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agapedude
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Name: Daniel
Gender: Male
Interests: Gods View Of Things- The knowledge of God is more inportant to life than the knowledge of anything else
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Movies I never liked the way I see life in the movies, I have a life of my own-The Narnia thing was great!
Heroes Jesus, Fransis A. Schaeffer , William and Catherine Booth, and anyone else who really follows Him
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Member Since:
1/26/2005
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| SEXA Biblical View of Sex
Intro
Have you ever seen something in nature that was so beautiful that for a moment you were totally captivated by it- something like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or maybe something as simple as a sunset over the ocean? It was so beautiful that you wanted to become a part of it, to reach out and touch it and become one with it, but you couldn’t. You were left with a great sense of longing, but no way for it to be fulfilled. Sex in some way is the one thing this side of heaven that gives us that chance- the chance to be united with beauty and become one with it. What’s more is that this beauty is a living person with personality and life and love. Not only is there the possibility of fulfilling your own desire of being united with beauty, but if things are ideal this beauty actually desires you as well! It almost sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. We were created for this!
Why we crave sex
According to the Biblical account of creation mankind was made in the image of God. This means that man was made with the capacity to know and relate to God. We also know that God made Adam and then made Eve so that Adam would not be alone. From the beginning it is evident that we were made for relationship with God and each other. Without this capacity for relationship we would be machines. It’s hard to imagine two machines longing for one another and falling in love, but without God how can something like love be accounted for? On the other hand, if God is love like the Bible says He is and He created people with a similar capacity to experience love then there is a reason behind what we feel and there is significant meaning behind sex. If we leave God out, then there are only two options. Either love just appeared out of nothing- which doesn’t make any sense- or there is no such thing as love and we really are just machines. Somehow that doesn’t begin to explain the magnitude of our incredible longing to be united with beauty. Our sexual longing is so strong that it points to something beyond ourselves and not something less. The greatness of sex demands a great explanation. If that something beyond us is God then we have a desire for sex because we were made in the image of God with the capacity to relate. Sex is relationship in its most intimate form.
Marriage is necessary
Do you ever remember being a kid on the playground playing a game of basketball and having someone suggest that you play without fouls or out of bounds? It may have sounded like a fun idea at first, but before you knew it the game could hardly be called basketball. Whether you could shoot, dribble and pass well didn’t seem to matter. Your freedom to shoot was no longer protected and instead the game was destroyed. At best it had become a very sorry version of football! Imagine the seventh game of the NBA Finals being played with out any referees. It would never happen simply for the integrity of the game. So what about the integrity of sex? What rules and boundaries do we have set up to guarantee that sex will be fun, fair, and even healthy? It is easy to jump under the banner of safe sex by just using a condom, but does that really make everything safe? If all it took was a condom to make sex safe then we would be denying what it means to be human. Essentially, that we are more than flesh and blood. There has to be a way to safeguard the total person and not just the physical. What if some guy told you that he wanted to have sex with your sister and his only reason was because she’s hot? She is more than a hot body- she is your sister. You know her as a person with real hopes and dreams, and if any guy is going to get with her he better prove that he sees her as something more than sexual candy. So if he really loves her and sees her as more than a sex object how can he prove it? First, he better be willing to take the time to get to know her family and her friends and gain their approval. Having done that he better be willing to stand before all of them plus his own family and friends, and with a ring say to her, “I promise to love you until death do us part.” He might argue that it’s too high of a price for a night of pleasure, but he would be missing the whole point. If he really loves her, then he won’t reduce her solely to a means of pleasure. Guided by the love you have for your sister you have shown him what constitutes a foul and what you consider out of bounds. If he’ll play by the rules, then game on. Enjoy the honeymoon! Marriage is absolutely essential to a great sex life. Sure, it sets up walls, but they are the walls of a playground!
