now in your sexuality before God, then you will give a gift to your future spouse should God call you to marriage—and that gift is that you will be more likely to be faithful once you are married, if God calls you to marriage.

A third way we can pursue sexual wholeness is through spiritual disciplines can help us stay pure….

Dallas Willard, a respected writer of the spiritual life describes a discipline as a practice that enables us to do what we cannot do by direct effort.

As we know, there is simply no area of human achievement—sports, music, learning a language where we do not need discipline.

Developing your spiritual muscles and your character muscles happens in much the same way that you would develop your physical muscles, your athletic abilities, or music abilities. They come through practice… and they also come, of course, by receiving the grace of God.

One of the disciplines that is especially helpful in moving toward sexual purity is fasting, i.e., voluntarily abstaining from food.

If you can’t eat because you don’t have money to buy food and you are starving, that is absolutely devastating. But if you don’t eat because you choose not to eat for some other purpose, then, as hard as that is, that can be life-giving.

When I have fasted, I have felt later a greater clarity of mind, sensitivity of spirit, and closer to God (and sometimes grumpier!)

A new world feels like it is opening up to me.

In my hunger I also feel a greater dependence on God. The choice to fast opens a door to a new world.

If we are single, we might consider sexual purity as a kind of fast where we say “no” to something in order to say “yes” to other gifts that God would have for us…the gift of being able to enjoy God with a clear conscience… Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.” The gift of being able to channel our sexual creative energy and use it in the service of other people.

Perhaps most important of all, choosing to remain sexually pure provides us with an opportunity to be faithful to God.

Henry Nouwen, priest, the gift that singles can bring is that we can be a sign of faithfulness to God in the body of Christ.

There is great joy and reward in being faithful to God.

There is reward and everlasting joy in being faithful to God.

Elton John, the pop singer, said in Amica Magazine some years ago that a boundary less life is fantastic: no rules to follow, don’t have to work 9-5, no kids to take to schools.

It’s simply great to have no boundaries.

I haven’t lived a perfect life by any means, but as I look back across my life I’m grateful that with God’s grace, I’ve able to say no to certain temptations to say yes to God.

There are people who told have told me, “I should gone for it (in certain situations) like in the movies.”

But, I have no regrets for choosing God’s way.

There is a certain attractiveness to sin and short term pleasures… but there is enduring joy and peace in choosing God’s way.

There is blessed in being naked before God and without shame.

If we have not chosen God’s way, through the mercy of God, we can begin anew…

In Lamentations 3: 22-23:

22 Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.

23 They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

Prayer…

Message M4: Marriage and Singleness


Title: The Naked Truth About Sex


Text: Eph. 5: 31-32; 1 Cor. 6: 15-20


Big idea: God designed sex for the covenant of marriage.


(Mic stand for Kathleen…)


In an episode of the popular sitcom Friends, Monica is talking to a guy and she says, “Can we still be friends and have sex?” “Sure,” he replied. "It’ll just be something we do together--like playing racquetball.”


We intuitively know that sex is something that is quite different from racquetball…


Ronald Rolheiser the author of The Holy Longing says that sex is a powerful fire…


Sex can lead to ecstasy or to despair. It is the most powerful of all fires, the best of all fires, the most dangerous of all fires… and the fire which ultimately lies at the base of almost everything, including the spiritual life.


Sex powerfully shapes our spiritual lives.


Over the next two Sundays we will be exploring God’s perspective on sex and sexuality.


Please turn to Ephesians 5:31.


In Ephesians 5:31 Paul, quotes the passage from Genesis 2 which describes God bringing together Adam and Eve as the first husband and wife; and as God does so, he speaks of a man leaving his father and mother to be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.


31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."


God describes here the essence of what happens here in marriage… a person leaves their parents, i.e., as we discussed last week in a relative sense he or she forsakes their parents so that the spouse can become the most important person in their lives and then unites with their marriage partner.


The uniting here that God described is consummated in sex.


Sex is a gift from God.


Some people view sex as shameful.


Some have experienced sex as painful or frustrating.


But God intends sex as a gift to us--a gift that brings joy and life and unites us body and soul with another human being.


God designed sex so that two people would become one.


God created sex as a unitive act that not only connects a man and a woman’s body, but also their souls.


God designed sex so that when a man and a woman came together physically in sexual union, there was also a powerful force that made them want to unite on every other level, as well.


Sex was designed so that when you give yourself to someone physically, you also want to give yourself emotionally, spiritually and economically.


Sex was designed such that when you get physically naked with someone you want to get naked in your soul with someone…


Now sex doesn’t always feel like it’s uniting us powerfully to another person, sometimes it feels just physical, but according to the one who designed sex, God, when a person has sex with another person he or she is becoming one flesh with them (if it doesn’t feel like it unites you to another person now, perhaps it did when you first started having sex or first started having sex with some you were in love with.)


I think we intuitively know that sex is more than just physical…


The reason Paul, says prohibits a person having sex with a prostitute is become he or she will become one that person in body and soul.


In 1 Corinthians 6:15-20:

15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." [a] 17 But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. [b]

18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins people commit are outside their bodies, but those who sin sexually sin against their own bodies. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

The reason that Paul in 1Cor. 6 says that God prohibits our sexually uniting with a prostitute is because God, as Paul knows from the Genesis 2:24 text, says the two will become one flesh.

Therefore, Paul asks “Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said the two will become one flesh.”

We live in a world where people often talk about “casual sex.” Even sex with someone you don’t love, or that is not intense or meaningful, is never truly casual. There is still something very powerful and profound about it.

This is why when we hear about a child being sexually molested, we shudder.

We intuitively know that that child hasn’t just been violated physically, but on a spiritual level, too.

