The Pattern of God's Faithful Love

 

One of the most beautiful stories in all of literature is the parable Jesus told of the Prodigal Son.  As the story goes, a man had two sons and one day the younger decides that he has had enough of living under his dad's roof.  He demands his inheritance from his father, which he gladly gives him, and then he wanders the world, living a life of pleasure.  Before too long the money evaporates and with it his friends and the good times.  The young man ends up feeding swine, which you can imagine how a Jew might feel about that, and he was so hungry that he was considering eating the slop he was giving to the pigs.  At that rock bottom moment, he came to his senses and said to himself, "The slaves in my father's house wear nicer clothes and eat better food than I am right now.  I'm going to go back home and beg my father to make me a slave!"

He returns home to find his father anxiously waiting for him, and as soon as he saw him in the distance, he ran to greet him and wrap him in a warm embrace.  His Father proceeded to organize a huge feast to celebrate his return, slaughtering the fatted calf.  The son makes his offer to become a slave, but his father won't hear of it.  "You are my son, you have always been my son and you always will be my son."  his father said and wrapped him in a new robe and put a ring on his hand.

This is a beautiful picture of the faithful love that God has for us.  It is boundless and unstoppable.  Over the last few posts, we have been looking at Christ's love for us and comparing it to our own relationships.  God designed the sexual relationship within marriage to mimic Christ's love for the church.  If we want to know what our sexuality should look like, we need to understand how Christ loves the church.  Christ's love is always free, total, faithful, and fruitful.  We have looked at his free and total love, and next time we will look at his fruitful love.  Today we will look at his faithful love.

Matthew 28:20b "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

Romans 8:38-39 "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Christ's love or us is truly jaw-dropping.  It is faithful in the most absolute and cosmic sense.  It is unbound and unbreakable.  No power of hell or scheme of man can overcome it.  The mountains can melt and the seas boil.  The planets in their courses can shatter and rain fire on us, and Christ's love will always endure.  The powers of darkness besiege and threaten to quench the light of that love, but their efforts are always in vain.  There is no blade sharp enough to cut it, no bullet fast enough to pierce it, no bomb powerful enough to destroy it.  Christ's love is unstoppable.

There is nothing that can stop Christ from loving us, not even our own unfaithfulness.  If we are unfaithful, he always remains faithful.  When we stumble and fall, he is always there, ready to help us back up.  Even if we push him away and petulantly demand to do things our own way, he is still standing by, watching, and waiting for the faintest sign that we are willing to receive his help once more.

We can betray him, turn our backs on him, dishonor, and disrespect him, and still his faithful love endures.  We can hurl rocks at him, flay his back with whips and nail him to a cross of wood.  But if we listen, we can hear him say, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  Time and again we choose our sins, pleasures, and the shiny baubles of this world over him, and every time he lovingly accepts us back.  Our love is fickle and prone to fail, but his never does.

I have known a handful of people who have had a significant other cheat on them, it is always a heart-breaking situation.  Sometimes I have heard them say, "Well she (or he) cheated, so that gives me the right to cheat as well.  If she is going to fool around, I get to fool around, too."  Unfaithfulness in a relationship is borderline impossible to bear, most relationships cannot survive it.  When our love is rejected and betrayed it is easy to give in to those feelings of anger and vengeance and seek some sort of payback.

But this is not the faithful love that God shows us.  No matter how we may betray him, he stays faithful to us.  We turn away from him for the idols of money, sex, and entertainment, but he never turns away.  His love is as constant as the sun and moon.

God loves us with a covenantal love, that is an unbreakable vow.  No matter our sin and rebellion, God is always our father, and we are always his children, and nothing can change that.

Most parents would say that they love their children with this kind of faithful love.  There is nothing their children can do to make them stop loving them.  No matter how disrespectful and rebellious a child may be, the faithful love of their parents never wavers.  That same kind of love is what God is calling us to in our sexual relationships.  Husbands and wives should be as committed, if not more committed, than good parents are to their children.

We live in a society that has lost touch with this type of love.  We have had no-fault divorce for a long time now, and it has done much more to damage homes than it has to help them.  Marriage is a struggle, and it can be a fight to stay committed, but this is the model God has shown us.  He never leaves us or forsakes us, even if we leave and forsake him.  He is calling us to love our spouses in the same way.  Even if we are forsaken, we remain faithful, for better or worse, as the traditional vows have it.

When it comes to our sexuality, we need to ask ourselves if what we are doing is reflecting God's faithful love.  Obviously, infidelity is off the table.  More and more people are adopting open marriages, and this contradicts God's faithful love as well.  We cannot be faithful to our spouses either, if we are engaging in pornography and fantasy, if we are flirting, engaging in emotional affairs, participating in chat rooms and so on.  Faithfulness means that 100% of our attention and affection is focused on our beloved, no matter what he or she does or does not do.

I would say even masturbation cannot demonstrate faithful love, since it is taking sexual energy that should be directed toward our spouses and using it for self-gratification.  Sex was meant to draw us out of ourselves and into connection with our significant other, if we are not doing that, we are not modeling God's faithful love.

God is calling us to be messengers of his great love.  We should be declaring his free, total, and faithful love through our sexual relationships.  There is a higher purpose to our bodies and sexuality and that is to declare God's faithful love to all those around us.  Sex was never meant to be the self-expressive, self-indulgent thing that our society has made it out to be.  May we be willing to lay aside our selfish desires and seek only to glorify God in every way we use our bodies.