The Truly Good Life, Part 1

WARNING- ADULT DISCUSSION FOLLOWS (well, no more adult than what the Bible does...)-

Encountering the Good Life?

As I was preparing my sermon a couple weeks ago on Saturday night, I decided to run to the grocery store to pick up something for an illustration I wanted to use.  While doing so, I found another compelling illustration- the world vs. Christ on "the good life".

You see, as I was checking out, it seemed my eyes were shouted at from every angle with sex, sex, and more sex from men's magazines, women's magazines (that seemed designed to be more alluring to men), and even "news magazines" (the National Enquirer is a news mag, right?).  Here in this place of convenience designed to slow me down only long enought to entice me to further impulse purchases by all the magazines, candy, and other goodies strategically placed around me, I was subtly being told by my culture that what I really needed was the vision of sex being portrayed in every possible suggestive pose and scantily clad body you could imagine.  Here were all the insider knowledge I needed to become what I was not, have what I did not, look like I do not, and so start living what I had not-  the really  "the good life"

Are you kidding me?

Now lets be careful- here is where we tend to get self-righteous as Christians.  "Oh yes, we need to get the smut out of the stores and out of our sight"...  "Amen, pastor.  Sex is not the way to the good life- only Jesus."  Nothing wrong with either of those statements, as far as they go...  But they often allow us to become prideful and self-righteous in our condemnation of our culture's sexual perversions while not honestly examining our own lives to see if we understand and are pursuing the Bible's version of the "good life" when it comes to sex.

Now I just lost some of you- THE BIBLE'S VERSION OF THE GOOD LIFE HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH SEX????  WHAT???  And isn't it inappropriate for a minister to even be thinking let alone writing about such nonsense?  Well, I figure that if Jesus and the Bible have something to say about it, then its probably OK for us to discuss it, don't you think?  And God's Word has an aweful lot to say about not just sex, but about how it is part of God's good plan for our lives- i.e. "the good life!"

To begin with, the sexual relationship between a husband and a wife is given a very special place of honor in the Christian worldview as it is meant to point beyond itself to "image" the relationship between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31-32).  It "images" or shows (among other things) the committed love that the Bible calls "hessed" - the steadfast love of the Lord in giving Himself sacrificially for His people.  This is why 1 Cor. 7:4 teaches us that sex in marriage is not about ourselves, but is actually to be a gift given to one's spouse.  

Going back to our beginnings, part of our very purpose of "imaging" God in creation is to procreate and so fill the world with live image bearers of the Creator (Gen 1:28).  It also unites husband and wife together in the mystery of two becoming one flesh (Gen 2:23-24), and so even "images" to the world something of the Triune nature of God himself.

Getting the good life right...

When you begin to consider just this quick sample of the Bible's picture of sex's roll in the good life, we can begin to see past the lies of the checkout counter to the truth of  God's good gift of marital love.  Both our culture and the gospel think very highly of sex, but for very different reasons and purposes.  To our culture it is about me; to the gospel it is about the other, and how only such sacrificial giving of oneself to another leads to glorifying God.  Our culture says sex is all important; the gospel says it is part of God's good design for creation, but even this can be renounced for the sake of the Kingdom of God (Matt 19:1-12). 

So lets be clear, we do not need to indulge in watching or looking at smut to be destroyed by this false siren of the good life; we need only make it about me and my satisfaction.  Place sex upon the pinnacle of our priorities and we turn the good gift of God into a powerful force of personal destruction.  So who shapes your vision of the good life and the place of sex within it: Christ, or the checkout counter?