Standing on the safe side of Salvation!

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Have you ever found yourself in a situation where some obstacle gets in your way? Where your desire to get from one place to another is blocked by factors you find too hard to overcome. Normally this is not too great an issue. Just give up, or slowly find another way around the issue.

Increase the temperature. Imagine a life and death situation. A situation where the obstacle just has to be overcome because if not, you lose your life! The urgency will force you to take risks that you would not normally take.

Friends, I wonder whether we need to increase the temperature.

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Christian Marriage (Part 5)

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To be a Christian is to be someone who recognizes, more sharply and clearly than our world, that the creation story is not the end.

As early as Genesis 4 we are introduced to Lamech who took more than one wife, even the great Abraham had more than one wife and also had concubines.The Old Testament accounts report polygamy but they never hold it up as an example to be imitated. By the end of Genesis we’ve seen adultery, incest, rape, homosexual rape, prostitution – quite a bit more than we really were bargaining on.

The fall has damaged all of our relationships, especially and profoundly the marriage relationship.

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The Purpose of Marriage (Part 4) – To Relate Sexually

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The purpose of marriage is more than God bringing a man and a woman together to rule – the purpose of marriage is to bring a man and a woman together to relate sexually.

Back to Genesis. Let’s look at the flesh! The women is taken from the flesh of the man (2:21), to become flesh of his flesh (2:23) and to then join together as one flesh (2:24), naked and not ashamed (2:25) – this is sexual and deeply relational.

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The Purpose of Marriage (Part 2) – Togetherness

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What is the purpose of marriage? Why does it exist?

The Lord said, ‘It is not good for a man to be alone’; I will make a helper fit for him’ (Gen 2:18)

The common reading of this verse implies that it is not good for a man to be lonely. – as if the night life for Adam in the garden was not great and there was nothing good on Eden Cable TV! But is that all that going on here? Man needed some cheering up?

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Question: What does Ephesians 5:21-33 say about how men should relate to other women who are not their wives?

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Thanks for the question.

Your question however is not really answered by the passage. Notice that Ephesians 5:21-33 is using an exclusive relationship to illustrate a point for the whole church. This passage is not saying ‘Women, submit to Men’ or ‘Men, love Women’. It is saying ‘Wives, submit to the husband you have married’ (my paraphrase) or ‘Husbands, love the wife you have married’ (my paraphrase again).

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Testimony

Chris

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How did the axe-murder of the lady across the road lead Chris to become a Christian?

‘I grew up in a comfortable part of Sydney where nothing ever went wrong. But then came the night when the man across the road axe-murdered his wife before running outside, only to die of a heart attack. Not long after that, my next door neighbours were kidnapped by thieves, and had such a terrifying experience that they sold their house and moved away. Soon after that, the lady down the street blew her brains out, leaving her husband and four kids behind. All this happened in a safe place where bad things weren’t meant to happen! My assumption about life—get a good education, so you can get a good job, so you can live in a place like ours where nothing ever went wrong—was totally blown apart. I began to seriously wonder what life was all about.

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