This is why when we read about a woman being given a date rape drug and then raped… we sense that something has been taken from her even though she may not be able to recall what happened.

(I am not suggesting here, of course, that those kinds of violations are morally equivalent to two consenting adults sleeping with each other… no, the violations I just spoke of are much worse, of course. I am simply saying that we know through those negative examples that sex is more than something physical).

In Tom Cruise’s movie, Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz, Tom Cruise has friendship with a woman played by Cameron Diaz. They tell each other that they are just friends, but time and time they do have sex together. But the character played by Diaz ends up getting really attached. She confronts him while they are riding in his car and she says, “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise, whether you do or not?” The Diaz character in the movie is obsessive, but what she says nonetheless reflects the truth about sex, that when you have sex with someone your body makes a promise, whether you do or not.

Because sex was designed to make a promise to fuse you to another person in a powerful way, it makes sense that God commands us to reserve sex for the permanent and exclusive covenant of marriage.

Sex within the safety of a marriage covenant can offer powerful healing:

Christian psychiatrist John White says:

Erotic pleasure is the most superficial benefit of sex. It is the delight only of a moment. The bodily exposure that accompanies sex can be both profoundly symbolic and powerfully healing. It symbolizes the uncovering of our innermost selves, our deepest fears and yearnings. As I look tenderly on the body of another, and as I experience what it is to feel the tenderness of another’s caress and the delight of knowing I am loved as well as loving, it seems momentarily impossible to separate myself from my body, for the one who accepts my body also caresses with tenderness my inmost being or so it seems. So it makes sense that sexual relationships would be confined only to marriage for acceptance and disclosure are not the activities of a moment, but the delicate fabric of a lifetime’s weaving. Each time sex springs from casual encounters some of their life-healing nature is destroyed.

If we know of these truths about sex, then it should not surprise us at all when we read the surveys, they show that the people most satisfied in their sex lives are people who are married.

This seems counter-intuitive.

Our culture tells us that best sex occurs among young people who are not committed to each other, but the research shows that the most satisfying sex occurs within marriage.

Contrary to what Hollywood suggests, the most fulfilling sex takes place in the safety of a marriage covenant.

The most beautiful freedom occurs in a marriage covenant.

Like in our relationship with God, when we say no to other things, we will find ourselves most satisfied in God. So it is when we commit exclusively to our marriage partner, we will find ourselves most fulfilled. Sex can be an experience where we deeply bonded to our partner and where we renew our wedding vows.

How do we make the journey to the place of God’s intention for us sexually? Many of us here have not grown up with this kind of teaching. And certainly not the kind of counsel on sex you will receive in Maxim or Cosmo magazine.

At this time I want to invite Kathleen Morrissey to come forward, as she will share a part of her journey with us.

Healthy Single Sexuality


I came to Christ 8 years ago. I was raised as an atheist. My childhood home had a lot of abuse, and my parents were harshly critical. As a result, my heart longed for love and acceptance. As an adult I tried to fill those needs through sexual relationships. I longed for connection and for a deep love that would make me believe that I was acceptable, that I was lovable, that I belonged. The longing for connection is a God given need but how I chose to meet that need is where I went wrong. I discovered that a man can’t meet those needs, no matter how much he loves me. When I started attending church and came to believe in Jesus, I was still sexually active and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. Even though I had heard that premarital sex was a sin I decided that I wouldn’t change my behavior until I read in the Bible that I wasn’t supposed to act that way. At the time the only way that I read the Bible was to let it fall open at a page and I would read a few paragraphs. Well, within a couple of weeks of basically challenging God to prove to me that I wasn’t supposed to have premarital sex, the bible fell open to

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

"Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.


At that point I decided to abstain from sex until I got married.


I realized that having sex - even within a committed relationship - was wrong because if both of us valued our own desires over that of God’s it was more likely that within marriage one of us would also choose our own desires over the covenant of the marriage.


Once I had made a commitment to abstinence, I would have fail if God were not part of my plan. When we include God in our strategy, He is able to do exceedingly more than we ask, even beyond our imagination, because of His power working within us. As it says in Eph 3:20.


In the beginning of my “abstinence journey” I would fantasize about being married so I could have sex again. Or I would simply fantasize about sex. During the Living Waters course (which is a healing prayer ministry) it was brought to my attention that fantasy was wrong. This totally shocked me because I couldn’t see what harm I was doing to anyone. But as I focused on images of lust my longing increased and so did my frustration. Before long I would begin to feel like God was depriving me of what I wanted and I was tempted to sin. So as an experiment I decided that every time I found myself fantasizing about sex I would turn to Jesus. I would ask Him to be enough for me or I would simply call Him to mind. I soon recognized how much time in a day I spent hoping that things were different than they were. As I invited Jesus to interrupt my fantasies, things quickly changed. Within one week the temptation to fantasy stopped. It was as if Satan had been tempting me into this place that gave short term gratification and long term torment but as soon as I asked Jesus into this place it was defeating Satan’s plan because instead of drawing me away from Christ it was drawing me to Him so he stopped tempting me in this way and I no longer struggle with fantasy.


One night I had a dream that Matthew McConaughey wanted to sleep with me – I know only in my dreams. He kept saying things like come on I’m a movie star, I was voted the sexiest man alive, most women would jump at the chance. And I just kept saying “no”. Finally he said “Why not” and I said “because I love God more that I love you”. I think that is what it comes down to. I say that I love God but am I willing to choose to honor and respect Him? Am I willing to put His desires for my life before my own desires?


I don’t want to give the wrong impression here, I don’t feel called to be single. But I believe that while I am single I need to live in peace about how things are rather than what they are not. I chose to believe that God has good plans for me and that He will always be enough. Jeremiah 29:11 say: I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to give you hope and a future.