Culture fails to be a credible guide for sexual morality
Marriage may be the right context for sex, but what does that say about all those having sex outside of marriage? Is it wrong? Fifty years ago in American culture most people thought it was. Now, much of our culture accepts it as normal, but there still remains an element of Bible-believing Christians that say it’s wrong. Why have their views of sexual morality not changed along with the majority of culture? The answer is simple. In the Bible after God created everything including sex, He stepped back and concluded that all that He had made was good. If God is real and He is good then how can one improve or change His design for sex within marriage? The answer is that one can’t. This is why the views of Bible believing Christians have not changed with culture. In truth, the bigger question is for those who don’t have an absolute moral basis. When God is taken out of the equation and our existence is accounted for by the evolution of some primordial slime then human dignity really is in jeopardy. There is no way to explain where intellect, personality and emotion come from. They must be an illusion. Humans are left as a chance make-up of cells. Finally, if that is true what prevents the stronger from forcing sex with the weaker? Couldn’t that be excused as survival of the fittest? Unfortunately it doesn’t stop here. What if fifty years from now sex between adults and children is decided to be okay as long as there is mutual consent? On what basis could it be judged? How can a chance make-up of cells be held accountable for doing anything wrong? These are difficult questions, but when God given guidelines for sexuality are discarded and culture defines its own rules these questions must be asked.
Conclusion
In his essay, The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis writes, "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
There really is something to be learned here. When we fool around with sex outside of the context which God has given us to enjoy it in we demean the whole experience. We lose the opportunity to enjoy it to its fullest, but more importantly we lose the ability to see that as great as sex is it points to something even greater!
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| Treasure on earth?Why not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth? Because there the moth and rust and the thief come. The heart will be where your treasure is, what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure and the heart will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure. | | |
| THE SECRET OF THE SNOW
Lois Boynton’s work is done. In The Story of Waitstill Baxter, Kate Douglas Wiggin has told of the lives that brightened and of the homes that were sweetened by her gentle influence. And now she is dying! The Snow that falling outside the bedroom window seems to match the purity of her spirit. “After a windy moonlit night, a morning dawned in which a hush seemed to be on the earth. The cattle huddled together in the farmyards and the fowls shrank into their feathers. The sky was grey, and, suddenly, the first white heralds came floating down like scouts seeking for paths and camping places. Then
. . . . there fell from out of the skies
A feathery whiteness over all the land;
A strange, soft, spotless something, pure as light.
It could not be called a storm, for there had been no wind since sunrise, no whirling fury, no drifting; only a still, steady, solemn fall of crystal flakes, hour after hour.
And so a good woman is dying! And the soft white snow is falling! “Waitstill turned Mrs. Boynton’s bed so that she could look out of the window. Slope after slope, dazzling in white crust, rose one upon another and vanished as they slipped away into the dark green of the pine forests.”
The dying woman’s attention is divided between two objects, both very beautiful. She loves the snow and can scarcely take her eyes from its fleecy loveliness. She loves her Bible, too and that Book of Books lies open on her bed. She picks it up from time to time and searches her favorite portion—the book of Job—for a passage particularly dear to her.
“Here it is, daughter,” she whispers to Waitstill, “I have found it! It is in the same chapter in which the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy. The Lord speaks to Job out of the whirlwind and says: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” No, not yet; but, please God, I shall soon enter into the treasures of the snow and into many other treasures, too”; and, so saying, she closed her tired eyes.
All day long the airways were filled with the glittering army of the snowflakes; all day long the snow grew deeper and deeper on the ground; and, on the breath of some white-winged wonder that passed Lois Boynton’s window, her white soul took its flight!
II
The thought of Lois Boynton and her snowy passing rushed back upon my mind this morning. For this morning’s newspaper contained a thrill. The hills around the city, the paper said, were thickly coated with snow! Those who live further from the equator than I do will find it difficult to understand the excitement awakened by that announcement. Snow! Snow in Australia! Snow, not merely on distant mountains, but on hills close at hand! We had scarcely finished breakfast when there came a sharp ring at the bell. It was Douglass Pitt. At the gate stood his motor in which Mrs. Pitt and the two children were seated.
