To flourish is ‘to realize the full potential of what it means to be created and redeemed in the image of God.’ It is to follow our Creator in being creative. It is to make more of the world in which he has placed us.
There is also a relational element to human flourishing. Because relationship is central to God’s being as Trinity, love belongs to his very nature. And, as God image-bearers, we ourselves are incomplete without God and without one another. …
If the church were Christian, writes Phillip Gulley, ‘It would care more about love and less about sex.’
The church, apparently, is obsessed with sex. It frowns on sex outside marriage, divorce, dancing and (especially) homosexuality). Indeed, it finds the whole subject distasteful.
This anxiety about sex probably has two causes: Victorian mores and ‘the apostle Paul’s obvious aversion to marriage’. Contrast Paul’s ‘sour assessment of intimacy’ with the delight and joy of the Song of Solomon.…
In the Jewish society of Jesus’ day, it was almost unthinkable that a man would remain unmarried beyond the age of 20 or so. After all, the very first commandment of the Torah is to ‘go and multiply’). Few indeed are the recorded instances of unmarried men. There was a studious rabbi by the name of Simeon ben Azzi. And even he probably had been married, but had become a widower.
Girls were usually married by the age of twelve, and men by the age of twenty.…
‘If sex is for marriage, what does the Bible say about singleness?
1. It reminds us that Jesus himself was single, although he is also set before us as God’s model for humanness. This should not lead us to glorify singleness (since marriage is God’s general will for human beings, Gen 2:18, but rather to affirm that it is possible to be single and fully human at the same time! The world may say that sexual experience is indispensable to being human; the Bible flatly disagrees.…
