God Performs the Union

The one-flesh union between a man and woman is the heart of what marriage is.

Genesis 2:24 is God’s word of institution for marriage. But just as it was God who took the woman from the flesh of man (Genesis 2:21), it is God who in each marriage ordains and performs a uniting called one flesh. Man does not create this. God does. And it is not in man’s power to destroy. This is implicit here in Genesis 2:24, but Jesus makes it explicit in Mark 10:8–9. He quotes Genesis 2:24, then adds a comment that explodes like thunder with the glory of marriage. “‘The two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

When a couple speaks their vows, it is not a man or a woman or a pastor or parent who is the main actor — the main doer. God is. God joins a husband and a wife into a one-flesh union. God does that. The world does not know this. Which is one of the reasons why marriage is treated so casually. And Christians often act like they don’t know it, which is one of the reasons marriage in the church is not seen as the wonder it is. Marriage is God’s doing because it is a one-flesh union that God himself performs.

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This Isn’t Home

All of us know what it is like to be in a house that is not our own. Maybe you’ve slept in your share of hotels or someone else’s home. They have beds. They have tables. They may have food and they may be warm, but they are a far cry from being “your father’s house.” Your father’s house is where your father is.

We don’t always feel welcome here on earth. We wonder if there is a place for us here. People can make us feel unwanted. Tragedy leaves us feeling like intruders. Strangers. Interlopers in a land not ours. We don’t always feel welcome here. We shouldn’t. This isn’t our home. To feel unwelcome is no tragedy. Indeed it is healthy. We are not home here. This language we speak, it’s not ours. This body we wear, it isn’t us. And the world we live in, this isn’t home.

Max Lucado, A Gentle Thunder

I have chosen you out of the world, so you don’t belong to it. – John 15:19

One really cool thing that struck me about this little tid bit is this; “This body we wear, it isn’t us.” You see, what we have here isn’t our home, our forever place, but it is what God has given us to use as a tool for expanding His kingdom and bringing greater glory to His name each and every day. We all have amazing and wonderful gifts. It’s taken me many, many years to figure out what mine are, and we all have the responsibility to use these gifts for His glory and His recognition. God has given us such a short amount of time, use it wisely.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. -CS Lewis

Minds About God

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us…Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges…A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.

‎If by ‘practical men’ we mean unbelieving men engrossed in secular affairs and indifferent to the claims of Christ, the welfare of their own souls, or the interests of the world to come, then for them [knowledge of God's immutability] can have no meaning at all…But while such men may be in the majority, they do not by any means compose the whole of the population. There are still the seven thousand who have not bowed their knees to Baal.

The unbelieving mind would not be convinced by any proof and the worshipping heart needs none.

I think it might be demonstrated that almost every heresy that has afflicted the church through the years has arisen from believing about God things that are not true, or from overemphasizing certain true things so as to obscure other things equally true…For instance, the Bible teaches that God is love; some have interpreted this in such a way as virtually to deny that He is just, which the Bible also teaches.

A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Taken from Well Spent Journey

Is Faith Irrational?

Dr. John Patrick

A question was asked to Dr. John Patrick, a physician from England who lectures on matters of faith, science, and medicine.

“How do you suggest we respond to colleagues in the medical profession who regard our faith as irrational?”

He suggested, first of all, that we explore what’s meant by “irrational”. The word “irrational”, after all, is just a polite way of saying “crazy” or “insane”. If our faith is insane, one would expect that to manifest itself in visible ways. One would expect our lives to be chaotic, inconsistent, or disordered. Instead, we most often find the exact opposite: our lives reflect a sense of meaning, our relationships become healthier, and our thoughts and actions become subject to a higher set of standards.

In other words, living a godly life is the easiest way to dispel the notion that our faith is irrational.

The funny thing is that people of faith have plenty of room in their lives for reason. It’s modern-day secularists and rationalists who have no room in their lives for faith. Which is the bigger box? Who, then, is being small-minded?

To paraphrase the words of Dr. Patrick, our Christian faith is neither “rational” nor “irrational”. It’s supra-rational. It recognizes that human reason can only extend so far, and that there is an ultimate source of Truth beyond our powers of understanding. Science is a powerful tool, but we should recognize (with some humility) that there are certain questions that it cannot answer.

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Servants Who Become Sons

Screwtape reveals the Enemy’s (Yahweh) intentions:

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [the Enemy's] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more that on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of self-hood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of me is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) more propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The scary thing about this is that you don’t know you’re being turned into food like cattle, being sucked into the lies and deceit until you give yourself up to God and allow him to be your source of strength to fight off Satan.