Community was essential in my process of moving from being sexually active to abstinent. Having close friends helped ease my aloneness, I discovered that my friends love me and I can turn to them when I am struggling with literally anything. The more I shared with them the easier my struggles became.


They helped give me hope when I had given up hope for myself. When my friends who were more mature in Christ started to hope for me, they didn’t hope that I would get married; (although there is nothing wrong with praying for that) but they hoped that I would find peace in being single. For someone to hope that I would get married was like saying there is something wrong with being single which of course there’s not. It took time for me to learn to live with the hope and expectation of getting married without being disappointed or give up when it didn’t happen. God can still give me a full life and all the good things he has planned for me while I am still single.


Community also helped me see reality more clearly. I developed deep friendships with married women and through them I learned that the reality of marriage was nothing like my mind had imagined. My fantasy of marriage started to crumble. If I had entered into a marriage with my unrealistic expectations it would have been a disappointment and probably a failure. Even a good marriage has struggles. This is a good reminder when I see a romantic comedy; I can see it for the artificial Hollywood construct that it is and not try to compare my own life to it.


There have actually been some great benefits to abstinence.

1st. Sex is simply off the table. In conversations and relationships it’s just not an option so my energy is focused more on authentic connection. There is no energy wasted on sexual innuendo or on wondering what the sexual dynamics of the situation is.


Also, I can explore what is means to be fully a woman. It’s not about dressing to allure or create sexual desire. I can allow myself to be compassionate and caring without ulterior motives.


As well, after reading the passage in 1st Corinthians I realized why I always felt something had been taken from me when I slept with a man. I had become one with him and yet there was no marriage covenant between us. Sexuality is a God given gift but I used it as a tool to try and fill a need and in that way I removed all it’s beauty and purity. By abstaining from sex I avoid that feeling of emptiness and unloveliness and God can fill me with His truth.



(Take some time for silence).



As Kathleen shared, part of the way we move toward honoring God is to know that God intends sex to be shared in and only in the covenant of marriage.


Scripture is clear on this.


That this is God’s intention for us, for our good.


Kathleen also talked about how having connection with God and quality friendships helped her stay sexually chaste.


G.K. Chesterton has said every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God. Part of what can drive us to an unhealthy sexual connection with a person or through pornography or compulsive masturbation is a sense of loneliness that comes through a sense of being disconnected with God, people, or ourselves.


Having a healthy relationship with God and people can help us stay sexually pure.


When Kathleen was tempted through fantasy, she asked for Jesus to come and be enough for her. She also talked about cultivating deep friendships with other women.


These helped her in her journey toward sexual purity.


Third, I heard Kathleen taking about a desire to please God…


When Matthew McConaughey in Kathleen’s dream wanted to sleep with her… Kathleen declined by saying no “because I love God more that I love you”.


The passion to please God is a powerful motivator in keeping us sexually pure.


This is true both for single and the married person…


The dynamics of sexual purity for the married person is similar to the dynamics of sexual purity for the single person. The married person is called to a sexual one and just one person, the spouse. The single person is called to be sexually chaste, or a Kathleen said, to abstain. But the dynamics are similar. The single person refrains from sex, and the married refrains from sex with everyone, but his or her spouse.


Joseph refrained from sleeping with Potiphar’s wife in the book Genesis not because she didn’t have the body type he preferred, but because he didn’t want to sin against God by sleeping with her.


Some people say it is impossible to stay sexually chaste as a young single person or monogamous as a married person.


It is possible.


With God’s help it is possible.


I remember being in relationship with someone, and we were very honest. If it was not for our mutual commitment to God, we would have had sex by this time in our relationship.


It’s not easy to stay sexually pure, but it is possible with God’s help…


When are sexually pure, as Henri Nouwen says we become a sign of God’s faithfulness to the body of Christ.


What if you sinned sexually?


And who hasn’t at least to some degree in act or in thought?

Sometimes people will try to make you believe that God forgives sins, except sexual sins. But God forgives all sins and gives us a new beginning.

In Isaiah 1:18 God says:

18 "Come now, let us reason together,"
says the LORD.
"Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.

In Psalms 103: 10-12 we read:

10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.

11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;

12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

God’s mercy leads us to repentance…

The issue is not so much the past, but what will we do now and from this day forward.

Prayer of confession:

25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Ezekiel 36



1

Leaving, Cleaving and Priority of Relationships

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Message M3: Marriage and Singleness November 9, 2008

Title: Leaving, Cleaving and the Priority of Relationships

Text: Eph. 5: 21-33

Big Idea: When a person gets married, their spouse becomes their most important human relationship (in way that is analogous to a person’s relationship with God)

There is a passage in Scripture that those of us who are happily married find troubling: Matthew 22: 23-30.

Some members of a religious group called the Sadducees came to Jesus and asked him about a woman who had married seven different men across her lifetime and then died. The Sadducees asks Jesus, “At the resurrection whose wife will she be? Would she have seven husbands in heaven?” Jesus replies, “At the resurrection we will neither marry nor be given in marriage.” We know that in the life to come we will remember people we knew here. So, this is a very hard teaching for those who of us are happily married.

Author Lauren Winner points out that this encounter between the Sadducees and Jesus teaches, not only about marriage, but a lesson about the end of time—at the end of time there is only marriage between Christ and the church.

We have been looking at Ephesians 5--this famous passage on marriage.

If you have your Bibles pleasure turn there:

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body. ³¹ "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

At the end of our text Paul says, “This is a profound mystery, or a profound revelation, but I am talking about Christ and the church.” What Paul is saying is that his commentary on marriage, which is considered by many to be the central teaching on marriage in the Scripture, is really a metaphor for the church’s marriage with God.

