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By Pastor Glenn Pease
CONTENTS
1. ALONE IN PARADISE Based on
Gen. 2:18
2. THE CELEBRATION OF LOVE Based on Gen. 29:1‑30
3. INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE based on Num. 12
4. RUTH'S ROMANCE Based on Ruth 2:1f
5. THE CLEVER COUPLE Based on Ruth
3:1‑4, 4:1‑10
6. THE POWER OF BEAUTY Based
on Esther 2:5‑18
7. PRAISE AND ROMANCE Based on
Prov. 31:10‑31
8. THE PRAISES OF LOVE Based
on Song of Songs
9. THE FRAGRANCE OF LOVE Based
on Song of Songs 1:1‑17
10. ROMANTIC AND RELIGIOUS FRAGRANCE
Based on Song of Songs 1:3
11. ROMANTIC AND RELIGIOUS LOVE
Based on Song of Songs 1:1f
12. ROMANTIC AND RELIGIOUS KISSES
Based on Song of Songs 1:2
13. LOVE AND LUST Based on Song of Songs 1:4
14. WHAT IS BEAUTY Based on
Song of Songs 1:15‑16
15. ROMANTIC AND RELIGIOUS ROSES
Based on Song of Songs 2:1
16. THE GIFT OF MARRIAGE Based
on I Cor. 7:1‑7
17. THE SINGLE SAINT Based on
I Cor. 7:1‑7
18. HOW TO LOVE YOUR WIFE Based on Eph. 5:22‑33
19. MAKING MARRIAGE MARVELOUS Based on I Pet. 3:1‑7
20. HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL HUSBAND Based on I Pet. 3:7
1. ALONE IN PARADISE Based on Gen. 2:18
Back in the
days when women were fighting for the right to vote there were a number of
women speakers who could expound eloquently on the virtues and values of
women. The story is told the one such
speaker who brought her message to a conclusion by saying, "Where would
man be today without the care and comfort of women? Where would man be today without the hands and heart of
women? Where would man be today without
the labor and love of women? Just tell
me where would man be today without women?" Just then a little man shouted from the back of the crowd,
"Paradise!"
The
battle of the sexes is one in which each side seeks to reinforce its position
by going back to paradise and showing that everything would have been great if
it hadn't been for the other. Like the
woman who said to her husband, "Our marriage would have been perfect if it
hadn't been for you." He probably
agreed with the philosophy, but not the application. Women delight in pointing out that man was incomplete without
woman, and that even in paradise he was not happy without her. There are no lack of poets to back up her
claim to be the poetry of earth as the stars are the poetry of heaven. Hargrave wrote, "Clear, light‑giving
harmonies, women are the terrestrial planets that rule the destines of
mankind." Moore adds, "Ye are
the stars of the night, ye are gems of the morn, ye are dewdrops, whose luster
illumines the thorn."
Men
are quick to label this as sentimental nonsense, and they insist that Adam was
better off when he had paradise to himself.
They also have poetic support, for Andrew Marvell has written,
Such was that happy Garden‑state
While man there walked without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet?
But 'twas beyond a mortal's share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in paradise alone.
Women retaliate with the words of Dryden,
Our sex, you know, was after yours designed,
The last perfection of the Maker's Mind:
Heaven drew out all the gold for us, and left
Your dross behind.
Man then counters with these words:
For woman due allowance make.
Formed of a crooked rib was she.
By Heaven she could not straighten be;
Attempt to bend her, and she'll break.
On
and on the battle rages ad infinitum, ad nauseum, or in other words, until it
gets sickening. We are interested in
this battle only because it calls our attention to a basic human need, and the
only adequate solution to meet that need.
Man is made a social creature, and if he does not feel a part of
society, or if he does not have companionship, he ceases to find value in
life. One of the most unbearable
conditions of life is that of loneliness.
We want to examine God's relationship to this basic human problem and
seek to discover what it means for our own lives. In spite of all the fighting, men and women need each other, and
they know it. Josh Billings said,
"Adam without Eve would be as stupid as a person playing checkers alone." In verse 18 we find two aspects of God's
relationship to the problem of loneliness.
