CP 235 Eros by any other name.

CP 235 Eros by any other name.

Thinking about marriage 7.

The editor of “Leadership”, Marshall Shelley, recently wrote an editorial under the heading, “Eros by any other name”. I’m reprinting it in full.  It’s challenging for you – and for me. Enjoy both the article and, well… all things!

“Sometimes things just don’t come out right.  A pastor friend, Armin, told me about going to his first meeting of the local ministers.  He’d just moved to town, and as a courtesy, they asked him to begin with prayer. Concluding his prayer, he intended to say, “And, Lord, give us continued good success”. But it came out, “Lord, give us continued good sex”. The room froze; Armin didn’t know what to say next.  But one of the other ministers said heartily, “Amen!”

Everyone cracked up.  Armin reported, “They asked me to pray for them quite often after that”. It’s tough to talk in church about sex, even though it’s our culture’s most pervasive theme.  How can we speak willingly and well to a sexually charged culture?

John Piper and Justin Taylor, in their book, Sex and the Supremacy of God, offer a helpful insight: “The word sex in an English Bible almost always occurs in the context of sexual immorality (Greek, porneia).

You might conclude that the Bible does not have much to teach us about sex, and that when it does address sexuality, it does so only in a negative, prohibitory fashion.

But this would be a shallow conclusion.  Scripture has a lot to say about sex, because Scripture has a lot to say about everything.  So rather than searching the Bible only for the word sex, a more productive strategy would be to search for the phrase all things, since sex is obviously a subset of all things.

A sampling:

• Sex is good. (“Everything created by God is good.” – 1 Tim 4: 4)
• Sex is subject to Christ. (“He has put all things under his feet.” – Eph 1: 22)
• Christ makes sex new. (“I am making all things new” – Rev 21: 5)
• We must not be enslaved to sex (“I will not be enslaved to anything.” – 1 Cor 6: 12)
• In this fallen age, sex is both pure and impure. (“To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.” – Titus 1: 15).

What a sermon series this would be.”

(Marshall Shelley Leadership – Winter 2006)

And a further ‘Fred’ comment on last week's piece about, “Definitely not marriageable material… yet!” It’s this. Few of us will ever be able to enter marriage with sufficient maturity to be in a blissfully happy relationship. Strangely, just about the only setting in which such maturity can be developed is marriage!

Be blessed… Fred