A good marriage, either through our own experience of it or as an example to us, can prepare us for the kind of relationship we will enjoy with God in the world to come.

One of the ways that marriage tutors us in the life to come is that it shows us the priority of our relationships. The theologian Augustine suggested that “a well-ordered heart is to love the right thing to the right degree in the right way with the right kind of love.”

In Ephesians 5 we are taught about the priority of marriage which also becomes an analogy for the priority of our relationship with God.

In verse 31, after Paul speaks on the nature of marriage, he says “for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery (or “revelation”) but I am talking about Christ and the church.”

Here in Ephesians 5: 31 we read that in marriage “a man will leave his father and his mother and unite or ‘cleave’ to his wife.” These words are a quotation from Genesis 2: 24 where God says the same thing as he creates the institution of marriage in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.

When Paul speaks here, using the language of Genesis to describe marriage as a process where we leave our father and mother, many people in the Ancient Near Eastern world would have heard this as radically counter-cultural.

In Paul’s world (as is the case in many Asian and Latin cultures today) a person’s connections to their own family, and in particular their relationship with their parents, were considered hugely important. In fact, in the world in which this passage was first read, most people would have regarded their relationships with their parents as their most important one.

What does it mean to leave? Does it mean to physically leave your parents?

In the Jewish culture of Paul’s day, when a man and woman married, the couple would typically live in the man’s home--or at least very close to his parents.

So when God says for this reason when a man or a woman is married, he or she will leave his father and mother, God does not necessarily mean that the husband or wife will physically move from the parents’ home and set up a home far away (though this does, of course, make it easier to “leave”). Arguably, a better way to translate that word “leave” is “forsake.” We could translate this passage: For this reason a man will forsake his parents and be united to his wife.

What does it mean to forsake? Of course, forsaking is not an absolute forsaking. We are told in Scripture to honour our parents. The forsaking that occurs in marriage

is a relative forsaking. When a person marries, God calls the person to forsake a number of different things.

Ronald Rolheiser in his excellent book on the spiritual life, The Holy Longing, has pointed out that every choice is a renunciation. When you choose to marry, you renounce certain things. If you choose to have children, you renounce certain things.

Mike Mason, in his book, The Mystery of Marriage, has pointed out that when a person gets married, it is not so much the bringing together of two worlds as it is the destruction of two worlds and the making of a new world.

It sounds negative, but this renouncing of old opens you to fully experience what it is God has called you to. There is something about making God your heart focus that causes your relationship with God to flourish and there is something about focusing on your spouses that causes that relationship to flourish.

If you get married, part of what you called to do is to leave or forsake certain things.

One of the things that we leave behind would be old priorities.

I got married in my mid-thirties. I was wondering if I could make the adjustment work- wise, from working with the freedom of a single person to working as married person.

When Sakiko and I first got married, we went to England where I was pursuing a study sabbatical. As I shared before, I ended up spending way too much time in the library, and this particular university library was one where you could only study if you had student status. It was a library where you could not check books out, because many of the books were considered national treasures. I was operating in many ways with the work schedule of a single person, not the schedule of a married person.

One of the adjustments we will make if we are married, whether we are students or working on in job, is that the old way that we studied or worked will be left behind.

This does not mean, of course, that we necessarily leave our schools or our companies, but we find a new way to work. When we are married, we must shift our old priorities with respect to study and work and everything else.

When we are married, we will leave or forsake certain patterns that we had growing up.

Let’s envision a couple about to get married. The husband grew up in a traditional home. His dad worked outside the home growing up. His mom did not work outside the home, but as a homemaker. The way that his mom showed her love to his dad was to say when his dad came home from work was to say something like, “You have been working hard all day. Just relax. Read the paper. Watch hockey. Dinner will be ready in 12 minutes.” The way his mom showed his dad that she loved him was through traditional acts of service like cooking, doing laundry, etc. But this guy is marrying a woman where both the mom and the dad worked outside the home. And the way her dad showed her mom that he loved her was that he helped around the home a lot with cleaning, occasionally cooking, and changing the diapers. Let’s say, the guy’s wife has her own career… If he’s not willing to put his old patterns behind him, the marriage is headed for a collision.

In our family growing up we were pretty vocal and engaged in a lot of debate around the dinner table and would verbally spar and fight… 5 kids. Now as adults, we are relatively calmer, but when Sakiko first started coming to our family reunions she thought we were fighting…all the time I’m like no no no… we weren’t fighting… no one one’s feelings were hurt.

In Sakiko’s family there two kids, her and her sister, and they were much more civil with each other…

As couples, when you marry, you leave behind your old way of fighting or not fighting and find new healthy ways to fight.

It’s important to do some family of origin work perhaps with the help of counselor so we can leave behind old patterns.

When we are married, we leave behind certain old priorities. When we join our lives to God, we also leave behind certain old patterns relating to people…viewing the world. We leave behind certain relationships, both past relationships and future relationships. We forsake them. At a typical wedding ceremony, I will turn to the bride and then to the groom and ask them, “Do you promise in the presence of God and before these witnesses to love and comfort Lisa, to honour and cherish her, in sickness and in health and in prosperity, and in adversity, forsaking all others? Will you remain faithful to her as long as you both shall live?” Of course, the primary kind of relationship that a person is thinking about in the context of a marriage ceremony, that he or she will forsake, will be other romantic partners. It is a commitment to forsake other potential sexual partners. It is also an implicit commitment to say that no-one in my life will be a closer friend to me than you—that no-one will occupy the greater part of my heart than you.

But forsaking also includes our parents… don’t think about wedding

At this time I am going to invite Janice Hoshizaki, to come forward and talk about what that has looked like for her.

Could you describe where Brent was on priority list of people when you got married?