I. GOD'S ATTITUDE.
God
says it is not good for man to be alone.
Man was to be a social being, and so he can never be complete
alone. Loneliness is opposed to the
very nature of God Himself. God is not
alone and never has been in all eternity.
He is a trinity of three Persons in one Godhead. He has had eternal fellowship within His own
being. One of the key values of
recognizing God to be three Persons in One is that it explains His self‑sufficiency. No other being is self‑sufficient, for
they are dependent upon God and other forms of life. God alone is self‑sufficient, for He is Triune, and all the
requirements needed for love and fellowship are contained within His very
nature. God is complete in Himself, but
man is incomplete in himself.
God
did not intend to make man in His image with the nature of love and desire for
companionship, and then not meet that need.
But for awhile Adam was alone, and it is interesting that God would say
that it was not good. This means that
with all of the beauty of nature, and with all of the abundant provision of the
garden, and with a job to keep him active, and with many animals to keep him
company, there was still something missing.
There was an imperfection even in Paradise. That imperfection was not in
what was there, but it what was not there. Without human companionship all of
the physical blessings of the universe cannot satisfy the human heart. If this was true in paradise, how much more
is it true in our world today?
Cyril H.
Powell, in his book The Lonely Heart, tells of how an English landlady found
one of her lodgers unconscious and almost dead due to gas fumes. It was discovered
that he was once a well‑known actor whose name had been a household word
in England. Yet apparently all of his popularity and prosperity had not gained
for ham any true friends, and when he ceased to be famous he was left alone.
Unlike the Prodigal Son in the same situation he had no father to return to,
and apparently he did not know of God's good news of acceptance, and so he
wrote a note saying, "I am taking the only way out of this hell of
loneliness"
If this
was an isolated incident we could ignore it, but the fact is, this is a common
experience. The statistics are shouting out the truth from every land that it
is not good for man to be alone. It is, in fact, a very positive evil. One of the most frequent causes for suicide
is loneliness. G. Ray Jordan wrote, "Loneliness has driven far more people
to nervous collapse than all the theoretical doubts of mankind added
together." Erick Fromm in The Art
Of Living wrote, "The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his
separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity."
All
of the facts from every field of study confirm what God stated from the
beginning, and that is that it is not good for man to be alone. Man has to concede the point to the women
here. Paradise was incomplete without
her, and every life is incomplete without someone to love, and someone to love
them. This was God's attitude in the
beginning, and is, no doubt, His attitude yet today. But God does more than express an attitude. We see also in this verse:
II. GOD'S ACTION.
God
says, "I will make him a helper fit for him." God did not stop with an attitude, but went
on to action. He did not make a pronouncement,
and then not follow it up with performance.
He was not concerned with a resolution only, but was determined to come
up with a remedy. It is failure to
follow God at this point that has led to the church becoming ineffective and
meeting the world's deepest needs. Paul
Rees says something that we all know to be true, but he says it in a way that
we need to hear it.
"One of our substitutes
for basic Christian action is talk.
We are beguiled by the
wizardry of words. Our fault here
is both collective and
personal. Churchmen, meeting in
conference or synod, labor
long and tediously over "resolutions"
and
"pronouncements" they are going to make to their constituents
and the world. Often the mountain labors and brings forth a
mouse!
Some tame, nebulous
statement is drooled out ecclesiastical jargon,
which pitiably few people
will ever hear or heed. We easily
mistake
the saying of a thing for
the doing of it. And that goes for the
piously
woolly talk that you and I
do as individuals fully as much as it does
for the high‑sounding
"whereases" and "resolves" of professional
ecclesiastics."
It is
simply another way of saying that faith without works is dead. We have told ourselves so often that there
is no merit in good works that we have begun to believe that there is merit in
doing nothing. We need to realize that
good works cannot save us, but they may be the means by which God can save
others. Someone has divided the world
into three classes of people. They are
those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who do
not know what is happening, and the last includes the vast majority. If we take Christianity seriously, it
demands that we dare not be in any category but the first. Christians must be people of action.