“We are going for a run over the Dandenongs to see the snow,” he explained, “and we want you to come.”
I went, and, in going, was distinctly in the fashion. The road swarmed with cars. Everybody was off to see the snow. Some, born and brought up in this sunny land, were moved by curiosity; others who, like myself, had come from overseas, were moved by sentiment. The Australians climbed the hills because they had not seen the snow before; the Englishmen made the journey because they had. Every Englishman settled in Australia cherishes in his heart a fond though frantic hope. He knows that it can never be realized: the stars in their courses are fighting against him; he is but crying for the moon. Yet, even though he be permitted to spend a hundred summers beneath these sunny skies, he will never quite relinquish that pleasing and passionate illusion. He will steal furtively to the window every Christmas morning and will throw up the blinds to see if at last, at last, his dream has all come true. How he would love to see the whole horizon a sheet of dazzling whiteness! He wants the snow; the graceful, fluttering snow; the deep and drifting snow; he wants the snow, and, however long he lives, Christmas will never be Christmas to him without it. Who then can wonder that hundreds of immigrants mingled with the native-born in scouring the snow-clad hills this morning? And who can wonder that, as I returned from these scenes of exuberant excitement, I found Lois Boynton’s question taking complete possession of my mind. “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?”
III
Treasures! The treasures of the snow! The world’s real wealth, Carlyle declares, consist in its great prophetic souls. I confess with shame that, in the days of my darkness and ignorance, I thought that prophets were few and far between. I fancied that God sends one prophet to every million people. The snowflakes taught me that God sends a million prophets to every one of us. For the snowflakes are themselves prophets. They are a great and white-robed throng; a goodly fellowship; a multitude that no man can number. They are vocal with inspired and wondrous speech. The man who would know the number of God’s prophets must not only climb these Australian hills on some such rare occasion as we have celebrated today; he must travel through Russia, Siberia, Greenland, and Alaska; he must tour the great Antarctic continent and climb all our snow-clad ranges; he must count the snowflakes as he goes; and then, when he returns, he will know the number of the prophets! This is the wealth of the world. Until I discovered that the snowflakes were prophets, and turned my ear to catch the accent of their myriad voices, this snowy treasury was to me like a gold-mine all unknown. But the patriarch’s question inflamed my avarice. “The treasures of the snow” I said to myself, “The treasures of the snow!” Like one who hears a whisper of diamonds hidden in his garden, I began to search. And then it was that I heard the voices whispering among the snow.
IV
Those voices were a revelation to me. They told me that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useful things in the world. Catch a snowflake on a sheet of glass; examine it under a microscope; and what a triumph of architecture you have here! Not among the palaces of the Pharaohs nor among the temples of the Athenians could you find anything to rival this in daintiness, in symmetry, in splendor! As it gleams and glitters under the glass, the eye is bewildered by its indescribable beauty. It is a dream of glittering whiteness! Search the four corners of the earth and you will nowhere find anything more beautiful than this! Did not Patrick Martin, the clever designer of Huddersfield, confess that his most bewitching conceptions were suggested to him by watching the arrangement and formation of the snowflakes?
And yet, and yet! More than once I have crossed our great Australian desert. And why, I have asked myself, why is it a desert? Its soil is fertile. It needs but one thing to transform it into a garden. It needs water. If only I could fling across it a range of lofty mountains! The heat of summer would melt the priceless stores of winter snow, and the irrigating streams, pouring down from virgin heights, would turn all our deserts into fruitful fields. A few of New Zealand’s snow-capped and sky-piercing summits would be worth millions of tons of gold to Australia.
Again, those voices told me that Purity is Power. The snow is so stainlessly pure that, by comparison with it, our whitest things are put to shame. Yet it can hold up our most powerful engines and defeat armies that had proved invincible. The troops that followed Napoleon from conquest to conquest were vanquished at last by the resistless might of the snowflakes. That is what Tennyson means when he says of Sir Galahad that
His strength was as the strength of ten
Because his heart was pure.