Well, I thought my priorities were God first, Brent second, and my mom third—but only as long as they were all in agreement, it turned out. My actions kept showing that my mom was first, God was second, and Brent was maybe third. Even at third, he’d sometimes be tied with my brother and my work!

This made for a lot of conflict. I drew more on others’ opinions, especially my mom’s, when it came to things like where to attend church, what kind of place to live in, and wives’ and husbands’ roles, I also didn’t care as much about what Brent thought about his career and our life together as their potential impact on my mom. Soon after we were married, I fought with Brent vehemently about moving to Olympia, Washington, only a 4-hour drive away, because I didn’t want to leave my mom. We prayed about it, but because I knew how sad my mom would be, it felt like the wrong decision to me. She is a widow, after all, and from Japan, where traditionally, people are more closely tied with their parents. Even after we moved to Olympia, I continued to fight Brent on it, and with added resentment.

I knew that God wanted Brent to be a higher priority, but I had extenuating circumstances, I thought. You know how you sort of bargain with God? God couldn’t expect me to really “leave” my mom—a widow, from Japan-- and “cleave” to Brent? Surely He was just working on making Brent more agreeable.

Did that shift for you and if so how?

God brought people into my life who helped change my priorities. I joined two prayer groups after we moved to Olympia because I was so miserable. Both groups listened, prayed for me and pointed me to what God says about love and marriage in the Bible. I started to realize that concentrating so much on my mom and so little on Brent was “off” a bit.

I made a good friend who shared and modeled what a loving spouse was. She often talked and prayed about wanting to lift up her husband and not tear him down, even in their conflicts. Even though I’d grown up in church, I hadn’t really heard anyone speak openly about marital love and conflict like this before. Seeing what it looked like to make her husband a priority helped me see what it could look like for me.

What really made me change my priorities, though, was listening to Brent. Really listening, and with love. I didn’t just decide to do this myself, one day, though. A counselor we saw taught us to use a communication technique called “the floor,” which requires putting aside your thoughts to accurately hear and empathize with the other’s. At this point, we’d been married four years, but for the first time, I listened to Brent’s feelings about being low on my list without thinking about my rebuttal or what anyone else thought. And for the first time, I truly cared about how sad this made him feel.

Now, my actions better reflect my straightened-out priorities. I have, at times, chosen Brent’s way over my mom’s, and in a loving way! Here’s an example: When we moved back to Vancouver, we stayed with my mom until we could find a place of our own. At the start of our hunt, I would ask my mom to come along—the more eyes, the better, I thought! Well, my mom and I fell in love with this one condo and we immediately informed Brent of all of the reasons we should jump on it. Brent shared his reservations with us calmly. When my mom left the room, Brent and I talked more and I could see that negotiating with a two-against-one approach didn’t make sense. I told my mom later that we would keep looking and that I could see why Brent thought what he did. My mom, quite used to me agreeing with her, looked disappointed, but respected what we decided. I also stopped asking my mom to help us look, which was hard because after inviting her in, I was leaving her out. She didn’t see the place we ended up with until things were almost finalized. But you know, it all worked out—Brent and I both love our place, and as an aside, my mom likes it too.

Keeping my priorities straight is obviously something I still work on. Sometimes I forget to keep Brent up at the top. The difference is that my priorities have changed and now I just have to remember them. Before, I thought my priorities were fine the way they were.

As Janice spoke of, how would we know that we have really forsaken, again in relative terms, our parents? If our partner doesn’t feel like she or he is #1, he or she likely is not (unless they are truly crazy—they’d be in the best position to judge). If we are married and we find ourselves constantly needing to consult our parents on every major decision, we have not left them. If we always need the approval of our parents for the things that we do, we have not left them. If your spouse has a conflict with your parents and you always side with them, you have not left them. If there is conflict between your spouse and your parents and you are always neutral, you have not got far enough away.

If you hate your parents and what drives you is to do things that would irk your parents, and so you do the opposite of what they want you to do just to get back at them, you have not left them. So, we forsake our parents and we even forsake our children in a relative sense.

Biblically speaking, when we marry someone, that person becomes more important than our parents and even our children. The best thing that parents can do for their children is to love each other first. That creates a sense of stability and safety for the child. If the son becomes his mother’s surrogate spouse, that puts far too much pressure on him. He’s just a boy. We often tend to think of abusing a child as not loving a child enough, but ironically it is also possible to abuse a child by “loving” the child too much, becoming dependent on the child…

As I said, in the introduction Paul in Ephesians 5 is talking seemingly about marriage, but at the end of that passage about marriage he ends up talking about Christ’s relationship with the church. Marriage is really a metaphor for our most important relationship, our relationship with God.

Marriage is a metaphor for what our relationship with God can be like.

Marriage is not the ultimate relationship. It is a penultimate relationship and it points to our relationship with God.

In verse 32, Paul, when describing a husband and wife becoming one flesh, says this is a profound mystery or a profound revelation. He is talking about Christ and his relationship with us--the church.

The truths that Paul speaks of here, apply to marriage, but also to our more important, enduring relationship that is to our relationship with God.

It is hard to leave. It is hard to forsake. If we are married, it is hard to forsake old patterns or old priorities, our parents. Old ways are comfortable and they look attractive.

If we do commit our lives to God, it is also hard to forsake the old priorities, the old patterns which have become so engrained (which may be relationship or sex or others matters), and our parents, which we are called to do in a relative sense. (We will talk more about that in an upcoming message.)

Let me close by offering a couple of practical ways that will help us leave.