The
whole Bible is a history of God's great redemptive acts, and it is a challenge
to His people to become Godlike in their acts.
God cared about Adams loneliness, and He did something about it. If we care, then we too must do something
about the great need of lonely people.
Paul Tournier in his book Escape From Loneliness says that practically
everyone is lonely, and the root of this is in man's sin and revolt against
God. Man's loneliness is basically his lack
of an ultimate companion. The unsaved
person recognizes that no relationship will last, for all people must die. What can a Christian do about this? That is just the point, for though we cannot
provide a mate for every lonely person, nor can we create friends for everyone,
but we have a Gospel that offers every person a relationship to Christ, and it
is an eternal relationship. Christ is
the Friend who alone can satisfy that empty place in the lives of all people.
We
need to remember that it was not as a sinner running from God that Adam was
alone, and that God then said it was not good for him to be alone. It was an estate of perfect fellowship with
God that he still felt alone. Jesus
experienced great loneliness not because He was out of fellowship with God, but
because He lacked human companionship.
Jesus experienced what the great majority of people experience. There can be crowds everywhere, and still not
anyone really near you who understands you.
It is not true then that a Christian needs only to trust in God to
escape all the loneliness. We are still
social creatures, and without friendship and companionship of others we will
still experience loneliness, even when we have good fellowship with God.
It is
at this point that the church plays a major role in providing fellowship. Christians must learn to accept one another
with all of their differences and weaknesses, and they must seek to provide a
companionship in which there is real understanding. This is the essence of what makes the church different from other
groups of people. Where there is not
total acceptance of persons the church is failing to be the church. We live in a world of loneliness with the
only satisfactory answer to it. God has
given His Son, and the Son has given His life that we might be reconciled to
God and know Him as Father, and Jesus as Friend. All those who are friends of Jesus are friends of one another,
and this is the key to overcoming loneliness.
2. THE CELEBRATION OF LOVE
Based on Gen. 29:1‑30
Sir
Wilfred Grenfell, the famous medical missionary to Labrador, was a fast worker
when it came to falling in love. He was
on board a ship returning to England when he spotted a charming lady on
deck. He was 43 years old, and so it
was not as though he had never spotted a charming lady before. But this woman had such an appeal to him
that he proposed to her shortly after he met her. She naturally resisted saying, "But you don't even know my
name." He responded, "It
doesn't matter, I know what its going to be." Here was a case of love at first sight, and history is full of
such romantic stories where people find their mate in a moment and live happily
ever after.
Others
who are equally open to God's leading have a tough time finding their life
partner. Billy Graham is a prime
example of this side of the coin.
Graham was going steady with Emily Cavanaugh in college. He felt she was beautiful, talented, and
spiritual, and he told his parents he planned to ask her to be his wife. She admired Billy a great deal, but she came
to a point where she told him she had reconsidered his proposal, and she could
not accept it. He was devastated and
felt the world had ended.
Later
Graham developed a relationship with Ruth Bell. Their love grew, but it also hit a snag. She was a missionary kid and felt God wanted
her to be missionary, but Billy felt called to be an evangelist. They became engaged in 1941, but at Wheaton
College Ruth told Billy she was unsure after all. There were tears and struggles before Ruth could make a
commitment to be his wife. She realized
he needed the balance she could give him.
He was too serious, and she could add the lighter touch to his
personality. They have had a long and
happy marriage, but the point is, there was struggle and a lot of
adjustment.
Love
stories can be romantic love at first sight, or tangled webs of struggle type
stories. In one of the great love
stories of the Bible we have a case which is both. The story of Jacob and Rachel is a classic case of love at first
sight. She came with her flock of sheep
to the well, and Jacob became an instant servant by rolling away the stone from
the well to impress her. A short time after
he was negotiating for her hand in marriage.
But the story takes on the characteristics of complexity and struggle as
Laban throws his oldest daughter Leah into Jacob's bed, and thus began a
lifetime of conflict and competition in Jacob's love life.
