KneEmail - a devotional by Mike Benson associated with Forthright Magazine
Vows
MARRIAGE STRIPS AWAY the illusions about sex pounded into us daily by the media...
Few of us live with oversexed supermodels. We live instead with ordinary people, men and women who get bad breath, body odors, and unruly hair; who menstruate and experience occasional impotence; who have bad moods and embarrass us in public; who pay more attention to our children's needs than our own. We live with people who require compassion, tolerance, understanding, and an endless supply of forgiveness. So do our partners. Such is the ironical power of sex: it lures us into a relationship that offers to teach us what we need far more, sacrificial love.
Every married person I know wonders at times if he or she had married the wrong person. For that reason we need something more than a relationship built on emotions of the moment. We need something big enough to envelop circumstances rather than be enveloped by them. The old wedding vow sets out the commitment required of marriage: "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part..." (Philip Yancey).
KneEmail: "For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as well also forewarned you and testified. For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness" (1 Thess. 4:3-7; cf. Gen. 1:27-28; 2:18-25).