Purity and Power are inseparable. The snowflakes always conquer at the last. Whether in private or public life, the soul that is as chaste as the snowdrifts wields an influence and exerts an authority that nothing can withstand.
V
The gently rustling leaves of Lois Boynton’s Bible! The gently falling snowflakes outside Lois Boynton’s window! What was there in common between these two things? What associated the rustling pages with the falling flakes? Lois Boynton was about to take her place in the great white throng before the Great White Throne. And she felt that these two things—the Bible and the snowflakes—could prepare her spirit, as nothing else could, for that great transition. Their message is essentially a message of cleansing, of absolution, of redemption. Les us see if we can harmonize and focalize it.
Hugh Macmillan tells a pretty fairy story concerning a little pool of water in a hollow on a mountainside near Tarbet, at Loch Lomond. It is called the Fairy Loch. “If you look into it,” says the doctor, “you will see a great many colors in the water, owing to the varied nature of the materials that form its bottom. There is a legend about it which says that the fairies used to dye things for the people round about, if a specimen of the color was left along with the cloth on the brink of the pool at sunset. One evening a shepherd left beside the Fairy Loch the fleece of a black sheep, and placed upon it a white woolen thread to show that he wished the fleece dyed white. This fairly puzzled the tiny folk. They could dye a white fleece any color; but to make a black fleece white was impossible. In despair they threw all their colors into the loch and disappeared forever.” Hence, according to the story, the lovely pool acquired its rainbow-tinted bed. Is there, I ask myself, as I think of that Scottish loch, is there any process by which a black fleece may be made white? Lois Boynton feels that she is about to pass into a realm of stainless purity; how can a smudged soul be cleansed and fitted for that world of whiteness? The fairies of Loch Lomond gave up the black fleece in despair: can the snowflakes or the Bible solve the deeper problems of the soul?
VI
Away on a frozen headland in the Arctic Sea, surrounded on every hand by toppling icebergs, jostling ice-floes, and hills all wrapped in snow, is a lonely tomb. Standing not far from Cape Beechy, it is the northernmost grave in the world. A member of Sir George Nares’s polar expedition died at sea, and his comrades buried him on this desolate spot. The tomb is marked by a great flat stone, and, on a copper tablet at the head, are inscribed these words: “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”
Now look around you! The outlook, both seawards and landwards, is a blinding sheet of virgin whiteness! Could anything be made whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow? Let us think!
And, thinking, we remember Dr. Alexander Whyte’s holiday experience at Bonskeid. For days a horror of great darkness had overshadowed him. He could endure it no longer. “I stole into my hat and coat,” he says, “took my staff, and slipped out of the house in secret. For an hour and three-quarters, I walked alone and prayed; but, pray as I would; I got not one step nearer God in all those seven or eight cold miles. For two hours I struggled on, forsaken of God, and met neither God nor man all that chilly afternoon. When, at last, standing still, and looking at Schiehallion clothed in white from top to bottom, this of David shot up into my heart: “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” In a moment I was with God. Or, rather, God, so I believe, was with me, till I walked home under the rising moon with my heart in a flame of prayer and my eyes a fountain of tears.”
VII
This is very wonderful and very beautiful; but it does not completely satisfy us. How, we ask, how can that which is defiled be made as white as snow? We must submit this baffling question to the snowflakes themselves. The snowflakes, we have seen, are prophets. A prophet is born out of a great and memorable experience. Isaiah, for example, tells how he, a sinful man, was purged by fire taken from off the altar, and was then called to his prophetic office. The snowflakes, I have said, are prophets; have they known any experience akin to this? Let us release the Snowflake from the microscope in which we just now examined him and ask him this more crucial question.
“We were not always as you see us now,” explains the Snowflake. “We lay about the earth in stagnant pools, in pestilential marches, in filthy puddles, in noisome swamps; some of us were found in city gutters and in wayside ditches; we were all unclean. But the sunlight kissed us and caught us to itself. How it happened we none of us can tell. Before we knew what was taking place, we were swept through the skies and then set free again. But, when we were set free, we gazed at each other in astonishment. For, in some wonderful way, we had been cleansed from all that previously defiled us, and had been made as white as we are now!”
