Reflecting Christ Through Our Marriages

For the month of February, we have been talking about the Song of Solomon and Christian Romance. This week, we’re wrapping it up 3 key takeaways for you to remember so that you can enjoy a love that is exciting, fulfilling and free!

One of the big points that we made last week was how our lives and every facet of them, including sex, are all pieces of an intricately woven narrative designed to reflect and glorify our Creator. This means that there is no spiritual and secular divide, no quarantined areas where God has dominion and authority and other areas that are off limits to Him or that He just doesn’t care about. There is no such thing as spiritually neutral. In his letter to the Colossians, the apostle Paul said it like this:

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. - Colossians 3:23-24

Everything we do in life holds spiritual significance. So, what does this mean for our romantic lives? For dating? For Marriage? For Sex?

Our first key takeaway is that a God-honoring, biblically modeled relationship is inherently exciting. Notice, I didn’t say that it should be exciting but that it is exciting by nature. Look at the lives of the disciples. Before Jesus, they were fishermen, tax collectors, zealots. After meeting Jesus, they were travelers, preachers, outlaws and martyrs. It’s important to note that exciting does not always mean fun, and it definitely doesn’t always mean comfortable. Sure, you can have a safe, comfortable, predictable relationship, but is that really how you want the story of your life to read? There is something alluring about the wild and untamed areas of nature - the forests, the oceans, the mountains, the jungles – that cause us to want to go out and explore. We grow and learn something true about ourselves in the testing that these types of places stir up. Love is the same way. Countless times throughout human history and in various cultures, love is described like a stormy ocean, a treacherous mountain, an unclaimed and uncultivated wildland beckoning the brave and the bold to come out and explore. Unfortunately, many people today see marriage as the end of adventure, when in reality, your wedding day should be the first day of your maiden voyage setting off into the great expanse together. Your spouse is an adventure all unto themselves, beckoning you to explore every corner, to chart their tumultuous waters, to summit every peak. And no, these are not just euphemisms for sex, but descriptions that help us to reframe our understanding of intimacy. To know and to be known by this one person, for them to accept you with all of your flaws exposed and for you to accept them with theirs, is one of the deepest longings that each of us harbor in our hearts. Sure, there is danger and risk. What if they reject me? What if i screw it up? What if I don’t have what it takes? The truth is, throughout your marriage, they will reject you, you will screw it up and, brace yourself, you don’t have what it takes. You need more than you’ve got to have any hope of surviving this perilous quest, and this is where marriage points each one of us back to the Gospel. Christ is the One who knew all of your flaws and every one of your sins before you ever existed to commit them, and He still chose to make you. He is the one who bore that sin, as well as the scorn, shame and rejection of the whole world just so that you could have a relationship with Him. He was perfect and lived perfectly because He knew that you would not. He is all powerful, all sufficient and has everything that you need, exactly when you need it. Just like the disciples, He calls us into the adventure of following Him. There is nothing more exciting than this!

That was just the first key takeaway! Our next one is that a God-honoring, romantic relationship will be fulfilling. Psalm 37:4 says:

“Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Now, this verse and others like it are very frequently used out of context to mean that God is obligated to give you whatever you want, but the key to understanding is right in the beginning of the sentence. “Delight yourself in the LORD...” When we train our brains to not just obey God, but to actually enjoy Him and His commands, God will give our hearts what it is that we desire. In other words, when we desire Him, He will give Himself to us. This is true fulfillment because we were made to be in relationship with Him, to love Him with everything. But, as we’ve been saying all month long, we were also created to be in relationship with one another and, more specifically, to love one another. The lie of the world is that we can be satisfied by anything or anyone other than God. The reason why you are not feeling fulfillment is because you don’t have enough, so you are driven to accumilate more and more. More money, better cars, the newest phone, more followers, more partners, a higher body count. More, more, more. The problem is, adding more stuff into your life is not what you were made for, so it is never going to fulfill you. Rather than filling the hole in your heart, the hole just gets bigger with every new thing you try to fill it with. This way of living, of course, is going to cause you to feel empty, hopeless, depressed and this is exactly the way so many of us are feeling right now. We weren’t made to accumulate, we were made to be conduits. In Him, we have all that we need from a source that never runs out or even gets smaller. We can’t lose God’s love, mercy and grace by extending it outward, it only gets bigger. Love is not only life-giving, but it is life-creating. Without it, life is simply not life. Again, the apostle Paul says it like this:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” - 1 Cor. 13:1-3

Our final key takeaway is that when we learn to love our spouse in a way that is God-honoring, we will experience a love that is totally free. Loving God’s way is free because it’s unconditional. There’s nothing the other person can do to cause me to stop loving them. I am not loving them because I am getting something in return. It’s a love without a catch, because I have already received infinite love from God, so I’m not coming to the other person needing to be filled up by them. That is awesome, but that’s not the only way that this kind of love is free. You see, now you’re in a relationship with someone else and when both of you are living out this type of God-honoring love, there’s nothing to be afraid of between you anymore. 1 John 4:18 says:

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”

Love without fear, without shame, without regret. Being able to give yourself fully and without reservation because you know that they love you and are putting your needs ahead of their own. Back in the 60’s and 70’s the young people of that era started something they called the “free love” movement. In title, it sounded great! You can be physically intimate with anyone and everyone without holding anything back, no restraints, and this is going to bring you the greatest happiness – peace, love, harmony and all of that hippie nonsense. And it was just that, nonsense. It didn’t take long for the “free love” movement to lead to things like the AIDS epidemic, drastic increases in poverty, single-parent households and on-demand abortions. Is that what freedom looks like? Truely free love only comes from God and in relationships that are built honoring Him. He knows what we need, and He knows the right way for us to get it. We have to figure out if we want to keep spinning our wheels in the broken and destructive cycles of self-centered love that the world is promoting or if we will surrender our ways to His and love His way.