Out of
this both simple and complex love story God brought forth His people‑the
12 tribes of Israel, and the blood line to the Messiah, and the greatest love
story of all‑Christ and His bride the church. Romantic love is to be celebrated because the whole redemption
plan of God's love revolves around the romance of human love. You cannot tell the story of God's love
without the story of the love of husband and wife. Romance is at the very heart of God's plan of salvation, and it
becomes an effort in futility to try and separate love into the sacred and the
secular.
Romantic
love is a vital part of the sacred plan of God to save a lost world. It is
valid, therefore, to celebrate the gift of romance. God does so Himself by
making romantic love such a major part of His revelation. It is exalted to the
highest level in the Song of Songs where we read of romantic love in 8:6‑7,
"It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot
quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of
his house for love it would be utterly scorned."
Jacob's
love for Rachel illustrates this. He wanted her as his mate so strongly that he
would work for 7 years to possess her as his own, and v. 20 says the 7 years
were like only a few days because of his love for her. It was a small price to
pay for such a treasure. Love was his motivation; love was his energy, and love
was the fire that could not be quenched even though one wet blanket after
another was thrown on its flame. There is no escape from the emotional side of
love. It is a passion, or an intense feeling. The story of Christ's suffering
for his bride is called a passion play. His intense feelings were a passion.
Passion can be torment, and love sick people can go through torment in what
they are willing to pay in terms of suffering to possess the object of their
love.
I
remember the risks I used to take to see Lavonne when she lived 20 miles away
from me. I was a teen driving 50 dollar cars, and more than once I was broke
down on the highway between her home and mine. If I had a date with her nothing
else mattered but the keeping of that date. I literally risked my life to keep
a date with her. Blizzard warnings were irrelevant, and I would take off in a
car most people would not keep for parts, and head into the storm to get to
her. In our courtship I put 18,000
miles on an assortment of junk bound cars as I traveled that 20 mile stretch
over and over. I had to get out sometimes and put snow in the radiator to keep
the car from burning up. I had to get help from both her father and mine to get
out of the ditch. I had to suffer the torment of near worthless vehicles over
and over, and all of the pain of it was nothing for the joy of being with Lavonne. I know the power of the passion to possess.
Romantic
and Redemptive love have this in common‑they are passions to possess.
God's passion to possess fallen man, and Christ's passion to possess His lost
sheep were so great that they took on infinite suffering in order to make it
happen. The greatest power in the universe is the power of love. It moves and
motivates persons toward more goals than any other power. It is the prime mover
of God, for God is love, and because He is love He created all that is, and he
provided a plan whereby fallen man can be redeemed and restored to fellowship
with Himself. Love is why there is anything to celebrate at all. Love is why
there is a heaven to hope for, and why there can be joy in a fallen world.
The most
powerful motive for the overcoming of any problem is love. Aleida Huissen had
smoked for 50 years and tried often to quit but just could not do it. Then 79
year old Leo Jansen came into her life and proposed. He refused to set the wedding
day, however, until she quit her smoking. Will power had failed her for years,
but love was stronger and she was able to quit for the sake of love. Love was
the passion that gave her the power to do what she could not do without love. A. Z. Conrad said of love, "It
furnishes to the world its progress passion. It is storm‑defying, energy‑conquering,
venture‑challenging, soul‑awakening. It eats up the fires sent to
consume it. It swallows the floods sent to drown it."
If we
love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, it will not be hard to
give up anything that interferes with that love. If we cannot do it we lack the
love that give us the power of passion.
If we cannot give up things that hinder our relationship with our mate,
it is a sign that we have let the passion of love drain away. When we lose the
passion of love we lose the power that makes all relationships the priority
they need to be.
Jacob
loved Rachel, and when a monkey wrench was thrown into their lives, and he had
to work another 7 years to possess her, he did it for his love for her kept her
in the place of priority. This love story is like many of the classic romance
stories of literature. It is often like a tragedy. Rachel had to fight the battle
of the other woman, which was her own sister. She had to watch as Leah gained
status by giving Jacob children she could not give him. She eventually bore him
his beloved Joseph, but she never won the competition to give him the most
children. She also died before Leah and Leah got to be buried with Jacob in the
end. There were a lot of tears in this love story, but it is still a beautiful
and powerful story of passion and priority that should motivate us who have
less complex lives to celebrate the joys of love.
