Episode 1. Girls and Guys
Contentment is something a lot of people are looking for but sometimes we go looking for this most precious of commodities in all the wrong places and when that happens we get hurt – big time. …
Contentment is something a lot of people are looking for but sometimes we go looking for this most precious of commodities in all the wrong places and when that happens we get hurt – big time.
Back in the days when I was studying at Bible college, a good many years ago now, the principal of the college was a man by the name of Barry Chant and I remember quite distinctly one morning he came down to the common area where we all gathered before lectures and he announced that today was exactly fifty years since he’d started following Jesus. Fifty years! The more I came to know him as a teacher, as a colleague ultimately and as a trusted counsellor and friend, I realised how much of his life had been impacted by fifty years of walking with Jesus. The man has a maturity and a wisdom that are quite remarkable.
I say that as a preface because I’m about to share with you something today that he shared with me all those years ago. We were studying in our various streams of academia to become ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and I recall one lecture where he talked about the three things that generally bring ministers unstuck.
They’re really easy to remember because they all start with the letter ‘G’. Would you like to know what they are? Girls, gold and glory. Pretty simple, pretty powerful and the more I think about it those are the very same things that bring us unstuck in our search for contentment. Girls, or in the case of women guys, gold and glory.
I want to kick off with the first one of those today because unless we get this girls/guys thing under control then we’re not going to be content. The whole subject of the boy/girl, man/woman relationship and intimacy thing isn’t an easy one to talk about in this day and age without sounding a bit anachronistic because attitudes and lifestyles have changed a lot.
These days intimacy before marriage and indeed outside marriage is pretty much accepted in most societies as a fact of life. I think the current term is ‘friends with benefits’ where people engage in casual sex to meet their physical needs without the emotional entanglement of an exclusive boy/girl relationship. And most couples who get married today have slept together before they get married.
I heard a statistic the other day that fully 30% of married Australian men have visited a prostitute not to mention the office affairs, unfaithfulness and marriage breakdowns arising out of those extra marital affairs. And as the world around us becomes more and more accepting of promiscuity as purely a lifestyle choice, I start to find myself wondering ‘Hang on a minute, is it me that’s going crazy here? Am I the one who is out of touch by believing that physical and sexual intimacy belongs inside a marriage in this completely exclusive life long relationship between one man and one woman?’
Is the Biblical position on this is still tenable in this day and age? Then I pinch myself and I realise what Jesus has to say is as applicable today as it was two thousand years ago because truth, His truth is timeless. And this is what Jesus said when the religious leaders of the day came to ask Him about divorce. He said:
You’ve heard it said ‘You shall not commit adultery’ but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away, it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
And if your right hand causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away, it is better for you to lose one of your members than your whole body to go into hell. It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife let him give her a certificate of divorce’ but I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife except for grounds of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. (Matthew 5:27-32)
That seems pretty harsh doesn’t it? Pretty tough and rigid. If Jesus were alive today they’d probably call Him an extreme conservative, a fundamentalist but there’s a reason Jesus takes this apparently hard line and that reason is that God created us male and female in order that those of us who so choose can live in a lifelong intimate marriage as husband and wife. Plain and simple. Again here’s what He said quoting this time the first Book in the Bible, the Book of Genesis:
Some Pharisees came to him to test him and they asked him, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ And Jesus answered, ‘Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.’
So there is no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together let no one separate’. They said to him, ‘Why did Moses commands us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?’ And he said to them, ‘It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wife but from the beginning it was not so and I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for unchastity and marries another commits adultery.’ (Matthew 19:3-9)
The point is that we were created to be husband and wife and when we try and mess with that, when we try to break that it doesn’t work. Our physiological drive to reproduce is a very strong one, stronger in some than others to be sure but a strong one nevertheless. It’s a gift from God and it’s a gift that’s satisfied completely in the context of marriage as God has always planned.
You can’t be content chasing girls or guys as the case may be, outside marriage. It might seem fun at the time, exciting and alluring, fabulous but in the end it leads to emptiness and to loss because sex without love is always empty.
For me there is no one, there can never be anyone as beautiful as my wife. She’s mine and I’m hers, exclusively, no exceptions and in that my friend there is such great contentment. So if you find your eye or your heart wandering remember this; if you wander you will never ever be content, ever.
I know that completely flies in the face of contemporary beliefs and contemporary practice, it makes me look like a prude saying sex outside marriage, in all its different forms, is wrong well it ain’t me so please don’t shoot the messenger, it’s God. God wants you and me to be content, did you realise that? He places such a high value on contentment, on us being satisfied, fulfilled. 1 Timothy chapter 6, verse 6 the Apostle Paul writes:
Of course there is great gain in Godliness combined with contentment.
And therein lies the secret of God’s wisdom. Contentment and Godliness go hand in glove. You can’t have the one without the other. God created us, He knows us better than we know ourselves and through Jesus through His Word He’s telling us how to be content when it comes to our need to fulfil our desire for a male/female relationship.
Now a little bit later in the week I’m going to talk about singleness because not everyone gets married and singleness isn’t a disease, it’s a place where many, many people find contentment but the one thing that none of us will ever find contentment in is chasing gratification out there in a place where it will never satisfy.
God knows what He’s talking about, really He does and we step over that line to our peril. He loves us, He loves you and He loves me and as any loving father would He’s telling this to protect us from ourselves.
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