February 14, 2013
Friends with Benefits
The situation of people living
together outside of marriage is becoming more prevalent in the church, but the
real shocker is that it is being done by elderly folks. Sadly, many of us are buying
their arguments and understand the rhetoric they use that it is based on finances
and income. If widows and widowers were
to remarry they would lose their combined income and respective homes and would
then have to live in one home and on a single income. Neither person wants to
give up their own financial security, but neither do they think they should be
deprived of love and companionship. I see two glaring issues. 1) They don’t
trust God to supply their financial needs, and 2) They feel they are entitled
marital benefits outside the bonds of marriage. Awhile back I had a discussion
with a fellow believer on the current trend and when he talked about the need
for intimacy and he said, “I just don’t
think God wants us to be lonely and to suffer.” When I questioned his
correlation between suffering and abstinence he decided suffering probably
wasn’t exactly the right word to use. Jesus cautions us to put the temptations
of the world in their proper place, “For
the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need
them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to
you as well.” (Luke 12:30-31 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I see a third glaring issue. They are willing to abandon the truth for their choices. Sure, nobody should be deprived of love and companionship. But these do not come through romance and sexual relations alone. Two friends can live uprightly in the same household while even elevating one another’s uprightness by guarding boundaries together. This operates truth between them, and they will carry one another deeper into it. Never could companionship be better.
-----Nor is marriage just sharing shelter and enjoying companionship. It is making mental and emotional commitments far beyond what friends and companions do; it is each including the other into his own sense of self even more than it is the sharing of bodies. Moreover, it is a courageous walk into the truth, a willingness to be realigned by reality as God makes it, such that more subtle characteristics of the two stitch together at levels deeper than mere companionship can know. It stands them before God, alone together and stripped bare. That mental picture whispers for honesty.
-----We are not capable of enough honesty to actually stand before God, especially laid open and bare, and certainly not beside someone we claim to love, but whom we truthfully enjoy more than we please. None of our ways are made of all truth. Maybe some are made mostly of truth. But most are made predominantly of what we approve. Rarely is approval made for the complete flow of benefit only to wherever the truth has called it. Our selves surely have catch-cans for taxing off pieces of benefit before the remainder is released to go where it truly belongs. And that is what we more approve. It is no wonder words are used to express concepts they do not entirely mean and situations get twisted into meaning what they are not.
-----There is some confession involved in these relationships. Otherwise there would not be arguments and rhetoric. But arguments and rhetoric more expose a lack of repentance. It is not that sin must be followed by entirely complete confession preceding thoroughly binding repentance. That ‘s more perfect than are we. Then, all we have is the process of confession and repentance, the process of changing into His likeness from one degree of glory to another. One does not “rhetor” and argue and confess and repent at the same time. But many try to stand before God and man and lie at the same time. A risky business indeed!
-----If you just let the Bible say what it says while confessing you are not all it says and while trying harder, you will hear some amazing things about today. The church thinks it is gloriously the shelter of souls, the feeder of hunger, and the clothier of nakedness. Its leaders run tell everyone God’s visions for their believing and praising and giving. Yet they so fail to see through their own lordships that they put homosexuals and women in pulpits to preach to adulterers and sexual carousers cajoled into their pews. And as the resulting torrent of money flows in from a Sunday sea of bodies, the leaders are sure their spiritual wealth is making great favors for God by mankind’s being in church. They draw out and twist up like licorice the Bible’s own ideas before serving them into the sea. “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent.” (Rev 3:17-19)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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