The
passion of Jacob for Rachel was persistent through all of the changes of life.
Rachel did not stay the cute little shepherdess she was the day they met, and
the day he fell in love with her. In chapter 30 she became a jealous wife and a
nag. She wanted children so badly that she became obsessed, and Jacob had to
get angry with her. Later she stole her father's idols, and she risked getting
Jacob into serious trouble. It was not a trouble free marriage at all. Both had
blemishes on their character, but they never ceased to put each other in a
place of priority. "Love is not love that alters when it alteration
finds."
As
monogamists we think we only marry one mate, but the fact is we all marry a
number of people because our mates keep changing, and we have to adjust to
these changes and learn to love a different person than the one we married.
Through the years all mates change, and sometimes it can be hard to adjust, for
your mate may not be the person now that you expected them to be for life. You
have to fall in love again with a new person. Those who cannot adjust to
changes in their mate often get divorced.
All couples go through what is called divorce periods where they are in
the process of deciding if they love the new and different people they have
become. This is where love is again the power that keeps them together. If love
is allowed to fade, and there is no effort to rekindle the flame of passion,
there is a danger that they will part.
Those who make it through these periods do so because they work at
rekindling the flame. Those who neglect love and just drift tend to drift apart
completely. Divorce is a refusal to
remarry the new person your mate has become. Long‑range marriage is a
commitment to keep on marrying the mate you have no matter how often they
change.
Here is
the other side of love that goes beyond the feelings and emotions of passion to
the act of the will. Love on this level is a matter of choice. In Gen. 30:2
Jacob is angry at Rachel. He is no longer filled with passion to roll away
stones for her, or to labor for 7 years for her. He now has negative emotions,
and he wonders how she can be so ridiculous as to hold him responsible for her
barrenness. If love was only passion and positive emotions, Rachel could have
been divorced at this point, but Jacob's love was a commitment to her to love
her even when she was totally unreasonable. One sided definitions of love that
stress it to be a feeling fall far short of the real thing. Some have defined
love this way:
1. "A tickling sensation around the heart that
can't be scratched."
2. "Love is a dizziness that won't let me go
about my bizziness."
Such
feeling oriented definitions lead to serious problems when people take them as
the whole picture, for these feelings may be real for a time but they do not
persist, and if people expect them to always be present they will feel that
love has left them and they will move on to find it again with someone else.
Feeling oriented love will lead people into affairs, for people can have strong
feelings, and even passion for complete strangers who are attractive. If you
let this kind of feeling and passion be your guide you will never have a
lasting relationship of love. Love is commitment and choice to be loyal to one
person even when the feelings are not there.
The
world's advice is to find a new partner when you come to a divorce period in
your relationship. This is a rejection
of the other side of love which is commitment.
Commitment is what enables love to bridge the divorce period in
marriage. The feelings cannot leap that
gorge, and so two people are cut off from each other unless there is some other
means by which they can remain in contact.
Commitment is that means.
Eliminate commitment and live only on feeling love, and you can count on
being a statistic, for divorce is almost inevitable where there is no
commitment.
Commitment is a choice. If I
commit to turning right I cannot also turn left. Every commitment means a loss of some other choice. If I choose to be faithful to one person I
cannot also choose to play the field.
But on the other hand, if I choose to play the field I cannot ever again
choose to have been faithful to one.
Everybody has to give up something, and so the wise person looks at the
record of where different choices lead.
Our promiscuous people the happiest people? Are prostitutes noted for being the happiest partners in wedded
bliss? Does anybody give the playboy
highest marks in being the example for youth to follow? The facts are that two people committed to
one another for a lifetime are always the ideal of what love is all about. This is the kind of love that continues to
grow, and makes a poet like A. Warren write,
We could not know, my dear,
we could not guess
How years augment the
miracle of love;
How autumn brings a depth of tenderness
That is beyond young April's
dreaming of!
