Insightful Musings on theScriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Good morning, dear ones.

It’s overcast. So it could be a good time to work outside. Maybe I’ll begin with a round of milling before the cloud cover burns off and it gets hot. But first I want to knock out a little jog. It will be done without a dog. I feel like saying what the hunter said when his dog fell over a cliff—“Dog-gone!”

I have a phenomenon in the mill shed that I’ve never seen before. A robin has built her nest on top of a steel frame I use with the mill (a shingle and lap siding jig) that I store by hanging on some hooks up against a rafter. Maybe she went to school with some barn swallows. I’ve never known a robin to build a nest anywhere other than in a tree. What about you?

We actually went to a movie last evening—“America—Imagine the World without Her”—by Dinesh D’Souza. It’s a very good antidote to the rotten agenda and liberal media to misrepresent historical fact and promote destructive change. I highly recommend it.

Tomorrow, when you look back on today, may you judge it to be a good day.

Love, Dad/Ray.

I don’t lay any claim to being some kind of great teacher or counselor relative to marriage and sexual relationships. And I know that most of us are not eager to be publicly open to our private intimacies. We may also be typically bound by the traditional silence that this whole topic has been given in our past. However, the prevalence of conflict and problems in this area of life along with the clarity of scriptural instruction go together to give me an urgency that we as parents, teachers, and leaders be as forthright as the scriptures are on the subject.

Paul gives some instruction in this chapter that, in some cases, is hard to sort out and understand. But no one can accuse him for being ignorant or insensitive to the reality of human sexual passion. Even within the exclusive confines of marriage, there are still certain diabolical dangers that Paul wants his people to understand. (See 2 Corinthians 2:11) So he instructs married believers to constantly recognize their oneness with each other and that their married bodies are designed and ordained for the mutual satisfaction and fulfillment of each other. The “act of marriage” is intended to be an ongoing pattern of experience for normal married couples that should only be set aside temporarily for the purpose of focused spiritual pursuits. But even in that case, Paul cautions, it must be done with care and by mutual agreement—SO THAT SATAN WILL NOT TEMPT YOU. An implied point of the presentation is that good satisfying sexual participation in marriage is actually a form of effective spiritual warfare that helps protect one from the kind of temptation that leads to sexual failure—a favorite strategy and objective of Satan.

Let’s not lack in a basic understanding of this basic area of life. Too many do—and pay big consequences. God is the giver, designer, and creator of marriage and its special one-flesh feature. Satan is the stealer, twister, and destroyer of the same. Your best protection against the deceptive devices of the enemy is to nurture A HEART AFTER GOD and hide His Word in your heart as a means to live by its principles—SO THAT SATAN WILL NOT TEMPT YOU. Because if you don’t, he will.