Fruitful Love

 

There is a great mystery that God is trying to reveal through marriage.  We find this in Ephesians 5:31-32, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.  This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church."  What Paul is saying here is that there is a message that God wants to send out to the world through our bodies and sexuality, and that is the message of redemption and glorification found in Christ.  The love of husbands and wives for each other is meant to portray the love that Christ has for the church.  Over the last few posts, we have been investigating Christ's love and how this applies to our sexuality, and we have found that his love is always free, total, and faithful.  This week we will focus on the fact that Christ's love is fruitful.

John 10:10 "The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy; I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

Any time Christ gets involved, things are going to flourish and bear fruit.  Whatever he touches gains new life, eternal life.  We were dead in our trespasses and sins until Christ showed up to give us new life.  By the power of God, Christ rose from the dead, and when he enters into our lives, we are given new life as well.  God has given us sex as an image of Christ's life-giving love.  What this means is that sex was meant to bring new life into the world through it.  The marriage bed was meant to be a place where new life is conceived.  This is the primary purpose of sex.  We see this clearly in nature as well as in the Scriptures.

1 Peter 1:23 says this, "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever."  God created seed as an illustration of the life-giving power of the word of God and of Christ himself who is the physical manifestation of God's Word (see John 1).  Nearly all plants and animals have some sort of seed that is meant to bring forth the next generation of creatures.  The word "sperm" means the same thing as "seed".  Just as the seed or sperm of a man enters into the womb of a woman and brings for life, the seed of the word of God enters into the heart and brings forth new spiritual life.  The proper use of our genitals, sperm and egg cells is to be a reflection of this spiritual, eternal reality.

A few weeks back we did a post discussing birth control, and God's original plan for us to use sex to bring forth new life.  Not to belabor the point, but the natural use of sex is to bring children into the world.  After the creation, God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply.  His desire was for them to fill the earth with people, and this command still applies to us today.  God wants us to be fruitful, and when we are being fruitful, this is a sign of the love of Christ in us. It has only been in recent decades that churches have begun to embrace the idea that birth control is a good thing.  Originally this was not so.

Another way to think about it is that God wants souls added into his Kingdom, every faithful Christian should want the same thing.  Every time we bear children and raise them up for the Lord those are more souls that will enjoy eternal life.  There are certainly burdens in having a large family, but God is faithful and will always provide.  While there is always pain in this temporal life, we will be able to enjoy our families for all eternity.

Sex is not about our personal satisfaction and pleasure.  And while it is good for husbands and wives to bring pleasure and delight to each other in that embrace as this can demonstrate the faithful and total love of Christ, sex is meant to tell a much larger, more eternal and glorious story.  If we are cutting off that capability to produce life or are using our sexuality in some other way that would not produce life, then we are not using our sexuality properly.

Bringing new life into the world and raising children is a sacrifice, but part of Christ's total love is that he sacrificed his life to give us life.  We should be willing to sacrifice in order to bring new life into the world as well.

This does not necessarily mean that every sexual encounter between a husband and wife needs to bring forth life, but couples should always be open to that possibility.  There are methods using a woman's natural cycles of fertility and infertility that offer a balance between planning families using our God-given reason and the way he made our bodies, that do not include birth control.

As we are considering our own sexuality, Christ's free, total, faithful and fruitful love provides a framework around which we can test any given behavior.  We can ask ourselves, "Does a particular sexual act reflect Christ's free, total, faithful and fruitful love?"  If it does not, then we are not following the principles God has laid out for our sexuality.  "Therefore, to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." (James 4:17)

The reality is that there is only one context in which Christ's free, total, faithful and fruitful love can be properly displayed and that is between a man and woman in the covenant of marriage.  And even then, we need to be careful that in our marriage beds we are not indulging in activities that would contradict that display of Christ's love.

God is calling us to join him in declaring the eternal story of Christ's redemptive love for humankind, and one powerful way that we can do that is through our sexuality.  It is a glorious, joy-filled calling if we are willing to faithfully follow him in it.