I hope you are staying tuned to Nate’s blog for his tour schedule. Today he writes about family life and the Dodgy Roger.
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
Page 3 of 4
Guess what. No, no, you’ll never get it. I’ll just go ahead and tell you. I’m about to fire up a blog post merely to tell you that you need to go look at Amoretti. See? Told you you’d be shocked at me acting that out of character.
Today was week four in a series I am teaching on women and marriage, updating an old tape series that Canon Press has been carrying for many years. The subject today was the marriage bed, and don’t expect me to dive into the whole topic here. But, I will mention one or two things. The first thing has to do with the bed itself. What kind of place is your bedroom? Is your bed inviting? Or is it buried under loads of laundry waiting to be folded? If we want our marriage bed to be comparable to what is described in the Song of Songs (a banqueting house with a banner of love), we might consider purchasing a small storage shed in which to keep the spare bicycles so we can get them out of the master bedroom!
The second thing I will mention here is the beautiful garden imagery. The bride is a locked garden, and the beloved is invited into the garden. It is a private place for them to enjoy alone. Do you view yourself as an inviting garden? Or is the garden a bit bedraggled, untended, full of weeds? Well then, time to start doing some tending, weeding, planting. Could be some little resentments have sprung up, crowding out the joy. What better time than now to start clearing away the debris?
Conjugal love is compared to feasting; it is described as celebratory; it is a time of rejoicing together. The wife says to her husband (Song of Songs 1:2), “Your love is better than wine.” Not grape juice. Not even sparkling grape juice. But wine. Rich, potent, intoxicating. But here’s a problem: What if we don’t drink wine, not even in the Lord’s Supper? If we only drink grape juice, how can we understand the potency of this passage? And if we never feast and celebrate around our tables, how will we understand the comparison made here between the marriage bed and a banqueting hall?
Marriage is to be honored and the marriage bed undefiled (Hebrews 13:4). The Bible is not prudish when it comes to the marriage bed. So we should not be prudish about it either.
If you like reading N.D. Wilson stuff as I do, you will get a lot of fun out of the blog tour he is on for the next few days. I delivered a caramel mocha to him today in his third floor office perch as he was working away on this. He has been writing about Richard exploring the 100 cupboards, so it is lotsa fun. Go check it out here on his blog.
Much of what I have read of the Puritans has been of real spiritual benefit to me (though I confess to sticking with those Puritan writers who put the cookies on the lower shelf). They often say profoundly helpful things in memorable ways. For example, Samuel Rutherford, the great Scottish preacher said, “When I am in the cellar of affliction, I look for God’s choicest wines.” That’s a good one. And so, when we are in a trouble, it is a good thing to remember: look for God’s blessings in the affliction.
But sometimes we can elevate these great quotes from the Puritans to the level of “super-law” in our minds. We get hit hard with an affliction, and try as we might, we can’t find the wine. All we are doing is fumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch. And so we begin to think that we are pretty pitiful Christians if we can’t do better than this. We conclude that we are being punished for our lack of faith if we are not laying hold of the vintage wine. And this can lead to introspection and self-condemnation which are the last things needed in the midst of a hard providence.
Yes, the Bible tells us we should rejoice always, that we should count it all joy when we meet various trials. And of course, this is right and true. But rejoicing doesn’t always involve balloons and confetti and popping the champagne. Rejoicing in the Lord in the midst of suffering means thanking God for all things, even when it is hard things. Rejoicing may mean singing a song when we don’t necessarily feel like it, reciting a psalm, counting our blessings, giving thanks, remembering God’s promises, waiting for God’s deliverance, or doing our duties as we wait for healing and help.
So as we read the Puritans, and other writers like them, we ought to keep from laying heavy burdens on our consciences that God did not mean for us to bear.In other words, don’t beat yourself up if you can’t find the wine bottles in the basement. Don’t assume that you are a lousy Christian if you are feeling weary, lonely, or sad. These feelings are not sinful in themselves. We are to steward these feelings by the grace of God, make the most of our afflictions, and turn a profit on them by faith. But one of the things that will hinder that process is imposing a false standard on ourselves and then grieving over our inability to attain to it.
Just fyi – we’re doing a little behind the scenes juggling of the blog . . . and sometime this afternoon comments are going to be turned off for a brief time. Hopefully the transition will be relatively short and uneventful and then we’ll be back up and running.
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