How there would burn a
richer flame some day
Then that which first threw glory
on our way.
The
Bible makes it clear that God's ideal is two people who fall in love and
passionately seek to possess each other, and spend the rest of their lives
committed to weather all storms, and keep that passion alive until they are
parted by death. This means that
marriage is not a gamble. It is a sure
thing that it is going to be costly.
Love is a commitment to pay that cost of maintaining the
relationship. The Jacob‑Rachel
love story shouts out for all of history to hear that bad times, conflict, and
obstacles do not destroy a love which has gone beyond feelings to
commitment. The reason the world is
full of people who once loved each other, but are now divorced is because of a
one sided love, which is passion that never developed the other side of
commitment.
The
number one secret of a strong marriage is the assurance that your mate is
committed to you. You can fail them,
and get angry at them, but you know they are committed to you. This is the solid rock on which marriage is
built. Jesus said, "I will never
leave you nor forsake you." And
Paul said, "Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord." This is the foundation for
security in our faith. When you have
that kind of security in your marriage you build on solid rock and not on
sand. Lack of commitment leads to
insecurity. If we had no assurance that
Christ's love was permanent in spite of all our sin and failure, we could have
no sense of security at all. Some polls
have revealed that many Christians feel spiritually divorced, for they do not
have the assurance they will go to heaven.
They have a very unhappy spiritual marriage. Mates who do not feel secure are also unhappy, for they feel
their failure could lead them to be forsaken.
Commitment is what makes mates
realize their failure will not ever lead to being forsaken. It can be costly to make such a commitment,
but it is worth it for those who want the full potential of love in their
relationship.
When we
celebrate love we need to see it as a matter of rejoicing in the cost two
people have been willing to pay to keep their relationship alive and
growing. Jacob had to give up always
feeling the energy of his passion to labor for Rachel, and instead feel the
energy of anger at her pouting and depression. She had to give up the ideal of being the one to give him his
first son, and the most sons. She had
to endure the heartache of barrenness.
Anybody could write a script for romance better than what reality
produces, but reality is the price we have to pay for love in a fallen
world. Nobody gets it without cost, and
that even includes God. But God says,
and history says, and life says, love is worth the cost. Therefore, let us rejoice in romantic and redemptive
love, and celebrate love as God's greatest gift.
3. INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE based
on Num. 12
A boy in
Harvard College, many years back, got his father in Maine to come to Cambridge
and see the football game between Yale and Harvard. As they sat down, the boy
slapped his father on the back and said, "Dad, for three dollars you are
going to see more fight than you ever saw before." The old man smiled and
replied, "I'm not so sure about that Son, that's what I paid for my marriage
license." Marriage is like
football in several ways. It covers a lot of ground, and their are many
obstacles to overcome. Whoever is not prepared to face obstacles had better not
plan to play football, or get married.
The
football player faces two kinds of obstacles. There are those built into the
game, and which must be accepted to give the game meaning. Then there are the
illegal, or unjust, obstacles, which we call dirty playing. Sometimes the dirty
player is penalized, and sometimes he gets by with it, and the innocent player
suffers unjustly. Those who enter into
marriage face obstacles they know to be part of the game. There are natural and
normal trials, struggles, and adjustments. Marriage partners also face the
obstacles of dirty play also. They face the opposition of the ignorant, the
cruel, the prejudiced, the jealous, and those with numerous other evil motives.
Moses
had to face this kind of dirty play when he chose to marry across the race
line. He chose an Ethiopian, who was a descendant of Ham, to be his wife. His
sister and brother were offended by this union, and they made it known
publicly. They sought to degrade Moses because of it. Hastings Dictionary of
the Bible says concerning the Ethiopian, "It is likely that a black slave
girl is meant and that the fault found by Miriam and Aaron was with the
indignity of such a union." Most are convinced she was black, or at least
dark, but there is a possibility that she was no darker that Moses himself. She
could have been a part of the Cushites who were of Arabian stock, and less dark
that the Ethiopians. This is really irrelevant since the major fact is that it
was an interracial marriage.