| “The horizon, the way we put it last week is you get a vision of what the person is becoming, you get a vision of the ‘glory self.’ You get a vision of a perfect, radiant being that God wants this person to be, and you get excited about that and you get committed to seeing that person developed. You see that, now this is not something (of course) that ah, you know is particular in marriage, this is the way all Christian relationships should be; this is friendship with windows. See, if you get to know any Christian well, getting to know a Christian is a little like trying to look for a mountain on a cloudy day. You watch and you watch and you see the wind swirls and blows things around and at a certain point you can make out the peak and other times it’s completely cloudy. Then all the sudden the wind could just rip right through a cloud and you can see the snow on the mountain; and you see the sun just briefly shinning on it and it takes your breath away and than the next thing you know is back has come the fog. Getting to know a Christian is like that. Getting to know you is like that and you getting to know someone else is like that. You get a glimpse every so often of the gorgeous, radiant, perfect, the glory person, the glory self, that this person is becoming. You get a vision of what this person would be if this person was not shackled and fettered by his or her sins and faults. You get an idea of the beauty of it and the glory of it and you catch glimpses of it at certain times and you get committed to it and you say, ‘the spirit of God is working to make that person become that and I want to be a part of that, I want to be a part of the synergism of the process.’ What it really means to fall in love… is that you get a tremendous sense of that glory self, that real self, and you say, ‘I’m committed to that, I want to be like a candle stick on which this candle is placed, I want to find through prayer and service and helping, I want the light. The radiant person who’s locked inside here, I want the light of that person to be evident. I want other people to see the beauty of this person, I want this person to grow and develop in that direction as fast as possible.’ Now, that we said is the way any Christian friendship should go…’Do you do that? Or do you just find out if this person also likes the same kind of music you like? And by the way on top of that they believe the Bible! Wow! Now look, that’s not a world with windows, that’s a world without windows. That’s not, that is not a relationship that is constantly looking beyond time. Constantly saying, ‘We want to be friends for a few billion years!’ I know it is very hard to think about that when you live in New York and your friendships last 8 months and then someone moves. But that’s the way all friendships should be and in particular that’s the way marriage has got to be, it has got to be that kind of friendship.
Now, what are the implications, that’s the horizon, that’s the horizon, now the implications of this are marvelous! I mentioned some of them before but I didn’t mention others. If that’s the horizon, if that’s the thing that you’re after, number one, first implication: It means you will constantly find yourself falling in and out of ‘like.’ Please don’t say you’ve fallen out of love. Remember we talked about what love is, love is commitment to that glory person. Love is a commitment. But ‘like’ is the feeling. And the fact is that you will fall in and out of ‘like’ with somebody that you are in a relationship like this with. Why? Because you really in a sense got the real self, the permanent self, and you’ve also got attitude and personalities and traits and things like that that are going to burn off in the light of God’s glory over the years. They are not permanent, they are only temporary. And therefore there are going to be times when in which you are looking at dross and you’re mad about it…the process is a furnace; there are sparks (and not the romantic kind), there is heat. When ever you take a piece of metal ore that’s got beautiful, pure metal inside of it and also a lot of impurities that have to be burned off, what do you do with it? You put it through the furnace. And in the furnace the dross goes away and the pure, the real, the real metal stays.”
“So of course there is going to be times when you fall out of ‘like’ because there is lots and lots of dross there! There’s times when you’ve got to say there’s dross and it’s gotta go. And the other person wrestles and says…right. But the beautiful thing about this is that, and this is not in Christian relationships but…when you come up in front of the warts and imperfections you don’t think of it as dross, you just say, ‘I wish I had somebody else, somebody better. You come up against the imperfections and you, you can imagine someone better but what is interesting is that when you are in love, when two Christians are in love and they are thinking along these lines…and they have these kinds of horizons, you can also envision somebody better, but the person you envision better is the person in front of you. You see, you want perfection but you want her or his perfection. The kind of perfection that only that person will ever become, because you want them, you want the radiant them, you want the perfect them, you want the holy them. You don’t want somebody else. Of course you’re mad at them right now, you don’t want somebody else, you want them and you know the only way you are going to get them is to stick with them. Because they’re a Christian and you’re a Christian and the Bible says, Pauls says to the Philippians, he says, hey, in Philippi, he says, ‘I am convinced that the One who began a good work will bring it to completion on the day of Christ.’ How can he say that to an entire church? Does he know them? He hasn’t even met them. He says if you are a Christian and if you are a real Christian, ‘I know the good work that He began in you, He will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ.’
So you expect yourself to fall in and out of ‘like’, and yet the commitment grows even when you hate the imperfection you see because it’s dross and you want to get rid of it and you also want a perfect person but you want this perfect person.”
“’How do I know if this is the relationship that you’ve been talking about? How do I know if this is the relationship that I really, really ought to have?’ And I’ll tell you what it is: you can agree on what the real self is and what the dross is. That means that as you talk to one another and in your relationship, as you spend time together, you find that (let me take the man’s point for minute), you find that as you talk to this woman, not only does she have a terrific insight into who you really ought to be, who you can be, the glory self, the thing God wants you to be, the best about you, not only does she see it but in some ways she sees it to some degree better than you do. And as you speak to her you find that you get a better idea of who you should be and you get ignited about it, you get passionate for it. In other words, to know if this woman is good enough to be an amazing companion is: does she make you want to be holy? Does she give you a vision of what you should and could be in Christ that excites you so much that you want to get there? And do you feel it more and do you find you want it more when you are with her? And the real test is does it work backwards? In other words, if she’s the one that helps you see it, and she’s the one who knows you, the glory self, but if you don’t do a very good job, if you don’t help her with hers, then again that’s detrimental. But if it’s happening both ways, if visa is truly versa, if you can agree on what that real self is, if you can agree on what is dross and what is, what is metal, you’ve got a friendship on which…there can be windows, windows of eternity.” Tim Keller, Redeemer Church, New York |