Like the children of Israel, it is our natural tendency to remember with certain nostalgia the “the good old days.” The Israelites did not have a great life in Egypt—they were slaves. They were building the pyramids. They did not have a singular day off. But as God was leading them through the desert under the leadership of Moses to the promised land, they kept grumbling and complaining about how they would have been better off in Egypt with the onions and the leeks and the meat they had. It is often our tendency to glorify the past and to compare our present with what we had in the past, but when we are married to another person or brought into union with Christ, we are called to forsake that old world which was not as great as it might be in our memory and to resist the temptation to compare.

We are also called positively to renew our mind with the perspective that comes from the Word of God. Paul says in Romans 12:1-2:

¹ Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. ² Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Paul says we are to renew our mind through the Word of God. This is why reading the Word of God and meditating on the Word of God, ideally each day, is so important.

One of my philosophy professors Arthur Holmes, said “You’re not educated until you’ve read Plato’s Republic.” He wanted to motivate us to know the great classic.

You’re not going to be formed fully in Christ unless you know and internalize the sweeping truths and perspectives of the Word.

This is why it is so important to read the Word, spend time with people whose perspective reflects God’s as Janice did, and to tell each other the Gospel story as we gather Sunday after Sunday, in small groups, informally with people, at the Lord’s table, etc. so that our minds will be renewed.

As we resist the temptation to compare and as we renew our minds through the perspective of God, we will be better prepared for marriage (if God calls us to marriage) and for our everlasting union with God.

Marriage,Singleness,Transformation

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Message M2: Marriage, Singleness and Transformation Nov. 2, 2008

Text: Eph. 5: 18, 25-33

Big Idea: Both marriage and singleness in Christ are gateways to transformation and holiness.

If we are single and thinking about being married one day, we tend to view potential partners through a kind of market lens.

Perhaps we are looking for someone who’s attractive, or a person of sincere character, or someone who’s smart or funny or someone who can bring us security. We want to make sure that we don’t get a bad deal; we want to get a good deal. We tend to think about what a person can do for us.

But Paul in Ephesians presents us with an altogether different kind of vision for marriage.

A greater and loftier vision…

Paul calls us to see marriage as a place where we pour out our lives for another person as Christ loved us so that she or he will become pure and beautiful before God.

If you have your Bibles please turn to Ephesians 5

Eph. 5: 25-33

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing ^[a] her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body.

Paul calls us to see marriage as a place where we pour out our lives for another person as Christ loved us so that she or he will become pure and beautiful before God.

How can this happen? Remember this text is preceded by Ephesians 5:18 where Paul says:

Eph. 5:18

¹⁸ Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.

The way a person can love like Jesus is to be filled with the Spirit of Jesus.

In our text Paul says in vs. 25: “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”

WOW! This is a rare and amazing vision for marriage. If you are single and think one day you may be married, do you have vision to pour out your life for your spouse so that that person becomes more holy and beautiful before God?

(T) Conversely, do we have a vision for marriage (if we are married or sense we might be married one day one day) to become more holy through marriage?

Paul calls on husbands specifically to make their wives holy and beautiful by washing them with water through the Word. The washing is likely an allusion to baptism. When a person is baptized, as Haein was last Sunday evening, part of what the water symbolizes is the washing away of our sin.

One of the great doors that marriage can open up to a person is that it can provide space for a person to both experience cleansing himself or herself and help their spouse experience cleansing. How so?

One of the ways that marriage can cleanse us and make us more pure is that marriage can help to wash away our sins as the waters of baptism symbolize (Use prop). How does this happen? Marriage is a place where our sins are put under a kind of magnifying glass.

By nature, we are all self-centered, but that self-centeredness is not always apparent if we are not married, or not in a close relationship to person. For example, a single guy can live with the attitude, “I don’t need a laundry basket. The floor serves that function just fine.” When you can no longer see a square centimeter of the floor because your whole apartment is covered by clothes, you know it’s time to do the laundry. If you get married to a woman who likes some order in the home, especially when guests come over, you need to rethink the way you manage your laundry. A lot us guys become a little neater after we get married because we need to think of someone else’s preference for the home.

And as a single person we can pretty much largely live as we please without really needing to consider someone else’s preferences. As a single person I could be out 10-14 nights in a row. I could work pretty much work as long I wanted to. I had a lot of freedom to travel as part of my work. But as a married person I, like every married person, I had to re-adjust my work patterns.

Even in something as small as renting a DVD, as a single person I can choose something I want to watch. As a married person I am thinking not only would I enjoy this, but would my wife enjoy it. One of the things that marriage can do is that it can reveal our selfishness. Once that is revealed, it is possible, with God’s help, to start living a less self-centered life, more giving life.

The Ephesians text says in vs. 28 that the husband ought to love his wife as his own body.

He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does for the church. One of the ways that we care for ourselves physically is to wash ourselves, to shower, brush our teeth, etc. Our spouses can help us “wash” ourselves by helping us to see our self-centeredness and our flaws. Ideally, they do it gently and lovingly.

Other people can see things in us that we don’t necessarily see in ourselves. Sakiko might ask me, “Are you angry?” I may respond by saying, “No. Not angry.” “Well, you sure seem upset.” A day or two later, upon reflecting on it, I may come back and say, “Oh, yeah, the other day I was angry. You were right.”

A spouse can help you not only see your own self-centeredness, but when you don’t see something in your life, a spouse can help hold up the mirror to your anger or moodiness. If you are single, it is possible that you are angry or moody and no-one may notice.

If you are married or in a very close relationship with someone, a person will pick it up. If you are single or alone a lot, you may have a streak of anger, or sexism or materialism, or be overly controlling and it may be that no one notices. But if you are married or in a very close relationship with someone, the person will pick it up and may gently name it, and you will have the opportunity to experience cleansing and change.

So, marriage can be a place to make us holy.

We experience cleansing, purification, in our marriage through washing, but also through the Word. Paul has in mind the Word of God, specifically the Gospel that leads us to Christ.

