By Bill Hoffman, Alpha Chapter
Christ’s love for the Church is expressed as a bride. There is one bride for Christ and that is the Church. This bride of Christ is destined to be presented by the Son of God to God the Father as “not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, she should be holy without blemish.” This oneness is an awesome symbol for the purity of a man and woman in a relationship and marriage.
Here are some thoughts from Mr. Chesterton and relationships between a man and a woman. Hollywood mocks this oneness in all forms of media, life and literature. Chesterton has written:
Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.
To boast of two or many women he continues:
It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.
Concerning the sanctity, the sacredness of love between one man and one woman is worth the blessedness of life according to God’s moral law. Mr. Chesterton has written:
Surely one might pay for extraordinary morals.
C.S. Lewis has written this on the ‘Aha!’ discovery of the girl of your dreams.
There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and gone on at a later stage to “fall in love with her.”…Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with her in her totality…He is busy thinking of a person…to go on thinking of her.” He is love’s contemplative. At a later stage the explicitly sexual element awakes. (Four Loves)
How beautifully Mr. Lewis has expressed the simplicity of “delighted pre-occupation with a woman in her totality…busy thinking of a person.”
Dr. Jason Willoughby has written:
We veer between no intimacy at all and an unholy intimacy, between isolation and wickedness in a self-reinforcing pendulum going back and forth with no way out. “My people have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and have dug for themselves broken cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2)
My wife Shirley and I have been married 53 years and are delighted with a pre-occupation of one another in our totality. Our sexuality clothed with a discrete delight remains untarnished and free from the destructive force of pornography. As expressed by Dr. Willoughby, we are not “eating plastic fruit when there’s a Thanksgiving banquet full of real food set before us!”
Therefore brethren as you view the internet be ye imitators of God, walk in love as Christ has loved us. Let there be no vicarious pornography or fornication even named among you in the kingdom of Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 5)