The Snowflake says no more; but somehow, I think that I have guessed the patriarch’s secret. I fancy I have entered into the treasures of the snow. The Snowflake has helped me to understand, as I had never understood before, the text that captivated the heart of Lois Boynton as she prepared to take her flight to the City of the Undefiled; and it has helped me to understand, as I had never understood before, the wondrous words that stand inscribed above that Arctic grave. | | |
| Sovereignty and Freedom of ChoiceGod's sovereignty decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and mankind from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil, between selfishness and unselfish love. When we choose to do evil, we do not counter the sovereign will of God but fulfill it in the fact that an eternal decree decided not which choice we are to make but that we are free to make that choice. If in His absolute freedom God has willed that we are to have limited freedom who is there that can question His wisdom? . Mans will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. In the moral battle whoever is on Gods side is on the winning side and cannot loose; whoever is on the other side is on the loosing side and cannot win. Here there is no chance, no gamble. There is freedom to choose which side we will be on but no freedom to negotiate the results. We may repent and alter the consequences by making a right choice. Beyond that we cannot go. “ He that is not with me is against me” and “ no man can come to the Father but by Me”. The message of the gospel announces the good news of redemption; it commands all men everywhere to repent and it calls all mankind to surrender to grace by believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of all. Our choice is our own, but the consequences have already been determined by the sovereign will of almighty God | | |
| DeadGod forbid that I glory in anything else but the Cross of Christ. We must identify ourselves with Christ on His Cross. Paul did, Paul and Christ became united into one dying sinner on a cursed tree. Both Paul and Christ make up Christ crucified, the imputation of our guilt and pollution to Christ, and the imputation of Christ righteousness and the importation of the Spirit of Jesus Christ to us. I am crucified with Christ: with Christ who loves, and gave Himself for me. When the two thieves died on their crosses, after their two bodies were buried, if there still were complaints to the courts of justice and accusations, “ he stole my ox”, “he burned down my barn”, “he robbed my house”, “he murdered my son”. The judge would say to all such too-late accusations that the murderer was dead already.. He has been crucified already. He is beyond your accusations and my jurisdiction. He has paid already with his own life blood. His death has forever blotted out all that can ever be spoken or written against him. A dead man is not easily put to shame., and no jailer carried a corpse to prison. The law has been honored ten thousand time more than if it had never been broken because the law giver Himself has been crucified for our transgressions. As it was with the thieves past, and with Paul’s so it is with ours. Sins of omission and sins of commission. What I should have done and didn’t do. What I hated , and yet did. The trial I had been to other men. The sin and sorrow I has caused. The provocation and offence I had been. The blame I had brought on the ministry, and a thousand such like things. The secret of peace and overcoming is that Paul doesn’t not say that he : “once was” or that he “had been” but that he “is” at present crucified. Not only the is past sin all collected up and laid on Christ crucified but present sinfulness too. If your heart beats up its secret guilt, pollution and sinfulness with every pulse you would go mad unless your conscience and mind were both in the keeping of Christ crucified. As Luthers conscience was. “ The law is not the lord of my conscience” is what his lion like faith declared. Jesus Christ is almighty God, and He is the Lord of my conscience. He keeps the law out of my conscience by keeping my conscience continually sprinkled with His own peace keeping blood. The true believer is “dead” to his past and is a new creation in Christ. A true believers past moral corruption comes up to his conscience not in order to produce a bad conscience, but in order to find ther trusting believer already with Jesus. “I am crucified with Christ” to peace and rest. Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in this flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me. Nothing and noone but God the Son ,and God the Son crucified, could atone for mt sin. The blood of God my Maker, my Lawgiver, and my Redeemer surely is able to speak peace into my heart. He loved me and gave Himself for me. | | |
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