Paul also talks about caring for our marriage partner by nourishing her or him. In verse 29 Paul talks about how people will nourish their bodies by feeding them and caring for them. It is as we nourish and feed each other through Gospel and through words that build each other up that we can experience being made more like God, more like Jesus Christ.

It is as we nourish and feed each other that we can present our spouses as radiant before God.

I spoke earlier about how we human beings can be self-centered.

Ironically, at the same time, we can also suffer from an empty self where we experience this inner void with little or no sense of self in a positive sense, at all.

Part of what can happen in a good marriage is that the husband and wife can love and nourish each other in a way that fosters the development of true self.

“The human soul is like a wild animal,” says Parker Palmer in his book A Hidden Wholeness. Like a wild animal, the soul is shy and seeks safety in the dense underbrush of the woods. But if we can create a sense of safety… then the wild animal of the soul will make an appearance.

In marriage one of the ways that the soul can be purified, made more complete, is as husband and wife love each other in a way that enables the wild, shy animal of the soul to emerge.

The other day my wife Sakiko and I were talking about this and I asked her if and how her soul was made more complete in our marriage. She said, “One of things that this marriage has done for me is that it has enabled me to become a person who is willing to take more risks and be more adventuresome…” As a result of our marriage, she was willing to venture to a new country. And then on a smaller scale, “When we went on that sailing trip a few trip a few years ago, I found myself doing something that I would have never done on my own.” (We had taken a week on a sail boat to sail out to the Gulf Islands as part of a sailing course.) “As a single person,” Sakiko said, “I would never have done that. And being in this relationship has stretched me in being more willing to take risks and pursue adventure.”

For me, being in the safety of our marriage has meant that I have been able to pursue parts of my soul that I wouldn’t have explored otherwise. It is not that difficult for me to be out at on rough sea or jump out of an airplane with a parachute on my back, but it is much more difficult for me to access certain emotions and then to express them. In the safety of our marriage, I have found that I have been able to access parts of my heart and emotions that I didn’t know were there and then to be able to express them. It can be scary. It is easier to jump out of an airplane for a person like me, but through the love and security of our marriage bond I have able to explore new parts of my soul and thus become more whole.

Marriage has the capacity to make us holy and whole.

Even if we have come from backgrounds where we have been hurt maybe by our families of origin or by people or circumstances, marriage has the power to bring healing to us—to make us whole and holy. That wholeness can come as we offer the story of God to each other (vs. 25) and as we offer words of affirmation to each other.

Someone who attended the same seminary that I did has said that God has invested the marriage relationship with sufficient power to challenge the authority of accumulated, biographical verdicts against us, and thereby redeem the past. If you grew up in a family or in an environment where you were made to feel stupid, but your spouse makes you feel bright, you are going to feel bright. If you grew up not really feeling especially attractive, but your spouse makes you feel beautiful, you will feel beautiful. In marriage you have the capacity to re-program the self-appreciation of your spouse. Your word has the power to completely overturn verdicts that have been passed on to your spouse over the years. We can nourish our spouse through our love and words in ways that make her or him more beautiful.

So marriage really does have the power to transform us… to make us holy and whole.

Singleness can also be a gateway to transformation, as well.

At this time I am going to invite Kirsten Rumary, a member of this community, to come and talk about how singleness has been the gateway of transformation for her.

Singles Testimony – Tenth November 2008

Right around my 35^th bday, I was part of a small group that was doing an exercise where we imagined being on our deathbed at 70, looking back over our lives and reflecting on the things that were most important and life-giving. The first thing that struck me at the time was, “If I die at 70 then my life is half over!!” Thoughts of my own mortality gripped me. The next thought was, “This is not how I imagined my life would be at 35.” In particular, I didn’t think I would still be single. “What if I’m still single at 70? The first 35 years went by pretty fast – it’s not inconceivable that the next 35 will go by and I may never marry or have a family of my own. What will life look like if that’s the case?”

I decided I wanted to tap into the life experiences of other singles, so I sent out a question far and wide to all the singles I knew and more – from 19 to 69, men and women from all different backgrounds – “Tell me what is the Best and Worst thing about being single for you.” (INSERT POWER POINT BULLETS)

Best Things About Being Single:

*5) Financial Freedom

*4) No Requirement to Share

"I have my own bed, blankets and pillows all to myself, without snoring and motion"

*3) Not Having to Consult Anyone When Making Decisions

"I can do what I want, go where I want, eat what I want, learn what I want, putter at what I want."

*2) Time for Family & Friends & the Freedom to Choose Your Friends

"If you want to hike, you can hike with your hiking buddies. If you want to Kung Fu, you can Kung Fu with your Kung Fu buddies. There is no obligation to spend time with a spouse who may not have the same interests or friends that you do."

*1) Less Conflict in Relationships

"Being single means that I only have one set of quirks, neuroses, and relatives to deal with."

Worst Things About Being Single:

*5) Having No One who is Responsible for Me:

"Sometimes I think if I died it would take weeks for someone to find my body."

*4) No Children

"Don't you have to have sex to get one of those? Wait. I want to change my answer. No sex."

*3) The Nagging Feeling that there's Something Wrong with Me

"Why don't I get the same results when I use Axe Deodorant?"

*2) Single Person Pity

"When people say, "Don't worry, the right one is out there somewhere. Like I'm half a person or something."

*1) No One to Share Common Experiences of Life over Time

(Holidays, mealtimes, shared history, times of difficulty)

My conclusion was that in all the answers there was a common theme: the Best part of being single had to do with Freedom, and the Worst part had to do with Loneliness. So I asked myself: “If I’m single for the rest of my life, how will I handle the Freedom and the Loneliness that will be a part of my life?” As a Christian, my first thought was to look to Jesus for inspiration. Lucky for me, he was single!

First of all, as a man in ancient Hebrew society he would have had access to a fair amount of freedom, and although he was fully human he was also fully God and would have had access to a lot of power. But I saw that Jesus used his freedom to liberate and heal, to transform and serve those around him, not to dominate or control. Ultimately he laid down all His freedom to rescue the whole world. And even Jesus had accountability: “I only do what I see the Father doing.” As a North American woman in the 21^st century I have a lot more freedom than the women in Jesus’ day - but how do I use it? As I examine myself I see that often my tendency is to indulge my freedoms (my time, my money, my resources) for my own pursuits and pleasures, or to hoard them, to store them up as a reward for the times when I feel hard done by.

At the time, I decided that how I was using my freedom needed some tweaking and I implemented a few practical changes. First of all, I decided to start a home group – to provide a space for others to become known in more intimate ways in Christian community. I also decided to become part of a family. I figured, instead of complaining about not having my own family, maybe I could funnel that energy into actually participating in the lives of other families? (Sam and Ben) As a symbolic gesture, on my 35^th bday I threw a party for my friends and didn’t tell them it was my bday – I splurged on them rather than having them splurge on me. Since then Jesus continues to inspire me to use my freedom and my resources more generously, because I can.

Now for the loneliness – I know what it is to struggle with loneliness like many other singles. Sometimes when I pull up to my house at the end of the day, I have to sit outside for a while because I’m just not ready to go inside and be alone. (Married friend’s dream) But as I looked at Jesus’ life I thought that He too must have known great loneliness – people rejecting Him, leaving Him, a lot of the time people just didn’t get Him, his closest friends abandoned Him, and He experienced total separation from the Father when He was on the Cross. He probably knew what it meant to be completely alone more than anyone. This comforted me but it also challenged me, because I observed that Jesus still chose to be present to people, He still reached out to those around Him, even when He withdrew from others it was to spend time with His Father - my tendency in my aloneness is to withdraw into isolation and cut everyone off, and then comfort myself in selfish or illicit ways (to indulge my freedoms as if they were an antidote to the loneliness), or else let bitterness and resentment become my closest companions. I could see that another round of tweaking in my life was in order. Was I going to choose to be present to others, to still reach out, to press through my loneliness rather than wrap myself up in it?

And what about the illicit comforts I mentioned? I had been sexually active in my teens and 20’s, but by the time I was asking all these questions I had been walking in sexual abstinence for a while. I had come to believe that the narrative in the book of Genesis where God lays out His intention for human sexuality as being within that one-man/one-woman lifetime commitment was indeed the best plan. Now, I had embraced that belief assuming that I would marry and actually have the option again!

At 35 I was looking at abstinence not just as a means to an end of my choosing, but as an end in itself. It may sound silly, but sex wasn’t easy for me to give up and I chose to walk in that desert (so to speak) because I assumed I knew what the Promised Land was going to look like! So I have since had to ask myself: “Can I continue to choose abstinence with no thought of that future reward?” (And not just abstain from having sex with another person, but could I choose to embrace abstinence even in the little things?)

For example, I know there is a school of thought that suggests that fantasy, let’s say, is an acceptable practice for the modern single Christian and that Jesus didn’t condemn it or say anything about it (true), but what I hear Jesus and scripture pointing to and reaffirming is that story of human sexuality in Genesis; and I have to think there is something to that. So even creating fantasies of relationship in my mind seems less than God’s best intention because it doesn’t build on anything that’s actually real. Fantasy about another person actually violates that person because it uses them as a means to our own personal end. Now, I realize this is not a popular thought because we live in a culture where sexuality is seen as a personal right, rather than a gift to be given. But if sexual energy is meant to be used in service to one other, for the purpose of building mutual bonds of affection within a lifetime commitment and for creating new life, then allowing that energy to leak out anywhere else doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

So back to turning 35! Since then I have continued to ask myself hard questions around freedom/loneliness/abstinence. Preparing for today has opened up new questions I hadn’t asked before. For example: in the past I have seen my status as a single person as one of ‘waiting’; waiting for that status to change. Kind of like being in the middle of nowhere waiting to go somewhere. But if I am single for the rest of my life can I accept this place of ‘waiting’ as actually being somewhere? Can I live with the waiting as if it were a gift, in the way that joining with a spouse would be a gift? Can I choose to embrace waiting as if it were an offering of something, (something that I actually hold in my hands), as something tangible, rather than just the time it takes to get somewhere else? And can I let it refine me as much as being in a marriage would refine me?

As I was asking myself these questions I was reminded to look again to Jesus. It struck me that in the book of Revelation it talks about the time in the future when the risen Jesus will be revealed to the whole world – and that only the Father knows when that time will be. Even Jesus has to wait - right now Jesus is with the Father in heaven and He’s waiting – but I’m pretty sure He’s not sitting around moping or doing nothing. That thought is incredibly comforting to me! And I can see that my experience of waiting has been bringing me into a deeper walk with Jesus and it is refining me - my ability to persevere through difficult things is increasing – I’m learning how to follow instead of just doing my own thing – I have more self-control. This process has helped me see that I really do hold a lot more in my hands than I realized.

Pray: pray for the spirit to work in us as married… as single… Eph 5:18.

The reason that singleness or marriage can be transforming for us is because of Jesus Christ.

At this communion table, we see an example of person who was single and utterly faithful to God even to the point where he even was willing to lay his life for us as a sacrifice for our sin.

It’s as he lives in us, we can be utterly faithful to God as well.

As a married person the presence of this single person can help us love our spouses as Jesus has loved us and make us humble enough for us to allow God to transform us through our spouse.

Let us come as single people or as married and feed on Christ in our hearts by faith…

On the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread…